Day 32/33: Seven Samurai (1954)

Movie #13 – Seven Samurai (1954) - 207 min, cert PG.

A small community of farmers gets fed up of seeing their crops stolen by bandits every year, so they hire a small group of samurai to fight them off. That’s it. That’s the plot summary. It’s hard to believe how such a simple plot can fill almost three and a half hours of screen time, but fill them it does, and it actually fills them quite well. I was expecting to find this film very hard going. It is, after all, very long, very old, monochrome and in Japanese. But despite all these factors, I found it held my attention pretty well.

I didn’t get started on it until midnight, and then only managed an hour and a half before I had to go to bed, but I don’t think that was the film’s fault – I was just very tired. I got started earlier the following night, about 10 o’clock, and the rest of the film seemed to go by pretty quickly. Admittedly, it’s the second half that contains all the battle scenes between the samurai and the bandits, while the first half is all about the hiring of the samurai and their preparations for the coming battle, so the second half is much faster-paced anyway. All in all, though, it was a much better film than I expected.

Of course the film has achieved universal critical acclaim for being ground-breaking in its use of various film-making techniques, and indeed the director Akira Kurosawa has been credited with spawning the entire Action/Adventure genre, but none of these things I feel I am qualified to discuss. My main problem is that I have no frame of reference for it. I have seen very few films from this period, and certainly none from the far east, so I have really no idea how this film compares with its contemporaries.

Is it a good film? Yes. Would I recommend it? Yes, I would, even though I wasn’t expecting to. Am I keen to watch it again? No. Maybe one day I will revisit it, but not any time soon. It is one of those films that I feel I have to have seen if I ever want to be able to talk intelligently about cinema. Films like Citizen Kane, Psycho, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, and Apocalypse Now. But I’ve seen it now and that’s enough. Given the choice between this and The Magnificent Seven I think I’d rather choose the latter. I’ll give it 7/10, which leaves my top ten unchanged.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.       Schindler’s List (1993)

5.       Inception (2010)

6.       The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

7.       12 Angry Men (1957)

8.      The Godfather (1972)

9.       The Dark Knight (2008)

10.   Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Next up is Star Wars. That’s all, just Star Wars. None of this Episode IV: A New Hope nonsense. I remember seeing it at the cinema when it first came out and it was definitely just called Star Wars.

Day 31: The Return of the King (2003)

Movie #12 – The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - 201 min, cert 12A.

It’s no surprise to see this film high up the list. If anything, I’m surprised not to see it higher. This was the best of an outstanding trilogy. You can tell that Peter Jackson is a fan of the original books, as he really does them justice.

After a brief flashback to show how Gollum first acquired the One Ring, we pick up the plot immediately after the end of the previous film. Frodo and Sam, with Gollum, are making their way to Mordor. Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf are with King Theoden after their victory at Helm’s Deep, and they soon pick up the other two hobbits Merry and Pippin at Isengard. With a few minor scuffles along the way, the plot moves inexorably towards the battle for Minas Tirith where the massed ranks of good and evil are pitched against each other.

It is rare to find the final film of a trilogy which is also the best. In most other cases, it is the least well-received of the three. Star Wars, The Godfather, The Matrix and Back to the Future all spring to mind. But The Lord of the Rings is different, mainly because all three films were made together, so it’s not so much a third film, more like the third section of a single entity.

It’s easy to see why no one attempted to make a live-action version of this story until now. It’s only now that movie special effects have advanced to a point whereby it becomes possible to tell a tale of this nature with any degree of believability. Indeed, the effects used in this film are awesome. The mixture of CGI with live-action is so seamless that it becomes very easy to accept what’s happening on screen as reality. In particular, the way Jackson employs various tricks of scale to maintain the illusion that the leading characters are such radically different heights is easy to overlook. In reality, John Rhys-Davies who plays the dwarf Gimli is 6’1”, which is several inches taller than Orlando Bloom at 5’10½” who plays the elf Legolas. But at no point during the film does their relative size come into question. The same can be said of the hobbits when seen alongside the men. I believe Jackson had to make duplicates of several of the sets in different scales so that the actors could interact with them properly.

The only thing that lets the film down for me is its length. At 3 hours and 21 minutes it is the longest film on the list thus far, and the sixth longest overall (as the list stands today). This would be fine, if it wasn’t for the interminable epilogue. After Sauron is defeated and the forces of evil are vanquished it takes another 25 minutes to tell us that everyone lives happily ever after. This is all that lets it down, though, so it still warrants 9/10.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.       Schindler’s List (1993)

5.       Inception (2010)

6.       The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)

7.       12 Angry Men (1957)

8.      The Godfather (1972)

9.       The Dark Knight (2008)

10.   Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Next up is The Seven Samurai. I’ve not seen this before, but then considering it’s three and a half hours of subtitled Japanese in black & white, I’m not entirely surprised. I have seen The Magnificent Seven, which was based on this, but that’s as close as I’ve come. I suspect I might find it a bit of a challenge, so I’ll probably need to split it over two nights.

Day 30: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Movie #11 – Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980) - 124 min, cert U.

I was quite surprised to see this rank the highest of the original trilogy, although having watched it again, I can begin to see the reasons.

Plotwise (for the handful of people out there who don’t already know), the film continues takes up an unspecified time (probably a couple of years or so) after the Death Star was destroyed at the end of the previous one. The Rebel Alliance has a new secret base on the ice planet Hoth. The Empire, being run by Darth Vader, apparently from a fleet of vast battle cruisers, is searching for this base by sending out hundreds of deep space probes. When the base is discovered, there is a battle and the main characters split up to pursue separate storylines for the bulk of the remaining running time. Han & Leia, with Chewie and C3PO in tow escape from Vader’s clutches and make for a nearby mining colony where Han has a friend. Luke, with R2D2, goes to a remote planet comprising entirely of swamp where he is trained as a Jedi knight by Yoda, a little green alien.

The mood is by far the darkest of the three films. The other two see good triumph decisively over evil, but in this one, evil holds its own. There are no cuddly little teddy-bear aliens here. After the huge success of the first film, this one was clearly approached with a far bigger budget and a much more confident attitude. The battles are bigger, the sets are more believable, and the storyline is more grown-up. I think it’s this more mature approach that stops me from liking it too much. I would have seen this when it first came out, so I must have been 11 or 12 years old. As such, I wouldn’t have appreciated many of its subtleties. Even though I can see its merits more clearly now, those first impressions linger on, and this will always be my least favourite of the three.

One thing this film does have, though, over the other two is Yoda. He isn’t introduced in the previous film, and his appearances in the subsequent one are few and brief. The extraordinary skills of Frank Oz are really put to the test here and he rises to the challenge brilliantly. I can’t think of another screen puppet that even approaches Yoda for depth of performance and emotion. He makes ET look like a glove puppet by comparison. These days it would all be done with CGI, as indeed it was in Episodes I, II & III, and it’s a shame to think that puppetry like this is a lost art.

Overall, it is a good film, and indeed a better one than I remembered it to be, but I still can’t give it more than 7/10 which is probably very unfair of me.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.       Schindler’s List (1993)

5.       Inception (2010)

6.       12 Angry Men (1957)

7.       The Godfather (1972)

8.      The Dark Knight (2008)

9.       Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

10.   The Godfather: Part II (1974)

Next up is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Again, I’ve seen this one many times. My kids love it so I’ve sat through it numerous times with them. It is very long though, the longest so far.

Day 29: The Dark Knight (2008)

Movie #10 – The Dark Knight (2008) - 152 min, cert 12A.

This is the latest of many Batman adaptations to make it to the big screen. I hadn’t seen it before, and nor have I seen Batman Begins, it’s prequel, so it’s hard to tell whether I lost out on anything by watching this one first. Batman tends to be a pretty dark superhero at the best of times, but this movie paints a darker picture than usual.

Up-and-coming District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) has declared war against organized crime and the gangland bosses aren’t too happy about it. Between him and Batman (Christian Bale) their criminal activities are being completely stifled. In their desperation they turn to the maniacal Joker (Heath Ledger) who claims to be able to solve all their problems. The Joker turns the public against Batman by killing prominent figures at the rate of one a day, and threatening to continue until Batman reveals his true identity.

I found it a fairly run-of-the-mill action movie. Lots of explosions and outrageous technology. But nothing that hasn’t been seen before. The one thing that makes the movie stand out, however, is the performance of Ledger for which he deservedly won a posthumous Oscar. He steals every scene that he’s in with the way he revels gloriously in the anarchy that he creates. He has no real goal, he just wants to create chaos wherever he sees order.

Is Ledger’s performance enough to make this a great movie? Not in my opinion, but it does make it very watchable. I give it 7/10.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.       Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.       The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.       Schindler’s List (1993)

5.       Inception (2010)

6.       12 Angry Men (1957)

7.       The Godfather (1972)

8.      The Dark Knight (2008)

9.       The Godfather: Part II (1974)

10.   One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Next up is Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back. It goes without saying that I’ve seen this movie numerous times. I’ll watch it again as per my own rules, but I’m not expecting any new insights.

Day 28: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Movie #9 – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) - 133 min, cert 18.

This movie is about R. P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), a habitual criminal currently serving a sentence for statutory rape. He thinks that it might be easier to serve out his time in a psychiatric hospital than a prison so has decided to pretend to be mad. He soon finds out, however, that although the rules are less strict, some of the usual privileges that he is used to are no longer available. The ward is rules over by Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), a domineering matriarchal woman who believes that the rules are there for the patients’ benefit and must be strictly adhered to. McMurphy has a problem with rules and authority and clashes with Nurse Ratched at every possible opportunity.

There’s more to Ratched than this though. It’s as if she doesn’t actually want her patients to get better. She enjoys the feeling of superiority she gets when she’s putting them down and laying down the law to them. This becomes most clear at the end of film in her confrontation with Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif). Billy is a painfully shy and insular young man, but due to McMurphy’s influence, he stands up to her after being caught breaking the rules. However, she can’t accept this, and knowing exactly which buttons to push, reduces him back to his usual stuttering self.

Of course, psychiatric medicine has taken huge leaps forward since this movie was made, so the film in general has lost a lot of its relevancy, and this does detract from the film a certain amount. But the main reason people watch, and love, this film is Nicholson’s performance. If someone else had played the role of McMurphy, it would probably have been average at best. But the sheer exuberance and wild abandon that he brings to role make the film come alive.

I enjoyed the movie, but not massively so. It’s starting to look a little dated so I’ll just score it 6/10.

1.       The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)

2.      Pulp Fiction (1994)

3.      The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

4.      Schindler’s List (1993)

5.      Inception (2010)

6.      12 Angry Men (1957)

7.      The Godfather (1972)

8.      The Godfather: Part II (1974)

9.      One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

Next up is The Dark Knight, which will be the second film so far that I haven’t seen before, so I don’t really know what to expect.

Day 26: 12 Angry Men (1957)

Movie #8 – 12 Angry Men (1957) - 96 min, cert U.

This is a curious little film to find so high up the list. It made quite a welcome break from the big budget blockbusters that have gone before.

It is essentially a courtroom drama, only without the actual courtroom. Apart from maybe a minute right at the start, and another minute or two at the very end, the entire film takes place in a single room. It is the room in which a jury of 12 men has been locked while they try to reach a unanimous verdict on a murder trial. At first glance, the trial appears to be an open-and-shut case and all the jurors are happy to return an immediate guilty verdict and be on their way. All, that is, except one man (Henry Fonda) who is uncomfortable about deciding the fate of a man’s life so casually and votes ‘Not guilty’ to force the others into further discussion. Needless to say, as these discussions progress, holes start to appear in the case for the prosecution and one by one the jurors change their minds, as the film heads towards its fairly obvious conclusion.

It doesn’t actually matter that we know exactly how the film is going to end barely 20 minutes in. It is the journey that’s important, not the destination. The film is an exploration of the benefits and the pitfalls of the American ‘Trial by Jury’ system, where a person’s fate is decided by a panel of 12 random strangers. The whole point of them being strangers is so that they have no preconceptions of the defendant’s character before the trial begins. The trouble is, of course, that they do have preconceptions. Rather than basing them on knowledge of the defendant’s history, they are based instead on racial and social stereotypes. These prejudices become exposed as the facts in the case gradually unravel, until they are all that remain to tie the accused to the crime.

It is worth noting that Sidney Lumet, the director, makes ingenious use of camera tricks to build the tension as the film progresses. A short focal length on a camera lens gives a scene much more depth as the background appears further away. As the film goes on, Lumet gradually changes his lenses to have longer and longer focal lengths, making the walls appear almost to close in around the characters, increasing the claustrophobic feel of the room as the tensions of the characters within it rise. As well as this, he gradually lowers the camera as the film goes on. At the start of the film, most of the shots are taken from high up near the ceiling, looking down on the jurors. Towards the end, the camera is down at table height and the characters loom oppressively over it, making it feel as if the ceiling too is closing in on us.

It was certainly an enjoyable film, although I’m not convinced it deserves to be quite as high up the list as it is. I think I shall give it 8/10 and place it above The Godfather.

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
2. Pulp Fiction (1994)
3. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
4. Schindler’s List (1993)
5. Inception (2010)
6. 12 Angry Men (1957)
7. The Godfather (1972)
8. The Godfather: Part II (1974)

Next on the list is One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Again, I’ve seen this once before, but I think it was while I was at University twenty odd years ago, and I don’t think I can have been concentrating very hard as I remember very little about it. I shall have to see how much of it is familiar when I watch it again, probably on Friday night.

Day 25: Schindler’s List (1993)

Movie #7 – Schindler’s List (1993) - 195 min, cert 15.

Hooray, I’m back. I bought a brand new laptop yesterday and got straight back into the Top 250 last night with Spielberg’s harrowing tale of the Holocaust.

I last saw this movie, probably in the last 1990s, and I remember being captivated by it then. It has lost none of its power in the intervening time. It easily held my attention, despite the lateness of the hour, for its full three and a quarter hour running time. I had forgotten quite what a masterpiece it was.

The movie tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a German wheeler-dealer, who takes advantage of the Second World War and the repression of the Jewish people to make himself a fortune. He hires a Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to manage the day-to-day running of his business, leaving him free to make the right friends, grease the right palms and generally move in the right circles to maintain a steady stream of lucrative contracts. He uses Stern to hire other Jews to work in his factory. He pays them a pittance, but offers them protection from the escalating chaos and horror of the Holocaust. At the start of the film, Schindler’s only goal is to get rich and the protection of his Jewish workforce is the price he has to pay for his cheap labour. As the film progresses however, you see Schindler’s priorities gradually shift until this protection becomes his only concern and his wealth is just the means that allows him to do it. The film also spends a lot of its time focused on the character of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) a sociopathic camp commander who executes prisoners with all the emotional attachment of someone swatting flies.

The acting throughout the film, by the entire cast, is probably the best I’ve ever seen. The extras and minor characters are so good that it’s easy to forget they are acting at all. They appear instead like the subjects of some horrific documentary. This is reinforced by Spielberg’s decision to make the movie in black and white, a decision which is thoroughly justified. Indeed, Spielberg forgoes all of his movie-making tricks, and films it straight, just like a documentary. He captures the atrocities that take place in a completely dispassionate way. It’s like he’s saying – I don’t need to put an artificial spin on this, the evil on display speaks for itself. Because of the way he’s allowed himself to step back, I think this is Spielberg’s greatest work (at least of the ones I’ve seen anyway).

Overall, it’s an incredibly powerful movie that I would recommend everybody to see at least once in their lives. I have to give it 10/10 which puts it ahead of Inception in my personal list. I won’t put it above Shawshank Redemption though as it doesn’t have that feelgood factor; the subject matter is just too harrowing.

1. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
2. Pulp Fiction (1994)
3. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
4. Schindler’s List (1993)
5. Inception (2010)
6. The Godfather (1972)
7. The Godfather: Part II (1974)

Next on the list is 12 Angry Men, another film I have seen once, many years ago. I remember enjoying it then, but not massively so.