Japanese Movies/Discussion/Recommendations

just watched Kankuro Kudo's (Kisarazu Cat's Eye, IWGP, Tiger & Dragon) Midnight Pilgrims: Yaji and Kita....this movie was absolutely crazy.

It's Alice in Wonderland mets Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas in the Edo Period......straight acid for the brain. Weird but funny at times.

Udon....allegedly the new "Tampopo"

http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/007216.html

Tu_triky wrote:Udon....allegedly the new "Tampopo"

http://www.twitchfilm.net/archives/007216.html

Why remake a classic? :shakehead:

bmwracer wrote:
Why remake a classic? :shakehead:

it's not a remake per se...but it's today's analogue i guess.

Kurosawa's `Seven Samurai' restoration worthy of an epic


By Louis R. Carlozo
Tribune staff reporter


Take one frame of film.

Now, consider this: A second of film contains 24 frames. A minute, 1,440. And an epic film that lasts 3 hours, 27 minutes? That's close to 300,000 frames.

Now you have an idea of the frame-by-frame cleanup job tackled by Lee Kline and his crew as they spent a year restoring Akira Kurosawa's 1954 masterpiece "Seven Samurai" (Criterion, $49.95).

"It had already been released once in the Criterion Collection, so it had to be done better and with a look to what the newer technologies could do to make it look more pristine," says Kline, the DVD project's technical director. "We have whole new technologies at our hands that we didn't have 10 years ago; we can deal with scratches better, flicker, debris -- anything that's there, we can try to take a stab at it."

The epic, which concerns a band of ragtag samurai hired by 16th Century villagers to protect them from invading bandits, has influenced a host of modern directors, from George Lucas to Sam Peckinpah. With that status, you might think the movie to be something of a crown jewel in the vaults of Toho Co., the Tokyo-based studio that controls it.

Yet the original negative of "Seven Samurai" is gone. No one knows when it vanished, and to hear Kline tell it, the reasons why it did aren't clear.

"This is often the case, especially with films with Japan, because things are destroyed or lost in fires," he says. "With `Seven Samurai,' no one seems to know or no one seems to want to tell us."

Deprived of the original negative, Kline worked from a duplicate made from a master positive of the film. It took five weeks just to correct the flicker and stabilize it; restoration also involved scrutinizing and tweaking shades of black and white so that they more closely resembled what Kurosawa intended.

"We did the best that we could, and it's not cheap," says Kline, who has helmed similar efforts for DVD transfers of "Gimme Shelter," "8 1/2" and "Slacker." "A negative of this length of film is $30,000. But I'd like to consider it as a preservation effort. We have it, and it's going to sit in the Museum of Modern Art's vaults for a long, long, long time."

This for Kline brings up the larger of issue of film preservation -- which the best DVD projects promote, but often at the cost of overlooking unsung works.

"Studios are really busy archiving their films because they open their film cans and see dust," he notes. "That's scary. Movies like `The Wizard of Oz' and `Casablanca' are going to get saved because they've always made big money. But there are little gems sitting in vaults that are literally falling apart."

Because "Seven Samurai's" is a subtitled Japanese film from the 1950s, it's still unknown to a large number of Americans. But like Shakespeare's plays or The Beatles' music, it has the powerful ability to connect with audiences of all types. Action film buffs love "Samurai" for the intense battle scenes, while the intellectual current is enough to satisfy the egghead viewers.

"It's a super-fun film, but so much more than that, too," says Kim Hendrickson, producer of the DVD project. "[Kurosawa] wanted to make a popular entertainment but was a very astute historian, too. And he [sneaked] in this commentary about this new democracy that was emerging. To do all of that in your first samurai film is amazing."

What's more, "Samurai" paved the way for westerns such as "The Magnificent Seven" (loosely based on the film) and Peckinpah's works. "It's the way violence is presented on film; you can't think of `The Wild Bunch' without thinking of `Seven Samurai,'" Hendrickson says. "Kurosawa refined the presentation of action with wide-angle lenses down in the midst of things, and slow-motion interspersed with regular-speed action. That almost became a given in the movies of Peckinpah."

And if you want to hear more discussion about the film, there's a lot of material contained in this three-DVD set devoted to it. Two audio commentaries accompany the movie (one by a team of five film scholars, including Joan Mellen and Donald Richie; the other by Japanese film expert Michael Jeck). A third disc offers a two-hour interview with Kurosawa from 1993, produced by the Directors Guild of Japan.

As for what will happen to the film in another 10 years, those involved with the project are betting that restoration techniques will leap another notch, and that a high-definition release will be in order. "`Seven Samurai' will be in a different format," Hendrickson says. "But there won't be any other story that needs to be told. Anyone who has had anything to say about Kurosawa that's of substance is here."


http://metromix.chicagotribune.com/movies/mmx-0609050172sep05,0,7774251.story?coll=mmx-movies_heds

bmwracer wrote:Why remake a classic? :shakehead:

they do it all the time anyways, see?

Original:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077681/
Remake:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454841/

why?

because people are scared of change.. they want something familiar... the entertainment industry included.

krim wrote:why?

because people are scared of change.. they want something familiar... the entertainment industry included.

why? change is good. change works. (oh sorry, it's GREED, not change...)

^
lol

i only have change in my pockets. :puppydog: :beaten:



below is a nice review of the original Gojira.. which i'll have in a day or two. :victory:

GODZILLA
(a.k.a. GOJIRA, 1954)
To the average audience in America, the original Godzilla is a cheesy man-in-a-suit monster smashing cardboard buildings and stomping matchbox-size cars?something so bad that America's atrocious 1998 CGI version is actually perceived as an improvement. Science fiction fans may be a bit kinder in their assessment, acknowledging that the first Godzilla film is much better than the sequels that followed, but even they tend to rank the Japanese giant well below his American counterparts. In Japan, however, Godzilla's 1954 debut is considered to be a classic on par with KING KONG (1933). Now, thanks to Rialto Pictures, which released GODZILLA in selected theatres across the U.S. 2004 (the film's 50th anniversary), American audiences can finally take a look at the uncut and undubbed Japanese original. Those expecting a campy kiddy film will be surprised to see a slow and somber mini-masterpiece, a black-and-white nightmare about the threat of nuclear annihilation -- in short, a classic example of popular entertainment working as a serious metaphor.



GODZILLA (which was released stateside in a heavily Americanized version as GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS in 1956) dramatizes nuclear horror unlike any other film of its period, because the fantasy element is clearly standing in for a reality too horrible to contemplate directly. In a cinematic world filled with denial regarding the lethal use of nuclear weapons, Godzilla stands as reminder not only of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also of the unfortunate fishing boat, The Lucky Dragon, which was irradiated by nuclear fallout from the U.S. test of an H-Bomb in 1954. This incident, which resulted in the subsequent death of a crew member from Leukemia, was as much an inspiration for the making of GODZILLA as were the obvious American antecedents, KING KONG and THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953).

Like many classic monster movies, GODZILLA gradually builds to the revelation of its title character, then keeps it mostly off-screen. Instead, the focus is on the human characters, who wrestle with the impact that Godzilla?s destruction has on their lives (something to which the film's post-war Japanese audience could easily relate). The story even presents a genuine moral dilemma: should Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Harrata) use his Oxygen Destroyer to defeat Godzilla and, in the process, possibly reveal to the world a weapon even more devastating than the thing it's meant to defeat? Or should he keep his weapon a secret? The question (at least in the original Japanese version) isn't really whether the device will fall into the wrong hands; Serizawa has learned the painful lesson of Robert Oppenheimer: once the device is in any hands, its creator can no longer control it, and its use is almost inevitable.

The subtitled prints distributed by Rialto Pictures present the 1954 GODZILLA as it was released in Japan (where it was known as GOJIRA, a combination of the English word "gorilla" and the Japanese word for whale, "kurji"). There are substantial differences between this and the dubbed American version, GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. The subtitle "KING OF THE MONSTERS" was not the only addition; there were also new scenes with Raymond Burr playing American reporter Steve Martin (yes, his use of the name predates the famous comedian by decades). This footage provided an audience identification figure who could narrate events, bridge continuity gaps caused by the re-editing, and explain what was going on (despite the dubbing of the lead characters, much of the supporting cast's Japanese dialogue remained intact, while Burr's footage was filmed and intercut to look as if his character were standing on the sidelines, having the conversations translated to him). To be fair, the American version was not a complete bastardization but a reasonable attempt to present a new and unfamiliar piece of filmmaking to an audience that needed some kind of bridge to cross the cultural gap. In at least one small way, the U.S. version improves on the multi-character scenario of the original: by using Burr's reporter as a central viewpoint, the plot threads are tied up and presented much more clearly to the audience.

In every other way, however, the Japanese version is superior. With an opening scene that consciously recalls the fate of the unfortunate Lucky Dragon (a fishing boat is incinerated by a blinding nuclear flash from beneath the sea), the film intends to convey a shocking sense of the consequences of atomic weapons. Unlike the reassuring tone of American films of the period, which suggested that any nuclear aberrations could be dispatched by the same science that created them, GOJIRA offers no such consolation. Director and co-writer Ishiro Honda (himself a war veteran) tried to capture a realistic sense of war-like devastation, a warning of what was bound to happen since the nuclear genie had been unleashed from the bottle. Aided by Eija Tsuburayas special effects and Akira Ifukube?s dramatic music, Honda went a long way toward achieving his goal, but much of the impact was mitigated in the American release, which not only added Burr?s scenes but also deleted several sequences (U.S. prints ran less than 80 minutes, approximately twenty minutes short of the original).

The restored footage helps fill out the characterization and ground the story in a convincing sense of reality. Several previously unseen moments stand out: the clarification that the film?s morally conflicted Dr. Serizawa lost his eye in WWII, meaning he's a war hero; Serizawa's overheated insistence that he "has no German friends" (he doth protest too much, making one wonder whether in fact he is not in touch with ex-Nazi scientists he might have met during the war); the insistence by paleontologist Dr. Yamane's (SEVEN SAMURAI's Takashi Shimura) that Godzilla is worth studying because he is capable of surviving an H-bomb (something that should be of interest to the only country ever to suffer a nuclear attack). Most memorable is a brief dialogue aboard a train: when a male passenger jokes that his girlfriend will be the first victim should Godzilla appear in Tokyo, she responds, "Not me. Not after I survived the bomb at Nagasaki." One shouldn't overemphasize the impact of this scene (as filmed, it's almost a throwaway) but the fact that it was deleted from American prints for decades lends its reappearance here the uncomfortable cutting edge, reminding viewers that Godzilla exists because of America's nuclear attacks on civilian populations.

In other cases, subtitles enhance scenes that were visible but not translated in the U.S. version. In one scene, a mother hopelessly huddles with her two children on the sidewalk; with nowhere left to run from Godzilla's rampage, the only comfort she can offer to her offspring is, "We'll be with your father soon. We'll see him in heaven." In the second, as a crowd of evacuees stands near the shore, one orphaned character repeats, "Damn it!" while helplessly watching Godzilla overturn a bridge on its way back to the ocean. Unlike later Godzilla sequels, which filmed endless monster battles as if they were a wrestling matches staged atop a toy train set, moments like these keep the camera at eye level with the human characters, so that the special effects never become mere fun-filled spectacle. This is a film that makes you want to cringe at the destruction on screen, not applaud the ingenuity of the technicians.

This approach helps overcome the flaws in the special effects. The film's "suit-mation" technology has always been derided by American purists, who preferred the stop-motion techniques used by Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen (in which puppets with metal armatures are filmed one frame at a time). But the use of a man-in-a-suit, stomping around a detailed miniature cityscape, allowed for scenes of destruction that would have been impossible to achieve with the painstakingly slow stop-motion process. Filmed with low-key lighting to suggest the nighttime attacks, Gojira's raids on Tokyo achieve a wonderfully moody atmosphere that doesn't quite blind the eye to the occasionally visible wires, but does incline one to forgive the mistakes in favor of appreciating the overall tone.

That's because these sequences have a cumulative effect that is more impressive than anything scene in the 1998 American blockbuster. Edited together with shots that are always dramatic (even when not convincing), the imperfections fly by almost too fast to register. Thanks to fast-paced editing and stark photography, Godzilla's rampage conveys a sense of approaching, inevitable doom as no other special effects sequence ever has. With numerous composite shots to put Godzilla in the frame with his human victims, the sense of danger is conveyed unlike anything in any subsequent sequels. The achievement is best illustrated, perhaps, by the brief moment when television cameras atop a tower broadcast long shots of the Tokyo skyline engulfed in a sea of flames. The reporter on the scene insists to his viewers (and by extension to the film's actual audience) that this "is not a play or a motion picture!" Of course, we know it really is a movie, but we get the message: the film is telling us to take what we're seeing seriously, and for perhaps for the one and only time in a Godzilla film, we do.

--Steve Biodrowski
link

krim wrote:^
lol

i only have change in my pockets. :puppydog: :beaten:

below is a nice review of the original Gojira.. which i'll have in a day or two. :victory:

someone gave birth to gojira in the toilet over

that was me on sunday. :beaten:

krim wrote:that was me on sunday. :beaten:

mecha gojira then.....

that would've been way painful. :shakehead:

krim wrote:that would've been way painful. :shakehead:

:shamefulcry:

Tu_triky wrote:Kurosawa's `Seven Samurai' restoration worthy of an epic

My copy is on the way. :woot:

Judging from what I've read on this DVD, it's probably the best DVD released in 2006. :D

bmwracer wrote:
My copy is on the way. :woot:

Judging from what I've read on this DVD, it's probably the best DVD released in 2006. :D

sounds like they've done quite a bit of restorative work....should be interesting to watch :mrgreen:

Tu_triky wrote:sounds like they've done quite a bit of restorative work....should be interesting to watch :mrgreen:

Criterion is the gold standard for film-to-DVD restoration releases... The best. :thumbsup:

Here's a review of the DVD release from a friend at DVD Verdict: http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/sevensamuraise.php

bmwracer wrote:
Criterion is the gold standard for film-to-DVD restoration releases... The best. :thumbsup:

yeah i'm familiar with their superlative reputation....seems like they've outdone themselves here. *_*

Iv3_imt wrote:i recommend 'Touch' which is based on manga
It has good storyline
I like this kind of storyline

aside that, the acting of young actresses/actors are good as well
im talking bout the twin (i dunno their names) and Masami Nagasawa

Second movie i recommend is yamapi's old movie called Shonen wa Tori ni Natta
Chibi yamapi did a great job i believe
it is so touching

Has anyone watched Death Note? How is it?
What do others think bout Taiyou no Uta, kagen no tsuki and Rough?
These are some movies i wanna watch

Well I can give u my views on taiyou No Uta nad Kagen No Tsuki. Taiyou No uta is good but not that great because the story is not that touching but the plus side of this show would be the songs cause they are beautifully written. As for kagen no tsuki, I would recommend it because its quite a sad love story and the pace of the movie is not that slow.

ah! Someone mentioned the Death Note movie. I couldn't find a thread for it anywhere on this site.

Anyways, who here has watched Death Note yet?

I really, really want to watch it >< I wonder where I can find it. I've watched the trailers on YouTube pretty much til my eyeballs fell out. xD