Edward Zwick
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Dances with Wolves (1990)
Directed by Kevin Costner
influenced The Last Samurai (2003)
Themes Characters Plot
They've been seen before, and they've been explored again with films like Avatar or The Last Samurai .
Dances with Wolves another obvious touchstone, the picture depicts Cruise as lovably earnest in the Kevin Costner mold, another limited actor limited to a certain kind of role, but one who seems genuinely interested and invested in his projects.
More than one reviewer has already compared The Last Samurai to Dances With Wolves in which one enlightened white man forsakes his own dastardly white ways and embraces the peaceful, noble ways of a foreign culture.
Actually, this Asianized variant on Dances With Wolves seems mostly to exist to prove the truth of those lyrics by Mr. Gilbert in (ironically enough) The Mikado the ones where Koko makes a list of people who wouldn't be missed, and includes those persons who praise "every century but this one, and every country but their own."
"Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dances With Wolves" won Oscars for their skilled indulgence of the theme, so it comes as no surprise that "The Last Samurai" should borrow liberally from both, adding finishing touches culled from the likes of Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" and the classic television miniseries "Shogun."
His Dances With Wolves-style premise of a tormented U.S. soldier who finds peace by embracing the creed of the samurai has plenty of kick, and the production has surely done its homework.
The movie is a showcase for acting, and in addition to Ormond and Hopkins, it also shows how strong Aidan Quinn and Brad Pitt are, in roles that have inescapable parallels to the Rock Hudson and James Dean characters in "Giant."
In fact, what "Legends" will remind veteran moviegoers of most is the 1956 George Stevens-directed version of Ferber's "Giant," with Brad Pitt, Aidan Quinn and Julia Ormond standing in nicely for James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor.
Because Brad Pitt is routinely compared to American cinema's great tragic romantic rebel youth, James Dean-whom he resembles in appearance, style and, most important, talent and charisma-it probably explains why so many critics have compared "Legends of the Fall" to Dean's last movie, "Giant."
Akira Kurosawa was a pioneer of filmmaking who created and directed such film classics as “Seven Samurai”, and “Hidden Fortress” (just to name a few), and Zwick manages to create a love letter and a magnificent homage to the innovative director by paying tribute to the art of the samurai, a dying art that intertwines with the tale of one man’s redemption.
If not quite up to the standard of 1989's "Glory" -- director Edward Zwick's last historical war epic -- the film is nonetheless filled with exhilarating, gruesomely beautiful battle sequences and stylish nods to the great Kurosawa films, especially "Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo" and "Ran."
But again, this is an outsider's story and The Last Samuria has more in common with Dances with Wolves than with Seven Samurai.
Here, the connection is more broad-based, with Ran and Seven Samurai particularly coming to mind.
The top three greatest battle scenes ever filmed belong to Shakespeare adaptations: Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, followed by Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.
Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011)
Directed by Liz Garbus
influenced Pawn Sacrifice (2015)
Themes Plot
If you didn’t live through the hysteria that accompanied the Cold War chess showdown between Bobby Fischer and his Soviet opponent, Liz Garbus’ 2011 documentary, “Bobby Fischer Against the World” does a pretty good job of capturing the circus on film.
Pawn Sacrifice also lacks the clarity of Liz Garbus' documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World (2011).
Liz Garbus’s documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World is a lot more dramatic.
Although the zeitgeist-capturing film handsomely dramatizes elements of Liz Garbus’s excellent 2011 documentary Bobby Fischer Against the World, Fischer is still an enigma at the film’s end.
If you're looking for a more complete look at the Fischer/Spassky showdown, the documentary "Bobby Fischer Against the World" provides the most thorough examination.
When it comes to the big match, you might want to track down the excellent documentary "Bobby Fischer Against the World" for the full blow by blow, but Zwick's film gets to the essence of it.
Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993)
Directed by Steven Zaillian
influenced Pawn Sacrifice (2015)
Themes
My knowledge of the man was always miniscule: a footnote to a 1980s film I watched religiously called Searching for Bobby Fischer.
Pawn Sacrifice lacks the humanity of the Steven Zaillian film, Searching for Bobby Fischer (1993).
"Searching for Bobby Fischer" may be the best look at what growing up with such incredible chess skill can do to a child's psyche.
Chess may not seem like a terribly dramatic sport, but Fischer's operatic life and the innovative, unwaveringly focused way he played the game has inspired several excellent films, including Steve Zaillian's underappreciated "Searching for Bobby Fischer" and Liz Garbus' completely fascinating documentary, "Bobby Fischer Against the World."
As such, the movie has its moments, some of which are bold, ripsnorting fun, nicely recalling the hypnotic greatness of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” “Ran” and “Rashomon,” while other moments are just plain dumb, heavy-handed and awful.
If not quite up to the standard of 1989's "Glory" -- director Edward Zwick's last historical war epic -- the film is nonetheless filled with exhilarating, gruesomely beautiful battle sequences and stylish nods to the great Kurosawa films, especially "Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo" and "Ran."
Director Zwick expertly stages some of the most spectacular battle sequences since Kurosawa’s Ran, but they don’t compensate for the script’s more formulaic set-pieces or an eye-rolling ending that only serves to elevate Cruise’s character on an even higher pedestal.
Here, the connection is more broad-based, with Ran and Seven Samurai particularly coming to mind.
The top three greatest battle scenes ever filmed belong to Shakespeare adaptations: Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight, Akira Kurosawa's Ran and Kenneth Branagh's Henry V, followed by Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.
As such, the movie has its moments, some of which are bold, ripsnorting fun, nicely recalling the hypnotic greatness of Akira Kurosawa’s “The Seven Samurai,” “Ran” and “Rashomon,” while other moments are just plain dumb, heavy-handed and awful.
Having already paid tribute to Kurosawa with his Rashomon-updating Courage Under Fire, Zwick creates an ode to the master with calls to duty, splendid battle sequences and a look by cinematographer John Toll (The Thin Red Line) that captures the period in a way that could be hung in an art museum and is impossible to look away from.
Kurosawa's Rashomon proved to be an influence for Zwick's Courage Under Fire.
Braveheart (1995)
Directed by Mel Gibson
influenced The Last Samurai (2003), Legends of the Fall (1994)
Themes Plot
"Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dances With Wolves" won Oscars for their skilled indulgence of the theme, so it comes as no surprise that "The Last Samurai" should borrow liberally from both, adding finishing touches culled from the likes of Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" and the classic television miniseries "Shogun."
To one degree or another, he has borrowed from his own Glory, Mel Gibson's Braveheart , and the TV mini-series based on James Clavell's Shogun.
So if The Missing is Hitchcock in spurs and Master and Commander is Moby Dick with Russell Crowe pursuing a French warship instead of a whale, then The Last Samurai is Braveheart with kimonos instead of kilts.
Filmed on an epic scale, if The Last Samurai looks like Braveheart, small wonder again as cinematographer John Toll shot both films.
Nabbing Academy Awards for "Legends of the Fall" and "Braveheart," Toll's cinematic brilliance can also be seen in "The Thin Red Line," a wonderfully sweeping epic replete with beautiful landscapes ravaged by war.
"The Last Samurai" is spectacularly filmed by John Toll, who won Academy Awards for both "Legends of the Fall" and "Braveheart."
"Lawrence of Arabia" and "Dances With Wolves" won Oscars for their skilled indulgence of the theme, so it comes as no surprise that "The Last Samurai" should borrow liberally from both, adding finishing touches culled from the likes of Mel Gibson's "Braveheart" and the classic television miniseries "Shogun."
It has been compared to " Lawrence of Arabia " and "Dances With Wolves," films in which Westerners learn to respect Arabs and Indians, but this film goes a step further, clearly believing that Katsumoto's traditional society is superior to the modernism being unloaded by the Americans.
Small wonder that The Last Samurai reminds of Lawrence of Arabia , since the plot involves a disgraced military officer sent to contact an alien force (that has just raided a railroad) whom he comes to see as noble even as he views himself as their salvation--although Algren ultimately functions not like T.E.
Meanwhile, DiCaprio's South African fortune hunter Archer meets his match in humanitarian reporter Maddy (Connelly); it's the kind of dead weight from which flaccid romantic misadventures are made and reminds, if anything, of Joaquin Phoenix's cameo in Hotel Rwanda as a ventriloquist dummy for the filmmaker's belated activism.
Blood Diamond brings to mind the simplified treatment of worldly tragedies in the same line as Hotel Rwanda, but whereas the latter was merely watered down and overly polished, the former is outright clueless in both content and execution.
Zwick appears to want to make another Hotel Rwanda (2004) -- or at least something along the lines of Fernando Meirelles' The Constant Gardener (2005) -- when, in fact, his story is more like a politically conscious King Solomon's Mines with doses of Hemingway thrown in.
It is possible to build affecting, responsible dramas around horrific real-life events, as Terry George and Michael Winterbottom have with, respectively, "Hotel Rwanda" and "Welcome to Sarajevo."
Thoughts of 2004’s Hotel Rwanda zipped through my head as I watched Blood Diamond.
In the process, the movie rubs our faces in violence, actually outdoing such recent films as "Beyond Borders," "Hotel Rwanda," "The Constant Gardener" and "The Last King of Scotland" in portraying Africa as a scary, apocalyptic hell on earth.
These are among many moments reminiscent from past slavery productions, but "12 Years a Slave" does not engross to the level of seeing "Roots" for the first time, nor does it possess the grace or cinematography of the caliber of "Glory."
There’s deep violence in Northup’s violin’s snapped strings, not to mention the worst whipping scene ever captured on film—not even Denzel Washington’s runaway-slave whipping in “Glory” comes close.
Structurally, that’s not entirely unlike the dramatic problem you also find in films like Glory, which seem to think that the evils of prejudice would only be recognizable when viewed by a character introduced to these injustices for the first time.
Hollywood has produced plenty of historical dramas about race and racism (many dominated by white protagonists or major characters) from The Help to Glory.
That Kurosawa's film was a Japanese interpretation of the cowboys-and-Indians Western genre, which echoed back to spawn John Sturges's "The Magnificent Seven" (1960), is evidence of Kurosawa's deep assimilation of an American genre to a seemingly esoteric Japanese subject matter.
Edward Zwick’s sometimes compelling but miscast and overly conventional “Pawn Sacrifice” begins with a scene reminiscent of Francis Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974).
Alternatively, you have seen the man of two worlds theme with Shogun, or The Last Samurai, or once again, Dances with Wolves .
Even if you're not a movie nerd like myself, you can easily spot narrative references in films like Disney's Pocahontas , Dances With Wolves , The Last Samurai and so on.
There are echoes in this of Cameron’s “Aliens” (Giovanni Ribisi impresses as the corporate lackey who places profit above life), and of such infiltrator-becomes-an-initiate narratives as “A Man Called Horse,” “Dances with Wolves,” and “The Last Samurai.”
Occasionally Avatar ’s technical triumph is betrayed by its maddeningly derivative storyline which borrows elements wholesale from Dances With Wolves The Last Samurai and countless similar films about oppressors switching sides and going native.
If you’ve seen “Dances with Wolves,” if you’ve seen “The Last Samurai,” if you’ve seen “Pocahantas” then the odds are good that you’ve seen this.
I would give a synopsis of the plot, but I don’t need to if you’ve seen Dances with Wolves , Glory , Seven Years in Tibet , Blood Diamond , The Last Samurai , The Children of Huang Shi , or any other film where a white European character stumbles into a culture of noble but blinkered primitives and then proceeds to save them not only from his (and it is always his ) fellow Europeans, but also from themselves.
If not quite up to the standard of 1989's "Glory" -- director Edward Zwick's last historical war epic -- the film is nonetheless filled with exhilarating, gruesomely beautiful battle sequences and stylish nods to the great Kurosawa films, especially "Seven Samurai," "Yojimbo" and "Ran."
The Last Samurai is Hollywood’s reimagination of those gloriously muscular films by the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, cinematic masterpieces like Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
Directed by John Huston
influenced Blood Diamond (2006)
Themes
A subtle reference to John Huston’s "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" in the film’s climax puts a grace note on the trajectory of Danny Archer’s value system.
This is all a lot for one movie to do -- especially one that's also wants to be "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" -- and it might have been better if Zwick had dropped a few massacres and spent more time developing his secondary characters and making his transitions more credible.
Ripping off -- or at least borrowing heavily from -- the ending of The Constant Gardener and having DiCaprio do a bit of Gary Cooper from the film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) don't really change what the story is really about.
The opening (a match is struck in the darkness) is very trite, but the face that emerges belongs to Djimon Hounsou, the gifted column of muscle who lent Steven Spielberg's Amistad what Woody Strode lent John Ford's Sergeant Rutledge.
Nominated in four Globe categories, including best picture (drama division), director (Edward Zwick) and actor (Brad Pitt), "Legends of the Fall" plays like a Really Bad Cinema version of "Bonanza," with quite a bit of the plot from "East of Eden" thrown in for bad measure.
At first, the picture plays like “East of Eden” with a bonus brother; it gets sillier as it goes.
But, in a way, "Legends" is closer in mood to another Dean movie, "East of Eden"-or to what "East of Eden" might have been if director Elia Kazan had filmed John Steinbeck's whole epic novel, instead of merely its last section.
But at the risk of seeming ungrateful, the way this mashup of Love Story and Jerry Maguire brags about its characters' fantastic sex life is something of a turnoff.
And that's frankly a pity, because there's something sincere and plainspoken at the heart of the film, and you can sense it shooting for the same kind of modern-Zen territory as "Jerry Maguire."
While he's working the foyer - in scenes that recall the real 1996's best film, Jerry Maguire - she crosses the road to a meeting of Parkinson's sufferers.
Tonally, Love and Other Drugs, based on Jamie Reidy’s memoir “Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman,” strikingly resembles Jerry Maguire.