Seven Samurai

This is a big one, everybody.

A confession, this is the first time I have seen Seven Samurai all the way through. We watched it in Japanese class in high school, but I think I missed the first day, and I probably read books during the rest of it, because I was a shithead. I wasn't the best of students in that class, and my dumbass teenage apathy for old and foreign movies were also factors. We're all shitheads in our own ways in high school, though, right? Don't say you weren't, because we were all shitheads.

I discovered the films of Akira Kurosawa, along with anything else subtitled or made before Star Wars, on my own as an adult. I watched several of the major ones: Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Hidden Fortress, Rashomon, Throne of Blood; but I always have a hard time finding three and a half hours to set aside for an epic. On my recent quest for an awesome Blu Ray collection, I have finally righted this egregious error.

Look, it's a masterpiece. It's a perfect, perfect film. One of the best ever made. Kurosawa is possibly the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, or at least up there pretty high in the rankings.

What strikes me most about Akira Kurosawa's films is his storytelling. He conveys such emotional depth and complexity in all of his characters, and he achieves this with absolute clarity. The story is as straightforward as can be: a village of farmers, terrorized by a pack of brigands, recruit a group of samurai to help them defend themselves and their harvest. With that setup, Kurosawa unfurls a rich character-driven drama and adventure movie, simultaneously epic and personal.

The cast is huge and all of the characters are great, but we all know the star of this movie is Toshiro Mifune. There he is front and center on that poster. The man was one of the strongest screen presences of the time. The Brando of Japan (or Japando, as I like to say). This was before the role of Sanjuro took over his life and he became an international screen giant. He was still doing a variety of characters for Kurosawa at the time. And this is one of the greats. He runs rampant through the movie, and is clearly having a blast doing so. His energy is infectious for both the characters and the audience.

The only kind-of complaint is just the unfortunate fact that this movie was not shot in widescreen. Widescreen movies were still a fairly new thing at the time, the industry's way of competing with television. Kurosawa's first widescreen film was Yojimbo, 6 years later, and the man knew how to use the format like nobody else. That Yojimbo, a small, dark comedy got to use this format, but a movie as huge as Seven Samurai didn't have that opportunity is a shame. It could have opened up the scope so much more.

That complaint is small potatoes, really. The movie is beautiful. You can watch it instantly on Netflix, if you can find an appropriate chunk of your life to give to it.

Seven Samurai: A+

Marlon Japando: A+

High School Me: Shithead