It's taken me years to get around to watching Seven Samurai and now that it's here at the house, it's taken me three weeks to get through the whopping 207 minutes of film.
For comparison, that's longer than:
- nine episodes of Who's the Boss
- Air Bud and Air Bud: Golden Receiver watched back-to-back
- the time it took me to get home last year
- 30 YouTube presidential debate clips
- the monkey scene at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey
Those of you who have sat through this (fantastic) film: you recall the noisy and fierce samurai-wannabe Kikuchiyo, right? He seemed to me to be one of the biggest guys on the set, but it turns out the actor who played him (Toshiro Mifune) was only 5'8".
I've never gotten passed that damn monkey scene.
I don't believe anyone has, actually. I contend that the rest of the 2001 film is actually spliced together from blooper reels of the Kennedy inaguration speech.
If that were true, 2001 would be a much better movie.
Mifune is ok, but generally I prefer Takashi Shimura's roles in the various Kurosawa films. Ikiru is my favorite Kurosawa film, and it's also therefore one of the best films I've ever seen from any director. Over the last 2 years, I've seen every Kurosawa film Netflix has except for Madadayo (which is very near the top of my queue).
But how tall was Shimura-san?
5'7" according to imdb.
Wowza.
Took me 2 sittings as well, but definitely worth watching. I sometimes fear the movies able to tell a story in a similar fashion are dieing out. Then again, Titanic managed 194min... wait a second, I'm still worried.
--Z
Many great films are excrutiatingly long. Many long films also suck hard.
At least there's always Dr. Strangelove.