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Don't listen to the negative reviews

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

This is basically a 2 hour retelling of the life's work of Akira Kurosawa. Who I think has had a bigger impact on cinema than anybody else I have ever seen. This is not only insightful into his life, but a little bit of advertising, mainly because I wanted to see movies like Dodeska-Dan (which bombed on first release).I really enjoyed this one. Especially when talking about the bad things that happened in his life. You really do feel sorry for the guy when hearing about some of the stuff that happened. Stuff like the earthquake in the 1920's (which made me want to watch Kagemusha when it referred back to the quake).If you have the slightest interest in Kurosawa then please watch this documentary. You will not have your time wasted.

There is a phrase by the experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, who says some films are structured like a camera mounted on the head of a dog who goes down an alley, sniffing everything along the way.That's how this movie is. The structure is "Kurosawa started out as a baby, then he became a kid, then a young man, then a movie director, then he started making 'masterpieces', then he grew old, The End." The word 'masterpiece' is used a lot in this film to describe Kurosawa's output, without explaining *what* makes his films so good/great. Just because the off-screen narrator reading a script says that a film is a masterpiece, are we supposed to kiss his rear-end and accept that a certain movie is one of the great works of art of the 20th century? And one more point. The voice of Paul Scofield is used as the voice of Kurosawa, when excerpts from the director's memoirs are being read off screen. He brings pear-shaped Shakespearean tones to the text...but why him?? If you were making a documentary about Billie Holiday, would you use Dame Judi Densch as her voice????

How can a biography on Akira Kurosawa, who felt his life was devoted to the films he wrote and directed, and whose themes centered around the behavior and psychology of the characters, be justified when it fails to even mention 15 of his 32 movies, and does little more than allude to a few key periods in his life?Writer/director, Adam Low, rather than offering substantive information on Kurosawa, felt it more important to provide about 30 minutes of facts and 90 minutes of stretched out long meaningless scenes, including several of modern-day Japan, it's technological advances (do we remember what digital tv/dvd corporations were promoted here?), modern day looks at surviving cast and crew, etc. It felt like a lazy, rushed project.I would think that anyone that watches this documentary would want to walk away with some reasonable amount of insight to either his professional or personal life (if not both). It fails badly on both counts- I give this documentary 2/10 (or 1 out of 4 stars).

this dvd-ography strikes me as something of a "one-timer"; that is, once you've seen it, there's no reason to see it ever again. in fact, if you've seen more than a few kurosawa films, once might be too many.but used as an introduction to the filmmaker, "kurosawa" is worth watching, if you can look past editing techniques adam low and david kitson must have believed were clever, since they were (over)used throughout the piece. the main offender was the use of black and white footage, shot to try to emulate the look of kurosawa's films. however, it takes more than just switching to "BW" on your handycam to pull that off.the other one that really stuck out in a long, painful-to-watch kind of way, was at the end (spoiler?) at the site of kurosawa's grave, from which smoke emanates. the editor reversed a slow zoom out to give the effect of zooming in on smoke *returning* to the grave. it must have lasted five minutes.again, if you can look past these and are wondering what the deal is with all the hype about kurosawa, this is a wonderful place to find out.