Random Thoughts

Oooh! An evil… American?

He’s so evil!

OK, now he’s getting his comeuppance! Judo power to the rescue!

Wow.

Wow. I didn’t know that it was possible for a Kurosawa movie to get a rating this low on imdb!

Anyway, this was made in the last days of WWII, and is set in the late 1800s. So it’s about the martial arts guy from the first movie beating up cowardly, nefarious Americans around town, I guess?

It looks like it was made under very restrictive circumstances — I mean, Japan was losing badly, and Japanese society in general was suffering hard.

I’m just wondering where they got all these European-looking actors from. Prisoners of war? Hm… oh! Perhaps they’re all German? That’d make thing easier…

Yeah! That presenter guy in the middle is mouthing off something that sounds more German than English? Or perhaps it’s Japanese… the sound quality here is very uneven…

Man, this movie is chatty… it feels like Kurosawa is padding the run time.

Awkward!!!

Yeah! Fuck karate!

Did Kurusawa just invent Mixed Martial Arts?

Could be German, I guess…

Kurosawa made them fight barefoot in the snow.

Anyway, this movie is awful. There’s a couple of scenes that are amusing, but…

Sanshiro Sugata, Part Two. Akira Kurosawa. 1945.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

This blog series is winding down soon — I think I’m on schedule to watch the final movie early next week. And then I can finally watch something else!

(Yes, I know, I know.)

Again with the blind masseurs — was this filmed back-to-back with the previous movie, The Masseurs and a Woman?

I think Kant wrote a treatise about that? The Categorical Masseur?

This is amusing, but so weird. The movie seems to be poking gently fun at all the characters, and the plot is so light as to almost not exist at all.

Man, Shimizu is making do with very little — this scene with this Dramatic Bridge has been going on for ten minutes now… very dangerous!

I really like this movie — it’s witty and kind. Very relaxing. But also wistful and sad. In a good way.

Ornamental Hairpin. Hiroshi Shimizu. 1941.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

The first movie on the Shimizu was unrestored and barely watchable. The second looked very nice indeed, and was kinda brilliant. This one looks rather dodgy? Perhaps there’s a correlation between whether somebody’s found it worth their time to restore a film and how memorable it is, because it doesn’t really look promising either way.

It’s a comedy based on two blind guys stumbling around a lot?

That looks like the worst massage ever.

OK, this is pretty amusing. But…

The Masseurs and a Woman. Hiroshi Shimizu. 1938.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

OK, I’m getting confused now. Ozu uses the same actors in film after film (which isn’t unusual), but he also sets the films in very similar sets — often reusing the same offices and homes when shooting, apparently. So I’m finding myself going “oh, she’s the daughter of… oh, was that this film or the previous one”?

I’m sure if I’d seen these when they originally were released, that wouldn’t have been that much of a problem, but seeing all these films in the span of a week makes things more confusing.

Tihi.

I like this, but… Ozu’s previous two movies had a lot more going on. This is funny, too, but I guess it’s all heading towards a horrible tragedy (it’s got that feeling), so it’s more subdued? Less silly?

I think I see what Ozu is going for (Dave Berg’s The Lighter Side of… Dying Undramatically of Old Age), but it doesn’t quite work. Instead it’s just lightly wistful.

It’s a good film, but compared to a couple of other films on this box set, it’s very slight. So:

The End of Summer. Yasujirô Ozu. 1961.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.

To celebrate Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles winning the 2022 #1 spot for Longest Film Title Ever, I’m finally watching this thing, which is four and a half hours long.

Unless I ditch it, of course.

Ah:

The Age of the Medici, originally released in Italy as L’età di Cosimo de Medici (The Age of Cosimo de Medici), is a 1973 3-part TV series about the Renaissance in Florence, directed by Roberto Rossellini. The series was shot in English in the hope of securing a North American release, which it failed to achieve, and was later dubbed into Italian and shown on state television.

That explains the extremely bad looping. But fortunately the DVDs has the English soundtrack, too, which is less loopey. I mean, the English version is also filmed as a silent film with the dialogue added later (as Italians were wont to do), but the lips track vaguely more to what they’re saying in English.

This is pretty dire.

Half the scenes are like this — they’ve got a camera on a tripod, but they zoom and pan a lot. It looks painfully amateurish.

And the dialogue is just people spouting factoids at each other. Is this a TV series designed to punish unruly school children? And teach them facts about Firenze at the same time?

The costumes are nice.

But OK, I have absolutely no interest in this — it may well turn out to be an awesome masterpiece, but I’ll never find out.

The Age of the Medici. Roberto Rossellini. 1972.

This blog post is part of the Eclipse series.