ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

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"