Oh Darren, you have a world of marevels and joy awaiting you with Japanese cinema (Enter the Dragon is Chinese, made in Hong Kong and should not be spoken of in the same breath - anyway confusing Japanes and Chinese cinema is like confusing Hollywood with Bollywood).
I adore Japanese film and some of the early Television. I grew up watching Ultraman (TV). He was cool.
Anyway. Kurosawa is an utter genius! Start with your Seven Samurai, then Ran (based on King Lear), Throne of Blood (Macbeth obviously), The Bad Sleep Well (Hamlet). He has a grasp of Shakespear that is astounding!
Almost all of his work has been remade by Hollywood and others. Kubrick, and Spielberg, Bergman, Lumet, Scorsese amongst other greats regarded him as one of the world's greatest film maker (he directed, produced, edited and wrote the screenplays).
I am copying this from wiki as it's easier than typing it all out myself. The man is a film god!!!
Influences
A notable feature of Kurosawa's films is the breadth of his artistic influences. Some of his plots are based on William Shakespeare's works: Ran is loosely based on King Lear, Throne of Blood is based on Macbeth, while The Bad Sleep Well (1960) parallels Hamlet, but is not affirmed to be based on it. Kurosawa also directed film adaptations of Russian literary works, including The Idiot (1951) by Dostoevsky (his favorite author) and The Lower Depths (1957), from the play by Maxim Gorky. Ikiru was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Dersu Uzala (1975) was based on the 1923 memoir of the same title by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev. Story lines in Red Beard (1965) can be found in The Insulted and Humiliated by Dostoevsky.
High and Low (1963) was based on King's Ransom by American crime writer Ed McBain. Yojimbo may have been based on Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest and also borrows from American Westerns. Kurosawa was very fond of Georges Simenon and Stray Dog was a product of Kurosawa's desire to make a film in Simenon's manner.[13]
Cinematic influences include Frank Capra, William Wyler, Howard Hawks, his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto, and his favorite director John Ford,[14] whose habit of wearing dark glasses Kurosawa emulated. When Kurosawa met Ford, the American simply said, "You really like rain." Kurosawa responded, "You've really been paying attention to my films."[15] He would later instruct Yoshio Tsuchiya, one of the actors in Seven Samurai, to retrieve the same hat Ford wore during that meeting.[16]
Despite criticism by some Japanese critics that Kurosawa was "too Western,"[17] he was deeply influenced by Japanese culture as well, such as the Noh theaters and the Jidaigeki (period drama) genre of Japanese cinema.
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Influence
Seven Samurai was remade as The Magnificent Seven (1960)[18]. Seven Samurai is also considered the progenitor of the "men on a mission" film, popularized by films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and The Guns of Navarone (1961). The film is also recognized for popularizing the use of slow-motion in action films/sequences.
Rashomon was remade by Martin Ritt in 1964's The Outrage. Several films and television programs have also come to use what is known as the Rashomon effect, wherein various people give opposing or contrasting accounts of an event; these films include, but are not limited to Vantage Point, Courage Under Fire, Hero, Hoodwinked, and The Usual Suspects. Tajomaru, a film that centers on the eponymous character from Rashomon, was released in 2009.
Yojimbo was unofficially remade as the Sergio Leone western A Fistful of Dollars (1964) (resulting in a successful lawsuit by Kurosawa)[19] and was remade as the prohibition-era film Last Man Standing (1996). Sanjuro was remade in 2007 as Tsubaki Sanjuro, directed by Yoshimitsu Morita.
The Hidden Fortress (1957) was remade as The Last Princess (2008) and is an acknowledged influence on George Lucas's Star Wars films, in particular Episodes IV and VI and most notably in the characters of R2-D2 and C-3PO.[20][21] As well as using a modified version of Kurosawa's signature wipe transition, it has been observed that specific scenes from various Kurosawa films have been emulated throughout George Lucas's Star Wars saga.[21]
Remakes for Ikiru[22] and High and Low[23] are in progress. Second remakes for Rashomon and Seven Samurai are also on the way.[24][25]
The following directors either were directly influenced by Kurosawa, or greatly admired his work:
Satyajit Ray[citation needed] - the great Indian director (famous for his Apu trilogy) and winner of Oscar Lifetime Achievement award.
Andrei Tarkovsky[26][27]
Ingmar Bergman[28] - "Now I want to make it plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa."[29]
Federico Fellini[30] - Having only seen Seven Samurai from Kurosawa's oeuvre, he still thought Kurosawa was the "the greatest living example of what an author of the cinema should be."[31]
Bernardo Bertolucci - "Kurosawa's movies and La Dolce Vita, Fellini, are the things that pushed me sucked into being a film director."[32]
Robert Altman[33][34]
Sidney Lumet - "Kurosawa never affected me directly in terms of my own movie-making because I never would have presumed that I was capable of that perception and that vision."[35]
Sam Peckinpah - "I'd like to be able to make a Western like Kurosawa makes Westerns."[36]
Roman Polanski[37]
Steven Spielberg[38] - "the pictorial Shakespeare of our time"[39]
Martin Scorsese[38] - "His influence on filmmakers throughout the entire world is so profound as to be almost incomparable."[39]
George Lucas[21][38]
Francis Ford Coppola[40] - "One thing that distinguishes Akira Kurosawa is that he didn't make a masterpiece or two masterpieces, he made, you know, eight masterpieces."[41]
Zhang Yimou - "Other filmmakers have more money, more advanced techniques, more special effects. Yet no one has surpassed him."[42]
John Milius[43]
Takeshi Kitano - "...the ideal definition of cinema: a succession of perfect images. And Kurosawa is the only director who has attained that."[44]
John Woo[45][46] - "I love Kurosawa’s movies, and I got so much inspiration from him. He is one of my idols and one of the great masters"[47]
Werner Herzog[48] - "Of the filmmakers with whom I feel some kinship Griffith, Murnau, Pudovkin, Buñuel and Kurosawa come to mind. Everything these men did has the touch of greatness."[49]
Antoine Fuqua[50]
Alex Cox[51]
Arthur Penn[52][53]
Spike Lee[citation needed]
Sergio Leone
Last edited by Bull.ed (2010-03-02 21:20:37)
