The Last Samurai

Or should I title it, "The Last Tom Cruise movie I want to see".

I saw a post yesterday we R Lee Emery (the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket) who recounted a conversation with Stanley Kubrick just before he died. Kubrick said that "Eyes wide shut" was a piece of shit, thanks to the interference of Tom and Nichole. Well how about that?

Anyway, I watched the Samurai movie and have a simple description for it - "Dances with wolves set with Japs rather than Indians". And without the wolf. Well, maybe the wolf has been replaced by two young Japanese kids.

I watched it because I just love watching good Japanese actors in western movies. One of my favourites are the guys in "Black Rain" - they are just superb. The cast of Samurai are marvelous - stony faced, serious, 'full on' people.

One thing niggled me though - in one scene, the soldiers are muzzle loading their muskets. They attach the bayonet, then use the rammer etc, and then they fire, there is a lot of gunpowder smoke etc.

Then in another scene, it shows that their guns actually have bolts, so are they a single shot, bolt action rifle, or a muzzle loading musket? I never figured it out. The director seemed to be in love with smoke, so whenever anything fired, it shot out a lot of smoke. Yes, I know that gunpowder produces hideous amounts of smoke, but would bolt action rifles also produce great puffs of smoke, or had they moved on to a less smokey propellant by then?

One thing that irked me is that it showed the Samurai doing a mounted charge against infantry, and the Samurai chopping the infantry to bits. Had these guys never heard of "Waterloo" and "form square"? The French tried lots of cavalry charges against infrantry during the Napoleonic wars around 70 years before this movie was set, and the British generally shot them to bits with muzzle loading Brown Bess muskets. Why in 1877 should infantry in formation be overrun by cavalry?

Unless they were hopelessly trained, which is what they were.

I watched it and deleted it. It is not a movie worth saving.