3. Biutiful
Its Influence: Ikiru (1952)
A complete revision of Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952). Both films essentially study a character diagnosed with terminal cancer and their subsequent events to change the world around them. Biutiful is definitely interesting, but it represents the weaker tendencies of director Alejandro González Iñárritu. It’s a bleak and reflective brand of social realism imagined in an almost dystopian Barcelona. It possesses little, if any, of Kurosawa’s intimacy. Both men explore existentialism and family drama, but where Kurosawa recounts his character’s final days with a passive sincerity to emotion and family, Iñárritu explores with grand gestures and histrionic tragedy.
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