Japanese Movie Notes

The crowd at Chez Buce has been watching some Japanese classics lately--Mrs. B just got Netflix. Puts us in a kind of a time warp: for whatever reason, neither one of us saw much of this stuff first time around. OTOH, it does come freighted with a lairs of advance billing (retrospective advance billing?) that is tough to get past--but then, so does Shakespeare.

• Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff just might be the best movie ever made--give me a couple of years and I'll get back to you on that--but it certainly is a very good one, well worth the watching, and almost certainly worth watching again. I gather that the same director's Ugetsu might be even better; haven't seen it yet, but it's in the queue.

• Films of Yasujiro Ozu take some getting used to, but they're worth it. I didn't really get A Story of Floating Weeds, although I liked it well enough. Tokyo Story proved a lot more accessible, and made Floating Weeds more intelligible in retrospect. I'm still on the fence, though, about all those from-the-ground-up angle shots. Can't Ozu afford a tripod?

• Of course I "knew about" Kurosawa--I remember piling into a theatre with a bunch of (other) young people to watch Rashomon so many years ago (and not paying much attention). More recentlyI saw Ran in a weirdly inappropriate little concrete-block box that passes in Palookaville as an art house. I guess I hadn't caught up with the fact that the fashionable people stick up their nose at him--all show and glitz, they seem to say, and just maybe, got forbid, packaged for the western audience.

A look at Hidden Fortress gives you some clue as to why he has this rep, and as to why it is undeserved. It's a semi-comic adventure/road/caper movie: Harold and Kumar chase after Japanese gold. Some of the photography is gorgeous (he recreates old black-and-white comic books which, to my mind, is no bad thing). The music keeps reminding you (somewhat obtrusively) that none of this is really serious. It comes packaged with an endorsement by, and a blurb interview with, George Lucas, which may or may not enhance its street cred. But the fact is it's a compulsively watchable, mostly good-natured and entertaining, way to spend an evening. Random note: any film-maker who influenced so many other film-makers must have something going for him, not so?

Surprisisng-to-me Afterthought:If there is a common theme that runs through all this work, it is one of compassion--not necessarily the first stereotype that leaps to mind when you think of the nation that so brutally conquered China. But that may be the point. Especially in Mizoguchi, but also in the other two, you get a consistent message: the world's a nasty place, and precisely for this reason, it small acts of kindness, courtesy, respect, that offer whatever solace we may be able to extract. Not a bad text with which to start the week. Note to self, go check and see what else Netflix has on offer.