Product Description

One of the most visionary, deeply personal works in the 60-year career of the master behind Rashomon, The Seven Samurai and Ran. Featuring eight episodes rich in imagery and insight (and casting MARTIN SCORSESE as a feisty Vincent Van Gogh), it explores the costs of war, the perils of nuclear power and especially humankind's need to harmonize with nature. You will be enchanted ... and enthralled.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8647 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-03-18
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Japanese
• Subtitled in: Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 120 minutes

Amazon.com
Produced with assistance from George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, Dreams is an omnibus of eight short stories and parables that spell enchantment at every turn. The opening story, "Sun Under the Rain," emerges from director Akira Kurosawa's personal memories, as a child (whose house is modeled after Kurosawa's childhood home in Koishikawa) witnesses a fox's wedding ceremony in a magical forest. The Garden of Eden motif continues in "The Peach Orchard," while Lucas's ILM special effects group shines in the glorious "Crows" segment, in which an art admirer finds himself living within the paintings of Van Gogh (played with concentrated energy by Kurosawa enthusiast Martin Scorsese). In the idyllic closing fable, "The Village of the Watermills," a centenarian claims that "people nowadays have forgotten that they are also part of nature." The equally wise Kurosawa reinforces the old man's claim through these vivid but ultimately life-affirming tableaux. --Kevin Mulhall

From The New Yorker
Not one of its eight segments feels like a real dream. The kind of power that Kurosawa aims for, and intermittently achieves, in this picture is less oneiric than ceremonial. The film is a succession of sweeping dramatic gestures and lofty incantations performed in an atmosphere of hushed solemnity. The second half of "Dreams" is weak: the fifth episode, "Crows," about a fantasy encounter with van Gogh, is a thin conceit; and the remaining three segments are all static, self-conscious, and didactic. But there's greatness in the film's first hour. The opening segment, "Sunshine Through the Rain," is the vision of a small child who wanders into a forest and witnesses a wedding procession of foxes; the sequence has a wholly original sense of the rapturous fear and awe we feel when we first come upon the wonders of the natural world. The second episode, "The Peach Orchard," is also lovely (though its mood and pace are too similar to those of the first). The third segment, "The Blizzard," about four men trapped in a snowstorm, is all snow, howling-wind effects, and bleak, undifferentiated vistas of despair, until Kurosawa pulls a miracle out of the white void; a woman in long black hair and diaphanous robes appears to the party's leader as he battles sleep. It's a transcendent image, perhaps the most piercing ever made of the desires that keep people from surrendering to death. And the fourth episode, "The Tunnel," about a man returning from war and encountering his dead comrades, is a brilliant, hypnotic piece of filmmaking. Its images are simple, stark, and resonant, its dramatic shape is lucid and classically satisfying, and its rhythm is overwhelming, unstoppable; it moves with a sorrowful marching pace, the rhythm of grief. With Akira Terao, who plays the dreamer in six of the segments; Mieko Harada as the Snow Fairy; Martin Scorsese as van Gogh; and Chishu Ryu. Cinematography by Takao Saito and Masaharo Ueda. In Japanese. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker