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The hidden gems of Seven Samurai: Kyuzo

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Who are you calling a triangle?! Black and white. Check. Samurai. Double Check. Classic cinema. Check, check, check. Akira Kurosawa. Initiate screaming. Seven Samurai. Stop. Reeelax.  Young, aspiring directors get a mandatory face-off with the master Akira Kurosawa - whether they want it or not - the very first few weeks they set foot on campus. And they should. I mean, how else can you learn the basics of camera angles, storytelling through moving pictures, and turning a great script into an unextinguishable flame of classic cinema? Speaking of inextinguishable flames, I bet there are things you don't know about Seven Samurai. Hidden in those three and half hours of quiet brilliance are devices that contribute to the story and deepen the characters. And I'll get to them whether you want it or not, triangle! Well, opening scenes matter. But the ones that matter are not always placed at the start.  This is the case with Kyuzo - the masterful swordsman of the seven-strong bunch.
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Alien Franchise: What if...Story idea

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Hundreds if not thousands of eggs. From Alien (1979) In 1979, what started as a simple monster movie gathered enough speed to become one of the key movie pictures of the century - Ridley Scott's Alien. The story was expanded on by David Cameron's Aliens in 1984 and then went downhill with Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. A few years later Scott tried to remedy the third and fourth sequels and revive the story with Prometheus. Partly, he succeeded despite glaring holes in the movie. There are still places the story can take us and I would like to discuss some of them here. In the original we are led to a crashed derelict ship, the source of hundreds of alien eggs, emitting a warning signal. The Nostromo wakes up the crew and they go to investigate, which results in the birth of a few screams in space no one heard but everyone enjoyed the hell out of. The question here is: Why did the ship have so many eggs? Why was it only a few months from Earth? Where was it going? Why d
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Location: London, UK
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Nicky Santoro vs. Tommy Devito: The fight for supremacy

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Menacing guys to say the least... Joe Pesci in Goodfellas (left) and Casino (right). When George Carlin selects a baseball-bat-wielding Joe Pesci  ahead of God as the man to solve his problems, you know he's talking about balls. The job will be done. You can count on it. In fact, you can count the bodies. Joe Pesci gets it done. He sure did the job with two of my favourite cinema psychos: Martin Scorsese's Nicky Santoro and Tommy DeVito - the representations of the man Carlin is talking about, at least in part. There is a question brewing: what if, the two characters cross paths. What then? Santoro and DeVito are no non-sense, no half measures characters, hardened killers and bullies. They are both psychos. Any confrontation between them, say in the spirit of let's see 'who's the better gangster'  mano a mano , would probably end up in either one of them being stabbed like a hundred times and shot more than once or with someone having to spend time in th
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In Bruges: If you think in stereotypes, look away

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An inanimate fucking object. Why Bruges? This a question that hasn't got a specific answer. It's one of those questions that has purely subjective answers and all of them are correct. The same thing is true about this Martin McDonagh film . Bruges is a beautiful city but who cares when you can meet racist midgets, fat offended men, assassins, a hot chick that plays tricks on you, a killer with manners and a rude Canadian. This movie is breaking all the stereotypes it gets its hands on. And it does it with the kind of humour that you would piss your pants on - you know, the subjective kind, the one that makes you wonder what is so funny, but your laugh your ass off nonetheless. The plot is good, but what is a lot better are the characters. Even those ones that you meet for a minute. You simply care about them, and this is an ingredient of a job well done by the writers - in this case Martin McDonagh. Colin Farrell does a brilliant job portraying a grief-stricken pr
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