David Vining's Blog, page 124

Harakiri

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 completion of his humanist epic, he made two films rather quickly. The first, The Inheritance, is an entertaining little noir, but Harakiri feels like something that has been agonized over for years before completion. The precision of ...

The Inheritance

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 from cancer within the next few months and the ensuing explosion of conspiring and backstabbing that erupts from that news, all with a certain jazzy, noir feel to it. This is the more obviously cynical Kobayashi of Black River rather than the...

The Human Condition Part III: A Soldier’s Prayer

And so comes to a conclusion the epic tale of one idealist forced to confront the harsh realities of war and his degradation from purity through barbarity and into some kind of end. In some ways, it is a tale of the innocence of Japan itself being trampled under foot of the militaristic regime that held sway over Japanese politics preceding and during the war. This was never going to be a happy ending for our main character under the guidance of Masaki Kobayashi.

I haven’t talked enough a...

The Human Condition Part II: Road to Eternity

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 nine-and-a-half hours at once?). The second part continues the main character’s journey downward from a suited up bureaucrat in a corporate office to almost an animal by the end of this, his time in the Japanese army in Manchuria a...

The Human Condition Part I: No Greater Love

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 became the perfect excuse to find the time to revisit it, and so here we are with the first third of a film about the Japanese character during World War II, the degradation of a man, a prominent Japanese pacificist exorcising some demons all at the same t...

The Human Condition Part 1: No Greater Love

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 became the perfect excuse to find the time to revisit it, and so here we are with the first third of a film about the Japanese character during World War II, the degradation of a man, a prominent Japanese pacificist exorcising some demons all at the same t...

Black River

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 departure from the area, when development opportunities are opening up, and what happens to the people in the lowest rungs of society in the face of that. It’s also a love-triangle. There’s definitely interlapping elements between the two ...

I Will Buy You

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 to take for granted. This isn’t a man’s life or death in the balance, this is contract negotiations around a baseball player’s entry into the pros. We can definitely see the impact this has to people involv...

The Thick-Walled Room

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 War II, but it was an obviously political piece meant to attack the Japanese government for, what Kobayashi saw as, injustices against minor war criminals when more guilty ones were let off with lighter sentenc...

Fountainhead

Masaki Kobayashi drew down the number of main characters and expanded the narrative scope around his smaller cast for Fountainhead, in comparison to Beautiful Days. Instead of about six main characters, we’re down to two, while also having enough story to comfortably fill 130 minutes of screen time. The problem is that in this first effort to expand the smaller characters into full-fledged film leads, I think Kobayashi and his screenwriter Zenzo Matsuyama didn’t quite take the time they need...