Aaron's Thoughts
The more films you see, the more you realize just how much of film history builds on itself.
Every great auteur stands on the shoulders of those who came before him or her.
Movies like Memories of Murder, Parasite, and Zodiac are all time classics in their own right, but boy do they owe quite a lot to what Kurosawa does in High and Low. Sure, Fincher and Bong Joon Ho are both layering on their own artistic flair (along with the thousands of other directors that this influenced). But there is no denying how indebted it all is to the foundation that Kurosawa laid.
The irony though is that Kurosawa himself had influences that shaped him as a filmmaker. He stood on the shoulders of those who came before him. That’s why film history is so munch fun. You see a great film, then you watch what influenced that filmmaker, then you watched what influenced that filmmaker. You do that enough times and you are all the way back at the beginning. And that will only get more true the longer the medium exists.
As for the movie itself, what has not already been said about this masterpiece? Quite a bit stood out to me - the long takes, the contained nature of the first half compared to the sprawling nature of the second half, the class commentary, the performances, the genre switch. I also just loved how much time was spent showing the actual procedural part of the police procedural portion. Spending 10 minutes in a room full of cops giving updates on an investigation was far more thrilling than it had any right to be. I think my favorite thing though is how the name perfectly ties into the films two distinct halves. You get a “high” in the first half (in the house) and then a “low” in the second half (in the lower class areas). Just a perfect movie
