mnkykungfu said:
^I sort of work in linguistics, so I have a different take on translation from Japanese. It's such a context-based language that I don't feel anything but the most rudimentary translation is possible.
I don't so much mean things that are hard and nuanced to translate smoothly. I'm thinking more of choosing to translate things, that can't be translated. For want of a better example: If the translator assumed people outside of Japan wouldn't know what Sake was, they could choose to translate it to "dry sherry" because that would give an impression of what it tasted like but it would also make the people reading the subtitles thinking they were just drinking dry sherry and not Sake which is an important cultural detail. It would be like translating tea to coffee for a British film
.
mnkykungfu said:
Back to film reviews, I think I know why you prefer KB1 over KB2. It's ripped much more literally from extant films. KB2 is a more original work that only takes a few shots, scenes, and motifs from French New Wave and Spaghetti Westerns.
No it's kinda the opposite for me...
There is so much that is uniquely QT about KB1 that the influences are completely subsumed into the over powering style of his own invention. e.g. the Bride could only wear yellow in the crazy 88 scene because he needed a primary colour so your eye could follow her around in the frenetic carnage (something muted by the censored US cut) but red and blue wouldn't show up the blood on her suit. If it had to be yellow then why not openly homage Bruce Lee too. In it's original context 'Battles Without Honor and Humanity' was just a cool piece of music, QT uses it to describe character in a scene with no dialogue or sound.
..but KB2 feels like QT taking the foot of the accelerator and contenting himself with playing in the Spaghetti Western and Kung Fu genres plus
literally referencing 'Shogun Assassin'. There are many more overt homages in KB1, than in KB2 but they such a small part of the overall QT-ness and he's doing something smart with them anyway.
mnkykungfu said:
KB1 is an almost literal mash-up of Game of Death and Lady Snowblood framed up in Five Deadly Venoms style.
Sorry, I don't see that at all.
mnkykungfu said:
Tarantino just drops in iconic martial arts characters whole cloth, reproducing their costumes and portrayals, from Pai Mei
Pai Mei isn't in KB1 but I get your overall point.
asterixsmeagol said:
one of the second-run-theaters in my area did back-to-back screenings of Volumes 1 and 2. I enjoyed Volume 1 well enough, but 4+ hours was way too much and I was completely bored by the end.
IIRC, "The Whole Bloody Affair" is pretty much that. I can imagine it being wearisome. I did a chronological cut many years ago which worked better because as an accidental consequence of the linear story, some action scenes come forward and some dialogue scenes fall back, even out the pace but it's still loooong.
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Speaking of long films...
The Godfather Part II (1974)
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Country: United States
Length: 200 minutes
Type: Crime, Drama, Epic
I've never thought
'The Godfather Part II' is that famous sequel that is better than the first film. GF1 is a "perfect movie", while GF2 is "merely" one the greatest films ever
. It's 23-minutes longer than its 3-hour progenitor and feels it. The pacing increases exponentially in GF1 but it actually slows in GF2. The inventive cross-cutting parallel timelines disguise that it's the same film again. The opening wedding is now a Communion party and again opposing forces are plotting against the Corleone family, with the help of it's most trusted members. Michael outplays them, "settles all his debts" and it ends with him and Kay being estranged. It's just done bigger, with more gloss, more budget, higher stakes, darker conclusions and no corners cut (like the stock footage in GF1). Instead of Michael being on a path from good to evil, he's on a path from evil to evil-er, he doesn't metaphorically close a door on his wife, this time he literally puts her onto the street. The first film's main theme was comparing Vito's somewhat benevolent reign and Michael's new reign of terror. In GF2 they bring the dead Vito back as a young man (played brilliantly by
Robert De Niro) so they can make that the theme again. It's much less subtle though, as
Francis Ford Coppola directly compares young Vito bringing his family together (in both senses), with Michael destroying everybody around him, even himself. The flashbacks have a touch of "prequel-itis", so we learn how Vito got his voice, how he got his name and how Tommasino ended up in a wheelchair, when that was information we never need in GF1.
Like the third film, GF2 is hampered by actors refusing to reprise their roles. The absence of
Marlon Brando is artfully handled by Coppola, so him not being in the room at the end, drawing everybody else away, their laughter and joy heard from the next room, as Michael sits alone, is probably way better than whatever was planned if Brando had played ball. The bigger problem is
Richard Castellano not returning as Clemenza. Introducing a replacement character has nowhere near as much impact, especially as the young Clemenza is still included prominently in the flashback sequences. The substitution,
Michael V. Gazzo's Frank Pentangeli is a brilliantly written character and his performance is even better, so the situation is as good as it could be. I hadn't noticed before that Michael is often pictured drinking water (stretching to carbonated water when he's in cocktail-capitol Havana), which in films that feature the love of food and drink so heavily, must surely be symbolic of him taking no pleasure from life, just subsisting. I also noticed that a couple of scenes involving Pentangeli definitely appear to be edited out of order. All this nitpicking makes it sound like I don't like GF2 but really I love it, it's just that I've seen it many times and can see it's not perfect.
Al Pacino has never been better, a totally monstrous performance without hardly ever having to raise his voice to achieve it. You can see the rage physically building inside him, with no dialogue, as Kay is dropping the final revelation on him.
With parts 1 and 2 rewatched, I'm ready to see the new version of GF3!
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Chinatown (1974)
Director: Roman Polanski
Country: United States
Length: 131 minutes
Type: Noir, Crime, Drama
I couldn't remember if I'd seen this before, or if I was just familiar with the more iconic scenes (I think it's the former).
Roman Polanski's film is stylistically a fairly traditional Film-Noir, updated for the 70s with even more violence, cynicism and darker themes than were permissible back in the heyday of the genre.
Robert Towne's script cleverly uses our expectations of certain Noir character tropes to throw in a few twists and it's a solidly structured mystery, unlike some other convoluted/nonsensical detective films. It occurred to me that
Leonardo DiCaprio sometimes does a close imitation of
Jack Nicholson's style of acting in this film. If you loved 1997's
'L.A. Confidential', then you are sure to like this too.