User reviews

Although aware of Akira Kurosawa's standing in the realm of world cinema,I have never been a great fanatic of his films as most of them are Samurai films heavily laden with symbolic references to Japanese society.For me Akira Kurosawa's non Samurai films are better films as they speak of deeper issues like human sentiments.I watched "Rhapsody in August" directed by Akira Kurosawa film with rapt attention.As I was watching it after having watched "Madadayo",I could not help but comparing it both in style as well as content with that film.Both the films were made by Kurosawa when he was at the end of his career and may be for this reason he chose to make humanist stories.Rhapsody in August is a meaningful tale for all people whether they are young or old,American or Japanese.It is a film which shows how important a family is and how wisdom must be passed from the old to the young. Kurosawa has deftly tackled the question of Japan's Atomic bomb tragedy through plain words spoken by an old lady who tells her young grandchildren that with the passage of time all wounds are healed.Rhapsody in August tells us albeit in a non academic manner why it is important to live peacefully thereby avoiding war for the benefit of peaceful coexistence and human society.

A good movie is interesting and easy to understand. This is an absolute treasure of a film. A love letter to Nagasaki. An opportunity to see how deeply the atom bomb affected Japanese culture. An opportunity to see a number of the landmarks of the attack. And edited so wonderfully. Kurosawa always highly prized being able to tell the the story in images alone and understood how composition of shots increases content, and this movie has some very quiet sober shots that hit really really hard. It shows how we can fail to see things that are right under our noses for years and years. How things can happen that you never get over. I loved this movie!!!

"Rhapsody in August" (1991) is Akira Kurosawa's next to last film. It belongs to Kurosawa's final period of film-making when he moved away from themes such as samurai stories and historic eras of Japan and focused on issues such as the Second World War and its effect on the lives of ordinary people in Japan. The title of this film is a reference to August 9, 1945, when the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki.

"Rhapsody in August" tells the story of four young girls and boys who visit their grandmother in a village near Nagasaki for their summer vacation. She is one of the survivors of the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki during the war but she lost her husband in the atomic bomb attack. It is through her that her grandchildren learn about the atomic bomb attack and how it killed their grandfather. The children's parents have gone to Hawaii to visit the grandmother's elder brother, who had married an American woman and lived there since then.

The film shows how the children's indifference and disrespect for their grandmother gradually turns into understanding and respect for the sufferings she has gone through. We are allowed to explore the Nagasaki catastrophe through the grandmother's point of view and its aftermath through the children's view, who come to show much more understanding for the catastrophic event than their parents, who only seem to care about not raising the issue of the atomic bomb on fear that it might upset their American relatives and deprive them from their enterprise.

Although the film, in several occasions, makes direct criticism against the US over the Nagasaki atomic bomb attack, it is mostly through the grandmother's powerful and vivid recollections of the war, and the children's understanding of the events, that the depth of people's sufferings and the cruelty of the act -- the atomic bomb attack -- are seen. One great example is when the grandmother compares the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb to a great eye watching over the city.

The grandmother is the living soul of all the pains caused by the atomic bomb and Kurosawa, all through the film and particularly in its iconic ending, well reminds us that time might not heal all wounds.

A beautiful and deeply moving work,it deals with a taboo subject which is rarely treated on the screen.The approach is much different from that of Alain Resnais in "Hiroshima mon amour",and the main reason is that the director is Japanese.Far from Marguerite Duras' verbal logorrhea,Kurosawa lets us in the tragedy through children's eyes,and their simple and naive words.These children,who visit the memorial, only know what the history books tell:almost nothing.

One of the movie's main subject is building some kind of bridge between two generations(a bridge over troubled water,because the adults are rather unsympathetic characters).Kurosawa's granny is universal,she 's the embodiment of suffering,forgiveness and wisdom."Blame it on the war" she keeps on repeating during the whole movie.And her hard-earned peace of mind ,she tries to communicate it to her four grandsons.She does want to see his brother ,now dying,who emigrated to Hawai and made his fortune in pineapples, a long time ago,and his family.The children's fathers are mean little bourgeois,only interested in these American relatives' dough and luxury mansion with pools,the mothers hateful silly geese.None of them can understand the grandmother any more.

So if there's some hope to be found,it can only lie in the relationship old/young,skipping a whole generation,with the exception of minor Richard Gere character.The four children and their granny sitting under a blue moonlight when the adults are talking social promotion and money is beautifully filmed.But it will not delude for long.The last pictures are a real metaphor:sure the road to follow for the youngsters is the grandmother's one,which does not forget the past ,but it's a rocky road,edged with chasms .

Akira Kurosawa, in the twilight of his career, turned his attention to a quiet study of lingering wartime trauma, showing different generations of Japanese civilians recalling the atom bombing of Nagasaki, with varying degrees of shame, understanding, and curiosity. By coincidence the film opened just after the 50-year anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, but Kurosawa isn't interested in scratching old war wounds, and his characters show more envy than hatred of Western culture: note how the jeans and t-shirts worn by the younger kids are always colored in some combination of red, white and blue. But the story is too polite to generate anything resembling a conflict, and the occasional profound image (a rose in full bloom, surrounded by ants) may not be enough to hold the viewer's attention through the final credits. Late in life, Kurosawa the artist gave way to Kurosawa the messenger, and the result here is another mild disappointment from an acknowledged master filmmaker resting on his laurels: heartfelt and certainly respectable, but too often rarely more than simply dull.

When I saw this movie, I remembered Louis-Ferdinand Celine's book, "Journey to the End of the Night", a anti-war book. Reading reviews about the movie, listening to what people in the US had to say, seeing the reaction of the American media to this movie, I was sad, simply sad. This movie is not about Japan, it's not about America, it could have been anywhere a war had happened.

This movie is a poem against war and the scars it leaves forever deep in the mind of the people who suffered those wars. Those who didn't suffer a war are lucky, and shouldn't be blamed for being this lucky, but they should see movies like this to understand what war is about. The world is never better after war. The first ones to agree to settle things through warfare are the ones who didn't suffer war. There are no winners in a war, just remember.

I'm sorry that all those who felt attacked in their pride as Americans are missing the point of this movie. If your father or your grandfather, or your friend has been to war, just listen to them.

The performance of the grandmother will make you forget you're watching a movie! It is filmed simply and un-pretentiously, though is a very emotional film.

Enjoy.

PS: Oh and I'm not Japanese...

The idea of a film exploring the different generational perceptions and reactions to the atomic bomb in Nagasaki is a noble one and the subject certainly needs exposure. However, Kurosawa didn't quite pull off the mood with this one. The children's acting seems a little stilted, almost sitcom-ish, and their flat personalities do not create an appropriate contrast to the well-developed character of the grandmother. In a nutshell, the mood is incomplete because of poor acting or an underdeveloped screenplay-- and I'm not afraid to say so, despite the massive undertaking of talking about the atomic bomb.

Akira Kurosawa is one of my very favorite filmmakers. If you search through my reviews, I have written about a few, The Seven Samurai, High and Low, Kagemusha, and Dreams. I have seen many more, Rashomon, Ikiru (my personal favorite), Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Dersu Uzala, and Ran. I have only disliked one, High and Low, but not one of his films failed to amaze me in some way or other. My initial opinion, after seeing Rashomon, The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, Ran and Kagemusha was that he was an amazing stylist whose films felt slightly impersonal to me. I strongly disagree with that opinion now (I expressed it in my review to Kagemusha, which I'm surprised hasn't resulted in tons of hate mail).

I have just finished watching Kurosawa's second to last film, Rhapsody in August. It is not highly regarded, usually dismissed as a very minor work in a master's portfolio. This I also discovered about my second favorite of his films, Dreams. Well, as far as my opinion, I think people were dead wrong about both of these films.

Rhapsody in August is not a stylistic masterpiece like The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, or Ran. Instead, only second to Ikiru, it is Kurosawa's most humanistic film. I have only seen one film by him (although I've read a lot about him), but I would compare it more to Yasujiro Ozu's work.

This film has a plethora of themes, ranging from the effect of the H-Bomb on both the Japanese and the Americans, the generation gaps between the three generations present (the matriarch of the family feels separate from her middle-aged children, but she relates well to her grandchildren who are interested in their country's sorrowful history), and the effect of American culture on the Japanese of the present generation. It is quite a handful, but everything is handled so subtly that some viewers who don't pick up on it all may easily grow uninterested. In some ways, the film feels very didactic (in a good way). I can imagine this film being showed to younger children, since the four grandchildren, at least at the beginning, are learning about the history of the bomb and Nagazaki and their grandfather's death.

The only weak point of the film is probably the very end, which is difficult to understand. I have a feeling that there was some cross-cultural barrier preventing my understanding of it, so if anyone does get it, please contact me. Anyway, as I perceived it, the film ended kind of randomly. But still, what has come before is too good to get too upset by the lack of closure. It deserves a 10/10.

On August 9, 1945, six years into the bloodiest war concocted by governments of major powers, the humble Japanese people -that had nothing to do with the decisions of their barbarous rulers- he got up after another night marked by anxiety and terror. For the past six months, dozens of cities were being bombed by allied forces prepared to uproot every trace of fascism. And just three days before the most terrible bomb that has come to know humanity, had been released by the U.S. against the people of Hiroshima, killing 180,000 people with it, most of them, innocent civilians.

Around noon, a beautiful and loving lady, look forward to her husband who, at that time, was in the city of Nagasaki. When the clock struck at the stroke of 11:00 am, she was out of the house looking at the mountains that separated the place where he was the father of her children. Two seconds later, heard, this time very close, another terrifying explosion as three days before, he did believe that had opened wide the gates of hell. A huge mushroom of fire and smoke curled over the mountains in the center of Nagasaki and an satanic eye kept on your retina the image of all those around him. About 80 thousand civilians, without any role in the conflict, were killed instantly and in the course of the year. It was Harry S. Truman' gift, to account for the "power" of the American nation.

46 years after of this insucess, the director Akira Kurosawa tried to do an act of reflection, forgiveness and reconciliation, hatred against any lag still persists in the minds of people. And a grandmother, the woman who was waiting for the husband who never returned and never was able to identify among charred corpses, feels that he has erased any resentment in his heart, but still thinks with pain in man she loved. Four grandchildren accompany now and the memories will come to your mind as a choice between a trip to Hawaii is put on the table.

For unlucky, this is a timid film of little relevance and visual plot, and that does not achieve sufficient strength and sensitivity that we had used the master Kurosawa. The presence of Richard Gere gives very little, and the film dissolves without the emotional impact that we hoped we would.

We won't forget the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Akira Kurosawa makes sure of that, but not with a revengeful attitude, rather as a reminder to all humanity that we must care for each other and respect one another because the consequences of not doing so will be paid by all human beings.

Hearing about Rhapsody in August before seeing the film, I was seriously expecting a bad film with a lot of people saying it was Kurasawa's worst. Well, I wouldn't call it one of his finest, but I am not yet in a position to say it's his worst as I haven't seen every single one of his films(I will be watching Madadeyo in due course and see if it was as underwhelming as I remember). Rhapsody in August I do find a flawed film, the script is not entirely sure which way it wants to go and sometimes has a melodramatic tone, the ending is rather confusing and abrupt, the children's acting is rather stilted at times and Richard Gere while trying hard to bring a sense of understatement felt out of place to me. However, it is delicately directed by Kurasawa, and contains some typically gorgeous cinematography and images, especially the rose blooming and the ants. The score is pleasant and never over-bearing, and the story is humanistic and genuinely moving. Of the characters, the most intriguing and well developed was the grandmother Kane. Her scenes are the most haunting and poignant of the film, and she is powerfully acted by Sachiko Murase. All in all, while not Kurasawa's finest hour, I didn't find it a bad film and better than I was led to believe. Even at his worst, Kurasawa is better than a lot of directors now at their best, to me anyway. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Equipped only with a blown out umbrella twisted into the shape of a flower, an old lady, like some ancient Samurai warrior, braves a blinding rainstorm to plea for ending the inhumanity of war. One of his most lyrical and poetic works, Akira Kurosawa's second to last film, Rhapsody in August is about four young Japanese teenagers who stay with their grandmother one summer near Nagasaki and learn about the atomic destruction of their city on August 9, 1945. The film is both a lament for the suffering caused by militarism and an outcry against the world's collective loss of memory.

When the children visit their elderly grandmother, Kané (86-year old Sachiko Murase), she tells them that their grandfather died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, an event in their country's history that they know very little about. Concerned that the teenagers cannot understand the suffering that had occurred, and the possibility of such an event occurring again, Kané relates personal stories about her experience on that terrible day. Building bridges between generations through her stories, she is able to have the children look past the consumerist values instilled in them by their parents and discover both their countries heritage and the values in life that are most important. As the old woman tells each tale, the children are both curious and moved by their power and mysticism and visit the sites she describes in her stories.

They see the decaying remains of two old trees intertwined forever after a lightning storm. They visit the school yard where their grandfather died and see what is left of a jungle gym, now a pile of melted twisted metal that has become a memorial to those children and adults that suffered and died on that day. The film is haunted by Kané's attempt to cope with the emotional consequences of the bombing, an event that most are unable to remember, but that she is unable to forget. She tells the story of her younger brother, a painter, who could only paint eyes, specifically a large red eye, the "eye of the flash" that signaled the disaster in which 39,000 people were killed and an estimated 75,000 died years after.

The children's parents have gone to visit Kané's brother who emigrated tom Hawaii in 1920 to run a pineapple plantation and married a Caucasian American. One of ten brothers, Sujijiro, now in failing health, wants to see his sister before he dies but she is reluctant to go in spite of the urging of the children who drool over pictures of her brother's affluent surroundings. When the parents return from Hawaii, wishing to establish good relations with the wealthy Hawaiian family, they try to persuade Kané to go. When Clark (Richard Gere), Sujijiro's son, flies to Nagasaki, the parents are sure it is because he wants to end the proposed visit, resenting the implication that America caused his Uncle's death.

When Clark arrives, however, the family discovers the opposite. Although Gere does not look the part of a Japanese-American, his warmth, sincerity, and passion for peace more than compensate and his time in the film is one of the highlights. He first expresses his remorse for his uncle's death in the bombing and visits the shrines in Nagasaki with the four children and their parents. Some critics say the film alludes only to the dropping of the atomic bomb and not to any of the events that preceded it, including the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. However, it is clearly Kurosawa's intention to dramatize the futility of war, not the wrongdoing of one country.

In a tender conversation with Kané, Clark apologizes for what he "should" have said but Kané repeatedly and simply responds, "it's all right", blame it on the war", pointing out that many Americans as well as Japanese died in the fighting. Kané agrees to go to Hawaii but only after joining in a memorial service to the Nagasaki victims, repeating the mantra of Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva (Buddhist deity), "Gate gate paragate parasamgate bodhi svaha" - "gone, gone, everyone gone to the other shore". One of the loveliest scenes in the film is the sight of a colony of ants climbing the stem of a rose bush, a final epiphany suggesting that amidst the destruction, beauty and hope survive.

Interesting follow up watch to "Oppenheimer" to say the least...

This movie is quite slow, feeling more like Kurosawa pondering the bombing attacks of Nagasaki and Hiroshima by exploring a single Japanese family in the aftermath. I'm not sure there is a real story here, other than the grandmother having some major PTSD from the attacks. The children actors were fairly bad and did not convince me at all that they were real people. But I have to commend the visual style of the picture. Each shot feels painterly in how it's composed, and Kurosawa follows his later career dream like imagery in this and it's effective.

I disliked the ending quite a bit, and thought Richard Gere was unnecessary, however when the film does explore the morality of the Japanese bombings, it gets way more interesting. I especially liked how all the kids wore shirts from various American universities to show the cultural impact the U. S still has on Japan despite the horrific bombings in the 1940's. Overall, I would only watch this if you want to watch Kurosawa's work, but as a standalone film, a lot of it does not work. Even some of the commentary felt a little biased on the bombings considering there were more reasons why the bombs were dropped that just weren't mentioned at all in this.

This is the toughest negative review I've ever written. I love Kurosawa's work; his films are deeply philosophical and unquestionably artistic. Also I have very deep sympathy and respect for the 200,000 Japanese civilians who were broiled alive when that idiot Truman decided to play boom boom with his new toy. As far as "preaching to the choir" goes, I AM THE CHOIR.

But someone has to say it. This movie was awful. It was so clumsy and melodramatic that it made a mockery of both Kurosawa and the atomic tragedy he portrays. Like my title implies, it's the "ABC afterschool special" version of life after the atomic bomb, complete with a cast of sappy kids, an overly-sentimental script, amateur editing and a philosophical message so vapid that it wouldn't fill the back of a postcard.

Have you ever sat around at Thanksgiving dinner listening to your great-grandmother ramble incoherently about something of great importance? She repeats herself. She takes 10 minutes to communicate the simplest thought. And when it's all over, no one knows or cares what she was talking about because the presentation was so damn irritating. That's what you get here.

I'll give you an example of one scene. The scene shows the widowed grandmother praying before some lighted candles. It should be obvious that she's paying respects to her dead husband killed by the bomb. But just in case you didn't catch that--just in case you thought she was playing bingo or something--here's how the script goes:

Kid #1: What's that about?

Kid #2: Chanting Buddhist sutras.

Kid #3: It's a service for the souls of the departed.

Kid #2: It's August. Soon it'll be Atomic Bomb Day.

Kid #3: August 9th.

Kid #4: The day grandpa died.

(camera lingers for 5 or 10 seconds)

Oh puh-leez. I think we got the message ten minutes ago. What could have been a gripping moment is now just an irritating waste of film and dialogue (with bad acting to boot). I could see the audience collectively rolling its eyes, and I'm ashamed to admit I was rolling along with them.

Don't even get me started on the people in the audience who reacted defensively, believing this to be an anti-American slam. Obviously it's NOT. But I can understand how people might come away with that impression. Kurosawa lays it on so thick that you can't help but feel like he's pointing the finger of blame. If he HAD made it an anti-American film (or at least anti-idiot-Truman), then I would have found it much more interesting. But instead, it's just an overinflated pity party that never ends. There's no conflict; all the characters agree that the bomb sucked. All the characters bow their heads. All the characters feel sorry. For 2 hours it's a one-way ticket to "waaah".

Save yourself the violin strings. Skip this movie and watch the documentary "Nagasaki: The Horror and Legacy of Fat Man" (1995) which is a gripping testament to the suffering and madness experienced by the Japanese civilians. Or if you want to enjoy a GOOD sentimental film of Kurosawa, watch "Ikuru" (1952). But I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to watch this movie.

I got really bore at first time when I saw this movie in theatre in 1992. Since I know Kurosawa is a perfectionist and usually try to say something important in his movie, I am sure there are some hidden message in his story other than the obvious. After twenty years, I decided to rent the out the DVD to examine the movie in detail. I was not disappointed and the true theme revealed to me immediately and I love it even the 3rd and 4th time. It was not just about the H-bomb incidence. It was a way for Kurosawa to tell the how young Japanese generation abandoned their own tradition culture and it is the American, once the enemy of Japan, are reviving it for the country. His second major theme was about old people who seen to be weak, senile and out of time, but when circumstance arise, they could still release plenty of energy to protect their youngs like how he still could such powerful movie like Rhphsody in August. I believe Kurosawa did this movie strictly for his fans to enjoy because unless you understand his thought, this movie is extremely boring at the surface, look as if it is produced by an old man out of touch with his time.

The third of Kurosawa's three works that dealt directly with the atomic bombing of Japan and its aftermath, Rhapsody in August is a flawed but worthwhile penultimate film from one of the masters of the craft. There's a deep well of emotion hiding in the film for a while, hidden behind a quartet of children that feel wrong in more ways than one narratively, but ultimately they fall enough to the side for the movie to actually find the more subtle emotional point Kurosawa was going for.

It's July of 1990, and Kane (Sachiko Murase) is being visited by her four grandchildren Tami (Tomoko Otakara), Shinjiro (Mitsunori Isaki), Tateo (Hidetaka Yoshioka), and Minako (Mieko Suzuki) while Kane's two children Tadao (Hisashi Igawa) and Yoshie (Toshie Negishi) visit their newfound uncle in Hawaii, a naturalized American citizen who had moved there before the war. This newfound uncle is a wealthy pineapple plantation owner, and the adult brother and sister visiting are hoping for a family reconciliation that could lead to them sharing in the great wealth in the United States.

The main problem of this film is the four grandchildren. I'm not sure why Kurosawa decided to keep the grandchildren as the vehicle for background information on the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. I presume it's sourced from Nabe no naka by Kiyoko Murata on which the screenplay is based, but I think it's a change that needed to happen. The dialogue between them is unnatural. The performances aren't really very good, and their efforts to bring forth the background and scars of the bombing are didactic. They explain everything in exact detail that never feels like real dialogue, delivered rather unconvincingly by the young cast. Maybe Kurosawa, at 80 years old, just didn't have the pulse of the youth of the day?

Anyway, when their time with Grandma begins, they are taken with the images from Hawaii and the wealth of their newfound family. However, Grandma is not concerned with it. She doesn't even really believe that this newfound brother of hers is actually her brother. She doesn't remember the name of this brother, but since she was one of the youngest of at least ten children, that's not entirely disqualifying. The children, excited by the idea of breaking up their summer vacation in the Japanese countryside with a visit to Hawaii, are happy to try and goad her into visiting. While they do that, they learn about their grandfather, a schoolteacher who died at the school he was teaching at the morning of the bombing. His body was never found because the building and everyone in it was charred beyond recognition.

One of the big points of the film is the idea of old scars and how we deal with them. For the youth of Japan, they seem to have forgotten the bombing. The children on playgrounds run around monuments to the bombing without seeing them. These scars are very real to those who lived through it, though. Even though firebombing destroyed far more of Japanese cities than the two atomic bombs, there's something world shattering about a single flash that wipes out an entire city, and surviving it while everyone else dies. This is the core of the film, and yet the first half lays it on thick, delivered by these four grandchildren.

I really think a more radical reinvention of the story to fit the medium of cinema might have been appropriate. There was a moment late where one character explains that the sky of one morning is just like the sky of the morning of the bomb, and I knew that it was something that could have been just shown visually. It would have required a flashback in order to do it, though, and then I saw the movie as it would have been with a dual narrative, one set in 1945 and the other set in 1990. Quieter with far less emphasis on the grandchildren while giving more time to Kane, I think this version in my head would have been more effective overall.

The grandchildren send a telegram back to Clarke (Richard Gere) with information about how Grandma has decided to go but will have to wait until after August 9 in order to honor her husband, and he instantly drops everything to come. Now, I had no trouble guessing why he came, but the movie strings us along for about ten minutes with the idea that Clarke is coming to break off everything between the two families, a theory put forward by Tadao and Yoshie because Americans, they say, are just indignant about being reminded of the bomb. Just one mention, they believe, is enough to break off family contact. Well, I knew that wasn't true. I knew he was coming in order to honor his uncle, and this bit of attempted tension just kind of fell flat.

However, once Clarke gets to Japan, the movie finds that well of emotion. It's not that Richard Gere is some kind of powerhouse of an actor. Speaking Japanese (phonetically, I believe), he's a charming presence for sure. However, the emotion springs up when they visit, coincidentally at the same time as the grandchildren, the school where Grandfather died. Gathering around the monument of the twisted metal of a jungle gym from that day, they quietly consider the loss of life while children are released to recess behind them, playing happily while the classmates of those that died arrive to plant and tend to flowers around it.

Then Clarke goes to his aunt's house, and there's a wonderful scene between him and Grandma where they sit quietly and talk about his uncle. He attends a Buddhist prayer ceremony for the victims of the bombing, and it's another quiet, emotionally affecting scene. It's really not because it's Gere, but because the center of the emotion of the film is Clark's and Kane's. Together, they form the heart of pain, regret, and loss that the movie is going for.

The film ends with that morning like the morning of the bombing which turns to rain. Grandma, perhaps finally entering some level of dementia, goes out to walk to Nagasaki, as though it was that morning, and the family chases her in the rain, with Grandma letting neither the wind nor the rain deter her in her quest.

I kind of love the second half of this film. It's gentle, subtle, and emotional. I barely tolerated the first half, though. Didactic, stilted, and centered on four rather annoying children, it doesn't work all that well. However, as a whole, I think the film ends up working quite well. I especially like the image of the little organ that one of the children progressively fixes over the summer, a nice metaphor for the addressing of past mistakes.

This is Kurosawa working professionally as a director but not bringing quite enough as a writer. I maintain that a complete revision of the story's structure is what it needed to really mine the emotional possibilities of the film, but the man was 80 years old. I suppose I can't really fault him for not taking the film in a more ambitious direction. As a small film set mostly on a single set of a country house, Rhapsody in August is mixed, but ultimately good.

If this is a "weak" movie by Akira Kurosawa, then I can imagine how great a "strong" one is. Perhaps it is uncharacteristic of his work. So what? Must it be a samurai epic to be great? What Samurai epics by Kurosawa that I have seen are spectacular.

The elements of great drama are all here. An old woman who had lost her husband in the atom bomb explosion at Nagasaki discovers that she has a brother who had emigrated to Hawaii seventy years earlier, had become an American citizen, and had married a woman not of Japanese origin through correspondence that her grandchildren had with their uncle's son (Richard Gere). The old woman has demons with which to contend -- The Bomb, the military defeat which must have seared the esteem of every Japanese of the time, the intrusion of American culture into Japanese life, her children who have become insufferably petty and materialistic... ...Sure, Richard Gere is not one of my favorite actors, but he plays the role of someone 'just visiting' who speaks broken Japanese. That minor role mercifully stretches his limited acting talents little..

The treatment of Nagasaki as two worlds -- one lost, one all-new -- seems to tell me much about the Japanese, at least of the children's generation. Maybe the children can save the memory of the significance of the changes in Japan since 1945, if not the events themselves.

The confusing ending prevents me from giving a "10/10" rating. Not since the Civil War have any Americans have experienced anything remotely similar to the events in this story in America. It's beautifully done, and it is gripping for someone who has no ties to Japan. It reminds me in some respects of "Gone With the Wind" without the objectionable features of racism, catty characters as protagonists, or perverse sentimentality of a rotten social order such as the one that Japan had before 1945. If GWTW gets an "8" from me, then "Rhapsody in August" gets a "9".

Rhapsody in August is a very small movie. It has little of Kurosawa's bravura cinematic flare and could well, from its look, have been made for television. Yet there is something rather lovely about this little thing.

The movie is about children staying with their grandmother who learn that she has a brother living in America. She doesn't remember this brother, one of many siblings, some dead, and the children, eager for a trip to California, try and encourage her to remember.

The grandma is lovely. The children seemed a bit unconvincing, speaking in stiff conversations and sometimes over-emoting, but maybe that's what children are like in Japan.

The grandma lives near Nagasaki, where she lost her husband, and the children do some downbeat sightseeing.

When I read user reviews of this movie, several were mainly just a description of the story, and I seem to be doing the same thing. I'm not sure what it is about this movie that makes one want to tell what happens, since really, not much does. It's an episodic film that is notable not for story but for lovely, quiet moments like the survivors of a school carefully tending the twisted jungle gym left as a memorial.

Perhaps one wants to tell the story because the movie is made up of little moments, like a search for a mysterious tree or ants crawling to a rose, that don't on their own seem to mean much and yet in the context of the film are striking.

There is something wandering about the movie, although since life does wander this may be a feature rather than a bug. Like the reviewers here, I don't know what to make of the final, overlong scene, and I would have preferred something else. But I am glad I saw this.

I have seen this film many times. This morning I watched it again and was deeply moved, but in a more personal way this time, in watching the scenes first of the children visiting the site of their grandfather's death in Nagasaki, and then later watching the scene where the classmates of the children killed by the Bomb came to make the yearly pilgrimage to the memorial of twisted metal that had once been a playground jungle gym, so that they could replant the flowerbed and repolish the memorial plaque. I hope that the City of New York can create such a living memorial to those who died on September 11, 2001. I would recommend viewing this film again, if you have already seen it, or certainly for the first time, if you have not seen it, as it carries a very powerful message.

RHAPSODY IN AUGUST is not an anti-American film. Although some of the characters express anti-American sentiments, the film rejects them. And Richard Gere's character does not apologize for the atomic bombing (which would have been unforgivably presumptuous of Kurosawa). He apologizes for his family's ignorance of the fate of his uncle.

But that's not to say that this is a good film. Kurosawa hectors the audience, which is a thing he hardly ever does. And surely Kurosawa could have found a more interesting American actor than Richard Gere to play Clark. And it is true that Kurosawa, while eschewing an anti-American stance, does try to pin the blame on "war," meaning that he tries to parcel the blame out equally. But of course, the blame for WWII isn't shared equally. Perhaps having Clark mention that his mother's brother died at Pearl Harbor, or making his wife a Chinese-American whose parents were murdered at Nanking, might have served as a prophylactic against this moral failing. Of course, this might have meant that Kurosawa would have had to come to terms with his own past as a wartime propagandist for the government which committed those crimes.

Perhaps the silliest aspect of the film is its indignant insistence that Americans don't want to discuss the bombings.

Please. We discuss it all the time. We debate, and we agonize, and we yammer endlessly about what might have happened, and what did Truman think might have happened, and what if this and what if that. We also talk about the firebombings of Tokyo and Dresden, the sellout to Stalin at Yalta, and all the other things we did which are at least morally questionable if not criminal.

And to have this point of view put forth in a film which studiously avoids mention of Pearl Harbor, Nanking, the Philippines, Bataan, the atrocities in the POW camps, or any other undoubted crimes committed by the Japanese government is particularly galling.

All in all, the poorest of the 22 Kurosawa films which I have seen. The only thing here to which I can give unqualified praise is the remarkable performance of Sachiko Murase as Kane.

when i compare this movie to other movies from Kurosawa, it is not one of his best. but though its still a good movie, and i enjoyed it. when i watched it, it "sucked" me into it, in the way a good book does it. i like how Kurosawa is setting the focus on the bombing of Nagasaki, without overdoing it. without the use of sad/touching music and heroic speeches (like it is used in other movies touching sad historic moments), you can feel the grief over the bombing. i also like the acting of especially the Japanese cast, Gere's character is a bit to playful, but all in all, all right. so all in all, i think that the movie is worth watching. it is shot beautiful, and it has an interesting and solid story.

Akira Kurosawa's penultimate film, Rhapsody in August, is a family drama that's mostly about various people dealing with the 45th anniversary of the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki. Letterboxd lists it as a comedy/drama, but I'd disagree. The first half is tonally a little lighter than the second, but neither feels like it's trying to be particularly comedic.

It's a solid movie, and I think it works better in the second half and the first. Surprisingly, Richard Gere is in it for a bit, and once you get over the surprise of seeing him rock up in a Kurosawa film, he's pretty good.

It's typically well acted and nicely shot, as you'd expect from Kurosawa. Its pacing is particularly slow, and I think that's what keeps me from liking it as much as his other 1990s films, but it's still a worthy entry in his fantastic filmography. It also ends on a strange but memorable note - one of those endings I can't make perfect sense of, but it feels appropriate somehow.

The second to last film made by Akira Kurosawa. A film about three generations of Japanese forced to deal with the atomic bombing and its consequences. Also starring Richard Gere, for some weird reason.

I'm vividly reminded of Isao Takahata of Studio Ghibli as I watch this film. He is a masterful film maker as well, but this is the first film from Kurosawa that I've seen where I felt I was not Japanese enough to fully get it. With Takahata that's most of his films. What the atomic bombs meant for Japan, and still do, is not something that can be easily understood by foreigners, and this film is not the one to explain it to them. Then again, I don't think that's its purpose. It's more of an essay to categorize how the Japanese themselves feel about the bombings.

But, because I'm probably missing over half of what the film is trying to say, I'm left with a film that moves around languishingly, contains emotional cues which I have no way of getting, is very much subject matter over good story, and has Richard Gere in it.

What am I supposed to say about a film like this? It's good. Probably. I assume... I mean, it's Kurosawa. And I don't regret seeing it. But I also didn't really get it.

I need to study some history. Let's call it average in the meantime.