Brandon’s movie memory

An ugly, gray horrors-of-war movie. The twist here is that instead of simply running through all the reasons why war is hell, this one brings sex into the picture - not just the usual love and desire stuff, but a variety of situations dealing with sexual need during wartime.

Our titular heroine (Nishi) is a nurse in an army hospital in 1939 during Japan’s war with China. She spends some of her time at a base hospital where men with illnesses and minor injuries rest up before they are sent home or back into combat, and the rest of her time at an understaffed camp hospital at the front dealing with a constant flow of critically wounded men, fatalities and amputations. She is raped by a soldier who is sent back into combat to his death as punishment. She sexually services a man who lost both arms and can’t take care of himself anymore (but he commits suicide soon afterwards). Then she ends up at the front in love with a morphine-addicted surgeon, in a platoon where the local “comfort women” are spreading cholera to the troops, but the troops keep visiting them anyway. Mishi manages to get Dr. Okagi off the morphine so he can make love to her, but the place is destroyed in a Chinese raid a few hours later, everyone killed but Nishi. She finds Okagi’s body on the ground. The end!

A pretty interesting movie, definitely not the kind of war film I’ve seen before. Compassionate, but also somewhat hopeless given the surroundings and situations. I liked it, but can’t say I’m itching to watch it again.

Nishi is played by Ayako Wakao, who starred in a bunch of Masumura’s films (Seisaku’s Wife, Manji, A Wife Confesses, A False Student, Afraid To Die) as well as Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (played the money-lending girl who opens her own shop at the end) and A Geisha, Ozu’s Floating Weeds, and Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. Dr. Okagi appeared in Suzuki’s Underworld Beauty. And the armless guy starred in Oshima’s Naked Youth.

J. Rosenbaum:
“Roughly contemporary with M*A*S*H (as in Altman’s film, scenes of war-front surgery provide a corollary to Vietnam), it sometimes suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme–how to preserve one’s humanity amid impossible circumstances–but its ethics are considerably more developed.”

J. Sharp for Midnight Eye:

Made for Daiei Studios, Masumura’s stark wartime drama, an adaptation of a novel by Arima Yorichika, is one of the handful of films made in the mid 60s dealing with the personal experiences of those involved in the war, including the same director’s previous Hoodlum Soldier (Heitai Yakuza, 1965) and Seijun Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute (Shunpuden, 1966). Both Masumura and Suzuki had been active towards the end of the war, and both used their experience to examine the conflicts and interpersonal dramas that arose on the frontline in order to question such concepts as duty and loyalty to their country. To this end both directors approach their subject using strong female protagonists whose role in the war is often forgotten, with Story of a Prostitute focusing on a group of prostitutes sent out to the frontline to service the soldiers, and Red Angel almost making analogous use of the nurses (although Masumura’s film does feature a group of prostitutes and takes pains to point out that the nurses duty is not the same as theirs!) In a world gone mad it is these female characters who provide the only source of stability and comfort, even morality, whilst the shell-shocked, emasculated walking wounded dream of returning home to their families.

MAR 20, 2008
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Saw on 35mm for the first time. I do not know this movie as well as I think I do… lots of forgotten parts (the town in Iceland buried in ash) and mis-remembered bits. I was grateful to see it projected, but don’t feel that it loses too much on television - gonna keep happily watching the DVD for years to come. If I have a favorite movie right now, this is it.

A new favorite line: “At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.” This is the impression I got from some Japanese movies.

Checked out the DVD again and watched some of the extras. The Chris Darke short didn’t teach me much, just strengthened my belief that nearly all video-art installations consist of too-small TV screens in too-large white rooms full of uncomfortable folding chairs.

DEC 30, 2006
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A reminder of the attempted Chris Marker Marathon begun in late August. Showed it off to Jimmy & Dawn.

A movie about memory, images, directing and editing, making pictures, turning life into art and vice versa.

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.”

Explanation for the electronically processed images: “He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.”

Owls and cats! Digitally processed images. Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Three children on a road in Iceland. Apocalypse Now. Sacred symbols at Macy’s. Teens dancing in the streets. The same scene in Vertigo that Marker references in La Jetee. Kamikaze. An image. A memory. A glance.

Even better than I remembered, and I remembered it as a masterpiece. Such a good documentary that it may not be a documentary at all. The best travelogue ever.

If this site didn’t already exist, I may have felt compelled to create it myself.

Dawn loved it. Jimmy too, I hope?

The Chris Marker Marathon will continue someday. Got some Rivette to watch first, I think.

This came right in between the two other Ozu films I’ve seen, around the same time as The Hidden Fortress, Underworld Beauty and Giants & Toys.

Ozu’s first color film (in a very nice looking print at Emory) and the handout told us to watch for the red teapot but didn’t say why. The teapot was often anchored in the corner of the shot, a helpful indicator of which way the camera is oriented in the room. Not too familiar with Japanese traditional housing so it confused me that there was a giant opening on both sides of the living room until I noticed the teapot. That probably wasn’t the intention.

Music is nice for the most part, but turns into an icky music-box score sometimes in the home scenes. Reading what I wrote about Tokyo Story, it says Ozu’s signature line is “it’s a beautiful day”… I remember it in this movie, though I don’t know if it was during the family outing at the lake or another time, because I wasn’t listening for it.

Stars Shin Saburi (from a few other Ozu films) as Hirayama, a man to whom everyone turns for family advice. He claims that happiness for the children is the most important thing, but when it comes to his own oldest daughter (Ineko Arima from Tokyo Twilight, The Human Condition and Late Chrysanthemums) he backs down and refuses to let her marry who she wants. Hirayama’s wife (Kinuyo Tanaka, star of Life of Oharu, Flowing, The Crucified Woman, Sansho the Bailiff) patiently waits it out as he wrestles with his daughter’s decision to marry without his consent, agrees to attend her wedding at the last minute, and finally goes to visit her new home in Hiroshima to make up for having never smiled at the wedding (final shot is his train leaving).

Hirayama’s younger daughter was Miyuki Kuwano, only 16 when this came out, starred in Oshima’s Naked Youth two years later. The family’s giant-mouthed friend from Osaka with health problems, Cheiko Naniwa, appeared in Mizoguchi’s The Crucified Woman. Hirayama’s good friend (whose daughter leaves home and marries against his will, working at a bar which Hirayama visits) is the great Yoshiko Kuga, main guy from Tokyo Story and everything else, appearing in 180 films, 32 of them by Ozu.

Everything works out in the end. Hirayama is on the train, his friend is seeing his own daughter again, and the big-mouthed woman’s daughter is thinking of marrying. All the men have lots of daughters in this film - there’s a theory presented for that, but I think it was just meant for laughs. The scenes at the bar with Hirayama and his employee are pretty funny, too - I’d forgotten that Ozu was sometimes a humorist. Ozu had a co-writer, and it’s based on a novel - not trying to credit the director with every line of dialogue, but he embraced it at least.

Senses of Cinema explains the style: “There are no long takes or are there any very brief shots in his films. Each character’s contribution to a dialogue is delivered in a single shot. This technique is not however, to be confused with television dialogue where one actor looks left to the other actor looking right. Ozu’s performers are centrally placed, looking at the listener, and, at the audience. Between each dialogue scene, there is an establishing shot. These are held longer than establishing shots are in other filmmaker’s works, and they contain very little movement, or if movement is present, it occurs in the distance, often at the junction in a long corridor framed either side by the walls.”

And: “Ultimately Ozu’s films are observational. The Osaka woman may be the most annoying and irritating individual in Equinox Flower, yet she is not judged by the film. Hirayama, in his stubbornness towards his daughter and in excusing himself to escape another conversation with the Osaka woman demonstrates his human fallibility. Ozu easily identifies his characters faults, but he readily understands and forgives their foibles. Along with Renoir, he is one of the great humanists of the cinema.”

Excerpts from the Criterion essay:

[Ichikawa is] one of the preeminent figures in the golden age of postwar, “humanist” Japanese cinema

Few war films have ever had the courage to wallow so directly in the offal of man’s inhumanity to man, or to render so bleakly and so bluntly the emotional carnage that festers long after the battle’s end.

Based on Shohei Ooka’s award-winning 1952 novel, drawn from the writer’s own experiences as a soldier and prisoner of war, Fires on the Plain seeks to detail the increasingly desperate conditions endured during the final days of World War II by what remained of the 65,000 members of the Japanese forces who had so brutally conducted a three-years-plus occupation of the Philippines. Set on the Philippine island of Leyte, in 1945, the film is told largely from the perspective of a battle-harrowed and sunken-eyed foot soldier named Tamura, who, suffering from tuberculosis, has been ordered to blow himself up with his last remaining grenade should the Japanese field hospital refuse him admittance. Fires on the Plain’s ever more oneiric visions of everyday wartime atrocities (landscapes strewn with stinking corpses, feral dogs so ravenous that they seem to have slipped the surly bonds of gravity, rigor-­stiffened hands clawing up at the heavens black with swarms of feces-­maddened flies) serve to emphasize a single abiding point: the innately human will for survival can sometimes seem a fate far worse than the certainty of death. And yet Tamura—played with a sense of dissociated bemusement by Daiei Studio’s genre stalwart Eiji Funakoshi (a familiar face to fans of both Yasuzo Masumura’s pressure-cooker social satires and the Godzilla-come-lately rampages of Gamera the giant turtle)—keeps on living, if only to set himself apart from the soldiers all around him who, in their desperation, have begun to regard the mortal remains of their fallen comrades with hungry eyes.

Ichikawa was apparently pretty well disliked by Japanese critics and industry types until a few years later when Masumura and the Japanese New Wave came along to back him up with their even harsher and crazier films.

Movie has a few moments of humor, and a few vaguely moral scenes, like when our hero (who later played the title role in Blind Beast) shoots a Japanese soldier who just killed (and plans to eat) another soldier, but mostly it’s just “horrors of war: the movie,” beautifully shot. Emory showed Peeping Tom the following week, warning us that PT was a horror movie, but this one certainly has more horror in it than PT does. Very good, but not easy to watch.

The “gunman” (Hideaki Ito, star of Cross Fire from the Gamera director), a stranger who blows into town, plays one of the two ruling gangs against the other and emerges as the sole adult survivor.

Ruka Uchida, love child of the red and white clans, the other survivor and only non-participant of the bloodshed. According to closing titles he will grow up to be sequel-happy Italian hero Django.

Shun Oguri (Azumi, Miike’s Crows Episode 0) is Akira, the boy’s father, killed before the movie even starts but shown in flashback.

Yoshino Kimura (Glory to the Filmmaker, Dream Cruise), mother of the young boy turned Red Clan prostitute and killed off at the end.

Koichi Sato (Ring Spiral, Kinji Fukasaku’s Gate of Youth), cruel leader of the red clan, rips it up with a chain gun.

Yusuke Iseya (Memories of Matsuko, Distance, After Life, upcoming Blindness), stylin’ leader of the white clan, kinda the less evil of the two evil lords.

Kaori Momoi (Izo, Kagemusha), Akira’s mother and a legendary badass in hiding who comes out and helps our hero for the final fight. Falls somewhat in love with a white-headbanded guy whose name I couldn’t figure out.

Teruyuki Kagawa (of Memories of Matsuko, Serpent’s Path and the next K. Kurosawa film), the town sheriff torn between loyalties to both sides, becomes schizophrenic. Probably Miike’s most interesting new character in the story.

Quentin Tarantino (Destiny Turns On The Radio, Little Nicky) plays the funny-talking white guy in the framing scenes.

Watched late at night with Jimmy. Full of eager anticipation, turned quickly to apprehension when we’re unable to understand half the dialogue (plays at festivals with English subtitles, which we lacked). Then movie seemed to get longer and louder and more tedious, and I got sleepier and less interested…

I mean, don’t get me wrong, it has visual appeal, and a few stand-up-and-clap moments of bravura. Didn’t leave me cold exactly, just… wasn’t thrilling and I started to regret suggesting it.

But ya know what? Looking through the screen shots I started to like it a lot more. It’s a really awesome movie when… you know…

…when I’m not watching it.

It seems that Kitano wants to make a new film. He is unsure of himself… only gets four words into the title (in a hasty typeface) before giving up.

He tries a bunch of different genres:

But none of them are working out. It’s all been done before.

Wait… what about a comedy with a girl, her mother and a duck puppet?

Yes! Kitano is triumphant… he shall film this comedy!

Throw in some more characters… a cross-dressing mad scientist and his giant robot:

Aaaaand we’re off:

But wait, things are starting to fall apart. The film crew is spotted, effects and costumes and backgrounds are revealed to be artificial. The narrative is making no sense.

Finally a series of giant explosions destroy it all… the comedy, the genre stories, all the Kitano identities and characters and false sets!

The title! Glory! No uncertainty anymore!

Kitano’s final diagnosis:

Pretty bearable anime. I’d been warned that it’s such a mindblowingly twisted movie that most people can’t follow… but it’s not that I couldn’t follow, it’s that I didn’t care enough to. Some of the visuals are neat, but the story and movie are just so uninteresting, I barely made it all the way through. A plot description would take too long, but it involves a lot of scientists and a dream machine that makes some of ‘em go hudsucker-proxy nuts and makes others think they can take over the world in dreams. I don’t remember how it ends.

The faces of the leads are not shown until the fifteen minute mark. For the first sixth of the movie there’s only the poetic narration faded with shots of their bodies and hands.

I don’t know what to say when confronted with Resnais or Marker movies, keep throwing out “poetic narration”.

Rest of the movie is conventional by comparison with the intro and with 90% of “Last Year at Marienbad”, but then “Marienbad” came afterwards and I’ve watched it a bunch of times, so I would have to say that.

IMDB plot: “While shooting an international movie about peace in Hiroshima, a married French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) has a torrid one night stand with a married Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). They feel a deep passion for each other and she discloses her first love in times of war in the French town of Nevers to him. He falls in love with her and asks her to stay with him in Hiroshima.”

The film is such a dream that when I finish watching it I seem to wake up and forget most of the details. This is the second time I’ve seen it and it never quite sticks. Ahh, dvd commentary will help.

Writer Marguerite Duras is a novelist whose book is sitting on my bedside waiting for me to read (update: oooh, it was good). Lead actor Okada was in Naruse’s “Mother”, “Rififi In Tokyo”, “X From Outer Space” and “Lady Snowblood”. He played the lead in “Woman in the Dunes”, the main character’s boss in “The Face of Another” and the man in white in “Stairway to the Distant Past” (released the same year Okada died). Riva (still alive) was in “Kapo” the same year, then starred in “I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse” and played Binoche’s mother (?) in “Blue”. Shot by super master Sacha Vierny (”Marienbad”, “Muriel”, Bunuel, Ruiz, Greenaway) and Michio Takahashi (”Gamera vs. Barugon”). Editor Henri Colpi won the palme d’or at cannes two years later (tying with Viridiana) with his directorial debut.

Below is from the commentary track.

The intro reminds of Pompeii and “evokes the very beginnings of life”.

On the woman’s visit to Hiroshima’s hospitals and landmarks: “it will never be more than a theme-park experience”

Scenes from “Children of Hiroshima” are used precisely for their lack of authenticity, and the images remind of Nazi death camps.

Resnais was commissioned to make a film about the atomic bomb with Marker scripting, but it fell through, leading instead to this film.

Resnais and Varda both love cats (surely not as much as Marker does!)

Duras “would become the high priestess of French literature in the 1960’s and 70’s”

Despite not writing his own screenplays, “Resnais can fairly be described as an auteur because a majority of his feature films and many of his shorts deal with the nature of memory and its relationship to the present. Memories have a vivid present-tense quality in Resnais’s cinema and in Marienbad… they are almost indistinguishable from current incidents.”

Hey wow, he mentions “The Koumiko Mystery”.

The star of “Children of Paradise” had a similar thing happen - an affair with a german officer, then publically shamed with hair cut off after the war.

Resnais is an expert on comic books.

Starts with a Jean Cocteau quote and animated/drawn images on TV. It’s “un film de Chris Marker”, no fooling around with that. Music by Toru Takemitsu (uncredited on IMDB) who scored a bunch of classics like “Double Suicide”, “Kwaidan”, “Pitfall” and “Ran”. Co-produced by “Le chat Pompon” (hmmm).

Marker meets “by chance” a young girl at the ‘64 Tokyo Olympics, quickly loses interest in the Olympics themselves and instead follows her around the city, pondering shops and trinkets, symbols and national and personal identity as in Sans Soleil. Halfway through the picture, Marker “disappears”, goes back to France, and the narration is taken over by Koumiko, tape-recordings of her answers to his interview questions about current events, beauty, love, animals, and finally WWII. Catherine Lupton’s book notes that “this premise enables Marker to synthesize all the widely disparate methods and idioms explored in his films so far: a light-hearted personal travelogue, the investigative interview and the melancholy and disquieting fiction.”

Koumiko stops under a billboard for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, then the camera follows pedestrians with umbrellas while the theme song from that film plays… nice.

Marker’s trademark animal appearances: a googly-eyed owl on an outdoor sign, a whole cat montage, and Koumiko imitating both animals.

Beautiful movie, just as essential as the other Marker films I’ve managed to see. I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, despite the horrid video quality.

“Marker’s fond and playful homage to the French New Wave… The fluid roles that Koumiko plays for the camera mesh with the presentation of Japan as a ‘world of appearances,’ as Marker would later call it in Sans Soleil”.

“Washingtonians” may still be the stupidest episode of this “Masters of Horror” season so far, but this one is outright the worst. The others have been falling over themselves trying to find a new twist (”I know! george washington was a cannibal! oooh, killer ice cream man and if you eat his ice cream you TURN INTO ICE CREAM!”), but this one gives us no reason to watch, recycling three tired old horror concepts and adding no new style or twist or excellence:

1. guy is afraid of a thing [water] and must confront that thing [go on a boat ride with his boss and boss's wife whom guy is secretly sleeping with].

2. guy and boss have killed people in the past [guy's brother drowned, boss killed his ex-wife] who come back as ghosts to haunt them.

3. things keep happening that were just a dream… or were they???!???!??????!!!?

Guy’s dead brother wasn’t killed on purpose so in the end he helps take care of the malicious dead ex-wife. Still, guy and boss’s wife are left floating out in the ocean at night, and guy is bleeding from the leg, so I hope sharks eat them before morning.

I only half paid attention. Writer of Ring/Dark Water (who is starting to seem obsessive about drowning) and director of Scarecrow and Ring 0. The boss played the lead in “Audition” and the not-as-good white guy starred in “Captivity”.

Man has accident. Needs new face.

Fortunately he’s friends with a brilliant tissue-replacement surgeon who wants to test his theories that facially-scarred people can reintegrate into society if their faces could appear normal again.

They find someone with a good face to copy (note: it’s the miner from Pitfall)

The doctor works hard in his all-glass laboratory.

The procedure is a success!

But the doctor’s psychological theories were wrong - the burnt man uses his new face to create a sociopath alternate personality, kind of like “Hollow Man” but not at all like “Darkman”.

Meanwhile, a young woman with a similarly deformed face has an unhealthy relationship with her brother.

Completely beautiful movie, obviously.

If Pitfall was a weird movie, this one just dives off a steep cliff of weirdness.

And it doesn’t end well. For anyone.

The photography & video quality on this are so excellent, the story could’ve been about nothing and I still would’ve enjoyed it. But the story is neat too.

A worker has deserted from the army, and runs off with his son in search of work. He’s lured to a mining town and then killed by a mysterious white-suited man. End of movie.

But no! First of all, he sticks around as a ghost… second, the same actor plays a lookalike union leader at one of the two mining communities. Nobody figures out who the white-suited man is, or what he’s up to, but he later kills a women shopkeeper also, the last person to see the first man alive. The union bosses flail around and finally kill each other, the dead wander among the ghost community of the town, and the murdered man’s son hides, observes, and lives off stolen candy from the shop as the movie gets quickly darker and stranger. Apparently it’s all a satire about corruption.

An excellent first feature. Teshigahara had his visual style down, wasn’t injecting as much surreal weirdness into the image as he later would. Reviews mention Antonioni and Resnais as visual influences, and Kafka, Beckett and Carroll as story influences. This came out right after Jigoku, Viridiana, Last Year at Marienbad, The Testament of Orpheus, Eyes Without a Face and L’Avventura, and fits right in with that early 60’s European art film scene.

Eureka says “Teshigahara coined the term ‘documentary fantasy’ for this study of the powerless, impoverished worker in postwar Japan.”

“You women, you know nothing about friendships between men. Besides being suspicious, what else are you good for?”

Edward Yang died two weeks ago. The least I can do is watch his extremely acclaimed four-hour movie from ‘91 that I bought on bootleg DVD almost four years ago and never watched before.

Unfortunately, “there are over a hundred speaking parts in the film and it is necessary to stay focused in order to keep track of what’s going on and to whom, which is a good trick to make sure your audience is always paying attention” (KS Kincaid). And my copy is a fuzzy bootleg disc from a decent-quality print. Not many close-ups and picture resolution is just poor enough that I usually can’t tell who is who. I try to latch on whenever someone says a character’s name, so I struggled somewhat through the storyline and lost many of the side characters and threads. Also there’s the occasional close-up on a letter or page with no subtitle translation. Criterion has done Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi”, so maybe there’s enough interest that this will get an eventual nice release.

Set in Taiwan in the early 60’s during military rule, an uneasy time according to the intro text, when many kids formed street gangs to strengthen their sense of identity and security. I sort of lost the gang thread, but kept up with lead character Sir and his family (gov’t worker dad, mom, younger sister, MIA older brother Honey) and friends (Cat & Airplane, girlfriend Ming), so when the bloody nighttime gang war (lit only with flashlights during a blackout) comes a half hour into disc two, I wasn’t sure who was slaughtering who, or how come it wasn’t a big deal to anyone the next day after a bunch of people had been killed. Instead, the secret police round up Sir’s dad and subject him to at least one full day and night of questioning and confessions and statements at an ominous ice factory.

Ming is actually Honey’s girl, but ends up briefly with Sir. After he gets expelled, she ends up with one of his friends, and is rumored to never have been faithful to Honey in the first place. Sir kills her with young Cat’s sword, a shocking action, but not as senseless as it first seems, given Sir’s history of violence, his idols and friends, everything leading up to the killing.

During more innocent times, the kids watch a John Wayne movie (?), send tapes to Elvis Presley, and hang out at the film studio next to the school.

The line “Honey’s dead” was probably not inspired by the Jesus & Mary Chain album of that title.

I’m interested in what people who understood the movie better than I did thought.

IMDB reviewer: “Edward Yang’s own father fled from Shanghai. Artifacts from other countries have great impact in this film, the use of Japanese samurai swords which are ultimately used as murder weapons, Russian novels are read by teenagers and understood as `swordsmen’ novels, a family’s observation that the Chinese fought the Japanese for 20 years only to then live in Japanese houses listening to Japanese music, an old tape recorder that has been left behind by the WWII American forces is used to adapt American lyrics and American rock n roll music for the Chinese, the film features American doo-wop music, first love, cigarettes, casual dress, the influence of Hollywood motion picture magazines and movies, the voice of John Wayne can be heard in one of the movie theaters, the title of the film comes from the Elvis Presley song, `Are You Lonesome Tonight,’ a comment on the dark cloud hanging over everyone’s heads, hardly a brighter, summer day.”

“Inspired by a true incident of a 14 year old boy murdering a 13 year old girl, the first juvenile murder case in Taiwan’s history, the film opens and closes with an old, broken down radio broadcasting the lists of graduating students.”

“The film is so meticulous in its construction and its feeling of community (its preparation, filming and post-production took several years) that at the same time its length automatically gives it an epic quality it is a remarkably intimate film that is about as far from an epic in the traditional (Hollywood) sense as possible.”

“Like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s City of Sadness, A Brighter Summer Day is not a political film but a work of art that shows how individual experience is impacted by the flow of time and history.”

“The film is laced with nostalgia, but never at the expense of intelligence. He deftly creates a manifesto here that sums up his volatile, often conflicting, attitudes about his country’s modern history. Watching the film, with its seemingly limitless ability to examine the country, one laments the fact that every developing nation doesn’t have a storyteller as gifted as Yang probing the history of its progress.” (Movie Martyr)

Senses of Cinema on Yi Yi: “The film conveys a magnificent sense of life being lived, of time taking its toll on these characters as we watch them, unmatched in world film outside two of the other pre-eminent auteurs of Third World cinema: Abbas Kiarostami and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Yang is gifted with a remarkable sense of framing, alternating between a tighter framing that glimpses into the characters’ interior lives, and a more idiosyncratic framing that removes the characters from the immediacy of the close-up, and inserts physical-psychological-mental space between us and them.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum also compares Taiwanese Yang and Hou with Kiarostami (as well as Makhmalbaf). “Part of what’s valuable about these four directors is what’s also made their films relatively unmarketable here–meditative narrative rhythms combined with a preference for long shots and medium shots over close-ups, an approach that both assumes and encourages analytical distance rather than simple immersion in the action.” “I have no doubt that the 230-minute version of A Brighter Summer Day… belongs in the company of key works of our era. … Indeed, Yang’s film surpasses these other masterpieces in its novelistic qualities, richly realizing a physical and social world as dense with family, community, and other personal ties as any John Ford film, and furnished with more sheer physical presence (including characters, settings, and objects) than any other fiction film I know of from the 90s.”

Oh wow, the actor who played Sir later appeared in “Happy Together”, “Three Times” and “Crouching Tiger”, played Mimi’s boyfriend in “2046″ and the lead in Wong’s “The Hand”.

Hope I get to see this again sometime with better picture clarity… would be worth the trouble.

Imamura’s comeback film a decade after “Profound Desire of the Gods”. Flashed back and forth in time and space and starts at the end, rather like most of today’s movies, telling story of a sociopath killer with a troubled past. Iwao Enokizu is on a delivery run when he kills a couple of guys. Goes on the run for a couple months, pretends to be a professor and takes up with a girl at the boarding house he’s hiding at. They seem to like each other, but he ends up killing her (and her distrustful ex-con mother) and I think one other person before getting caught.

Style to spare. Not my favorite movie, but definitely good and possibly great, makes up for the last Imamura movie I wasn’t too sure about, “The Eel”. Happy to see a very modern Japanese movie, not a sloggy period piece. Watched with Jimmy Lo, who also liked. Made about the same time as Days of Heaven, Apocalypse Now, Stalker, Stroszek, Kagemusha, Zigeunerweisen, Altered States and The Elephant Man.

Portrait of a whorehouse at a certain point in time when politicians were discussing whether to outlaw the profession (voted the ban down at the end of the movie, but it eventually passed, some say as a result of the movie). Six or seven prostitutes all with different desperate situations. One has a suicidally depressing home life with sick husband and infant they can’t afford, one is trying to support her son who disowns her when he finds out what she does at work, one is a rich bitch escaping her controlling father, one is aiming to escape through marriage but her husband mistreats her and she comes crawling back, and one is bilking her clients out of extra money so she can quit and start her own business (the only happy ending here).

The same sort of feminine miserablism that I’ve come to expect from Mizoguchi after Life Of Oharu. This one has a more impressive look to it (the main house and the street outside, the costumes, the acting, all exquisite) but still a depressing movie that I didn’t enjoy very much. I may have liked it better than Ugetsu though… have to see that one again, and check out Sansho The Bailiff sometime.

A turning-point year for Japanese cinema: Mizoguchi’s final film, the beginning of the Japanese New Wave, and (according to Reverse Shot) the beginning of “more socially critical efforts” by Yasujiro Ozu. It’s also the year of “The Burmese Harp”, but I haven’t seen that yet.

Saw this one with Pia from work.