Friday Minute
No. 61 | March 26, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

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

Featured this week
Monday         —   Rashomon (1950)
Tuesday         —   Ikiru (To Live) (1952)
Wednesday    —   Seven Samurai (1954)
Thursday        —   Yojimbo (1961)

Ran (1985)

Man is born crying.  When he has cried enough, he dies.

The story

Akira Kurosawa adapts a parable of feudal Japan, Lord Mori’s lesson of the three arrows, along with Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear, for this story set in the 16th century.  Aging warlord Hidetora Ichimonji intends to divide his kingdom among his three sons.  Betrayal begets revenge, as the family is consumed in an epic and tragic battle for succession.  Ran is Japanese for chaos or rebellion.

Views & reaction

Vincent Canby:

The film’s physical spectacle is astonishingly fine, the battle scenes so well integrated into the strong, inevitable story line that they never seem to become arbitrary set pieces—specialty numbers—the work of second-unit directors who know more about horses than actors.  It’s also meant as praise when I say that Ran is very much an old man’s movie—Kurosawa is seventy-five years old…. Here is a film by a man whose art now stands outside time and fashion.

Ran…is a film that couldn’t possibly have been made at any earlier period in this great director’s career.

—The New York Times, 1985

 Roger Ebert:

One of the early reviews of Akira Kurosawa’s Ran said that he could not possibly have directed it at an earlier age.  My first impression was to question that act of critical omnipotence.  Who is to say Kurosawa couldn’t have made this film at fifty or sixty, instead of at seventy-five, as he has?  But then I thought longer about Ran, which is based on Shakespeare’s King Lear and on a similar medieval samurai legend.  And I thought about Laurence Olivier’s Lear and about the Lear I recently saw starring Douglas Campbell and I realized that age is probably a prerequisite to fully understanding this character.  Dustin Hoffman might be able to play Willy Loman by aging himself with makeup, but he will have to wait another twenty years to play Lear….

Ran is a great, glorious achievement.  Kurosawa must often have associated himself with the old lord as he tried to put this film together, but in the end he has triumphed, and the image I have of him, at seventy-five, is of three arrows bundled together.

—The Chicago Sun-Times, 1985

Michael Gebert:

In old age, Akira Kurosawa seems to have moved into a timeless realm of his own where his samurai dramas ask the big questions that no one else even dares contemplate any more; he seems to walk with Shakespeare and the Greek dramatists, not mere 20th-century moviemakers….

Akira Kurosawa’s recasting of King Lear as a struggle between an old shogun and three samurai sons, the main troublemaker egged on Macbeth-like by his power-mad wife (Mieko Harada, in a tour-de-force performance).  A dazzling fusion of brilliant color and overwhelming drama, filmed with imperial command of the art form by a great director as the summation of his work—and perhaps the one lasting masterpiece of recent years.

—The Encyclopedia of Movie Awards, 1996 (on Kagemusha and Ran)

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Ran (1985)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

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Final Friday Five, the monthly mini-quiz
1.  Name the only movie to receive three Oscar nominations for Best Actor.
      a.  The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
      b.  The Godfather, Part II (1974)
      c.  Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
      d.  Gone With the Wind (1939)
      e.  The Caine Mutiny (1954)

2.  For these films directed by Akira Kurosawa, name two of the three that did not star Toshiro Mifune.
      a.  Drunken Angel
      b.  Rashomon
      c.  Ikiru (To Live)
      d.  Seven Samurai
      e.  Throne of Blood
      f.   Yojimbo
      g.  Dersu Uzala
      h.  Kagemusha

3.  For the eight painters listed below, name the actors who portrayed them on the big screen.
      a.  Vincent van Gogh
      b.  Pablo Picasso
      c.  Jackson Pollock
      d.  Rembrandt van Rijn
      e.  Michelangelo Buonarroti
      f.   Andy Warhol
      g.  Diego Rivera
      h.  Paul Gauguin
      Actors:  Alfred Molina, Anthony Hopkins, Anthony Quinn, Charles Laughton, Charlton Heston, Ed Harris, Jared Harris, Kirk Douglas

4.  For the four baseball movies below, select the following four:  director, actor, player, team nickname.
      a.  Bull Durham
      b.  The Natural
      c.  Eight Men Out
      d.  Bang the Drum Slowly
      Directors:  Barry Levinson, John Sayles, John D. Hancock, Ron Shelton
      Actors:  D.B. Sweeney, Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner, Robert Redford
      Players:  Roy Hobbs, Crash Davis, Bruce Pearson, Joe Jackson
      Team Nicknames:  White Sox, Mammoths, Bulls, Knights

5.  Rearrange the  letters in the names below to form the names of five Best Actress winners from the past decade.
      a.  Linda I. McKeon
      b.  Caroline H. Hertz
      c.  Sarah Winkly
      d.  Rene H. Milner
      e.  Carol Buskland

Answers here.

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 60 | March 25, 2010

Kurosawa Centennial

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

Featured this week
Monday         —   Rashomon (1950)
Tuesday         —   Ikiru (To Live) (1952)
Wednesday    —   Seven Samurai (1954)

Yojimbo (1961)

I’ll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die.

The story

Sanjuro is a vagrant ronin (mercenary samurai) who visits a small town in 19th-century Japan.  Competing crime lords battle for control of the town, and Sanjuro offers his services as a yojimbo (bodyguard) for the side that makes the better offer.  Through political jockeying and deft use of his sword—a lot of dead bodies later—Sanjuro brings peace to the town.  The film borrows from American westerns (and was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars) and also transposes plot elements from the Dashiell Hammett novels Red Harvest and The Glass Key.

Views & reaction

Pauline Kael:

Yojimbo is not a film that needs much critical analysis; its boisterous power and good spirits are right there on the surface.  Lechery, avarice, cowardice, animality, are rendered by fire; they become joy in life, in even the lowest forms of human life.  (Kurosawa’s grotesque variants of the John Ford stock company include a giant—a bit mentally retarded, perhaps.)  The whimpering, maimed and cringing are so vivid they seem joyful; what in life might be pathetic, loathsome, offensive is made comic and beautiful.  Kurosawa makes us accept even the most brutish of his creatures as more alive than the man who doesn’t yield to temptation.  There is so much displacement that we don’t have time or inclination to ask why we are enjoying the action; we respond kinesthetically.  It’s hard to believe that others don’t share this response.  Still, I should remember Bosley Crowther with his “the dramatic penetratioin is not deep, and the plot complications are many and hard to follow in Japanese.”  And John Macdonald, who writes, “It is a dark, neurotic, claustrophobic film…” and, “The Japanese have long been noted for their clever mimicry of the West.  Yojimbo in the cinematic equivalent of their ten-cent ball-point pens and their ninety-eight-cent mini-cameras.  But one expects more of Kurosawa.”

More?  Kurosawa, one of the few great new masters of the medium, has had one weakness:  he has often failed to find themes that were commensurate with the surge and energy of his images….  Now, in Yojimbo, Kurosawa has made a farce of force.  And now that he has done it, we can remember how good his comic scenes always were and that he frequently tended toward parody.

—KPFA broadcast, 1962 / Partisan Review, 1963; from For Keeps, 1994

James Berardinelli:

Yojimbo does not cause viewers to ponder deep issues in the way Rashomon does, nor does it possess the epic grandness of The Seven Samurai, yet it must still be considered in the top tier of Kurosawa’s films.  Stylish, compelling, and involving, it became as much a blueprint for future productions as it is an homage to past ones.  And, in Mifune’s Sanjuro, we have an unforgettable protagonist—a super-samurai who, by the sheer force of his presence, elevates this movie to a level of greatness.  Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name,” a character whose influence has stretched far and wide over the past four decades, is a direct descendent of Sanjuro.  It is fair to say that, without Yojimbo, certain key aspects of Western cinema would not be the same today.

—reelviews.net, 2002

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Yojimbo (1961)
Akira Kurosawa, director
Trailer

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Point of View
“The term giant is used too often to describe artists.  But in the case of Akira Kurosawa, we have one of the rare instances where the term fits.”
—Martin Scorsese

…58…59…60.

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.