I watched a couple of movies:
äżșăŻćŸ
ăŁăŠăă (or âI Am Waitingâ in English - couldnât throw an apostrophe in there to at least try to match the register huh?)
This is an early Nikkatsu noir I watched on the Criterion Channel. Itâs pretty good!
I donât get the impression itâs especially notable in any one particular way, but I found it very solid. The theme of getting kind of stuck waiting in an older siblingâs shadow even when it turns out they havenât gone anywhere resonated pretty well with me, and itâs got fun character actors like you would want in a noir, like the drunk doctor is very good, and I particularly liked this guy (the actorâs name is æłąć€éæČ I think, but he doesnât appear to be famous) as a guy who acts tough with a gun but never manages to use it:
The main actor is strangely baby-faced for the boxer role (I think he was a famous singer before the movie), but sells the charm pretty well, and the central romance is fine.
The subtitles were baked in and I tried not to look at them, to some success. I remember it feeling sort of like reading along with a dictionary - I would frequently hear something I didnât understand and glance downward at the English. Which I guess is okay?
ä»æăæ°Žăźćșăă (or âDark Waterâ in English)
I was a little reticent to watch this one so soon after I watched the Ring movies, as itâs along similar lines, by the same director (äžç°ç§ć€«) as Ring 1&2 based on a story by the same author. But I do like those movies, so hey.
And yeah! Itâs very similar to Ring, in a good way! Both movies are full of quiet slows shots of just like - interesting architecture and lived-in feeling environments that I love. And a movie can really go a long way just selling you on the place and atmosphere. Like, the apartment building central to the movie and its kind of crummy staff, or the kindergarten, or the publishing company used in one scene, all feel very memorable to me.
The star, é»æšçł, I think does a great job as a very stressed single mother (and the child actress is good too), and itâs one where I strongly wished for things to work out for the characters. And having moved to a new apartment recently, the anxiety around wondering if that small blemish will go away on its own or if itâs going to turn out to be a serious problem is plenty real.
I think the only things taking it down a notch compared to Ring are just that the ghost involved isnât aesthetically as interesting to me (VHS tapes are cooler than water to me, apparently). And thereâs some things in the climax that unfortunately come across as corny (thereâs a bad 2000âs CGI moment that defused a lot of tension for me suddenly, for one).
The first scene is very dialogue heavy and implies a lot of backstory, so I ended up rewinding and watching it a total of 4 times - twice without subtitles, once with the English subtitles turned on, then finally again without. I had been able to understand very vaguely what was being said, but I didnât get fully that it was about discussing a potential custody fight with divorce lawyers until the runthrough with subtitles.
After that I did pretty good without subtitles though!