Category: misc

Ikiru at BFI Southbank

For those who have never seen it, Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) plays a little like Frank Capra’s better known It’s A Wonderful Life (1946), but the opposite way around. Instead of Jimmy Stewart’s suicide thoughts leading to his finding of reasons to carry on living, we have the magnificent Takashi Shimura finding a different kind of affirmation with the knowledge of his own impending death. I consider Ikiru the greater acheivement, and to be Kurosawa’s masterpiece: sad, simple yet profoundly existential, humane and strangely triumphant. It contains some of the most moving film moments I have ever seen, and Shimura’s central performance is quite simply extraordinary. Roger Ebert’s final comment in his review of the film captures its brilliance:

“Over the years I have seen Ikiru every five years or so, and each time it has moved me, and made me think. And the older I get, the less Watanabe seems like a pathetic old man, and the more he seems like every one of us.“

My full review is here: http://iambags.blogspot.com/2007/12/great-films-73-ikiru-akira-kurosawa.html

Ikiru runs at the BFI Southbank from 22-31 July, and hopefully will be touring around the country afterwards. I urge anybody with an open heart to see it.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme/july_seasons/japanese_gems/ikiru

Stan Winston, 1946-2008

You may not recognise his face but Stan Winston left an indelible visual mark on a number of the greatest Hollywood action films of the last thirty years: a frequent collaborator with James Cameron, he lended his visionary expertise to help create many famous cinema villains, including the Terminator, the Alien and the Predator, as well as bringing to life Steven Spielberg’s dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, and creating the striking gothic-influenced imagery of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns.

It seems a vague coincidence that i was reading this week that legendary visual effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen is to be giving a talk about his life and work at Edinburgh this year, for Winston was very much his spiritual successor; indeed, Harryhausen, Winston and his colleague Dennis Muren are the only special effects artists to have ever been honoured with their name emblazoned on a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Yet he is perhaps the last of the great effects men dealing with the tangible; in this age of CGi, teams of computer-based designers and green screeners seek to make the unreal real, rather than the old-fashioned sculptors and modellers like Winston who used their ingenuity to make the real seem unreal.

Read more about his life and work here:

http://www.stanwinstonstudio.com/home.html