Hacker Cinema
Seven Samurai
七人の侍
1954 · Film · 207 min
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
A samurai answers a village's request for protection after he falls on hard times. The town needs protection from bandits, so the samurai gathers six others to help him teach the people how to defend themselves, and the villagers provide the soldiers with food.
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38 comments on Hacker News
> And do we really need orders in 60 minutes?
Probably not necessary, but it can be quite convenient.
In the late '90s a company called Kozmo.com was doing 60 minute delivery in several cities of some basic food and snack, games, CDs, DVDs, magazines, books, and some other things.
It was pretty nice one night when I started watching "Seven Samurai" on a basic cable channel, and about 30 minutes in got annoyed at the number of commercial breaks they were inserting. During the next break I popped onto the computer, ordered the movie on DVD, along with some microwave popcorn and some drinks. I then went back to watching on TV.
About 15 minutes later their driver showed up, and 5 minutes after that I was watching from the DVD and eating my popcorn.
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
> it frequently produces mediocre or worse content
I agree, and I go one step beyond:
Any "series" is BY DEFINITION, bad. If to tell a good story you need +4 episodes, you're doing a poor job. Or, what's real, you're just bloating it ON PURPOSE to keep people attached to their screens.
If Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, 2001 Space Odyssey or any other good film managed to tell their story in <3hs, I'm sure any other of these "originals" should be able to do the same.
The real quality resides in making something SHORTER and condensed. This is when you start playing with REAL cinematic mechanisms. For example, Seven Samurai is well known for its use of motion and dynamism. Kurosawa communicates a lot without using dialogue, just by the use of movement of the characters or the background. Today's productions are just: explicit dialog > cut scene nature > explicit dialog > cut scene nature > etc.
Some stories might need longer runtimes, like Lord of the Rings or whatever "bigger universe" it is. But these are EXCEPTIONS, not the rule.
For the record, I do enjoy some Series: Friends, The Office, etc. But these are just comedies, and one could argue they're explicitly made to be "bloated" (in terms of length span).
> Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away
PS: I know I'm going to get downvoted to oblivion but I don't care.
I'm not so sure – I don't think it'll impact it positively or negatively. Personally, at least, it's never impacted my willingness to watch a movie. Seven Samurai is an all Japanese cast, but it's still my favorite movie of all time.
It's seven samurai in space with bits and pieces of warhammer nonsense. It's basically a movie for children.
"samurai" movies:
- Seven Samurai
- Rashomon
- Ran
- Throne of Blood
- Kagemusha
non-samurai:
- High and Low
- Ikiru
I would say that the essentials are Seven Samurai, High and Low, Rashomon.
Like that The Magnificent Seven (1960) reboot of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) ?
I think that's been going on for a while now:
https://reelrundown.com/film-industry/The-First-10-Musical-Short-Films-in-Recorded-History
I've had that same thought. How far away are we from true "video on demand"
- Show me the second season of Firefly, set after the events of Serenity - Remake Flash Gordon in the style of John Carpenter, with Roddy Piper as Flash - Create a 6 part mini-series, a modern day retelling of Seven Samurai, in 2050 Tokyo underworld, with Hiroyuki Sanada and Ken Watanabe - I'm too busy to read this obscure book from project gutenberg, make a movie of it for me - Here's a one-pager I wrote, give me a trailer for it with Keanu Reeves as the main star
Seven Samurai has one of the most bone-chilling scenes of horror of any movie I've ever seen:
> an old lady crosses the screen holding a rake.
By itself it's simple, almost meaningless, yet in context...
This type of argument always distracts from the fact that figuring out where we draw the line between theft and reimagining.
The Magnificent Seven for instance was a reworking of Seven Samurai, but stands on its own as an original creation. Going into a cinema and filming a picture to later put on a torrent site is not artistic reworking.
The hard discussion is about what is acceptable, we all know prior art exists.
Star Wars was borrowing heavily from Seven Samurai not just western films. Thus swords vs blasters works the same way swords vs arrows do in those films etc.
There are basically infinite ways to remix old stories like that. Hell even just the editing significantly improved Star Wars over the original script.
An easy litmus test to show its not the test of time is to plot the number of exceptional quality films made per year.
In any form of art, there have always been pieces motivated by artistic drive (i.e. a work of art like seven samurai or loan's run) and pieces motivated by profit (i.e. a product like all of the capeshit movies or the transformer movies). What we're seeing in film and other similar industries is a cabal of gatekeepers who don't fund things unless it fits the mold of proven, profit driven products. Remove the Larry Finks of the world from power, and you remove the powerwhore gatekeepers that have no concept of beauty.
I used to live pretty close to the AFI in Silver Spring and while I thought their selection of older movies was pretty great, I didn't end up going terribly often. I think it's linked to the fact that for most people (certainly me), going to the movies is a social occasion (I don't think I've ever gone to a movie theater by myself - I know people do, but I suspect that's a fairly small minority).
Anyhow, marketing does it's job - lots of people have some awareness of new movies coming out, and they're curious about that thing that they've heard about but haven't seen. It just seems tougher to drum up interest to go see Officespace or Edward Scissorhands or Seven Samurai or whatever - "I just saw that on TV", "Seen it a million times", "Never heard of it", etc.
There's a whole bunch of his films I'd put squarely in my all-time list. Ikiru, Ran, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, High and Low, Dersu Uzala, Rashomon. It's one masterpiece after another. Try watching Seven Samurai and Ikiru back to back to really appreciate the genius of Takeshi Shimura as an actor.
There's really no accounting for taste.
I like Battle Royale, and Seven Samurai is good, for an action movie. I hated Citizen Kane and Tokyo Story, and consider both to be highly overrated.
For a medium that is dependent on technology I’d say it’s impressive for any old movie to stand the test of time. I love old movies and I’m always impressed with their resourcefulness and heart. My favourite film is Seven Samurai but I sincerely hope that we can continue to make movies which challenge the preeminence of all time classics like Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story, The Rules of the Game, 8 1/2 .. like really take your pick of the top films on that list and you or anyone would do well to watch them many times over.
Anyone who doubts citizen Kane really needs to check out what kind of films were being made before it. CK was bold and experimental, an astounding picture. It’s still fresh in many ways and moving, dated too for sure but a definite classic. Orson Welles is legitimately one of my artistic heroes and he got screwed by the powers that be at the time. I kind of hate to see his work presented this way when he himself loved many of the film makers with movies on the sight and sound list.
Honestly I’m very take it or leave it with Hitchcock’s Vertigo which is the current #1 and it will probably maintain the stop spot on the critic list during the next polls. I also don’t get Sunset which always places super high. It’s good and the running in the field scene is a thrill but that’s the thing about these lists anyways, they are just a statistical average of what everyone thinks but we all have our personal dark horse favourites. One day, Battle Royale will get the credit it deserves.
I’ve been drinking if this seems disjointed.
"The Magnificent Seven" (the version with Yul Brynner) if you can't find the original Kurosawa movie "Seven Samurai".
I'm not much into television or big screen media but for some reason I really got into Kurosawa films. Right after watching Seven Samurai I went and got as many Kurosawa films I could get my hands on. I think there are only a couple I haven't seen now. They just ooze creativity and inspiration. Every actor is perfect for the role. Every shot is perfect for the scene. It all comes together to tell the story the way it was meant to be told.
The pacing is on point. The mood is on point. Kurosawa's films are really a study on how to produce quality.
One of my biggest complaints for modern films is how much they try and fit in each unit of time. It feels like they don't respect what they're trying to portray. There's value in pause. There's value in waiting and letting things sink in to the viewer. We don't need to rush everything. It takes time to appreciate.
It's easy to forget but acting and filming are actually art forms and Hollywood once excelled at them.
You won't see any evidence of that in the modern blockbuster, though. I remember a scene in one of the Iron Man movies (or perhaps the Avengers?) where Iron Man is fighting the Hulk. Scenes of the fight are interrupted by scenes where we see Tony Stark's face against a dark background- encased in his helmet, with the armour's HUD superimposed. It's a clever trick. The point though is not to create a dramatic effect. It's to maximise Robert Downey Jr's face time.
When I was younger I was always on the lookout for "videoclip-like" directing. For instance, I was crazy about a French movie called Dobermann [1] that goes like a cheetah on speed and doesn't stop to take names. I was obsessed with portrayals of action and violence, the faster the better.
But there is power in standing still. There is power in silence, in saying nothing, in showing nothing. I was shown that in the movies of masters [2] [3]. Perhaps I've grown up in the process.
____________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobermann_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Samurai
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man
This something I don't understand about certain startup founders. If you're starting a company, you should have at least one absolute monster of a developer. Someone who is capable, communicative, and with a deep pool of knowledge. Someone who can attract, hire, and lead other good developers. Not your buddy Steve who made an iPhone app or two. Not that developer who has some PHP experience and built a React app once. A real, terrifyingly good developer. The aphorism "first class people hire first class people; second class people hire third class people" comes to mind.
Granted, I'm a pretty inexperienced developer, but I see companies being founded by people who are even less competent and less knowledgeable than me.
And sure, finding a competent person is hard. But it's like the movie Seven Samurai. Can't afford to pay a samurai? Find a hungry one. There are plenty of developers who are young, but still good. And if you can't even do that, then take any and all money you have, and pool it to find one or two (or seven) developers who can find other competent people.
I bet you could task the entire production team of Pulp Fiction with creating a movie, but without Quentin Tarantino it would never reach the same heights.
sub:
Paths of Glory : Kubrick
Seven Samurai : Kurosawa
Stalker : Tarkovsky
The Magnificent Seven might be a bad example there; it had a 2016 remake, which I'll bet led to some sales of the original film (and probably also the original original film, Seven Samurai).
> I can't imagine what the difference between 50 and 25 will be.
I think the problem we run into is that neither can most people.
> If you're hiring 40-60 year olds you cannot simply hire a 25 year old and get an "acceptable tradeoff of competency" unless you didn't need anything close to that competency in the first place.
And, again, the issue is that most people honestly believe that they don't need the extra competency.
I work in a relatively enlightened group. People treat me with considerable respect and I feel that they value my experience (I'm knocking up against 50 years old). Even still, if I say, "You know what, I've tried that before a few times and it never seems to work out" nobody will accept it as an answer :-). These young guys all want/need to make their own mistakes.
Sometimes I've even run into situations where people are doing considerable damage to their careers by making bad choices. Explaining the situation often makes them very, very unhappy. You end up feeling like the dad on a team of teenagers where everyone deep down loves and respects you, but day to day hates your guts :-).
Since the field is growing so fast, we have this influx of young talent. They just can't see beyond where they will be in 5 years. Just the other day I saw an ad on Youtube for some programmer mill -- "I took a 10 month course and now I'm living my dream," kind of BS. Everybody wants to think that they are doing an awesome job and we have pushed back the bar for awesome a fairly long way. There's an expectation that you can do a boot camp, work for a year or two and then it's easy street from there.
The reality, of course, is that 30 years on I'm still reading and hacking and struggling and experimenting and learning -- and I've been doing it for 30 years. I look in awe at some people in the industry and wonder if I will be able to gain that kind of competency before I retire.
I think if I could sum up the advantage of being more experienced it would be to watch the classic movie, "The Seven Samurai", note who survives to the end, think about why they survive and remark on what they plan to do next.
Even though already perfectly enjoyable, I'm thinking Kurosawa films like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Man that would be something.
> It's a matter of if you think about it for a bit it makes no sense, it's logically impossible.
Let's take a look at a dictionary definition of culture: "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time" (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/culture)
Now, note the "particular group of people" part. A person can be a member of more than one group. Some groups are sub-groups of others; some overlap with others.
For example, I am an American, and as such I have been brought up in American culture, with many of the traditions and ideals that that entails; Thanksgiving, the 4th of July, a strong belief in civil liberties, and a love of strawberry rhubarb pie.
American culture is also a subset of Western European culture, with influences from Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity, so while I am not myself Christian, I celebrate Christmas and Easter and have many Christian influences on my values and life.
However, I am also a member of other cultures. My most recent ancestors to travel to the US were Scottish; and so Scottish culture is also part of my culture, but not most other people in the US. I wear kilts to weddings, and have an uncle and cousin who play bagpipes at weddings and funerals. That's a part of my culture, but that is not a part of overall American culture.
I'm also a software engineer and computer geek, and involved in free software, advocacy for civil liberties online, advocate for strong encryption and privacy, and the like. This is a particular subculture that tends to promote strong protections for individual privacy and liberty, while openness and transparency on behalf of institutions such as corporations and governments. This is not part of mainstream American culture, but it is part of my culture; and this particular subculture spans multiple countries as well, so in many of these ways, I have more cultural values in common with a Brazilian or German who is also involved in these communities than I do with the average American.
There are many other subcultures I could describe myself as a member of. And the same goes for anyone you ask. "Culture" is not one big, monolithic thing with clear boundaries. Because it is a set of customs and beliefs shared with a group, that set can be larger or smaller, and stronger or weaker, depending on how big of a group you choose.
> And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"
Food is a pretty fundamental part of any culture. As something that is necessary for sustaining life, it's something that everyone does. In almost every culture I've seen, meals are a large part of fostering community, of strengthening social bonds. You have meals with family, with friends, with coworkers. "Breaking bread" is a term rich with culture connotations of mutual trust, peace, welcoming, because sharing food with someone is so important; and the same holds in many other cultures, one of the most generous and welcoming things you can do is invite someone to your table and share your food with them.
So don't be so quick to dismiss "ethnic food" as an important part of multiculturalism. Food is in many ways the heart of of a culture, and exploring the food culture of another people can be a strong way to share something with them.
However, multiculturalism can extend far beyond that as well.
The musical heritage of America is quite strongly multicultural. Ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop all have their roots in black culture in the US, but have had enormous influences in white culture as well. Of course a large amount of American musical traditions comes from Western European classical and pop traditions as well, and then there are a variety of folk traditions, such as Celtic, that have been integrated into the mainstream through bluegrass and country music.
But there's a lot more than just that. A large number of cultures have made substantial impact on film in America. Many of our "Western" genre is actually a product of Italy; but that in turn influence Akira Kurosawa in Japan, with Samurai westerns such as Yojimbo. His work has also influenced Western work, where The Magnificent Seven is a western remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and his The Hidden Fortress is one of the major influences on Star Wars.
Let's see, getting back to day to day life, Jewish culture has also had a fairly large impact; from Yiddish, we get words like "schmuck", "chutzpa" and "klutz". We also get bagels (oops, back to food again),
On the musical front again, some of the best American music like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue had roots in Western classical tradition, jazz, and klezmer, traditional Ashkenazi folk music.
I could go on, but man, detailing all of the positive effects of multiculturalism on American society could fill up hundreds of volumes of books, not just a single comment on HN.
> A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime.
That is not what is meant by the term "hate crime." Simply redefining a term that has a particular meaning to mean something else does not really add to the discussion.
I'll quote from Wikipedia:
> In both crime and law, hate crime (also known as bias-motivated crime) is a usually violent, prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group. Examples of such groups include but are not limited to: ethnicity, gender identity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, or sexual orientation.
A "hate crime" is not simply any violent crime. It is a crime in which the attacker was motivated by their perception of the victim's membership of some other group.
There are several things that can motivate a criminal to commit a crime. Poverty, greed, hatred of a particular group, hatred of a particular person, sheer anti-social tendencies, and I'm sure many other motivating factors. Only one of these falls under the term "hate crime" as it is commonly defined; those crimes in which hatred of a particular group of people is a primary motivator.
If you look at the statistics I cited in a previous comment, while it is true that black on white murder happens more often than white on black, white on white murder far surpasses either (and likewise, black on black). No amount of arguing about the black on white vs. white on black levels of crime will make these intraracial crimes go away, and the levels of intraracial crime is a very strong signal that racial animus is not actually the motivation for the majority of crime that occurs.
The reason it is important to look at the motivation behind a crime, and not just the statistics about whether a crime happened, is that the motivations can help tell you the best way to reduce that type of crime in the future.
Hate crimes, in the sense of any crime committed on behalf of membership in some group, can be particularly dangerous because they can lead to either prolonged violence between those two groups, or ethnic cleansing or genocide. These types of crimes, when allowed to escalate, have escalated into some of the greatest atrocities of a last couple of centuries. Breaking the chain of hate-motivated violence by discouraging the use of rhetoric of hate, by changing laws that institutionalize disparities between these groups, and by applying harsher penalties to those crimes committed for these reasons, are some ways to deal with these types of crimes.
Crimes committed due to a hatred of a particular person, however, are fairly different. They are usually based on some aspect of those people's relationship; perhaps an abusive domestic relationship, a cheating spouse, or the like. Here, there isn't some group-based animus, but a dysfunctional personal relationship. Here, the better way to deal with the problems are to provide better outlets for change than violence; provide shelters for people to escape from abusive relationships, allow divorce, as it it preferable to violence or murder.
Crimes that are committed due to poverty, to people having as sense of hopelessness and no further opportunity but to turn to crime, are another kind of problem. Here providing better social services, better education, better access to affordable housing, and the like can all help take that pressure off that can push people over the edge.
In all of these cases, the actual perpetrators of actual crimes do need to be punished; there needs to be deterrence as well. However, on a societal level, there can be many things done to reduce the temptation and pressure to engage in criminal behavior. And even on the individual level, knowing someone's motivation for a crime can be important in rehabilitating them and reintroducing them back to society.
The story behind the remakes is pretty interesting all by themselves:
John Sturges' The Magnificent Seven (1960) was based on The Seven Samurai (1954)
When first released in America, the title for Kurosawa's film was "The Magnificent Seven", it created a stir and the rights for "The Seven Samurai" were bought for US$250 from the Toho Corporation, Toho entered into the contract under the pretense of being the sole copyright owner. Over the following 30 years, several lawsuits followed since Kurosawa hadn't received royalties and hadn't given consent to remakes, the end result of which was that Kurosawa and other principals were paid back royalties, but were countersued and Toho Corp ended up having to pay $50000 to MGM (who also gained the rights to any future remake of The Seven Samurai set as a Western). I guess in the real world, the Bandits end up winning after all.
Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was based on Yojimbo (1961).
Leone didn't acquire the rights to Yojimbo, he just went ahead and made the film, which was surprisingly successful. Kurosawa reportedly said, "I’ve seen your movie. It’s a very good movie. Unfortunately, it’s my movie." Leone is supposed to have settled out of court for 15% of worldwide residuals plus $100,000.
Apropos of nothing in particular, but just because I love this Akira Kurosawa anecdote --
"Tarkovsky was sitting in the corner of the screening room watching the film with me, but he got up as soon as the film was over, and looked at me with a shy smile. I said to him, ‘It’s very good. It’s a frightening movie.’ He seemed embarrassed, but smiled happily. Then the two of us went to a film union restaurant and toasted with Vodka.
Tarkovsky, who does not usually drink, got completely drunk and cut off the speakers at the restaurant, then began singing the theme of Seven Samurai at the top of his lungs. I joined in, eager to keep up.
At that moment, I was very happy to be on Earth.”
That's wonderful. Stalker changed my life, it's a wonderful film. Do watch it.
The Wild Bunch.
Nevada Smith.
3:10 To Yuma, the original with Glen Ford and the remake with Russel Crowe are both excellent. Original story written by Elmore Leonard.
The Magnificent Seven. Watch it with The Seven Samurai.
Once Upon A Time in the West.
True Grit, original and remake.
Blazing Saddles.
The Naked Prey. Movie takes place in Africa, but it's based on a true story of the American West. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Colter#Colter.27s_Run https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Prey
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+western+movies&t=canonical
Seven Samurai is not an unambiguously better movie than On the Waterfront. I hate Elia Kazan as much as the next guy for what he did, but he was a historic talent directing historic talent, making snitching on the working man to the bosses seem positively heroic. Foreign things aren't always better.
Avatar and TDK historic points in film. AKA Dancing with Smurfs, and The Movie With More Plot Holes Than The Titanic. Hum, I beg to disagree.
Overall, I got a good laugh from the list. Seriously, this list should be called "things white US kids (of my age, granted) like". Rather than a history of cinema, it belongs more in the "comedy generated by computer" genre. Exhibit one: City Lights isn't there. Exhibit two: Modern Times isn't there. No Le Voyage dans la Lune, no Man With Camera, no Great Train Robbery, Rashomon isn't cool enough to make the list, Vertigo is too weird, and Battleship Potemkin is, like, too commie, you know. The final straws would be Independence Day and It's a Wonderful Life making the list.
I mean, On the Waterfront looks like it's very good (I haven't seen it), but, but, it was released in the same year than motherfucking Seven Samurai!
Someone should update the title: "Zack Snyder Denies Report of New Star Wars Film Based on Seven Samurai"
These are some movies/tv series that I deeply enjoyed and (some I) wish I had known about earlier.
9.9 Hitchhiker's guide to the universe, BBC TV series
9.9 Contact (1997) based on a novel by Carl Sagan. Very few people seem to know about this movie.
9.3 War Games
9.0 most Akiro Kurosawa movies:
Seven Samurai
High & Low
The Bad Sleep Well
Ikiru
Red Beard
9.0 Terminator 1 (watch again)
8.8 Terminator 2 (watch again)
8.7 Pirates of Silicon Valley
8.7 Matrix 1 (watch again)
8.7 The Italian Job (featuring Napster's original inventor)
8.7 Live Free or Die Hard
8.5 Track Down or Takedown (about social hacker Kevin Mitnick)
8.5 Revolution OS (2001)
8.5 Dr. Strangelove
8.5 2010 A space odyssey
8.3 Antitrust (2001)
8.3 Sneakers
8.3 COSMOS
8.2 Minority Report
8.2 2001 A space odyssey
8.2 Paycheck (2003)
8.0 The Thirteenth Floor (1999)
8.0 The Net
> IMO using the first approach you concede that you aren't skilled enough to meaningfully evaluate the previous work/ skills
Only to those who confuse a test on details with ignorance of a field.
There is a wonderful scene in The Seven Samurai. The leader is testing the prospective candidates one-by-one as they walk into the "interview" room. There is a junior fighter hidden behind the doorway who attacks each prospective samurai as he walks through the door.
Most of the fighters dispatch the junior fighter without much ado, and forgive the "interviewer" understanding that he must test each one of them. There is one candidate who stands outside the door before walking in and says (paraphrased): Please, skip the attack that I know you have planned; It is a waste of energy. He does this in such a way that it is clear he will dispatch the junior fighter even before fighting.
Then there is one candidate who is unaware and gets whacked over the head.
The scene is a wonderful summary of interviewing candidates. (And a great movie too, fwiw.)
This is the old "working harder vs. smarter" dilemma. When you're looking who to fund/hire, or what kind of culture to build, you can either attract people who work smarter or work harder, or both.
Working smarter is like finding an algorithm with a better time complexity. I was recently on a project where we could do it using The Architecture Going Forward That Is Always The Right Answer To Every Question, or the pragmatic way. I argued for the pragmatic way, but lost. February is the 1 year anniversary of this project. It has fallen far short of our goals, and we're now undoing the Grand Architecture way and implementing the pragmatic way, which is almost done and would have only taken 3-4 months, to achieve better software performance.
Working harder is like improving the constant: if you spend 80 hours instead of 40 hours, maybe you can get 20-40% more done.
Of course, it's great if you can get both. Working harder AND smarter. And there are a handful of people who do that. But not many, and you can't build a company full of them. Also, once people have had a lot more experience, and gained the ability to see the pitfalls before they step in them, they tend to want different things out of life, like, not working crazy hours. So you really have to choose.
My favourite movie of all time is Kurasawa's The Seven Samurai. In the movie, a very experienced Samurai has to put together a team quickly, so the "job interview" starts with the candidate walking to a room where someone tries to hit him with a pole. The first candidate is inexperienced but very talented. He parries the blow. The second candidate, as he's walking up to the room and before he could possibly see the assailant, somehow senses him and avoids the situation entirely.
I'd pick the second guy over the first guy any day.
Kurosawa worked with a team of writers, cinematographers, actors, assistants, producers. Seven Samurai was designed by committee -- Kurosawa just happened to have been at the head of that committee.
This is true for almost every film in existence. Certainly every widely distributed film.
This is also true for games. Some of the best games are driven by a single person -- think Kojima and Metal Gear or Miyamoto and Mario -- but they are the product of many, many talented artists working their asses off.
Half Life is the equivalent to The Seven Samurai.
I have Half Life. Yes, I have The Seven Samurai, in its black and white goodness. They both helped define in their respective areas the future. Half Life was that game for me. I still remember the feeling of finally seeing the soldiers, and then coming to a firm realization in horror that they were trying to kill me as well. The entire pulled me in at the time.
Art is, at it's core, something someone creates to experience. A painting is art because you experience it with your eyes. A song is art because you experience it with your ears. Both were creations intended to be experienced.
Architecture is art, not just because you can see it, but because you can actually feel it, move through it, use it. Beautiful architecture can be functional, and usually is. It solves a problem while being beautiful.
So, why does a game not become art? Winning, as described by Ebert? Architecture's goal isn't being art, it's to be a structure. The purpose of the art doesn't dictate whether it's art. The Mona Lisa isn't less art because it was commissioned. The goal of the Mona Lisa was in celebration of a birth, but does this diminish it's artistic value? The 'players' here used the painting for another purpose.
So, it can't be the goal. Winning isn't why I played Half Life. The story was why I played, the emotions it pulled on.
You make the argument that great films are driven by a single vision. But The Seven Samurai was not driven by a single person. So, if a game is designed by a single vision, can it become art?
The argument against games as an art is not new. Movies weren't art. Pictures weren't art. So many things weren't art before their time, and had to become art, evolve to art.
No. Discounting games as art diminishes all other forms of art.
Very few films are "art". Who's the video game equivalent of Kubrick or Kurosawa or Bergman?
Penny Arcade's comment on this is wonderfully wrong: "If a hundred artists create art for five years, how could the result not be art?"
Interestingly, that's exactly the sort of film that fails to be art. Great films are, without exception, products of a single driving vision, not designed by committee.
The only way to really claim that video games are art is to say, "Here, this game X is the equivalent to The Seven Samurai." Only that's not going to happen, because it doesn't exist. And because it doesn't exist, Ebert gets pummeled with long screeds of gamer angst rather than the only answer that would matter: "Game X is art."
I'll check some of these I haven't seen out. He's got a Hitchcock and Kurosawa film on there, and they're two of the finest directors of all time. Rashomon is actually one of my least favorite Kurosawa films, but it's still great - I just much more greatly like Ran (English: "Chaos", his best film), Ikiru ("Life", it drags towards the middle but the government council scene at the end is incredible), Kagemusha ("Shadow", wow what an incredible premise - really an overlooked masterpiece when looking at his career), and of course Seven Samurai. Then you've got Yojimbo which is an interesting story but kind of campy, and Rashomon which is a great piece of storytelling and a great piece of directing, but just isn't as satisfying of an experience as Ran, Ikiru, Kagemusha, or Seven Samurai. If I was recommending Kurosawa to a new viewer, I'd say watch them in that order, and then perhaps Rashomon.
I haven't seen all of Hitchcock's films, but it's something I've been meaning to do. The thing both of these directors (Kurosawa and Hitchcock) have in common - they're both absolutely obsessed with presentation. They don't waste a single scene in their movies. In their better films, Kurosawa and Hitchcock don't even waste a single shot - everything is perfectly constructed for a very specific reason. Really incredible experiences to watch them, and highly recommended for people who love movies, stories, or simply just art.