YMMV / Rashomon

• Adaptation Displacement: Very few people know that the movie is based on two short stories written by Ryunosuke Akutagawa: In a Grove and the original Rashomon.
• Awesome Music: The jungle beat as the woodcutter struts through the forest.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Tajōmaru, and this is in a film that encourages Alternate Character Interpretation. However, people can Take a Third Option and find him gross, pathetic, and sexy.
• Funny Moments:
  • The woodcutter's account of the husband and Tajōmaru's fight has them in a clumsy brawl, with them jamming their swords into the sides of things and wrestling each other to the ground.
  • When a commoner stops for shelter underneath Rashomon Gate, he grows curious about why the priest and woodcutter are so disturbed. The priest begins his story with an existential speech about the nature of man and his compulsion to lie. Then we get this line from the commoner:
    Commoner: I wanted a story, not one of your sermons!
• Genre Turning Point: At the time the film was made, it was generally considered that dream sequences excepted, what we see on screen actually happened. Anything characters just talk about could later be revealed as false, but if you actually see it onscreen, then it's a true part of the story. This film along with Alfred Hitchcock's Stage Fright (1950) and Frederick De Cordova's The Gal Who Took The West challenged that (and even Hitchcock regretted that gimmick in light of Stage Fright).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Even though it has been somewhat Vindicated by History, it's still considered one of Kurosawa's weaker films in its native land. The funny thing is that the Japanese can't agree on why Westerners love it so much. Half think they're just impressed by its exoticism, while others claim the complete reverse, that it's too Americanized. They generally point out that the film waters down the original short story In the Grove with a sentimental coda and framing device rather than leaving it up to the viewer to figure out the truth, and the film is quite a bit more vague in its period setting, whereas earlier Jidaigeki tended to be more precise regarding the period.
• Moe: The priest, played by the adorable Minoru Chiaki.
• Out of the Ghetto: Rashomon is generally considered the first film that introduced the concept of world cinema. Before, movies meant America or they meant Europe. That film industries existed in India, Japan, and China was known intellectually, but neither critics, distributors, or the general audience (both international and local) believed there was an audience for such works in the west. Rashomon broke that barrier and opened the doors for cinema from India, Africa, and South America, and made cinema the first international art-form and is considered to inaugurate the arthouse era.
• Special Effects Failure: The lip-sync of the medium speaking the samurai's voice is very poor, to say the least. Justified, given the film's low budget.
• Values Dissonance: The dead man seems to forgive Tajōmaru for raping his wife and interprets him with some moral virtue, and in the woodcutter's story, he slut shames her instead of standing up for her. Even in the wife's story, he looks at her with noticeable scorn.

---