5/14/20 (Thurs)
A 1955 film, also known as Hooray for Marriage, by Toyoda Shiro based on a novel set in Osaka in the late 1920s. The wayward son of a prominent shopkeeper has dumped his wife and child for a beautiful geisha from a poor family, prompting his father to disinherit him for sullying the family name. The geisha is hoping to be the man’s next bride. Silly her. Continue reading
4/15/20 (Wed)
I wasn’t particularly eager at first to see this 2001 film about a killer virus and ensuing global panic since we’re living it at the moment. But strong recommendations from friends and curiosity got the better of me. I wasn’t even aware of the film until the past few weeks, when it’s suddenly become a very hot property. One thing that attracted me was that unlike the typical horror film about zombies or aliens, a virus is very real, making the story all too credible – and, it turns out, prescient. The first (and still one of the few) horror films I saw that really terrified me was Jaws since, while I don’t believe in devils, I do believe in sharks. Still, Contagion-wise, it remained to be seen how close Hollywood was willing to stick to the plausible as opposed to the dramatic.
11/27/20 (Fri)
This 1965 work is one of Kurosawa’s most popular and acclaimed films, so I was looking forward to seeing it despite the off-putting three-hour running time.
The setting is a rural village in the mid-19th century towards the end of the Edo Era. A privileged medical student (Kayama Yuzo) expecting to serve as the shogun’s physician pays greetings at a poor public clinic in what he believes a formality, only to learn that he has in fact been assigned there. He detests his surroundings, complaining of the low life and stink (“the smell of the poor”, he is told), and imperiously refuses to wear the uniform or follow the rules. He is eventually won over by the clinic’s virtuous head doctor, known as Red Beard (Mifune Toshiro), who seeks to heal his patients’ souls as well as their bodies (shades of the earlier Drunken Angel). Moreover, his experience with a sickly young waif in the film’s second half brings him an understanding of the struggles of the kindly townspeople. He eventually receives his commission to the shogun, but turns the offer down in order to stay and help the underprivileged (probably a good thing since the already struggling shogunate was overthrown just a few years later).
A film full of clichés and melodrama. Continue reading
11/25/20 (Wed)
This fantastic 1961 samurai flick is set a century earlier in 1860, a turbulent period in Japan when the shogunate was tottering. Continue reading
11/22/20 (Sun)
One of Kurosawa’s first postwar flicks and his first film with Mifune Toshiro. It amounts to a rather heavy-handed look at yakuza culture as well as the race for riches that threatens to undermine the societal ties that bind. It featured exaggerated performances by both leads, who do lots of declaiming in place of normal speech. There is nothing natural in Shimura Takashi’s gruff language or treatment of others, while Mifune is charismatic but over-the-top in trying to be the tough gangster, putting on a show even in intimate moments. It’s hard to believe in either of these guys.
The story itself is interesting. Continue reading
11/20/20 (Fri)
This 1946 film, made under the watch of Occupation censors, was Kurosawa Akira’s first postwar work and one of his only films to focus on a woman. Continue reading
1/5/21 (Tues)
Nakahira Ko’s seminal 1956 film, which put the so-called taiyozoku (太陽族) or “sun tribe” on the map, is essentially Japan’s Look Back in Anger, a sensationalist look at disaffected youth in the postwar era that electrified the staid Japanese film world. It was adapted by Ishihara Shintaro from his novelette, which was bundled with two similar stories that were all made into films the same year (this being by far the best). The series includes the notorious Season of the Sun (太陽の季節), known infamously for the scene in which the main character slams his erect organ through the paper shoji screen. The title of that story led an interviewer to refer in an article to the Sun Tribe, a label that came to define a generation. (The story is alluded to in this film in the boat’s English name, Sun Season.) Ishihara makes a brief appearance in the film as one of a group of thugs, but more important was his insistence that the filmmakers cast his younger brother Yujiro, creating a legend.
sekenbanashi 