Wednesday Minute
No. 59 | March 24, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Films of Akira Kurosawa

Featured this week
Monday         —   Rashomon (1950)
Tuesday         —   Ikiru (To Live) (1952)

Seven Samurai (1954)

This is the nature of war:  By protecting others, you save yourself.  If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.

The story

A group of farmers enlist the help of samurai warriors to defend their village against a band of marauding bandits.  Much of story is devoted to the recruiting and hiring of the samurai, the suspicions that arise between the villagers and the mercenaries and the bonds they eventually form, as they await and prepare for the epic battle.

Views & reaction

Philipp Bühler:

The most celebrated of all samurai films is an epoch-making masterpiece, yet it’s also a highly untypical example of this most Japanese of genres.  Never before had a camera got so close to these proud warriors, and no previous filmmaker had burdened them with such a menial task as the defense of an impoverished village.  So it’s little wonder that Akira Kurosawa was decried in his homeland as a “Westernized” director.  Such suspicions were apparently confirmed when John Sturges produced his celebrated Western remake, The Magnificent Seven (1960).  For his own movies, Kurosawa himself had in fact borrowed from John Huston, a director he revered; and in using a modern film language understandable anywhere in the world, he made a clean break with the strict formalism of Japanese cinema.  The result, despite its enormous length, is an enthralling drama.  The film builds up slowly, closely observing the complex society it depicts before climaxing in a thrilling extended battle scene.  Almost in passing, Kurosawa invented the modern action movie.

—Movies of the 50s, Jürgen Müller, ed., 2006

John Anderson:

In a recent customer “review” logged in at the unavoidable Amazon.com, we learned that Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai was, like, okay.  But hardly as cool as the movie it so obviously ripped off, The Magnificent Seven.

As hard as it is to believe sometimes, the Internet was not conceived solely to give vent to unedited ignorance….  The writer didn’t notice that Seven Samurai was released in 1954 and John Sturges’s star-studded (and studly) Hollywood western four years later?  Forgivable.  The real issue is lack of judgment, poverty of taste.

The Magnificent Seven is a fun movie….

But Samurai—also known as The Magnificent Seven in its earliest manifestation—is a fully coherent work of art, an epic in every respect, including its length (which this fan refuses to concede is even slightly protratcted).  To merely call it a classic is glib—but it is a classic, because it continues to provoke, to impassion.  Yes, it spawned western interest in Japanese cinema precisely because it appealed to other-than-Japanese taste—it’s the great example of Kurosawa’s absorption and reimagining of Western entertainment (and, of course, the western) into a Japanese context, of recycling in a way that Hong Kong directors would do with John Ford a couple of decades later.

But this is a film that, coming as it did less than ten years after the country was nuked and defeated, reimagines Japan.

—The A List, 2002

Time Out Film Guide:

Despite the caricatured acting forms of Noh and Kabuki which Kurosawa adopted in his period films, the individual characterizations are precise and memorable, none more so than that by Takashi Shimura, one of the director’s favorite actors, playing the sage, aging, and oddly charismatic samurai leader.  The epic action scenes involving cavalry and samurai are still without peer.

—1000 Films to Change Your Life, 2006

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Seven Samurai (1954)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

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Quote of Note
Liz Wirth:  What do you care?  What do you care about Black Rock?
John J. Macreedy:  I don’t care anything about Black Rock.  Only it just seems to me that there aren’t many towns like this in America. But one town like it is enough.  And because I think something kind of bad happened here, Miss Wirth, something I can’t quite seem to find a handle to.
Liz Wirth:  You don’t know what you’re talking about.
John J. Macreedy:  Well, I know this much.  The rule of law has left here, and the guerrillas have taken over.
—Liz Wirth (Anne Francis), John J. Macreedy (Spencer Tracy), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

…58…59…60.

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Tuesday Minute
No. 58 | March 23, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
Films of Akira Kurosawa

Featured this week
Monday         —   Rashomon (1950)

Ikiru (To Live) (1952)

Life is so short
Fall in love, dear maiden
While your lips are still red
And before you are cold,
For there will be no tomorrow.

The story

Kanji Watanabe is an aging government bureaucrat who has achieved nothing but show up for work every day.  When he learns he is dying, he searches a way to bring a measure of joy and fulfillment to his life.  His son rebuffs him, a friendship with another women does not succeed, and he finally finds a sense of meaning in building a playground in a poor section of Tokyo.

Views & reaction

Ethan de Seife:

Though best known for his samurai epics…Akira Kurosawa was not, in the end, principally concerned with blood and guts….  Kurosawa was cinema’s greatest humanist, and nowhere is this more evident than in Ikiru….

Though full of sadness, Ikiru is ultimately a move of no small spiritual uplift.  And this was Kurosawa’s point—that to achieve anything like satisfaction or happiness, one must suffer.  But suffering, too, is a part of life, and it can be used for good.  Ikiru is immensely life-affirming, even if it is about death and sorrow.  Kurosawa’s gift was to show how these moods are not contradictory, but united as part of the cycle of life.  His sincere belief that small things make a difference is both refreshing and touching, especially in today’s irony-soaked global village.

—1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, 2002

Manny Farber:

Kurosawa’s Ikiru is a giveaway landmark, suggesting a new self-centering approach.  It sums up much of what a termite art aims at:  buglike immersion in a small area without point or aim, and, overall, concentration on nailing down one moment without glamorizing it, but forgetting this accomplishment as soon as it has been passed; the feeling that all is expendable, that it can be chopped up and flung down in a different arrangement without ruin.

—”White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art,” 1962, from Farber on Film, 2009

 Roger Ebert:

I saw Ikiru first in 1960 or 1961. I went to the movie because it was playing in a campus film series and only cost a quarter.  I sat enveloped in the story of Watanabe for 2 1/2 hours, and wrote about it in a class where the essay topic was Socrates’ statement, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”  Over the years I have seen Ikiru very five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think.  And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.

—The Great Movies, 1996

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Ikiru (To Live) (1952)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

 

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Famous Firsts
Anime is a popular style of film usually associated with Japan, where the word anime refers broadly to any animated film.  Here, anime has come to mean animation of a certain style, or styles, often influenced by manga (Japanese comics), and often with more mature themes than American animation.  The first animated film in Japan dates back to 1917 with Imokawa Mukuzo Genkanban no Maki.  The first color feature-length animation in Japan—often considered the first anime (in its more modern sense)—was The Tale of the White Serpent (1958), released in the U.S. in 1961 as Panda and the Magic Serpent.  Anime became a popular export to the U.S. during the 1960s with several TV series:  Osamu Tezuka’s Mighty Atom (adapted as Astro Boy for the U.S.), Mitsuteru Yokoyama’s Tetsujin 28-go (adapted as Gigantor), and Tatsuo Yoshida’s Mach Go Go Go (adapted as Speed Racer).

…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
No. 57 | March 22, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

Many movies I have seen, many others I have not.  If anyone ever asked for the greatest movie I had never seen, my first response might be How would I know if I haven’t see it?—which is true but not a satisfactory answer.  My next response would have been Seven Samurai, the epic from Japanese master film director Akira Kurosawa.  Why I had never seen the film I’m not entirely sure.  I’d seen enough Kurosawa that I had no doubt about his greatness.  I’d read glowing praise of the film from voices I respect.  I’d had the Criterion three-disc DVD set on my shelf for several years.  It was just sitting there, waiting for me to set aside 207 minutes of my life to take it in in all its glory.  I suppose, like a bottle of wine of a certain vintage, it was not something to be enjoyed too lightly.  I needed to wait for the right occasion.

Akira Kurosawa was born 100 years ago Tuesday.  As the film world celebrates the great director’s centennial, I’m happy to say I am not waiting any longer.  I opened the box—at last!—and watched Seven Samurai this past week.  It was worth the wait:  it is indeed a great film.

The seven samurai of the title are hired to protect a small village of farmers in 16th-century Japan.  Kurosawa time and again returned to the medieval period as a setting for his films—a setting about as foreign as you can imagine to the modern Western world.  Yet Kurosawa is often considered—and sometimes criticized for being—the most Western of the great Japanese directors.  His appeal, I suspect, is not his choice of subject matter (though the way of the warrior tends to translate from one culture to another better than other stories), or his crisp, fluid, masterly direction of action sequences, but his ability to create characters, sometimes by the dozen, with depth and clarity, in moving and memorable ways.  In Seven Samurai Kurosawa brings a whole village to life.  There’s a complexity and a balance to the storytelling that’s unusual to see in any film, and Kurosawa pulls it off brilliantly.

What Commodore Perry’s expedition in the 1850s meant for the opening of Japan to the West, Kurosawa’s Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 meant for the opening of Japanese film to the West.  Rashomon introduced the world to Kurosawa, and also led to the discovery of other greats of Japanese cinema, most notably Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story) and Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu). 

Rashomon was my introduction to Kurosawa years ago.  The first time I watched I was intrigued and mystified, so I played it again.  The solution to the mystery was still beyond knowing.  The film is famous for its lack of a solution in the traditional sense, but Kurosawa was not making a comment on truth so much as on the human character—how our needs determine what we allow ourselves to believe.  Among other things, Rashomon is many times an apt metaphor for how we view movies—what we see is what we bring.

Ikiru may seem like an unusual movie for Kurosawa, a director known for his grand epics of centuries past.  Set in a contemporary, urban Japan, as a number of Kurosawa’s early films were, Ikiru follows the final days of Watanabe, a government worker who is stricken with cancer and finds, for the first time, passion and meaning in his life.  The sight of Watanabe sitting on a swing, singing in the snow, in the playground he built, is one of the great images in all of cinema.  Ikiru is Kurosawa at his simplest, humanist best, and it remains my favorite of his works.

I say that knowing I need to see Ran again.  I’m older now.  I may appreciate it in ways I hadn’t before.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Akira Kurosawa made dozens of films.  Some are among best movies ever, others are just as good as anything you’ll see this year.  This week’s theme will feature five of Kurosawa’s best, with commentary from notable writers then and now.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for the next “greatest film I have never seen.”  It may be sitting on my shelf right now.

Our theme this week
Films of Akira Kurosawa

 About Akira Kurosawa

• Born March 23, 1910, Omori, Tokyo
• Studied Western painting, literature, and philosophy
• Worked in the 1930s and ’40s as a writer and assistant director
• Worked for leading Japanese director Yamamoto Kajiro
• Directed more than a dozen films starring Toshiro Mifune (Drunken Angel, Seven Samurai)
• Directed more than twenty films with actor Takashi Shimura (Ikiru, Seven Samurai)
• Well known for the rich themes, visual style, and complex narrative structure of his films
• Transposed Western story elements to Japanese settings (Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, westerns)
• Influenced generations of filmmakers around the world (John Sturges, Sergio Leone, and many others)
• Won countless awards for his films in addition to the career honors listed below
• Died September 6, 1998, Setagaya, Tokyo

Career honors

• Academy Awards:  Honorary Oscar, 1990
• Awards of the Japanese Academy:  Lifetime Achievement Award, 1999
• Blue Ribbon Awards (Japan):  Special Award, 1999
• Directors Guild of America:  Lifetime Achievement Award, 1992
• Mainichi Film Concours (Japan):  Special Award, 1999
• Moscow International Film Festival:  Honorary Prize, 1979
• San Francisco International Film Festival:  Akira Kurosawa Award for Lifetime Achievement in Film Directing, 1986
• Venice Film Festival:  Career Golden Lion, 1982

• No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)
• One Wonderful Sunday (1947)
• Drunken Angel (1948)
• Rashomon (1950)
• The Idiot (1951)
• Ikiru (To Live) (1952)
• Seven Samurai (1954)
• Throne of Blood (1957)
• The Hidden Fortress (1958)
• The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
• Yojimbo (1961)
• Sanjuro (1962)
• Red Beard (1965)
• Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (writer only, Japanese sequences, uncredited)
• Dersu Uzala (1975)
• Kagemusha (1980)
• Ran (1985)
• Dreams (1990)
• Rhapsody in August (1991)

Rashomon (1950)

Views & reaction

Satyajit Ray:

The effect of the film on me, personally, was electric.  I saw it three times on consecutive days and wondered each time if there was another film anywhere which gave such sustained and dazzling proof of a director’s command over every aspect of film making.  Even after fifteen years, whole chunks of the film come vividly back to mind in all their visual and aural richness:  the woodcutter’s journey through the forest, shot with a relentless tracking camera from an incredible variety of angles—high, low, back and front—and cut with axe-edge precision; the bandit’s first sight of the woman as she rides by, her veil lifted momentarily by a breeze, while he lolls in the shade of a tree, slapping away at mosquitoes; the striking formality of the court scene with the judge never seen at all; the scene of witchcraft with the medium whirling in a trance, and the wind blowing from two opposite directions at the same time…  No, there was no doubt the Japanese cinema was something to reckon with, and a good probe into its past achievements was called for.

—Akira Kurosawa (1966), from Our Films, Their Films (1994)

 Bosley Crowther:

Rasho-Mon, which created much excitement when it suddenly appeared upon the scene of the Venice Film Festival last autumn and carried off the grand prize, is, indeed, an artistic achievement of such distinct and exotic character that it is difficult to estimate it alongside conventional story films.  On the surface, it isn’t a picture of the sort that we’re accustomed to at all, being simply a careful observations of a dramatic incident from four points of view, with an eye to discovering some meaning—some rationalization—in the seeming heartlessness of man.

—The New York Times, 1951

 Time Magazine:

Brilliantly acted, Rashomon bulges with barbaric force.  The bandit (Toshiro Mifune) is an unforgettable animal figure, grunting, sweating, swatting at flies that constantly light on his half-naked body, exploding in hyena-like laughter of scorn and triumph.  But, more than a violent story, the film is a harsh study of universal drives stripped down to the core:  lust, fear, selfishness, pride, hatred, vanity, cruelty.  The woodcutter’s version of the crime lays bare the meanness of man with Swiftian bitterness and contempt.

Then, as if unwilling to end on so despairing a note, Director Akira Kurosawa tacks on a hopeful epilogue:  the three men in the rain-drenched ruins discover an abandoned baby, and, by the unselfish act of volunteering to adopt the child, the woodcutter restores the priest’s faith in humanity.  Though the film could hardly have found a better example of a compassionate saving grace, the scene seems an arbitrary afterthought that does not fit the story.

Rashomon has other failings.  Its slow pace is deliberate and consistent enough to be accepted as a matter of style, presumably designed to the Japanese taste, yet U.S. moviegoers are likely to find much of it draggy.  One long sequence is spoiled by a musical score that borrows freely from Ravel’s Bolero, and Director Kurosawa, though obviously gifted, sometimes becomes self-consciously infatuated with the look of his own images.  For all that, Rashomonis a novel, stimulating moviegoing experience, and a sure sign that U.S. film importers will be looking hard at Japanese pictures from now on.

—1952

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Rashomon (1950)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

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Quote of Note
Adela Quested:  I do so hate mysteries.
Richard Fielding:  We English do.
Mrs. Moore:  I rather like mysteries—but I rather dislike muddles.
Richard Fielding:  A mystery is only a high-sounding term for a muddle.
—Adela Quested (Judy Davis), Richard Fielding (James Fox), Mrs. Moore (Peggy Ashcroft), A Passage to India (1984)

…58…59…60.

Friday Minute
No. 56 | March 19, 2010

Humour Me

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
British comedies from the 1960s to today

Featured this week
Monday         —   Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Tuesday         —   Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Wednesday    —   A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
Thursday        —   Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

In the Loop (2009)

Three questions, three answers
The Americans want a war in the Middle East.  The British are determined not to get in the way.  This sounds familiar.  Is it a political satire or a documentary?

A satire, and a blistering one, but it does have the feel of a behind-the-scenes look at a story in the headlines.  Both the Brits and Americans are thoroughly skewered, and with the primary focus on British bureaucrats and politicians, they get the worst of it.  There’s Simon (Tom Hollander), a mid-level minister, who fumbles an interview when he says what he thinks, that war is “unforeseeable.”  That’s enough to set off an international crisis, and Malcolm, a vile and vicious government spokesman, seeks to control the damage.  A few characters want to avoid war, including an American general played by James Gandolfini.  They try to get Simon to speak out, but he’s reluctant to say anything that won’t help his career.

Peter Capaldi plays Malcom Tucker, the foul-mouthed British communications director.  David Rasche plays Linton Barwick, the glib U.S. assistant secretary of state.  Who’s scarier, and who’s funnier?

Malcolm is the bigger role, driving the action from the beginning to the end, and he’s there to humiliate Simon and every other Brit who steps out of line.  Capaldi gives a great performance, and there are few things as sweet as the sheer vitriol that comes from his mouth faster than you can laugh at it.  Linton Barwick is another matter.  He’s a smug, condesending liar, and Rasche gives it a comic turn that’s clearly channeling the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld.  Malcolm is a very funny creation and you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him, but there’s something especially scary about Barwick because he has the power and you know no one can stop him.

The British once were known for their talent for understatement.  Here and in the other films this week you see over-the-top caricatures and heavy doses of profanity.  Has something changed?

It seems so.

Three more from the 2000s

• Shaun of the Dead (2004)
• In Bruges (2008)
• Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

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In the Loop (2009)
Armando Iannucci, director
Trailer

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In the Loop (2009)
Peter Capaldi (Malcolm Tucker), Tom Hollander (Simon Foster), Gina McKee (Judy Molloy), Chris Addison (Toby Wright)

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Quote of Note
“In accordance to the principles of Doublethink, it does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, that victory is not possible.  The war is not meant to be won.  It is meant to be continuous.  The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor.  A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation.  The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects.  And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact.”
—Winston Smith (John Hurt), Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 55 | March 18, 2010

Humour Me

Our theme this week (theme introduction)
British comedies from the 1960s to today

Featured this week
Monday         —   Dr. Strangelove or:  How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Tuesday         —   Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Wednesday    —   A Fish Called Wanda (1988)

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Three questions, three answers
This one’s a romantic comedy, with lots of weddings, as they tell you right in the title, and a happy ending.  It’s hardly as subversive as some of the other films this week, wouldn’t you say?

I’m not so sure about that.  You’d hardly call the film a ringing endorsement of marriage.  The first wedding is a bit of a drunken, desperate affair, highlighted by Charlie’s highly irreverent toast, wittily delivered by Hugh Grant.  The second is one long joke, and a funny one until Charlie meets Carrie’s fiancé.  The third, Carrie’s, doesn’t last.  The fourth, Charlie’s, is done in desperation.  If there’s one ceremony that the filmmakers treat with any seriousness it’s Gareth’s funeral.  There’s more affection expressed at the graveside (by Gareth’s gay lover, no less) than at all the altars put together.  Many romantic comedies end with the wedding of the two stars, implicitly making the point that’s why people fall in love.  Four Weddings and a Funeral plays against that idea, which is one reason why it works.

Again there is the American interloper in the midst of a bevy of Brits.  What about that?

That seems to be a recurrent theme.  Maybe the Brits don’t know what to do without us.  Maybe we’re good comic foils.  Maybe they do it for business reasons.  Andie MacDowell gets the call this time, playing Carrie, the American beauty who catches Charlie’s eye and captures his heart.  She never really seems anything more than an outsider, though, while the Brits alone are in on all the fun.  Maybe it’s MacDowell’s performance, maybe it’s the writing, but I suppose it’s to the film’s credit that it still succeeds as a comedy and as a romance when it seems to have gotten one fundamental point wrong.  The movie is about Charlie’s search for love, and if you ask me, he blows it.  He ends up with the aloof Carrie and passes on his longtime admirer Fiona.  With all due respect to Andie MacDowell—he could have had Kristin Scott Thomas!  Hugh!  In the words of a famous talk-show host, “What the hell were you thinking?”

Was he just clueless?

At first, yes, but he has no excuse after the scene at Carrie’s wedding (clip below).  Fiona tells Charlie she’s been in love with the same bloke for ages, and he asks who it is.  “You, Charlie.  It’s always been you.”  I think of it as her “I coulda been a contenda” speech.  You remember On the Waterfront:  ”It wasn’t him, Charley.  It was you.”  (Or for a rather different take, Raging Bull.)  Charlie, lucky for him, doesn’t end up on a meat hook but with a kiss in the rain.  Fiona’s future is a spot beside Prince Charles—it’s not a happy ending for everybody.

Three more from the 1990s

• Brassed Off (1996)
• The Full Monty (1997)
• Waking Ned Devine (1998)

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Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Mike Newell, director
Wedding Two:  Rowan Atkinson (Father Gerald), David Haig (Bernard), Sophie Thompson (Lydia)

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Four Weddings and a Funeral
Hugh Grant (Charlie), Kristin Scott Thomas (Fiona)

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Four Weddings and a Funeral
Hugh Grant (Charlie), Andie MacDowell (Carrie)

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W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues”

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One of the Greats
Peter Cook was an influential figure in British comedy.  He gained prominence as a member of the satiric show Beyond the Fringe, with Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore, and he worked for decades on the British stage, on television, and in movies.  His film work includes The Wrong Box (1966), Bedazzled (1967), The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970), and The Princess Bride (1987).  In a poll conducted by Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2005, ten years after his death, Cook ranked at the top among comedians’ comedians—the funniest person of the English-speaking world.

…58…59…60.