Les Jones

Blogging > Light Blogging / "Seven Samurai"

Sorry for the lack of posts. Melissa and I have both had this bug that's going around. I got up this morning to help get the kids ready, then went back to bed and slept until 6:30 PM.

Luckily, all that wonderful sickness meant that we finally watched Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, which I've owned for like five years. I didn't know when I bought the DVD it was going to be three and a half hours run time.

Why didn't someone take me aside and tell me? I'm not the kind of guy that watches three hour plus movies if I can avoid it. In the VHS days I never rented anything that was two tapes. I figure in the time it takes watch a movie that long, I could get married in Vegas and divorced in Reno. I could get drunk, get laid, get the girl's name tattooed on my arm, sober up, and consider AA, Jesus, and calling a plastic surgeon about tat removal. If I've got three and a half hours to kill I'll use the time to write my own damned movie, thank you very much.

Being sick meant lots of time on the couch this weekend, so we finally watched it. (And even then, we spread the viewing across two days.) Seven Samurai is an extremely good movie, and I suppose it's better than the movie I could have come up with in three and a half hours on my own. (Try to act surprised.) I'm now listening to the commentary track, which is illuminating, to say the least. The narrator notes Kurosawa's use of wind and water in many scenes to add energy, and his frequent staging of foreground and background action. Good stuff.