3/11/25 (Tues)
A riveting backstage story about the ABC Sports crew members at the 1972 Munich Olympics, who, expecting a sleepy night setting up for the next day’s games, find themselves instead covering a life-or-death news story when the Black September terrorist group takes Israeli athletes hostage. Events start slowly, but as soon as a staff member hears what appear to be gunshots from the direction of the Olympic village, the story takes off with a momentum that never lets up.
3/2/25 (Sun)
Shinoda Masahiro’s 1979 adaptation of Izumi Kyoka’s 1913 stage fantasy. Shinoda, who had previously drawn on Bunraku theater for Double Suicide, here turns to Kabuki as his inspiration. While the stage show was not necessarily written for Kabuki, I saw a pitiful Kabuki version directed by and starring the great Tamasaburo way back in 2008 that I’d prefer to forget. The film, which also starred Tamasaburo, had not been seen for 42 years after its initial television broadcast, and I didn’t recognize the material until I started watching. I wouldn’t have bothered had I known. Continue reading
2/4/25 (Tues)
Chaplin wants to be philosophical in this very talky 1952 piece, but less would have been more. I suspect this would work better as a silent film, if only to avoid the platitudes that his character keeps spitting out. The film is hugely popular in Japan thanks to the melodramatic tone and its chaste treatment of the girl’s love.
2/2/25 (Sun)
Mitchell Leisen’s underrated 1939 film is one of the best screwball comedies ever, distinguished by a sparkling script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett in their sophomore effort as a team. All character traits and plot developments are logical, if nutty, and the pieces fit together beautifully. It boasts the funniest repartee since Trouble in Paradise, and its tone is dry but not as cynical as their later works. Leisen’s direction is flawless, moving with buoyant pace throughout in complete service to the story.
1/31/25 (Fri)
The final film (1956) in Inagaki’s Musashi trilogy (here are Parts 1 and 2) is by far the most straightforward, disposing of most pointless subplots as the story builds relentlessly from the start to the climactic duel with Sasaki Kojiro. The island, known in the film by its old moniker Funajima, was later renamed after Kojiro’s Ganryu fighting school due to the fame of the real-life battle in 1612. The trilogy thus stops at the midpoint in the career of the 28-year-old Musashi, who remained active as a warrior, artist, and author (most notably The Book of Five Rings) until his death in 1645.
1/30/25 (Thurs)
The second film (1955) in Inagaki’s Musashi trilogy. Continue reading
1/26/25 (Sun), home
Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1954 remake of his now-lost wartime epic about the legendary swordsman, adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa’s popular 1930s novel. The novel is a highly romanticized look at the elusive Miyamoto’s life, where the known facts are thin on the ground, and has done much to establish his swashbuckling image. The film is the first in a trilogy, as made clear in the English title. It proved a huge hit both at home and abroad. It was honored by Hollywood at the Academy Awards as the year’s best foreign-language film. I don’t think it was even the best Japanese-language film that year (its competition included The Seven Samurai, Sansho the Bailiff, Chikamatsu Story, Late Chrysanthemums, and Blue Ribbon and Kinejun winner Twenty-Four Eyes), but no arguing with success.
1/14/25 (Tues)
Tasaka Tomotaka’s 1963 version of Minakami Tsutomu’s novel was being shown as part of a celebration of actress Sakuma Yoshiko, whose performance in this weepy transformed her virginal image and propelled her to stardom. It offers a rather sanitized look at a brothel full of happy hookers overseen by a kindhearted madam. While this was hardly Japan’s first work about brothels, its salacious marketing strategy and portrayal of sex, however mild by today’s standards, raised eyebrows at the time and (along with Imamura Shohei’s The Insect Woman) triggered an “erotica boom” in Japan’s film industry.
1/12/25 (Sun)
Dexter Fletcher’s 2019 film biography of Elton John from childhood to his recovery from drug addiction some 30 years ago. It’s pretty standard fare for this type of film, starting with a difficult upbringing by disinterested parents to a success that he was not prepared for and ultimately to redemption.
1/11/25 (Thurs)
Kinoshita’s two-part 1949 work is one of more than two dozen film versions of the evergreen Kabuki classic Yotsuya Kaidan since the silent era. The first eight minutes or so of Part 2 simply repeat the final minutes of the first half, so I assume that this was originally intended as a single film, broken up either for excessive length or just to make an extra buck (the second one opened in theaters just two weeks after the first). The original Kabuki version was also split into two days, mixed with scenes from Chushingura (it was a spinoff of the latter), so I suppose it follows tradition in a sense. In any case, the film could and should be reedited into a single 2.5-hour film and should certainly be seen that way.
The Japanese title is literally “Yotsuya Ghost Story: A New Interpretation”. New is right – for one thing, the ghost story has no ghosts. Oiwa appears only as a figment of the guilt-ridden Iemon’s imagination rather than an actual spirit as in the play. The film cleverly has Tanaka Kinuya playing both Oiwa and Oiwa’s sister Osode, so that the latter represents for Iemon a haunting manifestation of Oiwa after her murder.
1/2/25 (Tues)
I never caught the original Shogun series way back when, so having seen the new version recently, I figured it was time to get caught up. As it turns out, both are superb renditions of the book, but their aims and approaches are very different.
1/2/25 (Tues)
I’m not sure if this 1962 film was meant to be serious, but it’s fantastic high camp, a drag queen’s dream. Bette Davis gives a gothic portrayal of the demented former star in Sunset Boulevard mixed with the demented fan in Misery, while Joan Crawford plays the crippled sister with an irritating gentleness that reminded me of Olivia de Havilland (Crawford’s real-life sister) in Gone With the Wind. Never a dull moment from start to finish.
A former child star failed to shake off her sweet, curly-haired Baby Jane image as she grew, only to see her little sister Blanche surpass her as a major movie star. Unfortunately Blanche was left crippled at the peak of her stardom, reportedly run over by her drunk and bitter sister. She is now wheelchair-bound, living with the spinster Jane on the second floor of her home. Jane has never forgiven Blanche for snatching stardom from her and treats her abominably, which is where the camp comes in. Continue reading
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