Word: kurosawa
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...first director to emerge from any country is usually taken as a spokesman for that nation's spirit. It's not until later we discover that, say, Akira Kurosawa was the least Japanese of Japanese auteurs, that Satyajit Ray's films had little to do with India's giddy musical movies. Now comes Kaurismaki, a foreign-film Oscar nominee. How Finnish is he? Do the locals really smoke and drink so much? Are they this dour and deadpan funny...
...depiction of Nango, The Thirteen Steps resembles Akira Kurosawa's 1952 classic Ikiru, which tells the story of a cancer-stricken bureaucrat who tries to redeem his stuck-in-the-mud existence by building a neighborhood playground. Like Ikiru's Kanji Watanabe, Nango is in a race against time to make amends for a lifetime of dutiful work by which he now feels poisoned. But compared to Kurosawa's characters, these protagonists are less deftly rendered. Nango's fanatical devotion to the case makes him the personification of a guilty conscience rather than a flesh and blood character...
DIED. JAMES COBURN, 74, rugged and rakish Academy Award-winning actor whose menacing screen presence defined a new type of tough guy in classics such as The Magnificent Seven (1960), an American version of Akira Kurosawa's Japanese epic The Seven Samurai, and The Great Escape (1963); in Los Angeles. Coburn, who rose to fame as the secret agent in the James Bond spoof Our Man Flint, was largely confined to minor roles during his career. While battling debilitating arthritis, however, Coburn won an Oscar in 1998 for his powerful performance as the abusive alcoholic "Pop" Whitehouse in Affliction...
...entry that has garnered the most buzz is NBC's Boomtown (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.), which tells each story from the perspective of several characters. But don't believe the early hype that compares it to Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon: that's like saying because 24 takes place in one day, it's TV's Ulysses. Kurosawa questioned the nature of truth, telling a story through unreliable narrators. Boomtown's relatively straightforward narrative mainly means you get to see car crashes from two different angles. (CSI's flashbacks, which change as the investigators get closer to the truth...
...Devils on the Doorstep, Jiang's second and, to date, last foray as a director, is set during the Japanese occupation of a rural Chinese village. It was shot in black-and-white with the stark sensibilities of Akira Kurosawa. It tells the tale of a hapless farmer who has two Japanese prisoners dumped on him by the Chinese resistance. He is ordered to interrogate them and deliver a report or face deadly consequences. Caught between fear of the rebels and fear of the Japanese, the farmer hatches a plan of self-preservation that proves disastrous. All the characters display...