Author Archive: Eric San Juan
Eric San Juan
November 12, 2018
Contributed Post Everyone wants their home to be as valuable as it possibly can be. That’s what all homeowners want so that they can achieve financial stability and have more flexibility when the time comes for them to sell their home and find a new one somewhere else. But if you want to make sure that your home is worth its maximum potential price, you need to know which things can impact the home’s value in key way. The Building’s Exterior The way the home looks from the outside will have a big impact on your home’s value because people will immediately judge it on how it looks on the outside, even if that’s not fair. It’s worth thinking about what you can do to…
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Eric San Juan
November 12, 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! The Idiot (1951) Following Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa tackled something quite different: a faithful adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Much like the book, it’s a sprawling, sometimes glacial affair focused on a complex web of interpersonal relationships. His initial cut came in at an imposing four and a half hours. At the behest of the studio he cut it down to three hours, then a…
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Eric San Juan
November 11, 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! Rashomon (1950) Reams upon reams have been written about Rashomon. It’s likely to be among the two or three Kurosawa films even casual film viewers have seen, or at least heard of, so for this capsule review series I won’t talk about it at length. I do in the book — it’s among the longest chapters — but when it comes to giving a…
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Films
A Month of Kurosawa, Akira Kurosawa, cinema, classic films, classic movies, classics, film, films, Japan, Japanese cinema, Japanese films, Japanese movies, movies, Rashomon, Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune
Eric San Juan
November 10, 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! Scandal (1950) In the years immediately following the end of World War II, Akira Kurosawa found himself increasingly frustrated with the sometimes salacious turn Japan’s newly free media had taken, with too many tabloids dishing out celebrity gossip and rumors. With Scandal, he decided to confront that issue head-on. Well, until Takashi Shimura’s character began to steal the spotlight, that is. Here, an artist portrayed…
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Eric San Juan
November 9, 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! Stray Dog (1949) “Masterpiece” is probably a word that gets thrown around a little too easily, especially when discussing movies, but it’s hard not to use the word when discussing 1949’s Stray Dog, a gritty crime noir by Akira Kurosawa that peels back the curtain on postwar Japan’s underground crime scene and presents some stark moral questions in the process. Stray Dog once again…
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Films
A Month of Kurosawa, Akira Kurosawa, crime films, film noir, foreign cinema, Japan, Japanese film, Japanese movies, noir, Takashi Shimura, Toshiro Mifune, Works By Eric
