«I want to correct some reviewers»
I hesitated to buy this movie due to criticisms on it's visual quality. I bought it anyway because it was Kurosawa. I'm glad I did. For the most part, the transfer was fine. There were scenes which appeared fogged, but that was because it was shot in fog and/or extreme cold conditions. The rest of the time I couldn't find what other reviewers were complaining about. An interesting study of two men from completely different backgrounds who grow to respect and love each other. My only negative comment is that I couldn't activate an added feature.
[Saturday, December 27, 2008]
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«A classic remastered»
This was one of my all time favorite movies. What a treat to get to own it on DVD. There is a small amount of poor quality at the beginning, but the rest is fine.
[Sunday, December 21, 2008]
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«Interesting, but not his strongest work.»
Dersu Uzala (Akira Kurosawa, 1975)
As much as I understand the importance of Akira Kurosawa in the greater language of film, I have to say that I've never really gotten his movies the way other people seem to; Rashomon is a movie I've watched a number of times trying to glean what it is that makes it, as many critics would have it, one of the hundred finest films ever made, and I just can't wrap my head around it. It's a good movie, to be sure, but I guess I'm missing something. I felt the same way about Dersu Uzala, now that I've seen it for the first time; I enjoyed it well enough, but nothing about it struck me as being for the ages.
Uzala himself (Maksim Munzuk) is a woodsman, who makes his living trapping and serving as a guide in the wilds of Taiga. He is hired by Vladimir Arseniev (Yuri Solomin), a captain in the Russian army, as a guide, and the two form a friendship during their time together that is renewed on occasion as the two run into each other. The real plot of the story develops when Dersu Uzala develops cataracts; with his eyesight getting worse and worse, his continued survival in the woods becomes untenable, and so Arseniev offers to put up Dersu, who's never lived anywhere but the woods, in his house in the city. Cue culture clash.
Dersu Uzala won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1975, beating out such luminaries as Wajda's The Promised Land and Kumai's Sandikan 8. I'm glad I wasn't a member of the Academy at that time; that would've been a tough call. (For the record, I should mention I'm not a member now, either.) I'm relatively sure I would've gone for one of the others, though; as I said above, Dersu Uzala is a good film, interesting if a bit slow to get to the real meat of the matter, but nothing about it grabbed me in the way slow films sometimes do (a perfect example of this is the work of Bela Tarr, in which nothing at all happens most of the time, but I can't tear my eyes away from the screen). Kurosawa gives us interesting, well-acted characters in a fantastic framework, and with some of the more stunning scenery I've come across in recent months, but there's that ineffable something about Kurosawa's movies that I just don't grasp. And I still don't know why. ***
[Wednesday, August 20, 2008]
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