Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#3 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. All filmed at once and released over a period of three years, The Human Condition is the Japanese, arthouse version of The Lord of the Rings or Manon of the Source, a single film production broken up into multiple parts for release reasons (who's gonna sit through… Continue reading The Human Condition Part II: Road to Eternity
#3 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. This is one of the big reasons why I decided to do a Masaki Kobayashi survey. I'd seen the film many moons ago and bought it a couple of years ago, but it's hard to find time for a ten-hour film. Getting knee deep in director filmographies… Continue reading The Human Condition Part I: No Greater Love
#11 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. This is The Lower Depths but angry. This feels like the closest Kobayashi ever came to making a Kurosawa movie, and it's still distinctly his own. It's a look at people living in the shadow of an American military base on the eve of the American military's… Continue reading Black River
#7 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. This is the Japanese baseball version of Ace in the Hole, but it's missing one component that could have pushed it into greatness. The characters are well-drawn, the situation appropriately murky, and the tension real, but there's a moral component to the story that Masaki Kobayashi seems… Continue reading I Will Buy You
#9 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. It's easy to see why Japanese authorities would have wanted cuts from Masaki Kobayashi's first attempt at his hard-hitting style of story about the individual against an oppressive system. Not only did it highlight some smaller forms of the war crimes of the Japanese army during World… Continue reading The Thick-Walled Room
David Vining, Author 