Ronin (1. 99. 8) - IMDb. Edit. Storyline. Ronin is the Japanese word used for Samurai without a master. In this case, the Ronin are outcast specialists of every kind, whose services are available to everyone - for money. Dierdre (undoubtedly from Ireland) hires several Ronin to form a team in order to retrieve an important suitcase from a man who is about to sell it to the Russians. After the mission has been completed successfully, the suitcase immediately gets switched by a member of the team who seems to work into his own pocket. The complex net of everyone tricking everyone begins to surface slowly, and deadly.. As the chase proceeds, at the point when . I tell you an old trick. You're the ace field man. It's a simple diagram. Sam takes the marker and draws on the board. Car comes through here. Shooters across each other. Oh my, where'd you learn that? Dark Horse was hurrying to get out their version of the Japanese loyalty saga of the 4. A look at the first trailer for . What Universal was trying to sell was new wave Orientalism. By Orientalism I mean the belief that one theory of culture could be used to describe all the peoples from North Africa to the Pacific Islands. I've felt uneasy sweeping winds of Orientalism even as a graduate student when I argued that to describe someone as Asian didn't paint any more detailed a picture than to say someone was European. We expect to know there are differences between Italians and Germans, even if they were allies during the last official world war, yet not with the Japanese and the Chinese, who were not. Advertisement. Sure, a person of East Asian ethnicity can sometimes pass for Japanese or Chinese or Korean when they are not. You'll get no argument from me there and that has been one of my favorite games when in Japan or parts of China and even Korea. Yet in the case of a historical drama, there are many differences and Universal's team for . With that in mind, people in America (as well, of course, as Japan) know what a samurai should look like. The samurai had a specific hairstyle, chonmage.
Nagisa Oshima's 1. In the 2. 00. 2 Oscar- nominated . Both movies are set at the end of the Tokugawa period (the 1. For the most part, the traditional samurai hairstyles were used in that Tom Cruise movie. The proper hairstyle also comes up in Takashi Miike's 2. Both Miike and Kobayashi's movies are set between 1. In both movies, samurai fake being sick because their top knot has been cut off. Advertisement. Historically, . People know what samurai are supposed to look like before, during and after that time, and the filmmakers of Keanu Reeves' version ignore that. We see the samurai with long hair and, before their ritual suicide, a funny bun on the top. Compare that to the 1. Seuss or Marie Antoinette meets kabuki than court style. Wavy hair was considered bad hair for Japanese women, something that has been pointed out to me in Los Angeles in modern times—the prejudice lingers. The official PlayStation®Store - Buy the latest PlayStation® games, movies and TV shows for your PS4 47 Ronin is a 2013 American adventure drama fantasy action film depicting a fictional account of the forty-seven Ronin, a real-life group of masterless samurai in. Further, what aristocratic woman would be without her ladies in waiting in Japan or any other royal house—not that the women are really aristocrats. During the Tokugawa period, Japan was ruled by the Shogunate through the aristocracy. The emperor was a puppet and he held his puppet court in Ky. The shogun was in Edo (now Tokyo). In the original version of the tale, an imperial envoy was sent annually to the shogun in Tokyo and the shogun's master of protocol, Lord Kira, supposed to instruct the Lord Asano on proper manners for the occasion. Yet in this 2. 01. Lord Asano and the shogun is addressed as your . Is that a mistake in translation or just ignorance on the part of the screenwriters? During the Tokugawa period, there was a rigid four- class system: samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants. The aristocracy was above system. Also outside the class system were the Ainu, the burakumin, actors, criminals, prostitutes and courtesans. This 2. 01. 3 movie repeatedly implies that Keanu Reeves character can't be a samurai because he's a half- breed. Yet during that time period only samurai were allowed to have swords and knives. A peasant could be killed on the spot for possessing a sword and we are repeatedly told that his character, Kai, is the son of a British sailor and a peasant. I'm not saying that there wasn't and isn't prejudice against mixed race persons in Japan, but that class was an important factor during the Tokugawa period. Kai was of the peasant class through his mother. Advertisement. Although I am not a native speaker of Japanese, I have been told that originally there was no word for privacy in Japan. In a country with walls that might literally be made of little more than paper, it is hard to get real privacy, so to a large extent, privacy is a mental state. You can't feel the claustrophobia of the mountainous island nation of Japan in this movie. Some of the scenes, perhaps filmed in Budapest, make the castle look vast and Japan filled with long, flat plains. Further, geography is all mixed up. The warriors travel easily from the Tokyo area to Deshima, the Dutch colony in the bay of Nagasaki, where Keanu Reeve's character is fighting monsters. Yet in reality that's a journey that would require 2. Google maps (or 8 hours by public transit). You get a sense of geographic confusion when you see the castle of the evil Lord Kira is shown as being in a dark and cold place and yet other scenes are in a bright place with cherry blossoms blooming. Cherry blossoms generally bloom in April and not for long. The winters in Tokyo are generally bright and dry. Instead of studying geography, the writers seemed to have fallen back on emotional scenic design. Dark and cold means evil. That didn't work for me in the 2. Turning the story of the 4. Ronin into a white- man- saves- the- day spectacle is cultural imperialism and in this day and age, that might have been a bad judgment call. The need to insert Keanu Reeves as a half- breed reminds me of Raymond Burr in the 1. While the dragon in Ang Lee's movie wasn't real or even CGI, the dragon in . Dragons are considered lucky in China and Japan, but the evil enchantress becomes a dragon in the . The script does incorporate Japanese legendary characters: the tengu who are mountain warriors and the fox who can transform itself into a beautiful woman, but brings in one unnamed beast instead of incorporating the kirin or the kappa. And why bring in that nameless beast for one appearance? Advertisement. The kind of imperialism of this version of . But it never gained traction there.. Market research showed the key demographic of young men didn't buy enough tickets.? The advertising for the movie clearly shows that the production team doesn't understand what makes a woman sexy in a kimono. Should a tale about Japan seem more Japanese? While the Variety article suggests the first- time feature director Carl Rinsch didn't find a ? Traditionally the story of the 4. Having Japanese actors as Japanese is a start and preferable to yellow face, but that isn't enough to make a good movie about Japan. Adding some Japanese items like swords and Japanese style armor, Japanese mythical creatures or a cherry tree doesn't make something Japanese.
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