{"id":2196,"date":"2009-12-15T17:46:23","date_gmt":"2009-12-16T00:46:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/12\/all-i-want-for-kurisumasu\/"},"modified":"2009-12-15T17:50:08","modified_gmt":"2009-12-16T00:50:08","slug":"all-i-want-for-kurisumasu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/15\/all-i-want-for-kurisumasu\/","title":{"rendered":"All I Want For Kurisumasu"},"content":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Akira Kurosawa in a Box, Including Early Rareties<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Courtesy of the Criterion Collection<\/p>\n

Kenichi Enomoto, left, and Denjiro Okochi in \u201cThe Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail,\u201d one of the films from the beginning of Kurosawa’s career, previously unavailable in the United States.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

THE most imposing DVD gift set of this holiday season is \u201cAK 100: 25 Films by\u00a0Akira Kurosawa<\/a>,\u201d which, in commemoration of Kurosawa\u2019s coming centennial, the Criterion Collection has released at the equally imposing retail price of $399.<\/p>\n

Elegantly packaged in a shoebox-size container covered in red and black linen, it contains 25 of the 30-odd features directed by Kurosawa, the Japanese filmmaker most famous for\u00a0\u201cRashomon\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(1950) and\u00a0\u201cSeven Samurai\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(1954). For the most part these are titles that have already been issued by Criterion in stand-alone editions; they\u2019ve been remastered here with a new menu design but without the extensive supplementary features for which Criterion has become justly famous. This time around it\u2019s just the movies, though the set comes with an abundantly illustrated 96-page book with an introductory essay and notes on each film by the Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince, as well as a personal reminiscence by Donald Richie, who was among the first critics to present Kurosawa to Western audiences.<\/p>\n

With surprisingly few exceptions Japanese movies were virtually unknown outside of Japan until \u201cRashomon\u201d won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice Film Festival, touching off a vogue for Japanese cinema that lasted through the decade. Kurosawa, who died in 1998, was never forgiven for his early success by the Western critics who came to prefer the more stylistically refined films of\u00a0Kenji Mizoguchi<\/a>,\u00a0Yasujiro Ozu<\/a>\u00a0and other directors whose work was discovered in Kurosawa\u2019s wake, or by the Japanese critics who considered Kurosawa too Western in his cultural references and aesthetic choices.<\/p>\n

Today these debates seem provincial and pointless. As the great French critic Andr\u00e9 Bazin wrote in a letter to his pupil\u00a0Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut<\/a>, \u201cUnquestionably anyone who prefers Kurosawa must be incurably blind, but anyone who loves only Mizoguchi is one-eyed.\u201d There is no denying the surging vitality of a \u201cSeven Samurai\u201d or a\u00a0\u201cYojimbo\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(1961), just as there is no denying the blunt thematic statements and stylistic jumble of films like\u00a0\u201cIkiru\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(1952) and\u00a0\u201cI Live in Fear\u201d<\/a>\u00a0(1955). And we now know that Mizoguchi and Ozu were influenced just as much by Western films as by Kurosawa, if not more so, with no apparent cost to their Japaneseness, itself a concept rendered suspicious by our postmodern distrust of essentialism.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading in the NY Times<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from the New York Times Akira Kurosawa in a Box, Including Early Rareties Courtesy of the Criterion Collection Kenichi Enomoto, left, and Denjiro Okochi in \u201cThe Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail,\u201d one of the films from the beginning of Kurosawa’s career, previously unavailable in the United States. THE most imposing DVD gift set […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}