Forget Bill, Kill Tom

"Give me a freaking break, Tom Cruise plays a samurai? Who's gonna take that seriously?"

It was over a year ago that I heard about the production of "The Last Samurai". The very idea of a movie casting a white American leading a samurai revolt during the Meiji Restoration was so appallingly revisionist, if not hyper-egocentrically base, that I was certain it would flop before it ever took off.

"This goes a step beyond the white guy going to Asia and playing center stage a la Shogun and 7 Years in Tibet. The white guy actually usurps the role of the Asian guy in his native country!" my friend furiously rattled off to me, while I was busy writing letters to try and impede the Hollywood production of "Memoirs of a Geisha", a movie based on the novel by Arthur Golden. In my mind, geishas and their painted faces had much more box office potential than a scientologist fumbling around with a Japanese sword, so my limited time and resources went into protesting the former from airing.

As it turned out, my psychic senses failed- while progress on Memoirs stopped, TLS went onto become a blockbuster in both the US and Japan. This critique comes a bit late as my hopes that TLS would generate as much (or as little) attention as "Kung Pow: Enter the Fist" were dashed, yet I felt was necessary, given that there is little substantial criticism, especially that from a social perspective, about this degrading film.

Now, going to see TLS to realize that it's crap would be like eating shit- that is, I don't need to do it to know that it tastes bad. And I certainly don't need to shell out the $10 or so to know which parts of the movie bother me. Those who did waste their money related to me the film's historical inaccuracies (overlooking the most glaring of all- that there was no white Samurai, duh), the bits of cultural appropriation, and the Hollywoodesque scenes in which the lone white man emerges victorious and minimally scathed after taking on a horde of colored savages.

And as usual, the critics, for the most part, didn't do their job. "[A] loving tribute to the great Japanese samurai movies. . ." waxed a review in the Chicago Tribune. A review for the Boston Globe called it "[an] epic drama. . .with all the muscle and splendor Hollywood can call up." And the comparison to "Dances with Wolves"? Hogwash! Kevin Costner, in DWW, never patronizingly teaches the Native Americans on how to be more Native American (vs Tom Cruise lecturing the Japanese on what it means to be Japanese), Costner never kills a Native American after aligning with them (vs Cruise slaughtering Japanese men by the scores without remorse), and Costner's romantic interest is of an equal social dynamic with a white woman (vs Cruise paired with a Japanese woman whose husband he killed).

Tom Cruise and Asian Women