So, Daniel and I have been using Netflix for a few weeks now. It's proving quite a bit of fun, and it's changed the way we watch movies in interesting ways.

First, we've been watching a lot more DVD's than usual. I expect our DVD watching will decline some once we get used to the novelty of having fresh new DVD's arrive in the mail every few days.

Second, I think we've been more daring in our movie choices than we've normally been when we rent from the video store. Normally, if we bother to make a trip to the video store, we're looking for a couple of hours of immediate and relatively mindless entertainment, and we tend to rent either sci-fi or action. Or anime, if the store carries it.

Well, we have rented a ton of anime from netflix, but we've also thrown plenty of foreign films, classics, documentaries, and lots of other stuff that we've always had a vague hankering to see, but never seemed to bring home from the video store.

Also, many of the things we rent are not actual movies but episodes of TV series - in addition to the anime, I've been working my way through season 1 of CSI, and I've got some classic British TV series on the queue somewhere.

My favorite actual movie rented so far is Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. A bit of a slow starter, but the last half is just non-stop twists and turns. The Hidden Fortress is probably most famous among science fiction movie fans for having provided a certain amount of inspiration for Star Wars. I'd heard some claims that Star Wars was "a total ripoff" of The Hidden Fortress - I'm happy to report that those claims are greatly exaggerated. It's true that it's quite easy to map the roles of the samurai general, the princess, and the two peasants from Fortress onto the roles of Obi Wan, Leia, and the two droids from Star Wars, the personalities of these characters don't really carry over across films. (Leia is much more mature than the princess in the Fortress, the droids are may be cowardly, but they're not greedy and they never plot against the other characters, etc.) And there are lots of elements in Star Wars that have no corresponding element in Fortress - no Luke Skywalker, no Deathstar, no real counterpart to Darth Vader.

This is not to deny Kurosawa's influence on Lucas. There was one scene in Fortress that made me remark to Daniel, "Oh, look, it's Mos Eisley cantina!" and another that had me saying, "Oh, no! How are they going to get out of this one? Mifune's character doesn't have any Jedi mind tricks!" And there were some individual shots that gave me a certain sense of filmic deja vu. I couldn't prove it without doing a closer comparison of the two films, but I strongly suspect that Obi Wan's initial appearance in Star Wars was consciously or unconsciously designed to imitate the first appearance of Mifune's character in The Hidden Fortress.

As I often find myself doing when I watch Japanese film, I wish the movie came with more background material. I kept asking questions like: What time period is this supposed to be? (We figured out that Hidden Fortress must be set in the late 1500's/early 1600's.) How come nobody wears pants? (A great many characters were wearing either shorts or loincloth type garments, even in apparently cold weather. This looked like maybe it was a class/status marker, but I wasn't sure.) Is the fact that the princess talks funny also a class/status marker, or does she just talk funny? Would a Japanese viewer perceive her as talking funny? (It's a plot point in the film that the princess spends a large chunk of time pretending to be mute because, "it is impossible to disguise her voice", so I guess the answer is yes.)

Given Kurosawa's prominence, there must be a ton of stuff written about The Hidden Fortress, so I can probably find the answers to all of these questions.

Side benefit to nobody wearing pants: Toshiro Mifune has great legs! Who knew?

Anyway, I've gone and thrown a bunch of other Kurosawa films onto my Netflix queue. Amusingly, Netflix's genre categorizations place movies like Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai not only in the category "Foreign Film", but in the category, "Western". This is perfectly appropriate, given how much Kurosawa was influenced by Westerns, and how much he influenced them right back. But it still strikes me as funny.