I Live In Fear Is A Brutal Rumination on Inescapable Paranoia

In I Live in Fear, the past doesn't just have an ominous presence, it practically blankets the proceedings. The horrors that atomic warfare have unleashed on Japan inform the tormented psychological state of the protagonist of this 1955 Akira Kurosawa motion picture.  That protagonist is middle-aged man Kiichi Nakajima (Toshiro Mifune), whose immense level of anxiety over the prospect of further atomic bombs coming alone and further damaging his world are what instill in him paranoia over making sure he's protected from any further bombings. At first, such paranoia leads him to merely build out a huge bomb shelter, but eventually, he concocts a scheme to travel to what he deems the only safe place on the planet: Brazil.

Stray Dog Meditates On Morality With Great Performances and Exceptional Blocking

Akira Kurosawa is handily one of my favorite filmmakers of all-time. Not exactly the most original sentiment, I agree, but gosh, I just love his movies to pieces. In particular, I love the blocking in his films, the arrangement of characters in a given shot, not to mention their body language, can be immediate visual indicators of who these characters are as people. Take a shot (pictured below) from Stray Dog, for instance, that films three characters in an interrogation room head-on. The woman being interrogated is closest to the camera and clearly evokes a sense of assured confidence that she can get out of this situation, while in the far back is the films protagonist, Detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), all buttoned up, nervous and kept at a distance from someone he wants answers from.

Akira Kurosawa Laid The Groundwork For Inspirational Sports Movies With His Directorial Debut Sanshiro Sugata

There was a time when the world of cinema didn't include director Akira Kurosawa. It's hard to even imagine, it's like picturing comic strips with Peanuts or rock n' roll music without The Beatles, but there was indeed a time period for filmmaking before Kurosawa started out his directorial career. Said career began with the motion picture Sanshiro Sugata, which was released in Japan in March 1943 (it wouldn't debut in America for three more decades in April 1974) to resounding success that paved the way for the numerous movies Kurosawa had yet to make. Many of those movies are superior to Sanshiro Sugata, but this is still a solid movie with plenty to offer beyond its historical importance.

William Shakespeare And Akira Kurosawa Fuse Together Beautifully In Throne of Blood

In the centuries that they've existed and cast such a large shadow over worldwide pop culture, William Shakespeare's works have been adapted through basically every manner conceivable, so it's no wonder that one the Bard's most iconic plays, Macbeth, got adapted into Throne of Blood, a feature film directed and partially written by similarly iconic filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa's style of filmmaking is just as distinctive as Shakespeare's prose. Merging the two of them together by way of taking the outline of Macbeth and contorting it into a tale set in feudal Japan makes good use of both men's talents, especially Kurosawa's, and results in a mixture as tantalizing as putting peanut butter and M&M's together!

Drunken Angel Works As Both A Post-WWII Parable And A Universally Compelling Tale In Its Own Right

SPOILERS FOR DRUNKEN ANGEL ARE AHEAD!!!

By the time Akira Kurosawa's 1948 film Drunken Angel begins, World War II has concluded, but the actions of said war are constantly being felt by so much of the population of Japan, who are just trying to adjust to some form of conventional reality. One person looking to just get by is Sanada (Takashi Shimura), a doctor who finds solace in helping patients and even more solace in consuming copious amounts of alcohol. Typically against his own better judgment, Sanada can't give up on any patient in need and that includes local ruffian Matsunaga (Toshiro Mifune), a young man who Sanada discovers has tuberculous, a condition that can only be cured if Matsunaga slows down his life.

Sanjuro Is Both A Sequel To Yojimbo And Yet Another Excellent Akira Kurosawa Movie

Sanjuro marks my sixth foray in the filmography of Akira Kurosawa and each time I view a movie by this guy, it really is an awesome experience. Kurosawa just shows so much skill as a filmmaker, with such great command of his craft, it's just a joy to spend a few hours immersed in something he created. Sanjuro is yet another great example of the kind of high-quality cinema Kurosawa so frequently dabbled in. This feature serves as a sequel to an earlier Kurosawa work Yojimbo, with Sanjuro, like its predecessor, featuring Toshiruo Mifune in a lead role as a heavily experienced samurai. Those expecting simply a retread of Yojimbo, though, will be elated to know there's plenty going on here in Sanjuro to give it its own identity.

An Inability To Lend Depth To Its Hefty Themes Hurts Courage Under Fire

Given how hesitant American moviegoers seem to be in terms of embracing foreign cinema, I'm thoroughly pleased with the notable ways Akira Kurosawa has impacted mainstream American cinema. Seven Samurai has been remade in an American context multiple times while his motion picture Rashamon has become the default example for a piece of storytelling involving multiple people offering different versions of how a certain chain of events occurred. It looks like Rashamon was a primary source of inspiration for the 1996 Edward Zwick directed Denzel Washington vehicle Courage Under Fire just by taking a gaze at its basic story.

Akira Kurosawa Tackles The World Of Crime Thrillers With High And Low

Crime thrillers have been a notable part of the very fabric of cinema for decades upon decades upon decades, so it's no wonder that Akira Kurosawa, a director notable for the versatility in the genres his films inhabits, would eventually dip his toes into this pond of storytelling with High And Low (which, unless I'm horribly mistaken, is not the only crime thriller in his filmography). Reuniting with Toshiro Mifune, the Leonardo DiCaprio to his Martin Scorsese, this is a tale set in then modern-day Japan and revolves around a kidnapping.

For A Movie Centered On Dares, Nerve Is Shockingly By-The-Numbers

Directors Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sure do love to contemplate the way technology informs the identity of modern day teenagers. Just as Akira Kurosawa frequently utilizes samurai in his tales or how Kathryn Bigelow examines the complex nature of modern-day warfare, Schulman and Joost seem to have a fixation on the way teens love their iPhone and internet judging by their past work like the 2010 documentary Catfish (which I haven't seen as of this writing) or the teaser trailer for their feature film Paranormal Activity 4, which centered on creepy things happening during a teenage girl's Skype call.

Ikiru Review (Classic Write-Up)

There are plenty of amazing moments to be found in Hamilton, many of which show a sense of wisdom that can only be accurately described as "remarkable". One such moment arrives in one of the final songs of the musical, as Alexander Hamilton is about to finally succumb to death, something he imagines so much it feels more like a memory. As the darkness envelops him, he comes to a shocking realization over what the word legacy truly means. I'll let Lin-Manuel Miranda's lyrics take it from here:

Rashomon Review (Classic Write-Up)

Similar to his endlessly remade 1954 work Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa's 1950 feature film Rashomon became so well-known and influential that its unique story structure (various individuals give their own retelling of a murder) was aped by countless movies and TV shows for decades to come. The first time I can recollect that I saw that specific narrative utilized was in an episode of Garfield & Friends and, of course, it wouldn't be the last time that style of storytelling would pop up again in the media I consumed. Watching Rashomon for the first time, it's easy to see why such an entertaining movie would spawn so many imitators, even if, for reasons I'll detail shortly, it doesn't quite stack up to the other Kurosawa pictures I've seen.

Seven Samurai Review (Classic Write-Up)

It's a testament to the quality of the 1954 motion picture Seven Samurai that its influence has so permeated American pop culture that we're still feeling it 62 years later. The film has inspired countless feature films over the numerous decades, namely in how it was remade in America into the well-known MGM western The Magnificent Seven (which is receiving a Denzel Washington led remake this year). Even when one separates Seven Samurai from its massive presence in the spectrum of the worldwide pop culture scene, one can easily see why this movies stuck around for so long.

In this Akira Kurosawa film, a village of farmers is coming under attack from ruthless bandits and annihilation seems all but inevitable. A small group of the inhabitants of this residence go off in search of samurai warriors to defend their domain, even though they have no financial way to compensate them (they intend to tide the combatants over with rice and even that goes missing shortly into their journey). Their voyage soon takes them to a ronin named Kambei (Takashi Shimura), who agrees to both aid the villagers in their task and be a master/trainer to a young man named Katsushiro (Isao Kimura).

Over time, Kambei and Katsushiro help the band of villagers acquire the services of five other samurai, with one of the samurai being an individual named Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), a character who becomes the heart and soul of the entire motion picture. When he first enters the story, he appears as a bumbling drunk, seemingly having all of the combat skills of an inert hippopotamus. Afterwards, he follows the group of six samurai much to their derision and it becomes clear to the audience that Kikuchiyo will be more of a source of effective comedy than anything else in this feature film.

But here's where the true storytelling genius of Seven Samurai is exemplified, as Kikuchiyo soon proves to be far more than what he seems at first glance. Oh he provides plenty of yuks, especially in a sequence where his pride gets the better of him as he attempts to ride a horse. But his backstory is slowly but surely revealed to both the viewer and the other samurai, and it turns out he was an orphaned offspring of villagers just like the ones he's been tasked to protect. The script does a masterful job dispensing this background information in a succinct manner while Toshiro Mifune is similarly in top-notch form ensuring that the more comedic side of this character can co-exist organically with more nuanced aspects of his personality that come forth in the later sequences of Seven Samurai.

Kikuchiyo isn't the only character to garner exceptionally more depth as the story moves along, and that may be the secret to why Seven Samurai works so well. The driving force behind this story is that the titular group of warriors must help protect this group of ragtag villagers and various conflicts and interactions between the downtrodden residents and mercenaries isn't glossed over in a two minute montage. Craft is put into the sundry of character dynamics present in the story, with maybe my favorite being the rapport between Kikychiyo and a constantly sorrowful villager named Yohei (Bokuzen Hidari).

Folks, there's a reason Akira Kurosawa is considered a silver screen legend in the grand scheme of cinema as an artform, and Seven Samurai allows one to see his visual stylings at their apex. There are so many gorgeous shots and pieces of imagery to be found in this motion picture (I particularly like the image of three of the titular samurai walking by the graves of fallen warriors in the last scene of the movie) to keep the One.Perfect.Shot. Twitter feed going for all of eternity. On a similar note, there's also a reason why Seven Samurai continues to resonate as a prominent influence of art in the 21st century. When you make a film this well made and riveting, it's bound to stick around in the pop culture consciousness for awhile.

Yojimbo Review (Classic Write-Up)

Where has this movie been all my life?

Honest to God, Yojimbo is such a clever, inventive, engaging and excellently produced motion picture I'm kicking myself for not watching it waaaaaayy sooner than I did. Better late than never, I suppose, especially when a great feature film like Yojimbo factors into the equation. Directed by Akira Kurosawa (he's also a writer of the film) and released in April 1961, this is the kind of movie that exemplifies why a simple premise can sometimes be the perfect thing to hinge an entire feature on.