Category Archives: Film

The Fireman’s Ball (Horí, má panenko)

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  • Horí, má panenko (The Fireman’s Ball)

5/22/21 (Sat)

Milos Forman’s 1967 farce was his final film in then-Czechoslovakia before absconding to greater glory in Hollywood (Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, Hair, Larry Flynt). Firemen in a small town are putting on a ball to honor their retiring president, which falls into turmoil due to their petty individual concerns and paranoia all around. At the opening, a worker putting up a banner is left hanging dangerously from the ceiling when his colleague, distracted by a trifling argument over a stolen cake, takes his hands off the ladder. Others run over to help, but we find that they are less concerned with the desperate man than with the banner and the party’s image. That sets the tone for the film, which is one rapid crisis after another until the last ironic image. It is really about the bureaucratic mindset of the organizers and crumbling values of society under the Communist regime. Continue reading →

Utamaro and His Five Women (歌麿をめぐる五人の女 )

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  • 歌麿をめぐる五人の女

6/7/21 (Mon)

Mizoguchi Kenji’s 1946 work on the famed ukiyoe artist was evidently one of the first movies to be approved after the war by the American occupying forces. Mizoguchi is widely said to have seen himself in the story of the devoted artist, which here involves censorship and female issues, but the same can probably by said for any film about a struggling artist from Lust for Life onwards. Given the director’s usual concern with the difficulties of women in Japanese society, I had assumed the female half of the title would be the film’s centerpiece.

In fact, though the five women dominate the narrative, the thematic focus is Utamaro’s obsession with his art. Continue reading →

The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記)

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  • にっぽん昆虫記 (The Insect Woman)

6/6/21 (Sun)

After Imamura Shohei’s previous work, the madcap Pigs and Battleships, I was ready for anything. This 1963 film – the literal Japanese title is a more clinical Chronicle of Japanese Insects – followed an effective two-year ban of the director by Nikkatsu for his over-the-top and over-the-budget Pigs. Still, Imamura, unbowed, held nothing back in his new piece about a ruthless woman who does whatever she can to survive. The brutal results ironically became the biggest-grossing film in his career, which presumably mollified the studio’s concerns.

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Pigs and Battleships (豚と軍艦)

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  • 豚と軍艦 (Pigs and Battleships)

6/1/21 (Tues)

The wild 1961 film that put director Imamura Shohei on the map (and got him banned from studio for two years). It’s a black comedy mixed with social satire about Japanese civilians and American sailors in Yokosuka, a coastal town near Tokyo that hosts a major US naval base, around 1960.

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The Cremator (Spalovač mrtvol)

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  • Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator)

5/19/21 (Wed)

Juraj Herz’s long-banned film of 1969 was part of the Czech New Wave, which largely disappeared when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the previous year. The setting is the 1930s just ahead of the Nazi takeover of the country. The head of a crematorium adheres to the Tibetan teaching that death helps end human suffering and open the way to a new future life, making him feel good about preparing people for their end – both the dead bodies entrusted to him and the living humans that he took it upon himself to “liberate”. Continue reading →

The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze)

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  • Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street)

5/9/21 (Sun)

I was browsing through Criterion’s selection of Best Foreign Language Oscar winners and chose this 1965 Czechoslovakian film by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos without knowing much about it. It turned out to be a Holocaust comedy, not a crowded category, set in 1942 in the newly created Nazi puppet state of Slovakia. The Tiso regime has accepted the Nuremberg Race Laws, setting off the conflict that drives the drama.

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Zero Focus (ゼロの焦点)

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  • ゼロの焦点 (Zero Focus)

4/29/21 (Thurs)

An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.

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Children of the Beehive, The Hairpin, Mr. Thank You （蜂の巣の子供たち、簪、有難うさん）

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  • 蜂の巣の子供たち (Children of the Beehive), 4/25/21 (Sun)
  • 簪（かんざし）(The Hairpin), 4/27/21 (Tues)
  • 有難うさん (Mr. Thank You)、4/27/21 (Tues)

Three films by the unjustly neglected Shimizu Hiroshi. Continue reading →

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (film)

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  • Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (film)

4/1/21 (Thurs), Netflix

Part of August Wilson’s 10-play cycle of the black experience in the US in the 20th century. A white-owned record company in Chicago has contracted to make a recording with the imperious Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), a real-life Southern singer from the 1920s known as Mother of the Blues. The record makers hope to broaden her appeal by commissioning new arrangements from Levee (a spectacular Chadwick Boseman), a young black musician who is more tuned in to the tastes of the broader public and sees this as his stepping stone to fame. Unfortunately Ma doesn’t take kindly to suggestions, well meaning or not, and takes every opportunity to stick it to the white man regardless of how that affects others, including the young kid’s future. The clash between Ma and Levee – over music, her various demands, her woman (over whom both are fighting; the real Ma was evidently an unashamed lesbian) – leads to fireworks.

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The Prom (film)

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  • The Prom (film)

3/17/21 (Wed)

The idea of The Prom was promising: a group of down-and-out actors looking for publicity decide to stage a protest in Hicksville (played here by Indiana), where a lesbian has effectively been kept from taking her lover to the school prom. I thought it was going to be a spoof on overzealous leftists and their any-cause-will-do attitude, and it starts off lively enough. But it quickly devolves into the usual flaccid material, a plodding story about identity and let’s-love-each-other and be-true-to-yourself platitudes. Yuck. Continue reading →