A foreign film well worth your time

I got a tip from a recent Wall Street Journal article ("Can’t Balance Bills With a Free Lunch, Our Columnist Learns," 04/04/07; Page B1) about a website that offers free downloads of movies whose copyrights have expired, thus putting them in the public domain. I went to www.emol.org and was elated to find one of my new favorite movies, Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, available for download – no registration, no spyware, completely and unequivocally FREE. You may want to have iTunes installed for playback of the MP4 video codec, but that’s a small price to pay, because iTunes is also free. Oh, and a fast network connection helps too.

Rashomon is one of Roger Ebert’s Great Movies, and he writes a film school-worthy review here which I could hardly improve upon. Needless to say, I highly encourage you to check it out – the article and the movie.

Yes, it’s black and white. Yes, it’s in Japanese. Yes, you have to read subtitles. No, it doesn’t have any actors in it you’re likely to recognize. Just get on with it already.

(Emol.org also hosts a number of other classic movies, most of which I have not seen, although "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" looks like a schlocky B-movie blast. See the complete list.)  

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