Star Wars

#12 at time of writing.

Star Wars. You had to be there.

I don't doubt that for teenagers in 1977, it was an absolutely mind-blowing experience. It's ambitious, and peppered with iconic (and very parody-able) moments. The universe is thoroughly imagined. But, well, it's not actually very good is it?

I avoided seeing Star Wars until I was at University in 2000, and predictably it didn't live up to the hype. It starts off promisingly enough, but then there's an interminable series of arid scenes on the desert planet and it doesn't get much better from there.

The acting is horrible, the story is unoriginal, it has plot holes big enough to drive the Millennium Falcon through, and the dialogue is beyond silly. That's not to say it wasn't an important film. Most know that Industrial Light and Magic was formed to do the special effects for Star Wars, thereby ushering in the age of the special effect driven movie.

The special effects were mind-blowing at the time, and so was the marketing. George Lucas may be a hack director, but he is a master of marketing. Star Wars was the first film to successfully create a line of merchandise and toys. And they sold like gangbusters, even though the first action figures were an empty box with an IOU inside!

I'm sure I'm being unfair. But there are certainly more than 11 better films. For one, Raiders of the Lost Ark was twice as good. Mind you, Empire Strikes Back was a vast improvement, and Temple of Doom was rubbish.

Having said all that, I remember enjoying Flash Gordon on Betamax when I was a kid, and that's a fucking awful film.



Believe it or not, several Star Wars characters are derived from Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. George Lucas acknowledges this in the first conference room scene on the Death Star. Just as an Imperial Officer is saying the line "...the Rebel's hidden fort..." he is telekinetically strangled by Darth Vader, shutting him up before he can say the full title.

Shame that Carrie Fisher did a Judy Garland and ended up addicted to drugs and wishing that she had turned down the film that made her famous.

For interest, here's a review from 1977. And for fun, here's the Star Wars Kid. This trailer made me laugh as well - why wasn't Fanboys released in the UK?

Rashomon

#67 at time of writing.

By all accounts, this represented a revolution in filmmaking at the time of its release. In fact, it is often credited as the reason the Academy created the "Best Foreign Film" category.

It certainly has a lot of unusual elements to its structure - a non-linear story with unreliable narrators, and a thoroughly ambiguous conclusion. I enjoyed it for the most part, but I think you definitely have to be in the right mood to watch it.

It's slow and artful, which I think are typical features of Kurosawa films. The overblown, grubby Japanese characters make for amusing viewing. And the concept of re-telling the same story from different perspectives keeps the suspense poised.

It didn't blow me away, but I would definitely give it a second chance.

Seven Samurai

#10 at time of writing.

The trouble with watching classic films is that they were often so influential that you feel like you've seen it all before. So when I sat down to watch this three-hour epic I expected to see a predictable story about brave, powerful and noble samurai warriors conquering all.

Wrong.

I was very surprised to see the samurai portrayed as poor, cowardly, desperate mercenaries. There are no heroes in this film.

In sixteenth century Japan a villager overhears a notorious gang of bandits plotting to ransack the village and steal all their grain. The village elder decides that they must try to hire samurai to defend themselves, but they have no money. It turns out that most of the samurai are so pathetic and desperate that they will work for three square meals a day - although the villagers can barely even afford that.

All this gives rise to personal battles of hope and pride and guilt, not to mention many wonderfully comic exchanges, while the villagers and the samurai prepare for the final showdown.

Many of Akira Kurosawa's films were remade into classic Westerns - in this case, The Magnificent Seven. I don't much like Westerns as a rule, but I liked this.