A discussion topic at Blu-ray.com forums has some additional information, including the fact that the print will be the Studio Canal print that was used for the French HD-DVD release a few years back.

Amazon.co.uk already takes pre-orders. If for no other reason, the product page is well worth checking out simply for a better look at the Blu-ray cover.

Well, apparently not, if director Rob Cohen has his say. And… Wait! Rob who, you may ask — at least I certainly did. Well, apparently he’s the fellow behind such films as The Fast and the Furious, xXx and the latest Mummy sequel. And now, sources like Variety, /Film and MTV Movies Blog report that his next project will be called Medieval. While few details are so far available, it is described as a film about seven “warriors from disparate cultures” working together to steal a king’s crown in order to earn their freedom.

While that isn’t exactly Seven Samurai, the film is being described as The Magnificent Seven set in the Middle Ages, so you do have a fairly strong link with Kurosawa’s work there at least. (Those not aware of it, The Magnificent Seven is a remake of Seven Samurai.) Whether that’s just marketing talk or something that describes the overall concept and not the actual story, remains to be seen.

Production is to start in October, and I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

I have now finally had the opportunity to watch the film, and as I try to do with all new Kurosawa related material, will air my biased and subjective views. Although I doubt that anyone reading this review is worried about being spoiled about plot details – in fact very much to the contrary – let me nevertheless make it absolutely clear and say that this review contains plot spoilers, especially when it comes to the parts that differ from Kurosawa’s original.

My overall impression of the movie is neither very positive nor very negative. I don’t think that The Last Princess is is an insult to Kurosawa, but neither is it an improvement on the original. I don’t necessarily see the point of the remake, other than the obvious financial one – it is not clever enough to offer a new take on the story, or solid enough to rival the original. And while The Last Princess may have a new official English title, it still very much is The Hidden Fortress. All major characters are still there in one form or another, and the also plot is by and large the same. There are, however, some changes.

Characters

Starting with the characters, Hiroshi Abe gives an excellent performance as Rokurota, the general played in the original by Toshiro Mifune. While he may lack Mifune’s explosiveness (but then again who doesn’t), Abe manages to match him with his presence, and his acting throughout is expressive and pleasant to follow. I had absolutely no trouble believing his character, making Abe’s Rokurota easily one of the best things about the movie. It should also be noted that the character itself is very close to the original.

Abe also kind of has that Mifune-look.

I will hesitantly give thumbs up also for Masami Nagasawa’s performance as the Princess. I easily preferred her over Misa Uehara’s performance in The Hidden Fortress, which I have always found quite one-dimensional. When comparing the two, Nagasawa’s approach to the character is softer, and while that may take away some of the character’s nobility, it also makes her more human and therefore easier to understand and feel for. Unfortunately, the film gives Nagasawa even fewer chances to actually act than did the original, as most scenes will simply have her standing there with a mixture of puzzlement and grief painted across her face.

Puzzlement and grief.

Then there is Jun Matsumoto as one of the two commoners helping the general and the princess. We discussed Jun’s character back when they were filming The Last Princess, and the character is indeed perhaps the biggest change from the original. So much so that the film makers have felt compelled to give him a new name, Takezo (the original had peasants Tahei and Matakishi). Also, instead of a peasant providing the film’s point-of-view and some slapstick comic relief, Takezo is a clever and serious character, who in the end saves the day. He is furthermore paired with the Princess, who functions as his love interest in a plot change which, as I will discuss later, seems strangely uncertain about itself.

Young Matsumoto’s performance is difficult to gauge. On the one hand, there appears to be very little wrong with his acting skills apart from the constant movement of his jaws that he keeps doing (difficult to explain, really). On the other hand, he doesn’t fit the role at all. Actually, if you have ever seen Prince the musician, imagine Prince playing the part and you’ll see what I mean. Matsumoto just isn’t a peasant. He moves and acts like a noble, someone who is accustomed to being watched and who is extremely conscious about his self-image. Like a pop star that he is. He also actually looks pretty much like Prince, which for me was endlessly disturbing.

One of these is from a film called ‘Graffiti Bridge’. But which one?

Now, if Matsumoto’s Takezo is made a more important character, the other commoner, played by Daisuke Miyagawa is played down. In fact, Shinpachi, as he is called in the remake, is now little less than a fairly useless occasional comedic extra, and in my mind Miyagawa doesn’t quite succeed in fulfilling that role. Also, and more importantly, the peculiar friendship between the two commoners present in the original is nowhere to be seen in the remake. The two characters hardly know one another, and are throw together largely by chance.

Shinpachi and some fake gold.

Then, there is the villain. In Kurosawa, he has an interesting history with Rokurota, which ultimately saves the escaping party, but in the remake he is… well, Darth Vader, really.

Darth Vader and some of his minions.

He even has something like a light sabre as a weapon. But I guess it’s ok to steal from Star Wars if you are making a Hidden Fortress remake. In either way, there is very little I can say about the villain except that he is nothing more than your stock villain, the epitome of pure evil. There is a belated hint at the shared history between him and Rokurota, but nothing is ever truly made of it, not like in the original.

Finally, there is the peasant girl who is bought from the slave trader. She makes a much briefer appearance here than she does in Kurosawa’s version: The Last Princess gives her a grand total of three minutes of screen time, most of which is spent off-camera. Although she still manages to save the princess’s life within that time, it does feel like the writers felt necessary to include her while being very unsure about what to actually do with her.

Plot

The film begins slightly differently from the original, but very soon finds Kurosawa’s story and follows it quite loyally for the first hour or so, or all the way up to the fire festival. There are a few minor additions, omissions and changes here and there, including an odd new scene centring around a homosexual joke, but by and large the adaptation is faithful, often so much so that the camera angles and compositions can easily be recognised as deriving from Kurosawa. We even have wipes, and I thought that they were fairly well used. Instead of a simple hard edged wipe, they actually utilise a wipe transition that makes it look like one scene is “painted” on top of another, and while it probably is a personal thing whether you like it or not, it worked really well for me.

In any case, everything changes with the fire festival. Or, to put it in another way, the film kind of falls apart there. And this not only in terms of its story, but also with the visuals. If I were nasty enough, I would suggest that the film makers were so incompetent that once they left the path prepared for them by Kurosawa, when they no more had Kurosawa’s film making decisions to copy, they completely lost control of what they were doing. But I would, of course, never say such a bad thing. Or would I?

Well, what happens is that in the chaos of the fire festival, Rokurota and the Princess are captured, and Takezo who now knows that he wants the Princess more than he wants the gold, is left with the task of trying to rescue the two. At this point, as in many parts of the film, the other commoner Shinpachi drifts away from the main narrative for a moment.

Takezo easily finds his way to the mountain castle where Rokurota and the Princess are being interrogated, and which stands on top of some slave mines where Takezo himself was working at the beginning of the film. Using his wits, some help from fellow slaves, and the clever idea of disguising himself as a guard, Takezo makes his way to the prisoners just when the Princess is about to be killed, and of course rescues them. What follows is an over-long escape sequence, where Takezo and the Princess work their way out while Rokurota duels Darth Vader. The whole tedious cliché filled action extravaganza culminates with the whole mountain exploding, and the good guys of course riding out unharmed.

Yes, exploding. A mountain.

This image needs no witty caption.

That, right there, is easily the most hilarious part of the film.

In the midst of all that insanity, we also learn that the gold that our heroes were carrying was in fact not gold at all, and that the Princess had know this all along – the actual one hundred gold pieces were actually transported to their destination by a hundred commoners. The whole hike had been a cover.

And so, from there the four make their way to safety, so the Princess can once again take her place as the Princess. On their way there, she and Takezo promise one another that they will stay by each other’s side in both good and bad times, and so it seems like everything will wrap up with a horrible cliché… until, suddenly, the writers seem to realise what they are doing and decide that the entire romantic sub-plot, which never quite took off in the first place, was a mistake (there is also absolutely no chemistry between the two actors), and Takezo abruptly turns around and leaves both the Princess and Rokurota without a word.

The final scene has Takezo and Shinpachi walking on a beach. After a brief conversation, which tells us that Takezo still cares about the Princess and that he and Shinpachi have profited absolutely nothing from the adventure except perhaps for their friendship, the two walk away from the camera, leaving us with the superimposed end titles.

Conclusion

Watching the ending, it seemed fairly obvious that the film makers were planning for a sequel. All the necessary elements were there, and I could easily see how they would play with the buddy movie concept while not making Takezo drift too far from his Princess.

Unfortunately for the film makers, Kurosawa’s name alone was not able to make the film a financial success, so I guess the sequels won’t see the light of the day. Too bad, really, for I’m kind of curious how they would have topped that exploding mountain in the first sequel.

So, worth seeing or not? I would say definitely worth it. It’s not a cinematic masterpiece by any stretch, but at least I was quite entertained, and I think that it does give you an insight into how certain people feel Kurosawa needs to be “modernized”.

Then again… no, I wouldn’t watch or recommend it if it didn’t have that Kurosawa connection.

Written at a time when Kurosawa hadn’t had a major Japanese studio behind him for almost 15 years, Kagemusha ended up marking something of a career rebirth for the director. And this is, famously, thanks to quite a surprising chain of events.

When Kurosawa first presented to Toho his plans for Kagemusha, which he at the time considered the most bankable of his three current projects (the other two being Ran and Masque of the Red Death), the company decided to pass, stating that Kurosawa’s estimated budget of $5.5 million (equivalent to around $18 million in 2009 if adjusted to inflation) was more than the company could give at a time when the Japanese film industry was struggling, and an average Japanese film cost one million US dollars to make.

Enter George Lucas, stage left, who had just a year earlier sculpted 121 minutes worth of solid marketing gold and decided to call it Star Wars. When Lucas, who has made no secret of the degree to which Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress influenced his space opera, learned about the situation, he called Alan Ladd Jr. (future producer of Blade Runner, among other things) who at that point worked at 20th Century Fox. Lucas then used his newly acquired influence over Ladd and Fox to bring the Hollywood studio to the table, suggesting that Fox co-finance Kagemusha in exchange for the foreign rights. Lucas, who in film circles is at least equally well known for his business skills as for his film making, played his cards extremely well there. He knew that Fox would have difficulties saying no to a man who had just given them one of the most successful films of all time and promised at least two more. He also knew that if Fox displayed interest in the film, Toho would find it harder to refuse to finance it. And Lucas was absolutely right.

Toho ultimately ended up spending around $6 million on the project. Luckily for everyone involved, the film proved a big hit, and made double that much in Japan alone. Although Kurosawa would release only one more film in the 1980s, Kagemusha opened new doors and investor models for him, and the next two Kurosawa films would both be at least partly financed by foreign investors.

Another famous piece of trivia about Kagemusha has to do with the lengths to which Kurosawa went in preparing for the shoot. Due to the mentioned difficulties in finding financing, and thinking that he would never be able to film the story, he had started drawing the script, directing it over and over again in his head. By the time Lucas had intervened and Kurosawa suddenly found himself on the director’s chair, the director knew exactly what he wanted, and had a huge number of drawings to illustrate it with. Even with the production being marred by numerous setbacks and changes, including the departures of both the film’s original star and composer, the extreme preparation is quite noticeable on screen, some have even suggested distractingly so.

As always, you can find more background information for Kagemusha and other films from the Kurosawa bibliography. As for the film itself, the Criterion edition is once again the best choice available, at least for the English speaking world. Do note that it is also the only English version of the film with the original Japanese running time of 179 minutes. The other versions are all 17 minutes shorter (the so-called “international cut”, also by Kurosawa), and lack among other things Takashi Shimura’s last appearance in a Kurosawa movie.

And now that we have got the clichés out of the way, the floor is yours. What is your take on Kagemusha? Too much red? Over-acting from Nakadai and some of the extras? Beautifully haunting music? A fascinating discourse on subjectivity, horrors of aggression and the paradoxes of identity? Kurosawa’s ultimate statement of pessimism and bitterness? More entertaining than contemplative? An educational masterpiece? A dress rehearsal for Ran?

Head over to the forums, and let us know!

I don’t think that I am exaggerating if I say that this is probably the most important release of Kurosawa archive material ever. There just is so much of it! Want to read some production notes on The Idiot? Here you go, 16 pages, hand-written. The script for The Quiet Duel? Sure, take a look. Want to know what the Film Daily thought about Yojimbo in 1962? Well, apparently it has satire and sophistication.

More of a visual type? No worries, may I interest you in some drawings for Rhapsody in August or posters for Dodesukaden? Production stills from Seven Samurai? Or are you more into Kurosawa as a person? Take a look at his travel photos from, say, Rome, New York (?) or London. Or how about some golf?

Or, if you are a more hard-core researcher, take a look for instance at the almost 100 pages of notes for The Sea is Watching, or Kurosawa’s notes for his autobiography. I feel that I could go on forever.

The website and most of the material is in Japanese, so those with no command of the language may find it slightly difficult to navigate around, but I’m sure that you’ll get the hang of it. The material is arranged into folders and subfolders, accessible from the left-hand menu. It helps if you are at least able to recognize the film names in Japanese. Note also that it may take a while for the images to load, as they are really good scans, some taking hundreds of megabytes as they are presented with incredible detail. (Thanks to the zoom system, you don’t actually need to load the whole image in one go, though.)

Even if the scans are not dated or tagged (edit: they actually are — each picture has this information in the “metadata” section), the search doesn’t seem to function perfectly, and some fairly obvious material is missing (probably due to copyright restrictions), this is an absolute treasure trove.

Jump in, take a look, and post your findings in the comments! Happy hunting!

As reported earlier, the film follows the adventures of the titular rogue from Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In A Grove”, most famously portrayed by Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Instead of a remake or an adaptation, however, Nakano’s film is an original work exploring the character’s rise to infamy.

The film is set for release on 29 September 2009 in Japan.

Yes, you read it right. Irvine Welsh is reportedly planning to direct The Magnificent Eleven, a football/soccer film based on The Magnificent Seven (the western based on Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai).

Some more details and commentary can be found over at Slashfilm.com.
]]> http://akirakurosawa.info/2009/05/23/what-do-seven-samurai-trainspotting-and-soccer-have-in-common/feed/ http://akirakurosawa.info/2009/05/18/criterion-to-release-kagemusha-on-blu-ray/ http://akirakurosawa.info/2009/05/18/criterion-to-release-kagemusha-on-blu-ray/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 06:06:39 +0000 Vili Maunula http://akirakurosawa.info/?p=430 Criterion has announced an August 18 release for a blu-ray edition of Kagemusha. In terms of extras, the blu-ray edition is an exact copy of Criterion’s double DVD release.

More information about the release can be found on Criterion’s product page.

But, forward we shall soldier, with this month’s target set on The Idiot, Kurosawa’s 1951 film perhaps best known for two things: one, it is often considered Kurosawa’s weakest effort, and two, the film was heavily re-edited by the studio (Shochiku), which pressured Kurosawa to slash off almost two hours off its running time. To the best of everyone’s knowledge, and despite Kurosawa’s attempts in the early 90s to dig up the original negatives, the only version that exists today is the edited 166 minute cut which some have deemed incoherent and difficult to follow.

That is, however, not the only point of criticism typically launched against the movie. An adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novel of the same name, The Idiot has often been viewed in terms of its relationship with the source text. While Kurosawa’s adaptation is on the surface very faithful to the book, many (starting with Richie) have criticised it for being too faithful to the story, while at the same time losing not only the underlying spirit of the novel, but also hampered its own cinematic qualities as a movie.

But, despite its prevalence in the literature, this is obviously not the only way in which to approach the work. Yoshimoto in particular reminds us of this, and encourages us to consider The Idiot as “an occasion to ask some fundamental questions concerning translation between different artistic media, cultures, and historical periods” (192). Yoshimoto further goes on to note the film’s prominent use of close-ups and “over-acting”, especially in the case of actress Setsuko Hara whose performance here is compared to those that she has given under Yasujiro Ozu, thus possibly giving us a glimpse of the different methods of film making employed by Kurosawa and Ozu, arguably the two best known Japanese film makers of all time.

For Kurosawa himself, The Idiot seemed to remain a positive memory despite the problems with its production and the hostile reviews that followed its release. From all of his films, he claimed to have received most letters for The Idiot, and all in all considered that he had made an entertaining film, and not only succeeded in what he had wanted to do with the source material, but had also become a much stronger film maker as a result.

But enough about the reception that the film has received before us. The floor, good people of AkiraKurosawa.info, is now yours.

Although just a very short introductory piece, I find Scott’s video quite good. Or, it did at least make me want to watch the film again. Although, it could also well be Takemitsu’s haunting score and the imagery that Scott had cherry picked from the movie. In any case, I think that the video serves its purpose in getting people interested in the film.

A personal anecdote: when I first saw Ran back in the early 90s from a low quality rental pan & scan VHS tape, I ended up watching it three times in a row without taking a break. That’s 480 minutes of Ran in one sitting. It would probably be an understatement to say that I was mesmerised by the film.