Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD. A visually stunning film! Long-lens shots and medium shots prevail which serve to convey an epic quality. Close ups are rare (unlike the current crop of tent-pole films that use quick-cut extreme close-ups to simulate "action" to the point of nausea). Director Akira Kurosawa fills the wide screen down to the square centimeter (one of his directorial trademarks). The video restoration is flawless. Not so much so for the audio restoration which contains occasional distortions. Film score is so-so, adding to the impact of some scenes, distracting from others. Subtitles are perfunctory and skip over some subtle and some not so subtle nuances. Costumes are, well, "interesting." Can't help but wonder how many young women publicly wore rather short shorts and tight blouses in feudal Japan! Or how extremely rugged terrain was navigated by folks wearing only sandals! Now to the story line, script, and acting. This film cries out for a "Director's Cut" version (or at least the outtakes), as many scenes are disjointed and abrupt with characters conveying information either gained from telepathy or by viewing the dailies! As for the story line, it's predicable and lame. Acting is uneven: two characters (used to stitch scenes together and provide marginal comic relief) are allowed to outrageously ham it up; the leading actress (Misa Uehara) plays scenes in a state of sustained hysteria (except when playing a deaf mute); and the leading actor (Toshiro Mifune) essentially plays a supporting role (except for some action scenes). Bottom line: park your brain at the door, and go with the flow. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

SnoopyStyle Tahei and Matashichi are two greedy bumbling peasants in feudal Japan. They are late to fight in a battle for the Yamana clan against the defeated Akizuki clan and end up digging graves. In the chaos, they escape and encounter General Rokurōta of the Akizuki clan hiding in the Hidden Fortress with Princess Yuki Akizuki and the remaining family gold. After Rokurōta's sister sacrifices herself in the princess' place, he takes the princess to a friendly ally. He tricks the two fools to carry the gold while the tomboy princess pretends to be mute. After witnessing an enslaved girl mistreated, the princess gets Rokurōta to purchase her.The great Akira Kurosawa made this samurai adventure comedy. The two foolish peasants are kind of funny. I imagine that they are a whole lot funnier back in the day for a Japanese audience. The culture, language and time differences do create a distance for a modern English audience. They are obviously broadly comical.

robertguttman It's almost impossible not to like "The Hidden Fortress". It is an action-adventure-comedy with something to please just about everyone. Created by one of the greatest film directors of all time, the movie follows a diverse set of characters through a series of more cliff-hanging adventures than any movie this side of "Raiders of the Lost Arc". As the noble and loyal samurai general in disguise who leads the cast, Toshiro Mifune was in absolute top form in this film. Sharing his adventures are a plucky and willful young princess and two hilariously foolish, venal and horny peasants. Their task is to convey the princess, along with a large cache of hidden gold, through enemy lines to safety. It's not a complicated plot but, in the hands of director Akira Kurosawa, it becomes a veritable roller-coaster ride of thrills. For those who insist that they don't care for black-and- white movies, or movies with subtitles, just be assured that those issues really don't matter in this case. If you don't enjoy this, you probably won't like anything.

Leofwine_draca In an interview, Akira Kurosawa said that he made THE HIDDEN FORTRESS as a deliberate counterpart to the earlier, darker films of his career; he'd just come off the back of his MACBETH adaptation, THRONE OF BLOOD (and, let's face it, things don't get much darker) and he wanted to make a lighter piece of entertainment for a change. THE HIDDEN FORTRESS is certainly that: it's a humour-filled adventure filled with action and spectacle. It's also one of my less favourite Kurosawa movies.I like darkness. I like dark, violent movies that explore the depths of the human soul. Comedy has never really appealed me to me – my tastes in humour are very subjective – and this film has a lot of comedy. In fact, pretty much every scene featuring the two cowardly peasants is played for laughs, and their appeal quickly wears thin. I began looking forward to the (few) moments they weren't around, and dreading their return to the fray.Still, the rest of the story is a lot of fun. Toshiro Mifune enjoys himself in a lighter role for a change, and gets to take part in some for-the-time spectacular action scenes; his duel with a rival general is particularly engaging. The scene-stealer of the piece is Misa Uehara, playing a princess who disguises herself as a mute for much of the production. Uehara is exceptional when given the opportunity to throw off the shackles surrounding the roles usually given to women in historical dramas and an intriguing forerunner to the later femme fatales who would populate Japanese samurai cinema come the 1970s.The story, involving the transportation of some gold across enemy country, is solid, but the plot does take a great deal of time to get moving. I wasn't very involved for the exceptionally long-winded introduction, but things get a lot better in the second half, when the genuine threat of discovery and death adds suspense to keep things moving along nicely. THE HIDDEN FORTRESS may not be an example of Kurosawa at his most profound, but it's a fine example of the director at work in a different, non-serious genre for a change.