Akira Kurosawa's Dreams (DVD)

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As a young man, the late Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa was a fan of Hollywood Westerns, leading him eventually to base several of his most famous movies, like "The Seven Samurai" and "Yojimbo," on them, substituting Samurai warriors for Western gunfighters. Later, in a matter of art imitating art imitating art, Hollywood produced "The Magnificent Seven" and Sergio Leone made "A Fistful of Dollars" based on the aforementioned Kurosawa films, and the circle was complete.

In any case, there's no doubt Kurosawa (1910-1998) was one of the world's great directors, even influencing George Lucas's 1977 "Star War" with his 1958 film "The Hidden Fortress." To mention other Kurosawa classics would seem superfluous, but lest we forget, think also of "Rashomon," "Throne of Blood," "Heaven and Hell," "Red Beard," "Ran," and many more. By the time he got to "Dreams" in 1990, he had almost a half century of filmmaking behind him, and he had every right to coddle himself a little.

"Akira Kurosawa's Dreams" is just that: A collection of dream segments that the director claims he experienced over the years and wrote into a screenplay. As such, there's no actual story line but a series of vaguely interrelated passages. Taken as a whole they may seem somewhat disparate and unfocused, but if you begin looking at them more closely, they take on an organic structure of their own and start making sense; besides, even taken individually they are highly provocative and visually stimulating. There are eight segments in all, eight dreams, many of them aided and abetted in their special effects by George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic.

The first couple of episodes, "Sunshine Through the Rain" and "The Peach Orchard," feature the encounters of a little boy, presumably Kurosawa himself, with mystical creatures dressed in elaborate, colorful costumes. These episodes reflect the director's concern for nature, trees, animals of the forest, and so on. The imagery is striking: fields of blossoming flowers, valleys and rainbows worthy of "The Wizard of Oz," exquisite figurine dolls, and graceful processions and dances that get progressively more spectacular. These are displays any Hollywood extravaganza would envy, yet they're poignant and thought-provoking as well.

The third and fourth episodes, "The Blizzard" and "The Tunnel," are in direct contrast to the splashy hues of the foregoing segments. Three and Four are grim and bleak, meditations on death, war, and destruction, the former recounting the exploits of dying men on a mountain-climbing expedition, the latter about a ghostly battalion of dead soldiers.

The fifth episode is my favorite, "Crows," wherein an art museum patron literally steps into a painting by Vincent Van Gogh and goes looking for the artist. As a lark, director Martin Scorsese plays Van Gogh, which is neither here nor there, but he should not give up his day job. In any case, this is one of the most beautiful and fanciful bits in the movie, the Van Gogh character voicing some artistic sentiment clearly reflective of Kurosawa.

Episodes six and seven, "Mt. Fuji in Red" and "The Weeping Demon," take us back into the dark side of things by creating hellish nightmare worlds that warn against the dangers of modern nuclear technology, warfare, and devastation. These segments are more in the nature of vintage Kurosawa and again in stark contrast to the film's more colorful and picturesque scenes.