directed by Akira Kurosawa
written by Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, and Hideo Oguni

Criterion Collection #2. As I said last time, I’m not pledging to continue doing this at any length. But who knows.

It’s Seven Samurai, by the way.

This is lots of fun. It took me 2 1/2 of the 3 hours of this movie before I knew it, but eventually it just sank in that I was having fun. The exaggerated, on-the-nose quality ultimately was a kind of sweetness; the imitation-Hollywood quality ultimately gave way to a genuine Hollywood-style pleasure.

But that’s what this is; not something bigger or greater than that. Somehow, somewhere, some aspect of the hype on this movie is out of whack. The Criterion commentary points it up: “Look: a tight close-up. Now watch as he falls back into a perfect composition with deep focus.” Blah blah blah. Naming the technical choices doesn’t make them remarkable. All movies, even terrible ones, demonstrate hard work and a lot of choices. To me this played like standard fare, but a little duller and broader, with undue yelping and whimpering, and a lot of space to reflect on nothing much happening. By the end I was able to find all of that more or less endearing, or at least ignorable, but I certainly never felt that the piece had risen anywhere near the level of great art. I remain unsure whether this slowness and broadness are somehow construed by others as artistic distinction, or whether those people have another way entirely of parsing the movie. But, really, this is a samurai movie about saving a village. It’s got some fun stuff in it. To claim much more than that already starts to seem like geek talk.

And boy does that commentary guy keep claiming more. His idolatry for Toshiro Mifune is absurd, especially considering that while he’s calling him something like “the greatest actor of all time at the absolute top of his game in one of his greatest roles,” the man in question is strutting around like a chicken, pulling ridiculous faces, and shouting, shouting, shouting. I don’t doubt he was a fine actor, and in context there’s nothing wrong with his over-the-top performance – but proportion, people!

I’ll grant the movie this: it’s right on the edge of contemporary standard practice, and that’s inevitably a very difficult region to judge properly, because it has enough of the present in it to soothe you into passivity, but enough of the past in it to require perspective. It’s a compliment to this movie’s later influence that I had to guard against watching it as a weak version of contemporary style. Lots of touches that George Lucas and friends would later rip off; my personal history with these things is the reverse of actual history and I tried hard to remember that this was the source and deserved the credit. I.e. yes, I acknowledge and admire that this is the first movie where we see a team assembled from individuals introduced one at a time. I admire it and it’s interesting, too. If this movie had been no fun at all, it would still have been historically interesting. But I’m just a little wary of the calculation that “historically interesting” + “fun” = “one of cinema’s great masterpieces.” Are we really sure about that?

I don’t know – did I miss the boat on this one? I just read what I wrote and it sounds sort of cranky. But look again at my thesis statement: “This is lots of fun.” That ain’t cranky!

I watched Criterion’s original release of the movie, from the library. Recently they reissued it in a multi-disc version that replaces this, with a much better image and all kinds of other stuff. But this was just fine for me; unless someone tells me otherwise, I’m done here.

The commentary was, for those of you counting, by a guy – an “expert” – named Michael Jeck. He somehow manages to make nerdish reverence sound pompous and self-satisfied, in a way that really brought me back to college lectures. Oh yeah, so that’s why I never felt comfortable in class. You forget these things, forget what they sound like and how they make you feel. I appreciated the memory jog. Sincerely, I did.

Click HERE for the second track in your Criterion Collection soundtrack album: the intermission music – a mini-suite of sorts, entr’acte style – from the soundtrack by Fumio Hayasaka (1914-1955). The score was much like the movie: a superficially Japan-ified imitation of Hollywood standard practice, somewhat gawky and broad, but ultimately appealing on its own terms.