04-21-2020, 10:06 AM
A bandit scares the eyebrows off a woman deep in a forest. Later on, one of the brows spins a cocoon and hatches into Mothra (1961). But that's another movie.
I never really understood this movie. A bunch of folk sit around telling the same tale over and over again. A child might find that endlessly fascinating, but an adult? It reminds me of that song, I say tomato, you say tomato, that I never understood...
Okay, all kidding aside, this is considered by many the high water mark for Kurosawa, if not of cinema itself. I find it really hard to gauge something like that. There are so many kinds of film...
So I'll just focus on Mifune, in 1950. Oh, let's throw Takashi Shimura in there too. So I've seen three Mifune movies released in my birth year: Scandal (April), Wedding Ring (July), Roshomon (August).
In Scandal, Mifune plays an artist annoyed when paparazzi and tabloids fabricate a lie about him; still, he remains civil, taking the matter to court (Shimura is really overdone as his pitifully inept lawyer -- Kurosawa, by the way, was never happy with Scandal, feeling he'd missed the mark, and I sense that it served as a warm-up for Roshomon).
Next is Wedding Ring (directed by Kinoshita, not Kurosawa), in which Mifune is very tame as a young hunk of a doctor, rather inept, ever losing his balance on a bus, doing an awkward cannonball when diving into water. He's reasonably fit, but hardly physical. Just a very soft character.
Finally comes Roshomon, where Mifune is an absolute beast. Shimura is also spot-on as the woodcutter. But Mifune-- Suddenly he's so physical, a tasmanian devil of the cartoon variety. Filthy, sweaty, scratching himself, swatting off mosquitoes. Making faces, throwing fits. I think this is where Mifune found himself. His zone, what he was capable of. And directors (expecially Kurosawa) saw what he could do.
But I'm no film historian and haven't researched it further than this impression. I'll leave it at that.
Though I don't want to start sounding like a broken record, I'll slip this into the canon of essential Kurosawa as well.
[Adding to my Things to Do list: Find out what happened to the other eyebrow.]
I never really understood this movie. A bunch of folk sit around telling the same tale over and over again. A child might find that endlessly fascinating, but an adult? It reminds me of that song, I say tomato, you say tomato, that I never understood...
Okay, all kidding aside, this is considered by many the high water mark for Kurosawa, if not of cinema itself. I find it really hard to gauge something like that. There are so many kinds of film...
So I'll just focus on Mifune, in 1950. Oh, let's throw Takashi Shimura in there too. So I've seen three Mifune movies released in my birth year: Scandal (April), Wedding Ring (July), Roshomon (August).
In Scandal, Mifune plays an artist annoyed when paparazzi and tabloids fabricate a lie about him; still, he remains civil, taking the matter to court (Shimura is really overdone as his pitifully inept lawyer -- Kurosawa, by the way, was never happy with Scandal, feeling he'd missed the mark, and I sense that it served as a warm-up for Roshomon).
Next is Wedding Ring (directed by Kinoshita, not Kurosawa), in which Mifune is very tame as a young hunk of a doctor, rather inept, ever losing his balance on a bus, doing an awkward cannonball when diving into water. He's reasonably fit, but hardly physical. Just a very soft character.
Finally comes Roshomon, where Mifune is an absolute beast. Shimura is also spot-on as the woodcutter. But Mifune-- Suddenly he's so physical, a tasmanian devil of the cartoon variety. Filthy, sweaty, scratching himself, swatting off mosquitoes. Making faces, throwing fits. I think this is where Mifune found himself. His zone, what he was capable of. And directors (expecially Kurosawa) saw what he could do.
But I'm no film historian and haven't researched it further than this impression. I'll leave it at that.
Though I don't want to start sounding like a broken record, I'll slip this into the canon of essential Kurosawa as well.
[Adding to my Things to Do list: Find out what happened to the other eyebrow.]
I'm nobody's pony.
