Hello again, everyone, and welcome once more to Hootoo's most punctual movie reviewing service. Sometimes, life is kind to you, and you don't have to spend hours and hours trying to think up a spurious connection between the two films under consideration in a given week...

Shadow of the Sun

For fifty years now, samurai have cast a long shadow over world cinema. Their greatest advocate, Akira Kurosawa (son of a samurai family himself), invented the iconography of the samurai movie single-handed, as well as providing storytellers of all kinds with a set of archetypes that show no signs of fading with age. From The Magnificent Seven to the Jedi Knights to Ghost Dog, the outsider with ferocious dedication and terrifying martial prowess is part of the Tarot deck of modern culture.

Which makes it all the more ironic that Kurosawa was criticised in his native Japan for portraying an idealised and stereotypical version of the country on celluloid (which I suppose must make him the Richard Curtis of his day). Also the fact that he himself admitted that one of the biggest influences on his style was John Ford - a more monolithically American director could not be conceived of. But the imagery remains, the mystique persists, intact.

Ed Zwick takes a crack at doing Kurosawa's legacy justice in The Last Samurai, a fictionalised retelling of the samurai rebellion of 1877, although, to ensure we gaijin turn up in sufficient numbers to recoup the sizeable budget, riding with the rebels is none other than Tom Cruise, even though he technically doesn't make the minimum height requirement. Eh? How's that work? I hear you wonder.

Well, Tom plays Nathan Algren, an embittered US Army officer racked with guilt about his role in atrocities committed against native Americans, reduced to being a salesman for the Winchester rifle company and trying to drink himself to death. But the appearance of old comrade Zebulon Gant (Billy Connolly - but don't worry, somebody sticks a yari through him before very long) signals a new opportunity. The Emperor of Japan wants someone to train his new modernised army, and Tom and Billy are offered the job.

However, it turns out that not everyone is happy with the westernisation of Japan, and the Emperor has his hands full with a rebellion led by noble samurai lord Katsumoto (a fine performance by Ken Watanabe, squarely in the tradition of the great Toshiro Mifune). Despite his better judgement, Tom leads his half-trained army against the samurai and promptly gets the squaddies minced and himself captured. Inevitably, though, he comes to admire the spirit of his captors and begins to question his own loyalties...

It's fairly clear that Tom Cruise would really like to win an Oscar for his performance in this film. If that happens, it will be rightly scorned by future generations, but there's still much to enjoy about The Last Samurai. As I've already mentioned, Watanabe is extremely good as Cruise's main sparring partner, and a little further down the cast list is a pleasing turn from Timothy Spall as an expat Brit (Spall's presence in a couple of the Cruiser's recent pics may be down to the great man apparently being a mad keen fan of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet). It's very handsomely mounted and photographed - the first appearance of the samurai as they ride out of the fog, like intruders from a lost world, is wonderful - and the action sequences are extremely spiffy, ranging from Tom twirling his daisho like nobody's business as he takes on five men single-handed, to a cool ninjas-vs-samurai skirmish, to a full-scale old-school pitched battle, of which Kurosawa himself might well have approved.

Having said that, it is rather long and a tiny bit predictable, and there's a lot of dead wood in the cast list. (I think the end is a cop-out, too, but will say no more for fear of spoiling the plot.) And this is a film built around a very strange ambivalency. The story is partly driven by liberal angst over imperialist exploitation of Japan and elsewhere - western culture is basically depicted as mercenary and decadent. 'Why do you hate you own kind so much?' the villain asks Cruise at one point - I could ask the scriptwriter and director the same question. This is especially pertinent as the culture the film portrays as spiritually and morally superior to the west's in virtually every way is that of the samurai. These guys are so noble and moral they make the Jedi look like pimps. This is a depiction of the caste far more idealised than anything Kurosawa ever put on film, and an unrealistic one (for one thing, the charming ritual where a samurai could summarily execute any passing peasant failing to show appropriate servility doesn't make it into the film). This film is about the mythic samurai stereotype rather than the historical reality - a commercially wise choice, I suppose, but one which dumbs it down considerably.

But one thing the film is certain of: and that's that Tom Cruise is a great, great guy. The samurai are wonderful, and they really like Tom - so imagine how much more wonderful that must make him! Yes, it's the same old Cruiser narcissism that has so often bedevilled his attempts to be taken seriously as an actor. He doesn't do the smile so much on this occasion, for which I suppose we must be thankful, but we do get lots of portentous voice-overs as he reveals his insights into the society of his new friends, and far too often things grind to a halt for a scene in which Tom gets to show off his range and talent for no real purpose other than to provide the award shows with a nice clip to accompany the nomination he's hoping for. It's this mixture of liberal angst, fetishistic hero-worship, and narcissism that takes the edge off an otherwise worthy piece of epic entertainment.

The Land of the Rising Daughter

And so we move on to Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation: another week, another film about a troubled American (this time round it's comedy legend Bill Murray) finding spiritual solace, of a sort, while visiting Japan. A joke about how it would be much more interesting if Tom Cruise starred in the thoughtful tale of bittersweet urban heartache and Murray led the samurai revolt is pretty much obligatory at this point - so feel free to make one for yourself.

Murray plays Bob Harris - not the whispering muso DJ but a Hollywood star - who's in Tokyo to promote a brand of Japanese whiskey. (It has become a sort of urban legend that really famous actors are forever flying off there to endorse unlikely products - Brad Pitt plugging haemorrhoid cream, that sort of thing¹ - for ridiculous sums, on the understanding the ads never appear outside Japan.) Quite how famous Bob actually is is a bit vague, as hardly anyone makes a big deal out of meeting him and he's not mobbed on the ginza, despite his face appearing on billboards and the sides of trucks. But anyway.

Staying at the same hotel is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young woman still figuring out what to do with her life, who's only in the country to accompany her photographer husband (who means well but is basically a bit of a putz). Bob and Charlotte get to know each other, and...

Well, nothing much actually happens, if we're honest. This is one of those films that's been very widely praised, and has certainly been crafted with a good deal of care and skill, and is very satisfying to watch. But the actual plot could be written on the back of a stamp. Bob and Charlotte basically have a very restrained and almost totally chaste affair before going their separate ways. The fact that it happens in Tokyo is largely immaterial - because, although there's some pretty scenery, the obligatory karaoke sequence (oh, how I love karaoke!), and some bracingly un-PC jokes about the Japanese, Coppola seems more interested in the city as a sort of absurd summation of everything about modern urban living, as seen with all the sense and personal investment stripped out of it (she also seems very interested in Johannson sitting around her hotel room in her pants, judging from the huge number of scenes in which this happens).

I'm probably not doing a very good job of selling you on this film, which is a shame as it really is rather good, honest - for one thing it has a couple of what I'm sure will prove to be the funniest scenes of the year, as the none-more-deadpan Murray contends with a demented TV commercial director and later on a rather excitable prostitute someone's had sent to his room. But Murray is excellent throughout, his lugubriousness also deployed to express a real sense of listlessness and quiet despair, as well as the realisation that his relationship with Johansson isn't in any proper sense real. Johansson is every bit his equal in a much less showy part, giving the film heart and soul. It's a hugely accomplished performance, and all the more impressive considering that only a few months ago the most memorable moment in Johansson's career was the sight of her getting glued to her bedroom wall by a giant spider.

Sofia Coppola, who knows a thing or two about dodgy early career moves herself, deserves huge credit for writing and directing such an accomplised and distinctive film - even if it isn't quite the work of utter genius many critics seem to have taken it for. Lost In Translation simply sets out to tell a story about the brief relationship between two very different people - and does it extremely well, filling the tale with charm and longing and real tenderness. A subtle gem.