Postwar human devastation and national tragedy: Yasujiro Ozu’s Kaze no naka no mendori mines a vein that looks back to his silent Woman of Tokyo (1933) and ahead to his Tokyo Twilight (1957). An upstairs boarder in Tokyo’s bleak, industrial, working-class outskirts, Tokiko Amamiya (Kinuyo Tanaka, Kenji Mizoguchi’s future star, wonderful) struggles to survive and […]
Daily Archives: July 11, 2008
I have added this entry to my 100 Greatest Asian Films list, which I invite you to visit elsewhere on this site. Rithy Panh’s beautiful and rhythmic Neak sre revolves around a family, Poeuv and Om (Peng Phan, phenomenal) and their seven daughters, and the Cambodian village community on the Mekong Delta to which they […]
This is the second half of the list. The first half is elsewhere on this site. 1969 52. THE FRUIT OF PARADISE. Ovoce stromu rajskych jime, Věra Chytilová’s follow-up to Daisies (see 1966), is prefaced by an experimental film based on Genesis. Superimpositions (to which are applied quick camera zigs and zags) evoke an Eden […]
Below, in chronological order, are the 100 greatest films that I have seen from Asian countries through 2008. I have included Ulrike Koch’s The Saltmen of Tibet (1997), a German documentary, because it is in the language of the host country and deals with Tibetans and Tibetan subject matter. Moreover, there is one film that […]
This is the second half of the list. 1974 46. STILL LIFE. From Iran, Tabiate bijan, by Sohrab Shahid Saless, is a minimalist study of lonely, isolated existence. Mohamad Sardari has spent thirty years at a remote outpost raising and lowering a gate to keep road traffic from crossing tracks when a train passes. He […]
I have written elsewhere that The Silence of the Lambs, for which director Jonathan Demme won an Oscar, is a vampire movie in disguise—a remark to which I will now add: but with all the fun sucked out. A preposterous thing that generates no thrills and is deeply offensive on the score of its misogynism, […]
