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I've been slowly working my way through Kurosawa in order myself. Unfortunately, I had already seen most of the great ones. Rather than going Miyazaki, though, you might want to just look at how post-war cinema in Japan developed by following the through line of Kurosawa and supplementing it with other major films from the period. Skip the weaker films by other directors and use their masterpieces to compare it to what Kurosawa was doing. zandert33 posted:Fair warning, the first few Kurosawa's are rough. In my opinion "One Wonderful Sunday" is his first true gem. I think you can see glimpses of the director Kurosawa would become in the Sugata films and The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, but he's still obviously learning. The scripts for the Sugata movies aren't very strong and there's an amazing fifteen minute short film buried in the seventy minutes of Tiger's Tail. Stray Dog is the moment that he becomes Kurosawa to me, though. Kull the Conqueror posted:Can't say I'll be able to hop on each and every movie you're watching, but I'd love to try with the stuff that's on Hulu Plus as there's a lot of early Kurosawa I haven't seen. In any event, best of luck on your journey. Kurosawa's work is life-affirming. Access to most of the foreign films in the Criterion collection is the best reason to have Hulu Plus. I've caught myself up on most of my "I really should watch that someday" films through it. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 16:52 on Aug 18, 2015 |
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Aug 18, 2015 16:49
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Neowyrm posted:Sanshiro Sugata, 1943, dir. Akira Kurosawa Yeah, there's a reason people have been saying that the early films aren't good. You haven't even hit the low point yet. One thing to bear in mind is that for the first ten to fifteen years of his directorial career, Kurosawa was working under heavy government oversight; first the authoritarian Imperial Japanese regime and later the American occupational government. There's twenty minutes cut out of this movie by the censors. I don't think that an additional twenty minutes would have saved it, but it does make it hard to judge as an artistic work when it's inherently propagandist. (Super tiny spoiler for some the themes in part two that I'm covering up just in case jivjov wants to go in completely blind) And the second Sanshiro film is even more nationalistic. The best thing in Sanshiro, in my view, is the cinematography. Kurosawa is the absolute master of it and even at this early point in his career his skill is showing up. Those early minutes of the film are identifiably Kurosawa with how incredibly well they're shot. The segment with the sandal, for example, or when he's clinging to the tree in the water. Unfortunately, once he gets inside and photographs the matches those qualities vanish.
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Aug 19, 2015 04:32
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jivjov posted:Gennosuke's apperance instantly sets him apart from other characters. Almost everyone else in the film is in very period-appropriate Japanese clothing, but he is dressed and groomed like a Westerner. One theme to watch for in the early years of Kurosawa is the effect of Western influences on Japan. Initially, I think it was spurred on by wartime politics, but Kurosawa seemed to want to explore it deeply. Sugata Sanshiro is set at a time when Japan was going nuts for the west; they had just recently opened up to the outside world again and there was a bit of mania for that stuff. And the film itself comes from a time when Japan was at the height of their nationalistic fervor. The flip side of this, though, is that Kurosawa himself was very influenced by western directors. In particular John Ford (and I have a story for that when you get a few more films down the line). Ford was cutting a new path of cinematography himself at the time (see Stagecoach) and Kurosawa took a lot of those concepts and cut a kind of parallel track. Compare this movie to the typical film of the early 40's (yes, there are several people besides Ford who stand out) and the difference is startling. FWIW, the thing that the censors objected to the most in Sugata Sanshiro was the love story and that's what got cut. If you're interested, Hulu Plus has a short piece (obviously taken from a DVD extra) on Kurosawa's relationship with the censors, though I'd recommend holding off on watching it for a while since it covers about the first ten films. Raxivace posted:Hell I'd go as far as saying One Wonderful Sunday and Sanshiro Sugata: Part II are genuinely bad films I don't think One Wonderful Sunday is a masterpiece, but it is an enjoyable film. Especially when you consider how it captures post-war Tokyo so directly (another theme Kurosawa is going to dive deeply into, despite the American censors objecting to it). Sure it's a sappy love story, but it's a post-apocalyptic sappy love story. Raxivace posted:Yeah, sadly this is the case. I've actually seen all 50+ of Alfred Hitchcock's feature films (Sans the film that has been lost to history), and his silent period is almost entirely dispensable, and that is longer than some director's entire careers alone. I liked The Lodger, at least.
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Aug 19, 2015 05:59
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jivjov posted:Anyone have any insight on exactly where The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail falls in the chronology? Wikipedia has both 1945 and 1952 listed, and as far as I can tell from the rather scant article...it was made in '45 but never publicly released until '52? Do I have that right? It was made in 1945. August 1945.
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Aug 19, 2015 23:24
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Well, you hit the bottom of the Kurosawa barrel. It only goes up from here!jivjov posted:As a historical curiosity, it was certainly very interesting to see a propaganda film from the perspective of an Axis power (literally containing a line about defeating the evil Americans and British). It really humanizes "the other side" of World War 2. Middle and high school social studies classes, at least in my experience, paint the Axis as being mustache twirling dastardly ne'er-do-wells or frothing slavering monsters. Watching this film was an exercise in realizing that the people on both sides of any war have lives, homes, and families. That said, there were some cliches that really made me think Kurosawa had been tasked with presenting the optics factory as the happiest place on earth. The administrators in charge are just too nice to be believed. They're frequently shown as being more than happy to send workers home on leave, and don't seem overly concerned with meeting quotas or the war effort overall. Maybe that's just a difference between Japanese and American cinema, but I went in expecting the overseers to be in an antagonistic (but definitely not villainous) role. Having the whole factory be a perfect little village of happy people certainly works from a propaganda perspective, but it just feels unnatural. Propaganda films everywhere tend to be alike and The Most Beautiful isn't really any different. "If we all pull together and respect the men in charge then everything will turn out just fine." There's no real conflict, no questioning even if the conclusion is that the authority is right. "Why aren't you like the main character?" the films ask their audience. It reminds me a lot of modern Christian cinema which comes from a similar place of propaganda to an audience that's already receptive to it. In another time and place, with other goals in mind, the factory managers would definitely be in an antagonistic role, but propaganda means that everyone is on the same side and paragons of virtue (or at least the virtues the propagandists want to extol). The exception is when you do get an easily knocked down, sneering strawman villain. Villains in propaganda can't be genuine threats because they might make people question those values. Imagine if there was a girl in the film who was a slacker and went around saying, "What's the point? The US has a dozen times our industrial base and we're constantly losing." Just expressing that thought is disruptive to the goals of the film so the most the slacker could do is say, "I don't wanna go to work today," and then be easily cowed by the virtuous heroine.
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Aug 22, 2015 16:22
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Raxivace posted:Well there's not much to say about Sanshiro II. It's the first movie again but worse for the most part. Yeah, the biggest point I can make is how blatant the film is with its anti-American themes. Not in a bad way, more in an absurd Rocky IV kind of way. Even Kurosawa's autobiography has barely anything to say about this movie. Basebf555 posted:Yea Kurosawa is the rare director that seemed to improve with age. Ran is in my top-3 favorite films of his and he made it fairly late in the game. Ran is great, but the films around it in his filmography just aren't as strong as Kurosawa was before. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Aug 29, 2015 |
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Aug 29, 2015 01:13
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I broke open the autobiography again and Kurosawa essentially just writes a page about how cold it was shooing on the mountain, that the guy who played Genzaburo accidentally scared some skiers, he got screwed by the studio on his pay for it, and "Sugata Sanshiro, Part II was not a very good film." But there is something interesting that occurred around the movie that's worth mentioning since it helps keep the things in context. The month that the movie was released, Kurosawa got married at the Meiji shrine in Tokyo. If you're not familiar with the location, it's the largest temple in Tokyo and is a very popular destination for weddings. The day after, it was destroyed in the firebombing of Tokyo. Kurosawa never got his wedding pictures as a result.
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Aug 29, 2015 15:18
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I've got less details about Miyazaki films (though someone gave me a book of his essays or maybe interviews with them that I really should get around to reading), but I can tell you a few interesting things about Cagliostro! Lupin III was the center of a huge international copyright case for decades. The original Arsene Lupin stories were still under copyright when the comics started in the 60's (also, they're really entertaining and worth reading) and at the time Japan was like China in terms of respecting copyright laws. As a result of the very lengthy litigation, Lupin material had a lot of trouble getting overseas distribution. Eventually they just ran out the clock, but before then people had to come up with some creative methods for avoiding getting sued. The makers of the video game Cliffhanger, for example, made a Dragon's Lair type game that took footage primarily from Castle of Cagliostro to make a game that consisted entirely of quick time events. They had to rename the main character "Cliff" to avoid problems. And when Streamline pictures released Lupin stuff including this movie, they called him "the Wolf".
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Sep 4, 2015 02:40
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Raxivace posted:There are three eras of Kurosawa as far as I'm concerned: the pre-Mifune era, the Mifune era, and the post-Mifune era. That actor had such a big impact on Kurosawa's career, and they both did a lot of their best work together. They're just one of the great director/actor duos, like Scorsese/DeNiro, Rossellini/Bergman, Ford/Wayne, Hithcock/Stewart etc. That's a good way to break it down. While I don't think Mifune was key to Kurosawa's genius, but they found each other at exactly the right moment in both of their careers to make an absolutely explosive mixture. I kind of liked The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail, but I also felt that the pacing was way off. Like it was padded to about three times the length it should have been. Interacting with other characters or a few more tense incidents would have rounded out the film. I made a big deal about the film being shot in August 1945 (really late July through the end of August, IIRC) earlier since the creation of this film spanned two governments. They stopped shooting for a few hours to go to an office on the Toho lot to hear the Emperor's radio address where he announced the surrender and then had to go back to work. A week or two later the US sent observers to the set to examine the state of the Japanese film industry. They were shooting the checkpoint sequence at the time and literally looking over Kurosawa's shoulder was John Ford. It wasn't until almost a decade later that Kurosawa discovered that his idol had been standing right next to him and he didn't even talk to him.
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Sep 6, 2015 14:10
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jivjov posted:Yeah, this is pretty much exactly how I felt about everything. This could have been a 25 minute short film and communicated exactly the same story and information. That's honestly what has me a bit trepidatious about getting to some of the 2-3 hour films, although Kurosawa will have had more time to refine his craft by then. The only one of his superlong films that I feel was a bad experience (as opposed to an "I didn't care for this" experience) was The Idiot. And the studio chopped over an hour of the movie on him with that one so it may be a situation where the original, over four hour cut (it was going to be two movies) is a better film.
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Sep 6, 2015 21:30
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I watched No Regrets for Our Youth about four months ago and I remember effectively nothing about it. It's a very slight movie with nothing besides the fact that it's by Kurosawa to recommend it.
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Sep 29, 2015 02:36
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jivjov posted:Just got a criterion collection copy of Ikiru for 50¢ at a local Japanese culture festival...when I get around to that one, I'll be able to review some bonus feature and the like Ikiru is astounding, but it's really amazing when you watch Ikiru and Seven Samurai back to back and all these characters from Ikiru show up in 16th century Japan...
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Oct 4, 2015 01:58
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Yeah, that climax just falls flat. It was a daring experiment, but experiments don't always work. So, lots of interesting things in One Wonderful Sunday. For one thing, this really marks the beginning of Kurosawa's Japanese recovery period. Many of his films for the next five years heavily feature the rebuilding of Japan (and Tokyo in particular) as a central theme. There was some of it in No Regrets for Our Youth, but I feel that the recovery wasn't the real focus of the film. In terms of upcoming movies, even Rashomon draws on that imagery a bit. As part of that, a lot of the backdrops in One Wonderful Sunday weren't sets, they were the actual city. That includes the broken neighborhoods in many of the shots. Kurosawa had problems with some of his surreptitious street shooting as passerbys wouldn't realize that he was shooting a movie and screw up his shots. This film also marks the point when Kurosawa really starts obsessing with using the weather, and wind in particular, as part of the scene. It's a technique that becomes one of his major trademarks as the perfectly timed gust blows in to dramatically highlight a shot. He won't get to use it much in the next few films, but once you start seeing it in his exterior shots you won't be able to stop seeing it.
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Oct 19, 2015 17:01
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jivjov posted:But in Gojira, people off the crashed train get stepped on, reporters fall to their death from a melting tower, a group of huddled civilians are atomized, and a mother and children cower in fear and wait to be reunited with a father who presumably perished in the war. IIRC, you see the kids in a later scene in the hospital where they've gotten radiation poisoning from being near Godzilla. It really is an amazing film, and then the first sequel immediately toss out everything great about the original movie and sets the pattern for the rest of the films. Those can be fun (as long as Minya isn't in the movie), but they might as well be a completely different series.
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Oct 31, 2015 23:35
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jivjov posted:That's the one place that the movie kinda pulls punches. Kids get scanned with a Geiger counter, and some adults make sad faces, but it's not made nearly as explicit as it could have been. That's very explicit to anyone in 1954, and especially anyone in Japan in 1954 (you need to get around to I Live in Fear. I think it's only 18 movies down the line for you).
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Oct 31, 2015 23:40
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Raxivace posted:Glad to hear you liked Drunken Angel, jiv. That movie to High & Low might be my favorite continuous run of any director ever, though Hitchcock's run of Rebecca to The Birds is neck and neck with it. I feel Drunken Angel hasn't quite crossed the thresh hold to greatness yet, but with every film Kurosawa is getting closer and closer to it until suddenly "Boom!" he just starts turning out masterpiece after masterpiece like it's no big thing. Of course, Drunken Angel brings in another piece of that magical time by adding Mifune.
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Nov 12, 2015 03:13
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Stray Dog is the moment that Kurosawa becomes Kurosawa. The next fifteen years of his work consists mainly of some of the greatest films ever made, with a few missteps (and even then I think some of those missteps are still drat good movies). Stray Dog obviously grew out of the noir genre and I think Scandal, his next movie, does as well. Though there's it's noir as if directed by... well, I'll save that so you can go in cold on that film. The oppressive climate of the downtrodden city. The flatfoot working a case that he's told he shouldn't pursue. The threat of violence hanging over everything. Although, it's a bit more... heroic, for lack of a better word, than noir generally is given the nature of the characters. I love the train station sequence in this film for the way it's shot so that you can see the process. In my view, the biggest part of Kurosawa's genius is in how he structures shots and that was a good example of it. Mifune tends to play very broad characters in Kurosawa films, initially coming from his tough guy roles and later reflecting his most iconic performance. In Stray Dog, though, I think he gives one of his better performances. Its intense, but also very understated compared to how he usually acts.
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Dec 31, 2015 07:08
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Raxivace posted:Is it really true that Stray Dog invented the "buddy cop" genre? As much as I love the movie I do wonder if that is giving it perhaps slightly too much credit, since to me it resembles more of a master/apprentice type of story than what we might think of as "buddy cop" movies today. Or maybe I just haven't seen enough of them, haha. I agree and that was my reading of the relationship between Sato and Murakami. It fits with Japanese organizational relationships as well, too, where seniority rather than position defines if someone is your peer. Personally, I see buddy cop movies growing out of detective fiction in general where you always need someone to bounce the detective off of. Once you start making those two characters more equals, the whole thing kind of snaps into place.
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Jan 1, 2016 19:10
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Scandal is often described as a poor effort on Kurosawa's part but I genuinely enjoy the film. It feels like a Frank Capra movie to me with the themes of the nobler aspects of humanity overcoming the corruption of the world. There's a lot of wonderful touches in the movie, too. I like the pettiness of the villain and how at the end of the day he's just an rear end in a top hat; it grounds the movie. I love the montage sequences where it swings back and forth between the different sides of the story for being so well shot. Same for the courtroom sequences. Regarding the tuberculosis, Kurosawa is still addressing the state of post-war Tokyo. He loved putting those disease ridden cesspits into his movies (at least until he brings that theme to it's own natural conclusion).
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Jan 15, 2016 07:23
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jivjov posted:I started in on Kurosawa's autobiography on my lunch break today, and it's fascinating. I'll do a full writeup when I finish it, but only a couple dozen pages in and I wholeheartedly recommend it. The worst part about that book is it stops at Rashomon. There's a second autobiography but it's never been translated into English. Well, one part of that second autobiography has been translated: the list of his one hundred favorite movies. It happens to include My Neighbor Totoro. The real challenge in making that list is not being able to include any Kurosawa films. 
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Jan 16, 2016 17:18
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While stopping at Rashomon worked thematically for his book, the problem is that an awful lot happened to Kurosawa after Rashomon that's needs to be addressed. Rashomon is the start of the peak of his career (which when we're talking about Kurosawa is actually a fifteen year long Himalayan plateau), but what happened after that is just as important as he undergoes his Orson Welles like fall (which I guess we'll talk about eight months from now ).
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Jan 16, 2016 23:38
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I was referring to how both had major problems working with studios and consequently found it nearly impossible to get their movies made. OTOH, Welles probably would have eaten all of the missing Magnificent Ambersons footage if he could have gotten something like Ran made at that same point in his career.
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Jan 17, 2016 03:02
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I have a theory that Japanese ghosts are all assholes. Rashomon fits neatly into that theory. The problem with Rashomon is that so much has been said about it that it's kind of difficult to think of anything novel to say, or even point out. It's the breakout moment for post-war Japanese cinema, but even if it wasn't there were so many fantastic films being made in Japan in those years that something was bound to. I can't think of any film that used the unreliable narrator to such an extent before Rashomon and it's still one of the greatest examples. Raxivace, you're making me feel like I should pick up more Kurosawa DVD's/Blurays. The ones that I have include some terrific film school style commentaries that really deepen my appreciation of the films.
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Jan 24, 2016 05:26
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jivjov posted:I'm honestly really glad that I know virtually nothing about a lot of these films going in. I'm sure that absolutely nothing I said was new or noteworthy in any way...but it felt that way to me! Well, let's hit the stuff, then. I think the important thing to walk away from Rashomon is that the truth doesn't matter. Maybe there's a fragment of fact in each of their stories, but maybe there isn't. The versions of the stories exist to reflect the characters; the lies they tell themselves, the lies they tell to protect others, and the lies they tell others to try to put things right. And the woodcutter isn't necessarily as truthful as anyone else. The materialistic nature of the ghost and his story is always commented on as being weird. I think in this case it's more cultural difference than anything else. The samurai ghost's behavior is in line with the ghosts in Japanese horror stories where they lash out any anyone living. If you ever get to Japan, obviously the Rashomon gate is long gone (it was a ruin even in the film!). A replica of the sister gate exists, though, and when I was there it was pouring rain so I got to stand under the gate and ponder the nature of humanity. And then get pushed down the steps by the "tame" deer that are roaming all over the place there. Raxivace posted:I think it's probably better not have too many expectations when watching classic movies anyways, because otherwise you might be setting standards up in your head that a movie can't possibly live up to. I especially see this a lot with younger people watching stuff like Citizen Kane or Vertigo (Both of which I do think are among the best films ever made fwiw) for the first time and not understanding why the movies literally didn't solve the secrets of the universe for them then and there or whatever. I've been making a point of trying to not say anything about upcoming films for just that reason. Well, beyond the fact that Kurosawa made a lot of absolutely incredible movies. jivjov posted:I'm rather amused that not a single post of discussion happened about Porco Rosso. This is probably due to my own tepid post about it. Well... uh... I watched it about a decade ago and remember that I thought it was okay. I think Miyazaki makes good movies, I just don't have a lot to say about them. Raxivace posted:I own almost every Kurosawa they've put out. I've yet to regret the purchase of a single one. I've got the Critereon DVD's of most of his samurai films. After my recent watch through I've picked up a much greater appreciation for the contemporarily set films. I have a theory for why that is, but stating it would be a bit of a spoiler so I'll save it for later. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Jan 24, 2016 |
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Jan 24, 2016 06:02
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jivjov posted:
I am shocked that Martin Ritt isn't as skilled of director as Akira Kurosawa. Are you planning on watching The Magnificent Seven when the time comes? I think it (and A Fistful of Dollars for that matter) stand well on their own in comparison with the original, though again they suffer from not being directed by Kurosawa. As for Star Wars, it might be better to watch it right after you finish Kurosawa's black and white films. Lucas borrowed more things stylistically from him than just a few characters from The Hidden Fortress and actually getting the whole perspective is kind of interesting. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 18:18
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jivjov posted:Oh I'm aware. I've just never seen the second one and it's been years since I watched TGTB&TU, so I figured I'd just do the whole set. I just rewatched The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly a couple of weeks ago and it's still amazing. I believe this is the point where someone is required to post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOr0na6mKJQ
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Feb 11, 2016 03:42
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Raxivace posted:No Kurosawa exclusive podcasts that I'm aware of though. We should have started one. I kind of like the current super-niche podcast trend that's going on. A ten or twenty episode deep dive into a topic can be pretty interesting even if it seems to mainly be used for pop culture stuff.
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Feb 12, 2016 05:49
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jivjov posted:My review of this is gonna be terrible. I just got to Part 2; and I only have the barest grasp of the plot of Part 1. Everything just feels so disjointed. This accurately sums up watching Kurosawa's The Idiot. But think about it this way, this is the last weak Kurosawa film for long time.
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Feb 21, 2016 01:39
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jivjov posted:and instead paid attention to the beautiful footage of wintery Japan and various locales within. Hokkaido seems to be very rarely used as a setting for Japanese films (for those not aware, it's the much colder, much less populated northern island in Japan; kind of Japanese Alaska). Occasionally, a giant monster will stomp through it on its way to the big time, but hardly any other depictions on film. The festival scene in the movie is a famous yearly event in Sapporo, though I think there's less ice skating with burning torches these days. One other thing to point out about The Idiot (since there are so few things to point out) is that it marks the beginning of Kurosawa's work with Russian culture. He'll go back to it a few times, and never with the success that his other films enjoyed.
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Feb 21, 2016 14:58
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El Graplurado posted:So yeah, you're right there aren't relatively many, particularly in classical Japanese cinema. But there are some, the island serving larger thematic purposes more often not. That's pretty cool. I actually poked around a little bit after going, "I can only think of three or four films set in Hokkaido," but didn't bother really digging into it like that. I'm not really sure if there was a thematic reason Kurosawa wanted to use Hokkaido in The Idiot; maybe he just felt like the snowy setting would be more evocative of the Russian roots of the story. And taking it back to this thread, Snow Trail (which I didn't count because I only remembered it as being set in the mountains) was written by Kurosawa and stars Mifune.
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Feb 22, 2016 01:25
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jivjov posted:And suddenly there's another film on my list. Oh, and Takashi Shimura is also featured in Snow Trail. You've already seen him several times in a variety of roles at this point (Sato in Stray Dog is his most prominent Kurosawa role through The Idiot; the films where he played a more central character aren't as significant as the ones where he played a side one, so far). He's given the lead in Ikiru. Random Stranger fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Feb 22, 2016 |
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Feb 22, 2016 02:12
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Raxivace posted:Has anyone here read Donald Richie's book on Kurosawa? I've been looking through it and dude has some kind of odd opinions, especially for our modern times Like he has a relatively lengthy chapter on No Regrets For Our Youth full of praise that borders on nonsensical, comparing Hara in the movie to performances like Jeanne Moreau's in Jules and Jim. There's also this weird point he tries to make where the poor characters in the movie represent liberals (Because we leftists think of the poor as "our heroes" it seems), as apparently Hara's character has to reject both conservatism and liberalism to find her true "self" or something. I don't really get the reading, and Kurosawa's films have never struck me as political in that kind of way. I can kind of see that argument since Hara's life was dicked over by the nationalist/conservative factions and then she rejected the new liberalism of the immediate post-war to establish a rural life. I don't agree with it since I think it reflects more of the humanism themes in Kurosawa where Hara does her part by supporting her husband's family, but there's a case to be made there. Kurosawa definitely got political, particularly with his modern set films and especially in his post-war period. They're not heavy-handedly political, but One Wonderful Sunday and Scandal definitely are anchored in the political realities of the day. And then moving further into his oeuvre, there's Ikiru and The Bad Sleep Well which are explicitly political (and I think thematically linked in their view on politics, though I'll save that for The Bad Sleep Well discussion). I wouldn't be shocked if someone found a political reading in Throne of Blood or Ran either given the themes of the movies.
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Feb 23, 2016 03:18
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Raxivace posted:Hey guys I watched the Nikkatsu noir I Am Waiting today, and I have a question about how it relates to Kurosawa's I Live In Fear. Spoiler tagging this just in case jiv doesn't want to know the general premise of I Live in Fear. There was a huge South American exodus from Japan in the 1950's. Big enough that the child of one of those families actually became President of Peru.
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Feb 24, 2016 12:37
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Raxivace posted:Interesting. What motivated this, exactly? Post-war anxiety that was still lingering? Pretty much. Remember that Japan was in political turmoil at the time and they were being used as a staging area for the US in the cold war. Everyone figured that as soon as the war started, Japan would be the first to go.
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Feb 26, 2016 12:37
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I've got a lot to say about Ikiru but I need to sleep so I'm going to stick to two points to start with and I'll come back with more. First, this is the capstone of Kurosawa's post-war filmmaking. Think of how many times the fetid swamps in the middle of devastated neighborhoods have been featured in Kurosawa films since the end of World War 2. And in Ikiru he closes that out by taking that symbol of the broken, poisoned remains of Japanese society and builds a park on it. Remember that 1952 was the end of the US occupation of Japan. Ikiru comes at the moment when Japan the old Japan has finally died and the new Japan is born, the new government has rebuilt Japan, and people are moving on. Kurosawa will return to the imagery of post-War Japan, but Ikiru feels like the themes of that time are being put to rest. Second, Ikiru is a very mature film. While anyone can connect with Watanabe's story, as life goes on the connection grows deeper. I feel that this happens a lot with Kurosawa's modern set films; they are all about life in a way that living more of it brings a deeper appreciation of them. I think it's because of how heartfelt the emotions presented in the film are.
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Mar 9, 2016 04:05
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jivjov posted:Aaaaaaaand sold! To the man with the Evangelion avatar. Yeah, seeing Ran on a big screen is a rare opportunity that should not be missed in general, doubly so if you're in the process of watching all the Kurosawa films. So more about Ikiru now that I'm not double posting. I love that early scene in the doctor's office. The mirrored conversations, the facial expressions, the way the characters are framed. It's a perfectly constructed scene in a movie with a lot of perfectly constructed scenes. The shift in the middle of the film feels a lot like a reaction to melodramas at the time. In the melodrama structure, there's the end of the second act shift where the downtrodden protagonist makes a determined shift in their situation. They've found their place and are now moving forward and the rest of the film is them resolving that. Ikiru says, "You know at this moment that he's going to get that park built, let's move ahead to something else." You don't get the emotional catharsis that the melodrama usually provides, but you get something richer than that as a new drama forms in the wake of the end of that drama.
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Mar 18, 2016 02:10
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Raxivace posted:Also I watched Ugetsu for this thread and am very excited to talk about it. I didn't realize that was on Hulu's Critereon collection and now I'm probably going to watch it tonight (at least if I can finish up my physics reading first).
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Apr 3, 2016 01:16
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GonSmithe posted:Seven Samurai is The Best. I know it's the trite, obvious one, but it really is my favorite Kurosawa. With Ugetsu, I loved the way the film was shot. The camera work was really dynamic on those sets. I recall one shot in particular where one couple was in their house in the foreground while through the door and off in the distance you could see the other desperately working in the night. Can't say I cared for the way the story unfolded, though. I think that came from the folktale nature of the adaptation where poverty and keeping to your social station is presented as a virtue. I don't think it intentionally ties back to salary men, especially since in 1950 the concept wouldn't really have formed yet (the go-getting 60's when Japanese business was booming was the real start of that, in my view, and I think we're going to be talking about later on). I think Tobei's story would have worked better for the story if he had killed the general. Not in some dramatic duel, of course, just a simple brutal slaying of a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. By making Tobei lie about it, it reinforced the idea that the real samurai were above those stupid peasants, a theme that's depressingly common in Japan. There's some tension with the concept in Kurosawa's films; Rashomon, for example, had the samurai completely disgraced in pretty much every sense of the word by a bandit. And in Seven Samurai... well, let's just say that the division between noble and peasant is really important to that film. With Ohama's storyline, I think the key point was that she was a survivor who would do anything to keep going, The fact that she could pull herself away and adapt in even the shittiest of situations gives her a bit more character than I think you're giving the film credit for. It's far from perfect, of course, it just fits the setting of the film appropriately. Ugetsu is the exception that proves my rule about Japanese ghosts all being assholes. There was one nice ghost out of the three. For other Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan is a must watch. It's one of the greatest films ever made and it's a ghost story anthology. Less masterpiecey but still cool and entertaining is Nakagawa's Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan; this would be the 1959 color version since it's a traditional ghost story that's been adapted into films dozens of times. Nakagawa to me is Japan's John Carpenter where he made some visually fantastic and influential horror films while still doing everything on the cheap. Both of those are in the Criterion Collection on Hulu.
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Apr 15, 2016 19:55
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Raxivace posted:I dunno man, the samurai that does behead the guy still does it in a kind of cold blooded way. The samurai in the beginning of the movie are all pretty big assholes too (IIRC none of them come to aid the village when it is first being attacked, which is an interesting contrast with what we'll see in Seven Samurai). The ending shot where Tobei throws his armor into the water seems to be a complete rejection of the class too- it's the peasant that's too good for the samurai now, not the other way around. Yeah, the samurai are definitely assholes who tear through ordinary people's lives, but in the context of the scene where Tobei is elevated to nobility, the lord sees through the lies because there was no way a peasant could kill a samurai. Throwing the armor away to me read as learning his place; he wasn't disgusted by the hypocrisy of the nobility of disillusioned by the reality of achieving his dream, his wife reminded him that he was just a peasant and that brought him home. But that's a fair interpretation, too.
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Apr 15, 2016 20:22
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Raxivace posted:One last thing I want to mention about Ugetsu is that the ghost woman's older attendant mentions their village being destroyed by Oda Nobunaga, who we will actually see depicted in one of Kurosawa's later movies, Kagemusha. We won't be getting to that one for a while, but I thought the connection was worth mentioning while I still remember it. Nobunaga is the eternal villain of Japanese culture because he's the guy who brought guns to knife fights.
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Apr 17, 2016 12:11
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