Ozu

I wrote 3,300 words on Yasujiro Ozu and Tokyo Story's canonization. I would like you to read them. There is no dedication in the piece, but it would surely go to David Bordwell.

November Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable.

1.  Chimes at Midnight (Welles, France/Spain, 1965).
2.  In the Mouth of Madness (Carpenter, USA, 1994)
3.  Red Line 7000 (Hawks, USA, 1965)
4.    Shanghai Express (Von Sternberg, USA, 1932)
5.   The Freshman (Newmeyer and Taylor, USA, 1925)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Emperor of the North (Aldrich, USA, 1973), Dangerous Game (Ferrara, USA, 1993), The 'Burbs (Dante, USA, 1989), Nosferatu The Vampyre (Herzog, Germany, 1975), In Another Country (Hong, South Korea, 2012), The Big Sky (Hawks, USA, 1952), Batang West Side (Diaz, Philipines/USA, 2001)

Rewatches: Tokyo Story (Ozu, Japan, 1953), The Color Wheel (Perry, USA, 2011), Southland Tales (Kelly, USA, 2006), In a Lonely Place (Ray, USA, 1950)

Kurosawa, Cinephilia, and Seven Samurai

Kurosawa is part of a contentious tradition now with Bergman and early Fellini in cinephilia for not making "open" movies. The main claim would be that their perfectly executed, pictorial frames do not allow for interpretation beyond what they present. These films do not require explanation in the way that their counterparts - Mizoguchi, Rosselini (only the latter works) and Antonioni respectively – make films that are only legible to those who have truly engaged with cinema. While I could point to Andrew Tracy’s piece in Cinema Scope at the time of the AK100 Criterion set (“prompts the question of why his presence among the most active and engaged sectors of present-day cinephilia feels so pallid,” a sentence that certainly doesn’t engage in any sort of exclusion process) or even David Bordwell’s defeatist attitude (“I still find most of his official classics overbearing, and the last films seem to me flabby exercises”), this would be falsely presumptuous to lay the blame on contemporary shoulders.

Instead, we can go all the way back to Cahiers Du Cinema to find the origins of such debate. Luc Moullet on Drunken Angel: “Its aesthetic pretensions…surpass in their grotesqueness anything even the European Cinema has produced,” and Ikiru: “As for the ending with the swing, confronted by such a piece of idiocy and affectation the audience is left speechless.” Jacques Rivette too, who notes “those ‘picturesqure qualities that made for the facile success of The Seven Samurai, of which we may now rightly ask whether it was especially aimed at the export market.” And Godard’s famous comment, “merely a more elegant Ralph Habib.”  Bazin was more cautious, noting his own (and I’d admit my own) preference for Mizoguchi, while writing “I wonder whether, instead of considering Kurrosawa’s cosmopolitanism as a commercial compromise, albeit of superior quality, we should not rather see it from now on as a dialectical progression pointing the way forward for the Japanese cinema.”*

June Screening Log

Color coded via Dan Sallitt's method (Current or upcoming releases not included). Click on the titles to writing when applicable.

1. The Son (Dardennes, Belgium, 2002)

2. Tokyo Twilight (Ozu, Japan, 1957)

3. Hatari! (Hawks, USA, 1962)

4. Trail of the Vigilantes (Dwan, USA, 1940)

5. Umberto D (De Sica, Italy, 1952)

6. Manhandled (Dwan, USA, 1924)

7. Early Summer (Ozu, Japan, 1951)

8. Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ozu, Japan, 1952)

9. One Mile From Heaven (Dwan, USA, 1937)

10. Drunken Master II (Lau, Hong Kong, 1994)

Also Notable (No order besides color categorization): Paris Belongs To Us (Rivette, France, 1959), Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Ozu, Japan, 1947), The Munektata Sisters (Ozu, Japan, 1950), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn (Meyers, USA, 1982), Birth (Glazer, USA, 2004), The Only Son (Ozu Japan, 1936), A Modern Musketeer (Dwan, USA, 1917), There Was a Father (Ozu, Japan, 1942), Stage Struck (Dwan, USA, 1925), Frontier Marshall (Dwan, USA, 1938), Brewster's Millions (Dwan, USA, 1945), They All Lie (Piñeiro, Argentina, 2009) Late Autumn (Ozu, Japan, 1960), Police Story 3: Supercop (Chan, Hong Kong, 1992), The Restless Breed (Dwan, USA, 1957), Driftwood (Dwan, USA, 1947), Rosalinda (Piñeiro, Argentina, 2010), Impolex (Perry, USA, 2009), The Iron Mask (Dwan, USA, 1929), Rendezvous With Annie (Dwan, USA, 1946), Dragnet Girl (Ozu, Japan, 1933), The Stolen Man (Piñeiro, Argentina, 2007), An Autumn Afternoon (Ozu, Japan, 1962)

Link Round Up: Shorts and Longs

When I saw the running time for Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways, my tolerance meter started ticking, as the film runs just shy of three hours. And seeing how Heartbeats already felt a tad too long at under 90, I was a bit concerned. However, Dolan is a strong filmmaker, and I was surprised by the nuance and emotion he brought to this latest film. I review it over at In Review Online.

On the shorter side of things, the new and wonderful Criterion Blu-Ray of Safety Last! has three newly restored shorts by silent clown Harold Lloyd. You can read about them over at The Film Stage. 

Over at Letterboxd, I have been going through the filmographies of Yasujiro Ozu and Alan Dwan. #Dwanmentum.

The Filmic Discoveries of 2012 (Part II)

This is the second part of my list of films I watched for the first time in 2012. Read an explanation and the first 25 choices here.

25. Duck, You Sucker!, Directed by Sergio Leone (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; June 19^th) 

An explosive film that lives up to the amount of dynamite it delivers, Duck, You Sucker! seen completely cold. But since you’re hear reading this capsule, just know that it’s both Leone’s most fun film (the closest to a screwball comedy he ever made) and his most political. The fact the film “accidentally” switches genres and stakes forty-five minutes into the film is a complete Coup d'état of Leone, leading to the brilliant sequence where Rod Stieger leads a daring heist but instead becomes a revolutionary leader. It’s a bitter film to swallow, suggesting the lack of agency of any individual in a political battle, but it’s also pure visual pleasure, and now my favorite Leone. 

24. Show People, Directed by King Vidor (Seen on 35mm at Film Forum; January 23^rd) 

The good people at Film Forum could not have chosen a better time to show this great silent comedy than the height of last year’s Oscar season, as Show People is essentially The Artist made by the people The Artist was portraying. It’s also 1000 times better (fact). Instead of the divide between sound and silents, Vidor’s film shows the movements of a young Marion Davies from slapstick comedian to serious drama actor, while her love interest William Haines remains at the bottom. Vidor captures with authenticity the difference between stars and actors with a jibing sensibility, and peppers his film with plenty of cameos that make for a number of gags that rival the best of the screwballs. Vidor’s work with actors makes this a timeless classic about the importance of termite art.