Recently watched J-flicks:
K20: LEGEND OF THE MASK (2008)
ZORRO meets V FOR VENDETTA in an alternate (and still feudal) Japan. Matsu Takako (who happens to be my fave J-actress!!!) is Takeshi Kaneshiro's love interest, and anyone who's seen Nakamura Toru in NEMURERU MORI can bet their bottom dollar what sort of role he plays here. :rolleyes: I think I bought the DVD not just for the Takeshi Factor but also because Matsu and Nakamura Toro had worked with Kimura before, haha. (When worlds collide... *ka-boom!*) The CGI effects and set pieces are pretty impressive, but... story-wise, the film feels a bit... derivative, like I'd seen bits and pieces from countless other movies of the same masked-vigilante genre. Nothing special, in other words. And there are too many quick-fix plot developments that would have made more narrative sense in an animated film. Still, Takeshi is Takeshi, and Takeshi is looooove. :love_eyes:
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DEPARTURES (2008)
I watched this because A., I was curious what kind of movie trounced Israel's Waltz with Bashir, touted as the front runner in the 2009 Oscars' Foreign Film category, and B., it's.... from Japan, hihihi... (and so perhaps I thought I could play Six Degrees of Separation between the main cast and... Kimura, ehehe). :ashamed: DEPARTURES is such a quiet little film--no dramatic fireworks here, no earth-shattering social issues to grapple with--but that's precisely what I love about it. There's a certain stillness in the dialogue and in how the shots are framed, that finds its own strange symmetry in the quietude (and quietus) of the bodies that the protagonist, Daigo (Motoki Masahiro) prepares for funeral rites. The grief of the bereaved that Daigo witnesses in his course of work is genuine, and the loss of a loved one so acute, but the treatment is never overly sentimental, nor is it in any way irreverent or unsympathetic. On the contrary, the writing has great compassion for the characters and what they go through, and yet Death is neither glorified nor downplayed--it is simply seen for what it is: a passage, a crossing, just another part of the journey we all must take. But there's humor and irony and unexpected warmth that help the story toe the fine line between the funny and the funereal, and the characters--Daigo, who goes through his own personal rebirth, his wife, his boss, his female co-worker, even the minor characters like the old lady who owns the bathhouse--stay with you long after the movie ends.
You realize that this film is more of a celebration of Life amid the inescapable reality of Death--whatever your views on the Afterlife may be. Also, the hauntingly beautiful score by Joe Hisaishi (SPIRITED AWAY!!!!!!) is reason enough to watch this film, and the cello solos in particular strike a chord in the viewer's heart that is as potent and deep-rooted as love and grief themselves. :applaud:
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BUSHI NO ICHIBUN (2006)
<SPOILERS JUST AROUND THE BEND!!! *toot! toot!*>
Oh, all right, whatever, so maybe not ALL samurai life is about killing people, lol. :rolleyes: Fine, I get that now, that this film is supposed to depict the mundaneness of their everyday existence. But I dunno... the plot still seemed a little too thin for me, and the rising action was just too... slow... Was that what those samurai did all day, taste-test their liege lord's meals? How boooring! :drooling: No wonder they'd slit their bellies, just to spice things up, lol. Bad joke. Sorry. :nyah: I just wish the movie had shown more of that daily reality, just to prove that their everyday struggles could still be pretty interesting--with or without the bloodshed. And the film sure could have benefited from a little more complexity. That's why I felt the story had such a narrow, tunnel-vision focus on Kimura and the Wifey's domestic ordeal, that watching the movie left me strangely underwhelmed and even somewhat dissatisfied. :grumble: The editing was also too... static for my taste. Maybe the story and overall treatment would have been more appropriate for a stage play. BUSHI NO ICHIBUN may have been adapted from a book, but with a story so sparse, the source material may well have been a frikkin' HAIKU, hyukhyukhyuk. :dielaughing:
And so I give you:
Love & Honor: The Haiku
Don't eat the shellfish!
Too late, samurai's gone blind!
How will he live now?
Be brave, samurai!
Neurotoxins ate your brain,
But your wife loves you!
She'll do anything,
Even if it all leads to...
Betrayal and lies!
Will their love survive?
Oh no, samurai found out!
Wifey is banished!
Samurai's training!
To defend Wifey's honor!
Can a blind guy win?
Oh yes! He defeats
That Dirty Old Samurai!
And takes Wifey back!
Now they are happy!
He can eat nice food again.
(But no more shellfish!)
THE END.
:lol:
Kimura was really good here, though--one of his best performances that I've seen. :bow: You could really feel the rankling despondency and the bitterness over his impotence, and the grief over his own wife's betrayal--all festering inside of him, like a wound that wouldn't heal. I think my favorite scene was when he refused to tell his old kendo sensei why he was so hell-bent on training for revenge, because he still loved his wife and couldn't bear to cause her more dishonor. :pout: Throughout the film, his sightless eyes were pools of emotion I could just drown in, and I looooved all those close-ups of his face, despite the stubble and the bloodshot eyes and the disheveled topknot. (Oh, yuck, that hideous topknot! What were those samurai dudes thinkin'??? :bleh: Bald-patedness does NOT become Kimura! Give him back his hair, I don't care if it's fried and orange and weird!!!) I was also extremely relieved that he and the Wifey reunite in the end (thereby proving that "Love is blind," literally! :mwahaha:) and here I was thinking, oh crap, it ain't gonna end well, Kimura's gonna get himself killed by the Dirty Old Samurai's treachery and then the Wifey's gonna commit jigai using a bamboo peg beside her husband's broken, lifeless body..... But I guess not => Happy ending, yay! :yippee:
Maybe I'm still not a sophisticated enough viewer (and jidaegeki connoisseur) to appreciate the deglamorized, quieter side of the warrior class in feudal Japan. Maybe I'll always be THAT kind of viewer, the one that pops a chanbara movie into their DVD player and beats their chest, bellowing, "I want my savagery and gore! I want my katana blades gleaming crimson with blood! I want my epic duels to the death! I want my spewed guts and decapitated corpses littering the wayside! For love, for daimyo, for courage, for honor!" :metaldevil: Hahaha. If I had wanted to see a bunch of samurai sitting around all day and talking about the weather or how many kokus of rice they were getting this year, I would have watched a frikkin' History Channel documentary instead, durrr. :usuck:
(Off-topic: That being said, I've gotten started on the CHUUSHINGURA 1/47 tanpatsu, which thankfully sees more swordfight action than BUSHI NO ICHIBUN. Here Kimura is an Angry Young Samurai (with his kick-a$$ kendo swordplay! pretty nifty moves--for a TV production!), which sounds a helluva lot more interesting than Angry Blind Samurai Who Sits on His Porch All-Day Listening to the Crickets, lol. Kimura is younger and cuter in CHUUSHINGURA 1/47 (although his skin here is atrooooocioussss!!!!!), but I still can't get past that shaved scalp! :argh:)
K20: LEGEND OF THE MASK (2008)
ZORRO meets V FOR VENDETTA in an alternate (and still feudal) Japan. Matsu Takako (who happens to be my fave J-actress!!!) is Takeshi Kaneshiro's love interest, and anyone who's seen Nakamura Toru in NEMURERU MORI can bet their bottom dollar what sort of role he plays here. :rolleyes: I think I bought the DVD not just for the Takeshi Factor but also because Matsu and Nakamura Toro had worked with Kimura before, haha. (When worlds collide... *ka-boom!*) The CGI effects and set pieces are pretty impressive, but... story-wise, the film feels a bit... derivative, like I'd seen bits and pieces from countless other movies of the same masked-vigilante genre. Nothing special, in other words. And there are too many quick-fix plot developments that would have made more narrative sense in an animated film. Still, Takeshi is Takeshi, and Takeshi is looooove. :love_eyes:
*************************
DEPARTURES (2008)
I watched this because A., I was curious what kind of movie trounced Israel's Waltz with Bashir, touted as the front runner in the 2009 Oscars' Foreign Film category, and B., it's.... from Japan, hihihi... (and so perhaps I thought I could play Six Degrees of Separation between the main cast and... Kimura, ehehe). :ashamed: DEPARTURES is such a quiet little film--no dramatic fireworks here, no earth-shattering social issues to grapple with--but that's precisely what I love about it. There's a certain stillness in the dialogue and in how the shots are framed, that finds its own strange symmetry in the quietude (and quietus) of the bodies that the protagonist, Daigo (Motoki Masahiro) prepares for funeral rites. The grief of the bereaved that Daigo witnesses in his course of work is genuine, and the loss of a loved one so acute, but the treatment is never overly sentimental, nor is it in any way irreverent or unsympathetic. On the contrary, the writing has great compassion for the characters and what they go through, and yet Death is neither glorified nor downplayed--it is simply seen for what it is: a passage, a crossing, just another part of the journey we all must take. But there's humor and irony and unexpected warmth that help the story toe the fine line between the funny and the funereal, and the characters--Daigo, who goes through his own personal rebirth, his wife, his boss, his female co-worker, even the minor characters like the old lady who owns the bathhouse--stay with you long after the movie ends.
You realize that this film is more of a celebration of Life amid the inescapable reality of Death--whatever your views on the Afterlife may be. Also, the hauntingly beautiful score by Joe Hisaishi (SPIRITED AWAY!!!!!!) is reason enough to watch this film, and the cello solos in particular strike a chord in the viewer's heart that is as potent and deep-rooted as love and grief themselves. :applaud:
*************************
BUSHI NO ICHIBUN (2006)
<SPOILERS JUST AROUND THE BEND!!! *toot! toot!*>
Spoiler — click to reveal
Hmmm... Well... <how do I say this?> I think I came into this movie expecting two hours of swordplay and bloodshed and spewed guts and decapitated corpses littering the wayside. :beaten: What I didn't expect was a domestic drama with just 9 minutes of kendo training and one short duel near the end. :cursing: I told my best friend (who'd also seen BUSHI NO ICHIBUN) about it and she was like, "Oh don't be silly, that's exactly what Yoji Yamada is known for in Japan, his movies don't glamorize the samurai, he shows them as real, ordinary folk." :beatyou:Oh, all right, whatever, so maybe not ALL samurai life is about killing people, lol. :rolleyes: Fine, I get that now, that this film is supposed to depict the mundaneness of their everyday existence. But I dunno... the plot still seemed a little too thin for me, and the rising action was just too... slow... Was that what those samurai did all day, taste-test their liege lord's meals? How boooring! :drooling: No wonder they'd slit their bellies, just to spice things up, lol. Bad joke. Sorry. :nyah: I just wish the movie had shown more of that daily reality, just to prove that their everyday struggles could still be pretty interesting--with or without the bloodshed. And the film sure could have benefited from a little more complexity. That's why I felt the story had such a narrow, tunnel-vision focus on Kimura and the Wifey's domestic ordeal, that watching the movie left me strangely underwhelmed and even somewhat dissatisfied. :grumble: The editing was also too... static for my taste. Maybe the story and overall treatment would have been more appropriate for a stage play. BUSHI NO ICHIBUN may have been adapted from a book, but with a story so sparse, the source material may well have been a frikkin' HAIKU, hyukhyukhyuk. :dielaughing:
And so I give you:
Love & Honor: The Haiku
Don't eat the shellfish!
Too late, samurai's gone blind!
How will he live now?
Be brave, samurai!
Neurotoxins ate your brain,
But your wife loves you!
She'll do anything,
Even if it all leads to...
Betrayal and lies!
Will their love survive?
Oh no, samurai found out!
Wifey is banished!
Samurai's training!
To defend Wifey's honor!
Can a blind guy win?
Oh yes! He defeats
That Dirty Old Samurai!
And takes Wifey back!
Now they are happy!
He can eat nice food again.
(But no more shellfish!)
THE END.
:lol:
Kimura was really good here, though--one of his best performances that I've seen. :bow: You could really feel the rankling despondency and the bitterness over his impotence, and the grief over his own wife's betrayal--all festering inside of him, like a wound that wouldn't heal. I think my favorite scene was when he refused to tell his old kendo sensei why he was so hell-bent on training for revenge, because he still loved his wife and couldn't bear to cause her more dishonor. :pout: Throughout the film, his sightless eyes were pools of emotion I could just drown in, and I looooved all those close-ups of his face, despite the stubble and the bloodshot eyes and the disheveled topknot. (Oh, yuck, that hideous topknot! What were those samurai dudes thinkin'??? :bleh: Bald-patedness does NOT become Kimura! Give him back his hair, I don't care if it's fried and orange and weird!!!) I was also extremely relieved that he and the Wifey reunite in the end (thereby proving that "Love is blind," literally! :mwahaha:) and here I was thinking, oh crap, it ain't gonna end well, Kimura's gonna get himself killed by the Dirty Old Samurai's treachery and then the Wifey's gonna commit jigai using a bamboo peg beside her husband's broken, lifeless body..... But I guess not => Happy ending, yay! :yippee:
Maybe I'm still not a sophisticated enough viewer (and jidaegeki connoisseur) to appreciate the deglamorized, quieter side of the warrior class in feudal Japan. Maybe I'll always be THAT kind of viewer, the one that pops a chanbara movie into their DVD player and beats their chest, bellowing, "I want my savagery and gore! I want my katana blades gleaming crimson with blood! I want my epic duels to the death! I want my spewed guts and decapitated corpses littering the wayside! For love, for daimyo, for courage, for honor!" :metaldevil: Hahaha. If I had wanted to see a bunch of samurai sitting around all day and talking about the weather or how many kokus of rice they were getting this year, I would have watched a frikkin' History Channel documentary instead, durrr. :usuck:
(Off-topic: That being said, I've gotten started on the CHUUSHINGURA 1/47 tanpatsu, which thankfully sees more swordfight action than BUSHI NO ICHIBUN. Here Kimura is an Angry Young Samurai (with his kick-a$$ kendo swordplay! pretty nifty moves--for a TV production!), which sounds a helluva lot more interesting than Angry Blind Samurai Who Sits on His Porch All-Day Listening to the Crickets, lol. Kimura is younger and cuter in CHUUSHINGURA 1/47 (although his skin here is atrooooocioussss!!!!!), but I still can't get past that shaved scalp! :argh:)