Rashomon (1950)

This is a movie about a murder told from the perspectives of 4 different people set in ancient Japan. A man and a monk tell the story of a hearing to a stranger at a shrine while the three wait out a storm. During the trial, we hear the story from the perspective of a bandit, who supposedly is the murderer, a woman, who was the wife of the deceased and was raped by the bandit, and by the dead man, through a medium. Each version of the story is slightly different, but the fact that the man died, and his death in some way related to the woman's rape is present in each of the versions. At the end, one of our narrators (who is also the one who found the body) stated that he saw the whole thing and he tells us what actually happened.

The story is kind of slow-moving. There is a lot that could have been edited out and the acting was kind of overdone. The narrators were speaking of the story as a sort of lament for the state of humanity. They kept commenting on how this was such a horror story and how the state of humanity is in a really bad place if something like this could happen, and because they set it up that way, the actually story was kind of a let down. All of the characters were pathetic and I wish they'd all died... a suicide pact or something. Something to redeem their pathetic natures, but they were all simpering and childish in their own way. None of them present a proactive way to overcome their situation, they just whine and cry and it gets to be tiresome to watch after a while.