Delayed Reaction: Ikiru

Premise: After finding out he only has a few months to live, an old man commits his final months to building a park. 

Kurosawa really was allowed to do anything, wasn't he? He's sort of the Japanese Hitchcock in that he'd get to turn any "gimmick" into a full movie. For Hitchcock, it was "shoot a movie to look like a single shot" or "the whole story plays out from what a guy can see out his window". For Kurosawa, it was "tell the same story from numerous perspectives" or "what if Macbeth, but in feudal Japan?". I'm really coming to understand why Kurosawa is one of the cinematic masters. It's not even that he makes great movies. Rather, it's that he has great ideas. Whenever he made a new movie, it's like a new avenue of filmmaking opened up. 

Ikiru has a bit of a two halves problem. It's similar to how I felt about Paris, Texas. The first half, I didn't care for. The second half I loved, but I'm not sure the second half works without the time spent in the first half. Weirdly, I liked the bureaucracy the best, like the very long scene about people being sent from department to department. When the movie is about Kanji Watanabe exploring the Tokyo nightlife or having the non-romance relationship with Toyo, I didn't care much. I feel like 40% of those scenes were close ups of Takashi Shimura looking incredibly sad. Where the movie strongly picks up for me is when the bureaucrats argue at his wake about why he built the playground, how he did it, how much he was really responsible for it, and what it says about them that they haven't done something like that. It turns into a mix of Citizen Kane and a carpe diem movie, which is a sweet spot for me. This immediately jumped to #2 on my Kurosawa list behind Rashomon, and I could see it growing on me even more over the years. I may even like the early parts better. 

Verdict: Strongly Recommend