Seven Samurai

Monday, January 21, 2008

Yeah, that's right, naysayers. I'm demonstrating an honest to fucking goodness Kommitment to Klassiks here watching Seven Samurai, a legit klassik. No strings attached. It's not some weird genre film I'm counting because one guy told me it was good. This one is a recognized, consensus-agreed upon masterpiece. And I am so god damned Kommitted to Klassiks that I was willing to devote 3 1/2 hours of my life to it.

That's something I've noticed, by the way. A lot of these beloved motion pictures require a pretty serious chunk of your time. And that can be hard to do sometimes, you know, when you're tired after work and you're not sure you have that long of an attention span. Or that you want to spend every free minute on the weekend with your girlfriend, and she's maybe not interested in seeing a 3 1/2 black and white, subtitled movie without hardly any female characters in it.

Well, to get used to this, I thought I'd just right in and watch the one on my queue that was the longest, and Seven Samurai it was.

Then I realized that Lawrence of Arabia is 20 minutes longer. Mother fucking Peter O'Toole.




Oh yeah, I was actually going to say something about this one. The reputation is earned, this is a great film. An epic done right. A long, but entertaining journey that builds to a powerful conclusion. As opposed to a long and tedious epic journey that has 20 endings too many and then ends with a bunch of hobbits hugging each other.

It's a lot more cynical about human nature and society than I really was expecting. We think of the Japanese as maybe putting the society's interests over the individual, but Seven Samurai seems to argue against that. The samurai risk their lives to save a bunch of villagers for no better reason than it's the honorable thing to do, and maybe because they like to fight. The villages treat the samurai like shit even though they are relying on them for help, and they are shown as prone to mob mentality. In the end, by following their code, the samurai fight off the enemy, lose 4 of their 7 and... and what? They don't gain anything from it, the villages still won't mingle with them. The victory is short lived.

Well, I had thought maybe this one would have a happy ending. Guess not.

This isn't exactly a movie I'd watch all the time, but the greatness is evident. The story is long and complex, but it flows well because of the memorable characters. You know, again, kind of exactly what the Lord of the Rings movies failed at. Here, I especially liked this Toshiro Mifune individual, who plays some impulsive, reckless weirdo who isn't really a samurai, but pretends he is. It's such a unique, bizarre, energetic, spirited, etc performance in the middle of this big epic.

So this is I think the 3rd Kurosawa film I've seen in my life, and I am definitely planning on seeing some more. Also, I might try more of Mifune's movies... I hear he's a pretty reliable badass.