Saturday, May 24, 2014

浮草 / Floating Weeds



Why I Saw This Movie:
This is the 3rd film by legendary Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu (W) that my friend the Cinephile has gotten me to see, following Good Morning and Late Autumn.

The Review
          As Ozu has a highly stylized technique, much of the style of his movies is the same from film to film.  Film lovers gush over his techniques and you can find plenty of reviews on the Internet by people more intelligent than me. 
            I’m a bit of a philistine.  But I enjoyed this film nonetheless.
            Unlike the previous Ozu film’s I’ve seen, this film had much more of a plot, which caused me to get engaged in the story a lot more. 
            The film also was a lot more bittersweet, and it was hard to be unemotional while watching it.

7 out of 10 stars.  (I gave the two previous Ozu films 6 stars, but this one gets a small bump up because it has much more of a story, that makes it more accessible to the ordinary philistine like myself.)

Links
And from my own Grand Rapids Michigan, here’s Dave Blakeslee’s review of the film here

Link of the Day 
Chomsky: How America's Great University System Is Getting Destroyed

4 comments:

angrysoba said...

I saw this review of a previous Ozu film and thought you might be interested in it:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/michael-wood/at-the-movies

Joel Swagman said...

An interesting article. Thanks for the heads up.

Whisky Prajer said...

What a difference a bit of plotting can make, no? Some aesthetes regard the discipline as a milksop for the intellectually lazy, but phooey on them. Getting plot to "work" is, for any narrative artist, the preeminent challenge -- including arty-farty types like DFW.

Joel Swagman said...

My own personal preference is for plotting--so agreed.

However, to each his own. If some aesthetes prefer something more stylistic than narrative, they can feel free to enjoy film directors like Ozu.

Granted such people are definitely in the minority.

...and granted, secretly, I've never really trusted someone with tastes that are different than my own. As David Mitchell explains perfectly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg_gj2UO2tU