Toshiro Mifune Kills Indians

Let's just get this out of the way: the most obvious drawback of the movie Red Sun is that Toshiro Mifune's voice is dubbed when he speaks English. I've heard it was one of his greatest regrets that he was never allowed to use his voice for his English lines in his movies, and that makes me doubly sad. Mifune's voice is inimitable, resonating and powerful, and any voice they choose for him doesn't do the great actor justice. I really wish there was a version with his original voice, but I'm afraid I'm not so lucky.

That being said, Red Sun is a Western with Toshiro Mifune in it. In one movie, he adds Indians, banditos, and cowboys to The List of Things Killed by Toshiro Mifune. While his voice might not be his own (save when he speaks Japanese), his powerful screen presence commands this movie, and that alone is worth the almost two hours of runtime.

It's by no means a perfect movie, and so I'll anticipate some of the complaints you might have, and answer them all accordingly.

You: It's a hackneyed Western plot with stock characters and situations.
Me: It's Toshiro Mifune in a Western.

You: The writers clearly had only a cursory knowledge of Japanese culture.
Me: Toshiro Mifune plays a samurai badass.

You: Although the plot initially balances Charles Bronson's character with Toshiro Mifune's, the middle of the movie is heavily geared toward Bronson's character, and Mifune becomes something of a sidekick.
Me: Toshiro Mifune is no man's sidekick, least of all Charles Bronson's. He badasses his way right into the spotlight, whether the director wanted him to or not. Even when he's not speaking or doing much of anything, he's BEING TOSHIRO MIFUNE.

You: The supporting cast, particularly Ursula Andres as a whore who can't keep her shirt on, is disappointing.
Me: You'd be disappointing, too, if you were standing next to Toshiro Mifune.

You: The plots and conflicts are so contrived they practically groan for you.
Me: HAVE YOU HEARD NOTHING I'VE SAID? IT'S TOSHIRO M.F.ING MIFUNE IN A WESTERN!!!

Also, Charles Bronson's character is actually pretty likeable.

The Story of a Soldier

I love the song "The Story of a Soldier" from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I regularly cite that movie as one of the three best ever made (that I've seen, of course), and this sublime song is beautiful outside the song as well. I listen to it especially when I'm in a mood for Westerns. For those of you familiar with the film, (SPOILERS->) it's the song the Confederate prisoners are made to sing in the prison camp as the guard beats Tuco.

The extended version of the DVD has a longer version of the song on it, and the soundtrack CD has the full thing. I love that the song was written for the movie, but it sounds almost like an authentic Civil War era folk song. Here are the lyrics to the full version:

Bugles are calling from prairie to shore,
Sign up and fall in and march off to war;
Drums beating loudly, hearts beating proudly,
March blue and gray and smile as you go.

Smoke hides the valleys and fire paints the plains,
Loud roar the cannons till ruin remains;
Blue grass and cotton burnt and forgotten,
All hope seems gone, so soldier, march on to die.

Count all the crosses and count all the tears,
These are the losses and sad souvenirs;
This devastation once was a nation,
So fall the dice, how high is the price?

There in the distance, a flag I can see,
Scorched and in ribbons but whose can it be?
How ends the story? Whose is the glory?
Ask if we dare our comrades out there who sleep.

Count all the crosses and count all the tears,
These are the losses and sad souvenirs;
This devastation once was a nation,
So fall the dice, how high is the price we pay?

To me, the song speaks beautifully of the loss and devastation of war, and also of the way men who live in difficult times struggle on while longing for a better life. I think it's wonderful the way a song from a movie or TV show can become so important to me even away from its original context. Are there any songs like that for you?

Wild West FPS

I think I abandoned any coherence of theme or topic in my blog a long time ago, so now I'm going to write something that might even interest one person in the world: why I believe no one will ever make a Wild West first-person shooter game that feels right. I have tried Call of Juarez, Red Dead Revolver, and Gun, and none of them made me feel like I was either in a Western movie or in a real-life Wild West situation. The reason is that video game developers are too tied to traditions of first person shooters, traditions that are opposed to the way a Western game should feel. These include:

1. You Run Everywhere. Since the days of Doom and Quake, first-person shooters have featured a guy running endlessly. Although some modern games attempt to make this a bit more realistic by giving you limited amounts of running, these still, more often than not, give you superhuman abilities to dash from place to place like a giddy pony, prancing merrily while laying down a hail of bullets.

Why it doesn't work: How many Westerns have you seen in which the heroes, instead of moseying down Main Street while tumbleweeds blow by in the background, instead charge down the dusty lane like a maddened bull? Or, in the middle of a firefight in the tavern over the only good-looking showgirl, dodging back and forth like a paranoid with a bladder problem? It just doesn't work. If there's a run function at all, it should be used extremely sparingly: very brief bursts of speed paced far apart.

2. You Piss Bullets: In the original FPS games, the only limit to your ability to shove out a living wall of ammo was your total ammo capacity. Even in more modern games, your guns carry dozens of rounds and take only a second or two to switch magazines. This lets you spew out such a ridiculous number of bullets that it makes that scene from Hot Shots Part Deux seem like a tea party with stuffed animals by comparison.

Why it doesn't work: In the Wild West, your gun didn't have an ammo belt leading down into a mystical lead reservoir in the Marianas Trench. In fact, the famous Colt Peacemaker held six bullets, five if you didn't want to shoot yourself in the leg if your gun got jarred. To reload, you first pull the hammer back to half-cocked, then use the reloading rod to push out every used cartridge, one at a time, rotating the cylinder as you do so. Next, you insert each new cartridge, one at a time. Even assuming you walk around with a handful of cartridges and have completely steady hands while bad men try their very best to improve your body with convenient blood ventilation (as all games seem to do), this is highly time consuming. Of course, some guns allowed for entire cylinders to be swapped out for pre-loaded ones, but I doubt even a skilled gunfighter would carry more than a few of these at a time. And that only applies to pistols; rifles were frequently single-shot, and even lever-action rifles had to be reloaded one bullet at a time.

3. You Mow Down Hordes of Bad Guys: This one is self-explanatory. In most games, you practically win entire battles single-handedly. Considering how many busloads of remarkably similar-looking enemies you kill, I'm surprised your character doesn't get carried off to Valhalla by valkyries during the inevitable death sequence. (The Call of Duty games are particularly bad at this: on the one hand, they expect you to chew through more bad guys than Rambo. On the other hand, despite your jaw-dropping killing power, you get walked through the missions by your squad commanders like a directionally-challenged twelve year old, as though having a single set path to travel from beginning to end of the map wasn't enough. Apparently, your supervisers think you are the embodiment of god's wrath on Earth sent to mete out justice on the unworthy, with the problem solving skills of a kidney bean.)

Why it doesn't work: While there are Westerns with high body counts (The Wild Bunch comes to mind), these inevitably involve Gatling guns. Since I don't want to go on another tangent about what annoys me in FPS games in general, let me just say these parts are basically pointless mini-games; entertaning only so long as the thrill of massacring the entire population of a small town with a powerful weapon lasts. In most situations, fights are between fairly small numbers of people. In The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Tuco and the man with no name sneak up and blow up a bridge and everybody leaves. In an FPS, they would have to shoot everyone anywhere near the bridge, blow it up, and then fight and kill the army that shows up to avenge it. Actually, it wouldn't be both of them. It would be the man with no name doing it all, while Tuco shoots one or two enemies, tells the same jokes ten times, and complains about how poorly you're doing as your soft squishy organs are slowly and forecefully replaced by lead.

4. Everyone is a Superhero: You shoot a bad guy in the stomach at point-blank range. He convulses for two seconds. Then, he shoots you in the face. Everyone takes as much killing as a buffalo, not to mention your own character survives so much he might as well make a living dynamiting train tunnels by holding the explosive in the right place and waiting patiently for it to blow, only to repeat again once he waits a few seconds or consumes a few health packs for his health to recover.

Why it doesn't work: Nothing is worse than shooting someone with your last bullet, only to have him shoot you right back as you struggle to reload. Also, just how well would Unforgiven have worked if Gene Hackman would have gotten up, brushed himself off, and squared off with Clint Eastwood all over again after Clint shoots him the first time? What about if during the climax to The Quick and the Dead, if Sharon Stone had to shoot Gene Hackman seventeen times instead of twice(actually, let's not talk about The Quick and the Dead. It's a silly movie.)? It's just not right, man.

HOW IT SHOULD WORK: Fewer bad guys. Fewer bullets. Each bad guy has a good chance to kill you; one or two hits and you're gone. No health packs or bandages or any such bullshit, except maybe bandages to partially repair limbs crippled by one bullet. When you're done, you light a cigar, toss your poncho over your shoulder, and ride your horse off into the sunset.

Bonus: Oh, and no freaking half-hour cut scenes. I don't want to have explained to me why my character wants to kill these people. I can fill that in for myself. Heck, I can do so in three words (four if you count the contraction): he's being paid. And that's plenty good enough for me.

Here's the final scene to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, my favorite Western. Now imagine if, instead of standing there firing one shot, they all charged in from opposite ends of the cemetary, banging away the whole time. Then, once they closed to within the ring, they were all three dashing around in circles, shooting off bullets all over the place, each getting hit a dozen or two times, reloading all the while, before finally collapsing... and respawning to start shooting all over again. It's just a good thing Sergio Leone doesn't play FPS.