Author Archive: Eric San Juan
Eric San Juan
November 30, 2018
To celebrate the upcoming release of my book, Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide, due out Dec. 15 from Rowman & Littlefield — preorder here! — I’ll be doing capsule reviews all month covering every single Kurosawa film and posting (very) brief excerpts. These will be short impressions and recommendations, nothing more. For a full, detailed analysis of each, grab the book! Rhapsody in August (1991) In his final years, Akira Kurosawa was tremendously concerned with the idea of legacy: what we leave behind and what our life meant. These ideas first started appearing in Dersu Uzala and Kagemusha, and then were amplified in Ran and Dreams. These are all movies that present the idea that we must confront our past in some fashion. The topic…
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Eric San Juan
November 29, 2018
To celebrate the upcoming release of my book, Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide, due out Dec. 15 from Rowman & Littlefield — preorder here! — I’ll be doing capsule reviews all month covering every single Kurosawa film and posting (very) brief excerpts. These will be short impressions and recommendations, nothing more. For a full, detailed analysis of each, grab the book! Dreams (1990) It would perhaps be overstating the case to call Dreams the final masterpiece by Akira Kurosawa, as this anthology of short films doesn’t quite rise to the level of his greatest works, but at times it comes pretty damn close. Dreams, sometimes called Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams, is a collection of loosely connected short films that have some similarity of theme (most either…
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Eric San Juan
November 28, 2018
To celebrate the upcoming release of my book, Akira Kurosawa: A Viewer’s Guide, due out Dec. 15 from Rowman & Littlefield — preorder here! — I’ll be doing capsule reviews all month covering every single Kurosawa film and posting (very) brief excerpts. These will be short impressions and recommendations, nothing more. For a full, detailed analysis of each, grab the book! Ran (1985) Ran is a masterpiece, one of the greatest films of all time, and you should do everything in your power to see it right away. That really could be the sum total of this capsule review, because it’s true, and if I start talking about what makes this film so great I’ll either start to gush or will end up writing a…
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Films
A Month of Kurosawa, Akira Kurosawa, classic films, classic movies, classics, film, films, Japan, Japanese cinema, Japanese films, Japanese movies, masterpiece, movies, period piece, samurai, samurai movies
Eric San Juan
November 28, 2018
Contributed Post Picture We are, inevitably, a product of our surroundings. As far as striving for greatness is concerned, we can feel bound by our surroundings. Because the struggle is so very real, especially when we are working to make our mark on this world, the very tangible feeling of succeeding in the face of modern struggles, like social mobility, inequality and the concerns of what is going to happen (especially post Brexit), can result in us finding ourselves at a disadvantage. And while triumph in the face of adversity is nothing new, the younger generations that find themselves struggling before they’ve even had a chance to get started is something the Baby Boomers and even the Generation X-ers may view as particularly harsh. But…
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Eric San Juan
November 28, 2018
Contributed Post Writing is a hard thing to do. It’s something we all can do in our own ways, with our own styles and tones, and our own perspectives on how art should work. But all in all, there’s a few rock solid structures that need to go into a story to make it relatable and believable: a gripping opening, characters with more dimensions than they have dialogue lines, a setting that has its own laws of the universe, and a bit of conflict that gets resolved by the end of the narrative. And all in all, conflict is often considered one of the most important parts of a story. So with that in mind, let’s think about how you can handle conflict, and what…
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