My delve into the works of Akira Kurosawa continues. Once again, all wonderfully shot movies, but did any of them manage to entertain? These are all individual dvds and weren't part of any boxsets that were available:
Silent Duel (1949) (b/w) was a film I really enjoyed. So rarely do you see people discuss sexually transmitted diseases in the social discourse, let alone in movies. I mean, how many can you think of? Philadelphia? Right… and. And yet I consider this to be the actual problem with sex, possibly the only problem beyond rape.
A soldier catches an STD while in service and, when he's operated on by the staff surgeon, the surgeon gets infected by the disease, forcing him to push away his bride to be upon his return to civilian life. Highly emotional, extremely intelligent and, for me, had really nice pacing and believable scenarios. Maybe not a must-watch for all but if the topic interests you then it's a hidden gem if ever there was one. 4.5/5
Scandal (1950) (b/w) Is an incredibly poorly paced and dragging predictable film that suffocates its few good story beats. A newspaper makes up a story about an artist having an affair with a beautiful female celebrity for the money, to which our hero decides to sue against all hope of winning. See, on the face of it this story is as relevant today as it was then, this should be great, right?
Alas, that aspect of the movie only covers the beginning and end, the main bulk of the film is centred around the shady lawyer the hero hires, who's as bent as the newspaper guys. So we just watch a solid hour of this old guy ham up his damaged conscience with ever more frustrating slowness. If I wasn't trying my best to give Akira a fully fair shot because its Akira I'd have started skipping at about the 40 minute mark. 2/5
Rashomon (1950) (b/w) is one of Akira's all time, all time classics. I recently saw Terry Gilliam in a YouTube video where he was basically creaming in his pants over this film. And after watching it I can see why. However, the film itself is actually quite difficult to watch. None of the characters are particularly likeable, it plays for laughs more than it plays for solemnness, and the ham levels are off the charts, with many scenes no being so much chewed as scoffed like a hungry pig.
However, what it does is make you think about it long after you've seen it. As each hour passes, as each day passes, one's mind kind of blanks out all the excess and leaves you with the core essence of the film, and that essence is pure genius. Apparently this film inspired The Usual Suspects among others. It tells the tale of a murder, only it tells the same tale several times, each time from the perspective of a different witness, for quite mind-bending results. A genuine all time classic that will forever be as relevant as the day it was written, though a less hammy remake would be great at some point. 4/5
Kagemusha The Shadow Warrior (1980) (colour) Was a bit of a let down for me. This is Akira back doing what he does best with a visual treat of Samurai and warring states era of Japan, now in full glorious colour! He was even given huge backing from both George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola to make this, both names used as promotion on the front cover. It's about a scummy rogue who happens to look like the emperor & so gets roped in to play the emperor after the emperor's death. Sounds fun, but its not.
It's mostly just very long and very boring humdrum things that happen with very little play made of the obvious potential. Sort of like the Star Wars prequels really, it always looks like something's happening, but nothing really happens. Even the big emotional ending kinda falls flat in a big *shrug* kinda way. After thinking about it afterwards I think this might be more of a big deal to the Japanese specifically as a big theme of the film is the morality of defensive rather than offensive warfare, which would obviously be a thing in Japan more than in the west, so there's a lot lost in translation as well, but even still, man do some of the scenes draaaag in the two and a half!!!!! hour film. 2.5/5
Ran (1985) (colour) is much more back on track. As the above but actually interesting and well paced. It probably helps as well that this is another of his Shakespeare reworks, this time transposing King Lear onto Samurai era warring states Japan. The primary difference here being that the kingdom is divided between his sons rather than his daughters. You could watch this without any knowledge of King Lear and it would still be equally as good. Take all my negatives about Kagemusha and reverse them and you have all the positives on show here, from great characters to great pacing and great character arcs. Quite possibly one of life's must watches. 4.5/5
Rhapsody in August (2001) (colour) Has Richard Gere in it for about 19 minutes. He even speaks some Japanese when he does show up, not much, but some. So what's it actually about beyond "having Richard Gere in a Kurosawa movie"? It's about this old grandma and the loss she and her generation suffered as a result of the bomb on Nagasaki, in her case her husband. Her grandchildren take up most of the screen time as they stay with her while their parents visit America. She refuses to go to America even though the kids desperately want to go. The kids visit lots of bomb memorials and stuff while they wait for her to decide if she'll go or not.
And this is the kind of film where reviewing it just consists of telling you the plot, because there's not really much else to say. It's a nice film. You know, a nice film. A film you could watch with the whole family and everyone can be equally unexcited and equally duty bound to say how nice it is. You just go along with its niceness until it stops, nothing really negative to say but nothing positive either, but with such a well meaning theme that it's impossible to really go against any of its lame aspects. A nice piece of Oscar bait that isn't over the top Oscar bait kind of thing. 3/5