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SCREENING LOG
- 10/06-10/12, 2003
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I watched THE SECRET LIVES OF DENTISTS, KAGAMIJISHI, WHAT
DID THE LADY FORGET?, DAYS OF YOUTH, I GRADUATED, BUT...,
I FLUNKED, BUT..., RECORD OF A TENEMENT GENTLEMAN, BROTHERS
AND SISTERS OF THE TODA FAMILY, WALK CHEERFULLY, THERE WAS
A FATHER, A STRAIGHTFORWARD BOY, A HEN IN THE WIND and BODY
AND SOUL.
Body and Soul (1947, Robert Rossen)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0039204/
A boxer wins the title belt only to realize how he's a pawn
in the boxing racket, his champion status made or broken by
the whims of fight fixers. The story is a bit arch in its
familiar setup of a talented numskull on the brink of a moral
ephiphany, his soul teetering between the good influence of
a prim and proper woman (complete with fake British accent)
and the bad influence of a ruthlessly greedy fight promoter.
The line readings are generally wooden and theatrical under
Rossen's lackluster direction, but Garfield's thuggish but
dignified performance, the dramatic highpoints and memorable
lines laid throughout Polonsky's tight script, and James Wong
Howe's atmospheric camerawork are the film's memorable qualities.
The climax, an intensely brutal and brilliantly executed fight
sequence is the film's real piece de resistance. #9 for 1947,
between BLACK NARCISSUS and T-MEN
The Secret Lives of Dentists (2002, Alan Rudolph)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0314630/
Campbell Scott plays an affluent dentist whose suspicion
of his wife's infidelity drives him to flights of fancy, which
director Rudolph depicts in startling and refreshing ways,
though gradually they become more of a gimmicky crutch for
the film to rest on, embodied chiefly in Dennis Leary, who
wears out his welcome as an obnoxious patient who becomes
Campbell's alter-ego during his delusional episodes. One's
enjoyment of the film rests largely on the degree to which
they empathize with a stony Scott who seems to be riffing
on Kevin Kline (mustache included) and his similarly bottled
depiction of suburban white male angst in THE ICE STORM. Hope
Davis does a good job while remaining essentially a cipher
for Scott and the audience to scrutinize though her character
ends with a whimper at the end. The three daughters are portrayed
as three-dimensional children and as stage props deployed
for maximum cuteness, sometimes within the same scene. There's
a fluidly directed sequence where the entire family comes
down with the flu that's quite sharp and observant. Uneven
but rewarding.
10 x Yasujiro Ozu:
Days of Youth (1929)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0020563/
This breezy student comedy about the misadventures of two
slacker collegians (Ichiro Yuki and Tatsuo Saito, who does
a great riff on Harold Lloyd) is Ozu's earliest existing film.Ê
The narrative is as incidental as ever but eventually locks
into an extended sequence capturing the foibles of a romantic
triangle that develops during an extended skiing sequence
-- which in itself is a wonder as it's probably the longest
exterior sequence Ozu ever filmed.Ê Ozu's filmmaking is more
"mainstream" than what he's known for, utilizing dissolves,
handheld camerawork and clever point of view shots to capture
the thrills and spills of the ski slopes.Ê Ozu's characteristically
lovely moments of human intimacy are in evidence, but they
have yet to be as sharply composed, pared down to the graphic
simplicity that is his hallmark.Ê It seems evident that a
younger, more carefree Ozu directed this -- it's relatively
slight but extremely affable depiction of youth -- one wonders
what wonders Ozu would have done with AMERICAN PIE. #10 for
1929 between STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. and STORM OVER ASIA
I Graduated, But... (1929)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0019796/
A college graduate is unable to find a job but tries to hide
his unemployment from his wife and fiancee. Though only 11
minutes of fragments is all that remains of Ozu's initial
entry in the "I Verbed, But..." series, it still plays rather
coherently. #12 for 1929
A Straightforward Boy (1929)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0020509/
Takeshi Sakamoto and Tatsuo Saito are two bumbling child
kidnappers (Sakamoto carries a butterfly net if that gives
you an idea of his skill level) who abduct a boy (Tomio Aoki,
Japan's Dennis the Menace) who turns out to be more than they
bargained for. Pieces of this slapstick crime caper based
on O. Henry's "The Ransom of Red Chief" are missing throughout,
but it still plays coherently and has its share of hilarious
moments. #13 for 1929
Walk Cheerfully (1930)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0020980/
A genuine rarity, an Ozu gangster movie, in which a conman
falls for one of his targets, achieving redemption through
love in a way that is highly reminiscent of Frank Borzage's
tales of romantic salvation. Ozu achieves a variety of moods,
from the playful hand signals and spontaneous dance routines
that gangsters use to greet each other, to the passion of
not only romantic love but fraternal devotion between the
conman and his best buddy, resulting in one of his most macho
movies as well as one of his most tender. Incidentally, Ozu
gives a lot of visual time in this film to close-up shots
of people's feet, a motif I don't quite understand in its
relation to the movie but is certainly striking. #4 for 1930
between ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT and I FLUNKED, BUT...
I Flunked, But... (1930)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0021283/
Ozu's follow-up to I GRADUATED, BUT... actually plays somewhat
like a prequel: a student fails when the shirt on which he
wrote his exam cheat sheet gets mistakenly sent to the laundry.Ê
The student contemplates his outcast fate as his graduating
dorm-mates all face the working world. The film is loaded
with clever shifts in perspective (such as when a boy, misunderstanding
the meaning of 'flunk' declares that he wants to flunk just
like his big brother), and the film becomes a hilarious and
touching reflection on college life and what it means to leave
it. #5 for 1930 between WALK CHEERFULLY and JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK
Kagamijishi (1936)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0345476/
This short documentary by Ozu was intended to present the
artistry ofÊkabuki dancer Kikugoro Onoe IV to both Japanese
and foreign audiences.Ê A voice-over narration introduces
Kikugoro as well as the dance he performs in the film's second
half, in which a young girl is transformed into a resplendent
lion (the imagery of which apparently inspired Jean Cocteau
as he conceived his own BEAUTY AND THE BEAST).Ê Watching Kikugoro
imitate the gestures of a demure maiden you see how he deserved
his fame.Ê Ozu shoots the performance inÊthreeÊsimple set-ups:
a roving frontal shot of the performers on stage, an angled
shot from the side of the stage,Êand an angled longshot that
acknowledges the presence of the audience in a way that is
unmistakably Ozu. #10 for 1936
What Did the Lady Forget? (1937)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0029557/
One of Ozu's most delightful comedies involves the minor
household upheaval caused by a freewheeling Japanese debutante's
visit to her henpecked professor uncle and his fussy wife.Ê
This film is blessed with a surfeit of small, drollÊgestures
that amply demonstrate both theÊwhimsicality and the sharpness
of Ozu's observations of human behavior:Êthe clucking communion
of housewives,Êclever games played by singing schoolboys and
the subtle, playfulÊbanter of relatives who know each others'
foibles all too well.ÊÊThe schoolgirl character is of particular
interest as a prototypical "liberated woman" who gets her
uncle to take her to a geisha house and isn't afraid of letting
her leg show under her skirt (here I wonder how much of this
was influenced by the '30s Hollywood screwball comedies Ozu
loved, or if it was truly indicative of emerging behavioral
trends among Japanese women).Ê Things come to a head though
as the girl and her uncle conspire for a night away from her
aunt, only to be confronted for their deception, leading to
an unsettling moment when the aunt gets slapped.Ê I'm not
entirely satisfied with how Ozu's characters later shrug off
this instance of domestic abuse as just another quirky behavior
that can be turned on its ear. Nonetheless the film stands
as a provocative exploration of male-female relationships
amidst the shifting mores of modern society. #6 for 1937 between
MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW and STAGE DOOR
Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0034298/
Ozu enters William Wyler terrain with a somber upscale family
drama about a mother and daughter who are shuttled in unwelcome
fashion from one family member's home to another following
the death of the family patriarch. The thematic elements of
displacement within a family unit anticipate TOKYO STORY --
there's even a bedtime scene between the mother and daughter
that echoes one in the later film. There's a startling lack
of music in this film, esp. during Ozu's normally music-filled
transitional shots, that contribute to an overall sense of
tense unease that touches on what might have been the general
wartime state of mind among Japanese at that time. The war
makes a subtle appearance in the form of the youngest son
who offers to take the unwanted family members with him to
settle in China -- a moment which might be aligned with Imperialist
propaganda, though in a fascinating way: the Chinese "frontier"
seems presented as a place where Japanese society can escape
its social hypocrisies and begin anew. #4 for 1941 between
THE MALTESE FALCON and THE LITTLE FOXES
There Was a Father (1942)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0034591/
Another sober wartime drama, this time a sort of reworking
of THE ONLY SON as a widower schoolteacher decides to send
his boy to a boarding school to give him the best education
possible and seek a higher paying position to afford tuition.
The film takes a sudden leap forward in time as the grown
son desires to take care of his aging father, but the father
forbids the son to compromise his own career. The war is barely
mentioned but the film can easily be read as a propagandistic
statement about self-sacrifice and devotion to duty, even
at the cost of family unity. However, the pensive, tentative
mood Ozu captures at the end, embodied in the son's distant,
troubled look as he thinks about his father, hints at Ozu's
own reservations with the moral message being issued. The
scenes of father and son together in both halves of the story
have a gentle perfection that gives the film all the beauty
it requires, thanks to great performances by Shuji Sano as
the grown son and Chishyu Ryo as the father. Amazingly, Ryu
was only 38 when he gave this totally believable performance
as an aging patriarch -- in fact he barely looks any different
than he does in AN AUTUMN AFTERNOON twenty years later! #6
for 1942 between CAT PEOPLE and MRS. MINIVER
Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0039651/
Ozu's first film after the War is a moving and highly effective
piece whose plea on behalf of the underprivileged feels remarkably
akin to what the Italian Neo-Realists were doing contemporaneously.
Choko Iida gives a marvelous performance as a dour widow who
finds herself in custody of a stoic orphan boy with a nasty
bedwetting habit. For much of this film Ozu is at his best,
when narrative concerns take a back seat to the unbridled
joy of witnessing the rhythms of human interaction with all
its quirky mannerisms: you're no longer following a story,
you're watching life unfold before your eyes. Towards the
end, the social agenda upsets this rhythm somewhat, but the
last shot of numerous orphans lying about in a playground
has a deeply troubling quality that lingers in the memory.
#4 for 1947 between THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR and MONSIEUR VERDOUX
A Hen in the Wind (1948)
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0040505/
A sensitive and powerful examination of the moral compromises
made during World War II and the toll they take on families.
Kinuyo Tanaka gives another of her sensitive and compelling
performances as a woman forced into prostitution to care for
her sick child, and is unable to keep her secret when her
husband returns from the front. Ozu takes on the topic of
prostitution while steering well clear of its potential for
sordidness (something I find both a virtue and a limitation...
in some ways it's *too* tactful). The scenes between the two
exceptional leads contribute to a film blessed with some of
the most uncomortable scenes Ozu has filmed, delving deep
into raw unresolved emotions of guilt, honor and devotion.
#7 for 1948 between THE BICYCLE THIEVES and LETTER FROM AN
UNKNOWN WOMAN
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