Saturday, June 21, 2008

Akira Kurosawa's Dreams - Crows



I love all the samurai films by Akira Kurosawa but Dreams stands out as one of my favorites. Released in 1990, when he was 80 years old, Dreams is an autobiography told in stories rendered from a long lifetime of nocturnal adventure, perplexity and suffering. You get a feel for the flow of Kurosawa's life through these stories as the early dreams in the film are obviously from his childhood and move along throughout his life from his love of painting to the weight of World War Two, the specter of nuclear annihilation and on to old age and death. The cinematography is ceaselessly astonishing with lush color and a mood that truly captures the strange sorts of feelings we all know from our own nighttime wanderings.

The above dream, Crows, features Martin Scorsese as Vincent Van Gogh.

2 comments:

The Nag said...

Other people's dreams fascinate me. My husband dreams, among other things, of being licked by wolves or being abducted by aliens. I, on the other hand, dream that I forgot to shave one of my armpits.

John M. said...

I'm kinda embarrassed to say that all I dream about now is blogging.

Instead of taking my Spanish exam in my underwear, I'm frantically digging through Google Reader looking for that post that I cannot find to save my life, or trying to get Technorati to ping... oh... wait, that one's not a dream. It's all starting to blend.

Maybe, hopefully, this will stop after a while.