Awakened By Impending Death: The Transformational Heroes of “Ikiru” and “Breaking Bad”

If I had to choose only one favorite movie, it would be Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (“To Live”) because it has everything, and is timeless. I wrote this essay in 2014, soon after watching the entirety of “Breaking Bad”, which I hadn’t watched during its run, in five weeks.

Bryan Cranston as Walter White in “Breaking Bad”