Akira Kurosawa - Overrated?

I found “Rashômon“ to be overrated as well. Not that I did not enjoy it, especially the photography in the woods and the scene with the medium.

Personally, I have never been a fan of the Ground Hog Day type format. It makes any film feel repetitive and drawn out, but I understand it was important to this particular story, so I can accept that.

My main issue with the film, however, is how the men at the beginning of the film go on and on about how this event that occurred to this man was absolutely the most horrible thing imaginable. To quote the priest "I, for one, have seen hundreds of men dying like animals, but even I've never before heard anything as terrible as this. Horrible, it's horrible! There's never been anything, anything as terrible as this, never! It's worse than fires, wars, epidemics, or bandits!" And the horrific event turns out to be some guy getting himself killed in the woods in one of three or four equally mundane ways. Seriously, that’s the Earth-shattering event?

Also, the scene with the baby seemed abrupt, a bit forced and quite simplistic, even for the time.

Couldn't agree more. I prefer him over, say, Kubrick (whom I love as well). If anything, he's underrated! I bet more people today know who Beyonce is.

I really just want you all angry and confused the whole time.

This is an old post but i was struck by one above saying he doesn't measure up to today's standards, if today's standards are seen as higher than in the 50's through to the 70's, then there's nothing to say to such a person, no getting through to such.

Yep, a common misconception amongst many people is that the history of cinema is somehow a static scale that keeps growing as time goes by. You can often meet with an opinion that a film is "good for its time", or something along these lines, implying that old films are inherently inferior. This is, of course, untrue. For example, I'd be hard-pressed to find a modern director who can block as masterfully as Kurosawa. Frankly, his 50s and 60s films look better than anything that gets released today and his stories are so powerful they got remade/stolen by countless others.

The hate for Kurosawa, both from highfalutin elitists who only love Ozu and Mizoguchi and the common folk who fail to recognize a masterpiece even if it sits right before their eyes, is ungrounded.

Glad to hear some common sense!! I still haven't seen some like The Hidden Fortress, need the Blu-ray, saw High and Low on The Criterion Channel, and it feels like an insult seeing that calibre of filmmaking on a computer screen.

Sure, but what can a man do. They prefer to screen new blockbusters that bring $$$. Classics like that have only limited screenings in select theaters in large cities, never anywhere else. So, we have no other choice but to watch such masterpieces at home.

I've rewatched Hidden Fortress recently and was flabbergasted and amazed. It's always the same scenario when I decide to rewatch a well-regarded classic that I loved the first time: I fear that I might not like it as much anymore. But it's never true. I always like it even MORE the second time around. Hidden Fortress is a perfect adventure movie and a blueprint for the original Star Wars trilogy. Incidentally, Lucas would watch old westerns from masters and Kurosawa and whatnot when making Star Wars, while modern filmmakers only watched the old Star Wars. Extrapolated to all film, this wonderfully explains why current mainstream cinema is at a historical low these days.