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Time to finish of my delve into the works of Akira Kurosawa. The final box set I had was the Kurosawa Classic Collection which contains five films on a more Dickensian theme than either samurais or Shakespeare. The following movies are all expertly shot, but do they manage to entertain?
Ikiru (1952, b/w) is a film of two parts. The first part slowly and morosely follows a council bureaucrat as we see the intense mundanity of his day to day life, made even more intense and morose as he discovers he has terminal cancer. The second part is the more interesting aspect to the film as we then watch a sort of courtroom perform the twelve angry men plotline as they attempt to bring justice to our protagonist's final act of courage.
It's two hours and twenty minutes long, which is far too long IMO and I don't think it would have lost anything by shedding an awful lot of the first part of the film. While it's well acted it also commits Kurosawa's biggest sin of over-lingering on so many shots for full emotional impact and, by doing so, cheapens each on in turn and tends to make one want to start rebelling against it rather than get into it. By the time I got to the more interesting part of the film I'd already spent most of my caring reserves.
The final part, about the last 45 minutes, where it's people discussing his life, is mostly a series of flashback to key moments and I can't help wonder why he didn't just make the whole film in this way, start off with the funeral and then provide the whole story in a series of succinct and concise flashbacks because, as it is, for all it's quality production and strong theme, it mostly succeeds in being disjointed and rambling. 3/5
I Live in Fear (1955, b/w) is a very unusual film. I can't say I've ever seen this plotline ever before. A family of a wealthy mining company sue the father and proprietor for, effectively, insanity because he wants to sell up and move everyone to Brazil, because he's clinically petrified of a nuke being dropped. He's then incenced that everyone is being so ungrateful, what with the whole reason the mine exists in the first place is because of him. He is also an incurable philanderer and has extra kids all over the place.
While being a respectable length at just one hour forty minutes, most of that time is spent following the lives and desires of so many different people that the film feels relatively pointless once completed. Sure, there's interest to be had, but mostly it's a big ol' let down of lots and lots of not a lot at all. I liked its themes and I liked to attempt at something different, just not the way it was presented. 2.5/5
The Lower Depths (1957, b/w) is some good old fashioned poverty-porn as we watch a bunch of slum dwellers go about their daily lives of squalor. There's no plot, per-se, it's just the pleasure of watching a whole bunch of character actors chew the scenery for two hours, each trying to win your heart in their own unique way. It mostly achieves this.
It's surprisingly well paced and actually did quite a good job of keeping me interested more the most part. With so many characters and no set protagonists the enjoyment rested entirely on the extent that you could find interest in each individual character, if you liked someone the film picks up, if you can't connect to a character the film slows down. For my part, I honestly had no idea what was 'going on' for pretty much the whole movie, I couldn't ell you much about any of the characters nor what their individual story was, but I still enjoyed this specific example of poverty-porn voyeurism. 3.5/5
Red Beard (1965, b/w) is surprisingly not a pirate movie. Weirdly, it's more poverty-porn encased within a hospital drama. Redbeard is the name of the head doctor. Like Ikiru, the film has two halves, or, rather one section that is two-thirds and one section that's one-third, and the two are very perfectly separated by an intermission. And good god will you be needing an intermission in this three hour film.
Also like the Ikiru, the second part is far superior to the first part by quite a huge margin. Like the second film, there's just too many short stories for it's own good. There are five stories told to the viewer, three of which, while interesting, are mostly superflouous and are mostly contained in the first part. One story fills the entire second part while the 'main' story, that of a spoilt doctor learning to love the charity of a poverty clinic, is mostly at the beginning and end of both parts.
So this is going to be very difficult to rate as I found the first hour and forty five minutes pretty much bog-standard fare of the 3/5 variety while the second part is such a beautiful and well contained little story, and one that shovels on the emotions with layer after layer after layer that I'd rate that part 4.5/5. A median or average of the two would not do justice to the truth of either.
So I'll imagine I've made a two hour fan edit with a lot of the fat taken out and throw forward a 4/5.
Dodes'Ka Den (1970, colour) is the poverty-porn film that literally broke Kurosawa. After being sacked from Tora Tora Tora for being to independent/arrogant/difficult, etc etc, he made this love letter to the slums and put so much into it that when it bombed he attempted suicide. A real dark era in his life. Do I harshly and coldly believe it deserved to bomb? Well, kinda.
Again, there's no actual plot, it's just two and a quarter hours of about eight interwoven short stories about a selection of slum dwellers. You've got your drunks, philanderers, rapists, good Samaritans, fantasists, assholes, crippled, thieves, gossips, the dark personal histories etc etc etc. But much like The Lower Depths, the extent to which the film is enjoyable is the extent to which you like each short story.
For me, I laughed along at quite a few, shared tears at a few, was meh'd by a few and a few bored me to death. It's amazing how one can be thoroughly enjoying one scene only to be literally twitching over the skip button about 5 seconds into a particularly boring scene with a different character. The worst of the lot is a couple who don't talk to each other, the resolution being finding out why they don't talk to each other. Which is nice and all… but… christ, by the final half hour I was volubly screaming "oh God, not these two again!" whenever it shot back to them.
So, like Redbeard, it's a very difficult film to rate, some stories are 4.5/5 while others are more in the line of 1/5, and one can't help feeling that if he'd just cut out a couple of characters and presented something more in the one hour forty mark then it would have been great. But that's the problem with auteurs who get so utterly wrapped up in their creations, they become so desperate to maintain every aspect of their 'vision' that it can wreck their movies as many times as it elevates them. Apparently, the director's cut is four hours long! LMAO. 3/5.
Ikiru (1952, b/w) is a film of two parts. The first part slowly and morosely follows a council bureaucrat as we see the intense mundanity of his day to day life, made even more intense and morose as he discovers he has terminal cancer. The second part is the more interesting aspect to the film as we then watch a sort of courtroom perform the twelve angry men plotline as they attempt to bring justice to our protagonist's final act of courage.
It's two hours and twenty minutes long, which is far too long IMO and I don't think it would have lost anything by shedding an awful lot of the first part of the film. While it's well acted it also commits Kurosawa's biggest sin of over-lingering on so many shots for full emotional impact and, by doing so, cheapens each on in turn and tends to make one want to start rebelling against it rather than get into it. By the time I got to the more interesting part of the film I'd already spent most of my caring reserves.
The final part, about the last 45 minutes, where it's people discussing his life, is mostly a series of flashback to key moments and I can't help wonder why he didn't just make the whole film in this way, start off with the funeral and then provide the whole story in a series of succinct and concise flashbacks because, as it is, for all it's quality production and strong theme, it mostly succeeds in being disjointed and rambling. 3/5
I Live in Fear (1955, b/w) is a very unusual film. I can't say I've ever seen this plotline ever before. A family of a wealthy mining company sue the father and proprietor for, effectively, insanity because he wants to sell up and move everyone to Brazil, because he's clinically petrified of a nuke being dropped. He's then incenced that everyone is being so ungrateful, what with the whole reason the mine exists in the first place is because of him. He is also an incurable philanderer and has extra kids all over the place.
While being a respectable length at just one hour forty minutes, most of that time is spent following the lives and desires of so many different people that the film feels relatively pointless once completed. Sure, there's interest to be had, but mostly it's a big ol' let down of lots and lots of not a lot at all. I liked its themes and I liked to attempt at something different, just not the way it was presented. 2.5/5
The Lower Depths (1957, b/w) is some good old fashioned poverty-porn as we watch a bunch of slum dwellers go about their daily lives of squalor. There's no plot, per-se, it's just the pleasure of watching a whole bunch of character actors chew the scenery for two hours, each trying to win your heart in their own unique way. It mostly achieves this.
It's surprisingly well paced and actually did quite a good job of keeping me interested more the most part. With so many characters and no set protagonists the enjoyment rested entirely on the extent that you could find interest in each individual character, if you liked someone the film picks up, if you can't connect to a character the film slows down. For my part, I honestly had no idea what was 'going on' for pretty much the whole movie, I couldn't ell you much about any of the characters nor what their individual story was, but I still enjoyed this specific example of poverty-porn voyeurism. 3.5/5
Red Beard (1965, b/w) is surprisingly not a pirate movie. Weirdly, it's more poverty-porn encased within a hospital drama. Redbeard is the name of the head doctor. Like Ikiru, the film has two halves, or, rather one section that is two-thirds and one section that's one-third, and the two are very perfectly separated by an intermission. And good god will you be needing an intermission in this three hour film.
Also like the Ikiru, the second part is far superior to the first part by quite a huge margin. Like the second film, there's just too many short stories for it's own good. There are five stories told to the viewer, three of which, while interesting, are mostly superflouous and are mostly contained in the first part. One story fills the entire second part while the 'main' story, that of a spoilt doctor learning to love the charity of a poverty clinic, is mostly at the beginning and end of both parts.
So this is going to be very difficult to rate as I found the first hour and forty five minutes pretty much bog-standard fare of the 3/5 variety while the second part is such a beautiful and well contained little story, and one that shovels on the emotions with layer after layer after layer that I'd rate that part 4.5/5. A median or average of the two would not do justice to the truth of either.
So I'll imagine I've made a two hour fan edit with a lot of the fat taken out and throw forward a 4/5.
Dodes'Ka Den (1970, colour) is the poverty-porn film that literally broke Kurosawa. After being sacked from Tora Tora Tora for being to independent/arrogant/difficult, etc etc, he made this love letter to the slums and put so much into it that when it bombed he attempted suicide. A real dark era in his life. Do I harshly and coldly believe it deserved to bomb? Well, kinda.
Again, there's no actual plot, it's just two and a quarter hours of about eight interwoven short stories about a selection of slum dwellers. You've got your drunks, philanderers, rapists, good Samaritans, fantasists, assholes, crippled, thieves, gossips, the dark personal histories etc etc etc. But much like The Lower Depths, the extent to which the film is enjoyable is the extent to which you like each short story.
For me, I laughed along at quite a few, shared tears at a few, was meh'd by a few and a few bored me to death. It's amazing how one can be thoroughly enjoying one scene only to be literally twitching over the skip button about 5 seconds into a particularly boring scene with a different character. The worst of the lot is a couple who don't talk to each other, the resolution being finding out why they don't talk to each other. Which is nice and all… but… christ, by the final half hour I was volubly screaming "oh God, not these two again!" whenever it shot back to them.
So, like Redbeard, it's a very difficult film to rate, some stories are 4.5/5 while others are more in the line of 1/5, and one can't help feeling that if he'd just cut out a couple of characters and presented something more in the one hour forty mark then it would have been great. But that's the problem with auteurs who get so utterly wrapped up in their creations, they become so desperate to maintain every aspect of their 'vision' that it can wreck their movies as many times as it elevates them. Apparently, the director's cut is four hours long! LMAO. 3/5.
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2014
- Messages
- 4,778