radioactive kale

In my AU Havoc and Hughes taught the boy to drive.

Hughes did it first because he is the boy's father figure and he saw it as a rite of passage. Once Edward got the hang of clutch, brake and gas pedals Hughes very quickly delegated the job to Havoc because he has a family and would like to live old enough to see his grandchildren.

like can we just. just take a moment to process that second image.

(For those who are about to ask, it’s called Throne of Blood in English but its actual name is Spiderweb Castle and some Shakespeare scholars are big mad about it because other Shakespeare scholars consider it the best film adaptation of Macbeth ever made and we can’t have that)

THE ARCHERS DIDN’T KNOW MIFUNE’S BLOCKING. Every time you see him fling out an arm he’s actually signaling to the archers which way he’s about to go. That’s it, that’s what they had to go on. And they were shooting on location on Mount Fuji, which Akira Kurosawa had chosen SPECIFICALLY FOR ITS DENSE FOG.

However, BECAUSE this was Akira Kurosawa—if you don’t know that name think “Stanley Kubrick but earlier and Japanese and not quite as much of an asshole to his actors”—and he was insane, Mifune is also wearing real 19th-century feudal lord armor, in the sense that while it’s a modern reproduction it is completely functional. A feudal lord from the early 1800s could have been resurrected in the 1950s when this was filmed, handed this armor, and would have gone “yeah, that’s correct.” There are actually a couple of shots where you see arrows hit his torso and bounce off, or stick in the armor but they’ve very clearly only just barely stuck rather than going through.

So his torso is protected, and there’s a railing in front of him that provides some protection to his legs, and yes, this means THE MOST VULNERABLE PART OF HIM WAS ALSO THE ONLY PART THAT WOULD DEFINITELY KILL HIM: his face. I’m sure it was of very little comfort to him that the archers also weren’t very powerful shots.

Oh, and his character dies by taking an arrow through the neck. You can tell that one is a trick shot because it’s the only shot filmed from that specific angle, but I can imagine Mifune was none too eager to do it after all this.

Another fascinating snippet:

"Lady Asaji" (the Lady MacBeth equivalent) never blinks while the camera is on her. Not once.

It's not easily noticed unless forewarned and looking, but it does contribute to an uncanny-valley feeling that there's something not-quite-right about the character.

I can't remember if the actress (Isuzu Yamada) went all the way with her court makeup and blackened her teeth as this one has done.

Probably not, or there would definitely be comments about it on-line.

I've seen on-line claims that the makeup is based on Kabuki theatre.

Noh, it isn't. :->

It's actually period-correct for a noblewoman of the Heian period (794-1185) and IIRC preceded - also may have inspired - that "female" style of Noh mask.

Here the makeup's being worn by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote "The Tale of Genji" about 1000 years ago.

If interested in this period and its customs, both very different to the later, better-known Tokugawa-period samurai stuff, "The World of the Shining Prince" by Ivan Morris is a fascinating read.

*****

More method acting with projectile weapons:

James Cagney was shot at with a REAL Thompson submachine gun during the making of both "Public Enemy" (1931) and "Angels With Dirty Faces" (1938).

I blogged about it years ago here, a long-ish post about safety vs realism in movie fights.

Here's Cagney talking about the Public Enemy one.