As Mad Men hurtles toward the final episode of its fourth season, a former real life Mad Man reviews the show's pilot episode. That man? My father.

Today's Kurosawa 101 focuses exclusively on what is generally regarded as not only the greatest Japanese film ever made, but perhaps the greatest in world cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho set the standard and post-modern horror has been hobbling to catch up ever since.

Do women rappers have to shake it in our faces in order to get us to listen? As this doc. notes some, like Salt 'N' Pepa do it with sassiness and sex appeal "...you know, if I was a book, I would sell / 'cause every curve on my body got a story to tell".

Teeming with fruit, soda cans, ceramic figurines, plastic tassels, stuffed animals, even hanging shirts, the “barrio” section of Hollywood Cemetery abounds with vivid, converging, and often holiday-specific ornamentation.

After eschewing innovations like color and wide-screen filmmaking, when Akira Kurosawa made the conversion to a wider screen, he did so by making six consecutive films in wide screen, with a degree of success that was as resounding as it was influential.

Today's Kurosawa 101 explores two of the greatest films in Kurosawa's catalog, Rashomon -- the film that made Kurosawa and Japanese cinema known throughout the world -- and Ikiru -- perhaps the greatest film ever made about impending death.

The physical presence of a room heightens the overwhelming sense of frustration felt by players who know that all the tools of escape are within their grasp if only they could put together the solution.

Through his influences and achievements, Kurosawa became one of the first true international filmmakers, inspiring several generations of filmmakers who would explore notions of genre and identity in film.

A zombie has a better chance of making it through the heavy ordnance firing range near my house than I have of making a mix – even a Halloween mix—that doesn’t devolve into sad, introspective territory.

Today's Kurosawa 101 films include the director's only effort at bringing a contemporary Japanese stage play to the screen (the rarely seen The Quiet Duel), a police procedural that was the finest Kurosawa film to date (Stray Dog), and a scree against tabloid journalism that resulted in one of the weakest films he would ever direct (Scandal).

Once Brothers underscores the irony that even as the NBA made efforts to "internationalize" its team rosters, the rest of the world followed its own course, bloody and brutal.

Kurosawa's films often act as deliberate examinations of the period in which they took place, exploring not only the difficult realities that existed, but also the personal ordeals of the individuals that had to confront within them.

Day Two of Kurosawa 101 examines three of the director's films that attempt to come to terms with the nature of life in Japan immediately following the end of WWII and the American Occupation.

Vuitton is a mass-producer of luxury, artisanal, unique individual bags, faking the faking of its own products at an art exhibition, while zealously pursuing the prosecution of the actual fakers through police action and courts of law around the world.

For all his ability with scope and eye for the epic, hiring Zack Snyder might not be the 100 percent right decision.