Today’s Special Edition of ‘Issues’: Arts and Entertainment.

Issue: The Seven Samurai.
At last, after several months of waiting and searching, I have watched the greatest samurai film ever made! And it was on DVD! This film was one of the most important influences on the early years of big epic Hollywood movie making. Young (but soon to be famous) directors then, like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Martin Scorsese, learned to emulate the unique camera techniques and the intricate weaving of life’s philosophy, done by Seven Samurai’s director, the great Akira Kurosawa, into a film’s action sequence and narrative storytelling. The Seven Samurai is by far the best Japanese action film I have ever seen and I highly recommend it to you. It’s in black and white and the story line is very slow, picking up speed only after halfway through, but the details and the realism of the movie will glue you to the screen. There are specks of humor, love, mystique and gore in it to satisfy the widest range of audience. The era setting of the movie ("The Unsettled Years") is during the times when warlords of different clans in feudal Japan are at war with each other so much, that there are a lot "free agent" samurai or "ronin" roaming the streets, hungry and in desperate need of a job. A farming village in the verge of bandits’ attack hires the seven samurai in this movie to protect their harvest. Soon that they realize that these seven samurai are more than just hungry and unemployed. The villagers know little about samurai’s life and their strict codes of waging war and how samurai view lower caste commoners like them villagers. Thus, the adventure begins.

Issue: Iceland’s Hottest New Export.
No, I am not talking about Bjork’s latest dance album and no, I am not talking about the bed peeing, horse-humping lesbians hailing from that cold European nation either. In fact, I am talking about my latest favorite rock band at the moment: Sigur Ros (or in English, "Victory Rose"). Thom Yorke, the frontman of Radiohead, recently mentioned this quartet’s newest album as his favorite. The band’s second full-length album, Agaetis Byrjun, or "An Okay Start", was released in homeland Iceland sometime near early 2000 but only reached the US shore the last few weeks, through the strings of good review by independent music critics. The band’s sound is futuristically phenomenal! Very orchestra-sounding and ambience filling, the whole album is a working concept, very much like Kid A but with more guitars and lyrics. The songs are sung in Icelandic and ‘Hopelandic’, a whale-like language that the band’s vocalist concocted on his own due to his uniquely sharp and childlike singing. One of the more interesting things about the band is that they play their instruments differently. The guitarist strokes his chords using a violin bow while the drummer is a part-time church bell ringer. The bassist sings back up and provides the song’s end groove by picking the strings with a drumstick. Their first single from that album, Svefn-g-englar ("The Sleepwalkers") is a recent college-radio top 10 hit.

Issue: The Testament by John Grisham.
I got back to my reading hobby a few days back. It’s been years since I touch a book. I used to read often, but then the hectic life of a student hindered me from doing that leisurely activity. This is my first book since; I am not sure, probably the middle quarter of 1997. The last thing that I read was an autobiography book by a WWII British P.O.W made to work on a long railway track from Thailand to the border of India by the Japanese Army. This book is also my first book by the author. I know several other titles already read by my friends and had seen a few made-to-movie titles by the same author, but none of them were about anything else but fiery courtroom battles and complicated legal entanglements. This book I am reading now, however, is about the desperate search in the middle of the Amazon jungle for a forgotten multimillionaire heir of a dead by-suicide industry mogul. So far, the opening chapters are engaging and fresh but I am slowly growing weary of the repetitive style of the author in lengthening the drama of the subplots. It’s a good page-turner still but to me, it is not strong enough to keep me awake during late night reading session. Next time, I am looking for a dark humor and twisted incest book written by a sexist middle age jerk with big balls that have a picture of a half-naked woman posing suggestively on the cover.