2.
He knew Toshiro Mifune was the motherfucker before anyone else did.

3.
Every time someone approaches me about my Seven Samurai tattoo, I end up babbling a bit about why I have it and try to impart how elegantly how his most popular work thrillingly presents seven men that are willing give to so much for so little reward and how it codifies a moral stance that I would only hope to live up to, given the circumstances. It also involves swords and cutting dudes, which is something that also codifies a stance I hold.

4.
If you can sit through Ikiru without losing by completely at the end, you’re probably at least 1/3 robot.

5.
The early melodrama The Quiet Duel or the bloated, too-fanciful Dreams may be among his lesser works, but his fingerprints are all over the final product, making them worth a viewer’s respect and study.

6.
Without Akira Kurosawa, I wouldn’t have the drive to tell stories that I do. He inspires me more than anyone else and I can’t imagine a world without his films and his spirit. He will always be The Master to me.

7.
“One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn’t make a masterpiece or two masterpieces, he made, you know, eight masterpieces.” – Francis Ford Coppola

Tonight, I’ll be returning to 1991′s finest urban crime drama for the first time in fifteen years when I do a drunken livetweet of New Jack City. It’ll start at 11pm EDT. Want to tag along? The film is on Netflix’s Watch Instantly and I’m @beaucoupkevin. Let’s all agree to use the hashtag #NewJackCity.

(I’m going to end up being like Carrie, aren’t I? Covered in pig’s blood, babbling about Ice T, all on stage by myself.)

This video’s being passed around the last couple of days with people discussing the cliché that is the dead cellular phone in horror and suspense movies. What I’ve not seen is anyone stating why this motif is so persistent.

Horror is derived from the feeling of isolation, from the fact that there is no easy out for a protagonist. In an era where 82% of Americans now have a cellular phone of some type, any screenplay (or comics script) that wants to keep the audience from suspecting the protagonists are as dumb as posts for not calling the police/national guard/Justice League in at the end of the first act needs to address the issue of the ubiquitous communications device that allows us to send pictures, emails, text messages, and make phone calls. Yes it’s a cliché, and usually clumsily handled, but it’s a necessary one to keep that needed suspension of disbelief aloft for the 90+ minutes of entertainment that the viewer has paid for.

(On a slightly-related note, that’s something I’ve noticed a lot about Japanese horror: it’s definitely about being isolated. In a very social, very crowded culture like theirs, the idea of being utterly alone already hits a tone. A prime example of this is the last third of Audition, where Takeshi Miike plays this to the hilt.)

2.
A second printing of the first issue of Glenn Brunswick and Dan McDaid’s Jersey Gods is hitting stands this week. I’ve been promising them a letter of comment for some time but I am quite wary of doing this as I’m afraid it’d wind up being one of those unabashed “Oh my god like you guys are so good and Glenn’s script is super-witty and sweetly romantic while managing to capture the cosmic bigness of the gods in the story and that Dan McDaid, boy, he can draw real good and when are you guys going to start a fan club with a button set and a newsletter I’d be the first member” sort of things, but suffice it to say that if your local shop has a copy of #1 and #2 in stock on Wednesday, you’d find yourself a better human being if you deigned to spend money on these books. You’ll notice them by their fine covers by Mike Allred and Darwyn Cooke, two gentlemen that you may have heard of.

3.
I got the trade for Secret Invasion because I remembered liking bits and pieces of it in single issues while being put off by the way the series hung together as a periodical. I can’t help feeling that is comes off as being really sparse despite having quite a lot of talking and punching. I read the entire 8-issue series in about an hour and didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Am I alone in thinking that there’s no real depth to the work and that thematically, it’s pretty barren? Yeah, there’s plenty of rah-rah Marvel Fan Moments that I genuinely enjoyed (Maria Hill versus Jarvis on the Helicarrier in a sequence that should have been in one issue instead of spread across three, Nick Fury stone-cold shooting aliens in the face) but it left me cold in the end, feeling like a means to an end instead of a story in its own right.

That said, that Thunderbolts crossover trade was a lot of fun, mostly because I enjoy Norman Osborne vamping it up and being all arched eyebrows and hissed commands when he’s not in the public eye.

4.
Man, that new Star Trek trailer, huh? Sure is something, isn’t it?

Yet the movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there’s simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated. As “Watchmen” lurches toward its apocalyptic (and slightly altered) finale, something happens that didn’t happen in the novel: Wavering in tone between seriousness and camp, and absent the cerebral tone that gave weight to some of the book’s headier ideas, the film seems to yield to the very superhero cliches it purports to subvert.

(Or am I overestimating people again? I am, aren’t I?)

^*(The two Verhoeven-directed films from that trio feature sequels and ancillary material that replaced humor with po-faced, science-fiction cliché, reminding us that nerds ruin everything. I came close to including Total Recall as well, but it seems to be more in the Commando end of big stupid action movies that occasionally wink at the audience.)

^**Thanks to MW from The ISS for pointing out that I was discussing social satire more than narrower, more genre-intensive versions.

Watchmen is at its core a drama. Yes, there’s a mystery that brings its main cast of players together, but it’s really about broken people and the fucked-up lives they lead. Laurie and Walter’s respective relationships with their mothers; the way Dan’s nostalgic values and fierce devotion to an intellectual ideal leads him down a lonely path; Adrian and Jon’s parallel devotion to logic, with the first becoming more alien as the other is held aloft as the height of humanity – all of these make the book work, and that’s where the real power of Watchmen lies, not in the (elegant and rewarding to be sure) investigation into the murder of Edward Blake. Even as they peel apart the superhero meme, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons devote a considerable amount of the book’s pagecount to exploring the common man in all its diversity (the newsstand vendor and the kid who reads pirate comics, the lesbian couple’s relationship woes, the psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with Rorschach.)

It’s this elegant dissection of people that allows Laurie’s realizations about her father to have a greater impact that the multiple pages devoted to Veidt’s final solution and its implementation. Moore is telling a story about everyone while Snyder, with his video game cutscene aesthetic and the stilted, too-mannered performances that pervade the clips available of the film, seems to have missed that point entirely, focusing on the costumed identities and the mystery. Yes, these are a few short pieces of scenes from a movie with a 2+ hour running time, but they seem quite telling. The riot scene from the 70s becomes high camp thanks to music by KC And The Sunshine Band and a jump that takes place in slow motion because it looks cool. Laurie and Dan’s re-emergence as superheroes is positively generic in its execution, lacking charm and tension entirely. Perhaps in the context of the film, these scenes have more power, but as someone who has read the book at least a dozen times over the years and knows how each beautifully-constructed simulacrum of a scene from the book fits into that story, I can’t help but pre-judge.

The more I see of the film version of Watchmen, the less I like it, and perhaps more importantly, the more I dislike what it represents: the dumbing-down of something greater for the sake of a false “authenticity” that’s apparent only to those shallowest of readers of the source material. Zack Snyder may have a made a movie that’s called Watchmen, features a cast of characters directly from the book, and liberally makes use of the book’s contents, but I’ll be very surprised if it has any of the original’s heart.

Yes, I just compared two comic nerds writing and drawing a sitcom about a comic shop to History’s Greatest Golfer. Any complaints?

2.
I’ve spent the past three nights rewatching Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai trilogy. If your only exposure to Mifune’s samurai performances are through the (admittedly universally excellent) Kurosawa films, I highly recommend watching the series for nothing more than watching a how excellently the man shows the lead character’s maturation from callow youth to master swordsman. The films may be the tiniest bit mawkish and convoluted, but the stories are rock-solid and the climactic battle between Miyamoto and the rival he never wanted is one of the great screen fights, all tension and release.

3.
Picked up Kazuo Umezu’s Cat Eyed Boy on a whim a few weeks ago and read the first volume in a day and then opting for a more leisurely route with the second. It’s definitely the sort of thing that’s more rewarding when read as it was originally distributed: in drips and drabs over a stretch of time. The gleeful insanity and “what the fuck” approach to storytelling (How many powers does the lead develop out of the blue?) is less annoying, even if you do lose the visceral thrill of wallowing in the junkier end of manga horror. My favorite part may well be the fantastic design and packaging from Viz.

4.
Speaking of Viz and Musashi Miyamoto, I just received the first of the new oversized three-in-one editions for Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond, a series I’ve been interested in but didn’t feel like reading in 20-something separate volumes at $10 a pop. Inoue’s art has always caught my eye and saving 30% while getting a bigger book in return is right up my alley. I assume someone’s upset over this, of course. Only negatives at first glance: the “bonus sketchbook” section ballyhooed in the flap copy is a paltry two pages, and there’s no way to determine how deep your commitment to Vagabond might be, just that this is the first chunk.

5.
The C.W. is apparently making a show I’m not going to watch about a character I only barely care about, but since it’s comics-related, it’s a thing? Newsarama’s responses are, of course, just as measured as always. My favorite? “This show infuriates me and it hasn’t even been made yet.” I guess that’s the opposite of the Whedonites who are begging Fox to not cancel Dollhouse before it even debuts?

6.
Seriously, did T.I. and his producers use the Numa Numa song on that track with Rihanna? Yes, they did.