Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#16 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Knowing that this was both a film by Kobayashi and in his melodrama period, I kept expecting this film to turn in much darker directions than it ever did. Instead of getting a bit of misery wrapped in irony that came to define the ending of Three… Continue reading Somewhere Under the Broad Sky
#12 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. I will say this for Masaki Kobayashi, there is a lot of ambition in his second feature film as both writer and director (The Thick-Walled Room was filmed first but delayed four years by the Japanese insistence on not revisiting the darker portions of their involvement in… Continue reading Three Loves
#8 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Masaki Kobayashi had the job. He was a director in the Japanese film industry now. As a gift, his mentor, Keisuke Kinoshita, gave him the script for a film called Sincerity that Kobayashi made his next project. I've read this described as a hybrid film between Kinoshita… Continue reading Sincerity (or, Sincere Heart)
#18 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. 45-minutes is kind of an awkward length for a film. It's more than a short film, but it's much shorter than what is typically considered feature length. Too long to have that sort of tight focus of a short film, but too short to expand the story… Continue reading Youth of the Son
Jacques Tati, like many other filmmakers, had projects that never got off the ground. He wrote a script title The Illusionist as one of those projects, dying without ever getting beyond the script stage. The director and animator Sylvain Chomet got his hands on it and decided that it spoke to him personally, especially the… Continue reading The Illusionist (2010)
David Vining, Author 