Word: kurosawa
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...first year in Japan, the open, young American met, by chance, both Yasunari Kawabata, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great Zen scholar, D.T. Suzuki; and a little afterward he found himself on a set where Akira Kurosawa was directing Toshiro Mifune in Drunken Angel. Very soon, every foreigner who landed in Tokyo?Somerset Maugham, Tom Wolfe, Richard Avedon, Philip Johnson?was calling on him to be shown around. Richie's shrewd, but forgiving, fascination with human quirks there gives us Truman Capote buying an "imitation geisha wig" and Kurosawa taking in a Fellini film without...
Such was not the case in the country’s earlier, perhaps more xenophobic days. The films of director Yasujiro Ozu, made between 1929 and 1962, were long thought to be too nuanced for the international market. Unlike Kurosawa, whose films featured samurai and other overtly stereotyped Japanese characters and plots, Ozu put his films in a contemporary setting and focused on more universal themes such as youth and aging, or more mundane topics such as the Japanese family dynamic. It wasn’t until the 1970s that theaters started screening his films outside his native country. Until...
From the earliest days of moving pictures, directors have been obsessed with bringing William Shakespeare's Macbeth to the screen. Orson Welles played the tragic king among Stonehenge-like ruins. Akira Kurosawa's murderous medieval lord went down in the most furious fusillade of arrows ever filmed. Roman Polanski, funded by Playboy Productions, filmed Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in the nude...
...easy to stand back and wax ironic about The Last Samurai. But it's not all that difficult to succumb to its full-spirited romanticism either. The director, Edward Zwick, whose Glory is one of the rare, recent triumphs among grand historical tales, has obviously studied his Kurosawa. Working on the script with Marshall Herskovitz and John Logan, Zwick brings the master's concentrated fury to his depictions of hand-to-hand combat; a certain raw, muddy brutality to Cruise's training for those moments; and both epic sweep and powerful detail to the big battles. By way of contrast...
...daring adaptation of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost set in Meiji restoration Japan and staged in the Quincy Grille—which he successfully petitioned to count for his joint VES-Literature degree—he aspires to a Polanski-cum-Kurosawa career trajectory. His weblog, which features translations of lesser-known Proust and original analysis of the Harvard Film Archive’s latest showings of post-war Icelandic cinema, is updated with alarming frequency. Friends enjoy the sly humour that lurks behind his blue-tinted glasses, which are worn even...