Word: rashomon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...veteran star of 126 films and Japan's most famous actor, but Toshiro Mifune, 63, is still known to American audiences by only a handful of movies, among them Kurosawa's Rashomon and the TV mini-series ShŌgun. In spite of his relatively low profile in the U.S.-or perhaps because of it-Mifune was honored last week at the Japan Society in Manhattan, which was beginning an eight-week-long, 40-film retrospective of his work. He surprised his New York audience by appearing at the gala opening in the costume yabusame, a centuries...
After nearly two decades of depression, the Japanese art film has returned to the status of a cottage industry. But it has not seized the world imagination as it did in the 1950s, when the Western success of Kurosawa's Rashomon unlocked a trove of tantalizing, hitherto unknown masterpieces. Part of the appeal of these films lay in their strangeness: Japan seemed not just another country but a different world, full of mystery, elegance, violence, surprise...
BORN. To Toshiro Mifune, 62, ruggedly handsome film actor often referred to as the John Wayne of Japan (Rashomon, 1950; The Seven Samurai, 1954; and the TV movie Shōgun, 1980); and Mika Kitagawa, 33, his longtime girlfriend and sometime movie actress: his third child, her first (he is still married to his first wife); a girl; in Tokyo. Name: Mika...
...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 him is an imagery that can only be termed timeless: the look of an army on the march, silhouetted against...
...result is a sometimes tedious, fitfully organized Rashomon-styte film that intersperses scenes purporting to show how the princess lived with what are presented as interviews with people who knew her and her world. In fact, all the characters in the film, which was shot mainly in Egypt, are actors. What they say about the princess and the indolent ways of Saudi royals is distilled from what Thomas claims to be 300 hours of conversation with well-placed Arabs and other sources (though he spent only two weeks in Saudi Arabia itself). What irritates the Saudis, besides the film...