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Blogged: a Stray Dog article

Mark at Movie Masterworks has written an excellent article on Stray Dog (Nora inu). His observations on Kurosawa’s movie are well worth reading.

Before you go, however, please note that reading the essay may take roughly two hours of your time. Not because the article is so long, but because it’ll make you want to watch the film again.

Edit: As kindly pointed out by Mark below, the essay was actually not written by him, but Gary Morris at Images: a Journal of Film and Popular Culture. Nevertheless, thanks to Mark for bringing the article to my attention via his blog. 🙂

Discussion

1 August 2006

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Mark

Thank you for your comment about Stay Dog, Vili. I don’t deserve credit for your praise, however. The essay was written by Gary Morris at http://imagesjournal.com/2004/reviews/straydog/. I gave credit to Gary at the end of the essay. I am very sorry for the confusion.

I am a big Kurosawa fan though I haven’t seen all his films yet. I’ll add your blog to my favorites so I can get some recommendations. I was thinking about getting “The Idiot” from Netflix but some of the reviews said it was not worth it because the studio edited Kurosawa’s, much longer, original version of the film. About the baseball footage, as a Chicago Cubs fan it was of great interest to me because it seemed baseball in Japan in 1949 was bigger than in the United States. Wrigley Field only has a capacity of 39,000 but in “Stray Dog” the baseball stadium held 50,000 people!

2 August 2006

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vili

Thanks for straightening that out, Mark! I seem to have overlooked the credit at the end.

I would personally not recommend “The Idiot” as much as I would most other Kurosawa films. It is long, yet difficult and frustrating to follow — probably because of the hundred minutes that were cut out. Mifune and the rest of the cast give a good performance, though, and even if it is not quite your most enjoyable Kurosawa film, it is still a Kurosawa film, so worth watching at some point.

I always felt that Kurosawa’s other forays into filming Russian classics in the form of Donzoko (The Lower Depths) and Dersu Uzala are far more interesting and satisfying.

PS. The design of your blog made me want to switch away from the current “baby blue” of this blog. It’s time I do something about it, as it was only meant as a temporary design, anyway.

4 August 2006

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Jeremy

Thanks for the link, gave me something to read before I went to bed, but now I got a urge to watch stray dog.

9 September 2006

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Mark

Vili, I thought you might like these Kurosawa sites I stumbled upon.

http://www.acidlogic.com/im_akirakurosawa.htm

http://www.acidlogic.com/im_toshiromifune.htm

13 September 2006

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vili

Thanks for the links, Mark! And sorry that it took so long to approve them; for some reason WordPress never sent me a notice that there were messages to approve.