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Major Kurosawa retrospective on at BFI Southbank now (June 2010) I want to see Yojimbo , Seven Samurai ,but also Bad Sleep Well which i believe is being remade

They're showing kurosawa this week at VIZ cinema, the new theatre in japan town, san francisco. Next week is ozu, and the week after that mizoguchi.
I just saw high and low. The print was ok and the sound system and comfy seats were great.

BB wrote:the sound system and comfy seats were great.

Monty Pythons 'Spanish Inquisition' team will be disappointed to hear that!
(unless, of course, you're a masochist!)

Bad idea: Firm scores Kurosawa remake rights.

Those stories for the most part have become so ubiquitous in pop culture that it really means nothing beyond their ability to use the names.

Toho itself has also been doing the Kurosawa remake thing for a while, with new versions of Sanjuro and The Hidden Fortress only a couple of years ago, though Hidden Fortress apparently departs from the Kurosawa in a number of ways (according to Mark Schilling's review in the Japan Times at the time of its release, this new film swaps out one of the bickering peasants for a young 20 something chap who immediately becomes the love interest for the princess).

Asahi Shinbun (Japanese) - Kurosawa's 659 page original script for Tora Tora Tora to be made available as a free e-book.

The script, co-written by Oguni Hideo and Kikushima Ryuuzou, will be made available on the 8th Dec. at the homepage of the company who handled the scanning of the text, Voyager.

It appears the book will be released on for their BinB service which be made available on the same day. Apparently it uses any HTML5-enabled browser to display books with Japanese characters, images, etc. and also supports EPUB. Since copy-write is far shorter in Japan than many other countries it will be interesting to see what else is made available for free in the future.

Awesome, just finished watching "Tora!" and the special features. This will be an interesting read.

An English translation of Kurosawa´s script The Masque of the Black Death is/was available at the Kurosawa Digital Archives. But now it seems inaccessible online AFAIK. If anybody knows anything about this, please post, thanks!

Nifty litte article about Dersu Uzala.

Includes info about the colour film stock used, a Soviet brand called Svema and apparently prone to early fading -- which might indicate restoration problems, and why the film looks the way it does on available DVDs

Video: Composing Movement from Tony Zhou

FrauBlucher wrote:Video: Composing Movement from Tony Zhou

Excellent. I learned stuff. F'rinstance, hadn't noticed before that Kurosawa' shots have a discernible beginning, middle, & end.

bottled spider wrote:

FrauBlucher wrote:Video: Composing Movement from Tony Zhou

Excellent. I learned stuff. F'rinstance, hadn't noticed before that Kurosawa' shots have a discernible beginning, middle, & end.

I can't tell if you're being facetious or not and I don't think it matters either way. I can say that I learn something every time I watch one of Tony Zhou's videos and I very much appreciate that he continues to make them.

This one, especially, made me anxious to see a decent print of Ran (I only have the copy from that old Kurosawa collector's set put out by a company I can't even recall). Does anyone have the Criterion DVD? I have several Criterion OOPs that I'd be willing to let you choose a couple from in trade.

Not facetious at all. I had never consciously noticed the beginning/middle/end aspect of individual shots in Kurosawa. Nor had it occurred to me that the most basic (but not sole) reason for Kurosawa's pronounced interest in weather is that it provides a way to add movement to an otherwise static scene. I've seen one other Tony Zhou video, also kindly linked by someone somewhere on this site (The Bad Sleep Well thread?), which was equally informative. My only criticism would be that I find the background score unnecessary and distracting.

bottled spider wrote:Not facetious at all. I had never consciously noticed the beginning/middle/end aspect of individual shots in Kurosawa. Nor had it occurred to me that the most basic (but not sole) reason for Kurosawa's pronounced interest in weather is that it provides a way to add movement to an otherwise static scene. I've seen one other Tony Zhou video, also kindly linked by someone somewhere on this site (The Bad Sleep Well thread?), which was equally informative. My only criticism would be that I find the background score unnecessary and distracting.

Glad you're enjoying the videos. I highly recommend his other videos (distracting background scores notwithstanding). They are so short that even if you only glean a thing or two from them, they end up being worth the time investment. They're all on the Vimeo channel you end up on from the link to the Kurosawa video.

wattsup32 wrote:Glad you're enjoying the videos. I highly recommend his other videos (distracting background scores notwithstanding). They are so short that even if you only glean a thing or two from them, they end up being worth the time investment. They're all on the Vimeo channel you end up on from the link to the Kurosawa video.

Not quite all sadly as Vimeo pulled the Snowpiercer: Left or Right video a week or so ago. It is still up on YouTube, but we'd better watch it fast!

This latest video is a wonderful one, especially with its focus on movement informing character behaviour (or multiple characters behaving, either contrasting differently against each other or moving as one) beyond the more common approach of how the action is composed through foreground/background, aspect ratio and so on. Even the atmosphere is a character in Kurosawa's films!

Red Beard, restored, to screen at this year´s Venice Film Festival:
http://www.screendaily.com/festivals/ve ... ntID=42422" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Also:

Toho has restored all of their Kurosawa productions. All films screen later this year as part of the Lumiere Film Festival in France:
http://www.festival-lumiere.org/en/prog ... ogram.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The French boutique label Wild Side Video is partnering with Toho for the screenings.

Kurosawa´s only (?) TV commercial, animated, for Calpis, Japanese yoghurt, probably made 1996 or 1997:

http://lovehk888.exblog.jp/19348377/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; - look in topmost Youtube screen - boy meets girl in bamboo forest

Article, early 1997:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ ... 35a6cd85f/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Well, it may have been the only TV commercial he directed—I assume he didn't direct the commercials he starred in, which included spots for NEC and Suntory—but it certainly wasn't his first directorial work for television as the article claims. He made a 75-minute television documentary called Uma no uta ("Song of the Horse") in 1970, which was long MIA but popped up on the bootleg/file-sharing circuit a few years ago. There's a Spanish-subbed version on Youtube.

That's weird, I thought Kurosawa was dead.

Brian C wrote:That's weird, I thought Kurosawa was dead.

Nopers as it must have been a publicity stunt to hide the (alternative) fact AK had trouble getting financing all of these years for this film project. Such is the life of a legendary filmmaker in today's film climate.

Maybe he's been living anonymously as a toy-maker in a Tokyo train station all this time!

I wonder if he painted any storyboards for it as he did for other projects.

The Honolulu Museum of Art (HoMA) will be screening an Akira Kurosawa Retrospective at the Doris Duke Theatre, OCT 7-NOV2. The full schedule has yet to be revealed, but will include 25 films.