Ah, let me dive into Akira Kurosawa’s epic masterpiece about medieval gig work!

The story kicks off in 16th-century Japan, where a village of farmers discovers that bandits are planning to raid them once their harvest is ready. (Apparently, bandits in feudal Japan were considerate enough to give advance notice of their robberies.) The villagers, tired of being the medieval equivalent of a free grocery store, decide to hire samurai for protection. Their budget? Room, board, and all the rice they can eat – which, in feudal Japan’s version of a job posting, translates to “unpaid internship with meals included.”

Enter Kambei, a wise, experienced samurai who’s first seen shaving his head to rescue a kidnapped child. (If that’s not the definition of a perfect job interview, I don’t know what is.) Despite the less-than-attractive compensation package, Kambei takes pity on the villagers and agrees to help. He then starts assembling his team like it’s Ocean’s Eleven: Medieval Edition.

The recruitment process brings together a colorful crew: Katsushirō, an eager young samurai wannabe; Gorobei, who can catch arrows mid-flight (a skill that, surprisingly, does come in handy); Kyūzō, a serious master swordsman; Heihachi, the funny one who’s good with an axe; Shichirōji, Kambei’s old war buddy; and the scene-stealing Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a wild card who’s clearly not a real samurai but makes up for it with enough energy to power a small village.

Once they reach the village, our samurai find that their job includes not just fighting bandits, but also being part-time therapists for a community with major trust issues. The farmers have hidden their women and valuables, because historically, samurai haven’t exactly been the most courteous house guests. Kikuchiyo, revealed to be a farmer’s son himself, calls out both sides for their prejudices in what must be feudal Japan’s first diversity and inclusion seminar.

While waiting for the bandits, the samurai turn the village into a fortress and train the farmers in the art of war, which goes about as well as you’d expect when teaching rice farmers to use spears. Meanwhile, young Katsushirō falls for a local farmer’s daughter, because apparently no one told him that workplace romances are complicated.

When the bandits finally attack, what follows is a series of increasingly intense battles in the rain (because Kurosawa never met a fight scene he couldn’t make more dramatic with weather). The samurai’s clever tactics and the farmers’ newfound courage turn the tide, but victory comes at a cost – four of the samurai die in the fighting, proving that even in medieval Japan, the mortality rate for temporary contract work was unreasonably high.

The film ends with the surviving samurai watching the farmers happily planting rice, leading Kambei to muse that the real winners are the villagers, while samurai just keep losing. (Though you could argue that the real losers were the bandits, who probably should have just applied for farming jobs instead.)

The whole thing serves as a poignant reminder that sometimes the best-paying jobs aren’t the most rewarding, and that if you’re going to hire security consultants, maybe offer better benefits than just rice.

In the end, “Seven Samurai” became so influential that it spawned numerous remakes, including “The Magnificent Seven,” proving that the concept of protecting villagers from bandits transcends both cultures and centuries – though the payment plans remain consistently poor.

5/5 Samurai Swords – Really just a classic movie. I love the idea of Samurai and have watched a LOT of these kind of movies (in addition to kung fu movies) such as Zatoichi and the Hidden Fortress. It’s really well acted and after a short while the subtitles became less obtrusive and and got pulled into the story. It was really well paced – the silences and ambient sounds were well placed and the on screen deaths were meaningful – hard to do character development with so many characters but Kurosawa pulled it off.

Ah, let me dive into Elia Kazan’s gritty masterpiece about corruption, conscience, and questionable career choices in the longshoremen industry!

The story follows Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando), an ex-boxer turned dockworker who spends his days doing the bidding of union boss Johnny Friendly – when he’s not tending to his rooftop pigeon coop, that is. (Nothing says “sensitive tough guy” quite like racing pigeons.) Terry’s brother Charley works as Friendly’s lawyer, making corruption a real family business.

The trouble starts when Terry unknowingly helps set up the murder of Joey Doyle, a dockworker who was planning to testify against Friendly’s corrupt union. Terry thought they were just going to “talk” to Joey, but instead, Joey takes an unscheduled flying lesson off a roof. Oops.

Enter Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint), Joey’s sister, who’s determined to find out who killed her brother. She’s also apparently the only person in this waterfront neighborhood who owns clothes that aren’t covered in grime. Terry starts falling for her, which really complicates his whole “pretend-nothing-happened” strategy. Meanwhile, the persistent Father Barry (Karl Malden) keeps popping up like a clerical whack-a-mole, giving waterfront sermons about standing up to corruption and making Terry feel guilty.

As Terry gets closer to Edie and more conflicted about his role in Joey’s death, Friendly starts getting nervous. More dock workers end up dead, including Kayo Dugan, who’s crushed by a “mysteriously” dropped load of whiskey cases. (OSHA would have had a field day with these working conditions.)

The turning point comes when Friendly orders Charley to make sure Terry doesn’t testify to the Crime Commission. In the famous taxi scene, Charley pulls a gun on his own brother, leading to Terry’s heartbreaking “I coulda been a contender” speech about how Charley ruined his boxing career by making him throw fights. Instead of killing Terry, Charley lets him go – and ends up dead himself, hung from a hook in an alley. (Friendly isn’t big on subtlety.)

This finally pushes Terry over the edge. He testifies against Friendly, which makes him about as popular on the docks as a punctured life vest. In the final showdown, Terry gets beaten to a pulp by Friendly and his goons, but refuses to stay down. He staggers to his feet and leads the other workers into the warehouse, breaking Friendly’s control over the dock.

The movie ends with Terry bloody but unbowed, having finally stood up for what’s right – though you have to wonder if maybe he should have considered a career change to something less dangerous, like professional alligator wrestling.

The whole thing serves as a powerful reminder that sometimes doing the right thing means getting punched in the face repeatedly, and that keeping pigeons is apparently the universal signal for “complicated character with a hidden soft side.”

5 punch drunk stars. I loved this movie – it’s got everything – romance! mobsters! Brando chewing the scenery! Brando quietly brooding! The famous ‘I could have been a contender!’ speech – just oozing 50’s cool guy vibes. The plot was a bit thin as a morality tale but it was overall well acted and engaging and worth the watch.

Ah, let me break down Stanley Kubrick’s darkly hilarious Cold War satire where everyone’s trying their best to avoid nuclear annihilation… and somehow making everything worse!

The film kicks off when General Jack D. Ripper, a man whose grip on reality is about as firm as his grip on proper bodily fluid management, decides to launch a nuclear attack on the USSR. His reasoning? He’s convinced the Soviets are corrupting America’s “precious bodily fluids” through fluoridation. (This is what happens when you get your medical information from questionable sources.)

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a British RAF officer, finds himself trapped at the base with the paranoid Ripper, trying desperately to get the recall code. Meanwhile, President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers in one of his three roles) assembles his advisors in the War Room, including the enthusiastically hawkish General Buck Turgidson, who treats potential nuclear war like an exciting football game.

Enter Dr. Strangelove himself (Sellers again), a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientist whose right arm occasionally decides to recreate the Nazi salute (talk about muscle memory issues). He’s supposedly the expert, though his expertise seems mainly focused on underground bunkers and their potential for repopulating the Earth – with a special emphasis on the male-to-female ratio that would be “necessary.”

The situation gets even more complicated when we learn about the Soviet “Doomsday Machine” – a device designed to automatically trigger world-ending nuclear destruction if the USSR is attacked. The Soviets built it as a deterrent but hadn’t announced it yet because, as the Soviet Ambassador explains, they were saving it for a special occasion. (Because nothing says “surprise party” like mutually assured destruction.)

As bombers approach their targets, Major T.J. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) leads his crew with cowboy enthusiasm, determined to complete their mission despite increasingly obvious signs that maybe they shouldn’t. This culminates in the iconic scene of Kong riding a nuclear bomb like a rodeo bull, which probably wasn’t in the Air Force training manual.

The film ends with a montage of nuclear explosions set to the cheery “We’ll Meet Again,” because sometimes gallows humor is the only appropriate response to the potential end of civilization.

Through it all, the film serves as a brilliant satire of Cold War politics, military bureaucracy, and the absurdity of nuclear deterrence – reminding us that sometimes the biggest threat to humanity isn’t our weapons, but the people in charge of them who insist they know exactly what they’re doing. It also suggests that maybe, just maybe, putting world-ending weapons in the hands of people worried about their precious bodily fluids isn’t the best idea.

The whole thing makes you wonder if somewhere, in some war room, there’s still a General Turgidson explaining how we can “win” a nuclear war with only 10-20 million casualties, “tops.”

4/5 ICMBs. I love Peter Seller’s comedy and him playing three roles in this movie probably set the standard for Eddie Murphy to follow in the 80’s. The comedy is absurdist and really reflects the time the movie was made and released. I’m not sure it would be very successful outside of that time however as the brand of humor is pretty specific. Overall though, superbly acted throughout even if it went a bit long in spots.

Let me lay out this twisted treasure hunt of a Western, where everyone’s moral compass spins like a broken slot machine!

The story kicks off during the Civil War, introducing us to our three protagonists – though “protagonists” might be stretching it for at least two of them. There’s “Blondie” (Clint Eastwood) who’s “the Good,” though his goodness seems mainly to consist of being slightly less awful than everyone else. Then there’s Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef), “the Bad,” who will cheerfully kill anyone as long as he’s been paid for it (he’s very professional about his awfulness). And finally, there’s Tuco (Eli Wallach), “the Ugly,” a fast-talking bandit who’s about as trustworthy as a rattlesnake in a sock drawer.

The film opens with Blondie and Tuco running a scam where Blondie turns in Tuco for the bounty, then shoots the rope at his hanging (usually waiting until the last possible second, because apparently Blondie has a flair for the dramatic). They split the money and move on to the next town. That is until Blondie decides to end their partnership by abandoning Tuco in the desert – which, as far as workplace resignations go, is pretty extreme.

Tuco survives (because cockroaches and Tuco are nature’s great survivors) and spends the next portion of the movie trying to get revenge on Blondie. This leads to him forcing Blondie to walk through the desert without water, which seems fair – though you’ve got to wonder if these guys have heard of mediation.

The plot kicks into high gear when they stumble across a dying Confederate soldier who reveals the location of $200,000 in Confederate gold. The catch? He tells Tuco the name of the cemetery where it’s buried and tells Blondie the name on the grave. Now they’re forced to work together, which goes about as well as you’d expect for two guys who just finished trying to kill each other.

Enter Angel Eyes, who’s been tracking this gold too. What follows is a three-way dance of alliances, betrayals, and Mexican standoffs, all while the Civil War rages around them like an inconvenient background event. Our three anti-heroes keep crossing paths with the war, getting wrapped up in prison camps and battles, though they remain impressively focused on their gold hunt despite the minor distraction of America tearing itself apart.

It all culminates in the famous three-way showdown in a massive circular graveyard, because if you’re going to have a Mexican standoff, you might as well do it somewhere photogenic. After enough tension to snap a piano wire, Blondie emerges victorious, sharing the gold with Tuco – except he’s left Tuco’s share out of reach while he’s tied up, because old habits die hard.

The whole thing is set to Ennio Morricone’s iconic score, which manages to turn “wah-WAH-wah” into high art. The film basically created the template for every subsequent movie where people squint at each other while pointing guns, which turns out to be quite a few movies.

And there you have it – a story that proves that maybe the real treasure was the enemies we made along the way, and that having a cool theme song makes everything you do about 300% more awesome.

5 Pistoleros out of 5. I’ll admit I love a good western – the genre has thinned out in recent years and not all of them a great but this is Clint Eastwood in his prime and he’s facing off against a great supporting cast (much better than that chair on the stage). The score is iconic – ecstasy of gold is right up there with what I consider one of the most iconic movie songs of all time (first place if you pretend John Williams doesn’t exist) [do yourself a favor and listen to Metallica’s cover if you haven’t its amazing]

If I didn’t have a series of other things to do this year – this would have probably knocked me into a Western movie rabbit hole. I still might go on one after this challenge is over because this movie is still resonating with me months after I watched it.