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2 items from 2011

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High and Low Blu Ray Review

24 August 2011 1:04 AM, PDT | FilmJunk | See recent FilmJunk news »

High and Low Directed by: Akira Kurosawa Written by: Ryuzo Kikushima, Hideo Oguni and Akira Kurosawa Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Kyoko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Tatsuya Nakadai With the summer blockbuster season wrapping up and a quarter of the year to go, it may be too early to pick a favourite movie of 2011. However, of all the classic films I'll get around to watching for the first time this year, I can comfortably say that Akira Kurosawa's High and Low will likely be my favourite. I arrived a little late to this party, but it's never too late to catch up with great cinema and what better way to do so than with a blu ray release by the Criterion Collection? This film is definitely a buy. Regular Kurosawa collaborator Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a successful business man working for a company called National Shoes. His insistence upon high quality »

- Jay C.

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Ran Review Pt.3 – Essentially Cinematic Work of Art

29 March 2011 1:20 PM, PDT | Alt Film Guide | See recent Alt Film Guide news »

Tatsuya Nakadai, Daisuke Ryu in Akira Kurosawa's Ran Ran Review: Part II In Ran, Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito, and Masaharu Ueda's cinematography shows that there's much more to great cinematography than just good scenery. One needs only look at films like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild or Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries to see that beautiful mountainscapes do not equal great art. Ran's cinematographers, by contrast, show how framing and flattening out imagery with telephoto lenses can render reality into a sort of Japanese flat art depiction of the world. That also illustrates the superfluity and flat out wrongheadedness of most critical writing on the use of certain types of lenses to get certain effects, whether in Ran or in general. Why? Because the flattening of images (such as in the openings ceremonial scenes in the mountains, especially when the frame is crowded) is not important for how it is achieved, »

- Dan Schneider

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2 items from 2011

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