It can be difficult to review a Kurosawa film. Many of his movies are clearly brilliant, a few are clearly poor, but a number are distinctive artistic visions that might work for you at one point in your life and not at another. Kagemusha, for example, was a movie I found terribly dull, only to watch it ten years later and find it brilliant.
But one cannot review a movie from the future, and in the present, I did not care for this one. It started decently enough, offering pleasantly humorous moments and an interesting eccentric as the protagonist, but the movie wanders through time in much too leisurely a way, built on a series of often mundane episodes, and by the halfway point I was feeling very restless, although not so much that I stopped watching.
It didn't help that I never understood the devotion of his students, who give him far more worship than seems reasonable. I mean, he seems like a nice guy, but he also seems like a bit of a kook. And the movie never shows you what he was like as a teacher, so there's no way to understand how his German language class made him so beloved.
Perhaps I'll watch this again in 20 years, to see if this movie is best viewed by old men, but for now, I didn't care for it.
But one cannot review a movie from the future, and in the present, I did not care for this one. It started decently enough, offering pleasantly humorous moments and an interesting eccentric as the protagonist, but the movie wanders through time in much too leisurely a way, built on a series of often mundane episodes, and by the halfway point I was feeling very restless, although not so much that I stopped watching.
It didn't help that I never understood the devotion of his students, who give him far more worship than seems reasonable. I mean, he seems like a nice guy, but he also seems like a bit of a kook. And the movie never shows you what he was like as a teacher, so there's no way to understand how his German language class made him so beloved.
Perhaps I'll watch this again in 20 years, to see if this movie is best viewed by old men, but for now, I didn't care for it.