David Vining's Blog, page 129

I think my feet hurt more than Gene Kelly’s do

But that probably has a small thing to do with the fact that Gene Kelly is dead.

Sight & Sound

How is it that Citizen Kane gained the reputation as the greatest film ever made?

It’s not some conspiracy, or just a general assumption. There’s a specific reason for it, and it has everything to do with the British Film Institute.

In 1952, the British Film Institute’s magazine, Sight & Sound performed a poll of film critics to find out what they considered to be the greatest films ever made. That poll gets repeated every ten years, was last done in 2012, and will be done again in a couple of...

Akira Kurosawa: The Definitive Ranking

Akira Kurosawa was one of the titans of cinema. Across his 30 feature films, he created some of the great populist entertainments, adapted foreign literature expertly into the Japanese idiom, and captured some of the best performances on film.

Without him, the world of cinema would be quite different. He effectively created the modern action movie with Seven Samurai. Yojimbo has been copied heavily (though it’s a bit of a copy of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key on its own). The Hidden Fo...

Madadayo

It’s an interesting irony that the last film of Kurosawa’s long career is titled Not Yet. He was a man who didn’t see an end for his career just yet, but an accident left him lame in his final months, preventing him from working on another film set. And yet, Madadayo is both the work of an old man looking clearly back at his own life as well as the limits of his old age. It is both vigorous and calm. It’s not entirely successful, a lesser work of a filmmaker who had made some of the great en...

Rhapsody in August

The third of Kurosawa’s three works that dealt directly with the atomic bombing of Japan and its aftermath, Rhapsody in August is a flawed but worthwhile penultimate film from one of the masters of the craft. There’s a deep well of emotion hiding in the film for a while, hidden behind a quartet of children that feel wrong in more ways than one narratively, but ultimately they fall enough to the side for the movie to actually find the more subtle emotional point Kurosawa was going for.

It’...

Dreams

This might be the most interesting autobiographical films I’ve seen, and that is in no small part because it’s not strictly autobiographical. A collection of dreams, obviously, that Kurosawa supposedly has had throughout his life, touching on real places and people he knew, it seems to show a psychological evolution of the man up to the early 90s from his childhood in the early twentieth century. This anthology’s only throughline is the author, telling stories of himself, his fears, dreams, ...

The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of: A Theda Bara Mystery

A friend of mine just published his new old school Hollywood murder mystery centered on the silent film actress Theda Bara, titled The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of.

He let me read an early draft, and it was an exciting, dreamy, and fun mystery that really captured the feel of 1910s Hollywood, frontier town and nascent film capitol of the world, in wonderful detail.

I highly recommend it.

Ran

The one movie that this reminds me most of isn’t Kagemusha or Throne of Blood or any other film by Akira Kurosawa. No, the movie Ran most reminds me of is Fanny and Alexander by Ingmar Bergman. Both films feel like culminations of careers, two master filmmakers putting everything they’d learned about the craft of filmmaking into a single, epic film. Sure, Bergman’s film didn’t involve massive battles between armies, but it was epic in its own, smaller way, a saga. Kurosawa, perhaps playfully...

Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – Some random thoughts

So, in response to Kurosawa’s adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, I decided to read the original novel (namely the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky), and I came away with a few thoughts.

In the book’s introduction by Pevear, he describes the writing process Dostoevsky had for the book. Written outside of Russia, he had developed a full plan for the book that he tossed after beginning, instead essentially writing the first seven chapters from the hip with the central...

Kagemusha

Dersu Uzala got Kurosawa back to work, but it was Star Wars that brought him back to the top of the cinematic world. George Lucas, heavily inspired by Kurosawa in his space opera, used his newfound power in Hollywood to, alongside Francis Ford Coppola, to convince 20th Century Fox to purchase the international rights to Kurosawa’s next film which secured the necessary funding when combined with Japanese sources to start filming on his dress rehearsal for his next film, Ran. That has always f...