Why are Japanese films so terrible?

Gojira movie feat.Smog Monster (Jap version) = second gratest film of all time. At one point they convene a MAJOR ROCK CONCERT ATOP A MOUNTAIN to dispel the demons of pollution, you think ver kidz are going to save the universe god that's lame, but ROCK CONCERT FAILS!! Only a jumping man in a rubbish rubber suit will do!!

Ring 2 fails to capitalise on the idea of the first film, and ends up in some sort of no mans land of schlocky pseudo horror. Pity. I hear Ring 0 (the prequel) is appalling too.

I of course rather like some Japanese films - and think After-Life is genius. I am looking forward to Battle Royale with more than a bit of interest.

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".

Yeah, I've ignored every one of those threads because I thought they were just full of stupid + blinkered opinions. We clearly need to step up our marketing acumen, people.

Ooh, I've wanted to check out Funky Forest for a while now, it looks ridiculous.

I agree that bumping "why are x films terrible" to discuss cinema from different countries isn't a great idea, but it seems to happen a fair amount. Start new threads with better titles, people!

> why are french films terrible

the french film title is actually funny, expecially if you do it in the accent and with a little shrug.

French films are shit. Porquoi?

still annoyed about lack of cheap region 2 copies of tokyo olympiad. the timing is ideal

Could rename the threads but I'm kind of attached to the "why are british films shit?" title despite liking a lot of them.

Nihon no eiga wa warui desu. Nan de?

bet that's wrong

I'm always against renaming threads unless it's a correction, an addition (e.g. an RIP) or removing something offensive. It makes the older parts of the thread less comprehensible, and I also have an attachment to keeping ilx history preserved where possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkaOz48cq2g

Nihon no eiga wa warui desu. Nan de?

I'd probably use "ga" instead of "wa" just to make it flow better, and "doushite" or "naze" are more often used for a singular "why?"

RFI: film in which a ne’er-do-well artist maudit gets something like a doctor’s note from one of his girlfriends saying she caught tuberculosis from him and calls it a “love letter.” I thought the title was even Love Letter, but that seems to be the title of a big blockbuster I don’t remember seeing.

I thought it might be part of Seijun Suzuki‘s Taishō Trilogy but haven’t been able to watch one of those in a while, and plot summaries didn’t seem to line up.

kurosawa's Scandal and Drunken Angel both have TB patients in them but i can't remember enough of the details to know if it's one of those

Drunken Angel was my first thought but I'm pretty sure it's not that.

Okay it was called Love Letter in English, in Japanese 恋文, the 1985 one directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-29-ca-14527-story.html
Think I got the plot a tiny bit mixed up with something else as well.

Which probably was his Appassionata, which showed Out of Competition at Cannes this year!

Speaking of movies you can't remember the name of... Yoshihiro Tatsumi's graphic memoirs A Drifting Life mentioned a movie where a store owner was told that one day people will come in the store and kill him. His family then fear every odd customer that comes in. Tatsumi mentioned that critics weren't fond of it but audiences remember it. I no longer have the book and I don't remember the title. Does it sound familiar to anyone?

it's listed in the book as "Don't Let Him Go" but I can't find the original japanese title...

Found it: Kyatsu o nigasuna
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164078/

thanks!!

Finally saw Crazy Thunder Road and I found it just okay. But it was a student film that got picked up by a big studio. Really enjoyed the extra of Jasper Sharp talking about the japanese amateur film scene though, he said it has a lot of institutional support and some of them go very far because of it.

80% through the Stray Cat Rock box and it's strange in a few ways.

it's a series but all the film's are unconnected. share some cast and are mostly about teenage gangs but the characters have different names in each film (and indeed die and reappear). can't immediately think of an English equivalent other than the Carry On films.

all of them seem to feature vehicles chases through streets and down stairs. usually in odd vehicles - jeeps, honda ct50s, a cute Japanese 'Buddy' (only 100 made, this one with a Thermos flask holder on the dashboard), a motorbike and side car

the main actress in the first film has a credit on the second film but only appears in two 30 second clips taken verbatim from the first film

and it's girl gangs, dressed in gogo gear and floral pant suits, having knife fights on waste land and hanging out in underground psyche clubs but the whole thing looks like a Childrens' Film Foundation film

all strange, but I've been enjoying them. and they are quite cheap if you catch them in an arrow films sale

https://en.wheelsage.org/daihatsu/fellow/buggy/pictures/tiup9d

that's a Fellow Buggy, the thing the main villian was riding in. leather jacket, shotgun and riding in what looks like a toy car

cute! reminds me of the Mini Moke

(comedy vehicle on 5th film is a 5-person tandem)

Last week went to see The Man Who Stole the Sun, wild Leonard Schrader-written film from the late 70s about a high school science teacher who builds an atomic bomb in his apartment and then is kind of at a loss for what to do with it. He eventually starts a cat-and-mouse game with a detective, calls into a radio show to get some idea, and decides to demand that the government get the Rolling Stones to play a show at the Budokan. Apparently it's quite accurate in its depiction of how to build your own nuke.

A Fugitive From The Past (Uchida, 1965)

simple police procedural which is somehow 3 hours long (but never drags). nice use of treated film at times.

(this is the 22nd film from the top 25 of the kinema junpo 1995 list that i've seen, and it's right near the top, #6 or so)

This was really good... thanks for the recommendation.

!!
https://rarefilmm.com/2019/08/kiga-kaikyo-1965/

over 100 japanese films there including out of print stuff by ozu and naruse, some of which looks great.

(i'd argue the uchida isn't rare anymore since arrow released it a year ago)

I know, right? I have been grabbing them in chunks. Have seen some great stuff as a result. I also bought the Arrow BD of the Uchida last week, no regrets!

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