These threads always start out hella boring, but there's been some really good stuff posted here lately.
kinda OT, but am I the only one who thought that 13 assasins was a huge pile of shit? I seriously can't get Miike. The first one and a half hours or film is really promising, like an old samurai film in the style of Kobayashi or Gosha, but then when the actual battle starts, the whole thing degenerates into this huge mess. There's no real sense of danger in any of the proceedings with the characters more concerned with striking cool poses during sword fights than actually staying alive. I'm all for some Miike weirdness (the flaming bulls were a fun touch), but I absolutely hated the last 30-40 minutes of the film. The death of the ridiculously evil warlord was a great scene tho, that was Miike that I liked.
Cypher is great btw. It looks really low budget, but it gets alot out of it.
This fall, the finnish film archive had a great retrospective of the works of the three Sergios. Leone, Corbucci and Sollima. I'd seen most of the films in the series previously, but to see stuff like Companeros and Il Mercenario on the big screen was a revelation. Thomas Milian and Tony Musante got some nice peasant/rebel style going on there, but the sartorial excellence in the films comes down to Franco Nero and Jack Palance.
