At the age of nine or ten years old, when my family and I were visiting my Grandmother at a local retirement home, my sister and I were watching television in her bedroom, my sister on our Grandmother's bed and I laying on the floor with a pillow supporting my head. As I was flipping through the channels, I randomly landed on PBS (maybe), just as the station announced that Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai" was about to begin. At that moment, our Dad appeared in the doorway, saying something to the effect of, "Wow, this is a classic." So we decided to watch, and for some reason my Dad was assigned the task of reading the subtitles out loud. I quickly became fascinated with the film, the villagers desperately seeking protection, the search for each Samurai, and especially Toshiro Mifune's character, Kikuchiyo, the most entertaining and interesting member of the group.
However, a problem soon emerged with this viewing experience. The station was airing the film in its entirety, with no commercial breaks. Since "Seven Samurai" is three and a half hours long, this meant my Dad would be reading subtitles for quite a long time. Much to my dismay, after about two and a half hours, my Dad had had enough, and left. I tried to finish the movie by reading the subtitles on my own, but I couldn't keep up. Deeply frustrated, I gave up and turned off the television. Years later, when I finally finished the entire film, the climactic battle scene at the end left me exhilarated at first, but my excitement soon turned to bitterness as I recalled my Dad's abandonment of the film years earlier. There are many ways to attribute greatness to a film, but it's hard to think of a better conformation of a movie's lasting quality than when it holds the attention of a young boy and leaves him distraught when his Father quits reading the subtitles for him.
(P.S. Love you Dad)
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