Akira Kurosawa - Overrated?

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I found “Rashômon“ to be overrated as well. Not that I did not enjoy it, especially the photography in the woods and the scene with the medium.

Personally, I have never been a fan of the Ground Hog Day type format. It makes any film feel repetitive and drawn out, but I understand it was important to this particular story, so I can accept that.

My main issue with the film, however, is how the men at the beginning of the film go on and on about how this event that occurred to this man was absolutely the most horrible thing imaginable. To quote the priest "I, for one, have seen hundreds of men dying like animals, but even I've never before heard anything as terrible as this. Horrible, it's horrible! There's never been anything, anything as terrible as this, never! It's worse than fires, wars, epidemics, or bandits!" And the horrific event turns out to be some guy getting himself killed in the woods in one of three or four equally mundane ways. Seriously, that’s the Earth-shattering event?

Also, the scene with the baby seemed abrupt, a bit forced and quite simplistic, even for the time.
You bumped a thread to show how you missed the point of a film. Good job!
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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."