Dreams (1990)

Dreams (1990)

Director: Akira Kurosawa, Ishiro Honda

Cast: Akira Terao, Martin Scorcese

When you are on your way to becoming a true Film Connoisseur, you simply have to see the works of certain directors who don’t just make movies for profit, they make films for the purest reasons, the love of the cinematic art form and to explore among other things, human nature. Legendary directors make their films because films can be honest and pure, they can be direct and undeniable. You know how the saying goes “A picture speaks louder than a thousand words”.  And so, here I am once again visiting Akira Kurosawa, one of the greatest directors who ever lived. I’m still catching up with his body of work to this day, but every time I do watch one of his films I am blown away by two things. Number one the beauty of the images, be they black and white or in color, and secondly I am blown away by how intimate his stories are. Kurosawa’s films might be about Samurai’s and temples and epic wars, but he takes his camera and whittles the story down to what really matters: human actions, human emotions, human nature.  

Going into Dreams it’s important to know that it’s an anthology film consisting of eight different stories which are all based on Akira Kurosawa’s own dreams. So this is a very personal film, with Kurosawa touching upon some very personal subject matter. Throughout the film, we have a character simple called ‘I’, who connects the short films. This character is a representation of Kurosawa himself, as he observes humanity. Basically, the film is Kurosawa’s observations on life and how he sees the world. It spans many areas of life, art, war, death, the afterlife, it’s all encompassing. Above all, what Kurosawa’s Dreams does is place a mirror against humanity, begging us to both analyze ourselves individually and as a collective as well.

For example, one of the shorts is about a nuclear power plant that blows up. The imagery of this short film is amazing because we see Mount Fuji being engulfed in wave after wave of fire and explosions. Now this story is epic in scale, but Kurosawa doesn’t focus on buildings falling and cars exploding the way that Roland Emmerich would, no, instead he focuses on a group of three people, at the shore, realizing the radioactive fallout is going to kill them and they have nowhere to go. Does life have meaning in their last few moments? Should you give up and commit suicide? Or do you enjoy your last moments of life? This is what I’m talking about! Real human emotions, important situations. The backdrop is epic, but the focus is intimate and personal, which is a characteristic of Kurosawa’s films. 

This was a film that Kurosawa was having a hard time getting made because it made revolutionary statements against nuclear energy. Producers didn’t want to produce a film that would criticize the government. So Kurosawa branched out to Steven Spielberg, who convinced Warner Brothers to distribute the film. Kurosawa had things to say about humanity and nothing was going to stop him from making his truthful film. How truthful is this film? Well, for example, on the story ‘Mount Fuji in Red’ Kurosawa basically calls the government ‘liars’ for calling Nuclear Power Plants “safe”. On the short film entitled ‘The Tunnel’, a retired military general encounters all of the soldiers who died under his command, placing the blame on him and his superiors for sending them to their deaths. And these are just two of the eight stories. The thing is that these shorts speak of undeniable truths, however harsh they might sound to whomever. But you know how things go in this world we live in, you say the truth, you get in trouble, which is the reason why I appreciate films that are brave and truthful like this one.

Aside from including beautiful, thought provoking insights on life, the film is also a beauty to look at. My favorite of the shorts has a painter visiting an art museum showcasing Van Gogh’s paintings. The artist looks at the paintings so much that he ends up going inside the paintings, walking through them, and actually meeting Van Gogh himself, who by the way is played by none other than Martin Scorcese himself! This is my favorite short film in Dreams because it talks about the creative/artistic process. Also because Kurosawa managed to successfully recreate some of Van Gogh’s paintings, its amazing. Bottom line is with Dreams you get a beautiful looking film that has a lot to say. It’s the kind of film that a director makes at the end of his career, you know, the kind that resumes everything the director has learned about life, the most important things, the themes that truly, really matter; the actions that have to be criticized; the experiences and emotions that need to be remembered and passed on from generation to generation.  Kind of like what Chaplin did with Limelight (1952) or Ridley Scott did with Prometheus (2012), films that are made by directors at the end of their career, which inevitably turn out more profound than their earlier films, because these directors have lived full lives and have so much more to say. So that’s what Dreams is all about. Kurosawa would go on to make two more films after Dreams: Rhapsody in August (1991) and Maadadayo (1993). With Dreams you get Kurosawa at the end of his career, at his most insightful, giving us his last opinion on how things are in the world. A beautiful, thought provoking film.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Yojimbo (1961)

Title: Yojimbo (1961)

Director: Akira Kurosawa

Cast: Toshiro Mifune

In Yojimbo, we meet a nameless ‘Ronin’ (a masterless Samurai) who stumbles upon a town that is being ravaged by the animosity between to warring factions. These two factions have taken over the businesses of the town, and have driven it to fear and extreme poverty. Nobody walks the streets, everybody stays in their homes, and young men are running away to live their lives somewhere else, leaving everything behind, including family. When the Ronin arrives at this town he is greeted by a dog carrying a decaying human hand! A small yet poignant sign of how bad things are in this town. The Ronin immediately notices that there is something wrong and that things need to be made right again. When the Ronin is asked to leave this cursed town by a frightened restaurant owner, the Ronin replies “I’ll get paid for killing, and this town is full of people who deserve to die” Ladies and gents, welcome to the bleak world of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo.

Akira Kurosawa was a master filmmaker, one of the best in the world. His films had a certain feeling to them, a certain sincerity which sticks with you long after you’ve watched them. His characters aren’t paper thin, they live and breathe and feel. Akira Kurosawa’s films never go by at a fast pace, in fact, he was a filmmaker that took his time in telling his stories, always mindful of the audience. He was of the mind that in order for a film to be successful, it had to be entertaining and easy for the audience to understand. If you’ve never experienced an Akira Kurosawa film, I recommend Rashomon (1950), Dreams (1990), or Seven Samurai (1954). These three films are just a small token of this esteemed directors filmography; a filmography that has gone on to influence many filmmakers from around the world.

For example, when Sergio Leone went on to make A Fist Full of Dollars (1964) he really set out to make a remake of Yojimbo. Leone confronted one problem after completing his film: he had not secured the rights to making the Yojimbo remake, so when Leone released A Fist Full of Dollars in Europe , Kurosawa sued. They settled for 100,000 for Kurosawa and a percentage of the films earnings and that was the end of that legal debacle. But when you watch A Fist Full of Dollars, what you are basically looking at is a western version of Yojimbo. Clint Eastwood plays the scruffy nameless loner who walks into a town at war with itself. He comes to make things right, by getting both sides to kill each other. A Fist Full of Dollars being a remake of Yojimbo makes perfect sense because when you look at it, Yojimbo plays out a lot like a western. Right down to the spooky ghost town where the wind is blowing non stop and there are showdowns in the middle of the street. This had a lot to do with the fact that Akira Kurosawa was very influenced by American Westerns.

For Yojimbo, Kurosawa was inspired by various elements, among them Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest. But Kurosawa was also influenced by a film that was also based on another one of Hammett’s novels, the film was The Glass Key (1942). In fact, Japanese film critics often criticized Kurosawa for being influenced by American films, a fact that he never denied. Yojimbo is a film that is filled with many trademark images that come straight out of American cowboy films. That shot of the lonely hero standing in the middle of the dusty road. The shot from behind the hero, as he faces off against his enemy, they all come from cowboy films. So what we got here is a sort of cinematic Ouroboros. Kurosawa fed off of John Ford films, Leone was inspired by Kurosawa; George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Takashi Miike all fed from Kurosawa and so on and so on…ad infinitum through out time. Films are like that, they have a way of continually influencing each other, Yojimbo being a good example of just that. Even Walter Hill made his own Yojimbo remake in 1999, he called his film Last Man Standing, which starred Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken. Last Man Standing had the same plot as Yojimbo, but set the story in a prohibition era Texas with gangsters and guns instead of samurais and swords. Recently, Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) borrowed heavily from Yojimbo, and I haven’t seen Miike’s 13 Assassins (2011), but I’m willing to bet it has a lot of Kurosawa in it. Just goes to show what in influential filmmaker Kurosawa was, Yojimbo being one of his most influential masterpieces.

Yojimbo has so many good things going for it. For example, I loved the dreadful mood that Kurosawa cast over the town. It feels as if death just walked through it, starting with the dog holding the human hand in its mouth. The black and white cinematography adds to the whole dreadful look. Kurosawa continued setting the dreadful atmosphere by starting the picture in a ghost town, with empty streets, and the constant  howl of the wind. Honest, good characters are scarce on this picture; most of the characters are despicable ones, caring only about their own personal interest. Always looking for a way to backstab and benefit from the other. In contrast to all that is the Ronin, a nameless vigilante who struts in the town and notices that things just aren’t right. Toshiro Mifune’s presence in this film is incredible, undeniable. At first glance he seems like a blood thirsty Samurai looking to make a couple of dollars, but then we realize he is much more then that. He is a character that wants to set things right in this town so that people can once again live in peace and harmony without all the bad elements hanging about. When a restaurant owner realizes the Ronin’s modus operandi, he smiles and tells him “you are not bad, you just act that way”. The Ronin is a character that you grow to like, he doesn’t look like a good guy, but his actions let you know otherwise.

Personally, I really loved Yojimbo. What held me on to it was Kurosawa’s storytelling style and Mifune’s strong performance. The way Kurosawa wrote the character, you feel like the Ronin is a character who has a genuine sense of what is right and wrong in this world. He’s on the side of ‘the people’, the good guys. The Kurosawa/Mifune combo came back for a sequel made just one year after Yojimbo, the sequel was called Sanjuro (1962). I’ll be reviewing that one in the next couple of days, look forward to that review. 

Rating: 5 out of 5