Japanese Cinema
Japanese Cinema
for some reason, after a long time away, i've found myself watching more japanese films this year, especially from the often dismissed period between late '70s and early '90s. japan is such a canonized/fetishized film country and also kind of dismissed and under-explored in crucial ways.
labyrinth romanesque, shun'ya ito 1988
murder in a port town brothel, from the filmmaker best known for directing the first three female prisoner scorpion movies. like those films this uses the limited setting to great effect (it's a strange three floor structure, with a mechanical elevator, extraordinary hanging light fixtures, a boiler room with a pipe expelling water out to the sea) and focusing on camaraderie and brutality between women within a very fixed, exploitative social environment.
what this adds is a strange, melancholy element of history - it's set in 1940, with many of the girls having emigrated from japan to the us and then forced to move back, the heavy weight of war and fascism lingering, the air of certain death hanging over the life of pretty much everyone. it starts with the brothel being destroyed by a construction crew in present day before moving back into the past, and ends up there again.
still somehow doesn't quite work; the mystery is somewhat obvious, it moves into thriller territory towards the end in a way i don't think is quite productive, some of the tonal shifts feel just a little off. but it's a film that sits well for me after thinking about it for the last few days.
her brother (kon ichikawa) likin dat kon doe. and i ain't even seen his most popular flicks. but from what i've seen, i'd easily nom this dude for one of flip's famous scfz dir polls. the makioka sisters is one of my favs. conflagration was great. princess from the moon was neat. odd obsession was odd. and this one was all of those things, in certain ways. first of all, monochrome majesty. rarely can such a muted colour palette come so alive. ichikawa could really shoot the shit out of a pic. and the way his films are edited, so unique. he doesn't quite linger like an ozu, but he's certainly not action-oriented like a kurosawa. he stays with a scene, but always seems to cut right before most other dirs would, like each scene is a little cliffhanger, elliptical without being opaque, everything clearly spelled out, but in handwriting you can only half-read. and this one embodies that through and through. it's a fairly simple tale, but the way it's told, how it unfolds, interesting stuff to be sure. it's a domestic/familial drama turned melodrama for the most part, but whereas it begins with this darkly comic tone (with some troublesome undertones), it shifts into an elegiac mode in a latter half that sheds alternative light on the former. ichikawa channeling sirk somehow (or something like that). then the ending nails it. it doesn't devolve into an unnecessary epilogue. instead, it sneaks up on us, ending where it began, only now much more darkly (tragi)comic. sidenote: this should be more well-known, just so it can be one of those foreign films that retains its foreign title, cuz otōto is simply perfect
Yeah, great director (Ito as well, of course!). Haven't seen much by both, though. My current favorite Ichikawa would be Kokoro (1955).
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
what do people think about yoshitaro nomura? i've only seen castle of sand so far, but he had an incredibly extensive career, only a fraction of which seems to be available to english speakers (and even less of that actively discussed, at least based on letterboxd or whatever).
but i was very impressed by suspicion, one of his later films. it's a kind of court room drama where a young woman, ex bar hostess convicted of some minor extortion, escapes a car crash into the water where her new wealthy husband dies. she's tried by media on circumstance and prejudice and the critique of media circus and japanese criminal justice etc are sharp but as expected.
what is very interesting is the play with performance, both the performance of the actors and the idea of a woman having to perform and be seen and the consequences of not being able or willing to meet those expectations. kaori mamoi as the suspected woman is kind of incredible, she almost single handedly pushes this film into an entirely different register.
but i was very impressed by suspicion, one of his later films. it's a kind of court room drama where a young woman, ex bar hostess convicted of some minor extortion, escapes a car crash into the water where her new wealthy husband dies. she's tried by media on circumstance and prejudice and the critique of media circus and japanese criminal justice etc are sharp but as expected.
what is very interesting is the play with performance, both the performance of the actors and the idea of a woman having to perform and be seen and the consequences of not being able or willing to meet those expectations. kaori mamoi as the suspected woman is kind of incredible, she almost single handedly pushes this film into an entirely different register.
I've only seen one film by Yoshitaro Nomura, VILLAGE OF EIGHT TOMBS (1977), which I watched last year and which was fairly entertaining and quite atmospheric, but nothing special in any way. Especially Nomura's directing seemed completely unremarkable to me (actually one of the least interesting directing I have seen in any 20th century Japanese film - and I've seen a few hundred). He seems to have been extremely prolific though, so there might be some jewels (but I'd guess more in the 50s and 60s when there was still a functioning studio system).
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
The only Nomura movie I've seen was The Demon and it was quite good in an of its era way, not meaning only good for its time, but seeming to capture something of it in tone and manner while remaining meaningful. It's worth checking out, and being reminded of it makes me also want to check out others he directed.
i've seen only the castle of sand and zero focus. imo they were each curious films, in that the first two thirds of both were startlingly good (the castle of sand in particular was a brilliant police procedural), and then fell off substantially in the last third, with odd shifts in narrative focus that couldn't compare to what preceded it (once again, this was the case with the castle of sand in particular). that's not to say i disliked either. in fact, it's more a testament to how well-done the beginnings and middles of those films were that i came away slightly disappointed in the end; they simply would've been difficult to top. so, i'd certainly like to explore more nomura. i think there's great promise there that if executed through to completion could make for something pretty special
the shift in focus in castle of sand is also present in the novel, one of the only by nomura's main collaborator seichiro matsumoto to be translated into english (as inspector imanishi investigates, which i definitely recommend).
suspicion, which is also based on a seichiro matsumoto novel, does a somewhat similar thing, where a focused legal procedural shifts via a series of flashbacks and digressions to something slightly different, more social or internal.
can also see why wba might have found him uninteresting, he's certainly not an immediately arresting stylist like so many of his contemporaries, wonder if comparing his version of village of eight tombs with ichikawa's would be interesting...
suspicion, which is also based on a seichiro matsumoto novel, does a somewhat similar thing, where a focused legal procedural shifts via a series of flashbacks and digressions to something slightly different, more social or internal.
can also see why wba might have found him uninteresting, he's certainly not an immediately arresting stylist like so many of his contemporaries, wonder if comparing his version of village of eight tombs with ichikawa's would be interesting...
i was kind of disappointed with toru murakawa's the most dangerous game, which had a great action sequence or two and some pleasures but kind of skated by on yusaku matsuda's early star signature, without ever burrowing into the strangeness of that signature like they would go on to do with target and the beast to die.
was much more interested in the killing game, released the same year - it's still a bare bones hitman movie, again with matsuda starting as a kind of goofy outsider, being pulled into a job and a series of betrayals, and killing almost all involved. but here the elemental filmmaking pleasures are so much more at the forefront - a fully created urban world full of strange apartments, ports, narrow corridors, smoky bars. it's still a film dedicated to building matsuda star power - the main character in cowboy bebop takes his outfit more or less directly from this film - but he gets to be odder, more distant, the cracks in the facade starting to show.
a pretty vibrant film but one that often plays better in motion than in still images, even though the image making (with lots of dark/black space in the framings) is quite good; lots of little physical/spacial business, from something as simple as matsuda draining and refilling a glass at a bar to the complex in through one door out the other corridor shootout that is the film's major action set piece.
circuit of sorrow - very early pop singer falls for race car driver youth romance by toru murakawa. like a lot of the early nikkatsu roman pornos i've seen this is a pretty mainstream romance with a handful of sex scenes thrown in, which here largely serve to convince us of the young couple's passion (otherwise they mostly just drive around and frolic on beaches). more or less convincing in the moment, but really struggles to create a convincing arch of their relationship as it moves towards the all too clearly telegraphed final sequence.
thought yasuo furuhata's yasha would be a much more standard ex gangster gets pulled back into violence sort of film, but it's much quiter than that, more willing to skip over any expected action beats. the snowy port town environment takes over, the women escape the schematic roles the movie seems it's going to put them in, the whole thing ends with this beautiful nancy wilson song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=en7ErxBscZs
dead or alive (takashi miike) a few thoughts:
1. what's the word for when something feels elliptical and straightforward at the same time, making sense out of nonsense, while making nonsense out of sense?
2. good alt titles would be: excretions, karmic kamikaze, and/or scarred for life
3. shit bath nuff said
1. what's the word for when something feels elliptical and straightforward at the same time, making sense out of nonsense, while making nonsense out of sense?
2. good alt titles would be: excretions, karmic kamikaze, and/or scarred for life
3. shit bath nuff said
i think i'll propose we poll miike next time my turn rolls around...
dead or alive 2: birds (takashi miike) takashi channels takeshi. if the first doa was miike's hana-bi, then this is his sonatine. it's also the reason i have little to no interest in knowing much about a flick before i watch it at this point in my life. fully expected more hypergratuitous ultraviolent ridiculousdebauchery, but nah. the beginning is crazy (shoutout to shinya tsukamoto), but not in that first-five-min-of-the-first-doa way; just crazy longtake funny-until-it's-not-funny-then-it's-funny-again way (think sideshow bob stepping on rake after rake in the cape feare ep of the simpsons). then it's something else, something slower, more thoughtful. there's still action, don't get me wrong. those close corridor shootouts are really something. tarantino probs watched lots of miike before filming the barroom scene in inglourious basterds. but the action, and more than that the shock value, take a backbackbackseat to the people and their relationships. miike does humanist filmmaking forreal. i was seriously this close to shedding a tear by the end, and y'all know that that ain't me. i actually really rec this one to kanafani, should he be lurking. think it might resonate with a dude with a lil dude at home
rounded out the doa trilogy with final, and found it to be the least interesting of the three. what i did find interesting is this: doa = dead ; doa2 = or ; doa3 = alive; meaning, the first film was a raunchy nasty ugly spectacle of death and dying (wantonly so), hence 'dead' ; the second film was a meditative tale about the rebirth of a long-thought-dead relationship (so death, rebirth, redeath), hence the 'or' ; the third film was living in an era of the dead, an apocalyptic future of forced sterilization, where life is the only hope, hence 'alive.' the third flick might be the least interesting of the three (imo), but it's an absolutely necessary epilogue. also, worth watching just for dat ending doe. miike, you crazy bastard, you
my first shinji somai, his debut film the terrible couple. it's based on a popular manga serial and the set-up is a little sitcommy - kid moves to tokyo, staying in his uncle's vacant house while he attends a top school, only to find out his paid lodger is the prettiest girl in his class! - but the film moves forward in an elegant, unhurried pace, allowing the adolescent mindset with all its strange flare-ups of emotion and disappointments and longing full room to move.
and somai even here is a constantly surprising filmmaker - there are some very elegant long take sequences of course and a few striking visual choices but what's really interesting is the weight he gives to certain blocks of action or behavior. like there's a scene near the very end with a human wack a mole game that somehow becomes one of the strangest, most moving moments i've seen in a while, just through staging and duration...
thought yuasa's lu over the wall would be somewhat minor based on the reviews but it's kind of great - sweet and secretly harsh environmental fable about the relationship between people and the oceans they live off of. the great pleasure is the drawing and animation, the way forms can bend and bubble and stretch, the whole thing somehow seems more musical than narrative if that makes sense.
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had to watch an obayashi last night, and ended up with his second feature black jack, which also stars the late jo shoshido in the title role.
it's an adaptation of one of osamu tezuka's most beloved characters - a brilliantly skilled rogue surgeon who lives in a tiny house on a winding hill, performing impossible surgeries for outrageous sums, his only companion seems to be a tiny child but is actually a middle age unborn twin who was given an synthetic body by black jack (i kind of love that the film does not even try to explain this back story).
the original story is, like most of the early black jack run, something like ten to 15 pages long; obayashi converts it into a 2 hour romantic epic with black jack somewhat at the periphery. young college girl gets hit in eye with tennis ball and loses sight in it; when she gets cornea transplant she starts to see visions of a mysterious stranger appear before her, and starts to fall in love...
it's all a little stretched out at 2 hours, to be honest. but obayashi shows so much wit and skill in his choices that it's never less than fascinating to watch for me.
The best Japanese film of every year – from 1925 to now
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/new ... every-year
https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/new ... every-year
pleased they put one of tanaka's in. pat raved about that one recently 
One of the greatest of Japanese directors, and WATCHER IN THE ATTIC is fantastic!!!
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
the person they got to write that blurb is the guy who wrote the definitive english language book on japanese erotic film, behind the pink curtain
edit - i think it's out of print but there's a copy on kg
lol i meant kinuyo tanaka (she stars in several ofc but one of her directorial efforts) 
I have a couple of them at home, in case I need a good birthday gift.
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
Yeah, I was just teasing you.
But Noboru really is great as well.
"I too am a child burned by future experiences, fallen back on myself and already suspecting the certainty that in the end only those will prove benevolent who believe in nothing." – Marran Gosov
i will watch tanaka's film tonight. in fact i have two i haven't seen i thinkunless i'm wrong there are 3 female directors in that entire list and one is the kawase woman
I counted 5
Kinuyo Tanaka
Miwa Nishikawa
Mipo Oh
Natsuka Kusano
Naomi Kawase
who's missing? (not a rhetorical question; curious!)
and the kawase woman...
