Ranking Kurosawa's Films

I have a soft spot for Throne of Blood. It takes ages to get going (though you could argue this is typical for him), and it seems dull, but all the while he's gradually adding to the set-up. Then in the last 15 minutes or so you get the hand-washing into the walking forest into the death scene, all executed more crisply, if more prosaically, than in Shakespeare. Three of Kurosawa's four greatest moments (though Mifune raising the banner in Seven Samurai may be the greatest of them all) means best Japanese film before Princess Mononoke.

I wonder sometimes why this board is so dead, but then I look above and see three people actually maligning Yojimbo. Amazing.

I just saw one of his lesser known/praised films, The Bad Sleep Well (1960). Kurosawa made it right before Yojimbo - it was the first movie to come out of his own indepedent studio. It's pretty good - a loose remaking of Hamlet to attack government and corporate corruption in modern postwar Japan. Kind of similar to what he did with High and Low Anyone else see it?

Also I am interested in seeing more of his movies, but there's a LOT to choose from. Especially from the '40s. He hasn't disappointed me yet, though. What do you think are the best ones (outside of Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, and Throne of Blood)?

I'd rate Ikiru highly. The story, one man pushing for his small community improvement in his last days, lingers in the memory.

Bought a 2 volume pirated set off eBay, which I now see is selling as 20 DVDs for 17 films. Eventually, will get around to seeing the ones (Red Blood, Throne of Blood) I haven't watched yet. Warning, though - the auction says the versions are legit, but Rashomon looks like it was filmed off a projection.

Cool, I'll probably check out Ikiru and maybe Stray Dog sometime soon.

here's how i'd rank what i've seen. I can remember one incredible shot from The Bad Sleep Well (headlights illuminating an actor on a darkened street) but otherwise it's rather slow and uninspired, especially given the source material. The Stray Dog plot is promising (inspiration for John C. Reilly's cop in Magnolia??) but otherwise insignificant. it's been a few years, however.

Great:
High and Low
Throne of Blood
Seven Samurai
Yojimbo
Sanjuro

Fine:
Stray Dog
Ikiru
The Bad Sleep Well

i need to see Ran, Hidden Fortress and Rashomon (and everything, really), but i'm most interested in Red Beard. it's one of Bill Murray's favorite movies.

re: Throne of Blood, I don't think I've seen a better Shakespeare film.

Good:
High and Low (thinks the audience is a bunch of idiots, e.g. not only showing the family's house on the top of the hill, but also having characters mention it and then opining on how it could cause people to dislike them. still, the caper stuff in enthralling.)
The Hidden Fortress
Yojimbo
Sanjuro

Bad:
Rashômon (only ruined by the ending, where the main character says "everyone is a liar!" like that's supposed to be the message)
The Bad Sleep Well (turns hamlet into a straight revenge fantasy; the ending anticipates hollywood's current "corporations are omnipotent evil" schlock)
Red Beard (zzzz)
Kagemusha (some interesting scenes, but it overcompensates against kurosawa's usual stating of the obvious by not having any point at all)
Ikiru (oprah book club)

barely remember: Throne of Blood, Ran, Seven Samurai

"Rashômon (only ruined by the ending, where the main character says "everyone is a liar!" like that's supposed to be the message)"

That's not the message?

Stray Dog is good, but I don't find it great, except for the last faceoff btwn Mifune and the killer, with a post-orgasmic tableau.

Today is his centennial.

just watched red beard. this opening line from someone's netflix review is pretty classic:

Red Beard teaches us that even samurai need health care reform.

I love Red Beard. It's my favorite Kurosawa, snd way more gripping than any plot summary makes it sound. Whoever said "zzzz" upthread... ????

1. dodeskaden

2. don't like at all

i live in fear
the bad sleep well
hidden fortress
ikiru
stray dog
seven samurai
yojimbo
throne of blood
ran

the 12 I've seen...

1. Seven Samurai
2. Ran
3. Dersu Uzala
4. Yojimbo
5. Dreams
6. Ikiru
7. Rashomon
8. Kagemusha
9. Rhapsody in August
10. The Hidden Fortress
11. High and Low
12. Sanjuro

kurosawa fest at pacific film archive in berkeley this summer is killing it. saw high and low last week... definitely seeing kagemusha and madadayo... i should probably go for ran as well. love this man.

bummed i missed ikiru.. good screen at pfa

wish i had $$$ to see every film at this fest, tbh

How many films are they showing? It's coming to my town in the fall.

Haven't seen them all but The Bad Sleep Well and Throne of Blood would be high in all-time film lists. Throne of Blood possibly top three.

Just got done w/Madadayo and am very pleased. A terrific last effort, maybe one of the best swan songs ever.

I've a choice between Red Beard and Dersu Uzala. Which one and why?

http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/akira-kurosawa-to-ingmar-bergman.html

also, two years late, but i'd go with red beard y because more nudity

how's I Live in Fear?

I would say it's unforgettable, except I don't recall if I've seen it. Yes if it's the one where Mifune plays much older than he was.

It is. I got the one starring Setsuko Hara instead.

I wasn't bowled over but it's worth seeing for Mifune acting totally wracked and frazzled for 2 hours. I feel it has a lot to say about life,death,society and all that but I'm not intellectually equipped to totally get it.

Akira Kurosawa's seminal classic Seven Samurai gets the remake treatment with this modern retelling from The Weinstein Co. Scott Mann directs from a script by John Fusco.

Probably be as shit as the awful Tarkovsky remake with Clonney and it will be 90 mins of linear storytelling with five samurai if Harvey is involved.

That remake was pretty good, actually

I fucking hated it tbh, eradicating all the mystery and beauty of the original and bringing in a very typically smug GC perfomance didn't work for me. I can't see this Kurosawa raping debacle being anything less than mediocre shit as well.

i didn't like the solaris remake but it could have been interesting, maybe. how you could remake seven samurai and not be doing something horrible is beyond me otoh.

Unemployed ninjas protecting helpless peasants and a movie in which Toshiro Mifune is the 2nd best actor, normally I am with you all the way Matt but not on this.

I watched Kagemusha for the first time since 1995, a first draft for what he'd realized far better in Ran: an idea of splendor, a sense that power is ceremonial and thus ephemeral.

*fingers moustache*

doesn't get any better than Ikiru and High and Low imo

I realized I prefer his urban dramas and Shakespeare adaptations to the samurai stuff.

I love the samurai films but I can't argue with Red Beard as his best.

The Bad Sleep Well is also great, though having Mifune off-screen for the ending creates a strangely muted effect.

Among his lesser films, I'm a big fan of The Idiot, which is too long, too slow, and (in its second part) too incoherent, but is still the most effective film adaptation of Dostoevsky.

I've been watching Kurosawa films in chronological order, so far have seen Sanshiro Sugata, Sanshiro Sugata Part Two, The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail, No Regrets for Our Youth, One Wonderful Sunday, and Stray Dog.

Setsuko Hara drew me into No Regrets for Our Youth the way she has in all of her films with Ozu. The other films I’ve enjoyed but haven’t loved.

The films made during the war were quite propagandistic and those made slightly after were subject to American censorship. They get better. I think Stray Dog, or the one just before that, Drunken Angel, are where he starts to get good (also when he starts working with Mifune and Shimura together)

> Rashomon, if anything, is a timeless story. Wasn't there even an American remake a couple of years ago?

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Tuesday, 8 July 2003 08:05 (sixteen years ago)

The Outrage (1964), transplants everything to a western setting (a railway station, not a temple...), has Paul Newman in the Mifune role and William Shatner as the preacher. It's well worth a watch.

xp Sanshiro Sugata 2 is pretty bad, but it's interesting as the first movie to show karate ... the contrast between the wild karate villains and the upright judoka reflects contemporary prejudice toward Okinawans and nationalist suspicions about karate being derived from Chinese martial arts.

Imagine my surprise when Vincent Van Gogh opens his mouth in Dreams.

just watched Rashomon, I liked that the final version of the story, told by the woodcutter who is confirmed to be a liar and a thief, is both the most pitiful and humiliating and also the most believable

I tried to absorb Stray Dog, but it was refracted out

still haven't watched Drunken Angel, I see that it's on the Criterion Channel

Throne of Blood was one of the films that changed the way I watch movies. It was also super influential for my personal music creation.

I thought The Idiot was beautiful, more emotionally powerful than any of the other films of his I’ve seen so far. I really liked the setting of eternal winter and the portrayal of extreme empathy

finally saw Drunken Angel on the Criterion Channel, it was also pretty great

I need to see more of his less canonical titles. I just watched Rashomon again yesterday; what a beautiful, bottomlessly fascinating movie.

not sure exactly why but I didn't love Ikiru

will come back to it

Seven Samurai is really long but has a lot of memorable characters, and Toshiro Mifune’s comic wild man performance is a large part of what keeps the film interesting

> Toshiro Mifune’s comic wild man performance is a large part of what keeps the film interesting

that's probably the opposite of what i think.

I Live in Fear wasn't all that compelling

I did like the final scene in the asylum stairway with Nakajima's daughter and Dr. Harada passing each other, it seemed very potent

I remember liking that one and some knowledgeable friend of mine describing the lead perform as “tightly coiled,” although it’s been awhile.

Throne of Blood did have some of the best ever Kurosawa scenes at its end, but the most indelible scene for me was near the beginning, the prophesying spirit in the forest with the weaving spool.

I know it’s an adaptation of Shakespeare, but it also seems very connected to Seven Samurai in portraying the tension between collectivism and individualism

seeing The Lower Depths (1957, based on a Gorky play) made me wonder if it was an influence for Kore-eda’s Shoplifters

there are some really great scenes in The Hidden Fortress - the prisoner uprising, the spear fight, the bonfire especially

I didn’t realize it was an influence on Lucas for Star Wars, including the telling of the story from the point of view of the lowliest characters

The Bad Sleep Well is relentless and grim, even for Kurosawa

it doesn’t seem at all interested in supplying a satisfying ending, which I like about it

Yojimbo is another really good samurai film, and is different from his previous ones with its frontier town Western quality

it's based on the classic hammett book Red Harvest and it really shows its source material

Watched Stray Dog last week and I loved loved LOVED it - it's so good simply in basic film-making terms (blocking, editing, show don't tell), and the gritty noir vibe and denouement felt timeless. But I'm a Mifune tragic so I guess I was going to like it.

I need to see it again! I've been immersed in Kurosawa but he made so many films that it's really hard to absorb them all

it's hard to pick a favorite Mifune performance, but I think he was really good in Yojimbo

Throne of Blood for me

saw Red Beard for the first time and thought it was fantastic, such a humane story and memorable Toshirô Mifune role

it has been really interesting to watch Kurosawa’s films in order and see the evolution of Mifune’s performances

Dodes’ka-den is not the most interesting of Kurosawa’s films narratively, but its style is fascinating. It feels like a real break from his previous work

it was his first color film, with brightly painted surfaces reminiscent of Red Desert. Also it had his first use of zoom lenses and cycloramas

the stylization of it kind of overwhelmed his previous social realism

Dersu Uzala is another really great Kurosawa film.

Gary Arnold in the WP in 1978 had a very dismissive review of it as “a pastoral epic about the inherent superiority of a man who lives alone and in harmony with nature” which “reflects a decline in dramatic power and a doting, futile taste in sentimental hero-worship.”

I don’t think that describes it at all. The kindness of it reminds me of Red Beard, and it has a lot to say about our current disrespect for other people and our disregard for the environment.

Takashi Shimura's role as the lead samurai in SEVEN SAMURAI is a beautiful work of art

huh, who knew we even had a separate film board. well, at least i don't have to worry about anyone responding to my post

Ha, it’s cursed, like one of those storefront locations that Jerry Seinfeld once referred to as “a black hole of retail.”