David Vining's Blog, page 125

Beautiful Days

Masaki Kobayashi was still in the phase where he couldn’t make the films he really wanted, but it seems obvious to me that he was bringing his passion to the movies he was making. Beautiful Days is in the same mold as Somewhere Beneath the Wide Sky and Three Loves, a film about a surprisingly large ensemble all revolving around a central idea. Written by Zenzo Matsuyama, who would go on to adapt The Human Condition for Kobayashi a few years later, Beautiful Days has a surprising depth of emo...

Somewhere Under the Broad Sky

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 Loves, I got something much more hopeful and straightforward. It’s a fine little film in that regard, about a family growing together and apart at the same time, and it’s interesting to note that even with the somewhat nice and almost comparatively ...

Three Loves

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 the Second World War). He wanted to tell a story of the three types of love (the Greek words agape, philia, and storge aren’t ever explicit, but they’re pretty obviously the three words most likely applying, though there’s a...

Sincerity (or, Sincere Heart)

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 and Kobayashi, but I can’t really expand on that because I’ve never seen a Kinoshita film. I can say that there do seem to be some of Kobayashi’s concerns about the individual in unjust systems in some form, but this is more ...

Youth of the Son

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 effectively like a feature, Youth of the Son sits uncomfortably in the middle. It’s also surprisingly sweetly natured, considering what I know of the director Masaki Kobayashi’s later work. A nice little story about a family of four as the two teenag...

The Illusionist (2010)

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 core idea of an older, traveling showman trying to connect with a younger woman in a fatherly way that either was meant as an apology to Tati’s legitimate daughter (Sophie...

Jacques Tati – The Definitive Ranking

Jacques Tati was one of the most wonderful voices in cinema. His combination of visual gag based humor, good humor, positive outlook, serious thought, and ability to dramatize his points without any dialogue to explain it created some of the most delightful and funny comedies ever that still manage to stand the test of time decades after his death.

I could have done with a dozen more of his films, but four films starring M. Hulot (as well as a couple of other films) was all we got. I’m h...

Parade

This feels like a combination of Jacques Tati’s sense of humor, an experiment from Ingmar Bergman, and the storytelling format of Federico Fellini. When Roger Ebert reviewed the film he called it a doodle, and I think that’s a very good way to distill Tati’s final effort, made for Swedish television. Effectively a variety show, it’s a series of disconnected comedic bits and ideas without much of an anchor to it. There are fun bits throughout, but without any sort of throughline with a story ...

Trafic

There ends up a lot to enjoy in Jacques Tati’s final theatrically released feature film, but I think it’s obvious that Tati was best when he was given total control of everything, gobs of money, and an unusual amount of time to craft the comedy. Out in the wilds, given the road trip format of the film’s story, the comedic stylings never reach the delirious highs of any of his previous three films, but his talent was too strong, his ideas too clear, and his heart too warm for the film overall...

PlayTime

Jacques Tati spent about a decade prepping, raising money for, and making his magnum opus of gentle comedy and visual gags, and it pretty much ended his career. He managed to get two more films off the ground before he died (one on Swedish television), but the expense of the film combined with its financial failure at the box office sent him into bankruptcy personally. That’s really unfortunate because PlayTime is one of the most wonderful, warm, and genuinely funny comedies ever made. It en...