Phillip Marlowe is Freakin Baller

Robert Altman is a skilled director, however only a single flick of his has caught my eye so far.  Of the three Altman films i have seen (The Long Goodbye, Nashville, And The Player) i have found that only one movie kept my attention and that was The Long Goodbye (Altman, 1973). The reason being is because this film has a ton of film noir elements, and film noir happens to be one of my favorite types of film.  For one there is the hard boiled smart and cunning detective, and there is also the fact that the detective seems to be from a different era in the way he dresses and the way he acts.  The reasons that the other two films were no so interesting to me is mainly the way that the plot line worked out. In Nashville (Altman, 1975) the plot seemed so messed up and so hard to follow that it really did not make me want to watch it all that more, not to mention much of the music played in the film was not to my liking.  In The Player (Altman, 1992)  the acting and the editing seemed way too over the top which really didn't make a good film for watching in my mind.  The musical score was there solely to annoy and was very bothersome while also mocking a classic hollywood film, Altman seemed to only want to mock hollywood in this film and it clearly shows in all aspects.  Although Altman was a very well credited director i do not believe that he could be considered one of the greats in my eyes, however i do look forward to seeing another film of his and i hope it lives up to my standards of The Long Goodbye.

Out of the many directors I have viewed films from, I have found that Kurosawa's films have far surpassed many of the other directors'. The way that he uses the hero in his films reminds me alot of the western, and because of this and my love for westerns, I find that his films are so very interesting to watch. By far his two best films that I have seen are Yojimbo and Seven Samurai, these two are my favorites because of the way he uses the hero. In Yojimbo the hero is just like the revisionist western hero, he is daring and smart but also gets himself into very awkward situations due to his flaws in character. The reason I liked Seven Samurai so much is because of the mixture used in the hero's, on one hand you have the classic hero who is kind, caring and does things for others and not for himself, while on the otherhand you have the Samurai who is almost the opposite. The other thing that I liked about Kurosawa was his use of the actor Toshiro Mifune, I thought that Mifune was an excellent actor and that he was the perfect person to portray many of Kurosawa's heroes with the exception for the main character in Stray Dog. Kurosawa made so many of his films look just like the kinds of westerns that I love, I had never thought that I would like foreign films this much, or ever samurai films in general but because of his unique style, Kurosawa made a new fan out of me.