Seven Samurai
In the titles of one of my favorite westers, "The Magnificent Seven" it says "based on the film 'Seven Samurai' by Akira Kurosawa.
Until last night I had never seen it, an it is truly a wonerful film. I'll post it here followed by "The Magnificent Seven" with a [pll asking you which picture was directed better and which you enjoyed more. I know how I feel, but I'm really intereste in how the community feels. - JW
A veteran samurai, who has fallen on hard times, answers a village's request for protection from bandits. He gathers 6 other samurai to help him, and they teach the townspeople how to defend themselves, and they supply the samurai with three small meals a day. The film culminates in a giant battle when 40 bandits attack the village.
From IMDB:
10/10
Kurosawa is the greatest director that ever lived
Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece... The Japanese equivalent to Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.. I say it's just as good, if not even better. Not only Kurosawa's most well known film, but the most widely recognized Japanese film ever made. This movie will forever be known as a milestone in motion picture history.
The story revolves around a village that has become a group of bandits' common looting and pillaging ground. The villagers cannot take this any longer and go to town to hire warriors to defend the village from the bandits. A wandering ronin, Kambei (Takashi Shimura) agrees to help them and with his help, they recruit six others that agree to take the job. The seven samurai teach the villagers how to stand up to the bandits and defend themselves. Finally, when the time comes, they engage in a fierce battle with the attacking bandits.
About once in every 20 years or so we are gifted with a film that has the meaning, power, richness, and technique that The Seven Samurai has. I cannot urge anyone enough to see this film, the images are true cinematic poetry rich with so much emotion that I cannot even describe them in words. If you have never seen any of Kurosawa's works, then please see Seven Samurai... you will witness the true beauty, excellence and magic that the art form known as film is capable of.
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A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) Part 1
Watch the complete film at josephwouk.locals(dot)com.
Anyone who missed this Speilberg film made 24 years ago MUST see this film which is much more relevant now than it was then. - JW
David, an artificial kid which is the first to have real feelings, especially a never-ending love for his "mother", Monica. Monica is the woman who adopted him as a substitute for her real son, who remains in cryo-stasis, stricken by an incurable disease. David is living happily with Monica and her husband, but when their real son returns home after a cure is discovered, his life changes dramatically.
10/10
Can't re-watch it again
I was 13-14 when I watched this movie. It's a long movie if I recall it correctly. I was so moved by it's theme, so I watched it all. I had strong feelings of sadness and sympathy towards little robot David that wanted to be a real child and to have a mom to love him. And that little bear ... I cried during some scenes. I don't ...
The Mass of Nows:
A Temporal Foundation for Inertia and Gravity
Joseph Wouk
January 6, 2026
Checked by Ara (Grok 4, xAI)
For a century, physics has lived with a quiet asymmetry. Special relativity shattered absolute simultaneity, forcing us to accept that "now" is observer-dependent—an infinite stack of "now-slices" foliating the four-dimensional block universe.
Yet when we turned to dynamics, to the origin of mass and force, we continued to treat space and time as a smooth, empty stage on which particles play. Inertia and gravity were described with exquisite mathematics, but their common cause remained mysterious. The equivalence principle told us they feel the same, but never why they are the same.
The Mass of Nows proposes a simple, radical answer: the stage is not empty. Between the infinite now-slices lies a dense plenum—the zero-point fields of every possible now, permeated by the four-dimensional extent of every particle's wave function.
Mass is not a property particles possess; it is the ...