Seven Samurai
The action genre dominates much of my blog but I had overlooked that much of what we enjoy today owes its success to highly acclaimed Seven Samurai from 1954. I had already seen and enjoyed The Magnificent Seven , which is a direct remake, but Akira Kurosawa's classic sat waiting patiently on my watchlist for quite a while so it was time to sit down and experience this in all its 207 minutes of running time. The story sees a small and impoverished Japanese village that is regularly preyed on by a group of vicious bandits in 1586. Times are getting very hard on the villagers and so they decide to seek out hired support from an aging samurai who takes to the idea of protecting the innocent. And, as the title would suggest, we see seven samurai take up arms to defend the villagers despite the odds being stacked against them. This is my first Kurosawa film and I went in knowing what to expect having the seen the western remake but that did not diminish my enjoyment in the slightest. I...
