Four people tell four different stories about one event. Who do you believe? Is anyone telling the truth? Are they all telling the truth?

Akira Kurosawa's legendary and riveting RASHOMON is a totally and doubly (or even triply) subjective experience — everything we see beyond the framing sequence set at the Rashomon gate in a torrential downpour, is filtered through the consciousness of a character, who is, in turn, recounting the stories of three other people. The material is presented in such a way to level the playing field; no story is given more narrative or factual weight than the others so that the viewer is left to evaluate the evidence and make their own judgments. RASHOMON says a great deal about how its characters see their world, but in forcing us to confront those perspectives, it says even more about how we see ours.

The four stories recount one event for which a thief (Toshiro Mifune) has been arrested. A samurai (Masayuki Mori) the thief encountered in the woods is dead, and his wife (Machiko Kyo) raped. At the trial, the thief, the wife, and the samurai (speaking from beyond the grave, through a medium) all testify. After the trial a witness — the man who shares the entire account with us from the position of the framing store at the Rashomon gate — gives us another account, one that should hypothetically be the most honest since, as an uninvolved bystander, he has nothing to gain or lose by lying. Yet his account differs so violently from the others nothing can be taken for granted. (Appropriately, the screenplay for RASHOMON is based on material from two totally different short stories by two different authors.)

The question is not simply did he or didn't he; indeed, by the thief's own cackling admission, he willingly and knowingly committed both acts. Rather the audience must try to decide what is believable and what is not; by filming the trial so that the witnesses nearly address the camera directly, the audience becomes both interrogator and jury. Quickly (even more quickly for viewers in 2005 since the movie has a reputation for its lack of an objective reality) it becomes clear that this is a fool's game. Not only is each story opposed to the others, but each is boobytrapped against seeming any more veracious than the others. The thief tells his story cackling like a lunatic, the wife cries, the samurai is dead and thus we must accept the notion that a ghost could actually deliver testimony from beyond the grave. Even our eyewitness is suspect: he initially says he discovered the body in the woods, but later admits that he'd witnessed the entire event, though Kurosawa interestingly never shows the eyewitness watching events within his own flashback.

But there is more to the movie than the simple realization that truth is in the eye of the beholder; if that were the case there would be no need to actually watch RASHOMON since, in the fifty-five years since its release to worldwide acclaim, the movie has become nothing less than the term by which we describe discrepancies between eyewitness accounts.

For instance, though it is rarely discussed, RASHOMON has an equal amount to say about genre. Not only do each witness' stories differ in content, they also differ in tone. The thief, for instance, tells a story of violence, of men testing their mettle against each other in physical combat. It is, in other words, an action movie. The wife's story, on the other hand, is about a woman's virtue and honor, and how, once sullied, it can never be cleansed; thus, hers is a melodrama.

This returns us to the issue of subjectivity: the authors of each story are flavoring their accounts to suit their own personal agendas and beliefs. So the eyewitness' account is tinged with cowardice; in his version, the thief and the samurai battle clumsily and unwillingly only after being bullied and shamed into the battle by the wife. But by lying and refusing to tell the "truth" in court, we can view the eyewitness as something of a coward himself, and therefore can read his account as one influenced by his willingness to believe that even men with swords are cowards too.

Though we remember distinct flashes of what has occurred, when RASHOMON ends (on a somewhat unfitting moment of hope) the four different version of the story we have heard begin to blend together. After all, different as they are, they are still the same basic story, told from four perspectives four different ways. A month after you've seen it, details remain, but muddied. Did the samurai kill himself in his own account or in the wife's? Even after careful study, RASHOMON is difficult to pin down to an objective truth. We, it seems, are just as unreliable as its characters.

IF YOU LIKED RASHOMON, CHECK OUT: HIGH AND LOW (1963), another masterpiece from Kurosawa. In this one, Mifune plays a businessman who finds that kidnappers demanding a ransom for the return of his son have nabbed the wrong kid.

THE BAD

Often people talk about holding a soft spot in their hearts for films they loved and watched as children. I hold a hard one for DIRTY DANCING.

My anti-DIRTY bias was not caused by any particularly bad childhood memory (like my brother’s full-on conniption during the graphic vomiting scene in THE SANDLOT), but generally sour recollection from throughout childhood. All the girls of my generation had seen it and loved DIRTY DANCING. Any chance they would get they would talk about it, they would sing the songs to each other, they would dance around as if they were Jennifer Gray. I vaguely recall being watching the film on play dates with girls who would force me to endure the film and then -- even worse! -- act out the scenes. It was enough to make a kid sick; to my unreceptive young mind, there was no crueler song to force an unreceptive child to sing than "(I've Had) The Time of My Life."

DIRTY DANCING has totally infected the women of my generation. Even in my graduate program in cinema studies, some of the smartest cinematic minds I have ever met are struck dumb when the subject comes up. I have never encountered more resistance about an oppositional stance about any picture than DIRTY DANCING. I might as well announce my admiration for child molestation for all the dumbfounded stares I receive when I declare myself a dedicated opponent of DIRTY DANCING and all that it stands for.

Just a few weeks ago, AFI included DIRTY DANCING in its list of the 100 greatest American movie quotes of all time for the famous line "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." There's just one problem: Baby (Jennifer Gray) isn't in a corner. She's against the wall, near a pillar, but not in any way that suggests that her parents (Jerry Orbach and Kelly Bishop) are physically restraining her. Through the dim haze of memory, I always thought Swayze was being noble but metaphorical. No, he's literally angry about the seating arrangements. Similarly, in his contribution to the film's popular soundtrack, Swayze sings that a woman is like the wind because "she's like the wind through [his] tree." Yes, things are like things when they are like those things. How is she like the wind Patrick?!? Can you be a little more specific?

Swayze, as Catskill retreat dance counselor Johnny Castle, represented — and perhaps still represents — the ideal male to a lot of women. But beyond his rock hard abs, wiggling hips, and his admittedly magnificent coiffure you're left with an overreacting whiner, a vacuous mimbo whose most soulful moments involve comparing women to commonplace meteorological phenomenon. Granted, the film is a fantasy for young girls; of going away, of falling in love, of coming out of your shell and becoming the belle of the ball. But how many women have fallen for self-obsessed cement-headed jerks who can dance just because of this movie?

This is not to say the movie isn't well-made; it would not work as well as it does if it wasn't fastidiously designed, sumptuously produced, and cannily acted (not to mention superbly danced by Swayze and Grey). Still, my youthful torture notwithstanding, there remains something unfulfilling about DIRTY DANCING, and maybe even something insidious. Women can do better than Patrick Swayze. Audiences can do better than DIRTY DANCING.

INSTEAD OF DIRTY DANCING, CHECK OUT: ROAD HOUSE (1989), Patrick Swayze’s finest hour, as an unstoppable bouncer named Dalton who ends Ben Gazzara’s oppressive reign of terror by strictly enforcing his bar’s 2 AM last call.

THE UGLY

It is unclear what, if anything, makes the title character a "prince" of space. Hiding amongst the Earth's populace as a bootblack, he repeatedly transforms into "Prince of Space" — dressed in tights and a satin cape, with soap dishes on his ears and what appears to be an ashtray as a chest logo — to repel an incursion of incompetent aliens from the planet Krankor with a gun that appears to fashioned out of a turkey baster and an inkwell. If this guy’s the prince, what the hell does the King of Space look like?

In 1959, in Japan, PRINCE OF SPACE may have been a fun kids' movie. The effects aren't terrible; no more terrible anyway, than the rest of the low-budget sci-fi movies of the period. Though time has certainly dated the material, it hasn't done nearly as much damage as the truly and utterly heinous dialogue dubbing, which is so offensively bad it must have been engineered and performed by someone who hated his job.

There is no other earthly explanation why Prince of Space would tell the Krankorians "Your weapons are useless against me!" six different times. Granted, the Krankorians are not particularly good shots and, indeed, they miss Prince of Space every single time they shoot at him. But does that make their weapons useless? Certainly their aim is useless, but not the weapons. And even if the weapons were useless, couldn't Prince of Space find a more interesting way of saying it? By the end the dubbing crew stopped masking their obvious contempt for the material by having Prince of Space voice their impatience. ("You see? How many times do I have to demonstrate to you? Your guns are worthless against me!") Other favorites: A pilot screaming "I can't move! I can't move!" while moving about his plane's cockpit and the leader of the Krankorians celebrating yet another failed attempt on Prince of Space's life by ordering his assistant to "Give everyone four hours off."

The Krankorians, whose instrument look like birdcages lined with Christmas lights placed inside cardboard boxes, have come to Earth in search of a newly invented and highly potent rocket fuel, but it would have been equally believable if they were here to swipe a large quantity of our planet's Spandex, as their entire fleet is covered in head to toe with the stuff. Their leader, The Phantom, strikes a particularly dashing figure, wearing a huge fake nose, moustache, and antenna, and his rather unflattering tights are accented by black lace shoulder pads, big knobby kneepads and orthopedic shoes. Not surprisingly, Earth (or at least Japan, we don't see the reaction anywhere else) meets these poorly dressed conquerors with a mixture of skepticism and indifference. To be fair, dressed like that, the only person the Krankorians could terrify is Steven Cojocaru.

PRINCE OF SPACE, royalty or not, is bad in the way we connoisseurs of movie badness hope all movies will be bad. It is totally unaware of its incompetence, in love with its own flimsy grandeur, and dubbed by filmmakers with a deep and powerful hatred for international film. It is shameful and terrible, but for entirely unintentional reasons, is tremendously entertaining. Its weapons are useless against me, but I love it anyway. And did I tell you its weapons are useless against me? Well, just in case, let me add it’s weapons are useless against me.

IF YOU LIKED PRINCE OF SPACE, CHECK OUT: KING KONG VERSUS GODZILLA (1972), a superb piece of Japanese sci-fi schlock. A less-than-intimidating Kong looks like he’s been left out in the sun too long.