Both are highly recommended. Of the two, the book is the more accessible; if you have an aversion to subtitles you won't enjoy the movie, but then, if you have an aversion to subtitles just grow up. I'm no big samurai movie fan, but this is one of the great movies of all time (if we believe the AFI 100 list), and is well worth watching for characterizations. Unlike modern action movies that claim descent from Seven Samurai, this movie actually has three-dimensional characters and stands as a great film apart from its action sequences. It is three hours long, but if you watched Dances With Wolves or any of the Lord of the Rings movies you should be over that.
The Mother Tongue is an extremely amusing look at where English comes from and why it is the way is. It's not exactly a linguistics textbook, but for the vast majority of us who have no particular desire to take a linguistics course, that may be a good thing. The book covers the development of English, then takes a look in separate chapters at slang, names, swearing, and numerous other topics of general interest to anyone who speaks or reads English (which is all of you). It's an extremely entertaining read, so much so as to warrant not reading it anyplace that you'd earn disapproval for laughing out loud. Again, both are highly recommended. I would have written longer reviews because I much enjoyed both book and movie, and both gave me something to think about long after I'd finished them (how often can you say of an action flick that you were still thinking about issues it raised hours later as you went to bed?), but other matters (detailed in a post later this evening) have occupied my mind rather a bit more this afternoon.
2 comments:
Good write-up. I'll have to track down Bill Bryson's "The Mother Tongue." Sounds like a great read. I was already a fan of Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," though I always felt his "Yojimbo" (1961) was the better flick. (I read somewhere that Clint Eastwood's "no-name" character -- "A Fistful of Dollars," "For a Few Dollars More," and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" -- was based on "Yojimbo.") It's hard to find in video stores. (I know; I’ve tried.) But it does turn up on late-night cable every couple of years.
Thanks. I didn't even bother looking in a video store for Seven Samurai (much less for several of the other foreign films I'm getting in the mail soon). I don't know WHY I waited to so long to get Netflix. I'll have to see if they've got Yojimbo available. They seem to have everything else.
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