Word: kurosawa
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...Akira Kurosawa, who died on Sept. 6, was one of the towering figures of world cinema. His work--31 movies made over 50 years--is one of the great treasures of film history. Kurosawa introduced Japanese cinema to the West in 1950 with Rashomon, a work of tremendous moral and cinematic force whose influence on Western filmmakers is immeasurable. This was the first in a series of masterpieces from Kurosawa in the '50s and '60s, one more startling than the other: Ikiru, The Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Yojimbo, High and Low; in his work, the CinemaScope...
DIED. AKIRA KUROSAWA, 88, cinematic visionary whose visceral and visually compelling films integrated Japanese culture into the global movie idiom and inspired a generation of Western directors; in Tokyo. Rashomon (1950), the tale of a murder seen four ways, first brought him fame outside Japan, its title now a byword for the fragility of truth. Even as his samurai epics like Throne of Blood (1957) and Ran (1985) borrowed from the West, particularly Shakespeare, movies outside Japan borrowed from him: The Seven Samurai is at the heart of The Magnificent Seven; The Hidden Fortress is concealed in Star Wars...
...Kurosawa's Rashomon premieres...
DIED. TOSHIRO MIFUNE, 77, rugged actor in epic Japanese films; in Mitaka, Japan. In his 16-film collaboration with director Akira Kurosawa, Mifune came to embody the heroic, archetypical loner with his rough features and angry intensity. America had cowboys; Japan had Mifune, wielding a sword and his trademark glare in the Oscar-winning Rashomon, The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Although Mifune often played the Pacific enemy in American films like Midway (1976), his menace needed no translation. It was his Japanese films that stuck with audiences, inspiring such imitators as Clint Eastwood and even Jim Belushi...
...genre that until recently tended to be low-rent and pretty much self-satirizing. Maybe this is an all too conspicuous waste of precious cinematic resources. But you have to admire everyone's chutzpah: the breadth of Burton's (and writer Jonathan Gems') movie references, which range from Kurosawa to Kubrick; and above all their refusal to offer us a single likable character. Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot...