Why are Japanese films so terrible?

Tokyo Fist = best.film.ever

followed by 7 Samurai

Didn't get much outta Violent Cop at all. He was a violent cop though, truth in titling there...

Godzilla vs Smog Monster, liked that one a bunch back in the day. The kids on the mountain were playing surf music on psychedelic Fenders, right?

Quite Good: "Ghost In The Shell", "Branded to Kill" (or is it "Branded to Thrill"? I mean the one with the hitman who is sexually aroused by the smell of cooking rice), "Violent Cop" (if only for the ending), "Ring" (not as scarey as people say, especially not on my tiny computer screen)

Pants, but bizarre non western pants (and therefore nevertheless interesting): "Roujin-Z" (see robotic beds fight!)

What about when Godzilla does the highland fling? That was funny! Ha ha ha!

I STILL HAVEN'T SEEN PRINCESS MONONOKE. Is there/has there been showings of his new film yet? (something like "wandering spirits" - can't recall right now)

And Ozu makes it hard for me to remember if I've seen a particular film, since every other one is called 'Late Spring' or 'Early Autumn' or 'That Bit Just Before Winter When All The Leaves Have Finally Fallen But It's Not That Cold Yet' or something like that.

Were the Gamera films Japanese or Korean?

I dunno, but it's kinda irrelevant, considering the universality of their wonderful theme song:

You are groovy Gamera
groovy, groovy Gamera

Betcha that Rock concert to stop pollution would've worked if they'd played that!

is anyone familiar with Terayama's cinematic output?
(Emperor Tomatoketchup, where children rule the world and have grown ups as there slaves, and Throw away your books, go out into the streets! which is like a japanese Brecht protest film)

Nothing like eating cornflakes and watching a blind masseuse take out a dozen people in a few seconds with a katana hidden in a cane.

Yes! Mizoguchi is less known than he should be. Other good films of his are "Sisters of the Gion", "The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums", "Women of the Night", "Miss Oyû", "Tales of Ugetsu", "Gion Festival Music", "The Woman of Rumour" and "The Tale of the Crucified Lovers".

Toky Decadence
Tetsuo
Tampopo
Akira
Audition

Spirited Away hasn't had its official release in Belgium. Waiting.

Jan

Search: Ugetsu, Onibaba, Kwaidan, Audition, DeadorAlive, Battle Royale, Tetsuo, Tokyo Fist, Electric Dragon 80000, Angel Dust, Ringu, Blind Beast, Tokyo Drifter, Sonatine, Hana-bi, Afterlife, Hole in the Sky, In the Realm of the Senses, Tampopo, Throne of Blood, Bullet Ballet, Uzumaki, and random Godzilla films i liked as a child.

there should be more Kurosawa, Miyazaki and Ozu and stuff but they somehow don't fall as much into my "canon". maybe i am just being contrarian.

Still must see: Dark Water, Love & Pop, Gemini, Happiness of the Katakuris, A Snake of June, Juon, Eureka, Cure, Tokyo Decadence, Branded to Kill

Akira Kurosawa is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time! The 'Baby Cart' series are AMAZING! The Godzilla films from the 60s (especially) are great fun with tremendous scope photography and set design and modern Japanese cinema has belched out such instant classics as 'Audition', 'Tokyo Fist', 'Uzumaki', 'Hypnosis' and 'Dark Water'. I saw 'Inugami' last week and it has style for sale! Man, they know how to make a film look good in Japan.

Kill this thread. I mean, whatever next - Hong Kong cinema, a load of shit or wot???!!!???!!!

jp-films.com is another decent resource, though you have to wade through endless amounts of pinku movies.

finally watched "Onoda, 10,000 night in the jungle" about hiroo onoda, the last (but one) soldier fighting the second world war (for 29 years after it had officially finished)

was good, from 2021, but was also 3.5 hours long. might still be on all-4 in the uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSgIj8XaoZk

Picked up a box set of the films of Kinuyo Tanaka in Paris some time ago and have been going through them.

Love Letter (1953) - This is about a dude drifting through the postwar era who finds a job writing English love letters from Japanese geishas to US GIs. Very much the kind of postwar poverty, ppl rising from the ashes of a destroyed country kind of film I'm a sucker for.

The Moon Has Risen (1955) - From a script by Ozu, and the critical consensus seems to be it's Tanaka doing Ozu, though to me it has a lively, youthful feeling that I don't often get from the master. Features future Nikkatsu youth idol Mie Kitahara and, of course, Chishu Ryu as the dad.

The Eternal Breasts (1955) - "You know" I thought to myself "I do sometimes hit a wall with melodrama when they pile on the misery like this". More fool me, this is actually a biopic of a poet who really existed. Most seem to think it's her masterpiece, but it's the one that resonated least with me. But I'm probably wrong, I struggle with Sirk too.

The Wandering Princess (1960) - Another biopic, this time of a member of the Japanese nobility who got married off to the emperor of Manchuria's brother, mostly to stitch things up for the Japanese govt to employ Manchuria as a puppet state. Huge Cinema of Quality vibes, and I can imagine this resonating the way Sissi did it in the West. It's a posho's perspective, so the suffering caused by the Japanese regime is portrayed in the abstract, a troubling news item there, a child complaining about the rude Japanese customers at his dad's inn there, while the suffering of the royal family, much of it of course at the hands of the Communists, is explicit and visceral. Nevermind, I'm an adult, I can contextualize, and at any rate the movie def doesn't paint the Japanese as the Good Guys in all this. Her first colour film and boy is it gorgeous. I figure if David Lean gets to stay in the canon we can get this in there, too.

Girls Of The Night (1961) - Back to black and white for this portrayal of a recovery home for sex workers (shortly after prostitution was outlawed in Japan), but really the focus is on Kuniko (Chisako Hara) in her efforts to return to the working world. Often pretty radical and certainly has a female director's eye for the myriad ways in which men can be The Worst. Disappointingly moralistic and conventional ending but what did I expect.

Love Under The Crucifix (1962) - Tanaka's last film is her sole foray into jidai-geki, Japanese historical cinema, and it dovetails both with the angry revisionism of the samurai films being made around the same time and Tanaka's work with Mizoguchi focusing on female suffering. Somewhat misleading English title - lead character Gin (Ineko Arima)'s romantic interest (played by Tatsuya Nakadai!) is indeed persecuted for his Christianity, but far from being a tract of christian suffering his religious feeling is mostly an impediment to her love, which ofc we are rooting for.

Six movies, none of them bad, quite an ouevre!

The anciliary material confirmed me in some petty prejudices I'd already held: when Tanaka decided to become a director, Mizoguchi, angry at losing his leading lady, went on a press tour saying she "lacked the intelligence" to direct and even had her blackballed from the major studios; contrast with Solid Dudes Ozu and Naruse, who supported her efforts in public and private. Not the first or last instance of a great artist behaving like a total dick of course, but does make me look at his dozens of films about the righteous suffering of the female sex with my eyebrow raised a bit higher.

not sure those are easily available in uk. happy to be contradicted.

had the week off and spent it watching japanese films...

the Battles Without Honour And Humanity box, 5 films by Fukasaku. the first one is well regarded but they were all kinda chaotic. writer changes for the last one too, so it was a bit different.

also Hiroshima, which was good and featured a very handy list of other japanese atomic bomb films, exactly 3 of which i've seen

had a rewatch of 'A Sun-Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era' after it was mentioned in commentary on one of the above, but it wasn't great.

also The Flavour Of Green Tea Over Rice (new BFI version), another rewatch, usual ozu quality.

and the Samurai trilogy, the Musashi Miyamoto thing, Criterion, main antagonist of whom was the love interest from Green Tea.

and picked up Battle Royale in fopp, which is also Fukasaku, albeit 25 years later (and 20 years old itself now).

not sure those are easily available in uk. happy to be contradicted.

Not in physical edition or streaming no, thus my buying the box in Paris - I think they played at the BFI semi recently though, judging by letterboxd reviews. At any rate you could always learn French like a civiliaed person pirate them.

Battles Without Honour Or Humanity felt impossible to watch without an accompanying spreadsheet.

i need to transcribe that list of japanese atomic bomb films, see if i can dig a few more up.

i looked online and found this howler
https://katakurifilms.com/8-of-the-best-japanese-films-about-the-atomic-bomb/
(fireflies is about the firebombing of kobe, nothing atomic about it)

I watched four of those Tanaka films recently and yeah they were all good. Some great cinematography and mise en scene at times... she'd clearly learned some things from working with Mizoguchi.

watched Osaka Elegy just now. it's well regarded but probably one for the heads.

anyway, in one bit they go to the theatre to see Banraku, the classic Japanese puppet plays. i can't remember seeing this in any other film. are there any others?

Takeshi Kitano's Dolls:

The first story is the one on which the film centers. The film leads into it by opening with a performance of Bunraku theatre, and closes with a shot of dolls from the same. The performance is that of "The Courier for Hell" by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, and it alludes to themes that reappear later in the film. Because the rest of the film itself (as Kitano himself has said) can be treated as Bunraku in film form, the film is quite symbolic.

(imdb lists 4, Dolls and Oharu and something Western. i don't remember the bit in Oharu and haven't seen Dolls)

((also puzzled by the fact 'hair-bun' is a thing people tag movies with))

I saw The Courier for Hell when I visited the Bunraku theatre in Osaka, it was heartbreaking!

Not a movie but Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles has a lot of bunraku in it iirc

I know there's some films made of bunraku performances, but I can't think of any that are part of the plot. a lot more with Noh plays etc
feel like I should mention Thunderbolt Fantasy here, a Japan/Taiwan wuxia puppet TV show created by Gen Urobuchi of Fate/Zero, Madoka Magica, Psychopass etc. fame. it's as daft as it sounds!

Shinoda’s Double Suicide uses bunraku as a narrative element iirc

a lot of the bunraku plays themselves seen to involve double suicides (based on the list of 10 or so top chikamatsu whatsisname plays i found online)

the bookseller in the film i watched last week had a bunch of double suicide titles too, i wonder if they were the same ones?

I watched A Colt Is My Passport the other day: a superb noir with a lot of western (the genre) touches including a very good Morricone-esque soundtrack

xp yeah the film is a bunraku adaptation

Colt Is My Passport very good yeah, def the highlight of that criterion Nikkatsu set

Samurai Wolf I & II. was expecting generic samurai stuff but there was a style to them that raised them above. this was post Fistful of Dollars ('66 and '67) and had obviously taken some cues from that (which, yeah, had itself taken cues from Yojimbo). pleasantly surprised.

i think the only other Gosha i have is Three Outlaw Samurai, his first, and the various others that are available are Yakuza based but I'll see.

in the meantime i have Ju-On and Sister Streetfighter on the way from arrow, to mix things up a bit.

Hideo Gosha is great, he reminds me of a Budd Boetticher or Phil Karlson - unpretentious artisan working in genre cinema whose sensibilities just happen to line up perfectly with his subject matter. Aside from the Samurai Wolf films I've also seen Sword Of The Beast (which was on Criterion) and his masterpiece, Goyokin (which I had to track down on a dodgy dvd). The only yakuza film I've seen of his is Violent Streets, a bit more outré than the swordplay stuff but well worth seeing.

One thing you can find in every one of his movies is the kind of hatred of authority that only a guy who lived through something like Imperial Japan could develop.

I caught Evil Does Not Exist on AppleTV and thought it was better than Drive My Car!

Maybe Hamaguchi needs his own thread?

a Ryûsuke Hamaguchi thread for all your Hamaguchi chat

i have a lot of these now, but they are still releasing new-to-me films that are great. Imai's Revenge (or Vengeance, it seems to have 4 names). looked lovely and that final duel...

written by Shinobu Hashimoto who also did Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Throne of Blood, Harakiri...

think this is the first Imai film i have too (although the imdb page has mostly Japanese names, which probably means limited Western release)

(the other thing I've noticed is that the last 7 or so purchases, from Arrow or Eureka, have all been Toei films)

I recently enjoyed Imai's remarkable Tower of Lilies, telling the grim wartime story of the Himeyuri students.

that got a mention in the extras, yes. Bushido was the only other dvd that came up in a search, but the mini-doc had plenty of clips of things.

and A Story Of Pure Love (1957) is on the list of nuclear films in the doc that accompanied Hiroshima recently.

ju-on. extras include 2 different audio commentaries and about 2 hours of other stuff including period and new interviews with cast and crew. this might take a while... (and this is only part 1)

Went to a free mystery screening at a local theater (same place I saw The Man Who Stole the Sun), which turned out to be Dynamite Don-Don, late-period yakuza comedy by Kihachi Okamoto. Set during the American occupation, rival yakuza clans are warned that there will be serious consequences for continued violence, and so end up establishing a baseball tournament instead. Gotta say this plot maybe didn't warrant 140 minutes, but it was pretty entertaining. They break a lot of the rules of baseball!

gotta love a shop i can walk to which not only has most Arrow releases in stock but which shadows Arrow's sales prices. picked up Dark Water and Irezuma for £9 each on saturday.

treated myself to the criterion zatoichi box for my birthday - 25 (of the 26) zatoichi films, all starring Shintaro Katsu. it's a hefty old thing, and hard to file.

have watched the three films on the first disk and the two b&w ones look so much better than the third. all the rest are colour.

Shintaro produced some of the Lone Wolf & Cub films and is in a bunch of other things i have, which i'll have to revisit. the directors are all unknown to me though. 25 films in about 12 years (the final one 16 years later), one year had 4 zatoichi films released...

also interesting is that Zatoichi meets people from other series along the way - Yojimbo (real, actual toshiro mifune) and the one-armed swordsman.

My guess is that once you're done with that box you won't be wanting to watch any more Zatoichi films for a while.

I love some of Tokuzo Tanaka's horror films and wanted to see his Zatoichi films but I'm not getting that whole set

also bought a 4th version of 47 ronin (after watching ako castle last week), the inagaki version, and The Wanderers, just because it was same ebay seller, by ichikawa and i liked the cover. obvious bootlegs though.

The digital-rental model is pretty weird but if you have the least interest in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's brand of horror, Chime is unmissable, peak stuff. Taut and concise. Crank the volume.

I'll look out for that if it comes to disc someday.

Shadow Of Fire (Shinya Tsukamoto) - This is a small story set in the slums of Japan after world war 2. Like the last few Tsukamoto films, the low budget is showing but it's still quite lush in places, the warm colors of the indoor scenes are lovely. He said that the 7 year old boy in the film showed up to audition of his of accord and that encouraged him to cast the boy.

It's part of a thematic trilogy including Fires On The Plain and Killing, but I'd say Kotoko fits in there too. He made these films because he's afraid Japan will go to war in the near future because it buries it's memories of war trauma, not enough people were encouraged to speak about their war experiences, samurai stories are heavily romanticized and so it seems to him that japan doesn't really understand war and historical violence enough to want to avoid it in the future. But these are very low budget films that didn't have much impact so I wouldn't be surprised if he kept going at this. In the bonus features he does a talk with historian Kota Ishii who written a book about the slums of the 40s (and 50s?)

When I seen Kotoko years ago I was really surprised when Tsuakmoto said it was motivated by his fears about his children's generation going to war, because the film appears to be kind of a semi-biopic about the singer/actress Cocco, who suffered from paranoid delusions about her son being in danger. I was confused by the war scene but later found out that the small crying child who gets his head blown off was Tsukamoto's own son! That's some exposure therapy (though it actually resembles a scene from Tetsuo 2, long before he had children).
I seen Victor LaValle a while ago talk about how when he had a child he immediately felt the urge to write about the worst things that could happen to his child. I don't think people consider or talk often enough about how storytellers and artists frequently are killing and brutalizing their own loved ones in their art to come to terms with what could really happen.

Didn't enjoy Kotoko to be honest - I found it kind of baffling and Cocco's character acted in ways I simply couldn't figure out. I suppose trauma is the explanation but it wasn't well told, for me. Maybe I should revisit.

I liked Kotoko a lot. It was probably the last Tsukamoto film that felt really substantial for me. There aren't any I dislike but I do miss when he was able to get a bigger production. I still haven't been able to see Nightmare Detective 2 or Female (an anthology film he's a part of). Nightmare Detective is probably my least favorite, apparently it's his own deal but it feels like he's a hired hand, you have a couple of actors who look like they're from the idol factory, he said he wanted to make three of them but I doubt that will happen now, I hope the second one is a lot better.