Contrary to what you might think, the eponymous last samurai is not Tom Cruise, but the rebel leader Katsumoto—or perhaps the entire rebel army. “Samurai” is, after all, both the singular and plural form.

The Last Samurai is another one of those stories, where the protagonist representing imperial {America, Britain} is told to lead an attack on primitive but noble people, but instead ends up appreciating their way of life and eventually joining their struggle against the imperialists. I’ve heard this genre called “Movies White People Need to Stop Making”; similar examples include Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves, and Avatar.

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Two movies in one week! I finally got a chance to watch Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi movie Alien. In the context of books I’ve spoken out against “classics” (okay, a blog post is not “speaking out”). So how does Alien measure up? Does it stand on its own two feet?

Well, to be honest, Alien feels like the movie equivalent of a science fiction short story. I could point to certain similar traits—minimal background and explication, “business-as-usual” atmosphere to start, and the restriction of the movie to one problem followed through from start to finish—but there’s more than that. I…

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Welcome back to normal posts on Chigaijin! After a two-week hiatus (really a one-month hiatus) I’m kicking things off again with a review of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill. I’ve got plenty of article ideas in the pipeline, so hopefully I’ll keep up a good post rate, at least for a while.

Kill Bill (Vol. 1) was my first Tarantino movie, though I’ve seen clips from Pulp Fiction before. I didn’t know much about the movie, except that there was a lot of violence and it felt like an odd thing to be watching with my grandma. So what I got…

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