Movies Serious Movie Discussion

[Bullitt68]

Apparently the censorship was not too happy with the ending and wanted a real miracle to happen and San Dimas had to show up. Only the first 45 mins or so belong to the original script, the second half was entirely rewritten. They tried to force Berlanga to keep re-shooting scenes constantly and when he refused, they hired Grau and it is unclear how many scenes he directed.
Funnily enough even after putting up with their bs, the censors still gave the film a 3R rating and it bombed when released. It might be the biggest commercial failure of Berlanga´s career.

Sad story. Sadder still, I just finished it and, not surprisingly, it's the weakest of his films yet. Unlike with Kubrick's Lolita, where he wasn't able to go as far as he wanted to go but still was able to make a hell of a film, Miracles of Thursday was very lame. Again, not surprisingly, the first third is the best (and the funniest---there are barely even any jokes for the rest of the movie, and only one mildly funny one). I loved the knuckleheads putting their (knuckle)heads together to try to create the fake miracle, and squabbling all the way through their attempts, but once Richard Basehart showed up and it became a weird dramatic treatment of the power of faith, it got very bland. And the big reveal at the end is just bad religious propaganda. Berlanga must've been so pissed. Damn shame, because it could've been a hell of a film.

If you haven't come across this, there's this website ran by a foundation which has some interesting facts on his bio and filmography. The guy at one point even volunteered for the blue division when they joined the nazi army in the eastern front to help save his father whom had a death penalty upon him, unlike most of the other volunteers who were in it because of their falangist ideology. Very little is widely known about the blue division (later called blue legion) but those guys went through hell in there, if he made it back and retained his sanity he must have been tough as nails.

https://berlangafilmmuseum.com/en/biography/

I knew that part of his bio with his dad, but I didn't go too deep into the historical war stuff. Cool video, though, and I appreciate that link. Tons of great info there.

 

[Spam On Rye]

Nice, Donald Richie is the American keeper of Japanese cinema. For me, I haven't seen that much pre-WWII stuff, and pretty much all that I have seen are from Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, while I would still like to see more from the '50s-'70s. Relatively recently, I marathoned a ton of Japanese New Wave stuff from the postwar period.




My entry into Japanese movies were Samurai movies. I grew up a huge martial arts movie fan so obviously I was going to be a huge Samurai movie fan. Then I started to watch and enjoy the dramas and the crime films, as well as of course the more contemporary horror movies.

Great taste man. Love all the new wave stuff as well but I'm ignorant of most post 60s Japanese cinema. Oshima and Imamura are too of my faves from that era and Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is probably my favorite Japanese b-flick. Big on Samurai films too. Especially the Kobayashi films. Also, love all the 20+ Zatoichi films. Other than that I seem to lean 20s to 60s films in general with Jap and Russian films being my sweet spot. Love silent films too with Chaplin probably being my favorite of all time. Started digging into British films only recently but plan to keep going. Really loving Joseph Losey films and Powell & Pressburger. Gonna do all the Olivier Shakespeare next.

 

[moreorless87]

Great taste man. Love all the new wave stuff as well but I'm ignorant of most post 60s Japanese cinema. Oshima and Imamura are too of my faves from that era and Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is probably my favorite Japanese b-flick. Big on Samurai films too. Especially the Kobayashi films. Also, love all the 20+ Zatoichi films. Other than that I seem to lean 20s to 60s films in general with Jap and Russian films being my sweet spot. Love silent films too with Chaplin probably being my favorite of all time. Started digging into British films only recently but plan to keep going. Really loving Joseph Losey films and Powell & Pressburger. Gonna do all the Olivier Shakespeare next.

Really I think Mizoguchi especially feels like the bridge between silent cinema(or course started off there although I'm not sure any of it still exists) and arthouse which carried across a lot of the same sensibilities, something like Osaka Story or The Story of The Last Chrysanthemum do feel strangely contemporary for films made pre WW2.

If you wanted a recommendation for latter work of Japanese New Wave directors @Bullitt68 I'd say maybe try Imamura's version of The Ballad of Narayama from 83. Story of life in an isolated village were people go "up the mountain" to die at a certain age, interesting mix of on one hand somewhat traditional period film but with a much harder edge to it, almost becomes anthropological with the humans acting in animalistic fashion alongside shots of insects/snakes/etc(somewhat akin to Woman of the Dunes but less overtly horror), generally a very effective atmosphere to it as well of wooded mysterious mountains.

 

[Bullitt68]

Great taste man. Love all the new wave stuff as well but I'm ignorant of most post 60s Japanese cinema. Oshima and Imamura are too of my faves from that era and Suzuki's Story of a Prostitute is probably my favorite Japanese b-flick. Big on Samurai films too. Especially the Kobayashi films. Also, love all the 20+ Zatoichi films.

Depending on how nerdy you are, here's an article that I wrote on Ichikawa (the official version from the journal Asian Cinema is behind a pay wall but this is what in academia is called the postprint version): https://www.academia.edu/104314422/...isual_Strategies_in_the_Films_of_Kon_Ichikawa.

For Samurai films, good call on Kobayashi. @europe1 and I are also huge fans of The Sword of Doom, which would be my pick for the best non-Kurosawa Samurai film. And then I actually got interested in Zatoichi because Bruce Lee was a huge fan of those films, and he even wanted to do his own Zatoichi film at some point. Before he died, he did a bunch of costume tests for some planned period films, and at 4:40 of the second vid you can see him doing a little blind swordsman. Man, the stuff that we missed out on when he died...





And then in the martial arts movie realm, I also have to show some love to Sonny Chiba and the Street Fighter films

Other than that I seem to lean 20s to 60s films in general with Jap and Russian films being my sweet spot.

For me, I've seen almost exclusively Soviet films, lots of the silent stuff and then the mid-century arthouse stuff. If you're a Tarkovsky guy then I know that you'll make a lot more friends around here

Love silent films too with Chaplin probably being my favorite of all time.

I just did a silent cinema unit in one of the film history classes that I teach. It's been a lot of years since I went through the silent stuff, but yeah, I love early cinema. Chaplin is the king - if The Circus isn't the GOAT silent film, then I have it second only to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc - all of Griffith's shorts as well as his major features are amazing, and even though he had a long career in the sound era I also love Fritz Lang's silent stuff.

Started digging into British films only recently but plan to keep going. Really loving Joseph Losey films and Powell & Pressburger. Gonna do all the Olivier Shakespeare next.

I hadn't seen much UK stuff until I did my PhD over there, at which point I got self-conscious about how little I'd seen and knew. Now I fucking love it, and I always make room for a week on UK stuff when I teach. Have you been staying in the same general time period of 1920-1960? Because I do love the British New Wave and there's a lot of awesome post-60s stuff stuff that people like @Rimbaud82 and @moreorless87 could point you to. For my part, I love Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life while his later film ....if is probably my all-time favorite British film. But I also do love a lot of Hitchcock's early work, Charles Laughton is one of my favorite actors and so I love his work, David Lean is renowned for his giant late career epics but I much prefer his earlier and more intimate British stuff, and then a bit random but among the classic black comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets is devastatingly hilarious.

For Losey, I really only know his earlier Hollywood stuff (his remake of Lang's M isn't half bad and The Prowler is a great underrated film noir). The only British film of his I've seen is The Servant. And then I don't love Powell and Pressburger the way that Scorsese does, but I do love Black Narcissus.

Really I think Mizoguchi especially feels like the bridge between silent cinema(or course started off there although I'm not sure any of it still exists) and arthouse which carried across a lot of the same sensibilities, something like Osaka Story or The Story of The Last Chrysanthemum do feel strangely contemporary for films made pre WW2.

Agreed. For Mizoguchi, if I recall the numbers, he made over 40 films in the '20s but only one remains (and I don't know which one it is but I haven't seen it). I'm most bummed that I can't see his 1929 film Bridge of Japan, which is one of the two Mizoguchi films (along with The 47 Ronin) that Ichikawa remade in his career. But yeah, it's weird how Mizoguchi often told "old" stories yet his films feel so contemporary, while Ozu often told contemporary stories yet his films feel rather "old-fashioned."

If you wanted a recommendation for latter work of Japanese New Wave directors @Bullitt68 I'd say maybe try Imamura's version of The Ballad of Narayama from 83. Story of life in an isolated village were people go "up the mountain" to die at a certain age, interesting mix of on one hand somewhat traditional period film but with a much harder edge to it, almost becomes anthropological with the humans acting in animalistic fashion alongside shots of insects/snakes/etc(somewhat akin to Woman of the Dunes but less overtly horror), generally a very effective atmosphere to it as well of wooded mysterious mountains.

I didn't watch that one when I did my Imamura run-through. And Keisuke Kinoshita also did an earlier version of that film. I guess I'll have to watch them both

 

[Bullitt68]

Well, in the surprise category, @Busgosu, I thought that Plácido kind of stunk. I'll admit right off the bat that I'm not a fan of these kinds of "comedies of manners," particularly the big ensemble "look how many people there are doing wacky stuff" films from Dinner at Eight and Smiles of a Summer Night to La Dolce Vita and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. This is the most Felliniesque film of Berlanga's thus far, but in the bad sense, in relation to Fellini's later films that give rise to jokes like this...



Don't get me wrong, the premise was killer, and there are some great bits - I love the early sequence at the bank, and the fact that a family is living in a ladies' room is fucking genius - but the main problem for me was how off the tone was. It was neither pure comedy like Welcome Mr. Marshall! nor was it straight pathos like The Rocket from Calabuch. Instead, it was in this weird no-man's-land of tone where I couldn't tell if I was supposed to be experiencing genuine emotion at the protagonist's hardship trying to pay for his vehicle like a character out of De Sica or if I was supposed to be amused by the exaggerated goofiness of the upper crust like a Buñuel film. The result was that I felt neither. Honestly, I was just bored and disinterested. I didn't care about the plot or the characters, and I didn't find much of it funny. With Miracles of Thursday, it started off very strong and it's not Berlanga's fault that his film was compromised, but Plácido is just a plain old swing and a miss.

 

[Spam On Rye]

Really I think Mizoguchi especially feels like the bridge between silent cinema(or course started off there although I'm not sure any of it still exists) and arthouse which carried across a lot of the same sensibilities, something like Osaka Story or The Story of The Last Chrysanthemum do feel strangely contemporary for films made pre WW2.

If you wanted a recommendation for latter work of Japanese New Wave directors @Bullitt68 I'd say maybe try Imamura's version of The Ballad of Narayama from 83. Story of life in an isolated village were people go "up the mountain" to die at a certain age, interesting mix of on one hand somewhat traditional period film but with a much harder edge to it, almost becomes anthropological with the humans acting in animalistic fashion alongside shots of insects/snakes/etc(somewhat akin to Woman of the Dunes but less overtly horror), generally a very effective atmosphere to it as well of wooded mysterious mountains.

Yeah I've always seen Mizoguchi as the Godfather of Japanese cinema. I think maybe Chrysanthemum was the first older foreign film I ever watched in my teens. It just felt like entering a different world. Very sad how much of his work has been lost.

I'm a big fan of the original Narayama film but haven't seen the Imamura version even though I'm a fan of his new wave stuff. The only film of his I've seen past the 60s is Black Rain and absolutely loved it. So yeah, I definitely need to watch his Narayama asap.

 

[Spam On Rye]

Depending on how nerdy you are, here's an article that I wrote on Ichikawa (the official version from the journal Asian Cinema is behind a pay wall but this is what in academia is called the postprint version): https://www.academia.edu/104314422/...isual_Strategies_in_the_Films_of_Kon_Ichikawa.

For Samurai films, good call on Kobayashi. @europe1 and I are also huge fans of The Sword of Doom, which would be my pick for the best non-Kurosawa Samurai film. And then I actually got interested in Zatoichi because Bruce Lee was a huge fan of those films, and he even wanted to do his own Zatoichi film at some point. Before he died, he did a bunch of costume tests for some planned period films, and at 4:40 of the second vid you can see him doing a little blind swordsman. Man, the stuff that we missed out on when he died...





And then in the martial arts movie realm, I also have to show some love to Sonny Chiba and the Street Fighter films



For me, I've seen almost exclusively Soviet films, lots of the silent stuff and then the mid-century arthouse stuff. If you're a Tarkovsky guy then I know that you'll make a lot more friends around here



I just did a silent cinema unit in one of the film history classes that I teach. It's been a lot of years since I went through the silent stuff, but yeah, I love early cinema. Chaplin is the king - if The Circus isn't the GOAT silent film, then I have it second only to Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc - all of Griffith's shorts as well as his major features are amazing, and even though he had a long career in the sound era I also love Fritz Lang's silent stuff.



I hadn't seen much UK stuff until I did my PhD over there, at which point I got self-conscious about how little I'd seen and knew. Now I fucking love it, and I always make room for a week on UK stuff when I teach. Have you been staying in the same general time period of 1920-1960? Because I do love the British New Wave and there's a lot of awesome post-60s stuff stuff that people like @Rimbaud82 and @moreorless87 could point you to. For my part, I love Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life while his later film ....if is probably my all-time favorite British film. But I also do love a lot of Hitchcock's early work, Charles Laughton is one of my favorite actors and so I love his work, David Lean is renowned for his giant late career epics but I much prefer his earlier and more intimate British stuff, and then a bit random but among the classic black comedies Kind Hearts and Coronets is devastatingly hilarious.

For Losey, I really only know his earlier Hollywood stuff (his remake of Lang's M isn't half bad and The Prowler is a great underrated film noir). The only British film of his I've seen is The Servant. And then I don't love Powell and Pressburger the way that Scorsese does, but I do love Black Narcissus.



Agreed. For Mizoguchi, if I recall the numbers, he made over 40 films in the '20s but only one remains (and I don't know which one it is but I haven't seen it). I'm most bummed that I can't see his 1929 film Bridge of Japan, which is one of the two Mizoguchi films (along with The 47 Ronin) that Ichikawa remade in his career. But yeah, it's weird how Mizoguchi often told "old" stories yet his films feel so contemporary, while Ozu often told contemporary stories yet his films feel rather "old-fashioned."



I didn't watch that one when I did my Imamura run-through. And Keisuke Kinoshita also did an earlier version of that film. I guess I'll have to watch them both

Thanks for the link. Will check it out.

I had no idea about Lee wanting to do Ichi. That's awesome. Would have been awesome. Katsu does a great job though. He's just the right combo of charm and sloven.

All of Tarkovsky and Shepitko's The Ascent are personal favorites of mine. The only metaphysical masterpieces ever made imo.

You have great taste. The Circus and Joan of Arc are both top 10 films for me. I love Lang's Die Nibelungen as well and all his Hollywood noir.

I definitely need to check out IF and The Sporting Life. I've seen most of Lean because I love Dickens and Kind Hearts and Coronets as well but still have tons of blind spots.

Another great Losey film is Mr. Klein and he also did a Hammer Horror film called The Damned that's a masterpiece of B-horror imo.

 

[moreorless87]

Yeah I've always seen Mizoguchi as the Godfather of Japanese cinema. I think maybe Chrysanthemum was the first older foreign film I ever watched in my teens. It just felt like entering a different world. Very sad how much of his work has been lost.

I'm a big fan of the original Narayama film but haven't seen the Imamura version even though I'm a fan of his new wave stuff. The only film of his I've seen past the 60s is Black Rain and absolutely loved it. So yeah, I definitely need to watch his Narayama asap.

Mizuguchi seems to have fallen from favour more recently in favour of Kurosawa and Ozu but remains my favourite, I'm guessing part of that might be just how far reaching his influence was on arthouse cinema generally and when names come up in relation to slow cinema with long flowing takes Tarkovsky tends to come before him despite I suspect Mizoguchi being a pretty major influence on him.

I think the Imamura Narayama is definately worth seeing, really just takes the basic idea from the original film and turns it into something else entirely. I'd guess you could predict that its very "earthy" coming from him and the location shoot is obviously vastly different from the original as well playing that up, He plays up the isolation so much as well that the society becomes almost tribal, a lot of films like that I think tend to try and transpose modern morality ontop that situation but this is really morality of that situation which makes for very interesting viewing IMHO.

 

[Bullitt68]

I had no idea about Lee wanting to do Ichi. That's awesome. Would have been awesome.

Bruce was coming into his own as a "martial auteur" with The Way of the Dragon and the planned The Game of Death, but he told Kareem Abdul-Jabbar that he was thinking about retiring because he knew that he couldn't keep hitting home runs like he was. I think that one option that he was considering was to not take his entire career onto his own shoulders writing/producing/directing/starring in every single film of his forever on, but rather doing some his own stuff here, then some Hollywood stuff there, and even some Shaw Brothers stuff. Originally, Shaw Brothers was the place he expected to land when he returned to Hong Kong, but Golden Harvest gave him a better deal. After Enter the Dragon and The Game of Death, he was going to finally work at Shaw Brothers as a bona fide star, which would've been so cool. And Zatoichi was one of the things that he really wanted to do.

All of Tarkovsky and Shepitko's The Ascent are personal favorites of mine. The only metaphysical masterpieces ever made imo.

It took me a lot of years and a lot of effort to come around on Tarkovsky. Even now, I love Ivan's Childhood, Solaris, and Stalker, but the rest is real tough for me. I've long said that Tarkovsky was born 50 years too late. If he would've come up in the silent era, his cinema would've been peerless. But in the sound era, his dialogue is just so clunky and contrived, at times literally just poems shoved into his actors' mouths. It makes things tough for me as a supreme dialogue lover.

You have great taste. The Circus and Joan of Arc are both top 10 films for me. I love Lang's Die Nibelungen as well and all his Hollywood noir.

Have you seen Chaplin's sound stuff, too? For a lot of years, I ignored his later sound stuff, but when I got around to it, I was blown away. Literally every film that he made until A Countess from Hong Kong is amazing, and A King in New York is very high on my list of Chaplin favorites even including his silent stuff. I've always found Buster Keaton overrated, but Harold Lloyd is my #2 behind Chaplin. Do you like the other silent clowns?

And yeah, Lang rules. Have you seen Der müde Tod (aka Destiny or Weary Death)? Metropolis obviously reigns supreme as Lang's crowning achievement during his silent era, and I'm also a huge fan of his crime epic Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, but Der müde Tod distills Griffith's monstrous Intolerance down to a more intimate scale and manages to outdo Griffith on the emotional level as a woman tries to fight death and bring her lover back to life. One of my favorite Lang films and one of my favorite silent films. I'm also a big fan of his noir films once he got to Hollywood. Scarlet Street is one of the most painful noir films ever made but I like The Woman in the Window even more. Lang was quite inspired to make Edward G. Robinson - Little Caesar himself, a titanic screen presence when the role called for it - one of the biggest saps in the noir dupe category.

I've seen most of Lean because I love Dickens

Haha, yep, his Great Expectations is the best adaptation of that story in film history. I've never liked - and still don't like - Lean's big epics (The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, Ryan's Daughter), but when I saw and loved Great Expectations and realized that Lean directed it, I was curious to see if I'd like his other earlier and smaller films. Turns out, I loved every one of them. His first two films are solid wartime, patriotic dramas, but postwar he's off and running. Blithe Spirit is hilarious and so beautifully shot in Technicolor, Brief Encounter is one of the all-time great melodramas, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist are probably the two best Dickens adaptations in film, The Passionate Friends was obviously another attempt at a Brief Encounter-level success and while it doesn't reach that level it's still a moving melodrama with the great Claude Rains, Madeleine is one of the many great underrated British noir films of the '40s and '50s, Hobson's Choice gave my man Charles Laughton one of his classic roles, and Summertime with Katharine Hepburn is maybe the most underrated melodrama of the '50s. I really do think that Lean rules, but not for the films that most everyone else does.

Another great Losey film is Mr. Klein and he also did a Hammer Horror film called The Damned that's a masterpiece of B-horror imo.

I'd never even heard of Mr. Klein, but it sounds wild, like a Hitchcockian "wrong man" thriller except instead of Cary Grant running around America it's Alain Delon trying to escape the Nazis in the Holocaust! That's a wild premise. I'd also never heard of The Damned, but I looked it up and that's another wild premise. He really cut loose once he jumped the pond, huh

 

[Busgosu]

Well, in the surprise category, @Busgosu, I thought that Plácido kind of stunk. I'll admit right off the bat that I'm not a fan of these kinds of "comedies of manners," particularly the big ensemble "look how many people there are doing wacky stuff" films from Dinner at Eight and Smiles of a Summer Night to La Dolce Vita and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. This is the most Felliniesque film of Berlanga's thus far, but in the bad sense, in relation to Fellini's later films that give rise to jokes like this.

Well, Plácido is regarded as one of Berlanga's best, but yeah, I ser your point and can understand why you didn't enjoy it too much.

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

I'm watching Severance right now... my memory has been off recently so I don't remember the whole show, but I am so impressed with this final episode of Season 1. Wow. #MindBlowing. I had to say something about it, lol

 

[HenryFlower]

how’s the Berlanga deep dive going? @Bullitt68
i see you’ve hit a few duds. how far off from The Executioner are you? that’s the one i’m very interested to get some thoughts on because i’ve shot it way up my queue in light of your recent viewing project

I'm watching Severance right now... my memory has been off recently so I don't remember the whole show, but I am so impressed with this final episode of Season 1. Wow. #MindBlowing. I had to say something about it, lol

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

how’s the Berlanga deep dive going? @Bullitt68
i see you’ve hit a few duds. how far off from The Executioner are you? that’s the one i’m very interested to get some thoughts on because i’ve shot it way up my queue in light of your recent viewing project

Yeah, pretty great. I'm definitely interested in Season 2. That first 15 minutes of the final episode, wow. It ended on a high note, too.

I thought the whole season was pretty great overall. Very interesting.

 

[HenryFlower]

Yeah, pretty great. I'm definitely interested in Season 2. That first 15 minutes of the final episode, wow. It ended on a high note, too.

I thought the whole season was pretty great overall. Very interesting.

the amount of (extremely well-earned & well-plotted) reveals that took me out at the knees was craziness. brilliant execution of tension escalation too

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

I'm watching The Holy Mountain, damn this is trippy. I don't even know what to say... it's very artistic, the scenes are really nice to look at, it's always real cool and 'stylish' - I like it.

I downloaded a subtitles track and ended up being the director describe each scene as it happens. Pretty cool.

 

[Bullitt68]

I'm watching Severance right now... my memory has been off recently so I don't remember the whole show, but I am so impressed with this final episode of Season 1. Wow. #MindBlowing. I had to say something about it, lol

Haha, meanwhile, because of that old thread, I started rewatching Hannibal today. I even made a new post in that thread like I'm back in the good old days of 2013-2015 when the GOAT series was airing live

how’s the Berlanga deep dive going? @Bullitt68
i see you’ve hit a few duds. how far off from The Executioner are you? that’s the one i’m very interested to get some thoughts on because i’ve shot it way up my queue in light of your recent viewing project

That's the next one up on the list. I'm about to start grading final papers for last term and then prepping for the new term starting next week, so my movie watching time is quickly evaporating, but I at least want to watch that one if not a couple more before the end of this little spring break of mine.

 

[moreorless87]

Agreed. For Mizoguchi, if I recall the numbers, he made over 40 films in the '20s but only one remains (and I don't know which one it is but I haven't seen it). I'm most bummed that I can't see his 1929 film Bridge of Japan, which is one of the two Mizoguchi films (along with The 47 Ronin) that Ichikawa remade in his career. But yeah, it's weird how Mizoguchi often told "old" stories yet his films feel so contemporary, while Ozu often told contemporary stories yet his films feel rather "old-fashioned."

Even with both mens contemporary stuff I think you could argue Ozu tends to focus on the older characters and Mizoguchi on the younger ones. Perhaps you could argue if politics are a factor maybe Mizoguchi's feminism is viewed as dated to modern eyes(not sure I'd agree but I'v seen it stated) whilst Ozu's conservatism tends to be viewed as an interesting view back to that post war era?

Visually very different as well but perhaps actually the opposite? Mizoguchi's long flowing takes seem like there aiming for a very anti modern atmosphere were as Ozu's fixed camera and very geometric shots feel very modern.

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

I'm rewatching the final episode right now of Severance, watching it yesterday for the first time while I was tripping was absolutely incredible. I felt like the show became an integral part of my trip, I was interpreting stuff from a new perspective. And watching it again I feel like the show was made for people who might be tripping. The way the camera moves and what it highlights, all very trippy. Like yesterday I was understanding it perfectly, today I'm not quite as good.

Rewatching just on having smoked a bowl and I have some questions for the show directors

Spoiler

Why is it that for each person the "Innie" takes total control and the person they were the rest of the time, the "Outie" just disappears. It's like only the "Innie" matters and that doesn't make sense.

I had another criticism, but I forgot, lol

This show is pretty good all around, I recommend it.

 

[Bullitt68]

Even with both mens contemporary stuff I think you could argue Ozu tends to focus on the older characters and Mizoguchi on the younger ones. Perhaps you could argue if politics are a factor maybe Mizoguchi's feminism is viewed as dated to modern eyes(not sure I'd agree but I'v seen it stated) whilst Ozu's conservatism tends to be viewed as an interesting view back to that post war era?

Visually very different as well but perhaps actually the opposite? Mizoguchi's long flowing takes seem like there aiming for a very anti modern atmosphere were as Ozu's fixed camera and very geometric shots feel very modern.

All true. Then again, Mizoguchi's moving camera was very much ahead of the curve, a progenitor of the contemporary art cinema (and especially slow cinema) fondness for camera movement, whereas Ozu's idiosyncratic and ostentatious static geometrism could be seen as very stagey and old-timey if not "uncinematic."

Meanwhile, sociopolitically, one of the reasons that Mizoguchi is experiencing a resurgence of late is precisely because of his ahead-of-its-time and still I'd say rather progressive feminism. As for Ozu, I've always found it fascinating to hear in one of his films (remembering that Ozu served in WWII and was part of a regiment that used chemical warfare on the Chinese and did all sorts of heinous stuff) Chishû Ryû in An Autumn Afternoon discuss how it was a good thing that the Japanese were defeated by the Allies.

Lots of fascinating stuff in both men's films, both when viewed in context and from a contemporary vantage point.

 

[HUNTERMANIA]

I'm rewatching Hannibal now. You know I've seen this show, seasons 1-2, like 48 times lol. There was a time period where I just left this on for days at a time. It's all I watched. And it's still new today. I'm still amazed by it and I'm not tired of it at all. I feel like this show has infinite durability.