ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

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.

For many years, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu were the big three Japanese directors, so it's natural that they'd be pitted against each other. I'd take Oshima over them all myself.

Which ones?

Yojimbo and Dreams, I think, but it was a while ago.

I find them boring too.

Ikiru
Throne Of Blood
Stray Dog
Dreams
Yojimbo
Kagemusha
Seven Samurai
One Wonderful Sunday
Rashomon
Drunken Angel
Sanjuro
Ran
The Men Who Tread On Tiger's Tails

Haven't seen the rest yet. Even the bottom choice here is still far from a bad film tho.

It really needs a reissue (and a restoration) to bring it back into print, but Rhapsody in August is worth catching. Haven't seen it in a long time (maybe high school?) so I'm not sure how the filmmaking would come off now, but at the time it was the first film I saw to really address the use of nuclear weapons to more or less end WWII. Plenty of famous examples pre-date it and according to Wikipedia there was controversy with some vocally criticizing the film's political stance, but at least to me I didn't think it was defending Japan's wrongs with regards to WWII - simply on humanitarian grounds it made a deep impression.

i've bought a copy of that in the last year (currently unwatched)

(the two i'm missing are The Idiot and Dreams)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_vs._the_Spider

why is this not titled "A small town sheriff and high school teacher vs. the spider"