Best I can say for this is the two actors (pardon my inability to figure which actor names) who come center stage in the latter half of the film, the samurai who's carrying the stolen sword and the retired swordsman with the daughter, show commanding enough presences that either could command the screen in a real samurai film. They even make Samurai Fiction's protagonist seem a little more interesting by association.
The problem with guitar-based rock in films portraying this period is people don't walk, run, fight to a four-beat. I just re-watched Hidden Fortress on the largest screen with the best sound available here. Mostly it's scored with traditional wind, string, and percussion instruments. But in a few, I think unfortunate, instances, Kurosawa gave over to western instruments for the sort of "welling-up" music with which Westerners now attempt to wrench emotions their directorial skills haven't earned. I shudder to think that, besides swiping the plot, Lucas may have let Kurosawa's western interpolations inspire that awful Star Wars music. The soundtrack of Sogo Ishii's Angel Dust showed a film can be scored Japanese style-with modern instruments and techniques, and even interpolate, without being destroyed by, Western sounds. But what Ishii does is a long way from playing electric guitar unkeyed to screen movements. In the same theater as Hidden Fortress, months before I saw Toyoda's Portrait of Hell destroyed, to blindly good reviews, by a live indie band that seldom even glanced at the screen.
On the other hand, I mostly liked Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus. Go figure.
The problem with guitar-based rock in films portraying this period is people don't walk, run, fight to a four-beat. I just re-watched Hidden Fortress on the largest screen with the best sound available here. Mostly it's scored with traditional wind, string, and percussion instruments. But in a few, I think unfortunate, instances, Kurosawa gave over to western instruments for the sort of "welling-up" music with which Westerners now attempt to wrench emotions their directorial skills haven't earned. I shudder to think that, besides swiping the plot, Lucas may have let Kurosawa's western interpolations inspire that awful Star Wars music. The soundtrack of Sogo Ishii's Angel Dust showed a film can be scored Japanese style-with modern instruments and techniques, and even interpolate, without being destroyed by, Western sounds. But what Ishii does is a long way from playing electric guitar unkeyed to screen movements. In the same theater as Hidden Fortress, months before I saw Toyoda's Portrait of Hell destroyed, to blindly good reviews, by a live indie band that seldom even glanced at the screen.
On the other hand, I mostly liked Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus. Go figure.