The last samurai how good/bad is it?

[Drake Tungsten]

The only proficiency test I took was to go to NE Honshu in January (Sendai and Matsushima) where the only thing in English was the romanization of Sendai in the JNR station signs. Snow was knee deep on the ground, so it was "communicate or die."

I think I'll be going to Tohoku next summer. The weather should be nice then, which is good, since my Japanese is still utter crap. If it came down to "communicate or die", my body would be on its way back to Nebraska within days...

so I didn't even know there was any form of organized proficiency tests for the language itself.

It's a pretty big deal now. I'd like to pass the ni-kyu test by the time I leave, but that's a pretty steep goal. San-kyu should be pretty easy though.

[Drake Tungsten]

The Last Samurai

That was a pretty good movie. I don't see Cruise winning an Oscar for his role, but he played the part well and the movie was quite good. A-

The Japanese love interest was a total fox, BTW.

[Grandpa Troll]

Re: The Last Samurai

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
That was a pretty good movie. I don't see Cruise winning an Oscar for his role, but he played the part well and the movie was quite good. A-

The Japanese love interest was a total fox, BTW.

[St Leo]

Review from my blog

The Last Samurai by the MPAA
Secularity: 8
Technophilia: 6
Tilt: 6
Arithmetic Mean: 6.7
Geometric Mean: 6.6
Median: 6
Mode: 6
Standard Deviation: You gotta be out of your mind

My Friend's Review: This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. [Dialogue snipped]. That's because you don't understand emotions. [Dialogue snipped]. This movie is about doing what you want and being happy with yourself and to hell with the world (loose paraphrase).

Okay, that's his opinion. Here's mine:

This movie is a load of bull**** hooey supported by swells of music that's designed to win Oscars, that goes on too long, and that has an absolutely terrible and insulting ending.

Tom Cruise, a depressed yank trying to drown his depression with a depressant, goes to Japan and improves his lightsabre skills.

The good guys in this movie are a bunch of macho jackasses from a highly-stratified society devoted to stultifying perfecting anything they do for perfection's sake.

The bad guys are stuffy corporate half-asses whose turn-ons include telegraph poles, railroads, and gunpowder. Not champions of social mobility and individual empowerment either, but at least they don't have the mechanistic motions their ancestors went through stuck up their asses.

Tom Cruise does his best to look like Viggo Mortensen. Or vice versa. I don't really care.

The worst thing about this movie is that Mr. Yankie survives the charge of the light samurai brigade against machine guns due to, uhm, magic and alien space bats. He then actually returns to his adoptive village with no survivor guilt or visible resentment from the locals. Bah.

Before the grand uberbattle, he compares the situation to the Battle of Thermopylae. He also mentions that all the idiot Spartans died at that battle.

Well, in that case, *******, "come back with your shield or on it". Don't ****ing survive a machine-gunning and don't ****ing yield. The whole point of the movie was the glorification of dumbassity. If the protagonist behaves like a non-dumbass, it ruins the whole point.

Anyways, if you want to see a realistic Hollywood movie about the life in 19th Century Japan, you aren't going to do any better than this.

rottenTomatoes.com: 68%

[Zero]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat


No. I lived in Japan, studied it's history and still speak and read the language passably well.

I still have about a hundred books in Japanese on my office shelf behind me.

‰R‚‚«...

[Zero]

I liked this movie. I imagined every bad thing it could have happened for this movie, and it did. But I liked it anyway.