Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Medium Core

Ok, so I like to study movies, but in a sort of casual way. I like to keep an eye on the opening credits for names I recognize, like the Visual Effects supervisor, the writer of the musical score, the producer, etc. Nothing really serious, but somewhat more than most people, I think. Anyway, you may recall from an earlier post, I am somewhat interested in the history of action movies, which is why I watched the movie Ran, which was directed by Akira Kurosawa several decades ago. Ran was pretty good, so I thought I would check out another of his works, "Seven Samurai."

Turns out I don't have what it takes.

See, when the movie arrived (yay Netflix!), I didn't give it a good once-over like I should have. I set it on the shelf and a few days later sat down to watch it with a huge pile of Grandma's Spaghetti. I soon discovered that the movie had three strikes against it (more or less): It was black and white, it was subtitled, and it was four hours long.

Four hours.

Now, in and of themselves, any two of those three things wouldn't be such a bad thing, but good gravy, when I'm munching on spaghetti and trying to relax, I just can't handle a four-hour black and white subtitled Japanese movie. So with all due respect to Kurosawa (and with apologies to Gavin, who did watch it a few years ago), I mailed it back without watching it. But hey, that's how things go, I guess. I'm making my through Goodfellas right now, with Heat sitting on the shelf waiting to be watched, as well as The Godfather Part 2. Summer is a good time, folks. :)

3 comments:

Inside The Console said...

You need to see if you can get Mythbusters from Netflix. I don't know if you're a fan of that show, but if not, you should be :-).

Throw a Mythbusters disc in your queue every so often and you'll stay pleasantly surprised.

-Phil

Unknown said...

Yeah, Mythbusters is a pretty good show. Some of the myths are a little spurious, but overall it's fairly entertaining, and a darn sight educational too. Can't beat that!

Anonymous said...

Kurosawa is great stuff. Black and white is great too. You can provide so much more emotion through the use of lighting in a black and white film than through any bit of special effects in a modern film. And yeah... Mythbusters is amazing... Blowing stuff up... for a living... yeah...