Your favorite movie!

What's your favorite movie? Mine is The Seven Samurai. I first saw this movie when I was home sick from elementary school in Los Angeles. "Ho, hum" I thought. "Another samurai movie." There are a lot of samurai movies on TV in Los Angeles. I don't like them but Quentin Tarantino became very influenced by them. I don't like Quentin Tarantino, either.

"Oh, well, there's nothing else on [in the daytime]."

"Hey, wait a minute. This is not the usual samurai movie. This is . . . What is this? The Seven Samurai? I've gotta remember this."

I did remember it. It wasn't on TV for a long time, but when it was, and I didn't have a TV (I was in college) I went over to a friend's place and made him watch it, too. I watched any other movies I could find by Akira Kurosawa. He has been a major influence on Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and other Hollywood directors. I have a large collection of his films and even taught a class about him to the foreign students here.

Many people think of Kurosawa as the Emperor of Japanese Film, which he may have been, but he didn't just make Japanese films. He made a Russian film, he made a French film (a samurai movie) and he made many Hollywood films, including work on the disasterous "Tora, Tora, Tora" but more importantly "Dreams".

Kurosawa was a famous perfectionist, and whenever people would ask him what was his best picture, he always said "The next one!" until he made "Ran" which he finally decided was his best film. It is a version of Shakespeare's "King Lear" in Japanese. Kurosawa made other Shakespeare films, and even his stories that weren't taken directly from Shakespeare, (e.g. "The Bad Sleep Well") were often heavily influenced by Shakespeare (in the case of "The Bad Sleep Well" by "Hamlet").

I could say a lot about Kurosawa, but maybe I'll just end by noting that his first film famous outside Japan was "Rashomon". It became a very influential film. It made film makers aware of the possibilities of presenting different versions of the past, a technique which has since become common in film. "Rashomon" has arguably become an English word.

For your assignment this week (due Friday) please tell the class about a film you enjoyed. Be sure to provide links, especially to its page on the Internet Movie Database. (Don't worry if you don't like foreign films. They have lots of Japanese films there, too.) Also be sure to include any other links, photos, or trailers you can find. Here's a trailer I found for "The Seven Samurai".