All bow to the glory of Kurosawa.

Samurais. Duh. Let me be all pompous like and edumaticulate some of you on the way of the Samurai... movies that is. Now I know, some of you know this already, but really it's interesting, and as I was talking about it with my roommate last night, after watching Inagaki's Samurai trilogy. I thought I should pass the information along to some of you.

A history of sorts: Akira Kurosawa made some 32 films in his lifetime, most of them masterpieces, some better than others. His 15th film was The Seven Samurai, probably his most famous, and rightfully so. It's totally awesome, and for those of you who haven't seen it, you should. I've heard in documentaries that Kurosawa was influenced by the concept of the western when he made The Seven Samurai, but he entirely stylized and re-invented it and put it in a Japanese samurai context. The Magnificent Seven, the famous western, was a remake of The Seven Samurai, only in English and with guns instead of swords. The Hidden Fortress was made a few films after The Seven Samurai, and oddly it is seldom known, that Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, is a remake of The Hidden Fortress. Even psycho hard-core Star Wars fan boys usually don't know that. George Lucas even gives an interview talking about it's influence on The Hidden Fortress DVD, I mean, the princess, the hero, the fortress is the Death Star, two bickering characters, one short, one tall are 3P0 and R2. It's just silly how similar it is.

Even sillier than the resemblance of Star Wars to The Hidden Fortress however, is the connection between Yojimbo, Kurosawa's Man With No Name samurai anti-hero film and Sergio Leone's Man With No Name gunslinger trilogy (remember Quentin Tarintino bleeping out the Bride's name in the first Kill Bill movie?). The plot of Yojimbo (which means bodygaurd in English... and not I'm not talking Kevin Costner here), and the plot of the first film in Leone's trilogy, A Fist Full of Dollars, no joke, is exactly the same. The character Eastwood plays, and Toshiro Mifune's character is exactly the same, only Mifune is better at it, believe it or not. Kill Bill, you might of heard, is strongly influenced by Leone's spaghetti westerns, with the close ups of the eyes, the music, and the style. So it's a funny thing I think, how Kurasowa, influenced by the western makes a samurai movie that influences Leone to make a western that will influence Tarintino to make a samurai movie. I think I just went cross-eyed.