A fine work whose brilliant finale lifts up the whole, Kihachi Okamoto’s Dai-bosatsu tôge—literally, The Pass of the Boddhisattva—thematically revolves around the price exacted by responsibility and the burden of history. Those who classify the protagonist, Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai, excellent), as “evil” or “sociopathic” are being ridiculous: within the film the first adjective is […]
Daily Archives: May 16, 2010
Luis Buñuel, whose contribution to the script survived his withdrawal from directing the project, appears to have been of two minds about the film Johnny Got His Gun that Dalton Trumbo himself directed during the Vietnam War. Buñuel found Trumbo’s film “overlong and overintellectualized,” but also felt that it “has the same power” and “disturbing […]
Dennis Grunes 