Why are Japanese films so terrible?

I was pleased to discover Survive Style 5+ on YT. Strap in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Av8RGht0M

The Japanese Embassy in London puts on free movie showings, this month it's Yasuo Furuhata's 'Station'

http://www.uk.emb-japan.go.jp/en/webmagazine/2015/01/film.html

crazy thunder road should be a huge cult film everywhere, not just in japan

if i ran a cinematheque i'd program a thunder road / crazy thunder road double bill for sure

I saw Tokyo Sonata yesterday and liked it but is that really possible for a boy that age to be locked up with adult criminals in those circumstances?

The Japanese Embassy in London puts on free movie showings, this month it's Yasuo Furuhata's 'Station'

http://www.uk.emb-japan.go.jp/en/webmagazine/2015/01/film.html

― MaresNest, Sunday, 1 February 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks for the reminder I should go there sometime. At a three quid too.

i think part of the requirements might be difficult:

"To know where you heard about this event"

er, on an ile thread called 'Why are Japanese films so terrible?'

ICA is doing a week of japanese films. i saw 2 yesterday and 3 on saturday. would love to see them all actually. never seen anything by naruse before so was good to see one of his last night though i think i wasnt awake enough to really engage with it fully. but of the others, i loved pretty much all of them, esp blood and bones with takeshi kitano. looking forward to seeing a rare seijun suzuki one on tuesday. theyre mostly more genre-y movies, but not formulaic, so its good to see stuff that isnt just arthouse fare for your berry eating snobs at curzon and isnt straight commercial popcorn fodder either. sort of slapping myself for not going to the japan touring programme's events before.

details here for the curious:

https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/seasons/japan-foundation-touring-film-programme

Was toying with going to see Scattered Clouds yesterday. Love so much of Naruse but didn't get round to it.

Have been to the touring programme before. Kind of local, forgettable fare that costs way too much to see (see also the Polish/Spanish/Czech 'festivals' mounted at a cinema in London). xp

im not claiming theyre masterpieces (though takeshi kitano did make blood and bones completely unforgettable), but idk, i like seeing east asian genre stuff too. sometimes people only want to see 'foreign' movies if theyre exotic or presenting/doing something stylistically different to generic stuff from the US/UK, but i dont mind seeing the regular stuff too if it does it well. they did a reasonable multibuy offer too.

I'm not saying you are claiming they are masterpieces.

I just don't take much of a liking to this block of films of 'heart warming tales' or (in Japan's case) cartoons Anime that don't seem to be deemed interesting enough to sustain even a one week showing at a cinema in London (they aren't great judges of this, and I guess it doesn't work that way) although cultural instiutes (Japan embassy, Goethe, I think the Korea embassy also) in London can do a fairly good job with cheap one-off screenings.

i think a lot of films get passed over by distributors for cinema release tbh. they appear and go down well at festivals but no one picks them up after that. not always to do with their quality. but yes, i dont think half of these films *would* do well as theyre not really 'interesting' enough for arthouse audiences who often like international movies for their novelty aspect or a window into another world etc, or show you the most extreme part of the society theyre from (or a chocolate box version of it), but even something like trash humpers only got shown at the ica for idk, one week when it came out. the japan touring programme i would say is a bit like the indian film festival in london, mostly for the people the films are made by.

I looked at the films for that Indian film festival last summer and didn't appeal. People turning up to see faces they are more comfortable in seeing is not my thing.

I bother with films from other parts of the world to see different worlds and extremities and aesthetics, often tied to politics most people find boring - which gives them an internationalism. Or so that is the case for much of the time..

"People turning up to see faces they are more comfortable in seeing is not my thing."

this is not behaviour limited to any one group...

the indian film fest had some good stuff in there (eg - miss lovely, which even S&S seemed to like iirc). theres more to indian cinema than satyajit ray. and i imagine for a certain type of cinephile, the japan touring programme reminds that there is more to japanese cinema than idk, ozu.

anyway, i saw this last year at the terracotta film fest, and apart from over-using the intro of be my baby, it was a really good modern japanese micro budget movie.

http://astore.amazon.co.uk/thiwinfil-21/detail/B00SBS0B34

third window put out a lot of good stuff. if tartan was still around i imagine they would have picked some of this stuff up.

and actually its not just about the audience wanting to see people who look like them (as if white western audiences dont do this), i think its simply about films that dont seek to explain certain things to an audience; it assumes there is that understanding already. basically it assumes the audience is a domestic one, rather than international one.

Well Ray or Ghatak or Oshima didn't seek to explain their content to a foreign audience. Not sure many international auteurs do this.

"People turning up to see faces they are more comfortable in seeing is not my thing."

this is not behaviour limited to any one group...

Of course not. However this kind of programme tends to reinforce this behaviour.

perhaps not 'explain' but 'awareness of who is watching this on the international arthouse/festival circuit' i think cant help but have some effect

"However this kind of programme tends to reinforce this behaviour."

are you saying there shouldnt be ___ (insert country) cinema festivals?

I view these touring festival programmes with suspicion.

'awareness of who is watching this on the international arthouse/festival circuit' i think cant help but have some effect

That may come in, but actually it could just as easily be the case that the film might be analysing something that easily crosses borders.

Does anyone recommend Blind Woman's Curse?

anyone seen this or any of the other 'continental trilogy' propaganda films?

http://www.japansociety.org/event/china-nights

http://www.midnighteye.com/features/midnight-eyes-best-and-worst-of-2014/

I could have swore I was checking for this more recently than early February but here it is.

The japanese films I've seen lately - Still the Water, Tokyo Tribe, Over Your Dead Body - really hasn't been that good, though Tokyo Tribe is ok. Doesn't seem to have been a banner year to me. I really like that the list ends with They Have Escaped being named 'Best Finnish Film'. That is both a nice non sequiteur, but also very very true.

When was the last Japanese masterpiece? Tokyo Sonata?

Have you seen Fires On The Plain yet? I really want to see it because it's Tsukamoto. The only nearby cinema cancelled it due to tech problems.

The report last year was similarly bleak. It's really sad to hear that a lot of the 80s-90s generation of directors have not been able to continue making films.

I've tried to catch it at two festivals, but scheduling, man! But yeah, I want to watch it.

Anybody keeping up with Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

Kinda. 'Penance' had it's charms. 'Real' goes off the rails and the most spectacular fashion I've seen in a looong time. That is one batshit final stretch. Haven't seen 'Seventh Code'.

Tokyo Tribe is getting UK disc releases by Eureka in June.

Wonder if that's the guy from Schaa Dara Parr I can see

I found Tokyo Tribe pretty disappointing. It's very ambitious, has some impressive visuals and some funny stuff but I think the whole thing just didn't work often enough. The music too rarely took off and the bad guys were extremely tiresome.

ooh, upcoming dvd box sets:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Battles-Without-Humanity-Blu-ray-Limited/dp/B013V721SC - 12 discs, £100

this is a bit more reasonable
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B013GM4KDG
THE SHOHEI IMAMURA MASTERPIECE COLLECTION - 5 BR, 6 DVD, 1 CD, £47

(would've liked Black Rain in that last one as well, been a while since i've seen it)

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/mikio-naruse-10-essential-films?utm_content=bufferac4f0&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitterbfi&utm_campaign=buffer

Yearning is settling nicely into the Late Spring slot in Naruse's body of work. (In other words, it's a favorite among those who go beyond the typical headliner, e.g. Tokyo Story, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.)

Perhaps someone familiar with japanese can correct me, but I've been wondering about what on earth the title of Naomi Kawase's film Still the Water is supposed to mean. The japanese title is Futatsume no Mado, which for my limited understand of grammar I would thought have been adjective + noun as in 'The Still Water' or just 'Still Water'. So I checked it on google translate, and it said Still the Water. So then I became a bit suspicious, and went on AsianWiki, which told me the title literally means The Second Window. And now I'm wondering if someone somewhere has actually google translated a film title and made it nonsensical, and I'm wondering how much of the dialogue was mistranslated as well. There were definitely some weird quotes when I watched it.

Anyways, watching lots of Kawase, and I really like most of it. One of the most unique japanese directors at this moment, definitely, though Still the Water is not as good as the earlier stuff. Has anyone seen any of her documentaries?

"window of the second eye", i guess? or the second eye's cornea?

i've never heard of this film til now. i just googled it and the poster is of people under water.

this makes sense as the first refractive layer of the eye is the cornea. its refractive index is comparable to water's, so i assume the refraction in the water is some analogy to perceiving something at first sight?

to break down the title:

quickly though: in japanese, there are different ways to count. when counting things like eyes, they say futatsu. you can have futatsu of other things. in this case, it is of "me", which is eye. "mado" is window. "no" is used to express possession, pretend it is an apostrophe-s; e.g., "'s".

so you get:

futatsu: two/second
me: eye
no: 's
mado: window

there are so many ways to count in japanese, that not even japanese people remember the correct way to count. futatsu is just another way to count.

my confusion is, though, if the title is saying "the second eye" or "two eyes", because japanese doesn't have plural like english does.

i'll ask my (japanese) girl when i get home

whoops

futatsume means second (a way of counting like i said above)
no just shows possession, but it's not needed in the english
mado is window

sorry for the confusion

目_目

So mystery solved. Google Translate for some reason recognizes film titles. It also claims that 'Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi' means Spirited Away. Dang it, it would have been a good anecdote otherwise.

Just finished Kawase's Hanezu. Brutal. Weird. Two men vying for one girl, but it's told from the viewpoints of two mountains of legend vying for another mountain, or it might be told from one of the men in the afterlife, and there's also a dead soldier from ww2 wandering around, and one of the men is an archeologist excavating 'the birthplace of japan' or something and he might be disturbing long dormant souls, and that might be what's going on. It's really really weird, especially considering most of the film is people eating soup and looking at birds...

I like Kawase more and more, the more I think about her. Still the Water is still bad, though.

Angel Dust by Sogo Ishii. Psychological detective murder mystery with a very sedate style. I couldn't follow it very much but very nice atmospheric style, sorta triphop(?) soundtrack.

Oh man, just finished Kohei Oguri's Muddy River, and most of it is just ok, but a few scenes near the end, man. Two small boys with few friends find each other, but bad luck and bad neighborhood might drive them apart again.

Movie about children realizing that the world is shit and that people are shit and that they themselves are shitty, and there's nothing to be done about it :(

Really good film, though. Will be checking out more of Oguri.

i used to watch a lot of japanese movies and anime since i was a boy and my interest in the country grew in large part because of the motif that kids realise the world is shit and people are shit

will check that one out

anyone besides Frederik seen Tokyo Tribe?

http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/tokyo-tribe

I found Tokyo Tribe pretty disappointing. It's very ambitious, has some impressive visuals and some funny stuff but I think the whole thing just didn't work often enough. The music too rarely took off and the bad guys were extremely tiresome.

― Robert Adam Gilmour, Saturday, 20 June 2015 01:47 (4 months ago)

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/25/tokyo-storys-setsuko-hara-dies-at-95

:-(

Looked to see if they had another year's roundup but their last update was half a year ago

http://www.midnighteye.com/features/reflections-in-a-midnight-eye/

Which directors are moving their films overseas? Are they moving house overseas or just getting financed from other countries?