After 30 years of working Hyakken Uchida [Tatsuo Matsumura] decides to retire as a professor and live out his retired life as a writer.  The Professor finds himself going through ups and downs at home in Japan during the war in the forties and as he enjoys his birthdays along with his former students who always want to know “Mahda Kai?” (Not Yet?) as after downing a massive glass of beer replies “Madada Yo!” (No Not Yet!).

Here is a film that I really just did not understand its purpose for being.  It tells the story of the retirement of this professor who always dreamed of becoming a writer and looks to go after his dream but nothing ever happens there.  He just basically watches as his life is shifted for the better and the worse.  You can say that he learns what is best about life in total throughout his retirement and through his former students who visit him continually and refuse to leave his life as they need to know if it’s time for him yet (in a funny way).

I even found it a stretch to understand these students’ feelings toward their teacher.  I’ve had few teachers in my lifetime that I would actually want to see after leaving their classrooms much less after leaving the school and I can get that you would become friends with your professor.  However, the lengths that some of these students go to to make sure that the Professor is so well kept in his retirement seems slightly suspicious and even though I doubt that’s meant to be there it feels more like a cultural difference here that I just will not understand.  I wonder how personal this character was for Akira Kurosawa since it was his last film and would make him 83 years old at the time when the film was released and even though he never seemed to stop working until this point I can imagine that retirement was something that he thought of a lot at this point.

With all this said there is one real saving of the movie, which isn’t that huge a saving.  It is the actual character of the Professor.  I did enjoy him in most scenes with his optimistic and childlike view on his world and his situations.  It’s even funnier that when you think back about the entire film that they moment that makes the Professor so depressed is not what happens during the war but when his cat runs off and get lost.  This guy is a child and a child that you love for being this type of a person.

In the end this is a movie that I would skip if someone was continually raving to me about the greatness of Kurosawa.  It is only just over two hours long but does nothing but bores you for the entire runtime with this lack of anything particularly interesting about the story.

IMDB says 7.4/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 87%

I say 3.5/10