Reviews of Yojimbo
Displaying all 3 reviews
Cinesthesia (aka Duncan)
3Apr10
All that you could ask for in a movie, and probably the best entry point for the Kurosawa uninitiated. Seven Samurai is often pointed to as his best, which is true, but it’s also epically long. Ran is often pointed to as the capstone for his career, which is true, but it’s also distanced and formal (and epically long). Yojimbo is, for my money, the best way to start digging into Kurosawa’s filmography.
Its sene of ironic cool still feels current 50 years later. In fact, in a post-camp, post-Tarantino world, its style of comical, violent exaggeration is arguably more at home than ever. An undeniable touchstone in the evolution of cinematic badass—darkly funny, perfectly shot, and tightly structured—it’s probably Kurosawa’s most directly entertaining film. Which is not to deny how richly detailed it is, or how well it stands as a fierce and earnest satire of ruthlessness and corruption (a theme Kurosawa would return to again and again). It feels at home today, yes, but its attitude is also oddly evocative of its time: the start of the 1960s, with rebel yells and challenges to tradition.
And you have to admire any movie that can be described as both “comically violent” and “a moral fable about humility.”
10 out of 10.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
MovieFreak4702
30Jul09
Kurosawa, simply put, is a master of shot composition. The way he moves the camera within the frame is nothing short of brilliant, keeping all essential visuals within each shot and not sparing anything story wise in the process. Every Kurosawa film is special, and Yojimbo is no different. Toshiro Mifune completely sells you with his dry wisdom and his compassion from beginning to end. Yojimbo is the perfect example of these two true artists having the best time they possibly can while also executing a perfectly action packed, comical and smart film, a combination that is rarely seen in films nowadays.
- Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
asuraf
30Nov08
Toshiro Mifune looms large in the frame, as big as a mountain, as Masaru Sato’s booming soundtrack announces the star entrance of one of Japan’s greatest film icons, the wandering ronin Sanjuro, who for two of Akira Kurosawa’s most entertaining jidai-geki will outwit and outmaneuver his opponents with a fox’s eye for improvisation and survival. Here, in perhaps the biggest hit of Kurosawa and Mifune’s glorious collaborations, Mifune’s Sanjuro walks into a dusty ghost town Main Street, finds a town divided by two rival Yakuza factions who have aligned themselves respectively with a silk merchant and sake dealer, crippled the economic structure of the town, and littered the street with dead bodies, and finds a way to use his powers as a master warrior bidding for a bodyguard job to play off each gang’s hatred for the other. Kurosawa and cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa fill the wide-screen frame with perfect symmetry as Sanjuro watches each gang, coming in from frame left and right, with giddy delight from a watchtower to see what his handy work has wrought, two scared and inexperienced gangs fighting for territory and capitalist control in a post Edo economy filled with corruption, but when Sanjuro isn’t in total control of the situation, we’re more apt to see the action through slats and boards, windows and frames within frames, the director as washed up figurehead. The film is a comedy, but a savage one at that, where the western stylistics of a dusty ghost town in economic free fall, and the wily hucksterism of a hungry ex-warrior, as well as his gun-totting rival (Tatsuya Nakadai) suggest with great ironic symbolism, the problematic politics of Japan’s economic post-war “miracle”, as modeled, of course, on western modernization.
- Currently 5.0/5 Stars.