10 Movies to See Before You Die

A while back I posted this list of movies I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t seen. So I’ve been working my way slowly through this list (quite slowly, actually) and this weekend I managed to get through two of them. Well, I had thought so, until I realized I hadn’t added Seven Samurai to the original list, thus making it only one of the movies. Damn it!

Seven Samurai is an incredible film. At three hours 37 minutes it’s certainly a marathon, and I definitely didn’t realize what I was getting myself into. As epic as it is though, it is actually only a series of intensely personal stories. Every blogger, critic and book written on film has gone over and over this movie, but I think it’s worth saying that it’s brilliant, it’s influential and it’s a must see. I did find it interesting though that, while ridiculously long, it doesn’t use its length in a way that says, ‘Hey look at what I can do!’ For reference, I point you to Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which felt at times much more like you were watching a child play in a sandbox, showing his parents the new tricks he learned and when they say, ‘It’s time for bed’, he say, ‘No, wait, just one more thing!’ Samurai, instead, chooses to craft and hone its characters so that in the last 5 minutes of the movie – in the final battle – we understand what they are doing and why in a very intimate way. It’s true, about an hour could have been cut out of this movie, but then we would never have cared for the farmers, and there would have been no point. We would not mourn a single death, and there would have been no point. In essence, it would have been the formulaic, distilled version of this movie that we DO see come from Hollywood everyday. It totally should have been on this list!

Rashomon was considerably shorter, coming in at only 88 minutes. While Seven Samurai used its length to tell the very essential part of its story, Rashomon used its length equally well and certainly for its own devices. Unfortunately, this movie was sold to me as a ‘courtroom drama’, which, if you’ve seen it, is hilarious. Not only is it the farthest thing from a courtroom drama, but it’s also not the point of the movie. The point of the movie is to mess with your perceptions of what is real, not only in the real world, but especially in film. Robert Altman’s introduction summed it up best, when you read a book your interpretations of the events and characters are your own, but in film, everything is there for you. You see what the camera sees. In this movie, what you think is the truth is constantly changing, which changed film forever.

I did have some issue with Kurosawa’s women, though. Without browbeating it too much, I felt that the sole female character in Seven Samurai was impotent and useless, other than a flight-of-fancy device, and in Rashomon I had serious problems with the mentality surrounding rape, even though I realize that those ideas had more to do with the time than they did with the filmmaker’s specific feelings about these topics. I didn’t let them prevent me from enjoying two excellent movies, however.

With a lot of cross-over cast this set of movies has very nicely whetted my palette for more Kurosawa… especially something called Throne of Blood. Which, I guess, will just have to go on next year’s list!