Tag: Akira Kurosawa
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Yes, Star Wars Has a Holy Trinity
The Star Wars universe is crafted from various influences, such as the films of Akira Kurosawa — particularly Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress — and Flash Gordon (Star Wars architect George Lucas actually wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie.) Philosophy and religion helped shape the direction of the Force, as well as the…
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Akira Kurosawa Accidentally Invented the Blood Geyser
There’s hardly a limit to the number of masterpieces filmmaking legend Akira Kurosawa has in his expansive oeuvre, but even his mistakes only further served to reveal his cinematic genius, evident in 1962’s Sanjuro when he accidentally invented the blood geyser! For horror fans, A Nightmare on Elm Street is probably the best example of…
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Nothing Influenced ’60s Westerns Like Akira Kurosawa’s Samurai Movies
The ’60s were an age that saw Hollywood running dry on Western ideas, so they turned elsewhere for influence and found gold in samurai movies. Up until this point, the genre had dominated a large part of moviegoers’ diets. Classic Westerns were being cranked out of Hollywood left and right in the ’50s, with most…
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Rebel Moon Director Zack Snyder Welcomes Your Inevitable Star Wars Comparisons
It’s no secret that Zack Snyder’s upcoming big-budget Netflix film “Rebel Moon” shares some DNA with “Star Wars.” Way back in 2013, outlets reported that the future “Justice League” filmmaker was already working on an idea for a “Star Wars” project in the vein of Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” By 2021, Lucasfilm had become firmly…
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Rebel Moon Trailer Breakdown: A War Amongst The Stars
A not-so-long time ago, in a Burbank studio, Zack Snyder pitched a “Star Wars” movie.The year was 2012. Disney had just bought Lucasfilm, which gave the company the keys to George Lucas’ blockbuster franchise. It was the earliest of days. Lucasfilm leader Kathleen Kennedy was taking meetings with every successful director in Hollywood, which led…
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The Best Detective Movie Isn’t ‘Knives Out’ — It’s This Kurosawa Classic
Knives Out and Glass Onion may have given viewers the quintessential movie private investigator of the modern age in Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), but the two pictures pale in comparison to the gold standard of detective movies. Loosely based on the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom, Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low revels in its police…
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George Lucas Partially Based Han Solo on This Famous Director
It’s no secret that Star Wars is a huge boiling cauldron of influences that George Lucas dosed together to create something new, original, and fresh. From the Samurai movies of Akira Kurosawa to the legendary structure devised by Joseph Campbell, nearly all of it has been extensively analyzed and explained – but not everything! One…
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Star Wars Had a Massive Impact on ‘Firefly’
Just like George Lucas drew inspiration from Flash Gordon adventure serials, Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, and Westerns to create the unique genre mish-mash that is the one and only Star Wars franchise, so have creators heavily drawn from Star Wars. Such is the cycle of media: all art takes creative cues from its predecessors. Ever…
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How Some Dirty Dishes Inspired The Look Of Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon
She’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs. She can outrun Imperial starships. She’s fast. She is the Millennium Falcon, and while she may not look like much, she’s got it where it counts. As for why she looks like, per Luke Skywalker, “a piece of junk,” that’s a surprisingly…
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Charles Bronson & Toshirō Mifune Teamed Up in This Samurai Spaghetti Western
Looking through the lens of pop culture, it can sometimes seem that the Spaghetti Western genre begins and ends with Sergio Leone. The same lens can also reduce the samurai genre down to the work of Akira Kurosawa. Not that being so completely defined by two masters of cinema is such a bad thing, but…