I watched half of it the other night and am quite enjoying it. When I get a chance I will rip the sub-titles and post them on my site with the others that I have extracted from various DVDs.

Now I have extra copies of the Eastern Eye releases of Rashomon, Throne of Blood and Red Beard. I guess I’ll see who has a birthday coming up who might appreciate them.

I am very picky about what DVDs go in my collection, wanting only the best movies over just a large amount, so having some subpar movies would really bother me.

By chance Vili, have you found any word about the DVD release date for the new Sanjuro?
I search to no avail

From the top of my head, I can in fact only think of three: Runaway Train, After the Rain and The Sea is Watching. All relatively recent ones, of course.

Runaway Train, while by no means a bad film, does not really seem like a “Kurosawa movie” to me. There are a few moments and lines of dialogue in it that make you think of Kurosawa, but all in all it does not pretend to be a Kurosawa movie, and I think it’s right in doing so. Obviously, when you watch it, you keep thinking about how Kurosawa would have filmed it, and then how it might have changed the rest of his career had the film actually got made. But you can only guess, of course.

If you feel like watching an action film, though, you could make a worse choice. It would also be great if, one day, the company holding the rights for the film and the earlier scripts would publish Kurosawa’s version alongside with the other drafts.

After the Rain perhaps feels the most Kurosawa-like of these three. Considering that most of the crew and actors had worked for Kurosawa, this is quite understandable. I must also say that I really quite like it. It is by no means a revolutionary movie or even a very remarkable one, and I doubt that it would have been that even if Kurosawa had himself directed it, but it is, I think, a very nice little film that has clearly been made with a lot of love and respect for Kurosawa.

The Sea is Watching is not bad either, although with this one I felt that the script was not fully finished. Or maybe it is just that, as far as I can recall, Kurosawa worked on the script alone, and it would perhaps have needed that co-writer he usually employed to bring his scripts and characters a second point of view and thus more depth. If you haven’t seen this yet, it is well worth watching, and you can usually find it quite cheap on eBay.

That “Kurosawa - Samurai Classics II” is really funny.

I have never seen “The fencing master” is it worth the effort and cost of getting the box set?

I have the criterion version of the other three movies.

And on that subject, I havent seen any of the Kurosawa written but not directed movies, are any of those worth getting? Can you even tell there is some Kurosawa in them?