cup21 :: r1.4

[Curtis, baby]

Buud Yam (Gaston Kadore, 1997)
xVQ


Distance (Hirokazu Koreeda, 2001)
xYoung


vote for either
xVQ or xYoung
by Mar 7

[ofrene]

name of movies are same as r1.3

[Curtis, baby]

whoops fixed

[Mario Gaborovic]

xVQ

[mesnalty]

I liked 'em both, but Distance is my kind of Kore-eda. I love the early stuff like After Life where he really swings for the fences thematically way more than the more recent family dramas.

xYoung

[john ryan]

xYoung

[rischka]

watching distance and realized i'd almost forgotten that tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 -- sidetracked now :p

[rischka]

XYoung

Hadn't seen a kore-eda in a long time

[DT.]

xYoung

[niminy-piminy]

xVQ

[ofrene]

xYoung

[Curtis, baby]

At least Mario stands with jiri this time...

xYoung wins 5-2.

[niminy-piminy]

At least Mario stands with jiri this time...

this round was the easiest to make a vote so far.
i didn't watch any Hirokazu Koreeda yet.
i can grasp that he is not a bad filmmaker and i can imagine liking some of his films (if watching them in the future) but somehow i was not able to tune in to this particular movie in the particular moment i watched it (i had a hard time following the storyline, i was permanently puzzled who is who, etc.).
however, i don't give up and will try some other Hirokazu Koreeda (sometime in the future).
on the other hand, i liked the Buud Yam "fairy-tale" and i was enchanted by the "scenography" (the houses).
i watched Koreeda first and once i reached about 15 min of Buud Yam i already made a vote (no dilemma — as opposed in the other rounds).

[Holymanm]

At least Mario stands with jiri this time...

this round was the easiest to make a vote so far.
i didn't watch any Hirokazu Koreeda yet.
i can grasp that he is not a bad filmmaker and i can imagine liking some of his films (if watching them in the future) but somehow i was not able to tune in to this particular movie in the particular moment i watched it (i had a hard time following the storyline, i was permanently puzzled who is who, etc.).
however, i don't give up and will try some other Hirokazu Koreeda (sometime in the future).
on the other hand, i liked the Buud Yam "fairy-tale" and i was enchanted by the "scenography" (the houses).
i watched Koreeda first and once i reached about 15 min of Buud Yam i already made a vote (no dilemma — as opposed in the other rounds).

Still Walking, Our Little Sister, Like Father Like Son - really great, quiet, beautiful, easy-to-watch movies (in my biased opinion - i love the man). mileage may ko-re, of course. haven't seen Shoplifters or The Third Murder yet though, which brought him a ton of fame later on. maybe they're even better! i know not!

[Curtis, baby]

Third murder least fav of mine. Shoplifters 2nd or 3rd behind I Wish

[niminy-piminy]

Still Walking, Our Little Sister, Like Father Like Son

bookmarked. ("Shoplifters", "I Wish" too.) thx!
now, when all the films of the first round are revealed, it's obvious Japanese cinema is highly cherished here.
out of all the films played in the first round, i watched (prior to Cup) only "Chain" by Jem Cohen.

[nrh]

now that jerry isn't around am i the only one who can't stand kore-eda? guy always felt like he was lab-engineered for the token japanese slot in euro film festival main slates, and to get praise from the "japanese cinema has been in decline since the death of ozu" crowd. departures seems like the last time he really went for something interesting in his comfort zone style (not counting the outliers like hana and airdoll, both awful), although i pretty much stopped watching around 2011 or so.

some of this i admit is petty annoyance; japan i think had a legitimate new wave in the '90s that was largely ignored and misunderstood by the western critical and distribution establishments, with kore-eda being perhaps the least interesting figure to have emerged as the most visible director.

it is always funny to me that the year shoplifters topped the very establishment kinema junpo best of list it topped the great and weird eiga geijutsu's worst of list (of course that year both chrysanthemum and the guillotine and asako 1 +2 managed to place on both eiga geijutsu's best and worst lists at the same time, exactly the kind of energy i want from a movie magazine).

[niminy-piminy]

japanese cinema

btw. my greatest dilemma so far was "Yokohama BJ Blues".
i watch noir/neo-noir films very rarely.
i only rarely watch films with cops, detectives, crime, maffia (yakuza), criminal investigations, etc.
but "Yokohama BJ Blue" was very cool.
i looked at what other films by Eiichi Kudo i could watch later (i didn't watch any so far) but i didn't pick anything yet.
what other would you recommend, nrh?

i watch sports films rarely too, but "Kaizer" was actually on my want-to-watch list already (prior to Cup) because i do watch films about liars.
so, ultimately i gave the vote to "Kaizer" (entry from my fav "liars genre") but i didn't dislike "Yokohama BJ Blues" (on the contrary).
btw. my two fav films with pathological liars are ADORABLE LIAR (Michel Deville, 1962) and CONFESSIONS OF FELIX KRULL (Kurt Hoffmann, 1957).

and btw. (as i said elsewhere) i don't have a driving license (i have zero passion for any sort of vehicles) and if anyone would tell me i might like a film with a Kawasaki-san type of a guy as the main protagonist, i would be highly skeptical, but most likely i am gonna vote for HIS MOTORBIKE, HER ISLAND. i am only in the middle now and didn't watch the other film yet (so i might change my mind), but i really like it. (otherwise, i watched by Nobuhiko Ôbayashi only REMEMBERANCE for a year poll recently).

and regardless of the Cup, in the past, i was somewhat digging Susumu Hani at one point (watched 6 films — hoping to see the rest of his oeuvre in the future) and was super-charmed by THE FLAME OF DEVOTION (1964) by Koreyoshi Kurahara (to mention just one highly memorable Japanese film).

[nrh]

i looked at what other films by Eiichi Kudo i could watch later (i didn't watch any so far) but i didn't pick anything yet.
what other, would you recommend, nrh?

i wrote about this in my genre introduction but i don't think eiichi kudo is realistically the auteur of yokohama bj blues at all. the film was made to promote a music tour by the lead actor yusaku matsuda, who at the time was transitioning from a kind of counter-culture comedy action star in the '70s to working in more art house films; he had starred in a very famous (and sadly un-subtitled) television show called "Detective Story" in the '70s and this in some ways i think can be seen as a deconstruction of his character there. plus all the other credits (writer, cinematographer, editor, etc) worked with matsuda in all his most famous movies, and the style very much reflects the movie he would direct himself a few years later (a-homansu).

so i would say to watch a-homansu, or maybe the beast to die or the much lighter detective story from 1983. eiichi kudo's '60s samurai films are very good (especially 13 assassins, remade by takashi miike much later) but very different in style and tone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sD0oAuK5U_U

[flip]

now that jerry isn't around am i the only one who can't stand kore-eda? g

some of this i admit is petty annoyance; japan i think had a legitimate new wave in the '90s that was largely ignored and misunderstood by the western critical and distribution establishments, with kore-eda being perhaps the least interesting figure to have emerged as the most visible director.

i've only seen two kore-eda, but i might be with you if i see more. i thought shoplifters was decent but i hated the vapid gift card profundity of after life. curious who belongs to that uncelebrated japanese new wave? zeze, suwa?

[niminy-piminy]

i read your first post in "Genre Intro" but somehow missed the second post (sorry, you had to repeat).
now, it makes sense i was puzzled i can't find something "Yokohama BJ Blues"-like in Eiichi Kudo's filmography.
"a-homansu" bookmarked!
films with martial arts, samurais, etc. i watch also very rarely, but the following phrase makes "a-homansu" tempting — i am a vivid deconstructivist ...

much like a-homansu would be a killing off of the action hero persona that made him an icon

[nrh]

yeah i would say suwa, kiyoshi kurosawa, takahisa zeze, shinji aoyama, takashi miike, hisayasu sato, naomi kawase, siono sono, rokuro mochizuki, ryuichi hiroki, nobuhiro yamashita (coming in at the tail end), shunjji iwai, maybe even shinya tsukamoto. definitely a disparate group (though no more so than say the filmmakers grouped together by berlin school) but there is also a lot shared, crossover in terms of writing criticism about each others films, mixing stars and technicians and writers. and definitely all drawn together by need to find new modes of production outside the collapsing 90s film industry, whether it is documentary, tv, dtv action, pinku, or home movie. and the more you look the closer seemingly disparate directors get - zeze is writing critical articles on miike, shinji aoyama is co-writing dream of garuda under a pseudonym...

[DT.]

departures seems like the last time he really went for something interesting in his comfort zone style

Huh?

[Curtis, baby]

Think he means After Life?

[nrh]

departures seems like the last time he really went for something interesting in his comfort zone style

Huh?

sorry, meant distance. departures is a 2008 film that definitely is not by kore-eda.

[rischka]

i'm not a kore-eda fan at all but the cult angle interests me -- it brought back ayoma's eureka and i liked this one better

also iwai annoys me more than kore-eda i think