Akira Kurosawa News, Information and Discussion
News archive for 2008
Daily Yomimuri review of ‘The Last Princess’
9 May, 2008Daily Yomimuri Online has a review of the new Hidden Fortress remake The Last Princess. Unlike the Mark Schilling review that I linked to earlier today, the Daily Yomimuri piece, More...
Mark Schilling reviews ‘The Last Princess’
9 May, 2008The Japan Times’s Mark Schilling, who has written extensively on modern Japanese film, gave us the first verdict of last year’s remake of Sanjuro, and he is at it again More...
AK Film Club: ‘Drunken Angel’ for June, other films to follow
8 May, 2008 (4 comments)Although we have yet but scratched the surface of Rashomon with our first ever Film Club discussion series, it is already time to start thinking about the next films so More...
Forum issues (please read)
5 May, 2008Just a heads-up: some legitimate posts have recently been caught by the forum spam filter and been marked as spam, therefore not making the posts appear at all. Mainly long More...
Toho sues Cosmo… yet again
2 May, 2008 (1 comment)Toho has reportedly sued Cosmo for $130,000, this time due to the company manufacturing three classic non-Kurosawa films that Toho holds the copyright for. Earlier this year, Toho hit Cosmo More...
USC screening of The Last Princess
2 May, 2008 (2 comments)Japan Zone and Tokyo Graph have short articles on the recent University of Southern California screening of The Last Princess, a remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress that opens in More...
Online Film Club #1: Rashomon
1 May, 2008I think that May 1st has by now started everywhere on the globe, and has in fact already finished in many places, so let me now announce the first session More...
Criterion revisits High and Low
23 April, 2008 (5 comments)Criterion continues their process of updating some of their oldest Kurosawa releases. Next in line is High and Low, which will get a new treatment on a double disc set More...
The Last Princess: US premiere, The Three website
18 April, 2008Before its official May 10 opening in Japan, The Last Princess (the new remake of The Hidden Fortress) will have its US premiere in Los Angeles. The screening will take More...
Filming of Weinsteins’ Seven Samurai to start this year?
16 April, 2008The “Thompson on Hollywood” blog on Variety reports about the latest developments with The Weinstein Co.’s Asian Film Fund. While most of the article is about The Forbidden Kingdom, the More...
Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club #1: Rashomon, May 1st
11 April, 2008 (2 comments)As decided earlier, AkiraKurosawa.info’s Akira Kurosawa Online Film Club will kick off on May 1st 2008 with Rashomon. Everyone is welcome to participate. The Film Club was set up to More...
The Last Princess, plus more remakes in the horizon
29 March, 2008 (1 comment)Nikkei News has an article on The Last Princess, which as most readers should by now know is a remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress to be released in Japan More...
Toho sues Cosmo over Kurosawa DVDs
20 March, 2008 (1 comment)According to Variety, Toho has thrown a $1.2 million lawsuit at Cosmo Coordinate that manufactured and sold budget versions of Kurosawa’s DVDs until the court ruling last year degreed that More...
Second teaser trailer for The Last Princess
18 March, 2008 (1 comment)The second teaser trailer for Shinji Higuchi’s remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, renamed The Last Princess, has been made available on the updated official website. The trailer is also More...
John Fusco on the ‘Seven Samurai’ remake
18 March, 2008 (3 comments)Screenwriter John Fusco has talked briefly to SciFi Wire about the Seven Samurai remake that he is currently working on under the Weinstein Co. He is quoted in the article More...
Akemi Negishi passes away
18 March, 2008The Japanese actress Akemi Negishi died of cancer in Kawasaki on March 11 at the age of 73. Negishi first came into international prominence through Josef von Strinberg’s 1953 More...
AK100 has a website
14 March, 2008 (13 comments)Some time ago I mentioned the “AK100 Project” initiative, which is set to begin later this year in order to celebrate and remember Kurosawa through “exhibitions of Kurosawa’s work, newly More...
The Last Princess theme song announced
14 March, 2008 (1 comment)Famed Japanese rocker Tomoyasu Hotei, RnB singer Kreva and bassist Seiji Kameda (of the band Tokyo Jihen) have been announced as working on the theme song for Shinji Higuchi’s remake More...
Tokyo event with Nogami and Richie
14 March, 2008 (2 comments)Those of you in Tokyo at the end of the month may not want to miss an event that the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan is organizing on the 31st More...
Toru Takemitsu documentary
14 March, 2008 (1 comment)A documentary on the soundtrack work of Toru Takemitsu has appeared on YouTube. You can watch the first part here, and follow the “Related videos” links to continue with parts More...
Copyrights for Kurosawa’s scripts sold to a third party
2 March, 2008 (1 comment)While trying to find more information about the recent press announcement regarding unfinished Kurosawa footage, I stumbled upon a Japan Today article from December 29 last year. The article in More...
Unfinished footage by Kurosawa to be released
2 March, 2008 (2 comments)The Screen Daily correspondent Jason Gray writes in his blog about a Kurosawa Production press conference, according to which footage from an unfinished 1983 documentary by Kurosawa, as well as More...
Beastie Boys Kurosawa
1 March, 2008 (9 comments)Criterion’s February 2008 newsletter has a “top ten Criterions” list from the Beastie Boys member Adam Yauch. Four of the ten films on his list are Kurosawa titles, with Seven More...
May 23 DVD release for Morita’s Sanjuro
29 February, 2008 (1 comment)According to the official website, the DVD for Yoshimitsu Morita’s remake of Sanjuro will be out on 23 May, 2008. The release will have two different versions, a basic DVD More...
New website look
23 February, 2008 (20 comments)Although I was pretty happy with the design that I came up with about a year ago, in the long run it turned out to be extremely impractical and, let’s More...
Blogged: Detailed transcriptions of Kurosawa’s movies
21 February, 2008 (16 comments)Kurosawa continues to inspire people in many interesting ways. One of the most fascinating examples of this that I have seen in the recent past I stumbled upon this morning More...
Teruyo Nogami’s memoirs hit the silver screen in Berlin
14 February, 2008 (26 comments)Yoji Yamada’s Kabei - Our Mother, which is based on the war time memoirs of Teruyo Nogami, got its first foreign screening at the Berling Film Festival on Wednesday. The More...
Kon Ichikawa dies at 92
14 February, 2008 (2 comments)Legendary Japanese film maker Kon Ichikawa died yesterday of pneumonia in Tokyo. He was 92. The passing away of Ichikawa, who was perhaps best known abroad for The Burmese Harp More...
The Hidden Fortress has full trailer, becomes “The Last Princess”
10 February, 2008 (13 comments)Shinji Higuchi’s remake of Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress now has a full trailer, available on the official website, as well as at YouTube. The trailer seems to put into question More...
Review: “Akira Kurosawa - Interviews”
2 February, 2008Published last December, Akira Kurosawa: Interviews is the latest volume in the University Press of Mississippi film book series Conversations with Filmmakers. It is also the first English language book More...
“In a Bamboo Grove” on BBC Radio
26 January, 2008Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s In a Bamboo Grove has been dramatised for the radio by the BBC. The short story, of course, worked as the primary source text for Kurosawa’s Rashomon. I More...
New region 4 Kurosawa from Madman
24 January, 2008 (5 comments)As Master Thief pointed out a few days ago in the comments to Amazon’s new Kurosawa offerings, the Australian Madman Entertainment’s Eastern Eye series put out a host of new More...
Amazon’s new Kurosawa offerings
22 January, 2008 (5 comments)The Amazon.com exclusive Criterion Collection Director Series: Akira Kurosawa that I wrote about recently turns out to consist of Criterion’s new version of Yojimbo, Seven Samurai and Sanjuro (as well More...
Two new Rashomon releases
21 January, 2008January 7 quietly saw the All Regions DVD release of Rashomon by a company called Triad Productions. Based on the item description on the Amazon website, according to which the More...
Postwar Kurosawa reviews
14 January, 2008 (3 comments)Reviews of the Postwar Kurosawa set have started to fly in. As usual, DVD Talk gives us a good general overview of the box set, while the DVD Beaver review More...
Hidden Fortress remake has a teaser trailer
12 January, 2008 (1 comment)The Hidden Fortress remake now has a teaser trailer that can be viewed on the official website. It of course doesn’t reveal all that much about the finer details, but More...
An Indian Kurosawa box set to be released
9 January, 2008The Indian film company Palador Pictures has announced the release of an Akira Kurosawa DVD Box Set comprising five of the director’s best known films. The box set is exclusively More...