Film/Music: Leonard Cohen: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to see this concert documentary at the Northwest Film Forum at an 11 pm show. Sitting in the dark theater, the 16mm footage close up on a rumpled Leonard Cohen, I realized two things: Leonard Cohen was hot, and more importantly, sitting there was the closest I'd ever get to seeing him in concert. Looking at the sea of 600,000 cold, wet, hungry people at 4 in the morning, it was probably a preferable experience. Plus I wasn't born yet.

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Image unrelated. I have a conquistador lamp, and you don't.

Books/Film: The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune by Stuart Galbraith IV.

As you probably know, I've been watching a lot of Kurosawa and Mifune lately. Kurosawa is still probably the most recognized Japanese director in the Western world, and Mifune his most recognized muse. Mifune's samurai characters are iconic, and despite the fact that they parted ways artistically in the 60s, they were closely associated in the popular mind until their deaths and, in fact, beyond. It makes sense, then, that the only English-language biography I could find about either of them was an enormous joint biography that I finally finished the other day.

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Movies in bold are ones I hadn't seen before. Ones with asterisks, I saw in a theater. I know I've been bad about reviews, but if you want to hear my take on any of these let me know, please. I'm probably more likely to talk if prompted than sit down to write a formal review, these days.

Stray Dog*
Look Back in Anger
The Devil's Rain
The Tenth Level
High and Low *
The Bad Sleep Well
Seven Samurai*
The Time Traveler's Wife
Hedwig and the Angry Inch*
Night of the Iguana
Zodiac
Drunken Angel

Lots of Kurosawa this month! I'm reading a huge dual biography of him and Mifune, The Emperor and the Wolf, which is fascinating. They're both badasses, and what strikes me most initially is how impossible it is for me to understand the experience of growing up in Japan in the pre-war years (not to mention the war) and have gone through the experiences they did. How most of it is incomprehensible to me. And yet, their films and characters are, with allowances made for cultural differences, totally comprehensible. Everything really boils down to being human in the end, to the extent that watching them without any background knowledge really doesn't clue me in to how different their experiences are. I don't know where I'm going with that, if anywhere, but it's interesting.