Cortechba Overrated

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Yvonne Jodi Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

moondog-8 There is a phrase by the experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, who says some films are structured like a camera mounted on the head of a dog who goes down an alley, sniffing everything along the way.That's how this movie is. The structure is "Kurosawa started out as a baby, then he became a kid, then a young man, then a movie director, then he started making 'masterpieces', then he grew old, The End." The word 'masterpiece' is used a lot in this film to describe Kurosawa's output, without explaining *what* makes his films so good/great. Just because the off-screen narrator reading a script says that a film is a masterpiece, are we supposed to kiss his rear-end and accept that a certain movie is one of the great works of art of the 20th century? And one more point. The voice of Paul Scofield is used as the voice of Kurosawa, when excerpts from the director's memoirs are being read off screen. He brings pear-shaped Shakespearean tones to the text...but why him?? If you were making a documentary about Billie Holiday, would you use Dame Judi Densch as her voice????

mugczar this dvd-ography strikes me as something of a "one-timer"; that is, once you've seen it, there's no reason to see it ever again. in fact, if you've seen more than a few kurosawa films, once might be too many.but used as an introduction to the filmmaker, "kurosawa" is worth watching, if you can look past editing techniques adam low and david kitson must have believed were clever, since they were (over)used throughout the piece. the main offender was the use of black and white footage, shot to try to emulate the look of kurosawa's films. however, it takes more than just switching to "BW" on your handycam to pull that off.the other one that really stuck out in a long, painful-to-watch kind of way, was at the end (spoiler?) at the site of kurosawa's grave, from which smoke emanates. the editor reversed a slow zoom out to give the effect of zooming in on smoke *returning* to the grave. it must have lasted five minutes.again, if you can look past these and are wondering what the deal is with all the hype about kurosawa, this is a wonderful place to find out.

tedg Spoilers herein.I'm skeptical of projects like this. A great artist is no more defined than that his work stands on its own. Kurosawa's work does. He is one of less than a half dozen people who invented film and thereby changed the way we dream.I believe in biographies of historical characters, because a convincing case can be made for history as a collection of human actions, not ideas. So it makes sense to understand some of those people in some way. But art is different. Different enough that if we talk about the life, it has to be the life of ideas.Pollock was a drunk. So what? The recent film of his life reduced his work to an unexplained obsession. What's interesting and important with that?Anyway, the rationale behind these projects, this one surely, is an appreciation of a life, despite the repeated information that he was all film and nothing else. We do get snippets of some work, but largely wrapped around some fact: his difficulties with management, his financing, the hotel room he used when writing the script. A huge `discovery' is presented when explaining that a childhood expedition to see corpses from the great earthquake is reflected in later films. Some lip service is given to his intensity and commitment. But nowhere can we find something about his ideas of visual grammar. We don't get any insight into the subjectivization of the camera, the revolution he wrought.I'm sure that this was financed with school libraries in mind, so they dumbed it down to match TeeVee notions of what biographies are all about. But I am also sure that this master would rather see a film about him, centered on the work and with no dialog at all. None, even words as well intoned as those by Shepard and Scofield.

brickwall I saw this on PBS' Great Performances. This documentary is about film genius Akira Kurosawa. The documentary charts Akira Kurosawa's early life in pre-WWII Japan to the end of his life. Kurosawa brought Japanese cinema to a world wide audience. I recommend "Kurosawa" for anyone who is an Akira Kurosawa fan.