{"id":1702,"date":"2005-09-03T23:09:10","date_gmt":"2005-09-03T23:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-1702.html"},"modified":"2006-12-30T16:27:13","modified_gmt":"2006-12-30T16:27:13","slug":"the-last-samurai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/2005\/09\/03\/the-last-samurai\/","title":{"rendered":"<i>The Last Samurai<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s an undeniably beautiful film, lovingly shot with some extraordinary fight and battle scenes.  But&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m getting tired of Tom Cruise&#8217;s earnest, indefatigable, one-man-who-pulls-through-in-the-end schtick.  This was one performance too many for me.  Also, I found the film&#8217;s constant heavy hammering on the themes of honour and loyalty really tiresome.  By the end of the film I was longing to see more of the everyday lives of the rebel villagers, and less of their warriors&#8217; desire to die a glorious death in battle.  There are more subtle ways to tell a story about honour.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the race thing bothered me:  the fact that it&#8217;s a white man who eventually redeems the honour of the Samurai.  I understand why the characters were chosen to work that way, in order to make it fly as a big-budget Hollywood epic, but I found it ugly and patronising nevertheless.  I would much rather thave watched this film if it had been a Japanese production, with the focus on Ken Watanabe&#8217;s character Katsumoto instead.  In fact, you could remove the Tom Cruise character altogether, and you&#8217;d end up with a stronger story.  The tragedy would be greater, and the emotional impact would be more honest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s an undeniably beautiful film, lovingly shot with some extraordinary fight and battle scenes. But&#8230; I&#8217;m getting tired of Tom Cruise&#8217;s earnest, indefatigable, one-man-who-pulls-through-in-the-end schtick. This was one performance too many for me. Also, I found the film&#8217;s constant heavy hammering on the themes of honour and loyalty really tiresome. By the end of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[1142],"class_list":["post-1702","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films_25_stars","tag-legendshome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1702"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1702\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1702"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1702"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1702"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}