In article <9218a0e.0401281824.60b96591@posting.google.com>,
<Amoredben@aol.com> wrote:

> I thought Violent Cop and Tampopo were great films. I also liked a
> couple Akira Kurosawa film, but I don't remember the names of any of
> them. I never saw The Seven Samurai because it was really long and the
> subtitles were bad. Are there any other good ones available with
> English subtitles. If they have blurred subtitles like those Hong Kong
> Films, I'm not interested.

I've seen many movies that I liked by Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi,
three of Japan's greatest film makers.  And many others by
lesser-knowns.  Some of them have less-than-desirable subtitles, others
are fine.  If the possibility of bad subtitles is the deal-breaker I
would caution anyone to avoid foreign films.  This would certainly hold
true of French, Italian and German films. But many of the world's
greatest films, I believe, were actually many outside of California.

One has to take a chance but I find that these movies are generally so
difficult to get at all, particularly in a subtitled edition that you
are virtually guaranteed and exceptional movie.  At least the odds are
fastly better than whatever one blindly grabs at Blockbuster.

My favorite bad-subtitles situation is with the bedroom seen in
Godard's critical cornerstone "Breathless"  White subtitles on an
overexposed scene dominated by white sheets.  It's so frustrating that
it becomes funny.  Not much is lost anyway.  If you had no subtitles in
Antonioni's L'Aventura I think you'd miss nothing.

The same can be said for many classic Japanese movies.  They're not
exactly detective movies.  A word, sentence or even dialogue can be
lost without missing too much.  Hopefully one doesn't have that happen
to often, but when you're whittling up the text into nuance-free
translations, it's not like you're missing poetry.

If you're just looking to explore for movies that folks think highly of
in Japanese film, I'd suggest wallowing through <http://www.facets.org>
particularly with a couple of secondary browsers open to
<http://www.allmovie.com> and <http://www.imdb.com> for additional
referential aid.  You can find some fabululous movies, and then you can
rent them by mail.

If you're in the USA it's a system that works.

-- 
First they gerrymander us into one-party fiefs. Then they tell us they only
care about the swing districts. Then they complain about voter apathy.
 -- Gail Collins