Oscar Memories

The clips from the Akira Kurosawa movies showed a bunch of people being shot with arrows and some nice young women being cruelly killed off. For me as a viewer, and I’m sure for other viewers, these scenes were painful and just plain pointless.

The whole attitude involved--that by showing man’s inhumanity to man you make us all better--is really boneheaded. All it does is give people nightmares.

Let’s quit acting like Kurosawa is teaching people something they don’t already know. Grossing people out to make a humanitarian point is like punching someone in the stomach to try to explain that being hit is painful.

JOHN SIMONS

Long Beach