1. “Dora-heita (2000)” movie review.

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    I liked "Dora-heita", believing that it provided fun characters, an engaging story, a quirky sense of humor, exotic locations, fine cinematography, an eccentric score and awesome fight scenes. It might not be the best samurai flick of all time, but neither were the majority of flicks by Akira Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi or Keisuke Kinoshita. So why would you expect it to be anything more than a good film?
  2. “Kwaidan (1964)” movie review

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    I firmly believe that enjoying a movie comes down to a balance between its objective quality and our subjective response to the film, with the percentage differing from person to person and sometimes movie to movie. Prior to watching “Kwaidan”, I was in a sour mood due to some technical difficulties surrounding my latest episode of “Critiquing the Critics”. It was ruining my entire week and I wanted to get my mind off of it. In retrospect, perhaps watching "Kwaidan" during this time was a mistake. I was not in the right state of mind to deal with something this methodically slow, which is a shame because the concept of a 'samurai ghost story' really intrigues me. Did all of this effect my enjoyment of “Kwaidan”? Possibly, as I was utterly bored while watching it.