Duh, I already *know* he's handsome
I was at the library, picking movies to tide me through the weekend when I read the cover of the Kurosawa movie The Scandal and had to snicker. It began something like (in Norwegian): "The handsome and smooth Toshirô Mifune plays Ichiro, an artist who [...]"
Ignoring how weird it for a professional movie synopsis to immediately start telling me how attractive the main actor is before even mentioning the plot (or bringing up the physical appearance of the actors, period), what's up with the ambiguous wording, "smooth" (glatt) there? In Norwegian I take it to mean one of two things, either smooth as in hairless/smooth-faced (because I guess Mifune usually had some chin fuzz going in most of his samurai movies, or maybe it's to bring attention to how young he was at the time?) or the more negative glætt, i.e. someone who thinks they're charming but comes across more as insufferable or obnoxious.
Well, it didn't intrigue me enough to actually get The Scandal anyway, at least not today. Actually I tried to watch another early Kurosawa/Mifune movie last week, Nora Inu, but it's officially the first Kurosawa movie I couldn't get through. Between this and Hakuchi (The Idiot) I'm starting to think that contemporary-set Kurosawa movies just aren't for me.
So no Japanese cinema for me this weekend, though I've got both Korean and French movies in addition to the usual British and American ones.
Ignoring how weird it for a professional movie synopsis to immediately start telling me how attractive the main actor is before even mentioning the plot (or bringing up the physical appearance of the actors, period), what's up with the ambiguous wording, "smooth" (glatt) there? In Norwegian I take it to mean one of two things, either smooth as in hairless/smooth-faced (because I guess Mifune usually had some chin fuzz going in most of his samurai movies, or maybe it's to bring attention to how young he was at the time?) or the more negative glætt, i.e. someone who thinks they're charming but comes across more as insufferable or obnoxious.
Well, it didn't intrigue me enough to actually get The Scandal anyway, at least not today. Actually I tried to watch another early Kurosawa/Mifune movie last week, Nora Inu, but it's officially the first Kurosawa movie I couldn't get through. Between this and Hakuchi (The Idiot) I'm starting to think that contemporary-set Kurosawa movies just aren't for me.
So no Japanese cinema for me this weekend, though I've got both Korean and French movies in addition to the usual British and American ones.