Floating Weeds (1959, Yasujiro Ozu)

Quest Status: 757 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #966

The films of Yasujiro Ozu are a rare breed. Heavy with emotion, but moving along with a light touch much like the momentum that prods us along with our lives, day in and day out. Still, every time I start to form an idea of what "typical Ozu" is, the next Ozu film I see always confounds me in some new way. This was one of Ozu's first color films, shot by the master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa. Miyagawa's involvement results in some unusually daring visual moments (most notably an argument during a downpour between people on opposite sides of the street), although Ozu's trademark floor cam is still there - watching the characters from the vantage point of a tatami mat as usual.

 

Rather than the Tokyo-based family dramas (and comedies) that were Ozu's standard fare, Floating Weeds is a sultry summer film set in a sleepy seaside town, which becomes host to a broken-down Kabuki troupe hosted by the surly patriarch Ganjiro Nakamura. Those who have seen Ozu's original 1934 silent film A Story of Floating Weeds will know the basic story. That film was more theatrical, whereas this remake focuses more on the details of setting and season which define Ozu's later films.

 

 

There's also a much harsher take on the main character, whose plays are criticized for being hammy and old-fashioned. This is even more true off stage, as he abuses the women in his troupe and hypocritically attempts to exert control over his son, who grew up thinking of him as an uncle. The drama is more heightened than usual, the characters more grating and desperate, but Ozu's tender sense of humanity still shines through - especially in his warm treatment of the younger characters, whose innocence and sincerity provides the perfect foil for their pathetic elders.

--- 243 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Alexander Nevsky (1938, Sergei Eisenstein)

Quest Status: 756 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #532

"Defense? I don't know how to defend. We shall spite them with all our power!" - Alexander Nevsky

 

Some films can be visually beautiful while being otherwise reprehensible. Alexander Nevsky is one of those films for me. Sergei Eisenstein was never known for his subtlety - as in his most famous film, Battleship Potemkin, one of the bombastic and explosive movies ever made. What bothers me about Alexander Nevsky is that it's a film about war that wholeheartedly promotes war as something virtuous and heroic. And that's something I just can't get behind, even if it is set in the 13th century.

The thing about Alexander Nevsky is that while it's a historical film about a real-life Russian hero (and saint!), it's obviously meant as a work of propaganda. How else can you take a film about fighting the barbaric Germans made just as the Nazis were beginning to set their sights on Europe? And wow, are these Germans barbaric! I mean, giving wailing babies the sign of the cross before dropping them on a giant bonfire, all while an old ghoul grinds a portable organ like the great grand-pappy of Dr. Phibes. Who wouldn't be ready to charge into battle at the drop of a hat (and a few lines about expressing your love for the motherland)?

Everything about the Russians, and the titular warrior's attempt to lead a ragtag group of peasants against the German horde, is just as pure and good as the Germans are corrupt and evil. Battle and the ability to wage war is seen as the foremost human virtue. Courage on the battlefield is the only standard that women use to choose their husbands. Add that to the fact that approximately a third of the film is one long battle sequence on a frozen lake. Of course, when the visuals are as masterful as these, it's hard to complain too much. The scene where the German battalion slowly creeps across the lake from far off in the distance is simply sublime. If only the rest of the film wasn't so hard to swallow.

 

--- 244 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

An Angel At My Table (1990, Jane Campion)

Quest Status: 755 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #622

Even after 120 years of film history, and lots of advancements (as well as setbacks) in women's rights during that time, it still comes as something of a shock to see a film by a female director, with a female main character, more women than men in the cast, written by a woman and based on the autobiography of a female author. It's a good shock, of course, but it serves to illustrate how few films like this there have been - and why directors like Jane Campion are so important in film history.

As for the film itself, it's actually based on not one, but three autobiographies by the New Zealand poet and novelist Janet Frame. It was made as a three-part TV miniseries, with one episode for each book, which actually makes it feel like a pretty brisk watch. The first episode, To the Is-land, focuses on Janet's childhood. It's a lyrical and evocative portrait of growing up in WWII-era New Zealand. The second episode, which shares the title of the main film, is the most harrowing of the three parts. It covers Janet's failed attempt to become a teacher and her subsequent diagnosis with schizophrenia, which landed her in a lunatic asylum for eight years. Here, the necessary compression of time is noticeably, as it doesn't feel like eight years have passed once she's finally released, but the utter destructiveness and cruelty of the "hundreds" of electroshock treatments and inhuman treatment she received are palpable.

The third episode, The Envoy from Mirror City, finds Janet in the midst of a late blooming which occurred well into her adult life, during which she traveled around Europe and wrote some of her most acclaimed works - including a novel about her horrific experiences being treated for schizophrenia. This episode is like the calm after the storm, and is notable for Campion's exquisite rendering of how it feels to be a woman experiencing life's many pleasures and pains for the first time. To add to the list above, it's also highly unusual to see a woman who doesn't fit traditional standards of beauty in full nudity - but we see Janet naked quite a bit in this last section of the film. As with just about everything else in the movie, Campion captures it with incredible lyricism and delicacy, transforming a movie that could have been an average biopic into one that manages to convey something of the essence of its subject.

--- 245 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Army of Shadows (1969, Jean-Pierre Melville)

Quest Status: 754 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #350

When I think of Jean-Pierre Melville, I think of Alain Devon in Le Samourai, a lone wolf in a world of cool, emotionless gangsters. Army of Shadows is a film about the world French Resistance rather than gangsters, but the two worlds turn out to be surprisingly similar. Both are painted in the same chilly greys and blues. The action here seems to play out in perpetual winter, and much of it at night, as well. The heroes wear the same trenchcoats and are guided not by love, but by a stoic devotion to a mysterious boss whose rule over his men is absolute.

 

In other words, Army of Shadows is about much of the same things that defined his work in the crime thriller genre. He focuses on the minutiae of the Resistance's attempts to evade the Nazi occupation forces, with very little time spent on political or personal matters. When the middle-aged leader of a Resistance group in Marseilles meets a young communist in a camp for political prisoners, the two bond, not over ideology, but over the realization that they both have "comrades." 

 

 

As in Le Samourai, the important thing isn't the code that one adheres to, but that one adheres to that code with unwavering fidelity. Maybe what drew Melville to the world of the Resistance in the first place is that it must have felt like a losing cause, not unlike the world of crime. Anyone who joins must accept that it's only a matter of time before they are caught, tortured, and killed - and not everyone is able to deal with the pressure. For those who are, there's no better reward than the knowledge that they remained true to their comrades. And that when fate comes knocking, the belief that they will have the courage not to run.

--- 246 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Ludwig (1973, Luchino Visconti)

Quest Status: 753 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #975

I haven't seen most of Luchino Visconti's movies for close to ten years, when I was still in the midst of my initial obsession with film. In those days, I devoured movies morning, noon and night - often using a portable DVD player to fill every waking minute of time with movies. Regrettably, legendary Visconti masterpieces like The Leopard and Death By Venice are among the ones that I remember watching on that device for the first and only time. So when I come to a movie like Ludwig, it feels like I'm coming to Visconti with a blank slate to fill with new impressions (even though there are a few of his movies that I've digested properly).

 

 

Ludwig starts out as a sane movie about an eccentric and somewhat childlike king, and over the course of four hours, slides slowly into increasingly colorful and sprawling excess. This mirrors the journey of its subject: the "Mad King" Ludwig II of Bavaria. At first, his exploits consist mainly of spending huge sums on his patronage of Richard Wagner, who staged Tristan and Isolde for the first time on Ludwig's dime. As the film progresses, however, Ludwig starts building castles with underground ponds and swan boats, while also opting for illicit homosexual affairs with male aids rather than marrying and continuing the royal lineage. 

An Italian-German co-production with an international cast (who spoke in English and had their lines dubbed in Italian after the fact), Ludwig was initially cut down to a less decadent length and sanitized for mass consumption, but it really needed to be four hours long in order to properly convey the king's slow descent into madness. What it didn't need were the occasional faux-documentary asides where ministers from Ludwig's government talk candidly about their disapproval (or, occasionally, approval) of the monarch's ruling style. It may have seemed like a fashionable idea at the time, but the rest of the film is more than able to convey these ideas on its own.

--- 247 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-ho)

Quest Status: 752 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #692

Memories of Murder is not your typical true crime serial-killer thriller. It follows the police investigation of a real-life serial killer in a rural Korean farming town, but it lacks suspense, or any clues to lead the characters on their "inevitable" path to find the killer. In fact, it's practically impossible to categorize. However, it does succeed as an enigmatic mystery that gets in your head and stays there much longer than the 132 minute running time.

 

A lot of this has to do with Bong Joon-ho's unconventional approach to tone and character development. The first half of the movie is often more of a goofy cop buddy comedy than a thriller, with inept sidekicks Song Kang-ho (the father in Bong's recent Oscar-winner Parasite) and Kim Roi-ha trading wisecracks and beating suspects into confessions, when they're not butting horns with the seasoned new recruit from Seoul (the brooding Kim Sang-kyung).

 

 

But as the film unfolds, layer upon layer of uncertainty is added to the investigation, and the dynamics between the characters begin to subtly shift. There are moments of dark humor, frustration, creeping dead, and inertia - while the truth seems to drift farther and farther out of reach. It's a classic case of "the more you think you know, the less you actually do." One of the thing that makes the film so unsettling is that while the characters' unpredictable behavioral shifts make them seem human and relatable, these shifts also make it impossible to know who they really are. Everyone seems vulnerable and transparent, both the police and the suspects, but are they really? Can we ever really know for sure who's guilty and innocent? These are the types of questions that Bong Joon-ho asks in this film, even though even he knows that the answers are just blowin' in the wind. Or, in this case, in the rain.

--- 248 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.

Kagemusha (1980, Akira Kurosawa)

Quest Status: 751 / 1000

TSPDT Rank #544

It's been awhile since I've seen an Akira Kurosawa film for the first time. I guess the last one was Sanjuro a couple years back. Kagemusha has a few shades of that film in it, with a plot involving a lowly drifter becoming involved in the upper echelons of feudal society. There are also hints of Throne of Blood, The Hidden Fortress, and other Kurosawa classics. But the consensus on Kagemusha seems to be that it pales in comparison to Kurosawa's earlier work.

Those who say this are forgetting one important thing though: this is Akira Kurosawa we're talking about here. It's impossible to compare Kagemusha to his earlier films. The use of vivid color cinematography - relatively new to Kurosawa's work at the time - gives the film a painterly style, foreshadowing the impressionistic qualities of later films like Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. Gone are the visceral, tactile battle scenes of Seven Samurai. Instead, we have a three-hour historical epic which is largely about resisting the urge to fight in an attempt to hold territory. When the film's climactic battle scene finally comes, the character's fates are already decided. There is the build-up to a fight, and then the aftermath. The viewer is never caught in the crossfire, which might have something to do with why the film doesn't get as much praise as some of Kurosawa's classics from the 1950s and '60s.

There's a resigned pessimism to Kagemusha that sets it apart from those earlier movies. Being Kurosawa's reintroduction to the world after a painful period of depression which left him mostly inactive for most of the 1970s, this film about a double living in the shadow of the man he is charged with impersonating feels deeply personal. Kurosawa almost certainly felt the pressure of living up to the Japanese public's memory of his past self, as well as the new audience which the names of executive producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola brought to the film. Kagemusha might not impress Star Wars fans, but it is a work of elegiac grandeur, signaling the return of a master throwing himself into his art as if it were the last film of his life.

 

--- 249 films remaining ---

 

NOTE

This review is part of my new Tumblr blog Cinema Cycles, which can be found here.