Movie thoughts and fiction updates.
#6 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Adapted from the Shusaku Endo novel Lord, Have Mercy, Masaki Kobayashi's Hymn to a Tired Man is a combination of his own The Thick-Walled Room and Kurosawa's Ikiru, a re-evaluation of war crimes of the Japanese Army during World War II and the embrace of what can… Continue reading Hymn to a Tired Man
I don't know if it's the presence of Toshiro Mifune that pushes this over the top for me in terms of Masaki Kobayashi's filmography, but there are a host of things in Samurai Rebellion (I prefer how Kobayashi always just referred to it as Rebellion) that makes it stand above the rest, no matter how… Continue reading Some extra thoughts on Samurai Rebellion
#5 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. There's a streak in a lot of filmmakers where they want to make a film that's obviously fake. Most of what they do is heavily realistic, and yet they all have this desire to tell a story that's inherently formalistic. Fellini largely made a career out of… Continue reading Kwaidan
#2 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Masaki Kobayashi had shown great talent for a long time before this, and he'd even made the engrossing epic The Human Condition which seems like it could have been the pinnacle of any man's career, and then he goes and makes Harakiri. In the year following his… Continue reading Harakiri
#14 in my ranking of Masaki Kobayashi's films. Masaki Kobayashi finished his epic, humanist, three-part tale of World War II, and his next film couldn't be further from that. The Inheritance is a hardnosed look at one rich man trying to figure out who to give his fortune to on the event of his death… Continue reading The Inheritance
David Vining, Author 