The Grudge (2002)

"They're coming for me!"

This isn't the Hollywood remake with Sarah Michelle Gellar- it's the Japanese original, the one Sam Raimi raved about. So is it any good? Well, yes, but it's a good film, not a great one, where some fantastic horror set pieces and very good direction save what is an over-convoluted narrative with too many characters.

Films in multiple acts based on different characters can work, and work well; see the entire career of Quentin Tarantino, the master of making a non-linear narrative comprehensible to the average person. But a narrative horror film, based on the ramping up of tension and ever-increasing shocks, in which the supernatural horror is held back but shown in terrifying glimpses? Here, where such a narrative is technically done very well indeed, the chosen narrative style serves to destroy the overall effect of what are truly superb individual horror set pieces.

That doesn't take away from the effectiveness of those set pieces, though, and it's the direction that truly makes this film shine. A very modern horror, eschewing all sense of the Gothic for modern white interiors and brutalist exteriors has a very different and very effective look. Worth a go but perhaps, in spite of some technical excellence, not quite as good as its reputation.

The Hidden Fortress (1958)

"What you make of another's kindness is up to you."

Let's get the obvious comments about this being a blatant influence on Star Wars out of the way quickly, shall we? The directorial style, with the wipes; there's a princess, who gives out a medal at the end; Tahei and Matakishi are C-3PO and R2-D2, and their squabbling at the start of the film is awfully similar, as are all their early scenes. That's enough to be blatant, and I suspect the great Toshiro Mifune's General Matakishi is a big influence on Obi-Wan. Will that do?

But as an Akira Kurasawa film, shockingly only the second I've blogged although I saw a fair few in my pre-blogging days? Well, it's not his best; perhaps it lacks the thematic or aesthetic depths of his best work. But it is nevertheless awesomely made even if the script is odd; shorn of anything more than superficial themes of honour and vague spirituality, it contains Mifune being Mifune, an awesome duelling scene with lances on foot(!), and of course a comic chorus in the form of Tahei and Matakishi, who are rather interestingly foregrounded from the very start, the film being more or less their POV. They also, however, highlight the oddity of a film which is classily directed and made in a modern manner, with a new script, but set entirely within an early modern value system of feudalism, where peasants are simply rude mechanicals, crude and greedy as opposed to the noble behaviour of the posher characters.

It's a brilliant film for all the usual Kurosawa reasons, though, even if it probably would have ended up as one of his lesser-known works if not for George Lucas.