I have a negative bias against old movies. Mostly black and white movies. It is really weird, because not only am I pretty snooty with the films I watch (see that, I called them “films”, which makes my movie viewing experience that much better than yours!), so you would think I’d go on and on about how great citizen kane is compared to the common swill people watch these days. But I don’t, I haven’t even seen citizen kane, or Lawrence of Arabia, or a bunch of “old” movies because the thought of a black and white movie with a mono soundtrack and out of sync audio makes me cringe. Cringe and fall asleep from boredom. So, I don’t watch old movies. I will watch black and white movies ( I did watch Eraserhead a few times, but thats because it’s a weird ass movie. I’ll watch super weird before old.

Well a while ago, a friend of mine ( Corrigan ) purchased an Akira Kurosawa DVD box set. I WANTED to see some of them, but I was still too timid. Then I watched Lucky Number Slevin and found out it was a modern re-telling of Yojimbo. So after that I was convinced that I show watch some of these movies. Now, the other weekend I finally had the opportunity to borrow those from Corrigan. I came home, relaxed, put in Sanjuro and I watched it from beginning to end.

I was pretty amazed how well the story was told, all the fore-shadowing that was tastefully done, the acting and even the action. The fighting was pretty cool for an older movie, and Yojimbo had a very need “special effect” of the character “Sanjuro” throwing a knife at a leaf blowing in the wind. After watching Sanjuro I was pretty excited to watch some more, so the next evening I put in Yojimbo. It was pretty different than Lucky Number Slevin, which I was happy about, but a great movie.

I’ll continue to watch what the rest of them, and hopefully this brings me one step closer to watching more movies without reservations. But I’m pretty stubborn.