Pulse (2001)

Clues on the internet suggest the original Japanese Pulse (released in Japan as Kairo) is not particularly high on the list of so-called J-Horror, where Ringu, Ju-on, and Dark Water are more the first titles to be discussed. This is despite the fact that director and writer Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation) made one of the earliest with 1989’s Sweet Home. Like many J-Horror pictures from the 1990s and 2000s, Pulse got a US remake a few years on, and like many it had mixed results. I’m one who will stump for the US version of The Ring over Ringu, but otherwise the Japanese originals I’ve seen tend to be noticeably better. Certainly that’s the case with Pulse, although I should probably mention my viewing of the remake was on a somewhat sketchy free youtube version with a problem print or transfer. So I was a little hesitant to pull the trigger at all on the original but then I noticed it was available on a channel I’d already signed up for. Scour those catalogs—they’re often skimpy when you look into it—and cancel subscriptions quickly is turning into a way of life. Getting to the point, the Japanese Pulse is quite good. In many ways J-Horror is all slow burn—we learn the premises through the actions and reactions of the characters and the pacing is slow, like playing a 45 at 33. But the sense of dread is somehow thick and the images are carefully conceived and rendered to support specific moods. We are given ample time for the details to sink in like dense pellets of terror and anxiety paste. Things like black stains on walls, or red tape, or the words “The Forbidden Room” on a piece of paper coming from a printer become quite unnerving. More than you might think, or maybe you have to be in the mood and I was. Times being what they were in 2001, the sounds of modem tones connecting are heard often, and in ways they are not meant to be heard. The internet is unnaturally reaching out to connect with our characters. The premise is vague, leaving us to fill in the gaps: ghosts live on the internet like people in the Superman comics live in the Phantom Zone. Do they like it there? It’s hard to say, but they seem to want the living to join them, which the living find depressing if not terrifying. Pulse is one of those movies whose first half is better than the second, which is exacerbated by a longish running time of two full hours. But in that first half it accomplishes for me everything the much more widely celebrated Ju-on couldn’t—that atmosphere of overwhelming numbing terror, like panic-bad dreams, accomplished all with ideas and imagery and not once ever with cheap jump-scare cuts or gore. Worth a look, and maybe I’m ready for another try at Ju-on.

Ikiru (1952)

Japan, 143 minutes
Director: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni
Photography: Asakazu Nakai
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Editor: Koichi Iwashita
Cast: Takashi Shimura, Nobuo Kaneko, Kyoko Seki, Miki Odagiri, Yunosuke Ito, Nobuo Nakamura

"Ikiru" is a Japanese verb that means "to live, to be alive, to exist," but somehow that translation has only occasionally been tried for the title of one of director and cowriter Akira Kurosawa's greatest movies. Perhaps Kurosawa's status as the most Westernized of Japan's famous midcentury film directors, with Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, had to be compensated with the most Japanese-sounding titles in the West—Rashomon, Yojimbo, and Kagemusha are among his most famous.

Ikiru is also something of a departure in that, as with most of Ozu's work, Kurosawa has set the action of this picture in modern-day rather than historical samurai times. Long-time Kurosawa trouper Takashi Shimura takes the dominating lead role of Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged widower and Japanese government bureaucrat for most of his adult life, who has learned—well, figured out really, as the Japanese medical system as shown was remarkably evasive about it—that he has inoperable stomach cancer and at most a year to live. It might be Shimura's greatest role, bearing the largest burdens of a man in extremis, facing down his own death. The picture follows the arc of his coming to terms with his condition, with the last hour reserved for an unusual show of consequences.

Yojimbo (1961)

Yôjinbô, Japan, 110 minutes
Director/editor: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Ryuzo Kikushima
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Masaru Sato
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kyu Sazanka, Daisuke Kato, Seizaburo Kawazu, Takashi Shimura, Eijiro Tono, Kamatari Fujiwara, Isuzu Yamada, Hiroshi Tachikawa

Akira Kurosawa—director, co-writer, film editor, even costume designer on this one—enjoyed his biggest international hit to that point with Yojimbo, a samurai action picture that remains uniquely modern, positioned at a unique crossroads of film history and going its own way. It serves up a cynical, comical human corruption that eventually made its way into the American Western and still strikes chords decades later. Sergio Leone adapted the basic narrative for the first of his iconic Man With No Name spaghetti westerns, Fistful of Dollars.

It's not just the Leone style of storytelling, with the unmistakable echoes in the work of Quentin Tarantino, Beat Takeshi, and so many others, that makes Yojimbo look and feel so oddly fresh today, compact and muscular and efficient. It also packs a mixed nuts assortment of strange elements that keep one off balance, even as it rollicks along. The soundtrack is jazzy and jarring, with an air of West Side Story, a '50s Broadway musical about New York City juvenile delinquents. The widescreen treatment lifts the petty level of squabble on which Yojimbo operates into an epic realm of blowing dust, scheming, and sudden grotesque death. Long shots with telephoto lens provide a fluid and gritty documentary feel and contribute to the heavy air. And with the expedient of a firearm—that's singular, as one thug only, Unosuke (Tatsuya Nakadai from The Human Condition), is somehow in possession of a six-shooter—it even slips into moods and gestures of the Hong Kong action films that followed later. Yojimbo is so insistent on its own weirdness, with its curated selection of elements that don't quite gel, that it's the experience of seeing it and being surprised by it that most sticks.

Ran (1985)

Japan/France, 162 minutes
Director/editor: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni, Masato Ide, William Shakespeare
Photography: Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda
Music: Toru Takemitsu
Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Mieko Harada, Akira Terao, Jinpachi Nezu, Daisuke Ryu, Pita, Masayuki Yui, Yoshiko Miyazaki, Mansai Nomura

Akira Kurosawa's late grand epic, made when he was 75, can serve today as one self-contained clinic in The Big Movie, the sweeping, ponderous exercises that swallow one whole, with story, with image, with music and color and faces and event. They come in many shapes and sizes, of course (nearly always long), and Ran is only one. It is filled with gravitas, riffing equally on classic Japanese jidaigeki and Shakespeare and matters of great moral and personal moment, at the highest and lowest levels of power. At the same time it occupies an exclusive cinematic space defined across the decades of Kurosawa's career. Perhaps most surprising, it is capable of a convulsive, headlong narrative momentum.

I think that's probably the Shakespeare, of course, the famous Western streak of Kurosawa. I don't know King Lear, the Shakespeare story adapted here, but I recognize the complexities and symmetries of the storytelling, which has biblical strains as well in its primary narrative arc of spiteful sons and stupid father. It has two remarkable characters: first the stupid father, the warlord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), and then his daughter-in-law Kaede (Mieko Harada). They share a complicated background that plays out by proxy, the ghost of their conflict haunting the epic battle scenes for which this picture is rightly famous. Ran is another fine example, perhaps the last so purely, of Kurosawa's never-ending adroit balancing act of self-consciousness, between East and West, privation and privilege, pageantry and naturalism, theater and cinema, war and peace, life and death and the spirit world.

Rashomon (1950)

Japan, 88 minutes
Director/editor: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Photography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, Takashi Shimura, Minoru Chiaki, Kichijirō Ueda, Noriko Honma, Daisuke Katō

Akira Kurosawa's breakthrough art-house hit introduced him to Western audiences as something of an ambitious and self-serious (not to say pretentious) filmmaker. Rashomon has its analogues in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal and Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (both of which came a few years later) as compact black-and-white non-English-speaking pictures that lend themselves afterward to lively, overly intellectualized discussion and explication over coffee and cigarettes, and which incidentally tended to over-define their creators. They are a bit obvious about their intentions and also tended to obfuscate some of the better efforts that followed.

Nevertheless, I remain fond of Rashomon, even as I most often get the sense in latter-day reviews how unexcited many are about it now, as they argue that at this point the picture is more famous for being famous. David Thomson, in the 2002 edition of his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, says that its "debate on truth is trite." But I like it for the artful way it is shot, for its music, for its players—and yes, even for its debate on truth.

Seven Samurai (1954)

Shichinin no samurai, Japan, 207 minutes
Director/editor: Akira Kurosawa
Writers: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Hideo Oguni
Photography: Asakazu Nakai
Music: Fumio Hayasaka
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Keiko Tsushima, Yukiko Shimazaki, Kamatari Fujiwara, Daisuke Kato, Isao Kimura, Minoru Chiaki, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yoshio Kosugi, Bokuzen Hidari, Yoshio Inaba, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Kokuten Kodo, Keiji Sakakida, Shinpei Takagi, Haruko Toyama

Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was probably even more revolutionary to popular Japanese cinema and the samurai culture on which it is based than it proved to be ultimately to world art film—and it has been a pretty big deal in those circles. Made shortly after the end of the American occupation following World War II, during which samurai films had been virtually banned for their democracy-undermining messages, Kurosawa practically reinvented the form for a new time, one that corresponded with his own brief period of optimism about the fate of the Japanese and more broadly about humanity itself.

Where once samurai culture had concerned itself with accomplished warriors of honor owing debts of fealty to feudal lords, Kurosawa repositioned the historical focus from their glory years of the 17th and 18th centuries to the time just before that, in the late 16th century, the Sengoku period, known as an era of constant civil wars. With this one stroke—augmented, to be sure, by many dozen more shrewd decisions in the composition of the story and in the filmmaking itself—Kurosawa found the key that enabled him to make one of the richest, most deeply involving epic tales ever concocted, one that has lost nary a jot of its power in the nearly 60 years since its release.