Ikiru (1952)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Kanji Watanabe is a middle-aged man who has worked in the same monotonous bureaucratic position for decades. Learning he has cancer, he starts to look for the meaning of his life.
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What critics compared Ikiru to
Even Ikiru, arguably the most internationally lauded Japanese film to fixate upon mortality, swaddles its potentially improper subject matter in humanist ideals; its very title, roughly translated as “to live,” aptly emblemizes the manner in which Akira Kurosawa meant partly to meditate on the concept of will, using the imminent finality of physical life as a mere launching pad.
Ostensibly a modern-to-the-minute adaptation of James Thurber’s indelible short story, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is kind of like if Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” were remade as an 114-minute Super Bowl commercial.
Like Mr. Watanabe in Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru, he’s drawn to the possibility of regaining his youthful sense of wonder, but he goes about it the wrong way… by trying to possess someone who is out of his reach.
All of this makes for a conveniently schematic chronology that strangely echoes the structure of many of his films, such as Ikiru and High and Low.
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So it’s also about “Seven Samurai’’ and “Ikiru,’’ “Rashomon,’’ and “Throne of Blood.’’
Akira Kurosawa's ("Rashomon"/"Ikiru""seven Samurai") Yojimbo, which translates into English as bodyguard, was the great filmmaker's most financially successful film and my favorite of all his films.
Though possessing neither the Shakespearean sweep of Seven Samurai, the moral probing of Ikiru, or the narrative audacity of Rashômon, Akira Kurosawa's seminal gangster/samurai fable Yojimbo is just as important a landmark in the director's career—if not for its devilish hybrid of styles, inversion of genre conventions, and sly political commentary, then certainly for sheer entertainment value.