sherlockjr, have you ever heard of the book
Reel Conversations: Reading Films with Young Adults by Alan Teasley and Ann Wilder? It's a terrific book on using film in the classroom that I wish more of my fellow English teachers (the ones who continually show Disney's version of Huck Finn after reading the novel) would read. Anyway, the authors reported success with showing
The Samurai Trilogy to tenth-graders as a means of teaching about Japanese culture. There's a bit of an age-gap between those classes and yours, but it might work. I admit I haven't seen these, though I've been meaning to.
I've shown
Rashomon in my film class (mostly seniors) with mixed results, so I wouldn't recommend that as a Kurosawa film for eighth-graders, but how about
Yojimbo and/or
Sanjuro? These were mentioned by the authors as possibilities and, flashing back to my memories of these films, I think they'd work fairly well.
All of this is contingent, of course, on you wanting to show samurai movies in addition to all the other samurai-related content you said you'd have in the course.
skuhn8 wrote:
what CC films would be appropriate for younger people, perhaps high school age.
I've used a couple English-language Criterions in the classroom, and both went over well and provoked thoughtful discussions. One is
Do the Right Thing, which I showed in my film class. It made high school seniors engaged in something school-related in May, which says quite a bit. Of course, you have to be careful because of the language and nudity (again, my class is mostly seniors and they and their parents sign off on watching R-rated movies at the beginning of the semester). The other is the 1946 version of
The Killers, which I showed to honors-level sophomores as part of a unit on different types of narratives and heroes, pairing it with reading
Slaughterhouse-Five. Obviously, the use of this one is a bit more esoteric than you'd like, but the kids did enjoy the movie itself and trying to piece together the fractured story.