Akira Kurosawa was born on March 23, 1910 to the descendents of a samurai family, with seven brothers and sisters. His childhood was marred repeatedly by death and destruction, all three of his brothers dying premature deaths, as well as one of his sisters. He lived through the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, in which 100,000 people ...
Ran is Kurosawa’s last masterpiece from a man who made many. He made three more films afterwards, but none came close to the size and scope of Ran. Financing had been hard for Kurosawa to raise in his later years. Since Red Beard in 1965, he was making one film every five years and at ...
Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashamon is loosely based on two short stories by Ryuonsuke Akutagawa. The main story of the film is based on In the Grove while the film’s opening and closing scenes is from the short story, Rashomon. Like other novels or books that became films, there are naturally differences in the film and ...
What is a dream? Some might call it a reflection of one’s subconscious. Others might call it a deep seeded regret, want, or desire. Others may even cite it as a vision of the future, or explanation of the past. Akira Kurosawa once said that “Man is a genius when he is dreaming.” Nobody will ...
Turner Classic Movies recently presented the classic film Rashomon, a Japanese psychological drama directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film is done in the Japanese language and has English subtitles. The word Rashomon means In the Woods which is the setting for this dynamic presentation. A college professor of mine once used the generic Rashomon to ...
On the 65th anniversary of the Hollywood blacklist, Sean Penn wrote an article for The Hollywood Reporter discussing his blacklisted father, Leon Penn. In the article, Penn called his dad “a patriot to his core,” a war veteran who was “barred from working in motion pictures by the same country for which he had risked ...
I started writing a short history for each of the Top 100 films on the American Film Institutes list, and then I realized that the AFI list is problematic for a few different reasons. It only represents the opinions of film critics, it stays within the boundaries of Hollywood and American born films, and it ...
Takashi Miike, Japanese director of several cult and horror films such as “Ichi the Killer,” has taken an old samurai film, “Harakiri” by Masaki Kobayashi, and remade it in 3D. The film was already a cult classic. The popularity of samurai cinema has waned over the years, so this remake might help bring back the ...
