I watched a couple more movies:
壁あつき部屋 (The Thick-Walled room)
I watched this one because I love Kwaidan, and loved Black River when I watched it last year, and so the director, Masaki Kobayashi, is batting 100 so far for me! So in my backlog system I put a queue together of some of his movies on the Criterion Channel (with The Human Condition notably left out since I think I might try pairing it with the book down the line out of curiosity).
And I’d say the streak is holding so far, since I think this is a really interesting movie! I can definitely see elements of both Black River and Kwaidan in it, with the latter coming in the form of this one delirium sequence:
… And the former showing in a strong emphasis on portraying the social elements of the subject. The movie is about B and C class war criminals - which I take to mean from the movie, rank and file soldiers who commited war crimes, rather than architects and orchestrators who planned or profited off of them. It’s obviously a really fraught and complciated subject! Especially, surely, in the 50s in the movie was made. And while I don’t really think it like, interrogates the full scope of Japanese war crimes at all (the credits say it’s based on diaries of B and C class war criminals, and the characters it portrays are individuals who definitely did bad things and killed innocents in the war no question - but also under circumstances like being ordered to do it, or being framed for further crimes by unsympathetic tribunals. It doesn’t touch at all on more systemic massacres or oppression or sexual assault or anything involving Japan’s occupation of Korea, etc.), I think it conveys a righteous socialist anger towards the “A” class war criminals and profiteers, with the focused-on characters largely being forgotten manual laborers and minorities put in horrific circumstances by the engine of war and then left to rot with their own guilt as the machine trundles away without them.
The ending arc for the closest thing to a protagonist
is when he gets parole and goes to the house of the (repugnant, kitten-kicking) commander who ordered him to kill an innocent and then let him take all the blame, and ultimately decides not to kill him and returns to prison in a triumphant end. It would be an interesting one to write an essay about on exactly what I think it’s saying and how, but I’m gonna try to avoid doing that since it’s really late.
And all of that is amid a setting teeming with interesting (now) historic detail, like the communist brother visiting one of the inmates, or the news from Korea being a continuing major topic, or the independence-seeking guerillas in scenes set in (I think, I could 100% be wrong) the Philippines.
Even if the subject matter is uncomfortable, and it could never be and isn’t a be-all end-all take on the subject, I think it’s a very interesting and considered slice of a turbulent part of history.
It’s got some 50s movie clunkiness to it though. There’s a lot of western MPs and tribunal staff etc. who almost invariably all have very weird and hard to place accents (to my ears at least), in that ineffable “this is ultimately meant to be English-sounding background noise for Japanese subtitles” way. And one part I didn’t like at all is a female side character is very bluntly portrayed as having been quote “colonized” since the war ended, going from one exaggerated feminine stereotype to another, for the sake of showing the irony of an imprisoned war criminal pining for her.
Anyway, because of the complexity of the subject matter, I just let myself read the subtitles. But I’d at least like to think plenty of language got through anyway!
瞳の中の訪問者
A while back I was reading Nobuhiko Obayashi’s wikipedia page and saw that he directed a movie where Joe Shishido plays Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack???
That’s such a bizarre combination of things that I new I had to see it soon, and sadly I don’t think it’s in print in any form, so I just watched a version someone put on youtube without any subtitles. Language-wise, I think I did ok! It’s not the most complicated of stories (and I think maybe I’ve read the original in English).
Like Obayashi’s adaptation of The Drifting Classroom, this is an adaptation of a manga with a really distinctive style, where Obayashi’s own really distinctive style 100% takes over it.
I think a lot of what makes Tezuka’s work so good is that he can do anything - silly and endearing, gritty and tense, completely absurd and fully grounded, all sharing the same page and somehow equally effective. I get the impression from this on the other hand, Obayashi is gonna do Obayashi stuff (garish experimental visuals, simple melodrama, showing young women undressing maybe a disconcerting amount), and he’s gonna knock that stuff out of the park, but you aren’t gonna like… ever forget it’s a movie Obayashi directed, you know?
And so there’s a surprising ton of like, faithful adaptations of the characters (Pinoko moved directly into the context of a live action movie is weird) and Tezuka in-jokes all over the place. But there isn’t really any attempt to give those elements the air of weight and seriousness they have in the comic. Joe Shishido is already a pretty silly looking person because of those cosmetically altered cheeks of his… and taking the Black Jack costume directly from the page to screen does not help. He doesn’t do a bad job, but if I remember right - there’s only one surgery scene in the movie, and it’s played goofily for laughs. I definitely found myself pining for a version of this where he got to play more straight-faced dramatic scenes and could sell the absurdity of the costume more (which made me think of Branded to Kill and wonder what Seijun Suzuki’s verison of this would look like…)
… But the whole main part of the movie doesn’t really have anything to do with that and it’s about a girl tennis star getting sucked into a deadly romance with a scary pianist who might be a ghost living in her transplanted eye and that’s definitely full-on a good fun vehicle for Obayashi (fresh after House, even, apparently). There’s some really good melodramatic stuff in there, and I love the soundtrack both in how much fun it has with the repetetive plot-relevant piano riff in dramatic moments, and in the electronic noodling it gets into in lower-key scenes.
It’s aaaalmost just a fun good goofy movie - but it’s hard to ignore how distracting the Black Jack stuff is! Not necessarily in a bad way… just an unusual way.
Anyone curious about what this Drama CD-series is about, can take a look in the Listening Practice-thread.
everything from the music to the SFX is really well done.
(not counting the multiple special releases)
I only finished 2 episodes though, meaning to watch Ep. 3 tonight. I usually love comedies with 犬飼貴丈 and 板尾創路 so I want so much for it to be good.
Can always un-suspend later. ya know?