His pick 1950s: Seven Samurai

If you want to live forever and never die, start watching this movie.

Seriously though.

Ever sang that "song that never ends" haha.  Okay, okay, I'm done.

But not with this movie yet.

Okay for real, we started watching this the day after we watched The Iron Giant.

It took us almost a week to finish.  Mostly, because Corey has been so tired with switching work shifts. But, also because this movie is very long.

It's in black and white.

And it's in Japanese.  Subtitled in English.

The story is that these Japanese farmers were attacked by bandits who promised to come back and steal and plunder and all that stuff when their harvest comes in.  So, they decide to try to find samurai to come and help them defend themselves.  But they can only pay them with food.

The guy on the left is the leader and helps find six more samurai to help them. Obviously, since they are only being paid with food, these samurai have good intentions and motives and have good overall character.

The entire first half (first disk) of the movie is them deciding to, and finding, the samurai. Approximately 100 minutes at least.  And a little bit of the samurai starting to figure out how to best fortify and defend the village (I think, maybe that party was on the second).  I really could've done with about 90% less of this entire half of the film, because to be honest, the second part wasn't bad.  The second part involved more preparations, some development of the small love story, and the actual battle against the bandits.

The battle is pretty long, but not constant.  It's interesting and a good ending to the movie.

Apparently this guy did a lot of new stuff with camera work and shooting outdoors, battle scenes, etc.  I find it really difficult to watch black and white movies with outdoor scenes, it's just so difficult to distinguish the scenery and all.

The development of a few of the characters was done pretty interestingly.  But then others I kept getting mixed up because, and I hate that this sounds bad, but the names were so confusing to me!

It is really difficult to rate this movie. I hate to say it, but the subject matter just wasn't interesting to me.  It wasn't visually appealing to me because of the outside black and white stuff, and I don't like having to watch a movie and read it at the same time.  I'm just not sophisticated enough and I won't pretend to be, haha.

I give it a 5 out of 10. I didn't strongly dislike it as far as content, etc.  And I didn't love it either.  It's not a movie I would've kept watching had it not been on the list.  To me, the length wasn't justifiable with my level of interest in the story.  And that's just my opinion.