TV/Movies Megathread

[jimmy olsen]

They still look like a young punk.  I mean, everyone jumps on my ass for insufficiently positive reviews of The French Connection and The Conversation.  And there's even more old people per capita in Japan.

I think I missed something...

Who is they?

[Ideologue]

Japanese kids who don't like Ozu.

Probably.  I've never seen Tokyo Story, either, and there is a large chance that it will in fact be boring (but it could be great).  I need to watch it, and some Mizoguchi pictures too.  However, my motives are impure: I mainly want to educate myself on the Japanese (presumptive) classics so I can know my shit when putting Masaki Kobayashi's films in context with his contemporaries.  (I'm writing up his first picture, the so-banal-it's-actually-weird-again situation comedy short film The Youth of the Son right now.)

Of course, I'm educated enough on his biggest contemporary to say that, unless literally every other movie of Kobayashi's I watch is genuine garbage, he's already significantly better than Akira Kurosawa, who has shaped up to be possibly the most overrated sound filmmaker of all time.

[Eddie Teach]

 

Rashomon was awesome. Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Throne of Blood were all pretty great too.

[Ideologue]

Rashomon, Sanjuro, and the first half of High and Low are all first-class filmmaking.  I also love Yojimbo, though it is (mildly) overrated.

Throne of Blood sucks (it's slow and boring).  The Hidden Fortress sucks in a different way (it's annoying and offensive).  The numbingly anodyne last half of High and Low utterly wastes the best single-location thriller since Rope.  The Bad Sleep Well, while very good, somewhat squanders its own thriller set-up.  Stray Dog is a limp noodle.  The Seven Samurai is very good as well, but it's often rated one of TEH BEST MOVIES OF ALL TIME!!1 despite being at least one hour too long yet unable to find twenty minutes to fit in an Eli Wallach that would provide even a first dimension to the Zerglike bandit army the samurai have been called upon to stop.

Overall, Kurosawa overly relies on the charisma of Takashi Shimura and/or Toshiro Mifune to get him through; yet even that's not enough to make so many of his movies genuinely great routinely mishandles the truly wonderful premises he and his script collaborators come up with, from defeating a bandit army, to deciding whether or not to ransom a servant's kid for all your money, to losing your police-issued gun to a criminal in a country with hardly any privately owned firearms, to murdering rich people because they killed your dad.

We'll see if Ikiru wastes "having stomach cancer" and Sanshiro Sugata wastes "judo and jujitsu are cool."

[Ideologue]

N.B.: I don't think Kurosawa is a bad director.  I think he is a great director.

[Ideologue]

I also watched an episode of Father Knows Best, "Bud the Millionaire," and enjoyed it.  Jim taught Bud a valuable lesson, and Betty was hot.

B

And:

Invaders From Mars (1953).  Unless you like the paranoid fantasies of stupid children who read too many pulp stories but whose subconsciouses don't yet know how to properly construct one of their own, avoid this supposed demi-classic like the plague: yes, much like a season of Dallas or a run of Newhart, it turns out it was all a dream.

Martians arrive, burying their ship in a sandpit.  Unwary passersby are sucked into the ground, and the Martians surgically graft mind-control nodes onto their victims.  But a young boy witnessed their spaceship land, saw his father descend into the sand, and soon discovers that whatever came out is very wrong--as do we, since this film's acting for "evil" would embarrass a high school drama club.  Will he be able to convince the authorities that what he knows is real?

Sure he does, and by the thirty-five minute mark.  He immediately finds a sympathetic ear in a psychologist (or something) and her friend, a scientist whose nonsensical, strangely omniscient technobabble is--I have read--supposed to be a "tell" that it's a dream.  In fact, it comes off only as an especially awful example of the goofy exposition inherent to the genre in this era; in a charming film, it would be charming too.  It is not charming whatsoever.

With just a few phone calls, the army is mobilized and the aliens are besieged.  The rest of the film is the military's boring and stupid attempts to breach the aliens defenses.  One appreciates Invasion of the Body Snatchers all the more for its tensionless counterpoint here.

This picture is noteworthy almost solely for the fact that this was what poor William Cameron Menzies was directing in 1953.  He does demonstrate that he still knows how to build a hell of a montage in Invaders' one genuinely awesome sequence.  This is its climactic scene, where the young protagonist runs for his life from a ticking timebomb, and does so for eternity across an endless series of flashback dissolves while creepy choral music plays.

This is the sequence parodied with great aplomb in the climax of that nearly-lost diamond in the rough, the excellent stock-footage cash-in/hilarious slapstick comedy, Invasion Earth: The Aliens Are Here.  To what extent I enjoyed Invaders From Mars, it was almost entirely for finally discovering a missing referent for one of my childhood joys.

On the other hand, huge chunks of badly integrated stock footage are used through the film's unforgivably limp middle forty minutes.

As the original PD, Menzies of course designed the film himself, but he did so--evidently--on a budget of the change (and condoms*) he was able to fish from his couch.  Other than a legitimately great optically illusive forest that looks like a painting but is weirdly real, and a neat touch with the alien master brain, the design of the film is subpar--especially when "par" is Things To fucking Come.

C

*Apparently the tunnels leading to the Martian spaceship are lined with inflated rubbers.  Someone should've used a prophylactic on this movie.

[jimmy olsen]

Getting so hyped for Godzilla, looks like it's gonna rock!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pX97_0rxU

[celedhring]

Ide, if you're in a Japanese film binge, definitely check out some of the 60s Japanese New Wave - Mashamiro Sinoda in particular. My favorite films of his are Pale Flower and Double Suicide. Other directors are Shohei Imamura and Naghisa Oshima.

I say this because the new wave guys are *absolutely not* like Ozu or Kurosawa and they seem pretty forgotten in the West. A lot of them apprenticed with Ozu, actually, so their reaction against the old master is very energetic.

Some of the films are pretty fantastic - and Double Suicide or Assassination show how to take on traditional Japanese themes without being a stiff. The yakuza stories are also great, and there's a bunch of stuff dealing with Japan in the aftermath of WWII that's been largely ignored in the West.

[Ideologue]

Double Suicide or Japanese Summer: Double Suicide?  One is Shinoda, the other Oshima.  The former sounds better:

A paper merchant sacrifices family, fortune, and ultimately life for his erotic obsession with a prostitute.

Sounds emotionally wrenching.  But I wonder how it ends?

The latter sounds eye-rollingly ironic, although it could be good:

A sex-obsessed young woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, a gun-crazy wannabe gangster—these are just three of the irrational, oddball anarchists trapped in an underground hideaway.

Does Tokyo Drifter count?  I'm gonna watch Tokyo Drifter.

In this free-jazz gangster film, reformed killer "Phoenix" Tetsu drifts around Japan, awaiting his own execution, until he's called back to Tokyo to help battle a rival gang.

I don't know about "free jazz" but the part where he fights people sounds fun.

Right now, I'm focusing mostly on the 50s.  List for this week is as follows:

The 47 Ronin (Mizoguchi, 42)
Sincere Heart (Kobayashi, 53)
Tokyo Story (Ozu, 53)
Ugetsu (Mizoguchi, 53)
Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky (Kobayashi, 54) (I'm skipping a couple in his filmography--the Criterion Collection is incomplete )
Sansho the Bailiff (Mizoguchi, 54)
Beautiful Days (Kobayashi, 55)
I Will Buy You (Kobayashi, 56)
Street of Shame (Mizoguchi, 56)
The Human Condition Trilogy (Kobayashi, 58-61)

You know what sucks though?  The more recent Kobayashi movies don't seem to be available, most unfortunately Inn of Evil.   I don't understand that at all.  The director and star of Harakiri together again, c'mon.

[Ideologue]

I probably also have to watch a Kinoshita movie or two, due to his mentorship of Kobayashi.  MELODRAMA AHOY.

[celedhring]

Tokyo Drifter definitely does count. All those jazz-addled experimental yakuza stories are great. And yeah, it's the first Double Suicide (haven't seen Oshima's, although it does have a good rep). If you like it you absolutely have to check Pale Flower too, it's a great energetic yakuza story - were a semi-retired yakuza hitman loses everything because of his erotic obsession with a hot thrill-seeker in Tokyo's gambling scene. (there's a pattern here, if you can spot it). One of the great things of the Japanese New Wave is that it isn't BORING like the pretentious French one. There's a bunch of violence, sex and luridness in their films (Empire of the Senses anyone?). I could probably show The Weird Ones to a stoned college brat and he'd love it.

All these guys hated the guts of Ozu and Mizoguchi, so their films are nothing like theirs. Funnily, quite a few of them actually apprenticed with Ozu. There's quite a bit of "look pa I had a tatto made! I know you hate tattoos so that's why I did it!" rebellious attitude to them 

Kobayashi is one of those "forgotten" filmmakers, very successful and popular in the 60s but one whom his appreciation seems to have declined with time. It didn't help that he was sandwiched between Ozu/Mizoguchi's late classicism in the 50s and the New Wave onslaught in the 60s - he's a transitional figure of sorts, rejecting the themes and inherent hieratic cruelty of Ozu's classicism and his view of the Japanese society, but not quite going as far as the Japanese New Wave would.

[Ideologue]

Yeah, I've sort of scrupulously avoided the French New Wave.  Godard does impressive long takes!  Of a busy supermarket!  Le cinema du futur!

There's that one with time travel I kinda wanna see.  I forget if that's Godard or what.  There's also that one that I dunno if it's New Wave, or just French, where Gerard Depardieu and a pal wander aimlessly around the countryside and break into houses and seduce/rape women.  Either way, it wasn't nearly as good as My Father the Hero.

[Ideologue]

Oh, and Kobayashi: yeah, he's the big guy no one ever mentions--especially other than Harakiri.  Even Kwaidan, which won a Cannes prize and got nominated for best foreign film, is hardly spoken of (albeit, I admit, for defensible reasons).  That might be a small part of why I enjoy his films as much as I have--not out of some hipster sentiment, but simply because he hasn't been hyped to the ends of the fucking Earth like Kurosawa.  It also helps that his movies tend to have a better sense of pace and are far superior at creating and maintaining (and ultimately releasing) tension.  Plus, his films are blatantly disgusted by society; there's a real sense of viciousness and hatred in Harakiri that even something as acidly farcical as Sanjuro can't approach, and the allegory to Imperial Japan is a lot more patent.

Credit to Sanjuro for the best final fight of about any action film though.  Holy moly, if you're not expecting that, will you ever be surprised...  (I think I'm probably the only person on Earth who thinks Sanjuro is bounds better than Yojimbo, let alone Kurosawa's best film.  But of the nine I've seen, Rashomon's the only real competitor.)

[celedhring]

I happen to think the French New Wave is more rellevant because of the (huge) influence it had on other countries and filmmakers than the films it produced itself. Godard and the lot asked important questions about how films were being made, but others had better answers.

I like Kurosawa, but his films can be very uneven. 7 Samurai is fantastically boring. Yojimbo/Sanjuro I really like, though. Plus his late films - Ran, Dersu Urzala, Dreams...- where he enjoyed international backing, are feasts for the eyes.

[CountDeMoney]

Getting so hyped for Godzilla, looks like it's gonna rock!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pX97_0rxU

You're going to fuck it all up.