11/9/23 (Thurs)
The latest overwrought work by provocateur Tsukamoto Shinya. The Foreign Correspondents Club was showing a subtitled version for the overseas press, and free sounded like the right price. That proved optimistic. There was an after-talk by the director (who produces his own films – no one else will), but we opted for dinner instead.
10/22/23 (Sun)
I was jet lagged when I saw this superb production of C.P. Taylor’s 1981 classic in London almost precisely one year earlier, so I wasn’t going to miss the chance to catch the NT Live recording. As Holocaust dramas are not necessarily a big thing in Japan, I figured tickets would be easy to come by and booked that morning, only to discover that the theater was nearly sold out; I was lucky to get two adjoining seats. I presume that’s due to the presence of David Tennant in the lead role, though I’m not sure how they know him here.
10/19/23 (Thurs)
Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s 1997 film is considered a classic of the horror genre and was apparently highly influential. Continue reading
10/7/23 (Sat)
John Ford’s 1946 version of the OK Corral gunfight shows a civilization in the throes of creation, a community coming together in a spartan desert territory as it sets the laws and values that it wants to live by. Much the same process was explored in the musical Oklahoma! just three years earlier.
10/6/23 (Fri), home
Kaurismäki’s 1990 film, the droll film that really put him on the global map, sounded much grimmer than it eventually turned out to be. Continue reading
10/5/23 (Thurs)
Unfunnily Yours is more like it. Preston Sturges’ 1948 film was apparently his last critical success after a string of flops, though it was a commercial failure at the time. That was partly due to the untimely suicide of Rex Harrison’s real-life suffering mistress, which creepily paralleled one of the plot points, and the studio didn’t help things by shifting strategy and advertising the black comedy as a thriller. It’s been reevaluated since and appears on many lists of best-ever comedies; it’s one of Tarantino’s 11 favorite films. Not on mine.
9/29/23 (Fri)
This 1963 film, which I never knew existed, popped up when I was checking out articles about the present Broadway revival. It’s a film of the Broadway original from two years earlier with many of the members of the original cast, including writer Ossie Davis and his wife Ruby Dee. It’s nominally about a black preacher in Georgia who recruits a random woman from Dothan to impersonate his late cousin in order to win an inheritance, figuring the white guy in control of the funds won’t be able to tell the women apart. Naturally events soon spin out of control. But as with any good satire, it’s about a lot more than its story.
9/25/23 (Sun)
The third offering (2006) in Kaurismäki’s Finland/Loser Trilogy. The Finnish title Laitakaupungin Valot is a takeoff on Chaplin’s City Lights (Kaupungin Valot), apparently meaning something like “Lights from the Other Side of the Tracks” – if that’s true, maybe they should have gone with an equally pun-filled Seedy Lights or Shitty Lights (pardon the language) or Far-From-the-City Lights. Both films end with the hapless protagonist getting out of prison and an uplifting clasp of hands with a woman. But the resemblance pretty much ends there, and maybe the English titlists were wise to ignore the pun.
10/1/23 (Sun)
This 2002 film is the second in Kaurismäki’s so-called Finland/Loser Trilogy. The films are only loosely tied together by theme; I accidentally watched the third one before this, but it didn’t really matter. Actually it seems that any of his films can fall into this category, so not sure what prompted the trilogy label.
9/23/23 (Sat)
The title of Aki Kaurismäki’s 1996 feature, the first in his so-called Finland (or Loser) Trilogy, has the whiff of Naruse’s Floating Clouds and even the same Japanese title (浮き雲 here vs. Naruse’s浮雲). However, the bleakness of the Japanese film is nowhere evident in Kaurismäki, whose dry presentation and pokerfaced characters deliver a black comedy with an unexpectedly upbeat ending.
8/9/23 (Wed)
Jules Dassin’s 1950 film does for postwar London what his The Naked City three years earlier did for postwar New York. I learned afterwards that there are two versions of this film: one edited for the UK and Commonwealth, and the other for the US and the rest of the world. Neither was overseen by the director, who was kept away from the Commie-hating authorities in the US due to his liberal past, but he later expressed a preference for this one, the US version. The UK version reportedly treats the slimy protagonist more sympathetically and offers a more positive ending, making me glad I watched this one instead.
8/7/23 (Mon)
A noir film of 1947 by the famed Ealing Studio, which I know more for its comedies; indeed, director Robert Hamer is best known for his fabulous Kind Hearts and Coronets for the studio a few years later.
We are in contemporary (postwar) London’s working-class East End. A convict escapes from prison and finds his way to the home of his former sweetheart Rose, a hardened shrew now married to a dull but stable businessman with two grown daughters from his previous marriage and a son of their own (who, it is hinted, may in fact be the convict’s child). She does her best to clear everyone out of the small house and hide the convict despite a constant danger of discovery. Continue reading
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