Let me start by saying that this movie is quite good. You will not have squandered the hour and a half it takes to watch it. However, a few things bothered me: 1. Perhaps a quibble, but I *hated* the music. The endless loop of what sounded like variations on Bolero for the first half of the movie -- augh! In general, I found it very choreographed; at times, it was more like watching a ballet. It was very overwrought and distracting.
2. The acting. Horribly overdone on the part of Toshiro Mifune; at times he seemed to have taken classes at the Daffy Duck School of Acting. He was not the only one overacting, either, just the most prominent.
3. The ending. We get through this very subtle and ambiguous movie, where, even at the end, we have no clue which of the four versions (or which mix of the four versions!) of the story actually happened, and Kurosawa absolutely clubs us silly with the theme of redemption. I wanted the movie to end when the woodcutter said, "On days like this, we have cause to be suspicious" (or something similar). I don't know what possessed Kurosawa to bugger the ending like he did, but, in my version, it'd be about two minutes shorter.
That said, there's a lot to like about the movie. I love how Kurosawa leads you into a false smugness at the end when it's revealed that the woodcutter stole the dagger. "Ah hah!" I thought; "Clearly, the dead samurai was telling the truth!" I was impressed with my sleuthing, my quick recall of the medium relating that he felt someone removing the dagger. Then it occurred to me that, in every story, the dagger was left behind. Probably my favorite part was when I had to go back and watch the end of all of the stories to ensure that the dagger was still there, either in the samurai or in the ground.
Good movie, but in desperate need of a dose of subtlety.
2. The acting. Horribly overdone on the part of Toshiro Mifune; at times he seemed to have taken classes at the Daffy Duck School of Acting. He was not the only one overacting, either, just the most prominent.
3. The ending. We get through this very subtle and ambiguous movie, where, even at the end, we have no clue which of the four versions (or which mix of the four versions!) of the story actually happened, and Kurosawa absolutely clubs us silly with the theme of redemption. I wanted the movie to end when the woodcutter said, "On days like this, we have cause to be suspicious" (or something similar). I don't know what possessed Kurosawa to bugger the ending like he did, but, in my version, it'd be about two minutes shorter.
That said, there's a lot to like about the movie. I love how Kurosawa leads you into a false smugness at the end when it's revealed that the woodcutter stole the dagger. "Ah hah!" I thought; "Clearly, the dead samurai was telling the truth!" I was impressed with my sleuthing, my quick recall of the medium relating that he felt someone removing the dagger. Then it occurred to me that, in every story, the dagger was left behind. Probably my favorite part was when I had to go back and watch the end of all of the stories to ensure that the dagger was still there, either in the samurai or in the ground.
Good movie, but in desperate need of a dose of subtlety.