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Where Has This Film Been All My Life?
Sep. 13th, 2012 09:25 pmOk, a quick post, just to talk about a film that I watched today.
I came across it, because, in a moment of extreme boredom, I was trawling through Moviebob's video reviews and found a special episode about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films. He just happened to mention Six-String Samurai as a 'rockabilly parody of the genre' of Mad Max style apocalypse survival and almost a 'must-own'. This, it seems, though, wasn’t everyone’s opinion, as I later found, when looking for pictures for this post, that it has a rather scathing entry on badmovies.org. I found this dismissal of the film, though, rather unfair. Yeah, it’s goofy and low-budget, but that doesn’t necessarily make a film bad.
My reaction to it, as you may have guessed was somewhat different. Immediately after hearing about it, I looked up the trailer, and knew that this film would be right up my street, but I didn't realise just what a bizarre and imperfect mixture it would be: part Wizard of Oz, part Samurai story, part kung-fu movie, part Highlander, part rockabilly Mad Max, not absolutely everything in it was to my taste. Yet, the whole was both cohesive and engaging. Indeed, the 1950s theme was a nice change from the usual aesthetics of such films. Of course, it also helps the fight scenes that Jeffrey Falcon who wrote the thing and plays the lead, is actually a martial artist.
But, I don't want to review this movie. I want to talk about what I think I liked about it, other than the quirky sense of humour (which admittedly I didn't always get, although that might have been the bad sound quality and my relatively poor knowledge of musical and kung-fu specifics) and the fact that the words 'apocalypse' and 'samurai' in any medium will usually push my buttons. Also the word 'teleportation', but that's not relevant here.
What I liked about it was that it didn't rely on its quirkiness, but instead gave us a world of well-acted, engaging and nuanced characters with actual arcs, which meld seamlessly into the weirdly hyperbolic world of the narrative. And it does this with very little actual speech. Character traits are portrayed through tone of voice, facial expressions and actions. Buddy, the main character, is cool and cynical, but his actions in the film both show his movement from his selfish way of being (part of what I like about this story is that it's essentially about a warrior finding a cause to fight for other than personal glory) and belie his cynicism. Yes, that's cheesy as hell, but the film acknowledges that, and then makes you care anyway. Or, at least, it did with me.
This was, though the reason why the ending was both a tear-jerker and a bit of a let-down. But, I would absolutely recommend this film: any film which tries to have emotional depth when it has every excuse not to is, to me, a sign of all that is good in human artistic endeavour.
I came across it, because, in a moment of extreme boredom, I was trawling through Moviebob's video reviews and found a special episode about apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic films. He just happened to mention Six-String Samurai as a 'rockabilly parody of the genre' of Mad Max style apocalypse survival and almost a 'must-own'. This, it seems, though, wasn’t everyone’s opinion, as I later found, when looking for pictures for this post, that it has a rather scathing entry on badmovies.org. I found this dismissal of the film, though, rather unfair. Yeah, it’s goofy and low-budget, but that doesn’t necessarily make a film bad.
My reaction to it, as you may have guessed was somewhat different. Immediately after hearing about it, I looked up the trailer, and knew that this film would be right up my street, but I didn't realise just what a bizarre and imperfect mixture it would be: part Wizard of Oz, part Samurai story, part kung-fu movie, part Highlander, part rockabilly Mad Max, not absolutely everything in it was to my taste. Yet, the whole was both cohesive and engaging. Indeed, the 1950s theme was a nice change from the usual aesthetics of such films. Of course, it also helps the fight scenes that Jeffrey Falcon who wrote the thing and plays the lead, is actually a martial artist.
But, I don't want to review this movie. I want to talk about what I think I liked about it, other than the quirky sense of humour (which admittedly I didn't always get, although that might have been the bad sound quality and my relatively poor knowledge of musical and kung-fu specifics) and the fact that the words 'apocalypse' and 'samurai' in any medium will usually push my buttons. Also the word 'teleportation', but that's not relevant here.
What I liked about it was that it didn't rely on its quirkiness, but instead gave us a world of well-acted, engaging and nuanced characters with actual arcs, which meld seamlessly into the weirdly hyperbolic world of the narrative. And it does this with very little actual speech. Character traits are portrayed through tone of voice, facial expressions and actions. Buddy, the main character, is cool and cynical, but his actions in the film both show his movement from his selfish way of being (part of what I like about this story is that it's essentially about a warrior finding a cause to fight for other than personal glory) and belie his cynicism. Yes, that's cheesy as hell, but the film acknowledges that, and then makes you care anyway. Or, at least, it did with me.
This was, though the reason why the ending was both a tear-jerker and a bit of a let-down. But, I would absolutely recommend this film: any film which tries to have emotional depth when it has every excuse not to is, to me, a sign of all that is good in human artistic endeavour.
