the m0vie blog

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney and this week with special guest Chris Lavery, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode thrown in.

This time, Akira Kurosawa’s Shichinin no Samurai.

In feudal Japan, a small village finds itself threatened by an army of bandits. In a desperate attempt to protect their barley crop from the marauding menace, the villages decide to hire a samurai to the protect the village. Inevitably, they end up with more than they bargained for.

At time of recording, it was ranked the 19th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Show notes:

• Recorded 4th February 2018.
• Partly to mirror the structure of the film, and partly because watching the film and recording the podcast took a long time, there is an intermission in this episode. The intermission runs from 1:32:15 to 1:34:12.
• Shichinin no Samurai at The Internet Movie Database.
• The IMDB 250 as it appeared at time of recording.
• Follow Chris on Twitter.
• Philip French reviews Seven Samurai for The Observer, June 2014.
• Roger Ebert reviews Seven Samurai for his “Great Movie” series, August 2001.
• Bosley Crowther reviews Seven Samurai for The New York Times, October 1956.
• David Ehrenstein discusses the richness of Seven Samurai for Criterion, November 1999.
• Rob Nixon looks at the production of Seven Samurai for TCM.
• Akira Kurosawa talks about his filmmaking technique with The New York Times, October 1981.
• Pacze Moj on the use of telephoto lenses in Seven Samurai, April 2007.
• Doug Kim at Chasing Light on the group compositions in Seven Samurai, May 2010.
• Assorted quotes from Akira Kurosawa on his use of cameras.
• Peggy Chiao on Akira Kurosawa’s early influences for Criterion, October 2010.
• Joe Leydon at Cowboys & Indians discusses the influence of Seven Samurai on the entire western genre, September 2016.
• Bryan Young at StarWars.com on the influence of Seven Samurai on Star Wars, June 2013.
• Zack Snyder compares Justice League to Seven Samurai, March 2016.
• Ben Child at The Guardian on how modern Hollywood still draws from Japanese popular culture, July 2016.
• Philip Kemp on the historical context of Seven Samurai for Criterion, October 2010.
• Roger Ebert discusses his relationship with Gene Siskel, February 2009.
• Siskel and Ebert interview one another in The Chicago Tribune, April 1998.
• Justin McCurry and John Aglionby at The Guardian on the Japanese soldiers still emerging from the jungle, May 2005.
• British Columbia provides a brief history of Japanese “mandarin” oranges.
• Sean Loughlin at CNN on the rebranding of “french fries” as “freedom fries” during the Iraq War, March 2003.
• Snopes on the urban legend that French’s Mustard claimed that “the only thing French” about them was their name, October 2007.
• Hannah Miles at Artifacts Journal on the racist depictions of the Japanese in American popular culture during the Second World War, March 2012.
• Erik Lundegaard at The Huffington Post on how racism directed at the Japanese defined the earliest live action Batman serials, July 2008.
• Christopher Howard at the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television on the ways in which Japanese cinema struggled with the American occupation after the Second World War, March 2016.
• Follow The 250 on Twitter.
• Subscribe to The 250 on iTunes.
• Subscribe to The 250 on Stitcher.
• Listen to The 250 on Soundcloud.

Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: akira kurosawa, chris lavery, films, influence, japan, japanese cinema, samurai, Seven Samurai, westerns |