Category Archives: Film

Humanity and Paper Balloons (人情紙風船)

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人情紙風船 (Humanity and Paper Balloons)

4/26/14 (Sat)

A much acclaimed film from 1937. It’s the last of only three surviving works from director Yamanaka Sadao, who was evidently drafted into the army the day the film was released and died soon thereafter in Manchuria. I was interested in it mainly because it draws from the Kabuki play Shinza the Barber, which I saw earlier this month. (That was in turn based on the Bunraku play 恋娘昔八丈 that I saw late last year.) It had a string of Nakamuras and Ichikawas in the cast, which sounded suspiciously Kabuki-like, and it turns out that they were disaffected young Kabuki actors who had formed their own left-wing troupe, the Zenshinza, to pursue a more naturalistic acting style. I had assumed the movie would be a standard period piece, but that turned out to be not quite the case. Continue reading →

Gravity

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Gravity

2/2/14 (Sun), Tokyo

A much-talked about film, already out for several weeks here, being hyped as a potential Oscar winner. I usually don’t take much notice of these disaster flicks, having been burned once too often. But I was interested in how they would build a film around spacewalking, where character interaction is obviously going to be limited, and I like Sandra Bullock.  Continue reading →

Street of Shame (赤線地帯)

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赤線地帯 (Street of Shame)

9/16/13 (Thurs), Tokyo

Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1956 film about five prostitutes working at a brothel (the ironically named “Dreamland”) in Yoshiwara, Tokyo’s old red-light district, and struggling to survive amid the changing mores of the post-war era. The government is moving to outlaw prostitution with the laudable aim of protecting women (and to answer public opinion), but the move would in fact destroy not only the livelihood of these women but, in Mizoguchi’s world, the only way that women can make it on their own in society. Continue reading →

Three Idiots

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Three Idiots

8/4/2013 (Sun), Tokyo

The comedy Three Idiots (2009) is apparently India’s biggest grossing film ever, which in itself piqued my curiosity. It’s unusually long for a comedy at 170 min, but its run in Japan has been exceptionally long for an Indian movie, suggesting that it has been well received, and was coming to an end. So without knowing anything more, I figured I’d go for it.  Continue reading →

Saturday Night Fever

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Saturday Night Fever

7/31/13 (Wed)

I had tried to download Saturday Night Fever on iTunes on a whim while I was on an island in Thailand, but it was so painfully slow – it was set to take nearly three days at that speed – that I gave up. I finished the job back in Tokyo, which took about two minutes. I hadn’t seen the film since its debut in 1977 and wondered if it would live up to my misty water-colored memories.

Happily it did, and then some. Continue reading →

Lincoln

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Lincoln (film)  

5/18/13 (Sat), Tokyo

I didn’t have high expectations for this film given the political sensibilities surrounding blacks and slavery along with Spielberg’s sappy PC tendencies. Still, while those fears were realized within about three minutes of the opening, the film as a whole proved enlightening and entertaining at the same time.  Continue reading →

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (女が階段を上る時 )

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女が階段を上る時 (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs)

2 March 2008

Keiko (Takamine Hideko) is the mama-san of a Ginza hostess bar in the late 1950s. In an image repeated many times throughout the film, we first see her climbing the narrow stairs to her establishment, a dreary ritual that she says in an overdub that she hates. Nevertheless, she notes that, once she’s up, she can handle anything. She was widowed quite young and at age 30 is standing dangerously on the brink of her sell-date. But she has pledged chastity to her late husband and is intent on maintaining respectability, adamantly refusing to mix sexually with the wealthy businessmen who patronize the bar. She stands up for the old values, for example continuing to wear a kimono unlike the Western dress of other hostesses. Her dream is to open her own place in Ginza, which would give her independence. But for that she would need a patron – and such patrons would be hard to come by without sexual favors. Meanwhile, her boss is complaining that she is losing business, and indeed several of her hostesses quit and steal her customers. Pressured by the expenses of keeping up a good front (perfumes, kimonos and such), falling revenues, the day-to-day grind of the business and family medical needs, she gradually allows her high morals to slip away.

Continue reading →