Remastered Kurosawa samurai dvds

I'm not going to do a full review of these two Japanese classics; a lot has been written about them and more in depth than I could ever do. But I will say that having owned the original Criterion dvds, these are superior quality prints. I could never figure out what happened on the original dvds -- for instance, on the original Sanjuro dvd, there were artifacts, pinholes and damage to the print, making it even worse than the VHS release. The sound was murky as well. Here, we get the original 3 channel stereo that was used for both films, and the image quality is far superior. And the extras include the episodes of It's Wonderful to Create, a good documentary about Akira Kurosawa and the making of his films -- of course the episodes here deal with the mentioned films. Copious notes abound in the booklets. If you have been on the fence about upgrading, jump off and buy these. You won't be disappointed.

For Horowitz

For Horowitz is about a woman (Ji-Su, played by Uhm Jung-Hwa) whose family sacrificed everything to put her into music school. However talented she was, she could not attain the next essential step to developing her career: studying abroad. Ji-Su ended up becoming a woman in her thirties, still single, and her career on hold. To regain some control and direction, she moves to a small city and takes over an old studio where she plans to give lessons to those who are serious about music. But she finds out that teaching in a less populated area means less talent. Mothers bring in their sons or daughters who are mediocre at best. There is a boy (Gyung-Min, played by Shin Eui-Jae) that she has run in with, a troublemaker who causes havoc around him, especially the pizza place below her studio. He steals her posters advertising her studio, breaks windows, just causes a general mess. Ji-Su finds the boy's grandmother -- his only family member and guardian -- and finds that she is no better at controlling her grandson. On top of everything else, while attending a piano recital by an old mentor, she encounters her fellow classmates, all of whom are having various degrees of success, and who are still trying to compete against each other to succeed. She finds it demeaning and distasteful. One day, she is trying to deal with Gyung-Min -- in an arguement with the grandmother she boasted that she could do a better job feeding him, and the grandmother took her up on it -- and discovers that he has a talent for playing the piano, having the ear to reproduce notes perfectly. She decides to teach him, and he becomes a willing pupil. Gyung-Min's talent is such that she begins to dream fame and fortune for the both of them -- in reality, she is happy to take him to a department store, where they find a piano, and he in effect becomes an advertisement for her studio. Soon she is swamped with children, including the pizza man downstairs, who has become smitten with her beauty and her playing, and has decided to take lessons to be near her. But Gyung-Min becomes jealous at the lack of attention that she now gives him, and starts trouble by picking fights with the kids. Horrified mothers take their children out of class, and soon she is down a handful of students. The relationship between Ji-Su and Gyung-Min become closer to mother and son, yet there are still some barriers -- he has flashbacks to a car accident that killed his parents, and is afraid of bright light. And she is living though him in music success. At his first competition, he is nervous but prepared, yet becomes paralyzed by the spotlights that turn on in his face. Gyung-Min never competes, and embarrassed, Ji-Su refuses to teach him anymore. Their separation causes anxiety for both, and she eventually finds him and reconcile. One evening they meet the teacher's old classmate, who invites them to a house where a visiting music teacher and his wife are staying. After Gyung-Min does an impromptu recital, he gains their favor, and afterwords is invited to study under the professor overseas. This is the opportunity that Ji-Su never had, and she has mixed feelings about it, thinking that she can do just as good a job. After the boy's grandmother dies in the hospital, she plans on adopting the boy. Her family though does not think she is up to the task, especially as a single woman. Her brother thinks that he is better off overseas, under the professor's tutelage. Confronted with the fact that she was never given this opportunity, and that she still hasn't progressed much in her social life, she concedes. They have a tearful departure. Years later, she and the pizza man are a couple, and attend a piano recital by a new prominent pianist. It is Gyung-Min, now grown to be a masterful musician. He dedicates a piece to her, and it is a tune that he made up one day in class.

This is an enjoyable film, even though it has a by the book plot. Uhm Jung-Hwa and Shin Eui-Jae give solid performances that show depth and complexity that makes their on screen relationship so moving. The music, so often annoying or generic background noise in many Korean melodramas, is excellent in this film, as it should be. The direction is excellent, conveying emotion without hysterics, effectively telling the story, giving flashbacks and revealing dreams that add to the story and not be a distraction. Recommended.

Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain

Eureka's Masters of Cinema series is a great source for the dvd foreign film junkie. Based in England, this label has quietly built a fine catalogue of old movies, most of which have never been available for home release, let alone dvd. Over the holidays I ordered the anticipated 3 dvd set of Mikio Naruse's films, and received it around the New Year. The quality, annotation and commendary rival Criterion -- the only caveat is that their releases are PAL, so you need a universal dvd player with a good built in PAL converter to see these. Sound of the Mountain is one of the three films offered in the box set, based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata. It is a story of a loveless marriage, the husband (played by Ken Uehara, a major male lead) not caring for his wife (played by legendary actress Setsuko Hara), and her growing relationship between her and her father in law (played by Yamamura). The marriage is in name only; and both have learned to hide their disgust towards each other. When her husband's sister suddenly moves into the family home, child in tow, the wife's self made world slowly crumbles as she sees in her sister in law the possible outcome of her own marriage. On top of that, she is also pregnant, and struggles with the concept of bearing her husband's child. The only meaningful person in her life is her father in law, who tries to rectify his son's bad behavior by investigating the son's adulterous relationship with a mistress, and trying to reform his bad ways, but it is too late. The wife decides to have an abortion. The final scene of the film, a famous walk in the park sequence, shows the wife (who has now left the house) and the father in law in a state of resignation as to their lot in life, a note of fondness between the two and a goodbye. It is one of the most lyrical and moving scenes in cinema.

Silent film obsession - Piccadilly

One of the pinnacles of British silent cinema, Piccadilly is a sumptuous showbiz melodrama seething with sexual and racial tension. The Chinese-American screen goddess Anna May Wong stars as Shosho, a scullery maid in a fashionable London nightclub whose sensuous tabletop dance catches the eye of suave club owner Valentine Wilmot. She rises to become the toast of London and the object of his erotic obsession - to the bitter jealousy of Mabel, his former lover and star dancer (played by Ziegfeld Follies star Gilda Gray).
-BFI review

Piccadilly is a remarkable silent film that is more memorable for the charismatic screen presence of Anna May Wong, than its melodramatic plot. Pandora's Box, which came out the same year, has a more powerful story, but Piccadilly touches upon the then taboo relationship between races. Forbidden desire toward those not like ourselves seemed daring, romantic and exotic, but they could never be consummated on film. The lover, whether male or female, always returned to white society, while the other fell victim to self sacrifice. Anna May Wong complained that for most of her career her characters always died at the end. Here is no exception. But Piccadilly offers her the best screen role of her career. As a dishwash girl in a fancy nightclub, she as Shosho is discovered as a hidden talent to the club owner, who is not happy with the draw of his current star, Mabel, who was a former lover. She is discovered because he goes down to the washroom to fire someone for not properly cleaning a dish, which was served to a customer. Shosho was dancing on the countertop, and was reprimanded. But Wilmot, the club owner, saw potential, and later takes her under his wing and grooms her to be the next star of the club. Shosho is no starry eyed neophyte; she is smart enough to demand control over her look and to hire a family member to play the music. Her performance is a hit. Mabel is jealous of her success, and of Wilmot's increasing ardor for her. An argument follows, and Shosho is killed. A twisting courtroom trial follows, and the killer is sentanced.

While having notable parts in the silent Thief of Bagdad and Peter Pan, Anna May Wong captured worldwide notice with her role in Piccadilly. She was perfect for silent film -- her eyes and body language oozed sensuality and expression. This is one of the only films where she is allowed to kiss a white man. The director, E.A. DuPont captures the feel of 1920's jazz age London as well as the grimy underworld that barely separated the two. The overall acting of the cast is good, probably above average for it's day, but for modern viewers it will seem a little stiff. Recommended to silent film lovers and those with an interest in the screen legend of Ann May Wong.

Creature Feature or Social Commentary? The Host

Sorry for the delay. I was in a car accident the first weekend of the New Year, where my vehicle was totalled. Fortunately, everyone was all right. Dealing with paperwork and getting a new car has preoccupied my time, but don't think I haven't been watching movies. No siree!

We'll start off with what was the top box office draw in South Korea in 2006, a film called The Host. It's a difficult movie to label -- it isn't a horror film, nor, in spite the cover shot, is it a monster movie. It does share many traits of a classic film, Godzilla, in that the focus is not on the beast but what created it, the victims, and the society it affects. The Host is without a doubt one of the more unique cinema offerings that South Korea has produced in a few years. The story begins with a look inside a US military lab in Seoul, where an assistant is ordered to dump vast amounts of formadelyde into the sink, which is eventually emptied into the Han River. A couple of years later some fishermen come across a weird species of reptile, and disgusted, toss it back into the sea. Later, a man commits suicide by diving into the river from a bridge. We then focus on a man and his father who work a vending house along the Han River, selling food to people who come to picnic or for lunches. Song Kang Ho plays Gang-du, the vender's son who seems to be a good for nothing slacker who sleeps all the time. He is divorced, and has a thirteen year old daughter who returns from school, disgusted that for parent's day her drunken uncle was the only family member who could attend. The daughter has an aunt who is a professional sportsman, an archer who wins bronze in a televised championship. While correcting a botched order, Gang-du goes to the riverside, where he finds the people staring at something underneath the bridge. To his astonishment, it is a huge mammal hanging upside down like a bat, which then dives into the river. It takes some food tossed to it in the river, then comes out of the water and begins to devour the people. Chaos ensues, and Gang-du rushes back to the vending house, and grabs his daughter as she comes out to see what is going on. In the frenzy, they fall and lose contact. She is taken by the monster and dragged into the sea. The survivors of the incident are later gathered at city hall, in disbelief and grieving for their lost loved ones. There Gang-du's family come together and grieve over his daughter's death. A man in a yellow protective suit comes in, and warns that they are all going to be decontaminated and placed under examination, as the creature apparently infected a US soldier who was at the scene. While at the hospital, Gang-du receives a garbled cell phone call from his daughter -- somehow she survived, and was at the bottom of a huge sewer. The family, while each having personal difficulties in the past, band together and escape from the hospital, and head for the Han River. With the help of some local gangsters they get some weapons and a sewer map, and they head into the vast sewer system, looking for the daughter. They find the creature and attack it, but they only manage to annoy it, and in the fight the father is killed. Gang-du is captured again by the military, but his brother and sister escape. The brother finds out the location of the phone call, with the aid of a friend who turns around and betrays him by informing the officials, but he escapes. The sister, armed with her crossbow, is given the daughter's coordinates and goes into the tunnel to find her. She immediately runs into the creature, and is knocked unconscious. Gang-du, after a terrifying series of examinations, takes a nurse hostage and flees the holding area, which happens to be near the river. He steals a car and heads off to the sewers, where he runs into his family again. The daughter, realizing that she is in a repository for the creature's victims, is searching for a way out. A boy who was part of a recent deposit, survives. She takes care of him, and makes a rope out of the victims' clothes to try to escape. But the creature appears, and they hide in a little hole that the creature can't get into. Later it sleeps, and the daughter is determined to get out, but climbng on the creature to the rope and to safety. She almost makes it, but the creature awakes, and devours the children. It confronts the family later on, but Gang-du and his siblings are ready: the sister fires a Molotov cocktail arrow and sears the creature, Gang-du himself delivers the death blow with a metal pole. The children are coughed up; however, only the boy survives. The virus is later admitted to be a hoax, and political apologies are made. The boy ends up living with Gang-du at the vending house.

What makes The Host a unique and refreshing film for me is that there are no clichés, no familiar elements that one would expect. It is a well thought out film. Perhaps we are to infer that formaldehyde, when dumped in large quantities, will make monsters, or maybe not. But the idea is that of careless waste (in particular by a foreign element, the US military) of toxic substances could affect out natural resources. There is a lot of political stuff going on, but it is all in the background. What is more unnerving is the handling of a major disaster by the authorities, in managing and containing exposure to prevent outbreak. The military is shown but not as integral to the plot as the doctors and disease control agents who create chaos of their own. I think more than any other film from South Korea do I get some sense of the American presence in their culture, and how they can be perceived as both ally and a friend who has long outstayed his welcome. Gang-du and his dysfunctional family make for unique heroes in a movie -- they all have their problems, and at times don't get a long with each other, but in the end they work together to avenge the daughter's death. The direction is terrific -- direct, even paced and providing unusual twists. It clocks in at just under two hours. The Host lives up to its hype -- there has been tremendous interest in the film festivals and on the internet -- a well done film. Check it out!

Babel

Like Amores Perros and 21 Grams, Babel is a multiple narrative movie by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, threading together three seemingly different tales to form one overarching narrative. Unlike the other films, Babel, while powerful and compelling, lives up to its title not by subject matter but by being confusing and a little uninteresting. The movie begins in Morocco, as a villager sells to his neighbor a rifle which would help him and his sons fend off the jackals from killing their flock. But his two sons are young, and although the youngest is clearly a natural and accurate marksman, neither have the maturity to handle the gun. Sure enough, while trying to see if the rifle can really shoot long distances, the youngest aims at a passing bus and fires. The bus stops, and the kids run away scared. A woman (Cate Blanchett) was hit in the bus, and her husband (Brad Pitt) becomes frantic, as they are stuck in the middle of nowhere and the closest hospital is hours away. A man on the bus says that they are close to his town, and they drive there, as a doctor lives in the town. It is a strange and scary town to the tourists, and many want to leave the couple behind. But the doctor comes and can only stop the bleeding, which is profuse. He sews her up without anasthetics. There is a phone in the town, and the husband contacts the American embassy for help. There is a delay, because of some diplomatic complications. The police are sent out as well to investigate, and they find the bullet casings. Up to this point, everyone thinks that it is a terrorist act, but the police, after interrogating the villager who sold the rifle, come to the buyer's house where the children confess their doings to their father. They flee as the police arrive, and confront them in a shootout, where the older brother is shot. The youngest brother smashes the gun, and surrenders. Meanwhile, the tour bus leaves, and eventually the husband and wife are rescued. Another story deals with a Mexican nanny taking care of two children in San Diego. She is stressed because she has to go down into Mexico for her son's wedding; the parents are out of town, and she can't get anyone to cover for her. So she decides to take the children with her; her nephew comes in to pick them up, and they cross the border to attend the wedding, which is large, loud and a little scary to the children, but festive and clean. Everything is fine, and they go back to the US in the middle of the night. They meet trouble at the border. The passports are fine, but the children are clearly not related to the nanny or the nephew, and she failed to provide a letter of permission. In a panic, the nephew crashes through the gate, and they drive off into the desert, police in pursuit. The nephew drops them off in the desert, and drives off to let the police chase him. But they are in the middle of nowhere, and when day comes, they have to seek the shade for comfort from the sun. The heat is intense, and the daughter faints. The nanny leaves them to find help, but runs into the police, who arrest her. They find the children, and bring them back to the city. The nanny will be deported, however, and she is brought back to the border, to the arms of her son who is waiting for her. The final story takes place in Japan, about a father and his deaf mute daughter, a teenager, who is leading a normal life, hanging out with friends and flirting with the boys. But there is something wrong -- she is too sexually provocative, flashing anonymous men by exposing herself in a club and trying to tongue her dentist while he is inspecting her teeth. There are also a couple of police inspectors who want to talk to her father, and she is worried, remembering when the police came to talk to her dad after her mom killed herself. After losing a potential boyfriend in a club to one of her girlfriends, she goes home, depressed, and calls the younger inspector, claiming to have information about her father that he would be interested in. He comes, and after an awkward interview, she takes off her clothes and offers herself to him. Shocked, he refuses, and she breaks down, sobbing. He leaves, but runs into the father, and asks him about a rifle that he had owned, and was discovered in the hands of a Moroccan man in a mystery shooting. As it turns out, he was in Morocco, on a hunting tour, and he gave the man his gun as thanks. This ties to the first story, and as for the second, the children were the offspring of the husband and wife involved in the shooting.

THE great spy movie - The Good Shepherd

This is a New Year's treat. A three hour epic, The Good Shepherd is to the cold war spy films as Unforgiven was to the westerns, a complex and multilayered meditation of the history of modern American intelligence, from the 30's to the 60's, as seen through Edward Wilson (played by Matt Damon). The films begins with a couple making love in a seedy room, filmed in grainy black and white. It is 1961, and the U.S. is in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wilson is a senior CIA official who is in charge of special operations, and is given the assignment of handling the situation. The mission is a disaster, and everyone is looking for explanations. Wilson and his men believe there is a leak, and an investigation begins. From an anonymous source, Wilson is given a grainy black and white photograph of a couple having sex, along with an audio reel of their conversation. If they find out who the people are, they may have their man. Edmund Wilson is a stone faced, unemotional, man in the grey flannel suit character who is good at what he does. The film flashes back to his college years, in the late 30's, at Cambridge, where he studies poetry and is involved in drama. Wilson undergoes initiation at an exclusive club, the Skull and Crossbones, a combination of a fraternity, free masons, and old boys club. This establishes the network that would be around for the next thirty years for Wilson. He is approached by a government agent who wants him to investigate his poetry professor, an Englishman who is reported to be sympathetic to German interests. Wilson undertakes it partly out of patriotism, partly out of realizing that his professor had been deceiving him as a professor -- he plagarizes another poet's work. After successfully exposing his professor and his network, he is asked to join a newly formed intelligence agency. Training has to be done in England -- they have an established intelligence (the best in the world), and it was part of an agreement as the U.S. came to England's aid at the beginning of the war. Before this, Wilson is happily dating a schoolmate, until a fateful night, while out at a Skull and Crossbones retreat, meets a sister of one of the brothers, Margaret Russell (Angelina Jolie). They have a brief but intense one night stand, which results in her pregnancy. Out of duty, he marries her, but it is a loveless marriage. For this reason Wilson accepts the offer to be in the intelligence, and he goes alone to England for training. There he meets his old professor, who in fact turned out to be a British agent. His advice to his former student -- not to trust anyone, that the entire intelligence business is a conviluted world of moles, double agents, and people who lust for power. Over the next twenty years, we witness Wilson's rise through the ranks. It is not clean nor simple, as Wilson learns exactly what it means to not trust. An affair with his German secretary in post war Berlin leads to him finding out she is a double agent; she is executed. A Russian seeking asylum is discovered to be not what he seems, though it took many years to discover this, and at the expense of the man whose identity he stole. His marriage is rocky at best, and his son turns his life into an exercise in seeking his father's approval. He even decides to join the CIA, much to Wilson's dismay. His son becomes involved with a woman in Africa; their relationship becomes a security threat as the photograph is deciphered, and based on that information, Wilson goes to an African city and finds the building and the room. To his shock, he finds a talisman that he had made his son years ago -- Wilson's hobby was making bottled ships. His son turned out to be the leak. Wilson's dealings with his Russian counterpart had favored Wilson up to this point, but he refuses to give in to leverage. He does appeal to his rival, as they both recognize the value of family, but the African woman is killed, on her way to marry Wilson's son. The movie ends with a reorganization of the CIA, a move to a more modern headquarters, and Wilson finally reading his father's suicide note, written forty years prior, and discovering that he had followed his father's path, mistakes and all.

This is heavy stuff. My synopsis still barely covers all the things going on in this film. There are lots of subcontexts - father/son relationships, the role of the men's club and how that networking and mentality developed into government organizations, the symbolism of shoes, and who is filling them, and not the least, the attitudes of WASPs in an evolving and changing world. Matt Damon is excellent in the lead role -- his face is a stone mask, a mystery to his family and the spy world who called him "Mother," for his care taking and lead role as head of Special Operations. Angelina Jolie is great as well, in a very understated role as his long suffering wife, living in fear of her husband. Alec Baldwin, Timothy Hutton, Joe Pesci, and the director Robert De Niro all make significant contributions. De Niro's direction is even handed and the pace steady, essential to such a complicated narrative. One of the best U.S. films of 2006, if not this decade. Remember Smiley's People and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy? Both were classics of the Cold War spy genre, if not the best, but The Good Shepherd beats them both, in narrative, execution, and having the vantage point of being a post Cold War work. A landmark film, and highly recommended!