Dry Lake / Youth in Fury (乾いた湖)

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  • 乾いた湖 (Dry Lake / Youth in Fury)

4/11/25 (Sat)

Criterion had a special feature on Shinoda Masahiro, presumably set up after the 94-year-old’s recent death. I’m not always a fan of the director – I’ve always considered his supposed masterpiece Double Suicide a self-consciously artsy piece of tripe – but he’s never less than boring. I wasn’t sure what film the title Youth in Fury referred to, but it turned out to be an alternative title to the more literal Dry Lake (Kawaita Mizuumi), though dried-up lake would be closer. (His later Kawaita Hana was similarly rendered as Pale Flower rather than the better “Withered Flower”.) The film was written by a young Terayama Shuji, later a notorious avant-garde playwright who worked with Shinoda on a number of his early works. He also has a cameo role in the film. This is Shinoda’s second feature film.

Japan was torn at the time between nihilism and revolution in the face of the US victory in both war and peace. Both trends would be wiped away in the high-growth years to follow, when the population became too busy for either emotion. The film features three key strands among youth at the time primarily via three characters, all fellow university students.

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A Samurai in Time (侍タイムスリッパ―)

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  • 侍タイムスリッパ― (A Samurai in Time)

3/29/25 (Sat)

A samurai from the Aizu clan, which supports the shogun, is facing off against a member of the rebelling Choshu clan in what we now know was the dying days of the shogunate in the mid-19th century. Just as they pull out their swords, the samurai is struck by lightning. When he wakes up, he finds himself in a jidaigeki film studio in modern Japan.

As soon as I heard this much, I tuned out. I’m not a big fan of time travel comedies, which tend to rely on slapstick and fish-out-of-water setups; they rarely reach the dizzying heights of Back to the Future. Moreover, this was a small film directed by a rice farmer in Kyoto, who also acted as scenario writer, cinematographer, lighting co-designer, and editor. But as with One Cut of the Dead, it started as a small independent piece in a single theater, quietly built an audience on word of mouth, and has become a sleeper hit, earning an impressive ¥10,000m thus far in domestic sales on a tiny ¥26m (not a typo) budget. More amazingly, it won the Japan Academy Award for Best Film, the first ever for an independent work. So curiosity got the better of me. The producers must not have expected much from this since it’s already streaming on Amazon even as it continues in theaters despite opening last October.

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Some Like It Hot

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  • Some Like It Hot

3/27/25 (Thurs)

I was in the mood for something light and came across Billy Wilder’s 1959 masterwork by chance on Amazon. I hadn’t seen it in years but had been meaning to watch it after reading about the unfortunate Broadway musical version by the Hairspray guys. That show – Broadway’s second try at musicalizing this piece after Jule Styne’s 1972 Sugar – suffered two serious flaws. First, while the casting of a black actress as Sugar seemed a smart way of getting away from the Marilyn Monroe image, they actually wrote a black anthem for her, meaning that the character, not just the actress, has to be black. That seems limiting since it introduces a heavy issue that goes against the farce. Also, the Jack Lemmon character evidently starts enjoying his new identity as a woman, a woke interpretation that’s so dull at this point. The writers don’t seem to understand that we don’t want racial or gender issues thrown at us. We just want to see a man in a dress. I wish musical writers would broaden their horizons to more universal themes. At any rate, the show was unsuccessful and dropped quickly off the radar. Mercifully.

Fortunately we still have the film, which is blissfully free of everything except the desire to make us laugh. Continue reading →

Company (1995)

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  • Company (1995)

3/27/25 (Wed)

I had vague memories of Sam Mendes’ Donmar Warehouse production as rather overdone, but I do remember enjoying the performances, especially Adrian Lester as Bobby. When I learned that a filmed version had been broadcast, I immediately looked online and found it.

The director’s concept was to present the show as a figment of Bobby’s imagination, thereby establishing Bobby clearly as the central role rather than as an observer of others. Sondheim himself voices his approval in a video interview shown between acts. I have to say that the approach went over my head at the time and, even knowing the idea this time around, thought the director was taking things too seriously. The theme is not that difficult: does committing to someone mean losing oneself in the process (“Once you’re married, you can never again not have been married”), or is it offset by what we gain in companionship, i.e., company?

The musical stacks the deck against marriage by featuring battling, unhappy and even divorced couples – didn’t the writer know any happy pairs? – but the fact that they all remain together and still push Bobby to marry at the end suggests that they must see something in the arrangement, that the loss of freedom and such is compensated by something on the other side. Continue reading →

Red River

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  • Red River

3/22/25 (Sat)

Howard Hawks’ superb 1948 work is no country for young women, who only appear briefly at the beginning and (a tad more substantially) at the end. Otherwise it’s a man’s world as John Wayne seeks to defy the odds and move his 9,000-strong herd of cattle to Missouri regardless of the cost to the other men, provoking a mutiny among the harried team. His virtual son, played by Montgomery Clift, deposes him and leads the men to a safer route. That spurs Wayne to pledge to hunt Clift down and kill him. The final scene feels like High Noon as Clift waits for the inevitable showdown with his mentor.

Wayne is both hero (initially) and villain who, not recognizing his own obsolescence, seeks revenge on his “son” for displacing him. The setup is almost Shakespearian, which the scale of the film fully justifies.

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September 5

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  • September 5

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.

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Demon Pond (夜叉ヶ池)

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  • 夜叉ヶ池 (Demon Pond)

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 →

Limelight

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  • Limelight

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.

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Midnight

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  • Midnight

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.

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Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島)

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  • 宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島 (Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island)

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.

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Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵)

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  • 宮本武蔵 (Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto)

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.

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