The Beer Retard - May 19th, 2002

besides watching the kings lose to the damn lakers and talking to kristina on the phone, the only thing i did this weekend was watch movies. a lot of frickin movies. today, i took in a documentary about akira kurosawa. it started slow and i feared that it was going to go on that way for the full two hours. luckily, things picked up and it was pretty great. it should be obvious to anyone who's seen classics like rashomon, seven samurai, throne of blood, yojimbo, etc...the man was a genius. his films are so above and beyond what most other filmmakers have done. if you haven't seen at least 1 or 2 of his movies, you're truly missing out. the only thing lacking about the documentary was the omission of any information about the making of hidden fortress(supposedly george lucas' inspiration for star wars) and high & low. those two are among his best and i couldn't understand why they didn't discuss them at all.

i also watched the empire strikes back for the first time in awhile. i remember being so in awe of the star wars movies when i was a kid. it's different to see them now. the sense of awe is gone, but they're still amazing ly entertaining. empire was always my favorite of the first three that were made. i'm eventually going to make my way to theater to see episode two, but i need to check out phantom menace again. i only saw that one once and not all the way t hrough. i went to see it in the theater and actually fell asleep halfway into it. it must've been pretty bad because i never fall asleep at the movies.