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Showing posts with label Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Show all posts

Friday, July 15, 2011

Copa America 2011: Japan

Entry #5 of the Copa America 2011 Book & Film Festival.

Book: Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami



15 year old Kafka runs away from home and finds himself in a new town absorbing the treasures found in the Komura Memorial Library. Nakata can talk to cats and this ability makes him a great cat hunter and he manages to earn some money from these activities. The two have nothing in common but as in other Murakami novels such as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World & The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, two seemingly unrelated threads are destined to cross paths. As Kafka’s story starts to wind down, Nakata’s story picks up pace and progresses to a pivotal moment only to suddenly pause before the action switches over to Kafka’s tale, which starts building up pace again. This start-pause method continues until both stories’ path converge. In between the pages are many other sub-plots and fascinating elements of psychic driving, World War II lost soldiers, ghosts, time travel, dream navigation, undying love, graphic sex, incest, oedipal complex, prophecies, fish falling from the sky and characters such as Johnny Walker and Colonel Sanders. Near the end of the book, a scene right out of a horror movie makes an appearance when a slimy creature attempts to enter the human world. All the diverse elements are neatly put together in the overall framework of the story. A trademark of a good writer is the ability to spin fantastical tales in a smooth easy flowing manner. There is no doubt about Murakami’s talent as he is one of the best writers out there. However, there is no real need to infuse the book with all the minor sub-plots. If some of the elements were chopped out of the 615 pages, the book would not really lose anything. Editing is a useful necessity but it appears that famous authors are allowed a lot more leeway when it comes to getting their works edited. If the same freedom were allowed to filmmakers, then most films would easily be between 4-5 hours in length as directors would find every single shot perfect and something worthy of inclusion. Still, Kafka on the Shore is an engrossing read despite being jam packed with elements of sci-fi, sex, comedy, WWII, coming of age, romance, ghost & horror.

Film: Tokyo Sonata (2008, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)



Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s beautiful film depicts the breakdown of a family and eventual rebirth. Ryuhei (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his job and instead of telling his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi), continues to leave home everyday dressed for work while spending time on the streets or at a free soup kitchen. Megumi is slowly inching her way to independence but yearns for full freedom. Their elder son Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) is disenchanted with his life and believes his life would be better served by joining the American military. The youngest son Kenji (Kai Inowaki) also rebels against his parents by skipping school and using the money from his school fees to pay for secret piano lessons knowing full well that his father is against him learning music. Each character goes through a transformation after reaching a breaking point before awakening to a new dawn. Some of the family’s tender moments and even tensions share a bond with the cinema of Ozu. Overall, a quite sublime film.

Japan & Copa America

Japan first announced they were pulling of the Copa America in April citing the earthquake and tsunami as the reason. However, they changed their mind after a few weeks and decided to send a team to Argentina before officially pulling out again after a backlog of J-League fixtures would have hindered the Japanese national soccer team’s preparations. Japan’s absence at the Copa America has been a loss for sure because their national team showed plenty of technical promise at the 2010 Soccer World Cup. A redeeming aspect is that Japan have been invited to the next Copa America in four years time so that will provide another chance to monitor the progress of the Japanese team.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Japanese cinema spotlight

Overdue comments on a Japanese cinema spotlight that kicked off back in the summer and contained 9 features and one short:

The Only Son (1936, Yasujirô Ozu)
There was a Father (1942, Yasujirô Ozu)
Tales of Ugetsu (1953, Kenji Mizoguchi)
Bakumatsu Taiyoden (1957, Yuzo Kawashima)
Good Morning (1959, Yasujirô Ozu)
Tokyo Olympiad (1965, Kon Ichikawa)
Patriotism (1966, Yukio Mishima)
Samurai Rebellion (1967, Masaki Kobayashi)
Cure (1997, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Fish Story (2009, Yoshihiro Nakamura)

Ozu x 3: Emotions & Limited Communication

Ozu's The Only Son and There was a Father may be rooted in Japanese culture but the sentiments depicted in both films are equally Indian. Every Indian child learns very early on about Karma and the importance of doing one's work and not worrying about the end result. Such work often involves sacrifices but the sacrifices are meant to be minor bumps in the overall scheme. Sometimes the biggest challenge in performing the work is attempting to subdue one's emotional attachments. Both The Only Son and There was a Father show that the parent and son are trying their best to get through life by working diligently yet hiding their true feelings. It is clear in There was a Father that both the father and son want to live together in the same city but the father continues to bury his true emotions and asks his son to continue working hard. In The Only Son, it is the mother who breaks her back working in a factory so as to provide a better future for her son. The son then lives his life apart from the mother and does not even inform her of his marriage and child because he does not want his mother to feel her sacrifice was wasted. The son feels he did not achieve what his mother wanted him to so he feels better not to invite her to see him.

Parent-Children relationships should not be complicated but they become so over time. Job, work, careers muddle the waters but at the end of the day a simple honest conversations should clear any doubts. Yet, adults hold back honest communication with each other either because of fear or duty. If improper communication is not healthy, then no communication is worse. Good Morning takes a humorous approach to show that if children do not talk at all with their parents, then confusion and misunderstandings can lead to more damage. In the film, the two young boys go on a silent strike in order to protest their father's refusal to buy a tv. Yet, the silence amusingly unearths some insecurities in the neighbours, leading to awkward admissions and confessions.

A different kind of duty

Masaki Kobayashi's complex and powerful Samurai Rebellion carefully chooses its moments of wisdom, political games and sword fights. A samurai is told early on in the film to keep his emotions in check lest they get the better of him. He is reminded of the difficulty in getting along with his superiors and fellow vassals so if the samurai gets angry every time, then he won't last. That patience is especially required of a samurai in moments of peace when there is no enemy to fight. So a samurai is reduced to testing his sword on straw dummies. Slashing straw men is frustrating and humiliating but that is nothing compared to an arranged marriage proposal which tests the principles and honor of a samurai family, leading to the film's main conflict points.

A Serial infection

Multiple gruesome murders are committed in Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure but it is not a single killer that performs the acts. Instead, loved ones or people close to the victims do the killing. Yet, the killers are not aware of their crimes as they are remotely driven by an unknown man.

The topography of Cure feels like that of a serial killer investigation film cut from the same cloth of Memories of Murder (Joon-ho Bong) and Zodiac (David Fincher) yet Kurosawa's film immediately stands apart because of the hands off approach of the instigator who never really gets his own hands bloody. Yet, if one could open his brain, then one would see the images of blood that are being projected onto innocent would be killers. Also, the other interesting layer added to the film is the weakening health of the lead police officer's wife, resulting in the killer exploiting the officer's mental state. Reality is toyed with especially in a case when the killer never has to kill a victim himself.

A truly remarkably film which creates a dark unsettling atmosphere.

An event from a few hundred camera angles

It is remarkable to think that Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad was shot back in 1964, at a time when camera equipment was expensive. Yet, Kon Ichikawa had about 150 cameras at his disposal to record the historic Tokyo Olympics. But Kon Ichikawa does not make a conventional news footage documentary which shows all the winners of the main events. Instead, his almost three hour documentary is a work of art that displays the human element of the sporting event. We get to see both the triumphs and low points, winners and losers, and the camera lovingly holds onto certain poetic moments for a few extra minutes. The end result is mesmerizing and presents a radically different perspective of the Olympics.

The following words by George Plimpton perfectly describe the effect of the film:

I remember Ernest Hemingway telling me once that the unnoticed things in the hands of a good writer had an effect, and a powerful one, of making readers conscious of what they had been aware of only subconsciously. A parallel adage suggests that a great photographer can take a picture of a familiar street and tell you something about it you never knew before. After watching the 1964 Tokyo Olympiad, one can surely say that Ichikawa is of that tradition.

The Power of 5: a very fishy story

2012: A comet is on course to destroy earth. Who or what can save the world?

A Punk song, ofcourse!

Fish Story is a mind spinning tale about an unlikely superhero and an even more unlikely heroic song with the following lyrics:

The story of my solitude
If my solitude were a fish
It’d be so enormous, so militant
A whale would get out of there
.....
The story of my failure
If my failure were a fish
It’d be so tragically comic I’d have no place in the sea to be
Don’t you know you’re a liar! Don’t you know you’re a deceiver!
Music stacked up like wooden blocks Is the champion of justice!
If my justice really were a fish It’d be so greedy and arrogant


The film jumps across three decades with the only connecting element being the punk song. But thankfully by the end of an entertaining film, all the elements come together.

and the others...

Kenji Mizoguchi's haunting Ugetsu is a tale of how two men's selfish journey brings suffering to both men & their families. When the two men finally wake up from their self imposed trance, they find their life in ruins. Phillip Lapote's essay unravels the film's beauty:

One might say that Mizoguchi’s detached, accepting eye also resembles that of a ghost, looking down on mortal confusions, ambitions, vanities, and regrets. While all appearances are transitory and unstable in his world, there is also a powerfully anchoring stillness at its core, a spiritual strength no less than a virtuoso artistic focus. The periodic chants of the monks, the droning and the bells, the Buddhist sutras on Genjuro’s back, the landscapes surrounding human need, allude to this unchanging reality side by side with, or underneath, the restlessly mutable. Rooted in historical particulars, Ugetsu is a timeless masterpiece.

Yukio Mishima's Patriotism (Yûkoku, 1966) shockingly foreshadows the author's own suicide in 1970. Tony Rayns Criterion essay is essential reading about the film.

I was quite excited to see Bakumatsu Taiyoden, a title helmed by a director I had never heard. However, the discovery turned out to be anticlimatic as my DVD had no English subtitles thereby forcing me to follow the Japanese film without any assistance. All I could enjoy were some moments of humor injected in a samurai tale but the visual language was not enough to make a worthy impression.