Japanese title: Kozure Ôkami: Kowokashi udekashi tsukamatsuru)

From 1972.  I remember seeing this on Black Belt Theater in the ‘70s.  It’s the first in a fascinating, unique series.  (If a ronin assassin roaming the Japanese countryside pushing his toddler son in a baby carriage isn’t sui generis, then I don’t know what is.)  The blood effects on the DVD took me by surprise – they’d been excised from the TV version (with very good reason).  It’s clear they inspired Tarrantino in Kill Bill.  The film’s 82-minute running time is perfect.

FF= 0

Someone said they thought I’d like this little film I’d never heard of.  They were so right.  This is like digging in your garden and finding a diamond, folks.  Based on a true story, the HBO movie starts in the 1930s and ends in the ’60s, following the life of Vivien Thomas (Mos Def), a black man who helped pioneer the first cardiac surgery.

Like the film, Vivien Thomas is an undiscovered diamond – a brilliant guy with a high school education who wants to go to med school but is thwarted by the depression.  He hooks up with Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) and over the course of a decade or more they develop the techniques that allow them to treat pulmonary stenosis.

But the film’s subtext is racism.  Not the ugly, violent sort, but the matter-of-fact racism that makes Vivien Thomas invisible.  In the film, he’s the true innovator who makes the surgical miracle possible, but receives no recognition until long after he’d helped pioneer the field of cardiac surgery.

This film won a bunch of awards.  Am I the only one who’d never heard of it?  See it.

FF= 0

Wanted to see this on the big screen but schedules didn’t mesh.  Heard bad things about it and, yes, the whole traveling-down-the-lightning-bolts-to-machines-they-left-here-a-million-years-ago-that-nobody-happened-to-trip-over-in-those-million-years setup was crap, but man . . . watch it in surroundsound with the subwoofer cranked up and it’s freaking awesome.  Yeah, you could have cropped the whole Tim Robbins sequence and not missed a beat, but I was glued.  Tom Cruise may be a major a-hole, but he did right by this film . . . although I don’t know if he’d have been half as good without the amazing Dakota Fanning to play off of.  (Jeez, that’s an awful sentence, but I’ll leave it.)

FF= 0

Amazing.  Simply amazing.  How these penguins use teamwork to survive blizzards and howling windstorms is, well, inspiring.  You’d swear they can think.

FF= 0

People told me that if I checked my brain at the door I’d like this.  I did.  I didn’t.  GIGLI with guns.  What a waste of time.

FF= 5

Too much like THE RING.  Been there, done that.

FF= 5

This is the second (and probably the last) of these blind swordsman films I’ve seen.  Okay, but the novelty has worn off.

FF= 3

Wow.  Tried for weeks to see this during its theatrical release but something always got in the way.  Damn.  Wish I’d seen it on the big screen.  Again: Wow.

FF= 0

This is old school, B&W, yet very cool. A little confusing at times, but some real character development and (at least for me) an unpredictable course. The sword fights are far more realistic and less acrobatic than the flying silliness of later films.

FF= 0