From Austria and Germany, Austrian documentarian Michael Glawogger’s Workingman’s Death is divided into segments showing people, mostly men, banded together in performing almost incredibly harsh and unpleasant work in different places in the current world: Ukraine, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, China. There is (thankfully) no voiceover narration, only the sounds of labor, and conversations among the […]
Daily Archives: June 19, 2009
Intricate, razor-sharp black-and-white cinematography by Kenji Mizoguchi’s Kazuo Miyagawa gives Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo—literally, The Bodyguard—only the appearance of being a great work of visual art. It entertains but is scarcely important. However, this satirical action-comedy towers above its sequel, Kurosawa’s tedious Sanjuro (1962), and its spaghetti-western remake, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) starring […]
Dennis Grunes 