ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

I love the shot at the end where she puts down her Himalayas travel book and picks back up Harper's Bazaar. She's not going anywhere, and neither is he.

My memory is so terrible. I spent this whole rewatch convinced thorwald didn't do it.

Poor miss lonely heart! What a damning indictment on Jeff and Stella, ignoring the potential suicide happening in front of them multiple times for the simple thrill of the chase.

Think I might be in love with Grace Kelly. Hope to get a date when I meet her up in the stars one day

Sorry, very slow right here. Yes, this was much better than I remembered, love the construction of a particular space and a time, just so vividly conjured. And the story is so self-contained, doesn't feel like it's just under two hours at all. Parallels with Vertigo are spot on, when he falls at the end, that's basically the start of Vertigo, isn't it? The exploration of viewer as voyeur is fine, but it was good not to think about it too much.

Still prefer Vertigo though

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa, 1954

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Seven_Samurai_poster.jpg

Morbsies #97
Sight & Sound Critics #20
Sight & Sound Directors #14

Another biggie! For context here are the next five in the list

Johnny Guitar
Journey to Italy
Sansho the Bailiff
Ordet
The Night of the Hunter

LOL, perfect timing: Male weepies: Pick the "best," I guess

Every single one of the next five movies in line is a flaming goddamned masterpiece. I love all of the next five movies in line. They are great. Yep, love 'em.

Ordet happens to be your particular abnormality

(j/k I can understand loving it)

xps

Greatest film ever made IMO

Hm, guessing you mean Seven Samurai?

mibbes aye mibbes naw

Can be found here - https://archive.org/details/seven-samurai - it is quite long, isn't it?

The length of it feels fine

should explain that I somehow haven't seen it before

It flies by. Not a second overlong.

I wouldn't rank Seven Samurai in my Kurosawa top five.

I probably wouldn't either, but that's more about how many great films the dude has.

It is a bit sad that this is The One because there's a lot of more accessible intros - Yojimbo, Stray Dog, Ikiru.

The samurai film genre is interesting because if you compare it to the western, even though Ford and Hawks and etc certainly had moments where they questioned the myths there are a few decades' worth of films that mostly celebrate those myths, and so when the revisionist western rolls around we know what it's revising. But the samurai film, for a western audience, only comes into vogue in the postwar era, and so it's a generation of writers and directors who grew up with the samurai sprit being part of govt wartime propaganda and so it's pretty much all revisionism, very few movies come to mind where bushido is seen as anything other than a sick joke. At some point it just becomes part of the trope.

Donald Richie's book on Kurosawa is essential reading, and not surprisingly the chapter on Seven Samurai is great. (It may have been his favorite Kurosawa film - he usually listed it as one of his favorite films, period.)

I think it's very compelling to look at how WWII impacted Japanese films and how Japanese films grappled with the aftermath, especially now in light of the current rise of nationalism in certain parts of the world (like ours). Generally speaking, I never found comparisons between Japanese period epics and American Westerns all that interesting, but comparing The Seven Samurai to the American films it inspired (not just The Magnificent Seven but also Saving Private Ryan) does seem edifying in highlighting the differences in history and culture. The Seven Samurai always seemed like a great war film to me - nine years isn't that far removed from the end of WWII, and I was left with the impression that a defeated country was far more likely to re-examine and interrogate the culture surrounding war in ways that a proud and jingoistic country would not like to do. The myriad class conflicts and moral hypocrisies are either watered down or stripped away in something like The Magnificent Seven (turning samurai/military officers into "gunfighters" will do that), but they're always there in The Seven Samurai.

Kikuchiyo gun stealing scene the heart of this movie. Stunning end shot with the Katanas in the graves

The horses in this movie reminded me of the horse(s) in Andrei Rublev. Put me off, for what were some great scenes. hmph. I did eat stake for dinner though so I'm a bit of a simpleton in this way

I like my stake either well done or in the ground.

Rear window is a movie that I had seen so many parodies of that end at first reveal (most famously the Simpsons, but so many others), so the second part suddenly felt really disorienting!

the moment the man looks out of the screen at the audience is so crazy the first time you see it,

and the film is incredible in how it seems to surface filmic epistemologies in an instantly graspable way that can't be untangled from the film's dramatic dynamism! Sorry for the turgid way of phrasing that but I think its clear what I mean???

That said there's something that really 'wears off' about the effect that is very different from e.g. Vertigo, where it burrows down into your subconscious (why does she take the backdoor to the florist???). I think this one relies too much on a central trick or conceit, very A minus grade Hitchcock. There's also something about how its been parodied that gives it a flat, repackagable quality although that's not really its fault. Its a shame because its got so much good stuff in it (thelma ritter, wendell corey, Dior by Head and barbara bel geddes designing gravity defying bras etc) but i could probably never see it again and I wouldn't lose sleep.

seven samurai is so good and to me so obviously one of the best kurosawas so i'm curious what people who think this mid level would put ahead of it

Vertigo wears me down at the hour mark. Acts I and III are strange and powerful

What I'd rank over Seven Samurai:

Red Beard
The Bad Sleep Well
Throne of Blood
Stray Dog
High and Low

lol high and low is fun but bad

the scenes where they're all shouting at each other about shoes are really funny so i'll allow it

so much melodrama for the sake of a shoe mogul!

lol xpost

The shoe business can be a great setting for tragedy: see Bastards by Claire Denis.

yeah i remember the shoe company stuff being kind of dull, but the police procedural half of the movie is excellent

High & Low is my 2nd fave Kurosawa

Ran and High & Low are my fave Kurosawa's

High and Low and Ran are among my very favorite Kurosawa films too (along with The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Ikiru and maybe a couple of others. I have no desire to actually rank them, they're all great films doing very different things.

Ran's in my top ten.

It's in my top 10 ... of 1985

I need to see "The Bad Sleep Well"

FWIW, if there's ever a 35mm print of Ran playing at a repertory theater near you, it's definitely worth seeing. Obviously an epic is going to play better in a theater, but the current restoration that's being used in all DCP's, streaming and Blu-ray/UHD masters is marred by dubious color grading, something older film curators have pointed out given their familiarity with the oft-programmed film.

is Ran the one where there was an actual typhoon while they were filming and Kurosawa was like "we can use this"

It was, Tracer. Kurosawa so great in utilising the weather in his movies. Stray Dog - sweatiest movie ever made?

The rain really was the 8th samurai of this movie

fist pumped every time that deep sloshing mud came on screen

Few directors use movement as masterfully as Kurosawa, and his use of weather is tied to that. (IIRC the rain in Seven Samurai was completely generated - definitely planned.) One standard trick he knows well is how mixing furious or chaotic movement with stillness (or close to stillness) can amplify the emotional impact of any given moment. The rainy climax in The Seven Samurai has such moments (like right after the battle is over), but there are times where Kurosawa will have his characters simply stand there and look and he contrasts that with flags furiously rippling in the wind, or he'll have them next to a bonfire that'll have a lot of movement (either in the smoke or the rippling of the flames or the light). Other moments - in Ran when the emperor leaves his palace in a daze, his face frozen and the invading army just standing before him while all that smoke and fire ripples apocalyptically into the sky. IIRC the climax of Yojimbo has Mifune standing in opposition of the others, and again just standing around but you have a strong wind swirling all that dust. I almost want to compare it to the tension you might feel if you knew an earthquake was building up in the still earth beneath your feet.

I guess I should try again with Kurosawa. I’ve only seen a couple but found them kind of boring.

Which ones?

FWIW, I've seen Kurosawa get knocked down a few pegs simply because he's gotten so much more praise in the U.S. than Ozu and Mizoguchi. I think mainstream critics typically gravitated towards Kurosawa during his lifetime - I have a vague recollection of Roger Ebert and the staff at Entertainment Weekly more or less calling him Japan's greatest filmmaker - and a much higher percentage of his films are available to U.S. audiences. A big factor may be Spielberg and Lucas - at the height of their careers, they championed him endlessly as an enormous influence, so I'm sure that raised his profile.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker flat out wrote that he's "certainly not in the same artistic league with either Ozu or Mizoguchi." I suppose I would agree, but I also think it's also an incredibly uncharitable assessment.

Yeah, Kurosawa's experienced a counter-revolution in the last 30 years as Naruse, Mizoguchi, and Ozu's films have become available. He's "not human" in that Renoir vein or something.

There's also the fact that Kurosawa's movies are full of gangsters and swordplay, which gives them a crossover appeal to genre audiences...though frankly Kurosawa's non-violent dramas are great too.

Overall though I'd say Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi are all still benefiting from the lack of availability of so much from the golden age of Japanese cinema - I'd say at this point the Japanese New Wave is even more well represented. Take someone like Tomu Uchida - according to Kinema Junpo he made the second greatest film in the history of Japanese cinema, but how many of his movies have you seen?

Also gonna do that annoying reductress "men gets little charge out of telling ppl John Lennon beat his wife" thing and mention again that, when Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka embarked on her (very good) directorial career, Ozu and Naruse supported her in the press and during shooting, while Mizoguchi went to the papers to decry his star actress as "limited" and tried his best to blackball her from working altogether.

He also tried to get a 13-year old John Lennon to intervene.