We set Saturday evenings aside for our mutual entertainment. It's when we put down the newspapers, any magazines or books we're interested in reading, and prepare the small television set which we've kept, although we no longer receive television signals since Canada switched over from digital to analog and our sturdy old television sets were no longer of any use. Other than for use as a receptive screen for DVDs that we feel are worthwhile watching.

Anything reflecting Akira Kurosawa's oeuvre falls into that category. The late, great Japanese master of cinema who transformed old folk allegories into modern-day masterpieces of theatre, and who took ordinary everyday lives of Japanese living in sometimes extenuating circumstances and brought both the mundane and the unusual to the screen.

And this Saturday evening, after enjoying our usual pizza, baked this second time in the pizza drawer of our new, all-purpose microwave oven, we settled down together on the loveseat in our family room, little Riley stuffed in beside my husband, to view the three-disk set of The Seven Samurai, which we had seen years earlier on more than one occasion. This was the original, uncut version, and it took about three hours to view, with quaint intermissions separating the half-way mark and familiar Japanese Hiragana syllabus lettering explaining the progress of the story telling the tale of a village farming community looted time and again by local robbers enlisting the strategic and quasi-military strength of seven Ronin, Samurai troopers who had been let go when they were dismissed from the ranks of the imperial lord who kept a standing army, who roamed about, footloose and destitute.

The drama of the interaction between the desperate but cunning farm community and the sturdy, stalwart, honourable Ronin, and the palpable, distrustful tensions between the two, pays tribute to the history of Japan at that juncture in its broad journey to modernization, Japanese-style, with the Emperor considered an immortal, serving both country and the gods above.

Wonderful, albeit sometimes campy acting, with the tale unfolding in all its pathos and bloodcurdling gore to a uneasy but acceptable conclusion.