Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

Discuss internationally-released DVDs and Blu-rays or other international DVD and Blu-ray-related topics.
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smokes
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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#251 Post by smokes » Fri Sep 17, 2021 12:10 pm

L.A. wrote:
Thu Sep 16, 2021 12:14 pm
Star of David: Beautiful Girl Hunter coming to Blu-ray on October 5th from Impulse Pictures. Mondo Digital has a review for it.
wow this looks fantastic. i've been really enjoying a lot of these impulse nikkatsu releases

Calvin
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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#252 Post by Calvin » Thu Dec 30, 2021 1:21 pm

Third Window have confirmed that in 2022 they'll be releasing another Obayashi box set containing The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, School in the Crosshairs, His Motorbike, Her Island, and The Island Closest to Heaven

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Finch
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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#253 Post by Finch » Wed Jan 19, 2022 8:37 pm

rewind are reviewing the Japanese UHD of Kon Ichikawa's The Inugami Family UHD which comes with English subs for the feature. A standard edition without the book is hopefully forthcoming.

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feihong
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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#254 Post by feihong » Thu Jan 20, 2022 12:20 am

Calvin wrote:
Thu Dec 30, 2021 1:21 pm
Third Window have confirmed that in 2022 they'll be releasing another Obayashi box set containing The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, School in the Crosshairs, His Motorbike, Her Island, and The Island Closest to Heaven
Now, that is a nice box set. The only really weak movie in this set, to my mind, is The Island Closest to Heaven, which makes up for being aimless and boring by being gorgeous to look at. The others are some of Obayashi's nicest 80s pop movies. I'll be getting this one for sure.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#255 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:35 am

GWLTT is the only one of these I've seen -- and it was pretty enjoyable (despite some occasional, VERY cheesy special effects/graphics). So, I'm in for this one too.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#256 Post by Glowingwabbit » Thu Jan 20, 2022 7:13 pm

I'll be buying the set primarily for His Motorbike, Her Island which is my favorite so far of his work. Very excited to get that one. School in the Crosshairs didn't do anything for me and felt like a mess but I'm willing to try it again (maybe a restored version will help). The other two I haven't seen yet.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#257 Post by feihong » Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:26 pm

In the U.S. people know Obayashi for Hausu (rather than the much more charming and moving short Emotion: Dracula's Legendary Afternoon, offered on the same blu ray disc), but in Japan my impression is that the run of lightweight, playful movies starring pop singers in the 80s––represented by this set––is what he was most beloved for. The film conspicuously missing from this set, but I think key to Obayashi in the era, is Exchange Students, which is wonderful fun. The pictures in this set, however, are all his most pop-oriented movies (discounting the Momoe Yamaguchi vehicle, Take Me Away!, which feels more like a jobber kind of picture than most of Obayashi's movies), and the artsier movies he was making around the same time, including The Deserted City and Bound for the Fields, The Mountains and the Seacoast. The films in the boxset all have blu rays previously released in Japan (high-quality ones, too). There is a blu ray of The Deserted City, but Bound for the Fields––probably Obayashi's single best feature––remains sadly only on DVD in Japan (incidentally, the film can be seen with English subs on youtube, in both the full-color version and the black-and-white one––I personally prefer the color). I hope those films are ones they might release in the future. I liked School in the Crosshairs a lot––it seemed to me to be a kind of fun transitional movie between the weird little quasi-jobber period of the Blackjack movie, the Kosuke Kindaichi movie, and Take Me Away!, and the pop-art period of Girl Who Leapt Through Time and the rest of this set. So it has a lot of the gooniness of the jobber films, but some of the idol singer charm of the later movies. And I thought the fascist takeover of the school was a really interesting direction in which to take the movie. His Motorbike, Her Island is beautiful and believably romantic. It benefits from a very limited scope to the drama, and a really well-wrought mood. I'd say mood drives The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, as well––incidentally, that film is far better than the novel it's based on, which is something I wouldn't usually say. The Island Closest to Heaven works in a similar way. What it's missing is the clear throughline that ties the story elements together; something the other films all have. The central performance, from the same actress as in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, is good, but without the clear story structure, it doesn't hang together in as satisfying a way. But by and large, these are the mostly very entertaining movies, and a good representation of what made Obayashi so popular in Japan.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#258 Post by Michael Kerpan » Thu Jan 20, 2022 10:13 pm

I'm sorry Exchange Student didn't make it into this set... (FWIW, I like GWLTT a lot more than Hausu).

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#259 Post by Calvin » Fri Jan 21, 2022 3:06 am

I'm pretty sure all of the films Third Window licensed are from Kadokawa. Others, such as Exchange Students, are with different licensors.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#260 Post by Adam X » Fri Jan 21, 2022 7:05 am

feihong wrote:
Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:26 pm
In the U.S. people know Obayashi for Hausu (rather than the much more charming and moving short Emotion: Dracula's Legendary Afternoon, offered on the same blu ray disc), but in Japan my impression is that the run of lightweight, playful movies starring pop singers in the 80s––represented by this set
Well, I’m not American, but as someone who really liked Hausu but apparently (according to my Letterboxd diary) couldn’t even make it all the way through Emotion, do you think I might find enough to like in the films contained in either of TWF’s sets?

I’ve been meaning to check out Labyrinth of Cinema, but I have the impression I’d get more out of it if I’d seen more of Obayashi’s filmography than just the one feature.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#261 Post by pzadvance » Fri Jan 21, 2022 7:07 am

Interesting. I really liked Island Closest to Heaven, it has strong “live action studio ghibli” vibes, whereas i found Girl Who Leapt Through Time to be pretty dull and sloppy. Can’t wait to see the rest of the films in this set!

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#262 Post by feihong » Fri Jan 21, 2022 10:02 am

Adam X wrote:
Fri Jan 21, 2022 7:05 am
feihong wrote:
Thu Jan 20, 2022 8:26 pm
In the U.S. people know Obayashi for Hausu (rather than the much more charming and moving short Emotion: Dracula's Legendary Afternoon, offered on the same blu ray disc), but in Japan my impression is that the run of lightweight, playful movies starring pop singers in the 80s––represented by this set
Well, I’m not American, but as someone who really liked Hausu but apparently (according to my Letterboxd diary) couldn’t even make it all the way through Emotion, do you think I might find enough to like in the films contained in either of TWF’s sets?

I’ve been meaning to check out Labyrinth of Cinema, but I have the impression I’d get more out of it if I’d seen more of Obayashi’s filmography than just the one feature.
These 80s movies are very different than both Hausu and Emotion; much more streamlined. If you've seen any 80s Kadokawa movies, Like Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun or Detective Story, these are made in that mold. The focus is on a famous teen pop star and their precocious adventures in these movies, so The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and The Island Closest to Heaven focus on Tomoyo Harada, winning us over with her shy delicacy, and School in the Crosshairs gives us a lot of the spunky courage of Hiroko Yakushimaru, and also gives us some of her struggles with chauvinism she faced in Sailor Suit and Machine Gun as well (and also in The Terrible Couple, though that's not, I think a Kadokawa film). You still see Obayashi's very hand-made looking special effects, but these films are more plot and character driven than the 70s movies––which I would say are more driven by effects and editing, and a general mood––sort of the mood of the filmmaker. These 80s movies are much more "professional" (excepting Drifting Classroom, which is batsh*t insane, and Bound for the Fields, The Mountains & the Coastline, which is a more impressive, slightly more intellectual art film (this and the other ATG film, The Deserted City, showcase that side of Obayashi like no other films do before or after them).

I think there's a lot to like in these films. The personalities of the stars are compelling, the films look gorgeous, and they have great mood and, in what becomes a hallmark of Obayashi's films in the 80s, an impressive series of character actors in the supporting roles. We begin to see, at least in The Girl Who Conquered Time, Obayashi's very pleasant obsession with his town of Onomichi, which makes a pretty superb backdrop for his stories. This is a town built up and down a couple of small mountains, with a canal dividing it in two, and it serves as the setting for Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Exchange Students, Loneyhearts, The Rockinghorsemen, Chizuko's Little Sister, and Labyrinth of Cinema, at least––though I think some of the other films take place there, and some have some uncredited scenes there. Pretty sure parts of Goodbye for Tomorrow take place there, too.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is based on a Japanese science fiction novel which feels like it's written for young readers. Obayashi's take on the story adds a significant amount to the story that isn't there in the novel; material which, after seeing the film, you feel generally ought to be in the novel, too. Like many films from the era, including movies as diverse as Zigeunerweisen and My Neighbor Totoro, the film has a strong feeling of nostalgia for a vanishing old Japan, and an atmosphere of gentle mystery.

School in the Crosshairs, by comparison, is a little like the Obayashi movies after Hausu and immediately before it––like The Visitor in the Eye, Take Me Away, The Adventures of Kosuke Kindaichi, and Pretty Little Devil. All of these films feel, I would say, overplotted for what Obayashi really prefers later on. They have a kind of busy frippery to the scenes, a lot of fast talk, a lot of theatrical grandiosity, but that on-screen mis-en-scene rarely feels "plugged–in" to the character development, and rarely does it feed the plot in a clear, necessary way. There are a lot of gothic trappings still in The Visitor in the Eye and Pretty Little Devil, but in School in the Crosshairs Obayashi trades that for a kind of Scanners-like sci-fi paranoia. A precocious high school girl develops ESP powers just in time to fight off an invasion of her high school by ESP–using students trying to set up a fascist dystopia on the school grounds. For what I would say is the first time in Obayashi's canon, the plot and the character development and the style of filmmaking work together to necessarily deepen one another (as opposed to in Emotion, where one feels, I would say, a strong mis en scene, but an absent script and no strong acting, and Hausu, which I feel works in the same way). School in the Crosshairs doesn't land that plane entirely smoothly––the main villain is out of a mighty morphin power rangers episode, and the supporting characters besides Hiroko's love interest aren't well-developed at all, and the ending is a little convoluted, but the movie works well to charm us with Hiroko and to put us into her head as her perceptions, sensitivities, and mental abilities expand. The neatest scenes to me are the very boisterous kendo competitions in the gymnasium, where the camera races through the space, capturing the noise and tension inside Hiroko's head. This one is sort of a run-up to The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, in which a lot of similar material gets refined considerably (for instance, Obayashi just removes villains, campy or otherwise, entirely from the picture). The magical elements of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time are created much more organically than in School in the Crosshairs, but you can see the bones of Obayashi's light dramas of the 80s in it. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is the movie where Obayashi's control of his subject matter and his actors lines up to his technical ability, and in that movie you feel none of the flaws in School in the Crosshairs––which is amusing and interesting all the same.

The Island Closest to Heaven uses the same lead actress as The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and it has a very wistful, yearning mood. The film takes place in New Caldonia, and is very beautiful to look at. Tomoyo Harada arrives on the island to see what her late father describes as his own idea of paradise. Her adventures there take her off the beaten path, and enable her to intercede in other people's love affairs, and find a love affair of her own. I don't think Tomoyo Harada is quite as focused in this film––it's awfully hard to tell what her motivations are at various points in the story. And what story there is is very loose. The love affair Tomoyo's character has with a Japanese boy on the island is very heartfelt––all the romances are. So I think it mostly works, but I didn't personally feel the transporting effect The Girl Who Leapt Through Time gave me.

His Motorbike, Her Island is a romance between a rakish, independent-minded motorist and a bold, outspoken girl he meets on the road, who seems to accept him just as he is. The biker's challenge from then on in the story is to learn to accept her free spirit as the equivalent of his own, and worthy of his respect. The film is gorgeous, featuring a lot of back-country the main characters bike around, and some various hijinks. The main character is an extraordinary *sshole a lot of the time, but we see him come into maturity honestly over the breadth of the film. Riki Takeuchi shows up in it as a bosozoku the motorcyclist duels with a couple of times. As with most Obayashi movies of the 80s, there are a lot of charismatic teens in the film, and people sing some songs. I really appreciate how much often a cappella singing goes on 80s Japanese pop-art movies, from Shinji Somai to Seijun Suzuki to Obayashi. In this film, the biker's ex-girlfriend becomes his songwriting budy's girlfriend, and ends up a singer in the bar they all like to go to. In The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Tomoyo and one of her schoolfriends sing a song together in an intimate scene. There's a lot of later Obayashi movies where this is a major part of the picture.

All in all I'd say these films feel more mainstream than Hausu, but mainstream as made by a filmmaker with a very particular outlook. In spite of their pedigree as idol films (discounting His Motorbike Her Island there––it's a film which feels a lot like the idol films, even though I'm not certain the actresses are idol singers), none of these feel like they could really have been made this way by anyone but Obayashi. They have in them a lot of his joy and playfulness, and his wistful romantic sense, before all that curdles in the 90s, and Obayashi's obsession with death––not absent from these movies, but not an emphasis––overwhelms the playfulness in his filmmaking.

I have seen people complementing Labyrinth of Cinema before, but I have to admit I think the film is a trash fire, digressive in an unappealing way, and painfully awkward to watch. It's also incredibly long, and you feel the length, almost right away once it starts going. But to give you an example of where I'm coming from, All of Obayashi's work starting with at least The Reason in 2004 is excessively morbid, poorly produced, and rather shrill to me. I don't like Seven Weeks, or Hanagatami, or Casting Blossoms Into the Sky, either. In these films I think Obayashi reverts to putting the filmmaker's perspective first, as in Emotion and Hausu, but the filmmaker he is has some very desperately literal messages he wants to get across, like "no more bombs" and "no more war." I get it, and I do sympathize, but Obayashi's delivery of these messages is like this over-earnest, overlong harangue, and I find that in the process of delivery, the artificial reality of what generally constitutes a "movie" gets abandoned to a kind of overstuffed essay-form. It's an essay form not so nuanced as, say, Chris marker, and in terms of "no more bomb" movies, I find Hiroshima, Mon Amour far more compelling than Casting Blossoms. Comparing them, Hiroshima actually has a sort of threadbare story, and Casting Blossoms has none to speak of. As far as Labyrinth goes, I found it hung together less than Casting Blossoms or Hanagatami, and the green-screen filming reached a point where the movie was deeply un-fun to watch. Tadanobu Asano's scenes in particular look so glaringly artificial in all their elements it takes you right out of the experience. The film is narrated by a spaceman, which should be amazing, but it turns out this spaceman gets no development and has nothing to say. He's taking his flying saucer to the theater for it's last night of screenings, in order to meet his daughter there. A bunch of viewers sit down to see the show. Then we get all these disparate movie clips, mostly pointing back to Japanese military war-crimes against Japanese citizens. There's a few other genres. Characters reminisce woodenly about the past, and the closing of the cinema that night represents the death of the medium Obayashi clearly loves. It runs for only three painful hours, but really, it never seems to end. Watching it was like slow torture, because there are no characters and no plot to follow, because the audience members offering commentary say lines you feel come directly from the filmmaker's mouth, and because of these things, the poor special effects (it seems as if the whole movie might have been made on a green-screen stage––possibly the result of Obayashi's failing health), the awkward scenarios and poor acting and hashcraft editing, the film is almost never coherent during that time––even as the filmmaker seems to be trying to ram his themes straight down your throat. Perhaps there isn't another movie quite like it (except for Hanagatami and Seven Weeks), but I think the themes of the last 20 morbid years of Obayashi's filmmaking career are better worked-out in his first 100% morbid production, Goodbye for Tomorrow. That film features a cross-section of people from the Japanese countryside, all invited to meet their dead loved ones on a pier on the same night. The varied characters, with different agendas and experiences, all interact in a cottage next to the dock––and this makes up the majority of the runtime. Finally, a ship emerges out of the water, bearing their dead loved ones, who speak to each of them and try and convince the living to go on with their lives. At the end of the movie, guess what happens? But that film has a lot of merits these later movies lack––chief among them that the message of that film is to actually go on and move on with your life––a message the later films aren't so convinced of. Labyrinth of Cinema feels depressingly morbid as well, with the filmmaker obsessing over a lot of death long in the past. There is a kind of visual queasiness that descends upon these later pictures, which I can't help but feel is in some way connected to Obayashi's later preoccupation with morbidity. Anyway, to sum up, I don't recommend that one. But I think the four in the new set are some of Obayashi's better films––especially The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and His Motorbike, Her Island. There are still a lot of very good Obayashi movies out there, so I hope these sets continue.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#263 Post by Michael Kerpan » Fri Jan 21, 2022 10:48 am

Thanks for that lovely essay, feihong!

My wife and I spent several days based in Onomichi -- and it was a wonderful place to be. The polar opposite of Tokyo -- very slow-paced (and full of well-cared-for, apparently free range cats on the mountainside). We ate our breakfasts at Obayashi's favored breakfast place. It has a lovely little movie museum -- which had an expanded Ozu section at the time of our visit. I highly recommend it as a place to not just visit, but stay a little while, to anyone planning a trip to Japan.

I hope someone picks up Negishi's Detective Story.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#264 Post by Calvin » Fri Jan 21, 2022 1:24 pm

I'm hoping that Third Window include some of Obayashi's short films as extras. Onomichi and Confession sound like they would pair quite well with The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#265 Post by Finch » Fri Jan 21, 2022 4:29 pm

I wanted to thank feihong for that excellent write up too. It's nudged me strongly towards a blind buy pre-order. (I liked Hausu a great deal but even prior to feihong's post I knew to expect differently from the films in this set)

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#266 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jan 22, 2022 1:10 pm

Thanks for the rundown feihong, definitely sounds interesting- what are your impressions of Obayashi's Anti-War trilogy from Third Window? Curious if it’s also a safe blind buy to gauge impressions for this upcoming set

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#267 Post by feihong » Sat Jan 22, 2022 6:58 pm

I know there are people who like Hanagatami a lot––I am not one of them. I actually don't feel Obayashi's anti-war trilogy is as reliable a blind-buy, to tell the truth.

These later movies––Casting Blossoms Into the Sky, Seven Weeks, and Hanagatami, are very similar to Labyrinth of Cinema, and very different in tone and execution from the earlier films in Obayashi's career. Casting Blossoms Into the Sky is the first of these I saw, and it was strikingly frustrating and hard to watch. The film plays more like an essay on wartime atrocities than a feature. If I could encapsulate the story, I'd say that it's about the spirit of a girl killed during the war sort of pseudo-haunting the people of a town until the high school students there put on a play exposing all the wartime atrocities that took place in the town––whereupon she vanishes into thin air. There's also some crusty old writer who is researching the buried history of the town during WWII. Most of these later movies feature an Obayashi-like character, like this writer, who lurks around and acts obnoxious in the backgrounds of these later films––the spaceman in Labyrinth of Cinema functions in a similar way. There's a lot of nodding and sighing on the part of these characters, listening to people tell them stories and acting supercilious and smug about it––though the film doesn't provide that smugness as a "reading" of what's going on. It's not meant to feel smug––but the presence of this character always feels exasperatingly patronizing. If I remember right, this character in Casting Blossoms ends up having an affair with one of the bereaved townspeople––but any drama like that following these quasi-narrator characters never feels like something tethered very strongly to the film; it never feels necessary or like any kind of worthwhile addition to what's going on. Casting Blossoms moves at lightning speed, like Tsui Hark speed, through an essay format primarily focused on the effects of bombs of different tonnage. Eventually the teenagers stage this painful harangue of a play, and the truth of the tragedy of war is revealed to...to someone. Most of the audience members are the townspeople who already know what happened. So they nod a lot in agreement about what they're seeing. Basically, the film has no strand of dramatic tension in it at all; the essay comes first; and what you feel is the shrill and rather non-critical insistence of Obayashi himself that bombs must stop falling in the world; now, dammit.

I mean, I'm not opposed to this message, but this film is without humor, without drama, without anything really to aspire to. The film also doesn't try to imagine a world in which the bombs aren't falling; the obsession with tonnage and the dead girl riding a unicycle through the movie are what seem to move Obayashi to have made the movie in the first place. As I watched, I was reminded of the Michael Verhoeven film, The Nasty Girl, which had a similar essay-like structure, and which dealt with a young woman researching the resistance to the Nazis in her native town of Pfilzig. She comes to discover that the resistance was not so fervent as she had always been lead to believe, and this creates enormous problems for her in her life in Pfilzig. That film had so many critical valences––it so much accounted for the vicissitudes of life, for human behavior and psychology, it had such an understanding of irony (and a nice sense of humor), and even though it was largely filmed in front of a slide projector, there was actual narrative tension and intellectual probity going on in the film. As far as an effective anti-war film, I think Overlord does quite nicely. And in terms of an essay film, Marker and Syberberg go so much deeper––and that's what you need to make something like this very interesting. Instead, Casting Blossoms Into the Sky feels awkward and extraordinarily flat-–as if Obayashi was only interested in delivering his message, without any accompanying drama. There are some scenes with ghosts visiting elderly people, but none of this rates as dramatically involving.

After seeing Casting Blossoms, I was somewhat inured to this approach, so Seven Weeks and Hanagatami didn't surprise me so much. Seven Weeks is essentially about a wake, with flashbacks to sketch in the life of the person being remembered. I was so dispirited by Casting Blossoms that I watched this movie in a kind of a trance, and no part of it really stuck with me. I remember some lugubrious musicians on a green screen popping up throughout the film. It was deadly morbid and dull. Of Hanagatami, I can say that I watched 90 minutes of it, and felt like it ought to have been over. But it turns out that point is only the halfway mark. I'm afraid I haven't finished the film, because it was––to me, at least––so very awful. A lot of the filmmaking fouls of this late-period Obayashi are present in all of these films, but Hanagatami delivers their most self-evident representation. The cinematography in these later movies is intensely, grimly digital. The image is simultaneously too crisp and too thin, and Obayashi for some reason frequently films uncomfortably close to characters' faces, kind of like those much-lamented closeups in Shyamalan's The Last Airbender movie. There are a a lot of goony performances, broad to the point of absurdity, from a cast of what seem to be Obayashi's friends. In Hanagatami in particular, these supposed friends, ostensibly Obayashi's slightly younger peers, play teenagers. I don't want to be ageist about this, but I might have to be; the appearance of these 60-year-old men playing teenage boys, leering uncomfortably at 20-year-old actresses...I find it, in this case, disconcerting, primarily because these old men are supposed to be playing young men. The grimaces and rictus-like grins on their faces are supposed to be the unself-conscious smiles of teenagers, and I can't make my mind go there. It's just as jarring and disruptive to the drama as it is when they put a young actor in "old" makeup, like Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in Giant, or Carla Gugino hamming it up in Watchmen. The editing of scenes moves too fast for any dramatic beats to land, and I have to observe that the Obayashi of the 80s and 90s directed with a more measured pace––one that allowed the viewer to take in the plot and the emotional significance of what characters were doing and thinking. None of that is available for these later movies, because the pace is too fast to fully unpack. What's more, the special effects––which in Obayashi's golden period in the 80s looked charming and fun (and which were tolerable in Chizuko's Younger Sister in the 90s)––in these later films, perhaps because of the pall of digital filmmaking, these effects look gaudy and crude and distruptive to the drama. Even the cinematography feels off. Obayashi once was able to create an unusually jeweled image. His Onomichi films have this lustrous visual quality, which comes from atmosphere. In these films Obayashi films from rather far back, capturing light falling upon characters and settings. In these later films, Obayashi's camera seems to be only about a foot or two in front of the actors, and as a result none of the cinematography has much atmosphere or presence. It generally looks surprisingly ugly. Also present in all of the later Obayashi movies is this creeping morbidity. Obayashi has been obsessed with death since at least Emotion: Dracula's Legendary Afternoon, but in his earlier films, that obsession was kept relatively at bay, so that the drama of people actually living their lives could come through. But these later movies are obsessed with death, decay, and dissolution. Even scenes that aren't meant to be a wake end up feeling like one. The later films have this relentless death-drive that also makes them rather dramatically inert, because if our characters are just going to die––or if, as in Casting Blossoms, they end up about people talking about someone else dying ad infinitum––it's hard to generate any tension over the outcome of any given situation.

Even if these films don't strike everyone as bad––I think they're just awful, myself––They are radically different from Obayashi's earlier films in every way. The early films have charm and you can feel Obayashi invested in the drama he's creating. These later ones make it seem like if Obayashi could have gotten up before a crowd and told them to put an end to war, and if everyone set forth to oblige him, he might not need to make a film of it. I've seen people claim these films represent Obayashi moving beyond making mere film and more directly downloading his message to us. What that really does, though, is make for a film with very few interesting aspects that keep you watching. By comparison, the early movies are full of drama, excellent performances, gorgeous cinematography, exceptional editing...they have something to say, and they say it without sacrificing a dramatic narrative. They are everything the later films are not, and they are not didactic or sententious. While they might be a little sentimental, they aren't morbid the way the later films are. Honestly, the release of that previous box-set perplexed me. I guess packaging them as anti-war films makes sense, but I don't know why you'd lead off with Obayashi's least-accomplished films, in a cluster like that. If you like the films in this upcoming box set, I don't think you'd necessarily want to see what Obayashi has in store, 30 years down the road.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#268 Post by Adam X » Mon Jan 24, 2022 4:34 am

feihong, thanks so much for the write up on not just all the relevant films but of Obayashi’s work as a whole. A far better response than I ever expected.

The last time I asked a similar question on this forum was about Jacques Rivette whose films I’ve gone on to really love. Perhaps unfortunately, I think you may’ve put me off either one of TWF’s sets. His earlier films definitely sound more appealing, but you also bring up features of Japanese filmmaking from this era that tend to rub me the wrong way. I suspect I’ll pass on these films, but your writing was, and is, appreciated.

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feihong
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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#269 Post by feihong » Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:57 pm

I mean, I'd say Rivette is one of the great filmmakers of all time, and Obayashi is generally not that. And the very best Obayashi films, so far as I've seen, remain unavailable in the west––Exchange Students, Bound for the Fields, the Mountains, and the Coastline, The Deserted City, Chizuko's Little Sister, Beijing Watermelon, The Rocking Horsemen, Lonelyhearts, and the demented magic of Drifting Classroom, are all still not available (I think Emotion is one of the great films I've seen, and it is available, but it's not feature-length, so I think we can discount it for these purposes). Those are films where the subject matter is more unique and well-developed (excepting Drifting Classroom, but that movie is special because it is insane). Obayashi's Kadowkawa films are some of the very best Kadowkawa films from the 80s; they epitomize the best in the genre, but they don't transcend the genre, like Somai's Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun. By contrast, Obayashi's films for the Art Theater Guild are significantly deeper and more resonant. So he is a filmmaker capable of depth, but not likely to develop it further than what the production has called for. The Kadowkawa films (represented in this new boxset) are more vivid in their surface pleasures than in any underlying meaning behind them. That's kind of the lens I have for most of the Kadokawa films––pleasantly bourgeois, I suppose you could say. It's one aspect of Obayashi, just as his anti-war films are one aspect of his work, his death-obsessed films of the aughts are another aspect, and his more artsy films. With Obayashi, somehow, these different aspects of him correspond to particular eras. I've been meaning to do a larger writeup of all the Obayashi films I've seen, but I was waiting to complete my viewing. I still have to see Haruka Nostalgia, Switching: Goodbye Me, and Sada, and I have yet to finish Hanagatami, and I just found a subtitled version of his "Indian in the Cupboard" rip-off, Samurai Kids, which I'm keen to watch as well, along with computer-translated versions of The Last Snow and Song of Goodbye, which I mean to put myself through, no matter my distaste. That should put to bed the remaining Obayashi films I could see in some way and hope to understand. I wanted to wait until I saw all those before I did that. I was going to do it earlier last year, but the later movies proved really daunting, not things I wanted to watch in succession, so that's unmoored me a little there. There are still a few Obayashi films which are unavailable or at the very least, untranslated and hugely inaccessible (Turning Point being one of the ones I'm most curious about). I hope to see them all one day. But I hope I don't limit people's discovery of these movies when I say that Obayashi is an acquired taste. From early on, he has a real fluency for cinematic craft, which makes these movies generally fun to watch. His compositions are always quality, and the performances he gets from actors are excellent. But his wrestling back and forth with varied subject matter makes one film vastly appealing, and the next alienating in equal measure. His various eras are so different from one another and distinct, that it makes for these very extreme reactions even someone like me who is, ostensibly, a fan of his work, have to the various different projects. He has been willing to be so many different filmmakers at different times. I guess I post this saying that if what you want of Obayashi is something more substantive, there are movies out there where he achieves that. Bound for the Field, the Mountains, and the Seacoast is, to me at least, a great movie, and Exchange Students and The Deserted City are pretty close in terms of quality and profundity. Chizuko's Little Sister, despite a little bit of an imbalance in the film tonally, is of their level of quality and depth as well. But I think these films are harder for companies to access maybe than the Kadokawa productions, or the later anti-war films.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#270 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Feb 13, 2022 2:29 pm

Not Blu-Ray or DVD -- but not sure where else to put this....

Free Japanese films online (starting tomorrow) courtesy of the Japan Film Festival

https://watch.jff.jpf.go.jp/

I can recommend Ito, It's a Summer Film and Time of Eve (which I've seen), lots of other interesting stuff...

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#271 Post by Wittsdream » Wed Mar 02, 2022 10:54 am

A quick question for the collectors of Japanese cinema on this forum: Is the 8 film Mizoguchi blu-ray/dvd boxset issued on the Capricci label in France back in Nov, 2019 English-friendly? I missed out on the Masters of Cinema set from nearly a decade ago and want to acquire this if indeed it has English subtitles (at least on the features).

Thanks for any input.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#272 Post by tenia » Wed Mar 02, 2022 11:06 am

It only offers French subtitles.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#273 Post by feihong » Wed Jul 20, 2022 2:35 am

The world has turned and somehow Pony Canyon has deemed it appropriate to introduce a trio of long–buried Hideo Gosha films to blu ray. August 30th we'll suddenly have blu rays of Gosha's greatest movie, Goyokin, of The Oil–Hell Murder (fine, but not to my mind a necessary blu-ray buy) and...and... a blu-ray of freaking Tenchu. That film has, to my knowledge, never had an official home video release of any kind. I only have one Pony Canyon blu-ray, so far as I know: their early-on blu-ray of Swallowtail Butterfly. That disc is appreciated just for being born, but...the quality is really not great on that disc. I'm not sure if it's their fault, or if the film just needs restoration and isn't getting it. Still, I'm hopeful about these. The Tenchu disc can hardly be as bad as the bootlegs which have been out there up until now. And there's a pretty high-quality 1080p version of Goyokin that is streaming nowadays, which is better than the print I saw at the Egyptian theater a decade ago.

More blu-ray news: Looks like fabled screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto's disastrous second film as a director, Lake of Illusions, has been out on blu ray since February. This movie is famously bad, and there are no English subtitles to be found, anywhere, last I looked. The first sentence of the first review on Amazon Japan translates to "It's finally time to see rare works, stupid works, and bad works." That made me smile. Also, somehow there's a blu-ray of the Bae Doona film, Take Care of My Cat, coming September 2nd, from a Japanese label.

And a promising development: an HD version of Nobuhiko Obaysashi's Turning Point has surfaced, making me wonder if a blu-ray might not be far behind. There is also a 1080p version of Eureka out there, which is very beautiful, and which hopefully augurs some special treatment in the future. Suddenly the Japanese blu-ray scene starts to look interesting again.
Last edited by feihong on Wed Jul 20, 2022 7:06 pm, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#274 Post by swo17 » Wed Jul 20, 2022 3:14 am

Goyokin's great! Hopefully these get some attention from one of the Western boutiques

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Re: Japanese Films on DVD/Blu-ray

#275 Post by Calvin » Thu Aug 18, 2022 2:14 pm

I expect most people reading this thread will also be following the Third Window one but, in case not, their Obayashi 80s set will be out in October and is now available to pre-order

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