217 Tokyo Story

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Martha
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217 Tokyo Story

#1 Post by Martha » Sat Feb 12, 2005 10:12 pm

Tokyo Story

[img]http://criterion_production.s3.amazonaws.com/release_images/329/217_box_348x490_w100.jpg[/img]Image

A profoundly stirring evocation of elemental humanity and universal heartbreak, Tokyo Story is the crowning achievement of the unparalleled Yasujiro Ozu. The film, which follows an aging couple as they leave their rural village to visit their two married children in bustling postwar Tokyo, surveys the rich and complex world of family life with the director’s customary delicacy and incisive perspective on social mores. Featuring lovely performances from Ozu regulars Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara, Tokyo Story plumbs and deepens the director’s recurring themes of generational conflict, creating what is without question one of cinema’s mightiest masterpieces.


Disc Features

- New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary featuring Yasujiro Ozu scholar David Desser, editor of Ozu’s “Tokyo Story”
- I Lived, But . . . , a two-hour documentary from 1953 about Ozu’s life and career, featuring interviews with critics and former cast and crew members
- Talking with Ozu, a forty-minute tribute to the director from 1993, featuring the reflections of filmmakers Lindsay Anderson, Claire Denis, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Aki Kaurismäki, Stanley Kwan, Paul Schrader, and Wim Wenders
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation
-PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic David Bordwell


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ellipsis7
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#2 Post by ellipsis7 » Fri Jun 10, 2005 5:03 am

Best film of all time?

It's certainly up there in the top 5 for me....

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Michael Kerpan
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#3 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Jun 10, 2005 9:02 am

I guess it's always nice to hear praise of Ozu and his films -- but one has to wonder a bit when the piece is as naive, uninformed and even unprofessional as this one in the Guardian.

The writer (Peter Bradshaw) doesn't even get characters' names right! And he misreads the tone of the film completely. And what he says about Hara is on the level of fan magazine gush (and also not particularly accurate). Rubbishy -- despite the praise.

Simon Hattenstone's superficial overview of Ozu simply recycles critical truisms that have circulated since the 70s.

Nice to see Ozu getting some attention, though.

offtopic: I see Bradshaw also witlessly trashes Hou Hsiao Hsien's utterly wonderful "Cafe Lumiere" in this week's set of reviews.

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ellipsis7
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#4 Post by ellipsis7 » Fri Jun 10, 2005 9:18 am

Unusually all the film stuff is usually in the separate section Friday Review of The Guardian... This found its way into the also separate features G2 section... Hattenstone was previously briefly film critic, but agree with you that it is neither the most original nor the most carefully written pair of pieces... Still it's nice to see TOKYO STORY up there, and it was a pleasant surprise to find in the daily newspaper complete with large pics...

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#5 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Jun 10, 2005 9:24 am

Alas, the online edition doesn't have all the nice pictures!

I like seeing Ozu get publicity -- but worry that pieces like thes4e make it sound like seeing him is some sort of necessary, but not especially unpleasnt duty. There is no hint here that Ozu is, in fact, serves up lots of humor in his films (even in Tokyo Story).

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ellipsis7
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#6 Post by ellipsis7 » Fri Jun 10, 2005 9:33 am

Totally agree...

On other point:

I just caught Kiarostami's FIVE - 'Five Long takes dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu'... Very interesting, surprisingly engaging and sometimes humorous, although the connection with Ozu is more indirect than overt...

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#7 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Jun 10, 2005 10:10 am

Look forward to the Kiarostami film -=- I wonder if he'll do a "Five on Five" -- and if this will provide his concept of how hhis film connects to Ozu?

;~}

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skuhn8
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#8 Post by skuhn8 » Sat Jun 18, 2005 2:59 am

From the Criterion web site:
Tokyo Story Tops Best 1,000 List

The creators of the influential Halliwell's Film Guide have declared Yasujiro Ozu's timeless masterpiece Tokyo Story the best film of all time in their new Halliwell's Top 1,000, a book-length catalog of the 1,000 greatest films ever made. Ozu's poignant tale of aging and generational divide beat out such enduring classics as Citizen Kane and Vertigo, which, nevertheless, do appear in the top ten, along with Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. For more information on Ozu and Halliwell's, click here.Tokyo Story Tops Best 1,000 List

The creators of the influential Halliwell's Film Guide have declared Yasujiro Ozu's timeless masterpiece Tokyo Story the best film of all time in their new Halliwell's Top 1,000, a book-length catalog of the 1,000 greatest films ever made. Ozu's poignant tale of aging and generational divide beat out such enduring classics as Citizen Kane and Vertigo, which, nevertheless, do appear in the top ten, along with Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2. For more information on Ozu and Halliwell's, click here.
I wish I could understand the appeal of this film. After two viewings it still left me going "so what". I know this is one of those instances when it's the viewer coming up short on the goods and not the object viewed...but man! I see nothing there except insipid smiles masking repressed feeling captured by static camera shots. Is there a good place to go to understand and appreciate what Ozu is about or if I don't get it I just won't get it? I enjoyed Good Morning, but mostly due to it's "oh how cute" factor.

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#9 Post by dvdane » Sat Jun 18, 2005 4:30 am

Halliwell's Film Guide has nothing to do with Leslie Halliwell anymore. Ever since John Walker took over the guide after Halliwell's death, all of his ratings have been distorted and undermined. For instance Walker gave "Terminator 2" ** in the 8th Guide, something which made the followers of Halliwell drop the guide and probably make Halliwell himself roll in the grave.

Halliwell never included any of Ozu's films in his guide. In his companion, Ozu is only mentioned very briefly. So I doubt if he ever actually saw any of his films. Halliwell may have been a grumpy old man, but he probably would, if reviewed, had given "Tokyo Story" ** or maybe even *** (**** being his highest grade).

When Walker took over, several of Halliwells ratings were directly changed. For instance, Halliwell only gave "Seven Samurai" ***, but Walker upped the rating to ****. Likewise Halliwell only gave "8½" ** and noted, that "Some of it is fascinating, some not worth the trouble of sorting out."

Neither of these films would ever make it on his Top 10 best film list. Thus the new list has nothing to do with Halliwell at all, but merely is another step from its current directors away from the critism of Halliwell towards general appraisal of the films.

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#10 Post by artfilmfan » Sat Jun 18, 2005 5:35 pm

skuhn8 wrote:
I wish I could understand the appeal of this film. After two viewings it still left me going "so what". I know this is one of those instances when it's the viewer coming up short on the goods and not the object viewed...but man! I see nothing there except insipid smiles masking repressed feeling captured by static camera shots. Is there a good place to go to understand and appreciate what Ozu is about or if I don't get it I just won't get it? I enjoyed Good Morning, but mostly due to it's "oh how cute" factor.
Reading Roger Ebert's reviews may help you understand and appreciate what Ozu is about. I think he reviewed "Floating Weeds", "Tokyo Story" and "Late Spring" in the Great Movies section of his website. Or keep watching "Tokyo Story" once every few years until you "get it" (no kidding). I think "Tokyo Story" best expresses the essence of "what Ozu is about." Consider these questions:

- Does one see oneself in any of the children portrayed in "Tokyo Story"? That is, does one sometimes treat one's parents the same way, selfishly, as these children treat their elderly parents in "Tokyo Story"?

- If one has elderly parents, has one thought of the fact that one day they will no longer be around and that perhaps one should be nicer to them now before it's too late?

The essence of Ozu is not much about what others (aka "the experts") think or write about. It's more about one's understanding/feeling and whether one can relate to the situations, emotions, or characters that are depicted in the films.

I hope this helps. If not, maybe what you said, "if I don't get it I just won't get it", is true.

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#11 Post by GringoTex » Sat Jun 18, 2005 7:46 pm

dvdane wrote:Halliwell's Film Guide has nothing to do with Leslie Halliwell anymore.
Does Halliwell's Film Guide's fame come from the fact that it was the guide of it's kind?

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#12 Post by Jaime_Weinman » Sat Jun 18, 2005 10:12 pm

Halliwell's Film Guide has nothing to do with Leslie Halliwell anymore.
Yes, I often wonder why they even bother calling it "Halliwell's" now. The appeal of the guide was that, for better or for worse, it was a guide representing the ratings of one man (unlike, say, the Maltin guide, which is a group effort). Halliwell's tastes appeared to have stopped around 1950 -- as evidenced by his afterword, "The Decline and Fall of the Movie," where he basically ranted against every new development in cinema from CinemaScope onwards -- and he tended to give an inordinate number of four-star ratings to British movies he'd seen in his youth, etc. But they were his tastes, and it was interesting to follow them (and his choices of quotes from other critics was sometimes interesting, and sometimes contradicted his own opinions). Now it's just another guide that gives the "consensus" opinion about films, and it's lost the idiosyncracy.

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#13 Post by Brian Oblivious » Sat Jun 18, 2005 11:06 pm

Jaime_Weinman wrote: Halliwell's tastes appeared to have stopped around 1950


I wouldn't go so far as to say "stopped"- I've got the 1974 edition of the guide sitting in front of me, in which he placed a number of 1950's films in his top 100, including:


Invasion of the Body Snatchers
North By Northwest
Singing
(sic) in the Rain
Twelve Angry Men
Monsieur Hulot's Holiday
the Living Desert
Night of the Demon


among others.

But this discussion of Halliwell is veering way off-topic. I wish I could use Halliwell to steer it back to Ozu, but I'm afraid I have to agree with Henrik that the man probably never saw his films. Though he did see at least one Mizoguchi. His intro to the top 100 list even mentions it:

Besides, absolute standards vary: ten years ago the world's critics were polled and placed Ugetsu Monogatari near the top, but these days it is scarcely remembered.

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#14 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Aug 13, 2005 4:21 pm

> Tokyo Story ... for me it's a completely painful way to
> spend two hours.

Oh well. Looks like skuhn's never going to get invited to watch movies at MY house. (He wouldn't have any fun watching movies there).

;~}

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skuhn8
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#15 Post by skuhn8 » Sat Aug 13, 2005 4:36 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:> Tokyo Story ... for me it's a completely painful way to
> spend two hours.

Oh well. Looks like skuhn's never going to get invited to watch movies at MY house. (He wouldn't have any fun watching movies there).

;~}
Actually I would LOVE to watch Tokyo Story with someone who appreciates it. I haven't watched Early Summer yet because I'm hoping someday I'll have the opportunity of doing so. Commentary hasn't helped me, but I am confident that with time--and uh maturity--I'll come to appreciate it. As I've said on the Tokyo Story thread: "I just don't get it." I trust it's there. I'm one of those fools who actually appeals to authority. I don't think this film has as strong a fan base as it does just because people want to appear all high-falutin and such. What really bugs me about this period of Ozu--if it is a period thing, cause I enjoyed Good Morning--is that damn static camera on full front face shots. Drives me nuts.

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#16 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sat Aug 13, 2005 9:06 pm

> Actually I would LOVE to watch Tokyo Story with
> someone who appreciates it. I haven't watched Early
> Summer yet because I'm hoping someday I'll have the
> opportunity of doing so.

That said , I don't appreciate Tokyo Story, I mainly just enjoy it.

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#17 Post by peerpee » Fri Sep 23, 2005 9:14 pm

1953 (from the film):
Image


2005 (photo by Jeff Kuo):
Image

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Steven H
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#18 Post by Steven H » Fri Sep 23, 2005 9:47 pm

Thanks Nick, that's effin great. I just spent a good ten minutes looking at all the differences. Then and now.

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#19 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Sep 23, 2005 10:07 pm

Deeply impressed -- and grateful!

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skuhn8
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#20 Post by skuhn8 » Sat Sep 24, 2005 5:20 am

very impressed...and saddened. Not a big fan of progress, but it is really cool to see that awning still standing the test of time.

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#21 Post by shirobamba » Sat Sep 24, 2005 6:53 am

Thanks Nick. That´s great! Is there more of this kind?

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#22 Post by ellipsis7 » Sat Sep 24, 2005 7:30 am

Great pix!

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Michael
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#23 Post by Michael » Sat Sep 24, 2005 8:06 am

I don't mean to shift the attention on Tokyo Story but for those who love the before & after pics, here's the link for Vertigo: http://www.basichip.com/vertigo/main.htm

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#24 Post by artfilmfan » Sat Sep 24, 2005 12:39 pm

Thanks for the great picture comparing the scene from "Tokyo Story". It makes me appreciate this old B&W film even more. I often feel sad when looking at new photographs of places that were captured on film long ago.

I have photographs recently taken of the temples in Kyoto that are featured in "Late Spring" which show very little changes after these years. I took these pictures before I saw the film (i.e., I didn't know that they were featured in the film). Unfortunately, I don't know how to do the screen capture and I don't have a scanner to enable me to share the pictures online.

Where is that place shown in the "Tokyo Story" picture located ?

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#25 Post by peerpee » Sat Sep 24, 2005 12:41 pm

I believe it's Onomichi. I've got some more comparisons coming soon, courtesy of Jeff Kuo who spent days carefully working these out in June this year.

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