Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Kurodrama
Akira Kurosawa seems fond of epic films. At least he is fond of films with profound themes and messages. It is a shame, then, that Kurosawa is so overly dramatic in his films. Many analyze the use of weather and how it highlights scenes and heightens effect. Many directors have done so to great effect. However, Nebraska sized gusts blowing down the feudal streets of Japan is nothing but a distraction. Stray Dog does not need to remind us of the heat at constant intervals throughout the film, it is partonizing. The issue hardly ends with Kurosawa's depitction of weather. It grows to influence effects such as blood. This is especially evident in Ran. Kurosawa spent a million and a half dollars to build the set of a Japanese castle, only to burn it down. That shows a great level in care in the creation of cinema. It baffles me, then, why blood would be depicted by fire truck colored spray paint. The old idiom "the Devil is in the detail" comes to mind.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
Kurasawa is better known for his affect on American Cinema than for his actual work in Japan. His early works are interesting in the Japanese style which is more paced and slowly unfolding than the in-your-face film making of the United States. Like any successful film maker he went over-the-top with success and finally surreal in his final works. Unlike Woody Allen, at least all his films can be considered original (except for King Lear / Ran) and his own statements and not just the re-working of someone else's ideas (which is what Hollywood has used him for extensively.)
Dude i definitely feel you on the whole wind thing but i think that hey the set was going to come down anyway so why not burn it? i think it added to the realism of that scene granted that there probably was another, better way to do that, i think that that's his style and that that was the best way he could see getting it done.
yeah I think that a lot of what he did was overdone. While I enjoyed it, sometimes, especially during Ran, I found myself getting physically tired just watching what was happening on the screen because there was just so much action all the time. This was offset by long slow moving scenes however, which was nice...
Post a Comment