Seven Samurai

random movies that are supposed to be good that I haven’t seen #7/36 I have been asked many times what the best movie ever is, and for the first 10 or so years of my life my answer was always firmly “The Dark Knight”. When I started branching off into other genres of film, and delving more into the industry of film, my answer since has always been “not sure, too many good ones”, and despite the fact that I still may not have that answer, this might just be it. Seven Samurai is honestly one of if not the best films I have ever seen. From literally every standpoint this is a perfect movie. The writing never goes dry for its insane 3hr26m runtime, this movie is from 1954 shot in black and fucking white and still looks better than most films I’ve seen, wait sorry I just need to talk about this screenplay a little bit more. Jesus Christ this screenplay is ridiculous. This film is 3 and a half hours and literally never gets boring. NEVER. Like the dialogue is amazing and that’s one thing, but this story???? Oh my god. This story is the stuff of fucking legend. Even its little character-building sub-plots, like the thief in the house, are top tier. The minor but significant differences in virtues of each samurai (especially Kikuchiyo) that result in completely different endings for each samurai, that also intelligently affects the way each samurai attacks, or maintains their post. Ugh it’s just soooooo good. Crazy thing is.. this movie feels like it’s 3 and a half hours, it’s not like Oppenheimer where the time whizzes by you and you don’t even realize, this film makes you feel it’s runtime, but just because it’s apparent, does not make it a burden, considering I completely believe that this story could not have been condensed into anything shorter than this film, and the intermission halfway through caught me so off guard, I legit laughed out loud. The acting jobs are also phenomenal. I’d assume that most people would applaud Toshirô Mifune, or even Keiko Tsushima, who are both admittedly great, but I found myself immediately drawn to the performance of Takashi Shimura, who I thought was just splendid as his giddy and wise character. Yeah so overall this might be No.1 all-time for me. Oh yeah also the camera work was impressive, there was one shot in particular where the cam is outside of a house and it pans left and right following a character, than it follows her out, running left and right and left and right, frankly it was very impressive. Also the sound was very advanced for the time, there was a little mixing issue in the crying scene very early on the had me worried but that problem was quickly resolved. So yeah easy 10/10 But go form your own opinion pussy.