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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant,
By Senor de Tiempo (Midwest) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Criterion Collection Director Series - Akira Kurosawa (Throne Of Blood / Yojimbo / Seven Samurai / Sanjuro) - Amazon.com Exclusive (DVD)
You can't say enough about these films, and at the same time, there is no need to say anything. Kurosawa and Mifune together is really all you need to know. It may seem a bit pricey, but the Criterion people do good work, and it is well worth it. Sit back and enjoy.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stories of samurai,
This review is from: Criterion Collection Director Series - Akira Kurosawa (Throne Of Blood / Yojimbo / Seven Samurai / Sanjuro) - Amazon.com Exclusive (DVD)
Akira Kurosawa is one of those directors who needs no explanation, no introduction. He's that much of a legend.
And many of his best works were historical action movies of the best kind -- they have stories, and the action revolves around that. Each film in the "Criterion Collector Director Series: Akira Kurosawa" is vivid, compelling, often humorous and stars the fantastic Toshiro Mifune. "Seven Samurai" is the now-classic tale of an impoverished country village, which is regularly pillaged by bandits. Desperate to protect themselves, the villagers send out some young men to hire samurai to help them. What they get is a ragtag but willing band, led by a weary veteran and including an eager-puppy teen, a seeming nutcase (the predecessor of Captain Jack Sparrow?), and basically anyone who will fight for a square meal. "Throne of Blood" transplants Shakespeare's "Macbeth" to a medieval Japanese setting. Lord Taketori Washizu (Toshiro Mifune) is inflamed with ambition after a weird old lady predicts he will be Emperor, and his toxic wife (Isuzu Yamada) urges him to make the prediction come through -- by murdering the Emperor and his rival. But of course, this is never going to pay off.... "Yojimbo" was an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's "Red Harvest," the story of a detective who cleans up a city. This darkly humorous film introduces a wandering samurai-for-hire (Toshiro Mifune again), who stumbles onto a war between two clans. He's smarter than just about everyone else in the film, and so he begins playing both sides, deftly avoiding disaster as he deals with the clan war in his own way. "Sanjuro" is probably the lightest of all Kurosawa's movies. The scruffy, wily hero of "Yojimbo" (Toshiro Mifune yet again) returns, this time taking nine naive, inept young noblemen under his wing. They have to somehow rescue the Chamberlain, his wife and young daughter from the Superintendent -- assuming that "Sanjuro's" army of nine doesn't botch it all up. Kurosawa was well known to have a soft spot for American westerns -- Mifune's unnamed anti-hero acts like a medieval Japanese gunslinger, complete with piercing eyes. And judging by "Throne of Blood" (among others), Kurosawa pretty clearly was fond of Shakespeare as well. And he had a knack for all aspects of good moviemaking -- kinetic, fast-paced action, some kooky humour ("Get back in the closet!"), drama, gentle young romance, and some striking visuals. But he can also inject his filmmaking with an almost nightmarish, atmospheric intensity, as in "Throne of Blood" -- it shows the full range of his abilities, including the talent for transferring other people's stories into Japanese settings. There are a few odd quirks of the time -- when people are cut down in battle they have a tendency not to bleed (or they bleed too much). However, for form it can't be beaten. Battle scenes have a flash-bang intensity, or the slow, building pressure of duels. There's also early slow-motion effects, as demonstrated in "Seven Samurai" during a one-on-one fight. Mifune takes center stage in each of these movies, and he's nothing short of brilliant in them all. He's most engaging as the sharp-eyed, brilliantly tactical, unobtrusive ronin of "Yojimbo" and "Sanjuro," but he's also utterly brilliant as the chilling Washizu, and the erratic, eccentric Kikuchiyo. For any rabid cinephile, Kurosawa's films are a must -- epic action movies with plenty of swords, mayhem and grizzled heroes don't come any better than these.
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