Word: kurosawa
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...RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, three generations of a Japanese family contemplate a great and terrible event, the bombing of Nagasaki. But the milieu director Akira Kurosawa creates for their deliberations is small and serene: a farm where a grandmother, who witnessed the blast from afar and lost her husband in it, gently and indirectly informs her grandchildren about the past. And about the proper way to confront it -- with calm, unblinking acceptance. This is a part of their education their parents have neglected. For the middle generation, seeking economic advantage, especially with a branch of the family that has immigrated...
...Seeing Akira Kurosawa's Ran, also based on Lear, provided the missing link. In the film the daughters are sons, and one of them tells the old man that his children are what he made them. Smiley began reading commentaries about the play, especially by feminists, and was miffed to find that even the most radical rejected Shakespeare's terrible twosome: "A remark condemning Goneril and Regan was de rigueur...
...important people in his career Vincent Canby, the New York Times critic whose reviews have exhausted superlatives and sense in praise of Woody. He has few peers at the complex and honorable business of raising a laugh, yet he wants to play in the same league as Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, to create "true literature." On those occasions when he stops scaling Olympus and makes a popular comedy-drama such as Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters, he feels a little cheap, like the Whore of Mensa (the main character and title of one of his funniest short stories...
...officer -- the only member of his unit to survive the war - -- as he confronts the ghosts of his fallen comrades; we literally enter Van Gogh's paintings and find the artist (played by director Martin Scorsese) indifferent to death, obsessed with capturing nature's true spirit. In one of Kurosawa's most magically told tales, a child is forced to confront his hidden feelings about his family's carelessness in cutting down a peach orchard. It prefigures two later dreams (rather conventionally apocalyptic, alas), about an atomic accident and about postnuclear life, in which the human family heedlessly destroys...
...Kurosawa's delicate but insistent linkage of individual fate with the world's fate permits Dreams to avoid solipsism and grants it a certain cautionary urgency. What really compels one's attention, however, is not what he is saying but how he is saying it. At 80, Kurosawa, like many an older artist before him, is impatient with artifice; he has long since proved himself a master of complex narrative. Now he wants to tell what he knows as simply as possible. There are no wild juxtapositions of the creatures of his sleeping world with the images of his waking...