{"id":13580,"date":"2020-07-08T23:26:22","date_gmt":"2020-07-09T03:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=13580"},"modified":"2020-07-08T23:26:22","modified_gmt":"2020-07-09T03:26:22","slug":"merry-christmas-mr-lawrence-1983-nagisa-oshima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/13580","title":{"rendered":"Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983, Nagisa Oshima)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a WWII prison camp, Beat Takeshi is a sadistic guard led by humorless youngish Capt. Yonoi (the film&#8217;s composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto).  Lawrence (<em>Paddington 2<\/em>&#8216;s Tom Conti) is a prisoner who speaks some Japanese and represents the Brits, a bunch of sensible dudes until David Bowie (same year as <em><a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/10221\">The Hunger<\/a><\/em>) comes along.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/xmaslawrence4.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/xmaslawrence5.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><em>Cruel Story of Middle Age<\/em>.  A classy-looking narrative movie with tricky subject matter, feeling more like a prestige 80&#8217;s international coproduction than those late 60&#8217;s Oshima <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/7327\">youth films<\/a>.  Cool rumbling music, and lots of singing, never as fun as the pub songs in <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/1533\">the Terence Davies movies<\/a>.  The story is mostly survival tactics, power games, betrayals and brutality &#8211; strange that the lead actors were two rock stars and a comedian.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/xmaslawrence2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image20\/xmaslawrence1.jpg\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a WWII prison camp, Beat Takeshi is a sadistic guard led by humorless youngish Capt. Yonoi (the film&#8217;s composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto). Lawrence (Paddington 2&#8216;s Tom Conti) is a prisoner who speaks some Japanese and represents the Brits, a bunch of sensible dudes until David Bowie (same year as The Hunger) comes along. Cruel Story [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[357,161,873,247,2675,107,469,1205,472],"class_list":["post-13580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1980s","tag-david-bowie","tag-nagisa-oshima","tag-prison","tag-ryuichi-sakamoto","tag-takeshi-kitano","tag-torture","tag-translation","tag-wwii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13580"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13622,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13580\/revisions\/13622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}