The Bad Sleep Well is my 2nd favorite Kurosawa film after Ikiru.

Jesus christ you filthy savages, how is Rashomon not even in the top 5?

It is too hard doing a top 5 on Kurosawa. I would probably want Straw Dog in there somewhere.

Dodesukaden! Kurosawa slashed his throat six times after making that movie. Talk about hardcore, yo.

I have never seen The Bad Sleep Well. My own top five would probably be: Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Lower Depths, and the aforementioned Dodesukaden, which is seriously depressing, and I totally get both why nobody liked it, and why Kurosawa tried to kill himself after making it - it's compelling *because* of these flaws, and I find the film to be depressingly relatable.

I would love see a modernized remake, where the train kid's fake job is as a Sonichu-esque creative designer, the architect dad is addicted to Second Life, and everbody in the trash dump is married to their favorite anime characters, except for that one guy who sees life for what it is, and is destroyed by his lack of illusions.

I can picture one scene quite clearly, where that guy's fake-wife, Fluttershy, is trying to bring him back to the fantasy world that all the other people inhabit. But he's like "no, you're not real!" and then she vanishes, leaving him alone in his dark room, with nothing except the dying light of an old candle and the shadows growing around him.

As for geometry, I don't know much about filmmaking from a filmmaker's perspective, but triangles are a very important concept in visual arts such as painting and drawing. Fine-artsy painters love to use triangles to strengthen their compositions, and I would imagine the same technique is known to, and intentionally utilized by, artistically-inclined film directors such as Mr Kurosawa.

Oh screw you with the modern remakes! Magnificent Seven was nowhere near as good as the original.

These films will never be equaled.

There's nothing inherently wrong with doing a new take on an old story! Hell, most of Kurosawa's best loved work was patterned on this principle - all of his Shakespeare films and adaptions of Japanese folk tales, for example. While the later re-imaginings of Kurosawa weren't as good as the originals (I cannot speak to Samurai 7, as I have not seen it yet), that does not mean remakes are necessarily a bad idea, just that nobody has been up to the task yet.

Dodesukaden, in particular, is a film whose theme is even more resonant in today's internet-and-escapism-drenched world, than it was when it was first made. It was also both less well known and less well regarded than many of Kurosawa's other works, so a prospective director would have a smaller amount of inertia to overcome.

Maybe WE could crowd-source it? Pool all of our talents to tell a tale of a post-industrial hikikomori Detroit, populated by furries, juggalos, and high-functioning autistics, lost yet thriving in delusional worlds of their own creation?

I don't know, I think a Fistful of Dollars is a fine film.

I've found that if you ask someone what their favorite Kurosawa film is, you tend to get a different answer than if you'd asked them what they think his best film is.

Hooker:
I think the geometry thing is a bit of a stretch in the key scene he talks about, but it's probably present in the other K movies.

The reframing and composition make it easy to find shapes. I'm not sure he was sitting there saying: "triangle- triangle- triangle again!".

Also, I don't know if Imitation Game and Selma were terrible... as much as good without really stretching toward anything greater than that.
Maybe you're saying competent, but not good.

Anyway, most of the stuff on the "Every Frame A Painting" channel is pretty good. We have a few of them up on here.
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=142107

Is that another translation of hidden fortress?

Kurosawa was one of many talented post-war Japanese directors. I don't think he was the best of them, but his style was more western (lots of action and camera motion), so he got the most attention in America and Europe.

For my money, Ozu and Mizoguchi were the best Japanese directors of that time period and Kobayashi made the best samurai movies (Harakiri and Samurai Rebellion).

I second Samurai Rebellion as a worthy contender to anything in Kurosawa's medieval catalogue. I can't say whether it's better than Rashomon or Kagemusha, because, well, there's enough room at the table for everyone to have a seat. But it is top-notch. I remember thinking as I was watching it that somehow it had created a better sense of 'place' than almost any film I've seen. By the time the good-guy samurai were forced to transform their modest home into an improvised fortress, I felt as though I understood where each room was in relation to the others, and what were the implications of, say, leading a group of villains down a particular corridor. Yet, there was no deliberate, sloggy exposition to set that up; it was just done through visuals and staging.

Speaking of very good, I enjoyed this clip and will watch more from this fella's channel.

Yeah Harakiri is amazing.