Just Watched: Ikiru
Ikiru After suffering through Avatar I felt the need to watch something with potentially more redeeming value. I recorded Ikiru a couple of months ago when AMC was honoring Kurosawa with a movie marathon to coincide with what would have been his 100th birthday. Today seemed like as good a time as any to watch it. Going in I knew only two pieces of information about this film. First, I knew it was directed by Kurosawa and second that it involved an old man facing his mortality. What I didn't know was that it stared the same awesome actor who played the lead Samurai in Kurosawa's arguably most famous film 'The Seven Samurai' and that rather than being a medieval period piece (as have been all the Kurosawa films I've seen) this one took place in 1950s Japan. The plot is simple. The protagonist, Kanji Watanabe, a senior government bureaucrat learns he has stomach cancer and only months to live. The news of his impending death forces him to take a fresh l