Akira Kurosawa is surely one of the most well-known Japanese filmmakers, and it was exploring some of his classic samurai films that prompted me to create this blog.
I wanted to explore more of his work and that led me to Kagemusha (1980). While I hope to watch some of his films from other genres soon, Kagemusha is nevertheless interesting even though it’s another samurai epic. It marks the first Kurosawa film I’ve seen in colour – only his third overall, following Dodeskaden and the Soviet-Japanese production Dersu Uzala. Even though colour film seemed to arrive late in Japan, Kurosawa continued working in black and white well into the 1960s. Kagemusha is also striking to me for the absence of Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s longtime collaborator. The 1965 film Red Beard was their last work, but instead Kagemusha features Tastuya Nakadai as the lead – unrecognisable from his earlier appearances as villains in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro.
Continue reading “Review: Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980)”
for the simple fact that it’s shot in colour. Kurosawa’s masterful 
satisfying take on the 
horizons on Japanese cinema, one of the main reasons I want to watch films from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s is their outsized influence on later filmmakers. Quentin Tarantino is outspoken on the influence Japanese cinema has had on his pictures, with 
the NES, Nintendo’s first console) also titled Sweet Home based on the film. That game essentially kicks off the “survival horror” genre, with developer Capcom going on to create the far more famous Resident Evil / Biohazard series; the first Resident Evil, set in a dilapidated mansion, takes a lot of inspiration from Sweet Home.
e arrested for it). It’s probably no surprise then that I’m a fan of Japanese cinema: if nothing else, even if the movie is bad, it’s a window into a culture I’m interested in and a location I miss living in. The weird part is that until fairly recently I hadn’t seen many Japanese films I could say were good without having to qualify it. When I was younger, Japanese movie imports seemed to entirely consist of Ring-style horror and Takashi Miike’s trashier films.
Kino 893 