A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji (Tomu Uchida, 1955) - 8.25/10 - December 20th
Quite different from what I expected, but pretty good none the less. Instead of a character-driven Ozu (or Naruse) type of drama, this is a bit closer to the samurai films that Kurosawa made. Then again, the comparison really just ends with samurais which basically makes this is a completely different approach from the other films coming out of Japan at the time. Maybe it's a bit closer stylistically to Mizoguchi's films what with all the tracking shots and visual splendor. I suppose this falls inbetween all of those guy's films and winds up feeling a bit less confined to a certain style though this results in the film bordering on being just plain bland at times. If I wouldn't no matter, I'd say this was probably more of an influence on the modern Asian minimalists just because Uchida holds the camera longer than most of his peers. There's some scenes that almost feel like something out of Haneke film. The camera maintains a very detached and far away view from the characters but there's a lot of drama going on. If I hadn't already become so familar with the style of Naruse and Ozu, I'd probably signing Uchida's praises as the true influence on modern Asian cinema. The film does lack that emotional punch that I've come to expect from some of my favorite Japanese directors of the time period. The short running time doesn't help the case and there's like way too many characters. There's about, maybe eight that seem relevant and interesting, and then about twenty that are just thrown in for some mindless (and in this case, awkward) comic relief. Once the film has dedicated maybe 10 minutes to character, it moves on. There's also this really sort of unnecessary "bandit" subplot that thankfully is abandoned about halfway through the film. All these things make it very hard to see the characters...at all. Uchida does a fantastic job creating a distinct atmosphere but his actors are too melodramatic to care about. I can sort of see how this might be just using characters to create certain images a la Even Dwarfs Started Small, which is great. Uchida just spends too much time being a "visual film" and then decides, in an almost systematic fashion, to be a deep character study. The result is a beautiful film that certainly works, but I can't help but feel that there's something more to the characters than just what's being presented. I mean this in a way that's completely different that just characters being passive but it's more about how much compassion the director shows to his characters. Uchida has plenty for his, but I can't help but think that he's holding back.
July Rhapsody (Ann Hui, 2002) - 10/10 - December 21st
It feels pointless even writing a review for this: if you like any film in my top ten then this is pretty much a must. If you appreciate those moody type of dramas that come out of Hong Kong, yeah see this. As much as I like Wong Kar-Wai and Fruit Chan (and really, really like them!) neither one of them have come remotely close to doing something quite as great as this. I've always felt that Wong Kar-Wai borders a bit too much on being overly-stylized. He's great at what he does but I always feel he's one step of way of entering a David Fincher type of territory, though he's obviously gone to a more "mature" territory. On the other end, I've always felt that Fruit Chan's style is perfect but his material is always a little weak, feeling just like a redux of stuff has Wong done or in the case of Hollywood Hong Kong, just plain silly. This is really like the perfect coming together about everything that makes those two directors so great and probably a characterization similar to Cassavetes. Seriously, even if this were just ugly and dull, it be so great to watch just to see life presented in carefully, tenderly, and so on. There may be some visual shortcomings now that I think about it but that could easily be blamed on the mediocre DVD. I can still the basic idea of what Hui was trying to do through the watered down colors. The intimate close-ups of small objects, the occasional speed manipulation, the flashes of sequences that make simple conversations feel like extremely poetic voice-overs. Even with all this, there are some flaws. Maybe it's a bit hard to explain without the basic plot: A teacher named Yiu is basically having a midlife crisis and contemplating an affair with a student who is completely in love with him. There's this bad subplot about how "oh history is repeating itself" because Yiu's wife had an affair with their favorite teacher. There's a few sequences towards the end dealing with this that border on being too sentimental, the hospital scene in particular but the ending more than makes up for it.
Daughter of the Nile (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 1987) - 8.75/10 - December 21st
Hou's first venture into that strobe lights, party scene, saturated visuals type of film. Ironically, one of his best looking films is also the one that's in a terrible condition. Thankfully he sort of repeats a lot of the motifs here in his later films. The Mean Streets gang life stuff is seen in Goodbye South, Goodbye. The soft female voice-over in Millennium Mambo. The family structure stuff in like, every film he made in the 80s. If it weren't for availability issues, I'd say that this is probably Hou's most accessible film. It basically shows all the great things he can do, it's short and there's plenty of violence, a Chinese Cindy Lauper-esque song and silly old people. That may sound a bit over the top but it really isn't that much different from Tsai's Rebels of the Neon God. Not quite angsty enough, I guess.
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006) - 8.5/10 - December 24th
Doesn't quite live up to all the hype, but it's still really great anyway. As expected, this is very much along the lines of the other minimalistic Asian films that I generally love but with a more Malick-type edge. Yes, such a comparison is incredibly overused, even (hell, especially) by me but a film that takes place mostly outside, at least towards the beginning, and it's all about memories? Unavoidable comparison. The best sequence in the film is probably the 30 second opening static shot of trees with a simple yet great ambient score in the background. Throughout the film the same great score sort of comes up for short periods of time but never comes close to the overwhelmingly great way it's used to start the film. Towards the end, there's a ten minute sequence with this music that's also pretty great but feels sort of tacked on. It would have been great had the film ended with this sequences but instead there's five more minutes of build up and the film ends with a giant exercise routine?! It seems like Joe might be trying to contest the absurd humor that Tsai is so great at. It just feels like a very half-assed attempt at being wacky, but I actually find the film's more deadpan humor to be genuinely wacky, in a good way. Yet, it's not surprising to me that Joe has made a film called The Adventures of Iron Pussy. I guess the thing is, if you're going to do a film this rigid, you'll need to have a sense of humor.* This is really quite a funny film, just subdued to the point where it can't have a really profound emotional impact on me, even though I would say it's perfect otherwise.
*Maybe this is why Bela Tarr isn't any good? I thought this was like a revelation as I was writing but then I realized that Hou isn't that funny, either.
Away with Words (Christopher Doyle, 1997) - 8/10 - December 25th
Sort of like Zerkalo from Fallen Angels-era Wong Kar-Wai which means there's a lot of voice overs about memory and wide angle shots, speed manipulation, etc. The final result actually feels like a slightly more evolved version of something David Fincher would do. Doyle seems to be photographing a lot more graphic stuff in this film so maybe that's why. As a love story between Mavis Xu and Tadanobu Asano, the film is great but such an idea is never really "real" (for lack of a better word) but it's almost there. Instead, the film is suppose to be a connection between Asano and a completely unlikable gay bar owner who gets intoxicated and arrested every night. I wish this guy had been downplayed, he's really just annoying as fuck. There isn't a single good scene with that guy in it. In that case, it reminds me of the dramatic sequences in Zerkalo because both take away from the purely visceral experience that both films are intended to be. Stylistically, I sort of consider this stuff a bit less "mature" than the usual minimalistic films I watch but I think it has more to do with Doyle and wide-angle lens to be specific. I really like that spontaneous approach just as much but the style can begin to override a lot of the content. I suppose you could just watch this as a very long music video then.
Ginza Cosmetics (Mikio Naruse, 1951) - 8/10 - Decemeber 25th
It really is a shame that the subtitles for a lot of Naruse's films are so very bad. I think one of his strengths was writing really great, nuanced dialogue. This all gets lost underneath the fan-made translation but I can still see where some of his trademark stuff is. Kinuyo Tanaka is really great in this; everyone likes to mention Hadeko Takamine as Naruse's muse but he seemed to use Tanaka just as much. Even though she really is great, I feel that her characters are always a bit too "tragic." The setup of the film is a geisha trying to financially stay afloat and raise a child feels almost like Naruse parodying himself. I guess it's sort of ironic that this is actually the earliest Naruse film I've seen. Perhaps he worked out some of the sentimental kinks that seem present here because I can't help but see this sort of as a warm-up for his later stuff. Regardless, it is Naruse, and it is really compelling.
Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Yasujiro Ozu, 1952) - 9.25/10 - December 29th
A bit more dramatic and eventful than usual for Ozu but it ends up coming up on the right side of my taste. Hell, at the end it becomes outright melodramatic with all that "clothes and ties shouldn't matter, it's reliability that counts" stuff. It still ends up coming off as one of the more emotionally accessible films that Ozu has made. It starts out a bit like Faces; focusing on the distance between a husband and wife. Oddly enough, instead of their relationship getting progressively worse, it starts to get better in the last fifteen minutes or so. There's also a subplot about guess what: a young woman refusing to get married. I've come to accept this as an Ozu cliche in the same way that a struggle older woman is a bit of a Naruse cliche though I think in Ozu's case, it's more often convincing. Or maybe just more interesting. There's a few un-Ozu like style choices, like the ocassional tracking shots that in this context, feel like revelations. Anyway, there's really not much more I can say about this. Basically, there are very few moments that aren't totally compelling. Yes, one of Ozu's very best.
Humanity and Paper Balloons (Sadao Yamanka, 1937) - 9/10 - December 31st
I don't want to say something as outlandish as "cinema starts here!" but it is definitely one of the earliest films I've seen that I can consider as really great. This is probably even more contemplative than what Naruse and Ozu would do later on, which basically means that the takes are a lot longer. A common misunderstanding is that Ozu pioneered long static takes, where the truth is, his films have an awful lot of cuts. This is not a criticism of any director, though. However, It definitely seems that Yamanka would have ended up being more influential (if only for the fact that this is more technically radical) had his career not been cut so tragically short. The transition wipes seem a little bit out of place, but that's not too irritating. The whole time I was watching this I was almost completely befuddled by the plot details, but by the end I had sort of "figured" it out. In any case, this is definitely not some plot-driven samurai film. Despite it's length and how many dramatic events there are, it still feels like a perfectly accurate slice of life, focusing on a whole community in a very unhurried way. It's definitely a reach but all the organized crime stuff reminds me a little bit of Cyclo. Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, I ran into a lot of trouble trying to comprehend just exactly what was going on, which is similar to how I felt about my first viewing of Cyclo. I'd imagine that if I would have focused on the characters more, the film would have resonated even deeper with me. The good news being that subsequent viewings will probably clear things up for me and only add to my love for this great film.
A West Lake Moment (Yi Zhang and Ho Yim, 2004) - 7.5/10 - January 1st
Does a very good job of capturing that certain type of visual poetry that I tend to associate with my favorite films from China and Hong Kong and the story is also something up my alley; this could indeed be grouped under the "lost souls find each other" genre. Unfortunately, it's just a bit too stylized for my taste. The camera is actually a lot smoother than it is in films like Little Cheung or Chungking Express but the editing is just completely annoying. I mentioned in my review of Humanity and Paper Balloons that I find transitional wipes, fades, etc. to be quite annoying in almost every context. Here we are, almost 70 years from that film and people still think it's a logical choice. It's especially annoying when you combine this with the constantly tracking camera and the half-assed "subversive" editing. Rewinding a scene and replaying it doesn't make your film edgy or meaningful, it's just stupid. It's like the directors watched Fight Club and The New World and tried to emulate those two films as much as possible. As enticing as that might sound, it definitely results in simply too much stuff happening. There's voiceovers over beautiful landscapes but the directors are a bit impatient and instead of letting those truthful and elusive moments linger, they cut away. Usually, to something really boring. No joke, in the scene where Xun Zhou breaks up with her boyfriend, the screen freezes and becomes a torn photograph. Which leads me to the next problem, and that's the films incredibly obvious symbolism. When someone says there life is like a black hole, we're shown a person walking in some cave (?) for no reason. Another reoccuring motif is the little girl that Xun Zhou's character keeps talking to. It's her "inner child voice" or something goofy like that. It's like the writer realized he had a chance to add depth to the character and provide some cutesy child comedic relief at the same time. Unfortunately, nothing positive comes out of it. The story, even though it starts out good, does have some useless melodramatic subplots. As I said, this is soft of a lost souls find each other story. Xun Zhou meets a guy in a cafe and they fall in love - that's where a lot of the film comes from. But there's this completely unnecessary subplot about her best friend dying. He's one of those guys that's totally in love with a girl, but she treats like a little brother. Anyway, he dies and so there's this whole section about how she took him for granted and whatnot. This was pretty great to watch, though. As I said, the cinematography is definitely up to my standards and as always, Xun Zhou is completely captivating to watch.
Goddess of Mercy (Ann Hui, 2003) - 8/10 - January 2nd
My score for this is a bit generous since I will admit that I tried really hard to like it but I still think it's pretty accurate. The first hour is pretty much just flat out great. It took some time getting use to considering the fact that (a) I was expecting something more along the lines of Morvern Callar and Millennium Mambo and (b) it seemed to be filmed in a very cheap way. It wasn't quite digital so I can't put my finger on exactly what was so ugly about it but it did look like one of those Hong Kong TV shows that the "AZN" network plays at two in the morning. Still, after I got over this, it was smooth sailing for the first hour. Then, suddenly (probably right when is Tienjun is shot) the film begins to fall into this weird action/lifetime film hybrid. Suddenly, An Xin is an independent and forceful female trying to protect her little baby from random bad guys that appear and are quickly killed off. Or maybe, these were characters that had some significance in the beginning of the film but in any case, it seems like Hui almost consciously tried to shift as far away from the characters as possible in the final act. Seriously, I'm not even going to try to explain all the goofy organized drug busts that completely dominated the last thirty minutes of the film. I tried to look past this as much as possible, but every time a over-lit drug bust sequences happened I thought about the "independent party girl film" that I had imagined this to be and I realize how far away from my ideal film this is. Oddly enough, I did enjoy the fact that I was watching another Ann Hui film that ultimately increased my interest in her other films.
Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954) - 9/10 - January 2nd
A beautiful, low-key (as always with Naruse) examination of a group of aging geishas. It sounds a bit like his very own later masterpiece, Flowing but I'd say that is more of an ensemble piece where this feels like a series of vignettes that, without Sugimura's character, wouldn't be connected at all. This is probably because Naruse adapted the film from three different Fumiko Hayashi writings. This sounds a bit crazy on his part but never does he attempt to make any sort of connection between the stories; a tactic that is becoming more and more popular in modern Hollywood. Instead, it's just a very real, almost neutral, portrait of three women. The big attraction here is Haruko Sugimura's fantastic performance. I have a feeling she may have really identified with the role. It seems that a majority of her roles in Ozu's films are mostly supporting and (superficially) characterized as the "mean lady." The story of the film is that everyone owes her money and essentially everyone hates her but as the film moves along it becomes apparent just how much emotional baggage she has. The back story about that guy wanting to kill her was a bit melodramatic, I'll admit, but didn't seem all too important. It really only bothered me because it felt like it could have been trying to explain a lot of her psychology. I think it's a lot more interesting when such things are left unsaid. In any case, it's definitely one of the best performances I've ever seen. It's great to see one of my favorites get a lot more screen time.
UP NEXT: The Lower Depths, Fires on a Plain, Take Care of My Cat
Yamanaka's death is really one of the greatest tragedies in all of cinema. Even more tragic is the fact that he made over thirty films but only three have survived. 
