It’s official! I have now seen every film Akira Kurosawa ever made. I still have nine films left in my Kurosawa Diary project, but that’s mostly about revisiting films I’ve seen before, this time in chronological order. Last night at the Pacific Film Archive, I caught a double-bill of The Most Beautiful and The Men [...]
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I’m making an exception to the chronological format of this diary to cover Kurosawa’s first and third films as a director. I briefly discussed his first film, Sanshiro Sugata, in my first diary entry. I didn’t discuss the second because until last night, I had never seen it. I saw both movies last night at [...]
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Akira Kurosawa only made two sequels in his career, and only one after he reached his artistic maturity. Sanjuro didn’t start out as a sequel to Yojimbo, but as the earlier movie became box office dynamite, Kurosawa inserted the nameless main character from the first one into the center of his current screenplay. (Well, not [...]
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And so we come to Kurosawa at his most entertaining, and his most commercial. Oddly enough for this serious and often didactic auteur, also at his best. On one level, we have one of the most enjoyable action flicks ever made, with rousing swordplay, plenty of moments to cheer the hero, and many laughably inept [...]
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Few people know Kurosawa’s dark, contemporary, and suspenseful tale of corruption and revenge—perhaps because it was made around the same time as his three lightest and most entertaining sword-and-kimono flicks. Commercially speaking, it can’t stand up to its predecessor, The Hidden Fortress, or the two action comedies that would follow it, Yojimbo and Sanjuro. But [...]
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If you remember that the Japanese term for what we westerners call a “samurai movie” actually translates closer to “costume picture,” then The Hidden Fortress was the fifth and last such film Akira Kurosawa made in the 1950s. His four previous samurai movies were an existential exploration of the limits of human knowledge (Rashomon), an [...]
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I got the new Pacific Film Archive schedule in yesterday’s mail. And once again, I just sort of want to move into the theater. They’ve got the beginnings of a summer-long Kurosawa retrospective (in honor is his birth centenary) and a series of recent Romanian Cinema. They’ve got another one on recent additions to the [...]
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I’ve now arrived at an important transition in Akira Kurosawa’s career. In my project of watching all (or all available) Kurosawa films in chronological order, I’ve completed his pre-widescreen work. Every film I’ve watched so far, from his first, Sanshiro Sugata, to his 17th, The Lower Depths, was shot in the old Academy Ratio of [...]
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Akira Kurosawa turned two classic European stage plays into Japanese films in 1957. But while the first of these adaptations, Throne of Blood, is exciting, action-packed, and expressionistic, the second, The Lower Depths, is dialog-heavy and relentlessly realistic. I was also going to call it low-key, but I realized that wasn’t quite accurate. There’s a [...]
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