Word: kurosawa
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Yojimbo. A Japanese movie that really is great: a work by Akira (Rashomon) Kurosawa that seems no more than a bloody and hilarious parody of a Hollywood western but develops into a satire that can stand with the beastliest and best of Bertolt Brecht...
Yojimbo. Japan's Akira Kurosawa, best known for Rashomon, is probably the sole unarguable genius of the cinema who is now at work, and in this bloody and hilarious parody of a Hollywood western he has produced a satire on his species and his century that can stand with the beastliest and best of Bertolt Brecht...
Yojimbo. In the movies, where every man is a genius until proven otherwise, only one director of recent years has not been proven otherwise: Japan's Akira Kurosawa. In Rashomon, Seven Samurai and Throne of Blood he displayed formidable powers as a moralist, an ironist, a calligraphist of violence. In Ikiru, one of cinema's rare great works of art. he revealed a rugged realism, an exquisite humanity, a sense for what is sublime in being human. Now. in a movie that is both a wow of a show and a masterpiece of misanthropy, Kurosawa emerges...
...appalling assault on the human animal and all his works. Of the scores of characters in the film, only five can pretend to be human beings. What's more, three of the five are stupid and cowardly, and the best of them, the noblest instance of mankind that Kurosawa can discover, is the mercenary samurai-a professional killer. Everybody else in the picture is lecherous, treacherous, venal or criminally insane...
Moral: Humanity, drop dead! Humanity may not take Kurosawa's advice, but anybody who sees this picture will be shaken by it. Rage like a gale, action like an avalanche roar out of the screen, leveling all resistance. The scenes are short, the story swift, the cutting terse. Like a giant cauldron the screen boils with life, and Kurosawa's telescopic lenses, spooning deep, lift the depths to the surface and hurl the whole mess at the spectator's face. All the players play with succussive intensity, but Mifune, a magnificent athlete-actor, dominates the scene...