stephenksmith

Kurosawa is first and foremost, a story-teller. Through his stories we see much of ourselves--who we are, can be, the limits of our ethos and preconceived notions of who we are or capable of. Kurosawa amazes us with his range. Stories set in contemporary Japan. Ancient Japan. From businessmen to detectives to .... a strong little man living alone in the most desolate land on earth--Siberia. It is based on memoirs? of a Russian Army Captain who encountered Dersu at the end of the 19th century, when Russia was still mapping what it was--something that George Washington did when our country was unexplored. The story, of course, cannot avoid the necessary comparison of modern man with paleolithic nomadic man. What is good, evil, the measure of men specific to one's time. What senses have we lost or have been dulled by living in cocoons of civilization, warm houses and shared responsibility for warding off cruel nature and the creatures who inhabit the shadows outside the firelight. How important are fire, salt, matches, ammo.... all precious things that should be husbanded and even left in forest shelters for those who might need them in times of privation and soul lost wandering. Dersu says, "You bad man!" and "You very good man." and sometimes to the same man! He sees that no man is either all good or evil, but is capable in each moment of becoming either. We see men whose"normal" lives in civilization were shattered, and they went out into the wilderness to die or live, and let the gods determine their fate. I fell in love with this movie. And I laugh at many of us--the most modern and out-of-touch with nature: nature as beauty and as cruel harvester of our bodies when we can no longer push headlong into the dark blizzard. Now, so many of us dishonor the remaining tigers, bears, apex predators and a world seemed too green and gauzy and nonthreatening to so many. Why not go for a jog in the Colorado mountains? How many are killed, eaten by mountain lions, because they didn't respect nature as she is. Bears, wolves--why they won't hurt you if you but sit and gaze upon them with zen-like concentration--I fear you not, my brother. Yet this movie shows that we need not hate what ultimately comes to take us away to that land from in no traveler returns. The tiger is a god. And when one cannot kill him, clean and swift, and he runs away, then the gods say you will die soon. Not just a pretty creature to aim one's camera or rifle at and sigh. Or that fool in Herzog's "Grizzly Man". Anyone who knows the out of doors and the power nature still has over us, can only laugh at the idiot who pranced and danced amongst the grizzlies. Well, joke's on you, mister. It just so happened your hubris and modern sensibilities and lies you've told yourself about nature came around to bite you..... et' you.

Dersu Uzala is the divine opposite of Herzog's either ironic or stupid "Grizzly Man". Nature was neither a winter playground or an ugly place at all. For Dersu reveled in the smells, sounds and cornering winds that made the fire become something different with each poke of an ember reddened stick. Where life is now in the living. And nature is neither Disneyland nor a living hell, but is the relentless earth, moiling and seething, buckling up and taking one finally, in the end.

A superb movie that should be seen by many many more folk.

Ya Ya Ya Ya.. Yuck. Maggie Smith ought to be ashamed of herself, but hey, yah gotta pay the rent. Smarmy, lousy directing, every scene a parody of the South that never was. Negroes dancing in a funeral band to a birthday party of an old, priveleged drunk of a white woman... yezz'ma'am... we sho' do love youse and how you abused us on dee plantation! Bad script. Sandra Bullock hung in there and so did Ashley Judd, but the old women were horrid. Hard to make those actresses stink, but the script and director did. It was contrived, gauzey, florid and untrue. I wish the two male characters in the story would have walked away down dee lane, leaving these silly southern sisters to molder in their fantasies... let me give you a taste of the absurdity of the script... suppose, just suppose that you are premiering a play on broadway (the writer), and your mother's friends (the Ya Yuck sisters) take you out on the town, put a date-rape powder in your drink, and somehow fly you, comatose, (but, first class) to the bayou to confront your mother at all costs! I would have them arrested, sentenced to the looney bin, and get my buns back to NYC to my waiting director and actors. But not her. She "deals" with Moe-mama and her dear biddies.

Don't rent it. Don't watch it. Start a campaign to melt the videos into slag.

Most Sincerely, Stephen K. Smith

Boys hunt cats with BB guns and sell the dead meat on the road-kill restaurant black market. Sleazey little teen queens with marginal IQs put black tape on their nipples and rip it off, hard, to see if it makes their nipples grow! A boy/creature with a dirty set of pink playboy bunny ears walks around, urinates off interstate overpasses. The BB gun boys find a grandma who's in a redneck coma, and they shoot her in the toe with a BB gun to see if she'll react.

It's so bad, it's good. You'd better be "into" irony and sleaze. If you liked Pink Flamingos, you'll go for this. It's less a coherent movie than an expressionist post card from the depths of low-class, redneck America, and for once, it's not set in dee south. It's supposed to be Xenia, Ohio.

Actually, the scene that made me the sickest was when Gummo, our water-headed pre-teen was taking a bath in the dirtiest water you've ever seen. His sleazey little mother put a board over the old tub and began to feed him a plate of spaghetti, a big glass of milk, and a chocolate candy bar that moments before she'd bought at her front door from two African-am. kids who were pretending they were selling it for charity but laughed in private at the suckers who'd given them so much money. Anyway, back to the tub... for some reason (maybe because it was just after MY dinner), seeing this little sleazey greazer eating and schlorping the pasta and sucking on the milk in a cheap plastic tumbler with Momma jutting her hips to the side.... I don't know... it was a magic moment and turned my stomach.

See it if you're really really hip and really really cynical and really really in need of something twisted and different for an evening. Oh, if you're a cat lover, hang on for dear friggen life.

Steve Smith