Rashomon (1950): adapted from stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa by Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto; directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Toshiro Mifune (Tajomaru), Machiko Kyo (Masako Kanazawa), Masayuki Mori (Takehiro Kanazawa), Takashi Shimura (Woodcutter), Minoru Chiaki (Priest), and Kichijiro Ueda (Commoner):
The film that brought the attention of the world to writer-director Akira Kurosawa, Rashomon (named for the city gate beneath which its frame story occurs) remains a terse gem, expansive in its vision of humanity's faults and strengths. The structure is maybe the least interesting thing about it, and the structure is brilliant -- the same rape-and-murder incident told in four wildly different ways by four different voices.
The incident takes place in the countryside of feudal Japan. The frame story, central to the full vision of Kurosawa's morality, takes place at a ruined temple where three travelers, including a Monk grown weary of humanity's moral failings, shelter from a torrential downpour.
Those four voices are that of the alleged rapist and murderer, the disgraced wife, the murdered husband (by way of a medium), and an eyewitness. I remember reading a review from the time in which the American reviewer tried to figure out which version was correct. That reviewer discarded the testimony of the husband because ghosts don't exist. This is what I call missing the point of a movie.
I can't think of anything bad to say about Rashomon. The performances are splendid, the shot composition deft and often haunting, and whatever the moral of the whole thing might be, it's far from simple. It's also Kurosawa's shortest great film, clocking in at about 90 minutes, less than half the length of Seven Samurai and more than an hour shorter than Kagemusha and Ran. So you've got time to watch it! Highly recommended.
Kagemusha (1980): written by Masato Ide and Akira Kurosawa; directed by Akira Kurosawa; starring Tatsuya Nakadai (Shingen Takeda/ Kagemusha), Tsutomu Yamazaki (Nobukado Takeda), Ken'ichi Hagiwara (Katsuyori Takeda), and Jinpachi Nezu (Sohachiro Tsuchiya):
Kagemusha occurs in 16th-century feudal Japan, with financing to complete the film arranged by George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Kagemusha literally means 'double' or 'shadow warrior.' It tells the tale of a thief who replaces the first-injured and then-deceased Lord Shingen Takeda so as to keep the Lord's many enemies convinced that this military genius still lives.
The American financing came about because of the scale of the final battle sequence, though even that sequence surprises us in how all that money is deployed on the screen. Akira Kurosawa was a master of surprise, among many other things. The cinematography is terrific throughout, whether for that doom-laden final battle or for an eerie dream sequence experienced by the thief or for the shadows-and-silhouettes used to indicate battle throughout.
Kurosawa also pulls off the difficult feat of giving us a movie with only one truly likable character, the thief -- and even he is a flawed creature. There's a certain elegiac quality to the proceedings as we see the warfare of the Middle Ages give way to gunpowder and cannons. But Kurosawa undercuts his elegy with both the brutal realities of combat and with the characterization of those lords and retainers still committed to the old ways: in the end, they are deluded and, in their conduct towards the thief, an ungrateful lot of upper-class pricks.
Of Kurosawa's many films involving pre-20th-century Samurai culture, this may be the least. It's certainly the most intimate, despite that giant battle sequence. Even if the least, it's Kurosawa, which beats the best of most everyone else. Kagemusha haunts one in a more mundane way than the supernaturally tinged Throne of Blood, in a less spectacular way than Ran or Seven Samurai. But it definitely haunts, especially in its last tragic, absurd shot. Highly recommended.
Pearl Harbor: The Accused (2016) This HBO documentary does an awfully good job of absolving disgraced four-star admiral and Commander in Chief US Pacific Fleet Pearl Husband Edward Kimmel of responsibility for that Day of Infamy. Indeed, it does such a good job of doing so that the only explanation for the actions and inactions of US Naval Chief of Operations from 1939-1942 Harold Rainsford Stark is that Stark was a member of the time-altering lunatics of Rittenhouse on TV's Timeless.
Kimmel's grand-children continue to fight for his official absolution, but while a Senate Resolution absolving him of responsibility was passed in 1999, Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have refused to sign that Resolution, thus leaving Kimmel's honour in official limbo. It's really an astonishing story. Recommended.
Attack on Titan: [tankobon] Volume 1-3: written and illustrated by Hajime Isayama and others (2009): Violent, lightning-paced, and deeply weird. Attack on Titan, the Japanese manga smash that became internationally successful as well, is great and weird post-apocalyptic horror-action. One sort of blisters through it, wondering what the Hell is going on at points while one waits for the history of this strange, distorted Earth (well, I'm pretty sure it's Earth) to be unpacked by writer/creator Hajime Isayama and his crew.
In order to spoil as little as possible, I'll note that Attack on Titan takes a very common trope (humanity huddled together in its last refuge, beset by some terrible force) and refreshes it by making our collective nemesis... person-eating giants. Lots of them. Ranging from 12 feet to 50 feet in height. They can be hurt, but they regenerate faster than Wolverine: the only reliable kill-shot comes by targeting a small spot at the back of the neck.
The art depicts the giants as fantastic grotesques with idiotic expressions on their faces (mostly) and figures somewhat distorted from the human norm, enough so and varied enough that different monsters always seem to bring with them a horrific shock of the new. They're truly disturbing visual creations -- they create that frisson of un-ease that one seeks in horror but rarely finds. That they're beautifully integrated into vertiginous, sweeping battle sequences is also a triumph, a thrilling combination of horror and action.
Where did they come from? What are they? Why do they eat only humans? Why, having eaten pretty much everyone on the planet a century earlier, are they still alive and apparently non-starved? Where on Earth is the Last Redoubt of humanity (thanks, William Hope Hodgson!)? What secrets does one of our young protagonists have because of his vanished father's scientific enquiries into the origins of the Titans, secrets somehow hidden in his memory but unavailable to him?
Well, read the series. It's a blast. There are many adult characters, but the main protagonists are all in their late teens, new to the job of giant-killing. The writing is sharp, the characterization somewhat stereotypical. But when it comes to the giants and the battle sequences, Attack on Titan is terrific, horrific fun. And as it will clock in at about 4000 pages whenever it finishes, there's a lot more where these volumes came from. Highly recommended.
Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths: written and illustrated by Shigeru Mizuki, translated by Jocelyne Allen (1973/English edition 2011): A seminal Japanese manga in terms of dealing with World War Two and Japan's role in it, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is certainly one of the most depressing, emotionally draining graphic novels I've ever read. It marked something of a departure for its creator, Shigeru Mizuki, who previously had been best known for much more fantastic, whimsical manga work.
Mizuki does one of those things I tend to associate most with manga, in that he juxtaposes cartoony humans in the foreground with backgrounds that are often clearly copied from photographic material. This methodology can obviously have an awful lot of meanings. Here, it tends to highlight the transitory state of any human being when set against nature itself, and the world in its sublime giganticism. At points, though, photorealistic depictions of the dead whom we'd previously seen only as cartoons hammer home their basic, shattered humanity.
The book follows the horrifying adventures of Japanese soldiers trying to defend one of the islands in what is now Papua New Guinea from an invasion by the Allies during the waning days of World War Two. Mizuki himself survived such a scenario, and draws on his experiences and others for this bleakly comic look at the horrors of war, and the horrors of being an enlisted man in the Japanese Imperial Army.
If you thought your war was bad, keep in mind that suicide attacks were considered a terrific idea by many of the officers in the Japanese army. So, too, were regular beatings and absurd orders. Part of the plot hinges on a Catch-22 that makes most Western military Catch-22's look positively benign. A pointless suicide charge has been reported as complete, with all men nobly lost, to the island's central Japanese command.
But in reality, several dozen men didn't die in the assault for a variety of reasons. But their deaths have been reported. In order to save face at the command level, they have to die one way or another. The two surviving officers in charge of the group are expected to commit ritual suicide. The rest, including the grieviously wounded, must march back into enemy fire that they have no chance of surviving.
Good times!
This is a harrowing book, spiced with moments of humaneness and humanity, spiked with horrific, sometimes oddly funny moments of trauma and death. The translation could have used a defter hand at points. Anachronisms like "Meh." appear throughout, and there's no poetic ability shown in the recurring translations of popular Japanese songs that the soldiers occasionally sing. But the power and pathos of the narrative survive this, as does the deceivingly simple cartooning. But be warned: there is no catharsis here. There is ultimately no point to the deaths, no redemption. Highly recommended.
Sandman: The Dream Hunters: written by Neil Gaiman; illustrated by Yoshitaka Amano (1999): For the tenth anniversary of the first issue of his critically and commercially gigantic Sandman comic-book series (which ended its run in 1995), writer Neil Gaiman wrote a novella set in the Sandman universe and illustrated by acclaimed Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano. It's not a comic book, but rather an illustrated story, as Amano wasn't comfortable trying to draw a comic book.
We see several familiar characters again, chief among them Morpheus, also known as Dream, one of the seven Endless in Gaiman's comic book (the others being, circa 1989, Destiny, Death, Desire, Despair, Destruction, and Delirium, the last once having been Delight before something changed).
Set in medieval Japan, The Dream Hunters ostensibly retells a Japanese folk tale. Gaiman's afterword in which he somewhat puckishly and straight-facedly describes this (imaginary) folk tale led a lot of people to believe there really was a folk tale to begin with. There wasn't. That thinly veiled versions of DC Comics' Cain and Abel make an appearance, along with the Dream King's raven, possibly should have tipped people off.
The story begins with a bet between a fox and a badger about who can force a young Monk to abandon his lonely mountain-side shrine so that either the fox or the badger can live there. As foxes and badgers have considerable abilities in the realms of shape-changing and illusion, this is a bet it seems one or the other must win. But things don't go the way either plans.
It's a very enjoyable story, and Amano's illustrations offer a new look at Gaiman's Lord of Dreams and his kingdom. I do think that Gaiman is a better comic-book writer than a writer of prose, however, and P. Craig Russell's comic-book adaptation of this novella, from 2009, is superior to this work. In either case, one doesn't have to know the backstory of Sandman to enjoy the book. Recommended.
Sandman: The Dream Hunters: adapted by P. Craig Russell from a novella by Neil Gaiman and Yoshiaka Amano (2009): Writer-artist Russell adapted Neil Gaiman's illustrated 1999 Sandman novella into comic-book form to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first issue of Gaiman's hyper-popular Sandman series. The novella itself was released to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Sandman. What will the 30th anniversary bring?
Told as if it were an old Japanese folk story (it isn't, though Gaiman's afterword to the 1999 novella convinced a lot of people, including Russell, that it was), The Dream Hunters chronicles the adventures of a female fox, a young monk, and a magician searching for a cure for his chronic fear. It's set in a legendary Japan of animal spirits, demons, and witches. The Sandman himself -- Dream, or Morpheus -- plays a supporting role, as he periodically did in his own comic-book series. The narrative focus is squarely upon the fox and the monk.
Russell's art is pleasingly legendary in its own way, as sometimes cartoony and sometimes nightmarish demons rub shoulders with realistically rendered humans, a slightly anthropomorphic fox, and some truly horrible witches. Or are they oracles? Russell's faces are always expressive, that expressiveness the product of just a few lines properly placed.
The colouring by Lovern Kindzierski apparently tries to replicate the palette available to Japanese print-makers of a certain era. It's a lovely, muted wash of pastels and faded primary colours. Much of the wording remains Gaiman's, but Russell has done a fine job of selecting what to keep in language and what to render as art. All in all, this is a marvelous addition to the Sandman library, and worth owning whether or not one already has the novella. Highly recommended.
