Yes, I'm still getting my feet wet.
I just finished Kagemusha, a film by Kurosawa, and it is highly recommended. It is a dramatic and political epic, and not an action blockbuster (although I just read the finale had 5,000 extras for the sequence). IIRC, it takes place between 1572-1575 in feudal Japan. Both the acting and cinematography are top notch. It is long at 3 hours, but it never felt slow or painful in the slightest.
Per usual, I researched the PQ, and while it wasn't raved about, it was at least considered a worthy improvement over the DVD. This film was originally made in 1980. I wanted to rent yet another Kurosawa film, but the ones I found on Netflix are on DVD only.
The Criterion synopsis:
When a warlord dies, a peasant thief is called upon to impersonate him, and then finds himself haunted by the warlord’s spirit as well as his own ambitions. In his late, color masterpiece Kagemusha, Akira Kurosawa returns to the samurai film and to a primary theme of his career—the play between illusion and reality. Sumptuously reconstructing the splendor of feudal Japan and the pageantry of war, Kurosawa creates a historical epic that is also a meditation on the nature of power.
Both George Lucas and Francis Ford Copolla are credited as executive producers at the end of the movie, and upon research I discovered they convinced 20th Century Fox to make up the budget shortfall.
The last Kurosawa movie that I saw was a collection of short films, called Dreams, and I must admit it's pretty strange, and quite intense. In one of them, Martin Scorsese plays the role of Van Gogh, (and he was speaking English; the only short film that wasn't in Japanese that I remember).
It's already on its way back to Netflix, and the next one I'm getting is yet another Criterion classic, the Wages of Fear. I'll let you know how it goes.
Synopsis:
In a squalid South American oil town, four desperate men sign on for a suicide mission to drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin over a treacherous mountain route. As they ferry their explosive cargo to a faraway oil fire, each bump and jolt tests their courage, their friendship, and their nerves. The result is one of the greatest thrillers ever committed to celluloid, a white-knuckle ride from France’s legendary master of suspense, Henri-Georges Clouzot.
