Why are Japanese films so terrible?

I need help, film experts! I'm remembering a movie that has a crane shot of an old fashioned movie palace early in the movie. A sort of omniscient narrator is addressing the audience as a character outside of the movie theater. I think that this introduction is a frame and a pretext to go back in time to begin the story. I'm not sure if the metacinema motifs continue.

The movie might be Japanese. It shares some of the style of certain movies directed by Juzo Itami or Nobuhiko Obayashi. To me, it looks like it's from the late 80s or the 90s, recalling movies from an earlier time period.

I might have the decade and the country wrong, but I don't think I do.

I think it's Sada!

Definitely Sada! This old Variety review confirms it. I liked this movie and you should watch it if you haven't.

Meanwhile, I'm watching Obayashi's Labyrinth of Cinema on Mubi, which is why the opening from Sada got stuck in my head in the first place!

why are Mizoguchi Blu Rays so hard to come by in UK, I want to watch Genroku Chushingura :(
just look at this shit https://www.amazon.co.uk/Late-Mizoguchi-BLU-RAY-Masters-Cinema/dp/B00EZT3KYA

i have the dvd version of that, was £36 in 2011.

also have the 47 Ronin thing you mention, again dvd, bought on eBay from Korea, based on the packaging. it was quite cheap but looks legit.

I *think* the bulk of that Mizoguchi box set can be gotten on the Eureka 'Masters of Cinema' series, which are DVD only (kind of a twofer deal) but they were still individually expensive, iirc I paid through the nose for Akasen Chitai.

the dvd version is just a box made up of the 4 twofers, identical packaging even (i had sansho dayo and then bought the box).

i think the BRs weren't available individually (i never buy BRs if i have a choice so i may be wrong there). and the box design is different - the original dvd box design made it a bit more obvious it was MoC.

Even that Artificial Eye Mizoguchi Blu-Ray box that I would see all the time is up to over £120, in some places.

(i have that one too!)

yeah, it's maddening when there's the odd film that's out of print. i reckon if you're patient they'll be available again in some form, sooner or later. i mean they must look at the prices and can see the demand.

like Tokyo Olympiad is newly avialable, and Black Rain, albeit as part of a 3 disk box where i already have the other two... still waiting on Story Of A Tenement Gentleman and The Idiot.

Just SOME of the great films we'll be putting out on bluray over the next year...
Watch this space! pic.twitter.com/3USyI0WZai

— Third Window Films (@thirdwindow) July 20, 2021

Finally we get Crazy Thunder Road!

https://www.japansociety.org/arts-and-culture/films/japan-cuts-festival-of-new-japanese-film

lol, I've never opened this thread because I didn't realize y'all were celebrating Opposite Day up in here. Gonna have to gather my thoughts now.

there's a whole series of these threads - why are french films terrible, why are italian films terrible - and they get revived to talk abt those national cinemas, can't say it's my fave ILX running gag

(especially as I had posted that Third Window info in the boutique blu ray thread)

Yeah, I've ignored every one of those threads because I thought they were just full of stupid + blinkered opinions. We clearly need to step up our marketing acumen, people.

Ooh, I've wanted to check out Funky Forest for a while now, it looks ridiculous.

I agree that bumping "why are x films terrible" to discuss cinema from different countries isn't a great idea, but it seems to happen a fair amount. Start new threads with better titles, people!

> why are french films terrible

the french film title is actually funny, expecially if you do it in the accent and with a little shrug.

French films are shit. Porquoi?

still annoyed about lack of cheap region 2 copies of tokyo olympiad. the timing is ideal

Could rename the threads but I'm kind of attached to the "why are british films shit?" title despite liking a lot of them.

Nihon no eiga wa warui desu. Nan de?

bet that's wrong

I'm always against renaming threads unless it's a correction, an addition (e.g. an RIP) or removing something offensive. It makes the older parts of the thread less comprehensible, and I also have an attachment to keeping ilx history preserved where possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkaOz48cq2g

Nihon no eiga wa warui desu. Nan de?

I'd probably use "ga" instead of "wa" just to make it flow better, and "doushite" or "naze" are more often used for a singular "why?"

RFI: film in which a ne’er-do-well artist maudit gets something like a doctor’s note from one of his girlfriends saying she caught tuberculosis from him and calls it a “love letter.” I thought the title was even Love Letter, but that seems to be the title of a big blockbuster I don’t remember seeing.

I thought it might be part of Seijun Suzuki‘s Taishō Trilogy but haven’t been able to watch one of those in a while, and plot summaries didn’t seem to line up.

kurosawa's Scandal and Drunken Angel both have TB patients in them but i can't remember enough of the details to know if it's one of those

Drunken Angel was my first thought but I'm pretty sure it's not that.

Okay it was called Love Letter in English, in Japanese 恋文, the 1985 one directed by Tatsumi Kumashiro. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-08-29-ca-14527-story.html
Think I got the plot a tiny bit mixed up with something else as well.

Which probably was his Appassionata, which showed Out of Competition at Cannes this year!

Speaking of movies you can't remember the name of... Yoshihiro Tatsumi's graphic memoirs A Drifting Life mentioned a movie where a store owner was told that one day people will come in the store and kill him. His family then fear every odd customer that comes in. Tatsumi mentioned that critics weren't fond of it but audiences remember it. I no longer have the book and I don't remember the title. Does it sound familiar to anyone?

it's listed in the book as "Don't Let Him Go" but I can't find the original japanese title...

Found it: Kyatsu o nigasuna
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164078/

thanks!!

Finally saw Crazy Thunder Road and I found it just okay. But it was a student film that got picked up by a big studio. Really enjoyed the extra of Jasper Sharp talking about the japanese amateur film scene though, he said it has a lot of institutional support and some of them go very far because of it.

80% through the Stray Cat Rock box and it's strange in a few ways.

it's a series but all the film's are unconnected. share some cast and are mostly about teenage gangs but the characters have different names in each film (and indeed die and reappear). can't immediately think of an English equivalent other than the Carry On films.

all of them seem to feature vehicles chases through streets and down stairs. usually in odd vehicles - jeeps, honda ct50s, a cute Japanese 'Buddy' (only 100 made, this one with a Thermos flask holder on the dashboard), a motorbike and side car

the main actress in the first film has a credit on the second film but only appears in two 30 second clips taken verbatim from the first film

and it's girl gangs, dressed in gogo gear and floral pant suits, having knife fights on waste land and hanging out in underground psyche clubs but the whole thing looks like a Childrens' Film Foundation film

all strange, but I've been enjoying them. and they are quite cheap if you catch them in an arrow films sale

https://en.wheelsage.org/daihatsu/fellow/buggy/pictures/tiup9d

that's a Fellow Buggy, the thing the main villian was riding in. leather jacket, shotgun and riding in what looks like a toy car

cute! reminds me of the Mini Moke

(comedy vehicle on 5th film is a 5-person tandem)

Last week went to see The Man Who Stole the Sun, wild Leonard Schrader-written film from the late 70s about a high school science teacher who builds an atomic bomb in his apartment and then is kind of at a loss for what to do with it. He eventually starts a cat-and-mouse game with a detective, calls into a radio show to get some idea, and decides to demand that the government get the Rolling Stones to play a show at the Budokan. Apparently it's quite accurate in its depiction of how to build your own nuke.

A Fugitive From The Past (Uchida, 1965)

simple police procedural which is somehow 3 hours long (but never drags). nice use of treated film at times.

(this is the 22nd film from the top 25 of the kinema junpo 1995 list that i've seen, and it's right near the top, #6 or so)

This was really good... thanks for the recommendation.

!!
https://rarefilmm.com/2019/08/kiga-kaikyo-1965/

over 100 japanese films there including out of print stuff by ozu and naruse, some of which looks great.

(i'd argue the uchida isn't rare anymore since arrow released it a year ago)

I know, right? I have been grabbing them in chunks. Have seen some great stuff as a result. I also bought the Arrow BD of the Uchida last week, no regrets!

jp-films.com is another decent resource, though you have to wade through endless amounts of pinku movies.

finally watched "Onoda, 10,000 night in the jungle" about hiroo onoda, the last (but one) soldier fighting the second world war (for 29 years after it had officially finished)

was good, from 2021, but was also 3.5 hours long. might still be on all-4 in the uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSgIj8XaoZk

Picked up a box set of the films of Kinuyo Tanaka in Paris some time ago and have been going through them.

Love Letter (1953) - This is about a dude drifting through the postwar era who finds a job writing English love letters from Japanese geishas to US GIs. Very much the kind of postwar poverty, ppl rising from the ashes of a destroyed country kind of film I'm a sucker for.

The Moon Has Risen (1955) - From a script by Ozu, and the critical consensus seems to be it's Tanaka doing Ozu, though to me it has a lively, youthful feeling that I don't often get from the master. Features future Nikkatsu youth idol Mie Kitahara and, of course, Chishu Ryu as the dad.

The Eternal Breasts (1955) - "You know" I thought to myself "I do sometimes hit a wall with melodrama when they pile on the misery like this". More fool me, this is actually a biopic of a poet who really existed. Most seem to think it's her masterpiece, but it's the one that resonated least with me. But I'm probably wrong, I struggle with Sirk too.

The Wandering Princess (1960) - Another biopic, this time of a member of the Japanese nobility who got married off to the emperor of Manchuria's brother, mostly to stitch things up for the Japanese govt to employ Manchuria as a puppet state. Huge Cinema of Quality vibes, and I can imagine this resonating the way Sissi did it in the West. It's a posho's perspective, so the suffering caused by the Japanese regime is portrayed in the abstract, a troubling news item there, a child complaining about the rude Japanese customers at his dad's inn there, while the suffering of the royal family, much of it of course at the hands of the Communists, is explicit and visceral. Nevermind, I'm an adult, I can contextualize, and at any rate the movie def doesn't paint the Japanese as the Good Guys in all this. Her first colour film and boy is it gorgeous. I figure if David Lean gets to stay in the canon we can get this in there, too.

Girls Of The Night (1961) - Back to black and white for this portrayal of a recovery home for sex workers (shortly after prostitution was outlawed in Japan), but really the focus is on Kuniko (Chisako Hara) in her efforts to return to the working world. Often pretty radical and certainly has a female director's eye for the myriad ways in which men can be The Worst. Disappointingly moralistic and conventional ending but what did I expect.

Love Under The Crucifix (1962) - Tanaka's last film is her sole foray into jidai-geki, Japanese historical cinema, and it dovetails both with the angry revisionism of the samurai films being made around the same time and Tanaka's work with Mizoguchi focusing on female suffering. Somewhat misleading English title - lead character Gin (Ineko Arima)'s romantic interest (played by Tatsuya Nakadai!) is indeed persecuted for his Christianity, but far from being a tract of christian suffering his religious feeling is mostly an impediment to her love, which ofc we are rooting for.

Six movies, none of them bad, quite an ouevre!

The anciliary material confirmed me in some petty prejudices I'd already held: when Tanaka decided to become a director, Mizoguchi, angry at losing his leading lady, went on a press tour saying she "lacked the intelligence" to direct and even had her blackballed from the major studios; contrast with Solid Dudes Ozu and Naruse, who supported her efforts in public and private. Not the first or last instance of a great artist behaving like a total dick of course, but does make me look at his dozens of films about the righteous suffering of the female sex with my eyebrow raised a bit higher.

not sure those are easily available in uk. happy to be contradicted.

had the week off and spent it watching japanese films...

the Battles Without Honour And Humanity box, 5 films by Fukasaku. the first one is well regarded but they were all kinda chaotic. writer changes for the last one too, so it was a bit different.

also Hiroshima, which was good and featured a very handy list of other japanese atomic bomb films, exactly 3 of which i've seen

had a rewatch of 'A Sun-Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era' after it was mentioned in commentary on one of the above, but it wasn't great.

also The Flavour Of Green Tea Over Rice (new BFI version), another rewatch, usual ozu quality.

and the Samurai trilogy, the Musashi Miyamoto thing, Criterion, main antagonist of whom was the love interest from Green Tea.

and picked up Battle Royale in fopp, which is also Fukasaku, albeit 25 years later (and 20 years old itself now).

not sure those are easily available in uk. happy to be contradicted.

Not in physical edition or streaming no, thus my buying the box in Paris - I think they played at the BFI semi recently though, judging by letterboxd reviews. At any rate you could always learn French like a civiliaed person pirate them.

Battles Without Honour Or Humanity felt impossible to watch without an accompanying spreadsheet.