Frosty and I had high hopes for KUROSAWA, a documentary originally made for TV. Sadly, in two hours the filmmaker says next to nothing about Kurosawa's work as a social satirist and mentions only briefly the fact that Kurosawa was a technical innovator, without giving so much as a single example! On the other hand, at two different points during the movie the filmmaker shows us prolonged newsreel footage of the grisly corpses that littered Tokyo after much of the city burned down during the earthquake of 1923, when Kurosawa was 13, and at five or six different points he shows us the same damn scene of Toshiro Mifune getting pincushioned with arrows in THRONE OF BLOOD. (Did you know that the title THRONE OF BLOOD was created out of thin air by American distributors? An accurate translation of the Japanese title would be CASTLE OF THE SPIDER'S WEB.)

I could go on for pages, but you get the point -- this exploitative "documentary" tells no lies, but by neglecting altogether what's important and overemphasizing what's trivial, it gives us a badly unbalanced, largely misleading portrayal of who Kurosawa was and what he accomplished. I was gnashing my back molars when we left the theater.

My rating on the Watson scale: 1