Post by Dracula on Feb 19, 2023 13:51:41 GMT -5
Living(1/26/2023)
I’m going to be honest, I did not go into Living planning to be charitable. This is a remake of the 1952 film Ikiru, from the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and as a hardcore Kurosawa stan I really had no interest in seeing his work remade by pretty much anyone. Of course the obvious rejoinder to that attitude was to remember that A Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven were remakes of Kurosawa classics and they are pretty much bona fide classics, which is fair enough but those movies were at least trying to turn samurai movies into westerns which is a kind of translation effort that seemed interesting, but what’s the point of turning a movie about a dying Japanese bureaucrat in the 1950s into a movie about a dying English Bureaucrats in the 1950s? Honestly I’m still not sure what the answer to that is, but I must admit, Living does a more dignified job of trying than I anticipated. I actually didn’t know much about this movie before going and I don’t think I even saw a trailer so I was a bit surprised to find that the movie was actually to some extent trying to replicate the look and feel of a 1950s technicolor film; it’s in the Academy ratio and largely uses classical film style and has old fashioned opening credits, though the film’s dedication to this style kind of dissipates as it goes on. The film’s screenplay was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel winning Japanese-English novelist responsible for such works as The Remains of the Day and someone who is perhaps uniquely suited to translating the face-saving ways of Japan into the “stiff upper lip” ways of England. Bill Nighy does a decent job of stepping into Takashi Shimura’s shoes in the film’s lead and the supporting cast does some solid work as well. So, I ended up respecting this movie for the most part but at the end of the day it is standing on the shoulders of a giant and by the time it started replicating that scene on the swings (you know the one) the sheer impossibility of matching what came before became pretty apparent.
***1/2 out of Five
I’m going to be honest, I did not go into Living planning to be charitable. This is a remake of the 1952 film Ikiru, from the master filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, and as a hardcore Kurosawa stan I really had no interest in seeing his work remade by pretty much anyone. Of course the obvious rejoinder to that attitude was to remember that A Fistful of Dollars and The Magnificent Seven were remakes of Kurosawa classics and they are pretty much bona fide classics, which is fair enough but those movies were at least trying to turn samurai movies into westerns which is a kind of translation effort that seemed interesting, but what’s the point of turning a movie about a dying Japanese bureaucrat in the 1950s into a movie about a dying English Bureaucrats in the 1950s? Honestly I’m still not sure what the answer to that is, but I must admit, Living does a more dignified job of trying than I anticipated. I actually didn’t know much about this movie before going and I don’t think I even saw a trailer so I was a bit surprised to find that the movie was actually to some extent trying to replicate the look and feel of a 1950s technicolor film; it’s in the Academy ratio and largely uses classical film style and has old fashioned opening credits, though the film’s dedication to this style kind of dissipates as it goes on. The film’s screenplay was written by Kazuo Ishiguro, the Nobel winning Japanese-English novelist responsible for such works as The Remains of the Day and someone who is perhaps uniquely suited to translating the face-saving ways of Japan into the “stiff upper lip” ways of England. Bill Nighy does a decent job of stepping into Takashi Shimura’s shoes in the film’s lead and the supporting cast does some solid work as well. So, I ended up respecting this movie for the most part but at the end of the day it is standing on the shoulders of a giant and by the time it started replicating that scene on the swings (you know the one) the sheer impossibility of matching what came before became pretty apparent.
***1/2 out of Five
