Yogi's Movie Consumption Blog

A Samurai's son is forced to marry his son to the former mistress of his lord. I was already fascinated by the title sequence. The succession of images of roofs and shingles were visually mesmerizing and subtly establish one of the underlying themes of the story: Everybody has to stay aligned to tradition to keep the structure intact. But Mifunes character is stubborn and his fellow Samurai call him that. Although he flatly refuses his lord to wed his son to the dismissed wife of his lord, he is genuinely impressed when he realizes that the couple has taken a liking to each other. He realizes pretty fast that his own life has been full of ambition but devoid of happiness. So again he starts to struggle to make his son's life better than his. At some point the reason for Mifune's stubbornness becomes moot and he keeps on fighting for a higher ideal: Feelings of even a simple vassal should be honored even by the highest lord. During this quixotic battle he become...

When a falsely arrested black man turns out to be a police officers he reluctantly helps the sheriff of a racist small town in the South to solve a murder, despite all their tensions. This was a highly entertaining watch for me. Just seeing Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier play off each other is worth the time. I was fascinated by Poitier, but I somehow preferred Steiger's crazy mood jumps. For example: The sheriff's patience wears thin pretty fast with the smug behaviour of the big city homicide expert Tibbs (Poitier) - In one of the best confrontations between the two, the sheriff lets his deputy arrest Tibbs out of blind and helpless rage. Everybody in the room (and the audience) understands the pointless move but we can feel with the sheriff who just went over the edge of his intellectual and emotional possibilities. Tibbs keeps cool and has the upper hand, until he is confronted with his own racial prejudices. The scene where he meets the rich white land owne...

A headstrong chain-gang member who has a reputation of never giving up tries to escape from rural prison. The boxing, the egg-eating and the hole-digging scenes had a big impact on me. There is a progressive senselessness in the actions, the first being a sort of understandable pecking order fight, but after that everything Newman's character does is basically pointless - and it didn't matter if he was in control or not. All his other actions are just as aimless - the beheading of the parking meters, and the "fast working" performance with the road tarring machine, where he manages to motivate everybody to work like crazy. Because of all this, the story was deeply unsettling to me. The lead character is lost in life and the universe, and - very poignantly - dies inside a church. In a modern version, the church might be replaced by some kind of bank or corporation, that tries to give a bizarre mission to one's life while at the same time micromanaging it. ...