Foreign Entertainment

Growing up in front of the television is a lifestyle that afflicts most of the American population.  We are fed a pile of lukewarm entertainment which probably does more to harm our brains then it ever could do to help them.  The formulaic rubbish which we willingly digest from birth to death ranges from the banal sitcom to the utterly idiotic reality television.  Now that I’m a little older, and perhaps a little wiser, I turn my sites overseas, to British television and a slightly more intelligent level of programming.

Anyone who has an interest in Eastern cinema, or even foreign cinema in general, should be familiar with Akira Kurosawa.  He is the Japanese master of film that inspired so many of America’s own directors and writers.  His film The Hidden Fortress (1958) was the basis for Lucas’s first Star Wars film.  Yojimbo (1961) inspired the Clint Eastwood classic A Fistful of Dollars.  So many of his films have made their way to the West in one form or another that it is impossible to be a movie viewer of any sort and not have at least touched upon Kurosawa’s legacy.

Tampopo, directed by Juzo Itami, is an often overlooked comedy that I had the pleasure of stumbling upon during one of my university’s cultural film presentations.  The movie, for the most part, revolves around a trucker by the name of Goro who rolls into town like a cowboy to help the lady in distress – Tampopo - revitalize her failing noodle restaurant.  He does battle with bad guys who seek to undermine Tampopo’s success and gets into more than one fist-fight (as every cowboy worth his salt should).  The story of Goro and Tampopo is just one of the many lines that run through this movie, however.

I know there is a need in Hollywood for fresh ideas, and one of the best places to find them is to simply rob the neighbors, but it’s getting out of control.

First of all, these movies are never as good as the originals – no exceptions.  I know everyone raved about Scorsese’s adaptation of Infernal Affairs into the hit movie The Departed, but, even though it was a decent (and Academy Award winning) movie in its own right (and I happen to love Scorsese) it still did not carry the same punch that the original did.