Seventh Samurai
I think that the main thing that I took away from this film was that samurai is both singular and plural.
The film is 3.5 hours long....that's really long...like epic long. The length gave a more realistic perspective of what was actually happening in the battle (with a title like that you knew there had to be a battle), but it seemed to drag on for me. It really is comprable to a western epic and even though I haven't seen The Magnificent Seven, I could really see how the film could easily be adapted. Even though I usually don't enjoy films like this I sort of respect them. The action and characters are more realistic than some of the strict black-and-white-morality films. Although, I do have to say that I wish I knew more about the culture behind the film because it was quite obvious in some places that we just weren't getting it because we were americans. That said, the characters were still fairly easy to relate to.
The film was made in 1954, but the cinematography was really ahead of its time and superb for that era. Paul made the comment that he thought it had been filmed later because of all the tracking shots.
posted by Ivory @ 3:34 PM
3 Comments:
ok, so I keep getting this mixed up, but the title is actually Seven Samurai.
so, I guess I felt very distanced from the movie for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the acting was not naturalistic, this is due primarily to when the movie was made, I think. And secondly, I never felt attached to the characters and I think think this was caused by the sparsity of dialogue. It was very beautifully shot however and the costumes too were a lot of fun.
I've now seen three films by Kurosawa and this ranks in the middle. Of the two the one it was most like is Ran. I think I liked Ran better, because even though like this it had poor acting, I was more sympathetic to the characters having been previously been introduced to them by Shakespeare (the movie is a surprisingly tight adaptation of King Lear, given the fact that this king has sons rather than daughters). Also, Ran was in color and beautiful color with incredible environments that are completely unrealistic for the setting but so enjoyable that it excels the movie into a hyper-reality. And this is appropriate as King Lear is something of a fairy-tale.
The third film which I didn't care for at all was Dreams. A synopsis of the movie makes it sound like something I'd adore, its a sort of collection of fairy tales, but given the slow pacing and limited length of the movie, unfortunately none of them seemed realized. It's no Price of Milk.
I think that one of the reasons that we couldn't become completely invested in the characters (I was to some extent) was the cultural differences. I don't think that they were bad actors per-say, but they had different concepts of what it was to be a good actor.
Post a Comment
<< Home