Ikiru [Region 2] | Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori

Ikiru [Region 2] | Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori | 'How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death.'

DVDs:

Ikiru [Region 2]

	Ikiru [Region 2] Takashi Shimura, Shinichi Himori average customer review:based on 108 reviews
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Blessed with timeless humanity, grace, and heartbreaking compassion, Ikiru is one of the most moving dramas in the history of film. Legendary director Akira Kurosawa is best remembered for his samurai epics, but this contemporary masterpiece ranks among his greatest achievements, matched in every respect by the finest performance of Takashi Shimura's celebrated career. Shimura, who nobly led the Seven Samurai two years later, is sublimely perfect as a melancholy civil servant who, upon learning that he has terminal cancer, realizes he has nothing to show for his dreary, unsatisfying life. He seeks solace in nightlife and family, to no avail, until a simple inspiration leads him to a final, enduring act of public generosity. Expressing his own thoughts about death and the universal desire for a meaningful existence, Kurosawa infuses this drama with social conscience and deep, personal conviction, arriving at a conclusion that is emotionally overwhelming and simply unforgettable. --Jeff Shannon

for more information click here

Will Anyone Know You Lived

Ikiru tells the deceptively simple story of a man's final months. Kurosawa was inspired by The Death of Ivan Ilych and, admittedly, the subject matter of a man who has wasted his life being prompted by imminent death to examine his life & make something of what little he has left was not new even when Tolstoy penned his take on it. Kurosawa brings his master director's touch to an age-old idea. What does it mean to live?

A bland middle-aged government functionary who has spent thirty years rubber-stamping pieces of paper finds he is dying of stomach cancer. A slow, lonely, painful death over the next six months is all that awaits him. There are two parts to the movie. The awakening and the action. In the awakening, the man comes to grip with his fate and the realization that he has not lived his own life. This part ends with the man having the epiphany that he does not have to go quietly (and pointlessly) into that good night. The action part is him leaving his legacy by making a difference in the lives of others and the effect of that legacy on those who remember him. His legay: he endures all sorts of humiliation and obstructions as he secures the building of a playground in a poor neighborhood.

Kurosawa is telling two stories here. One is the story of dying man trying to understand and "live" his life at the last minute. The other is the story of postwar, defeated and forcibly democratized Tokyo, Japan. Written and filmed less than ten years after the atomic bombing and subsequent surrender, Kurosawa renders a somewhat daringly cynical portrayal of a Japan that has adopted Western ways more dutifully than competently. American censorship of Japanese movies had just ended the year Kurosawa filmed Ikiru. Western bureaucracy meets Japanese caste society. Oil and water. From work to baseball to nightlife, Kurosawa shows an Eastern people who have learned Western ways without yet understanding those ways. Complicating this is the generation gap between the young who are excited by Western capitalism and modernized social mores the older who cling to the only ways they know. Furthermore, Kurosawa's meticulous attention to detail in rendering a rebuilding society shows the effects of rationing on the average Japanese. For instance, a bright bubbly young lady shuttles from boring, tiring low paying job to boring, tiring low paying job as her proudly bought American stockings fill with holes. Kurosawa's Tokyo is grimy and dusty and distinctly unromantic. A Tokyo of useless nobodies, crass politicians, prostitutes, drunks, poor people, and unloving family members. The story of Japan parallels the story of the protagonist. Both have endured devastation and humiliation. Both are sick. Atomic fallout causes cancer and the man may very have been sickened by the fallout that spread all over Japan. Thousands were. Howver, the man is dying as Japan is recovering. Both are potentially redeemed through a deliberate change in worldview.

Takashi Shimura was one of Kurosawa's stable of actors and Kurosawa worked with Shimura over and over. Shimura's acting career spanned forty-five years and he was in over 200 movies. In Ikiru he is either in or referenced throughout the entire movie. Shimura gives an incredible performance as he evolves from pathetic sad sack to inspired man on a mission. Through Kurosawa's innovative use of wide screen close-ups, we are given the inspiration of a man who surprises himself by responding to suffering with a complete repudiation of his entire life up that point.

Kurosawa, a deft humanist, uses a deliberately objective narrator to show the man's ordinariness and thus, evokes a mixture of contempt and pity for this pathetic nobody and many a viewer will see themselves in a life wasted and ended so cruelly. This long, beautifully made film is Kurosawa at the height of his directorial powers.

for more information click here

'How tragic that man can never realize how beautiful life is until he is face to face with death.'

This is probably the greatest film about life and what it means to live. Watanabe is suffering from stomach cancer. With imminent death in his future, Watanabe resolves to figuring out how to spend his last days. The film is expertly plotted: During the first half we see Watanabe before his death, coping with his illness, his relationship to his son and daughter-in-law, his fascination with one of his young subordinates and his struggle to find his purpose in life. The final half of the picture takes place during Watanabe's wake, where his fellow bureaucrats and co-workers muse about Watanabe's final act of generosity. Subtle and poignant, this is one of the most beautiful movies ever made. Highly recommended!

for more information click here

Masterpiece

Ikiru (To Live), by Akira Kurosawa, is sort of a `lost' film. No, it was never really lost, but it is unlike the archetypal Kurosawa film Western audiences think of him making, and thereby lost in his canon. It is not some historical epic filled with honor, samurais, and swordplay. It is more in line with the genre of retrospective life films in the vein of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane or Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, in that we drop in the on the life of an ordinary man- in this case lifelong low level Tokyo city bureaucrat office head Kanji Watanabe (Takashi Shimura), a few months before his death by stomach cancer, and witness how this `living mummy', as his co-workers chide him (one of the nicer things they say about him), reclaims meaning in a life long since blanched of it. Unlike Charles Foster Kane, a business magnate, or Isak Borg, a renowned Academic, Watanabe is the sort of man most people would ignore.
His devotion to his work life only accentuates his forgetability, for he seems somehow pleased with himself and his existence (or maybe just narcotized), merely rubber stamping projects here and there, or assisting his underlings in giving grieving citizens the bureaucratic runaround. Yet, as soon as we, and he, get confirmation of his cancer (although his doctors, in Japanese tradition deny it, and Kurosawa deftly skewers this absurd tradition in a hilarious scene where another stomach patient- played by Atsushi Watanabe- tells Watanabe exactly what horrors to expect from the doctors and the disease, and is right) something within Watanabe shifts. A mere month shy of setting the all time record for perfect attendance, he skips out of work for a few days. The non-news of his impending demise has shattered all his desires for conformity.... This is a great film, and Shimura (a veteran of the Godzilla films I loved in my youth, as well a Kurosawa regular film player) gives a great performance. The way he imposes his will on the gangsters, bureaucrats, and politicians to get the park built shows smart subversion at its best, and possibly enough to make up for the years of living death between his wife's death and his graves-edge rebirth. Like Rashomon, which preceded it in the Kurosawa canon, Ikiru deals with perspective, but not the perspective of many on one event, but the perspective of many on many things: life, a man, a park, accomplishment. It is, in that way, something like Rashomon 2. It is one of the many reasons this is such a great film. Another is that while the first two thirds of the film, while Watanabe lives, is great, there have been Hollywood films that come close to it- in construction and true sentiment. But, no Hollywood film has ever done what the last third of this film does, craft a stage play that can basically stand alone as an existential debate on life and art, purposiveness and meaning. This daring and depth is what soars Ikiru past lesser films. Even Citizen Kane, as great and influential a film as that is, was not as daring narratively, as this film, for the themes of the film, while profound, are not really original. It's all how the film presents these issues, starting with the film's first shot of an X-Ray of Watanabe's stomach cancer. Despite all that is to occur, Kurosawa never lets us forget that all of what occurs is due to a few cells in a man's stomach that forgot how to behave. Without the cancer, Watanabe remains a mummy for years more, and the slum children have no park to relieve, however briefly, their misery.
Yet, even more profound than the philosophy of the film, is its realism. By the end of the film, we see that Watanabe's co-workers truly are bureaucratic scum. They talk the talk at his wake, but refuse to walk Watanabe's walk. Watanabe's victory is small, and temporal. Likely, the gangsters will find another way to corrupt that area, and with Watanabe gone there is no one left in his office who will care. Kurosawa has shown us victory, but acknowledges it may be Pyrrhic, at best. It is also the greatest artistic indictment of bureaucracies ever made, and not just of Post-War Japan's problems, nor even Japan's for the three tenets of Japanese bureaucracy- be punctual, never take off, and do nothing, are universal, even if only codified in Japan. We see this most eloquently in the scenes of Watanabe skipping work, for the office work comes to a halt and the mountain of paperwork continues to bloat.
Some believe that the famed Tolstoy story, The Death Of Ivan Ilyich, is the basis for this film, since both involve petty bureaucrats who die, but Ikiru is the far greater work of art, for it about life, not merely its waste. Ilyich cannot cope with life, while Watanabe, however, acts upon his demise's coming, but why he does, is a bit of a mystery. We can only assume his motives, for Kurosawa keeps much of his motivation a secret, as Watanabe spends quite some time `offstage', even when alive. Perhaps the only flaw in the film is in the subtitling, with white subtitles almost blanched out in some of the shots, but that's not anything Kurosawa had control over. That which he did shows mastery, something he never seems to have lost.

for more information click here

Extraordinary allegory - realization of death gives new meaning to life

Watanabe-san, a government bureaucratic drone with a monochromatic life, learns that he has stomach cancer and just a few months to live. This realization galvanizes him into making some large changes in his life, pursuing new relationships and noticing the beauty in everyday occurrences, like sunsets.

Most importantly, he takes up the one-man mission of championing the renovation of a local cesspool field into a children's park.

Only when he learned he was going to die did he truly start to live.

In the end, we are all terminal. This Kurosawa movie is an extraordinary allegory on how man can find meaning in his life by engagement with others, by helping others and joining in positive causes beyond their own immediate concerns.

Sadly, I suspect many Western audiences will be turned off by the length of the movie, its pacing, subtitles and black-and-white texture. That is a shame since "Ikiru" is a gem!

for more information click here