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Thread: Last Samurai Clones....

  1. #16
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    Originally posted by ap skeritt
    ...

    (Who ever would have guessed Richard Chamberlain was gay? I mean honestly, the chicks used to really dig him man...)

    ...
    Surely you know there's no better way to attract women than be gay????
    Huw Larsen

    Number 1 member of the Default Collective of Misfits

  2. #17
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    Heard some enlighted guy discussing the Niten Itto Ryu the other day, said that he had heard that Musashi had picked up his two sword techniques from portugese rapier and dagger techniques being used by GaiJin sailours.
    I've read this somewhere..it's in one of my books. Our resident Musashi expert, Hyaku, told me there is nothing to substantiate that claim though. There are several other koryu that use nito techniques as well.
    David F. Craik

  3. #18
    Jmorgan Guest

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    I think Mr. Smith said it best here:

    "but a couple of those Highlander wannabes turned into good students and are still with us today."

    Remember, we all had to get our start somewhere, I saw “Karate Kid” as a child and thought “that looks cool” then years later in high school a friend convinced me to take karate lessons with him, he fell by the way side and 12 years latter here I am still going.

    We will always have those people who see a movie or TV show that decide to take a martial art, some will be taught by frauds, some will look to be frauds, and some will become good students.

    I’m not going to lie, I liked the original Highlander movie and the old Samurai movies that would be on the TV on a Saturday afternoon as a kid and wanted to learn to use a sword. Because of this, A few years ago I tried out kenjitsu. I eventually called it quits when I found out the style was not all that authentic. (I would rather learn nothing than be a part of a fraud)

    All we can do is hope that those people who see these movies and then go looking for a school will find a reputable one and become good students, and for those that don’t you can’t save everyone from the martial arts frauds of the world.

    Jay Morgan

  4. #19
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    Morgan San,

    Definitely words of wisdom, I had some similar experiences on the path to finding my way in the martial arts.

    I started studying Karate under a guy who had either never been taught, or was self taught out of a book. After thinking "This is Crap", I walked away and ended up in a traditional dojo where the chief instructor was legit and had spent time in Japan and was affiliated with a Japanese organisation.

    Many years later I am a happy chappy and am closer to finding a better way.

    As for the effect of the movies on the martial arts, hey, I'm all for it if it spreads enthusiasm for the martial arts.

    I am just interested to see if any new dojo's will suddenly appear teaching kenjutsu or some of the koryu arts.

    Perhaps I am a little bitter, having been taken in by a fraudster once before.

    I note your points however, perhaps I should temper my past experience with a bit of a more compassionate outlook. I will meditate on this.

    Also, for the guys who answered my question about Musashi, thanks. I saw a video of someone performing nitten ryu over the weekend and I think it would be quite speculative to saw that there is a great portuguese / eurpoean influence, especially given the way the rapier uses the point, as opposed the the 'cut' of the katana.

    Cheers,

    Andy
    Andrew

  5. #20
    chris MS Guest

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    Has anyone seen, "Kill Bill"? I saw it over the weekend and think it'll more than likely have the bad effect you guys are talking about here. It's more over the top.

  6. #21
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    Tarentino Ryu

    well, at least they won't be wearing hakama...just yellow tracksuits instead
    Rev. Matt Boxall AKA Dr. Stupid

    *Puts on wizard hat and robe*

  7. #22
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    Yellow tracksuit = Bruce Lee?
    .

    Dojo Chief Crash Test Dummy

  8. #23
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    I don't think they can do spin offs for Bruce arts due to jeet kune do is already established and no Jeet kune do is really used in the movie...

    But maybe some Jeet kune Do/ Jun Fan Gung Fu spin offs may happen with yellow track suits.

    You can order them Via Hayashi, i get mine in a couple of weeks

    Cheers
    Rev. Matt Boxall AKA Dr. Stupid

    *Puts on wizard hat and robe*

  9. #24
    Kimpatsu Guest

    Default The way of the warrior

    From the Guardian film pages:
    'A real man does not think of victory or defeat. He plunges recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams." In the months to come, cinema will be offering plenty of cryptic oriental wisdom like this. And it will come amid scenes of elegant dismemberment and improbable sprays of blood. Because, in the realm of action movies, samurai is all the rage.

    Think of Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu in Quentin Tarantino's samurai tribute Kill Bill, the first volume of which opens this week. In a few months, we'll also be able to see Tom Cruise learn the way of the eastern warrior in his epic The Last Samurai, and Japanese tough guy Takeshi Kitano swapping guns for swords in his award-winning Zatoichi.

    After a long and bloody reign, the gun has fallen from favour as the action-movie weapon of choice. No one, it seems, wants to see gun movies any more. It could be a reaction to real-life gun violence, from Columbine to Iraq, or sheer boredom with the macho laziness of shoot-outs. Either way, from the historical battles of Gladiator to the magic feats of The Lord of the Rings and the swashbucklers of this summer's hit Pirates of the Caribbean, audiences have made it clear they want to see their heroes do something more athletic than pull a trigger.

    But there's more than weaponry behind the samurai vogue. There is the samurai code of honour, bushido - "the way of the warrior". The west, and its movies, have always had a bizarre fascination with bushido. Based on Zen and Confucian wisdom, its seven principles - courage, honesty, courtesy, honour, compassion, loyalty and complete sincerity - are almost the opposite of everything Hollywood stands for. Perhaps that's why it appeals to elite players like Cruise, who seems to be on a personal quest to transcend his movie-star status. "Bushido is really the reason I wanted to make this film," Cruise says of The Last Samurai. "I strongly identify with those values of honour, loyalty and passion. It's a very powerful code; those are wonderful things to aspire to in life."

    The Last Samurai is being talked of as Cruise's Gladiator. It is set in 1870s Japan, when the samurai's sword-based supremacy was being undermined by firearms, and its story is tailor-made for the star. Cruise's character is a disaffected American soldier brought over by the emperor to train the Japanese army in western warfare; instead he regains his purpose through his adoption by the samurai. Cruise trained for the part with samurai-like rigour: eight months learning swordfighting, hand-to-hand combat, horse riding and the Japanese language, and no doubt thumbing through samurai text Hagakure in his trailer.

    Tarantino put his own actors through similarly intense training: the members of his "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad" studied Japanese, kung-fu and kenjutsu sword techniques, the latter from veteran samurai movie star Sonny Chiba. They may not be the first American movies to take in samurai influences, but Kill Bill and The Last Samurai are aiming for an authenticity that previous Hollywood visions of Japan (like Richard Chamberlain's 1980s mini-series Shogun) have lacked.

    The samurai's infiltration of Hollywood has been a slow process. After the second world war, samurai values were associated with kamikaze pilots and Japan's wartime hostility. In Frank Capra's 1945 propaganda movie, Japan: Know Your Enemy, bushido is described as "the art of treachery". Since then, however, samurai movies have served as a useful bridge between the US and Japan. In fact, bearing in mind that the real samurai class was officially abolished more than 30 years before the invention of cinema, most of what the US knows about samurai it knows from the movies.

    In Japan, there was no such thing as a "samurai movie" before the second world war - although it was making plenty of jidaigeki, or historical movies, and, given that samurai had been a part of society for more than 1,000 years, it would have been very difficult to leave them out. When the American occupation government took over at the end of the war, it limited production of jidaigeki, fearing that they could reignite Japanese nationalism. Especially forbidden was the depiction of samurai swords, which were closely associated with feudal loyalty.

    But, by 1950, Japan's film industry had returned to normal and was starting to make an international impact. This was largely thanks to one director: Akira Kurosawa. His Rashomon opened the doors in 1950, but Seven Samurai, four years later, laid out the vocabulary of the modern samurai movie. The director was descended from a famous samurai family, and his father wore the samurai topknot when he was a boy. His seven samurai are noble, honourable, virtuous heroes. But much as Kurosawa loved the samurai, he also loved John Ford and Howard Hawks. It's debatable how authentically "Japanese" Seven Samurai is - Japanese critics certainly attacked it for being "too western". But it was a huge international hit, and Kurosawa followed it up with several more - Yojimbo, Sanjuro, The Hidden Fortress - all using his signature actor Toshiro Mifune.

    What followed was a period of cross-fertilisation between westerns and samurai movies. Their heroes were similarly rootless loners, operating in similarly romanticised versions of their country's histories, with similarly black-and-white views of good and evil. Their themes and stories (and, of course, their weapons) were interchangeable. Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Yojimbo were remade, respectively, as The Outrage, The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars.

    But Kurosawa's influence spread to all action genres. War films like The Dirty Dozen and The Guns of Navarone rehashed Seven Samurai's themes of noble teamwork. French director Jean-Pierre Melville translated bushido to 1960s France in his noir masterpiece Le Samouraï, with Alain Delon as a solitary hitman whose samurai-like values appear pathological in 1960s Paris. In more recent times, Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai successfully fused Japanese warrior sensibilities with those of urban America. And Cartoon Network's hit series Samurai Jack has been bringing bushido to pre-school kids worldwide.

    But the Hollywood product that has perpetuated samurai values more than any other is Star Wars. George Lucas is a Kurosawa devotee and has admitted borrowing plot elements from The Hidden Fortress. But there is also more than a hint of samurai about the Jedi, a noble order of warriors who spout Zen-like wisdom, follow an ancient code and fight with swords (Lucas cottoned on to the limitations of gun action well ahead of the pack). Even the word "Jedi" was inspired by Lucas hearing the word jidaigeki. And before Alec Guinness took the role, an early choice for Obi-Wan Kenobi was Mifune.

    While Hollywood quietly adopted the samurai, Japan turned Kurosawa's mould into a whole genre. Pulp samurai movies were churned out in 1960s and 1970s Japan, usually recycling existing legends, historical incidents and previous samurai films. Many took as their subject Miyamoto Musashi, a real-life 17th-century folk hero. The original Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, was played by one actor, Shintaro Katsu, over dozens of movies from 1962 until 1989. As much as Kurosawa, it is these gory but populist movies that Tarantino makes reference to in Kill Bill.

    By the 1980s that craze was over, and the cash-strapped Japanese film industry drifted away from the samurai into gun-toting yakuza movies. Since then, there has been little appetite for a samurai action revival. Nagisa Oshima's 1999 drama Gohatto offered an arthouse, homoerotic revision of samurai history, but Japanese youth have tended to associate samurai movies with their parents. So Kitano's update of Zatoichi, with plenty of computer-generated bloodshed, is a significant development, as was veteran director Yoji Yamada's success at the Japanese Film Academy awards last year with his Twilight Samurai. The release of Kill Bill and The Last Samurai, meanwhile, can only add momentum to Japan's samurai revival.

    The question is whether Japan's domestic samurai movies will be able to compete, now that Hollywood has thrown down its guns and picked up a sword. It could be one hell of a fight but, judging by the history, it's more likely to be a fruitful collaboration.

  10. #25
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    Mmm Interesting read the Guardian...
    .

    Dojo Chief Crash Test Dummy

  11. #26
    Kimpatsu Guest

    Thumbs up Good Taste!

    Originally posted by StanLee
    Mmm Interesting read the Guardian...
    My favourite newspaper; I read it online every day.

  12. #27
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    Default Re: Good Taste!

    Originally posted by Kimpatsu
    My favourite newspaper; I read it online every day.
    Do you get G2 online? best supplement from the Guardian ever...

    They had extracts from Micheal Moore's new book, very interesting.

    The Sun for pictures, The Guardian for news amd information

    Cheers
    Rev. Matt Boxall AKA Dr. Stupid

    *Puts on wizard hat and robe*

  13. #28
    Kimpatsu Guest

    Default Re: Re: Good Taste!

    Originally posted by monkeyboy_ssj
    Do you get G2 online? best supplement from the Guardian ever...
    They had extracts from Micheal Moore's new book, very interesting.
    The Sun for pictures, The Guardian for news amd information
    Cheers
    Don't really like the Current Bun, but yes, G2 comes online too--I get the whole paper. I read both the interview with Michael Moore and the extracts from Dude, Where's My Country? Very good.

  14. #29
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    Noticed you mentioned Shogun above.. Just wanted to let you know its out in DVD now. VERY AWSOME.. I got it for 50$ at Sams Club.
    Keven Cecil
    Iaika
    Musu Jikiden Eishin Ryu Iaijutsu
    www.whiteherondojo.net

  15. #30
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    Default Films and dojo membership

    Hello,

    I help in the "run" of the McGill Kendo Club here in Montreal (which explains are level of disorganization). We are anticipating a larger than usual influx of new students for the coming semester (we already have quite a few more than usual at the moment). We're assuming that this will be in response to Kill Bill and The Last Samurai films being released... so yes, I would think that the films are going to impact people joining up to something like kendo (at least at first). There is no kenjutsu (well, not legitimate kenjutsu) or much iaido in Montreal, so we're one of the only options for the hoards of samurai wannabe (the first newbie that comes in with a topknot will be submitted to torture by mockery).

    My poor sensei is already being inundated with emails about kendo and the particulars of the course offered.

    For some reason many people want to know how long it takes to get a "black belt" in kendo (there are no "belts" of course). Why is this? Is this such an important statistic? I have this feeling that people think that the "black belt" signifies the end of the road, that they have mastered the art and can thus stop afterwards. *sigh* If only it were so...
    Alexander Monteil
    Resident flyfisherman
    McGill Kendo
    www.mcgillkendo.ca

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