Just curious to see which films are mentioned by our great Mudspike community.
My top 10
Seven Samurai
Ran
Kagemusha
Yojimbo
Das Boot
Ivan the Terrible (parts I and II)
Downfall
Alexander Nevsky
Rashomon
Throne of Blood
and yes, I’m a hardcore Kurosawa fan. 
How about my top n favorites. I don’t think I have 10.
Rashomon. Best King Lear adaptation of the few I’ve seen. WRONG! I’m thinking of Ran. I haven’t actually seen Rashomon 
The Seven Samurai. I haven’t watched it in at least 20 years yet I can remember most scenes, even the basic layout of the village. I have seen Star Wars 100 times and I don’t think I have anywhere close to that level of visual recall.
La Regle du Jeu (Rules of the Game). I think maybe I liked it because I was told I would like it. Funny and charming.
Un coeur en hiver (A Heart in Winter). I love this mainly because I love the music of Ravel. And Emmanuelle Beart.
Just about anything by Miyazaki. Laputa and Howl’s Moving Castle are my favorites.
I didn’t think I would be able to pad it out to a top 10… But
In no particular order:
I don’t have 10, but I have a suggestion that is appropriate for this forum: Les Chevaliers du Ciel (alternately titled Sky Fighters), in the original French.
It’s a well produced film that captures the feel of the old TV series pretty well, and is just a good action flick when viewed that way too.
Of course, the badguy RAAF “Brigadier” is pretty jarring to me, so I just mind-canon him in as a Canadian impersonating an Australian 
The Shadow in My Eye
I didn’t realize the new Shogun series was actually not in English but in Japanese and subtitled.
Saw it won a ton of Emmys last weekend. Glad no one held the language against it.
@Clutch can chime in but my Japanese wife found the show unwatchable BECAUSE of the Japanese. And also because Vancouver looks absolutely nothing like any Japan south of Hokkaido. (I’ve watched it without her and enjoyed it)
“Unwatchable” seems a bit extreme, but yeah, it would be the equivalent of watching a Shakespeare play in Ye Olde King’s. Which is kinda funny now that I think about it, because the English in the show–while technically modern English given the time period–isn’t exactly 1600s English. But they get a pass on that because the English scenes would have been in Portuguese if they really stuck to the source material.
Also, Fuji best girl:
“Please be on your way” cocks flintlock
I’d be curious to know what she found wrong with the Japanese. Was it maybe the use of words and phrases that didn’t exist in the 16th century?
Not sure. I may have misunderstood. I just know that she enjoyed the (much derided) original and hated the (much loved) modern.
According to Sanada and Sawai they went to insane lengths to make sure the language was legit, as well as pretty much everything else.
The biggest criticisms I’ve found is that the plot of the 1980 version more closely matches the plot of the book, while the 2024 version changes a few things. However, I found the 1980 version to be highly romanticized and censored; even campy at times…I really despise the goofy Halloween costumes they try to pass off as period dress. The 2024 version is much more historically accurate in the nitty gritty details and realistically grotesque in some scenes (execution by boiling, chain shot pasting some samurai, etc.)
From my point of view, while the 1980 version may follow the original plot more closely, the 2024 version makes you feel like you’re actually there.
I love my wife deeply. But her taste in TV, especially Japanese TV is quite bad.
(Circling back…she said that the language felt accurate for the period. But the story itself felt foreign. Maybe ti her it felt a bit like how a Russian written and directed film about a young Confederate Civil War soldier might sit with a viewer actually from the American South. The language and accents are correct. But the overall vibe is not recognizable.)
If you say she really loves those awful game shows, then your case is rested.
Good points. Of course, the original miniseries was shown on broadcast tv back in 1980 so a high degree of censoring was unavoidable.
One of my brothers lived in Tokyo and Kobe for a couple of years, jumping back and forth between those two cities and Hong Kong. He was in his 20s working as a fashion model and having the time of his life. He has a book full of stories about living within the Japanese culture and the good times that he was fortunate to have living there. He met a Japanese American girl in Tokyo and they eventually moved back to LA. While I was visiting him in Manhattan Beech, she introduced me to a Japanese girlfriend of hers, with whom I had a short but fascinating relationship with.
One of the best stories that my brother tells is of a night riding his moped back to his apartment in Tokyo after a few hours after a shoot at a place called the Snake Bar, which is in the “Chinese” district. This is late 80s/early 90s time frame. For reasons unknown, my brother was inspired to ride a wheelee down the sidewalk in front of the police station. If memory serves they had admonished him earlier in the day for some action aboard the moped. The defiant act did not go well for him and he was nabbed by a couple of officers as he reached the far end of the building. They locked him and his moped up, threatening horrible things for his insolence.
That is until the captain, in a sudden turn of fortune for my brother, recognized him from a whisky commercial. The police swapped his release for a few photos with my brother and the night crew, although they retained his moped until he came back to pay a fine. I have a photo somewhere of my brother wearing a goofy moped helmet, smiling through bloodshot eyes, arm and arm with a group of hugely grinning Tokyo policemen.
To be fair, Japanese TV itself is quite bad 
NANI?!
Those game shows of theirs though are entertaining. Bizarre yet entertaining.
I can’t recall the last time a game show aired, except for the yearly ones on New Years. For the most part Japanese TV is about food and panelists’ reactions to food, random chat and panelists’ reactions to that chat, and tropey dramas that recycle the same two plotlines of time-travel and amnesia over and over and over again. Just this summer, there were three or four shows running concurrently, and in all of them a main character had amnesia…
He’s not wrong.
I’ve just rewatched The Boy and the Huron with my wife. She liked it but I think she prefers most of Miyazaki’s other works. I have a way of seeing the story that has me now feeling it is his best film. It is the culmination of themes he’s repeated since Heidi. They all come together here. It is rare for old people to make true art. I think he has.