Cheap Kwaidan - Criterion Collection (DVD) (Rentaro Mikuni, Michiyo Aratama) (Masaki Kobayashi) Price

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Customer Reviews of Kwaidan - Criterion Collection

One of the greatest fims of all time.
This film is so utterly magnificent, it's on eof the greatest films of all time. It has the most gorgeous art work, dream-like visuals, color photography I've ever seen in film. This is based on tales by Lafcadio Hearn. A bizzare, eerie and horrifying musical score by Toru Takemitsu works exellently with the beautiful visuals. This video also has a gorgeous color Cinemascope widescreen presentation. The first tale Black Hair, is a bit slow, but's it's so worth it in the unbelievable horror climax. The second tale, Woman in the Snow, is one of the best and most beautiful in the whole film. Masaki Kobayashi uses just all white during the blizzard sequinces with some blood reds, lush greens, dream like blues, and odd purples. The third story, Hoichi, the Earless, begins with one of the most beautiful scenes in the film. An epic sea battle between the Heikie and Genji clans. This scene feautures all kinds of bizzare and beautiful colors including a firey red sky. The rest of the film concerns a young blind man's horrifying ordeal with ghosts. I can see some references to this segment in Akira Kurosawa's Ran. The final segment is called In a Cup of Tea and is the weakest. It's too short, and too fast moving. It does feature lots of gorgeous visuals to make up for it. I recommend this film to anyone, if you haven't seen this film. CLICK BUY RIGHT NOW!

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A Feast
The best work of director Masaki Kobayashi is within calling distance of the achievements of other Japanese masters like Kurosawa and Mizoguchi. Perhaps inevitably uneven, given that it consists of four stories, KWAIDAN's best moments combine a graphic sense of composition, lush, dense colors, a tactile response to materials, and a tart, poetic use of sound. All, despite the occasional ragged shot, are served admirably by Criterion's transfer.

Watching KWAIDAN is a lot like sitting down to a full meal. The first course, "The Black Hair," is a fairly bland and predictable salad, spiced with some extraordinary filmmaking. (The sound of the second wife's kimono gliding over the wooden floors hauntingly condenses her character to a single, silky detail, for example.) It isn't bad, just mildly disappointing, leaving us hungry for more.

"The Woman in the Snow" would be a perfectly realized appetizer, except that with its powdered sugar snow, painted sunsets and theatrical lighting effects, it looks more like dessert. The sweet taste is a trick, however, a way of disarming us so that when the horror arrives, its raw simplicity is deeply frightening.

"Hoichi the Earless," the main course, is simply stunning, executed at a virtually indescribable level of formal control. There are no fewer than *five* layers of representation in the segment. The relatively Realistic framing story of Hoichi seamlessly slides into dreams and fantasy in which mists and shadows creep around characters posed as motionless, hieratic masses. A legendary battle between the Genji and Heike clans is staged in Kabuki-like bright colors, broad gestures and theatrical backdrops, intercut with a painting of the battle, while the soundtrack provides a *third* description through both a musical recounting and a narration of the story. "Hoichi" has the pictorial extravagance of RAN's battle scenes, but where Kurosawa paints his canvas with broad, epic strokes, Kobayashi abstracts the action into a few, highly compressed gestures. The segment is marred only by some low-comedy scenes which fortunately are brief enough not to get in the way.

The film concludes with "In a Cup of Tea," the most original as a story and, with its subdued colors, traditional editing and focus on the actors instead of the decor, the most Naturalistic as filmmaking. "Tea" combines a kind of Borgesian menace with an understated, knowing sense of humor. This is the real dessert, pleasant, surprising, occasinally funny but also, in its very last shot, an astringent reminder of what has come before. It is a suitably satisfying conclusion to a filling meal.

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Masterful work!
Anthology of ghost stories adapted from Lafcadio Hearn , American writer who lived in Japan .
Visually stunning.
The third chapter is the best. It turns around a poet who must create a epic poem about an ancient battle dictated for the leader of this dead regiment, killed in action, who emerges from the ashes to find out someone who reminds always the echoes of that bloody combat.
Extraordinary!