|
|
My Easy Marketplace - Seven Samurai - 3 Disc Remastered Edition (Criterion Collection Spine # 2)
|
List Price: $49.95
Our Price: $34.90
Your Save: $ 15.05 ( 30% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Criterion
Starring: Takashi Shimura, ToshirĂ´ Mifune, Yoshio Inaba, Seiji Miyaguchi, Minoru Chiaki
Directed By: Akira Kurosawa
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
Brand: Image Entertainment
EAN: 0715515019927
Format: Black & White
Label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
Number Of Items: 3
Publisher: Criterion
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2006-09-05
Running Time: 207
Studio: Criterion
Theatrical Release Date: 1954-01-01
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: Top 10 movie of all time
Comment: One of the greatest movies of all time just got better. (Better picture quality.) I'm teaching an Introduction to Film class next semester and each week we'll be discussing a different topic in film studies--photography, editing, sound, acting, drama. I'll be using this film to illustrate every single topic, b/c it literally is like a textbook on "how to make a film." I agree with the previous reviewer who said that this movie made me into a lifelong fan of film-making. The question of how Kurosawa created a timeless epic out of a gang of misfit samurai takes at least a lifetime to figure out. Needless to say, most of the remakes and knockoffs of this movie pale in comparison. You can't improve on a classic. I recommend this film to anyone and everyone. If you haven't seen "Seven Samurai", you don't know squat about films.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: 3 stars out of 4
Comment: The Bottom Line:
Though at 200+ minutes the movie is far too long, The Seven Samurai is well made and culminates in a skillfully directed battle scene; patient viewers may find much to treasure, but dillietantes should probably look elsewhere.
Customer Rating:
Summary: 3 hours of black and white subtitled movie? Wow, this will keep me awake!
Comment: The main reason this movie got three stars was because of how incredibly long it was. In addition, it was in black and white with white subtitles. I did like how when the people were stabbed with an arrow, they died. Not like in today's films, where someone has a bleeding neck and they still are windmill kicking you in the face. The plot was extremely realistic in theory. I liked that. There were a few lines in the movie that I thought were really wise and special to hear. But still 3 hours, black and white with white subtitles - I fell asleep. It took me 3 watches just to make it to the Intermission. SNORE.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This Movie Will Change Your Life and The World
Comment: This is the story of seven samurai who stood up for the forsaken and abandoned souls of society. They risked their lives for these peasants against a band of bandits. They didn't fight for money, glory, or legacy. They fought because it was the right thing to do...
This is the masterpiece that all epics are measured by.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Towering Classic Desecrated by Translator Linda Hoagland
Comment: For discriminating film fans, I strongly recommend seeking out older, more nimble translations of Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai," to compare against this latest version by Criterion Collection.
Unfortunately, Linda Hoagland's English translation in this version does a grave disservice to viewers and to the filmmakers who created this cinematic masterwork. Throughout the film, Hoagland's translation manages to be at near complete odds with the tone, nuance, subtle yet bracing eloquence, even humor, of Kurosawa's epic drama. (Incredibly, she even makes English sound horrible. She has no sense of cadence, absolutely NO EAR FOR ANY LANGUAGE.)
She also demonstrates a woeful inability to grasp and therefore convey the essence of the film's characters. Simply horrible. As a result, the translated words and expressions of the film's characters seem to be from an altogether different time and culture than the one depicted by Kurosawa and his collaborators, with the characters feeling disembodied and alienated from themselves, each other, and the film itself. This is truly regrettable, because it leaves first-time viewers, especially, with misimpressions of the film on so many levels.
Absent any lingual finesse, Hoagland's translation assumes such gross and indelicate liberties with the dialog, period setting, culture, and characterizations that it grates miserably against the very beauty and power and heart and spirit of this magnificent film -- quite an ignominious feat. It also evidences the power of language in cinema, but in the worst way. One winces to think that Kurosawa-san, et al, are turning in their graves at Hoagland's single-handed insult.
By extension, Hoagland's translation also undermines the greater emotional impact and experience of the film in its larger import as allegory. In doing so, she undercuts the filmmakers' attempt to convey a particular, imaginative vision of the Japanese people's experience of their history, culture, and struggle for individual and national identity amid the rapid onset of changes and complexities in the 20th century, relative to the country's feudal and rural past.
For this, Hoagland and Criterion Collection should be held accountable for this expediently crass, "contemporary" translation. How was such unmitigated butchery of this truly phenomenal film allowed to happen? To bonafide cineastes, this is unbelievable... maddening... and yet more evidence of the continually spiraling dive in U.S. standards of quality and fidelity to cinema as cultural document and art form. In this light, Ms. Hoagland's translation in this Criterion Collection version merits nothing but disdain.
Despite the technical quality of this print, any purchase of this DVD only encourages more of the same abysmal standards. The degree to which Hoagland's translation ruins the film, at least for some of us, far outweighs ANY negligible shortcoming in the print of previous versions. Indeed, compared to the absolutely horrid effect of her translation, any print differences are secondary and nearly indistinguishable in terms of the film's emotional and artistic impact -- which is absolutely inextricable from the language.
It's the MEANING of the film's narrative that most matters. And, for those of us who know of what we are speaking and who respect the poetry of language and culture, the effect of Hoagland's interference with that experience is analogous to razor blades across the eye (no insult to Bunuel intended), or acid thrown on bare skin. Hers is a most dubious achievement: "outdoing" the masterful hand of Kurosawa, et al, with one swipe of a translation. (I believe Ms. Hoagland is also responsible for the English translation of a "Cowboy Pictures" distribution/DVD of this film, from several years ago, wherein she also evidenced her execrable ineptitude at some of the most critical, moving moments of the film, but not nearly as egregiously as here.)
Hopefully, however, the rich and insightful work of authentically capable, intellectually astute, and keenly sensitive scholars, translators, and critics (from around the globe) will, in time, come to prevail over the rampant distortions and faux "authority" of those persons undeserving of the task.
At present, there is, for example, the brilliant auteur director Kitano Takeshi -- who is too independent (he owns his own film production company), smart, savvy (and still alive) to allow his work to become the botched object of abject English translation. Or, so, one would hope.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
Studio: Image Entertainment Release Date: 09/05/2006
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
