jmovie: Throne of Blood
Oct. 21st, 2007 04:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meganbmoore I just finished(well, half an hour ago...) Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood. Starring Toshiro Mifune (just like every other Kurosawa move I've seen, which is coincidence, not deliberate) ToB is based on Shakespeare's MacBeth. MacBeth is my favorite of Shakespeare's plays (blame Gargoyles...which actually has a MacBeth based on the actual history, but if I start on that I shall never shut up) and ToB is an excellent adaptation. For whatever reason, I don't actually have a lot to say about this one, beyond "it was really good."
One thing I do want to bring up, though, is Lady MacBeth. While I haven't read all of Shakespeare's plays, it seems that he only ever created 3 really strong and interesting female characters: Beatrice(Much Ado About Nothing), Kate(The Taming of the Shrew) and Lady MacBeth. Beatrice and Kate, though very different, are clever, independent and spirited. Lady MacBeth, though, is a little different. Though a protagonist, she's also a villainess, able to turn and apparently good and honorable man into a traitor and murderer, only to have her own machinations destroy her. When I first read MacBeth, I read her turnins him as a seduction, both in the feminine wiles sense, and a seduction of ambition that fed on fear, and the two theatrical versions I've seen played it that way(one excellently, the other not so much.) I was, therefore, rather interested to see how ToB handled it, and was pleased with the even darker, more conniving Asaji(I think that's what they called her) who fed and preyed on her husband's pride and ambition. Somehow, the character is what made a samurai movie based on a play about ancient Scotland work.
One thing I do want to bring up, though, is Lady MacBeth. While I haven't read all of Shakespeare's plays, it seems that he only ever created 3 really strong and interesting female characters: Beatrice(Much Ado About Nothing), Kate(The Taming of the Shrew) and Lady MacBeth. Beatrice and Kate, though very different, are clever, independent and spirited. Lady MacBeth, though, is a little different. Though a protagonist, she's also a villainess, able to turn and apparently good and honorable man into a traitor and murderer, only to have her own machinations destroy her. When I first read MacBeth, I read her turnins him as a seduction, both in the feminine wiles sense, and a seduction of ambition that fed on fear, and the two theatrical versions I've seen played it that way(one excellently, the other not so much.) I was, therefore, rather interested to see how ToB handled it, and was pleased with the even darker, more conniving Asaji(I think that's what they called her) who fed and preyed on her husband's pride and ambition. Somehow, the character is what made a samurai movie based on a play about ancient Scotland work.
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Date: 2007-10-21 09:58 pm (UTC)A short list of additional fantastic female characters:
Portia (Merchant of Venice)
Viola (Twelfth Night)
Rosalind (As You Like It)
Cordelia, Goneril, and Regan (King Lear; all are strong though two are wicked)
The female cast of Love's Labour's Lost
I always saw the MacBeths as fundamentally weak and grasping, a commentary on the banality of evil (people we trust who seem 'just normal' can contain opportunistic evil to rival those who plot and plan and embrace their ambitions all along) Lady MacBeth used her wiles to gain power through her equally weak and ambitious husband and then fell apart when things didn't work out how she thought they would (the reality of the murder seems to have been more than she could handle--hardly a strong person's reaction).
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Date: 2007-10-22 12:53 am (UTC)MacBeth himself has never interested me much, beyond his role(the failure to be a hero and being defeated by your own weakness is just as big a part of the heroic journey as the success of being a hero) and he is, indeed, a very weak man, but Lady MacBeth fascinates me.