What is you favorite samurai movie?

[truemane]

I have not seen Sword of Doom. I will put it on my must watch list.

What is this adaption of Unforgiven you are referring to? I assume you mean Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven.

He's referring to the 2013 Japanese remake, also called Unforgiven, starring Ken Watanabe and directed by Lee Sang-il (who directed the simply magical 2006 film Hula Girls). It's a very good movie, Ken Watanabe is amazing, but it's hampered by its source material a little too much to really lift off and fly.

Although there's a delicious symmetry in the fact that Clint Eastwood started the modern Western with a near-copy remake of a samurai film, and then his final Western, in a lot of ways the endcap on the entire genre, was remade into a samurai film.

Circle of life, it moves us all. Etc etc.

[Trafalgar]

The Sword of Doom is up there as far as Mifune films.

Finally got a chance to watch Sword of Doom (Thank You Criterion Collection). A very good movie, I don't think it is as good as my favorite Harakiri but very good.

Interestingly, both Harakiri and Sword of Doom star Tatsuya Nakadai. Nakadai is also the guy with the gun in Yojimbo. I think he is as good an actor as Mifune, especially in Harakiri.

[RossN]

I'm not a genre expert but I really liked 13 Assassins (the 2010 version, I haven't seen the older version.)

[Cazero]

Whoa, hey now. It's a close remake, but it's not even anything close to line-for-line, shot-for-shot. For one thing, the running time of Seven Samurai is almost twice the running time of the Magnificent Seven (almost 210 minutes vs just over 120) and there are all kinds of differences throughout. John Sturges was an able craftsman, but he was nowhere near the genius Kurosawa was. It has all the mechanical touchpoints of the original, but nowhere near the poetry. That movie always reminds me of Mark Twain's comment on women of his era using bad language ('She knows the words but not the music').

For what it's worth, I've enjoyed Magnificent Seven a lot more than Seven Samurai for the simple reason than the bandits are more credible in the former.
I know that the bandits are nothing more than a plot device in both, but Seven Samurai treats them like some kind of natural disaster that is unable to think or parley, wich makes artistic sense but cause a lot of fridge logic issues to me.

[Rogar Demonblud]

That's mainly due to Eli Wallach. The original intent in the movie was to have the bandits be almost as much a cipher as in 7S, but he thought it didn't make sense for successful bandits to be in plain near-rags. Hence the silk shirt, the decorated saddle, the dental work--he looks like a success story. And in many respects, his character is the other side of the coin for the gunmen, a cautionary tale about where they could go.

For another samurai movie set elsewhere, there's Tokyo Drifter.

[halfeye]

I keep seeing this thread and wanting to reply as a joke "Battle beyond the stars".

Seven Samurai is about the only Samurai movie I remember seeing.

[druid91]

Not a movie, but I rather liked Samurai 7 the Anime.