Screen Picks

Kurosawa and Mifune Retrospective (Sat., Jan. 25-Tue., Feb. 25, $8.50, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org) Few actor-director collaborations have borne such sweet and varied fruit as that between Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune. Lasting 17 years and yielding almost as many films, the partnership produced an astonishing percentage of acknowledged classics: Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Rashomon among them. Cowboy Booking's retrospective, which takes up residence at the Prince for the next month, offers new, retranslated prints of 10 of the duo's 16 films, doled out two or three per week so you don't get exhausted or simply collapse from joy.

The retrospective begins where you'd expect, with the samurai sagas that brought both men international stardom. Where, indeed, could an account of either Kurosawa or Mifune, to say nothing of both, begin but with Seven Samurai (Sat., Jan. 25, 7:30 p.m.; Sun., Jan. 26, 3:30 p.m.; Wed., Jan. 29, 7 p.m.)? At a hair under three and a half hours, the story of a besieged village that hires a group of wandering warriors to protect it is epic filmmaking at its grandest. The extent to which Kurosawa avoids the pompous or grandiose is miraculous, but he's aided immeasurably by one of Mifune's most robustly charismatic performances. No screen is too big for the vigor of Mifune's presence, and his roaring laugh infuses humanity into any story. The movie's influence is hard to gauge, but it's titanic, bearing on everything from American Westerns (including one outright remake, The Magnificent Seven) to fantasy epics like The Two Towers.

The shadow of Yojimbo (Sat., Jan. 25, 5 p.m.; Tue., Jan. 28, 7 p.m.) is almost as long. Mifune's amoral swordsman, who alternates sides in a bitter dispute between rival gangs, then watches as the chaos he has unleashed lays the town to waste, is the prototype for the modern mercenary antihero. (Again, the film spawned several remakes, including A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing.) Mifune is mysterious rather than opaque, neither purely opportunistic nor overly principled, although his allegiance-switching is so capricious as to seem almost arbitrary. Still, it remains Kurosawa's most popular film in the West, one that needs to be seen if only to understand everything that's come after.

In coming weeks, look for High and Low, Drunken Angel, Red Beard, Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, Rashomon and Stray Dog.

War Is… (Fri.-Sun., Jan. 24-26, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) The closing weekend for International House's war film series looks to the East, from a fortress siege in a forgotten Asian kingdom to oil fires in 1991 Iraq. It's a safe bet you've never seen anything like The Fall of Otrar (Fri., 8 p.m.) before. Ardak Amirkulov's 1990 film was shot in present-day Kazakhstan, but many of its settings appear unchanged from the film's 13th-century setting. Shot in sepia tones with occasional (and sometimes arbitrary) transitions into full color, the film chronicles the last days of Otrar, the kingdom most recently marked for conquest by Genghis Khan's hordes. When Unjukhan (Dokhdurbek Kydyraliyev), the scout who's returned from seven years of surveying the Mongols, tries to tell Otrar's leader, the fearsome Kairkhan, that they're soon to be attacked, well, let's just say if Kairkhan's heard the old adage about killing the messenger, he's pretty confident it doesn't extend to gruesomely torturing him. Otrar is slow going -- though it zips right along compared to the leaden Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Sat., 8 p.m.) -- mainly because its narrative is rudimentary at best. Still, the climactic attack on Otrar's fortress (which, again, can't help but recall the similar sequence in The Two Towers) is stunningly achieved, and probably has much to do with Martin Scorsese's championing of the film.

No such reservations attach to Lessons of Darkness (Sun., 7 p.m.), Werner Herzog's brilliant and provocative (if substantially flawed) hourlong tone poem. Composed of breathtaking footage shot while American crews were extinguishing Kuwaiti oil fires in the wake of the Gulf War, the film is anything but a documentary. Herzog's narration, which overlays the film's first half, conjures a science-fictional world where an unnamed conflict has laid waste to the environment; the camera scuds along the sand, picking up shards of metal that jut mysteriously from the ground, their origin as opaque as the means of their destruction. On the one hand, the liberties Herzog takes with documentary footage verge on self-indulgence. But when Herzog narrates "the war lasted only an hour" over the much-seen CNN footage of distant night-vision explosions, then follows it with images of the destruction, science fiction seems as appropriate a response as any to filling the government-mandated gaps in our knowledge. The film falters when Herzog's narration disappears, and the doubts it sows about accuracy are counterproductive -- when Herzog narrates a translation of a Kuwaiti woman's words, can we trust that it's what she actually said? But when Herzog is thoroughly in control, the film is transporting, hypnotic and utterly convincing. Preceded by two impressionistic documentaries by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi: On the Heights All is Peace and Diana's Looking Glass.

Badlands (Tue., Jan. 28, 7:30 p.m., free, Chestnut Hill Library, 8711 Germantown Ave., 215-901-2771, www.armcinema25.com/ tuesdaynights.html) Another study in disparity between narration and image comes courtesy of the Chestnut Hill Film Group, who are just revving up their winter/spring season. Terrence Malick's brilliant 1973 debut, based on the same Midwestern killing spree that inspired Natural Born Killers (if that's the word), features the same kind of guileless narration that clotted Days of Heaven (1978), but Sissy Spacek's wide-eyed 15-year-old is a complex creation, with the undiluted wonder of a child, but the unbridled cruelty as well. When she and Kit (a shockingly thin Martin Sheen) hole up in the woods after he's killed her father (the great Warren Oates), she muses on how she loves him, although "sometimes I wished he would fall in the river and drown, so I could watch." When Kit, just before he's caught by the police, adjusts the rear-view mirror of his getaway car to check his hair, it says more about the relationship between sociopathy and media-fueled vanity than any of NBK's sledgehammer imagery. It's too bad Malick never equaled it, but then, who could?

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March 11, 2004
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