Akira Kurosawa

I personally thought he was my favorite director that I have seen so far in Art of Film II. His use of dark humor in his supposedly serious movies is just great. For example, the scene where the right hand man of Jiro plays dumb and brings back the head of a stone fox. Though sometimes he does take some shots too far and leave it on the character for too long in my opinion, but it is something new I hadn't seen before. The types of heroes is a bit different from the type I'm used to from American films, his heroes aren't invincible, they actually can get hurt pretty badly (Sanjuro for example in Yojimbo). His use of weather, strong winds, rain, nature is never weak in his films.

My favorite movie out of the three we watched would probably have to be Yojimbo, just because of the loads of dark humor in that film. Kurosawa never made a comedy but Yojimbo was pretty close. It was interesting to see an action film incorporate so many jokes and laughs, I had never seen that before in any American films. Sanjuro as a character seems to be very likable as well, he has the skill of any great samurai, but he still acts and looks like a commoner, and pretty carefree as well. I think foreign films bring a lot of new ideas to movie making that Americans just don't seem to be able to create once they are stuck in their film making norms. They can sometimes bring a new experience to viewers.

Spirited Away

This film is one of the most recent films created by Hayao Miyazaki. I really liked this one too, but the story was a little hard to follow. The film just made take up some much random information about the spirit world, but I did like the creativity. I think my favorite part of the film is when the giant baby and the evil bird get turned into a baby and a little bird. Then the bird flies around carrying the mouse around for a lot of the movie. I thought that was just very funny and creative of Miyazaki. The animation was better than ever before, everything looked so real, yet still animated, I especially liked the water in this film. Once again, a film from studio Ghibli can not go without a great soundtrack, and this film has a nice soundtrack.

There were so many random things that happened in this movie. For example, a giant water spirit leaves a brown ball of something when it leaves, and she thinks it is medicine? I would have thought it to be something else... but that might just be me. The boiler man and the little coal guys were pretty cool, the little coal guys look just like the dust bunnies from Totoro. There were many random events, but not enough to lose the storyline. I still liked them for their creativity and just for fun. But it sort of takes a little away from the movie itself. The ending had nothing to do with the movie at all, where Haku reveals who he really was. We never knew she almost drowned as a kid in a lake, I do not remember the film ever mentioning it even once before revealing it in that scene. The theme of "Don't judge a book by its cover" is also in this film and it fits in really well. But overall I really liked this movie, another great job by Miyazaki.

Alfred Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was pretty unique when he started making his own films. His use of montage with sound to tell a story was very original back in his time. He also had his typical story lines full of suspense rather than surprise, this included the wrongly accused man or knowing a man has committed murder but just following him to see get caught. His fear of police and obsession with blonde women was pretty clear in many of his films. He always had the police ending up seen as weak and useless, and having a blonde woman as one of the main characters. Out of the three films that we had watched in class, I liked Vertigo. I liked the twists and turns throughout the movie, and when we were actually told the truth about everything was pretty satisfying. Then allowing the movie to progress after the point of us knowing the truth allowed us not to be left asking as many questions as we would have if it had just ended with us finding out what happened. There was still the last scene with the main character just standing there after the woman had fallen off the tower and fell to her death, we never found out what happened to him.

Overall I did not find myself to like Hitchcock as much as I thought I would. I think it is mostly because his style of film making has been copied over and over throughout the years by other directors. It just seems like I have seen his techniques used too many times already. At first I liked his background stories that were full of suspense, but those too had been copied and used countless time by other people. Even though they were original at the time, it just seemed a bit boring to me. The endings were typically predictable, with the exception of Vertigo in my opinion, which was why I liked it the most out of the three we watched in class.