Directed by Akira Kurosawa. A crafty ronin comes to a town divided by two criminal gangs and. Explore best mystery movies of all time. Follow direct links to watch top films online on Netflix, Amazon and iTunes. November 2. 01. 6 Movie Release Schedule & Calendar. Filter by Year & Month. Toshiro Mifune achieved more worldwide fame than any other Japanese actor of his century. He was born in Tsingtao, China. Movies (Now Showing) Movies and the Theaters Playing Them. Looking for theater schedules? Try Theaters (formerly The Marquee). New Movies; Box Office; Your Favorites. Matt Cummings. Published to tremendous acclaim in 2. Helen De. Witt’s massive novel The Last Samuraiis being reissued this month by New Directions. With any luck, the acclaim for De. Witt’s 2. 01. 1 tragicomisexual satire Lightning Rods will encourage readers to return to this unjustly forgotten big book of the turn of the 2. If they do, they’ll discover that it’s surprisingly relevant to the way we consume art today, the perfect novel for the age of streaming. How do we control our media? How does it control us? It might seem odd to suggest that a novel as aggressively analog as The Last Samurai has much to say to the Netflix generation. As De. Witt describes her complex plot, with a kind of hilarious deadpan, the novel is “the story of a single mother who uses Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai to provide male role models for her fatherless boy.” As much as the novel does in its 5. Indeed, the only consistent thread weaving its way throughout the multilingual, multiperspectival tome is the scene of the book’s two protagonists—Sibylla and her boy- genius son Ludo—watching a VHS copy of Seven Samurai over and over and over again. Kurosawa’s epic film is started, paused, rewound, talked over, and pored over throughout the book until it becomes a living part of the narrative, with star Toshiro Mifune uttering lines of Japanese within the text and the book’s plot taking on the structure of the samurai epic. But even as De. Witt’s novel fetishizes video, it provides an elegant—and newly useful—meditation on what it means to feel so intimately close to what we watch on TV. Helen Dewitt. New Directions. As much as The Last Samurai is a novel about a mother’s struggle to raise a son on her own, it is also a novel about art—not making art, or inspiring it, but consuming it and engaging with it in a million informal, inappropriate, but profoundly meaningful ways. For De. Witt, the most interesting style of consumption is repetition. The repeat viewer, in this novel, is a new kind of hero, a character whose psychological complexity is challenged by and forged in concert with the media she consumes. And it isn’t just Kurosawa. Watch Cinema Mifune: The Last Samurai 2016 MovieRepetition is both the novel’s topic—familial inheritance figured as an endless cycle of repeated mistakes and sins—and its style. Sibylla reads and rereads sections of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Wodehouse’s Leave it to Psmith. Sibylla and Ludo ride the same route through London on the appropriately named Circle Line every day, sometimes multiple times. Glenn Gould records nine or 1. ![]() The fictional pianist and performance artist Yamamoto plays and replays the same variations in concert so many times that the members of his audience miss their trains home. Phrases like “masterpiece of modern cinema” are repeated in Vonnegutian style throughout the text of the novel. And, of course, Sibylla and Ludo watch, pause, rewind, rewatch, and pore over the aforementioned “masterpiece of modern cinema,” Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, until Ludo appropriates the plot as a way to track down and test potential father figures in London. By and large, characters in this novel don’t just read a book, listen to a song, or watch a movie. They reread, replay, rewind until the book, song, or movie transubstantiates into something almost indescribable. They make ordinary art transcendent through repetition. A demented sex comedy for our impersonal age, Lightning Rods is funny, outrageous, and a vicious satire of capitalism. Video, like the remote control before it and online streaming and video on- demand after it, is what media scholars call a “control technology.” These technologies all share the ability to take power out of the hands of the network programmer or TV station and put it in the hands of the viewer. They symbolize the emergence and triumph of active spectatorship, the promise, however illusory, of control over a medium that is so often criticized for holding its viewers in a kind of dumb, passive thrall. With the ability to choose her spots, to replay the scenes she finds most significant, the VCR allows Sibylla to transform the film into something else entirely. We can reproduce the theatrical experience in our living rooms, but we can also chop up, fragment, and compulsively replay, as well. When I fly, I watch the same five- episode stretch of Parks and Recreationover and over to distract me. When I need to psych myself up, I rewatch You. Tube videos of triumphant public performances: Beyonc. I watch “The Suitcase” from Season 4 of Mad Men when I am lonely. I sync media, in other words, to the ebbs and flows of my life, making it look more like me. Rediscover the joys and surprises of great literature! Spend 2. 01. 6 reading and discussing six great novels alongside Slate's books and culture columnist Laura Miller and her fellow Slatesters. Join us today. It’s an illusion to imagine that control technologies like VHS or streaming give us actual power over these media forms, that they enable interactivity in any but the most superficial ways. But the ability to control our media even to the extent that we can is also an ability to give it new significance, to integrate it into not just how we live day today, but who we are. This is happening whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. The Last Samurai is neither a warning about nor a utopian celebration of this fact. But it is an argument that, sometimes, it can be beautiful.- -- The Last Samuraiby Helen De. Witt. New Directions. See all the pieces in the Slate Book Review. Read articles and publications about The Seven Samurai, 1954, directed by Akira Kurosawa, with Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Kuninori Kodo. 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