Word: kurosawa
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Pardon the sermonizing. But Akira Kurosawa's new film is, among other things, a parable about the importance of tradition in holding back the natural tendency toward disorder. Yet the film doesn't play like a parable. Although the boundless agony of the film's finale has a certain invevitability, the characters are not Kurosawa's puppets. Much of Kagemusha is intimate--the scope of the movie does not become apparent until the last half hour. Before that it proceeds matter-of-factly, with a subtle but pervasive irony, the compositions not only beautiful and delicate, but brimming with thematic...
KAGEMUSHA Directed by Akira Kurosawa Screenplay by Akira Kurosawa and Masato...
...27th film by Akira Kurosawa, 70, Kagemusha sounds like tricky, plot-laden political melodrama. Indeed, there is a lot of story here. On the other hand, there is a lot of film here too, more than 2½ hours of it, even in a truncated "international version." The considerable pleasure of Kagemusha tends to be of the stately visual variety. The old master of Japanese cinema (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) may merely allude to material that in younger hands would be the stuff of a passionate play. But Kurosawa's mood now is autumnal and dispassionate. What really interests...
...also plays the man he is doubling for) grows into his leadership role, acquiring the wisdom that should accompany leadership. In due course he is undone through ironic circumstances. And after that, one must witness the undoing of Shingen's clan through the misrule of his successor. Kurosawa contemplates ruin as he contemplates glory, with an objective thought as to what can be salvaged from disaster in the way of a momentary beauty, the accidental congeries of color and composition that men create as they go about their often bloody affairs. It is not much. But it is clearly...
Indeed, at times, restorers get carried away with their noble task. Akira Kurosawa is amused by the diligence of historians who assemble the complete Japanese versions of films that the director wanted Western audiences to see in a shorter, faster-paced form. He is now at work streamlining his latest film, The Shadow Warrior, in consultation with his executive producers: Francis Coppola and George Lucas...