JAPN 3320 Movie Journal: Seven Samurai

   Seven Samurai is a story between farmers and samurais. It was in the end of Sengoku era, some samurai lost their daimyo and they started to rob famers. The story began with a village of farmers; they used rice to employ samurai to help them beat the gangsters. The seven samurai fought for them and they won the war.

This is a classic samurai movie, emphasized the samurai spirits and their elegant personalities. 
Different from The Last Samurai, the samurais in this movie have to fight with other samurais. Besides the samurai spirits in this movie, there are still lots of issues that we can consider deeply. The justice in the movie is not as simple as people thought. Some audiences might confuse why Kanbei said the victors were belong to the farmers, the reasons were actually hide behind the treatments that farmers offered. The farmers provided their better rice to those samurais and ate worse rice in front of them in order to affect them, but they hid their wine and meat and other good food. When the war came, the unknown of their future made the farmers took out their food; in the situation, Kanbei was not angry about the farmers’ behaviors but accept it. After the war, some of the farmers dead, four samurais dead either; the farmers who lived were happy and they went back to their normal lives as fast as they could. How about the other samurais? They were left in the side and received no more attentions from the farmers because they do not need them anymore. It seemed like it was a good ending, but to those samurais who were dead in the war, what was the price for them?  

JAPN 3320 Movie Journal: Confession

     The scenes in Confessions were shot in a secondary school. Everything starts from the resignation of the teacher of 1-B. she thought that two of her students murdered her only daughter and she planned to revenge.

Asian people might be familiar to the issues in the movie due to the education systems. As people know, students have to take entrance exams to entre any of the schools; also, decline birthrate made the amount of only child increased, which made more parents gave all their loves to their only children. One of the scenes is that the teacher standing in front of the class and told them her daughter dead; sitting on their seats, the students only stopped for a while and then keeps chatting with others after they heard that. The cruel and indifference of these students are made by the society and their families. These young people do not have to response to anything they did wrong because of the protection from the law, their family, and school. They do not even think they were wrong but shirk and escape with it. As the teacher said in the movie, “if you are wrong, you are wrong,” and you have to pay. It is not the problem of age, but the attitudes that people have to adjust.