David Vining's Blog, page 14

Walk Cheerfully

Yasujiro Ozu takes on the gangster movie, and it’s just about the most Ozu gangster movie I can think of. A quite, melodramatic look at a man making a key choice without violence in the name of a woman, Walk Carefully is a wonderful little movie from Ozu’s silent period that demonstrates that while he works as a contract director in the studio system, he can still make films his own. By the time the finale rolls around, there’s no question that Ozu’s talent was being allowed to flourish.

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Student Romance: Days of Youth

It’s odd to see a first surviving film where the filmmaking is so polished, but this wasn’t Yasujiro Ozu’s first film. It was his eighth. Still, even in 1929, nearing the end of the sound era, it was still rare to see the subtle filmmaking on display from many directors. I mean, Ozu knew how to imply sound in silent film like the best of them. It’s just effortless cuts that make the point and move on without lingering. It’s really rather remarkable. The story it’s supporting is a lightly com...

Yasujiro Ozu: A Statement of Purpose

I’ve been wanting to do a Yasujiro Ozu retrospective for a while. And, now that I’ve decided to actually pull the trigger on one, I look forward to the nose dive in traffic to the blog for about a month and a half or so.

Worth it, though.

What kicked me into actually throwing him on the list was Paul Schrader’s book about what he called Transcendental Style in Film. Ozu was the first director he wrote about in the main body of the book (it included a forward written twenty years later ...

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Godzilla, the Heisei, Millennium, and Reiwa Eras: The Definitive Ranking

Am I going to combine this with the Showa Era into one big list?

Yeah…I don’t think so. Separate shall they be forever and anon!

The Heisei Era felt like an edgier version of the Showa Era. The Millennium Era went even edgier by its ending but has the added interest of being largely disconnected from each other, even the canon resetting with every film. The Reiwa Era is brand new, includes three movies (one of which was originally designed to be a TV series and became a trilogy), and i...

Godzilla Minus One

The most common themes across the Godzilla franchise are about technology and nuclear power, but the most common character motifs are about Japanese national identity. The films are mostly concerned with the former rather than the latter, so when the latter pops up, I tend to perk up a bit more than usual. Godzilla Minus One would make an interesting companion with the original by Ishiro Honda, less so because of the parallel origin stories of the central monster, and more for the dueling vi...

Godzilla: The Planet Eater

I finally read up a bit on the background of this trilogy of films, and two major things jumped out at me. The first was that this was originally intended as an anime series for television or streaming, not a trilogy of movies. So, the structure of it makes more sense. It still doesn’t work, but it makes more sense. The second thing that jumped out at me was that the co-director Kobun Shizuno seems to…hate Godzilla. More specifically, he seems to hate monster movies. Toho originally wanted a...

Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle

Oh, dear. This fell off a cliff real fast, didn’t it? Granted, the cliff of the first film wasn’t that high, but this is just a very serious drop in quality. Slightly longer with even less story to deal with, Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle is a complete and total slog that takes itself way, way too seriously. There’s nothing approximating a structure to hang the dull scenes of people arguing and discovering deus ex machinas in the forest. None of the promises from the first film come c...

Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters

I’ve always been reticent to getting into anime, and I think Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters is a good example of why. The storytelling is too episodic, the emotions too arch, and the focus is more about world-building than actual narrative. There are things to enjoy, but the connective tissue from one moment to the next is so reliant on lore and thin characters acting within small boxes that the whole package just doesn’t entertain nearly as much as I think it should. At least there’s a st...

Shin Godzilla

The Godzilla franchise has toyed with the procedural, ensemble approach to a story of a giant monster stomping on Japan off and on since the beginning. However, I think Shin Godzilla is the purest form of it. If you were to force it into a mold of a singular main character, it’s possible, but this is really the story of a modern nation facing an existential threat. If it reminds me of anything, it’s Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion which came out five years earlier. I’d be surprised if Hideaki ...