In a press release available at Yahoo! Financial News, Moto Sakakibara, the writer-director of a forthcoming film and TV series Monster Samurai, is quoted mentioning Akira Kurosawa as one of his influences. In case you are interested in the project, you can read an introduction and see some pictures at Sprite Animation’s showcase page.
The legendary Japanese New Wave director Shohei Imamura has passed away at the age of 79. He directed 22 films during his career spanning for more than four decades. His best known works include The Ballad of Narayama, Black Rain and The Eel.
Hong Kong’s The Standard reports that Hong Kong action star Donnie Yen is to star in the planned Hollywood remake of the Seven Samurai alongside George Clooney and Zhang Ziyi. The project, which has been around for years now, currently appears to be under the care of the Weinsteins.
This has somehow evaded my attention so far, but apparently a musical called See What I Wanna See was inspired by Rashomon. Whether it really is Kurosawa’s film, or more directly Akutagawa’s short story In A grove is not really made that clear by this article where I received my information from.
A new Chinese film directed by Chuan Lu and titled Mountain Patrol has been compared to Kurosawa’s works by both the Seattle Times (”…reminiscent of David Lean’s sprawling spectacles and More...
This post marks the opening of this website. Some work still remains to be done, but as matters stand now, it is open for visitors. Note that I have also included links to some older DVD reviews of Kurosawa’s films, hence the news articles stretching back to 2001.
Whether or not this is any good, I don’t know (yet I have my doubts). But since it has been in the news recently, and is vaguely Kurosawa related, I More...
Mainichi Daily News reports that the Akira Kurosawa film school has closed without ever actually opening its doors.
News