Yakuza Graveyard, Samurai Rebellion, A Perfect Couple, O.C & Stiggs, Northanger Abbey, & No Country for Old Men

Yakuza Graveyard is actually not the film I thought it was. I got it confused with Graveyard of Honor, a different Yakuza film directed by Kinji Fukasaku, and remade relatively recently by Takashi Miike. This one actually felt like a slightly restrained Miike film, full of yakuza and half-breeds who don't fit in, although this one only had female characters who are basically gangsters, druggies or whores. Or all three! Miike tends to have slightly more developed female characters. Only slightly, and they really depend on the film. Meiko Kaji, she of The Yakuza Papers (an earlier Fukasaku series of films about the problems with both the yakuza and related police corruption), the Lady Snowblood films, and the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, is the main female, but she really doesn't get that much to do. I vastly preferred The Yakuza Papers, which had a far greater sense of history and scale, although this one dealt interestingly with the economic reality of mid-70s Japan and police involvement in the Yakuza. So, while it was interesting, it didn't grab me as much as I would have wanted.

Samurai Rebellion was directed by Masaki Kobayashi, director of Kwaidan and Harakiri, and all around anti-Samurai man. This one is again about the corruption of the Samurai culture, like Harakiri, except that this is more about moral corruption, as the mistress of a Lord who has had his son is forced to marry the son of a great swordsman. When the lord needs to marry her to make the son the official heir due to the death of his other son, she's kidnapped and the son and the father must decide whether to fight or allow the woman the son loves to be taken from him. Of course, the main point is that Toshiro Mifune and Tatsuya Nakadai have a swordfight. Which makes the film, no matter what else is in it, it's worth it for that scene. That the rest of the movie is quite excellent is just a bonus.

A Perfect Couple is another late 70s Altman film after Quintet, although it's considerably better. Altman really doesn't do romantic comedy well, and this one is quite fluffy, with long musical interludes of a terrible (and I mean terrible) soft rock band breaking up a weird story of an older antique dealer who falls for a backup singer for the aforementioned band through a computer dating service. It's also very strange to see Dennis Franz in a very early role as Paul Dooley's brother and Henry Gibson (so much a one of those guys guys that I actually had to look him up because I couldn't remember what his name was). Ebert's review is actually fairly accurate (except for his saying the music wasn't terrible), as it was just all over the place, which works in some Altman films, but not this one, as pretty much any scene with the band was painfully bad.

O.C. & Stiggs has an interview with Altman saying that of all his movies, this one was watched most often (or nearly the most, I can't quite remember) at his place when he had friends over. He said that he wasn't sure whether people were more likely to laugh at or with the film. Considering the film isn't very funny, it's far more likely to be that they were laughing at it. It's a horrible mess, an unfunny "teen comedy" with bizarre Vietnam analogies and a ridiculous plot that doesn't make sense even after it's explained.

Northanger Abbey is, in my opinion, the new best version of Northanger Abbey, altough, based on the previous version I saw, that wouldn't be very hard. This one, though, was quite good and captured the ridiculous humor of the novel, even if it suffers from the same trimming of the other new Austen adaptations. Northanger Abbey is, by far, the funniest Austen work, mocking the horrible clichés of gothic novels with the humor that only shows flashes in most of her works, but here is almost constant. Felicity James is an outstanding Catherine Morland, and JJ Fields as Henry Tilney is the most perfect Austen hero. Well, Darcy is still the best, but Tilney is quite good, because of lines like "Now I must give one smirk, and then we may be rational again." I like Andrew Davies's decision to use Jane Austen's voice to help fill in the vast parts of the novel that needed to be cut for the 90 minute running time. As much as I love Pride and Prejudice, I have to say that Northanger Abbey was the most enjoyable Austen to read.

No Country for Old Men is the best film I've seen so far that came out last year. It also moves into number 3 on my list of best Coen brothers films, behind Miller's Crossing and The Big Lebowski, and just ahead of Barton Fink. Javier Bardem, as Anton Chigurh, is the most evil person in a Coen brothers film, and possibly the most evil person in a film. Just irredeemably evil, and watching the slightly normal people react to him is a lot of the humor, although Woody Harrelson, Kelly MacDonald (who knew she could play a Texan?), Tommy Lee Jones, and Garret Dillahunt were all outstanding. Josh Brolin was ok, but his character just doesn't have the same punch that just about every other character in the film has. It really is just a darkly hilarious film, gorgeous in a dirty sort of way, and a depressing view of society. And, of course, they shot the dogs.