Kill!, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, & Hyperculture

Kill! is based on the same novel as Sanjuro (about which I wrote "Sanjuro was good, but not as good as Yojimbo. It was funnier, but a little too preachy. Still, a mediocre Kurosawa film is better than the best of most other directors. The ending blood was completely out of character for the movie, but it was ok." when I saw it back in 2003), and was directed by Kihachi Okamoto, who also did Sword of Doom. This was pretty funny, but not nearly as good as Sanjuro. Mainly due to the two leads not being Mifune and Nakadai, the two best actors of their generation in Japan.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (no, I didn't rewatch the movie, I read the novel) is a book by Dai Sijie, who was sent to be reeducated, and ended up going to France to write this novel in French, which was then translated into English. So this was doubly translated, although once by the author himself. The story was still heartbreaking, although the added bit about the Three Gorges Dam wasn't from the book, but it probably needed a little extra due to the lack of that much movie in the relatively short book. It certainly could have worked, but it needed an ending. It could have ended like the book, but that's not going to bring the kind of closure that most movie goers expect.

I also wrote up the Hyperculture exhibit at the Kennedy Center, so if, for some reason, you read this blog, but not that blog, this is my time to tell you to read that one. It has robots, koi, polka-dots, and me almost falling asleep in public.

And, for those who care, apparently the Edison Chen sex scandal may be over, just like the writer's strike! Boo-yay!