Kurosawa’s movies are deep in how they portray a hero, but one of their most obnoxious pitfalls is Kurosawa’s choice to over-dramatize weather effects. Throughout the whole entire Kurosawa unit I was reminded of a humorous quote from Wikipedia. When Kurosawa met John Ford , Ford commented that Kurosawa likes to use rain. K responded saying that, “you’re paying a lot of attention to my films.” Well Kurosawa, you’re wrong. Anybody who watches one of your films will have picked up by the end of it that the weather is completely ridiculous. Kurosawa over dramatizes a lot of things in his movies often for artistic effect (like when Lady Kaede had her head chopped off and her blood literally painted the walls). But the weather effects to me do not always serve an artistic purpose. In Yojimbo I think they seriously had to have lined up the entire street with fans and blowers in order to get the wind that powerful. These types of thought crept up on my while I was watching the movies and actually prevented me from enjoying parts of the films. And absolutely nobody wants to see an old Japanese man’s upper thighs. Just nobody. Keep the wind to yourself Kurosawa.
2 comments:
The weather isn't the only absurd element of Kurosawa's films. Remember the blood gushers? The bright, tri-colored kimonos? That final take of the Buddah scroll in Ran? It isn't put of carelessness, it is almost as if Kurosawa was intentionally ridiculous.
--Colin
Yea a lot of it was over the top. I think you have a point that it may have been intentional though. In which case I totally respect him, because it takes a lot of guts to produce something like this with the idea that's it's going to be way over the top and people might not like it. What we also have to take into account is that fact that I don't think any of us have seen any movies by other Japanese directors, so it's entirely possible that this just happened to be the style that was popular in Japan at the time...
~Preston
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