Seven Samurai. Akira Kurosawa. Three and a half hours with an old-school intermission inbetween acts. Samurai movies are a dicey bunch usually. Talky most of the time, morality plays about duty and honor, while we confuse them for Westerns and steal from them blind appropriating their history, telescoping their myths into a 20 year window that we call the Old West. The chanbara films depict hundreds of years of lore but the best of the bunch were made early, by Akira Kurosawa before he became the legendary film-maker, revered by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, and spent the last years of his life struggling for funding. Last Man Standing, Magnificent Seven, even Pixar's A Bug's Life has stolen from this film. The plot is simple: Japanese villagers are struggling with a bandit problem, they hire samurai to help them and the samurai teach them how to defend themselves, as one way of life gives way to another.
But Seven Samurai is a masterpiece alright. So many of its scenes have been re-shot, roles recasted, set-pieces stolen, whole swaths of film redone to suit modern audiences over and over again, even Kurosawa couldn't help himself later on in life with Kagemusha and Ran, two films highly indebted to his first films. Still, the original holds true despite it all. It's wrily funny, not bogged down with the sort of cultural asides that generally need asterisks at the bottom of a page, and entertaining as hell. What more could you ask for.
