'Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable about the materiality of memory (and of film), the newly deceased find themselves in an ethereal limbo where they pick a single worldly recollection to be turned into an eternal celluloid keepsake. Distance (2001) observes the conflicting emotions—the sorrow, shame, and incomprehension—of the relatives of cult members who participated in a fatal terrorist attack and a ritualistic mass suicide.
'Both the novelistic touches and the documentary details in Kore-eda’s work reflect his formative years—he studied literature at Tokyo’s Waseda University and began his career making nonfiction films for Japanese television. The themes of loss and memory, not to mention his signature empathy for traumatized figures, are present in most of his early documentaries. However . . . (1991) links the life stories of two suicides: a bureaucrat in charge of Japan’s social welfare system and a woman who was a casualty of its failures. August Without Him (1994) centers on the first Japanese man to publicly admit contracting HIV through gay sexual contact; Without Memory (1996), likewise structured around direct encounters with the subject, is about a man who, due to a botched surgical procedure, suffers from a rare form of amnesia that prevents his brain from creating new memories.
'Many of Kore-eda’s documentaries have informed his fiction films. He adapted Maborosi from a novel but, in shaping his heroine, also drew from the government official’s widow in However . . . . The fascination with mnemonic process in After Life stems from the stranger-than-fiction case of Without Memory. Beyond his own nonfiction work, Kore-eda has also borrowed from real-life events. The cult in Distance is modeled on the notorious Aum Shinrikyo group, which launched sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Nobody Knows—which has affinities with Kore-eda’s first documentary, Lessons from a Calf (1991), about elementary school kids learning to care for a calf (and in the process to cope with loss)—is loosely based on a child-abandonment news story that scandalized Japan in the eighties.
'Still Walking, Kore-eda’s most personal work, has strong elements of autobiography. He has said that he made it in response to the death of his mother, whom he nursed toward the end of her life, and the film is full of personalizing details, the sense memories of childhood. It lingers in the kitchen as daikons are peeled, carrots chopped, edamame washed and salted. The humble corn tempura fritter is the equivalent here of Proust’s madeleine, and Kore-eda captures the vivid details of its preparation, from the snapping of the kernels off the cob to the crackle of the batter as it hits the hot oil. The film’s title comes from the lyrics of a 1960s hit, “Blue Light Yokohama,” a favorite of Kore-eda’s mother, and of Toshiko in the movie, for whom this wistfully romantic song has a perverse significance (we learn that it is a reminder of her husband’s betrayal).
'Kore-eda has always seemed to stand apart from most of his generational cohort—many of his best-known contemporaries, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike, are given to genre-minded experimentation, and in their own ways extend the radicalizing projects of such Japanese New Wave figures as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura. Often tagged as an old-school humanist, Kore-eda appears more directly descended from the age of classical cinema, and in tackling the “home drama,” that most quintessentially Japanese of genres, he invites comparisons to the most revered of his nation’s filmmakers, Yasujiro Ozu.
'At first glance, Still Walking does not lack for Ozu-esque themes and tropes. It concerns the relationship between parents and children. Much of it is confined to shoji-screen and tatami-mat interiors. The camera is usually fixed, and there’s even some pillow-shot punctuation; when we are outdoors, an occasional train stretches across the screen. It would not be inaccurate to call Still Walking a film that “grew under the shade” of Ozu, as Claire Denis has described 35 Shots of Rum, her 2008 tribute to the Japanese master’s Late Spring. But it is important to point out that Still Walking lacks the insistent discretion and circumscribed austerity of an Ozu film. Like another Ozu update, Café Lumière, by Hou Hsiao-hsien (the subject of one of Kore-eda’s documentaries), Still Walking takes care to reflect the sociocultural realities of present-day Japan (“These days, we’re not so abnormal,” Ryota tells his mother when she makes a jab about his unconventional family). And if Ozu’s ordinary folk are paragons of calm acceptance, Kore-eda’s are less reconciled to life’s cruelties and disappointments; if anything, as Kore-eda has pointed out, they are closer to the stubborn, openly anguished characters of Mikio Naruse, a director with a bleaker worldview than Ozu.
'There are no sentimental breakthroughs in Kore-eda’s day in the life—and the flash-forward epilogue implies that they don’t exist in life, period. In this family, people and relationships don’t change in any fundamental sense; avoidance prevails over confrontation. Some might simply chalk this up to Japanese decorum, but it has at least as much to do with Kore-eda’s gimlet-eyed appraisal of how hurts and grievances play out in most families, whatever the culture: silently and subcutaneously, in coded words and actions. But while Kore-eda grants his characters no epiphanies, he allows them pangs of regret and moments of dawning awareness. Resentments go unaired, and problems remain unsolved, but they are, however dimly or privately, recognized, even understood—which is, at least, one definition of family love.'-- Dennis Lim
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Stills
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Further
Hirokazu Kore-eda @ IMDb
'Hirokazu Koreeda's Top 10 Films You Should See'
‘They compare me to Ozu. But I’m more like Ken Loach’
Hirokazu Kore-eda @ The Criterion Collection
'Outtakes: Hirokazu Koreeda'
Hirokazu Kore-eda @ MUBI
'The Humanists: Hirokazu Koreeda's Maborosi'
'Hirokazu Koreeda: One of the Best'
'Hirokazu Koreeda: A Neorealist Approach to Filmmaking'
'Three Sisters with Laden Hearts: Hirokazu Koreeda and the Non-traditional Family'
'The Japanese family through Ozu’s and Korea’s cinema'
Hirokazu Kore-Eda interviewed @ The AV Club
'A Film Guide: The Works of Hirokazu Koreeda'
'Koreeda’s Nobody Knows: The Structure of a Fictional Documentary'
'Hirokazu Koreeda On Bad Dads and Subtle Moments'
'A guide to Japan’s greatest living filmmaker'
'The evolution of visionary Hirokazu Korea'
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Extras
The World According to Korea Hirokazu
Q&A with the LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON Director/Writer Hirokazu Korea
Tribute to Hirokazu Koreeda
Hirokazu Koreeda - After Life - Q&A - 2011
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Interview
from The Rumpus
The Rumpus: You studied at Waseda University in Tokyo — famous for its literature department — in order to become a novelist. How did you end up becoming a filmmaker?
Hirokazu Koreeda: I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements — two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class. In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I’d never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I’ve always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director.
Rumpus: But then you made documentaries before you made feature films.
Koreeda: First I wrote the screenplay for Nobody Knows and showed it to people at the studios without luck. But around that time I was making a documentary about an official in the ministry of the environment who committed suicide. This man oversaw cases surrounding the victims of Minamata disease, which was a huge controversy at the time — a corporation had been found illegally dumping mercury into a river, causing thousands of deaths, horrifying disfigurement, blindness, paralysis, for which they denied culpability. This man was a morally upright person, and he was in a bind. The government didn’t want to pay out any money or admit that there was a problem, but the victims he met were clearly suffering terribly, and he sympathized with them. He was caught in the middle and ended up committing suicide.
I interviewed his wife for a television documentary and afterward wrote a book of nonfiction about it. I was deeply moved by her reaction to her husband’s suicide — how she was able to make sense of it and how and if she would be able to get on with her life. I worked on this book for two years. A producer who read it told me about a novel, Maborosi, by the writer Teru Miyamoto, that had a similar theme, and suggested I direct an adaptation of it. I’d actually read the novel as a student, but then when I looked at it again it really struck me — the core of the story was the same, about a woman trying to grapple with her husband’s suicide. I mulled over this project for five years and then finally filmed it. So my first feature took this long path from documentary to nonfiction to screen adaptation of a fictional work.
Rumpus: Your newest film, Still Walking, has more personal origins than your other films. How did this affect the making of it?
Koreeda: It’s not totally autobiographical, but I based the characters on people close to me, and a lot of the dialogue actually came from things said in my family. But whereas the challenge of, say, Nobody Knows was to take events from a real incident and then try to try to get as close as possible to the characters so I could understand them, in Still Walking it was quite the opposite: in order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.
Rumpus: Maborosi drew comparisons to the films of Yasujiro Ozu when it came out. Still Walking seems reminiscent of Ozu’s work as well — perhaps more so.
Koreeda: When I made Maborosi, I was aware of drawing from Ozu’s style in framing certain scenes — unsuccessfully, to be honest. But Still Walking was so personal that I really set aside any consideration of technique or style or influence and just worked intuitively. The motif of family in Still Walking is similar to Maborosi, so perhaps that’s where the Ozu comparison comes from. Actually, seeing the movie now in completed form, I’d say it has more in common with Naruse’s work than with Ozu’s.
Rumpus: What about camera angles? You stick mostly to medium shots, with a minimum of close-ups, and the framing of them is similar to Ozu’s famed “tatami-eyed view.”
Koreeda: The biggest considerations I had were practical: how do you move such a large number of actors around a small space? So, for example, if I have to have the mother bring a pot of tea from the kitchen to the living room and serve it to the others, how do I, on a practical level, get everyone into the frame? Any decisions I made about the camera angles or movement came out of necessity, versus any sort of stylistic choice.
Rumpus: You’re able to get some of the most natural acting from children I’ve ever seen. Was there any particular method to this?
Koreeda: Well, the movie is pretty tightly scripted. But with the actors playing the children, I didn’t give them a script. All I told them was that this was a movie about going to their grandparents’ house during summer vacation, and that they should just run around and do whatever came naturally. The adult actors had to act around this; they had to deliver some very specific lines without knowing what the children around them would do or say. This collision of a predetermined and more random elements is something I’ve always been drawn to, and that I was pretty satisfied with in the final result.
Rumpus: Has the foreign reaction to your films ever taken you by surprise?
Koreeda: Yes. For one, I never thought Still Walking would be of any interest to Westerners or picked up overseas.
Rumpus: Why?
Koreeda: I didn’t think Westerners would get it at all. I figured, for example, that they would sit and think, why don’t these people ever just say what they’re thinking? And then the characters themselves don’t experience much growth, if any, from beginning to end.
I don’t believe in making movies to cater to a foreign audience. You never know what the reaction is going to be anyhow. At the time I made Maborosi, the Japanese movies getting any foreign attention were all period dramas and seemed to be about some representative element of Japanese life, and my movie was contemporary movie about one specific woman trying to understand her husband’s suicide. But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan — which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn’t find it interesting at all. But then again to my surprise it was also well received. Perhaps there was a stylistic element they were responding to — I was aware of Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, that forties documentary style, while I was making it — so maybe that was it. At any rate, I don’t concern myself with what the critics will say; you really have no idea anyway. That’s part of the fun of making movies, seeing what the reaction will be.
Rumpus: To what extent is a film’s reception in Japan dependent on its reception overseas?
Koreeda: If a movie is nominated for, say, an Academy award, that movie will instantly become popular in Japan. There’s always been a bit of a complex the Japanese have about being taken seriously in the West. At the same time, the contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West — say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase — are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation. One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They’re either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.
Rumpus: To go back to our first question, do you ever think about writing novels? What about doing more documentaries?
Koreeda: Actually, after Still Walking was made, I was asked to write a novel version. I accepted eagerly, but then about a month into it I realized how difficult writing a novel can be. I finished it and it was published, but it was difficult. As far as documentaries go, I believe unreservedly that they serve an important function in our culture. I’d love to be able to make both documentaries and feature films simultaneously, but so far that hasn’t happened.
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12 of Hirokazu Kore-eda's 20 films
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August Without Him (1994)
'Hirata Yukata became the first man in Japan to publicly acknowledge that he had contracted HIV through homosexual sex. Koreeda’s film is designed as a lament for Yukata, who had a profound impact on the filmmaker. His dying years are not presented as a time of physical deterioration, but rather an evolution of a relationship between two men, one of whom emerged from the process with a markedly changed perspective on the goal of objectivity in nonfiction film.'-- Harvard Film Archive
the entire film
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Maborosi (1995)
'This is the first film by Hirokazu Koreeda, a young Japanese director whose love for the work of the great Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63) is evident. Ozu is one of the four or five greatest directors of all time, and some of his visual touches are visible here. The camera, for example, is often placed at the eye level of someone kneeling on a tatami mat. Shots begin or end on empty rooms. Characters speak while seated side by side, not looking at one another. There are many long shots and few closeups; the camera does not move, but regards. In more obvious homage, Koreeda uses a technique that Ozu himself borrowed from Japanese poetry: the "pillow shot," inspired by "pillow words," which are words that do not lead out of or into the rest of the poem but provide a resting place -- a pause or punctuation. Koreeda frequently cuts away from the action to simply look for a moment at something: a street, a doorway, a shop front, a view. And there are two small touches in which the young director subtly acknowledges the master: a characteristic teakettle in the foreground of a shot, and a scene in which the engine of a canal boat makes a sound so uncannily similar to the boat at the beginning of Ozu's Floating Weeds (1959) that it might have been lifted from the soundtrack.'-- Roger Ebert
the entire film
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Without Memory (1996)
'A father loses his short-term memory as the result of a botched medical procedure which causes him to develop Wernicke's Encephalopathy. Koreeda chronicles his family’s fight to receive proper treatment and benefits from this devastating malpractice. Without Memory is an unabashed protest against the government and its disregard for health care. However, the film is also rich with thematic concerns, namely memory and loss, which infuse his later fiction films.'-- Harvard Film Archive
the entire film
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After Life (1998)
'Limbo becomes a place of psychological breakthrough in After Life, the film that introduced Koreeda to art-house audiences worldwide. As people die and journey to this other world, they are stopped at a sort of postmodern rest area, where they are greeted by counselors. The counselors ask the deceased to select one memory from life to take with them to the great beyond. Memories, which range from moments of first love to a trip to Disneyland, are recreated by the counselors and filmed so the departed may have a permanent record of their former lives. Despite his focus on the supernatural, Koreeda reveals a humanist sentiment on par with his fellow countryman, Yasujiro Ozu.'-- Harvard Film Archive
Trailer
Excerpt
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Distance (2001)
'Distance, nominated for the Golden Palm award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, focuses on the aftermath of a massacre by an apocalyptic religious cult. On the 3rd anniversary of the tragedy, four friends convene at a lake where the ashes of their loved ones are scattered. It is here where they encounter the sole survivor of the cult, who absconded just before the massacre. He gives them a tour round the religious sect’s headquarters and the characters are forced to confront their overwhelming feeling of loss as well as shame. Distance is interspersed with recollections, flashbacks and long, unbroken shots instilling a meditative tone to the proceedings. Ultimately, the film poses the question: can the characters put a distance between themselves and their loved one’s incomprehensible act of violence?'-- The Culture Trip
Trailer
the entire film (w/o subtitles)
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Nobody Knows (2004)
'Like his previous film Distance (2001), which involved an Aum-like cult, Hirokazu Koreeda's Nobody Knows was inspired by a real case of child abandonment in Tokyo, 1988. As with Distance, the headline event being referenced serves as purely the catalyst for a much more personal tale. With Nobody Knows, Kore-eda took the real case, mulled it over in his head for fifteen years and used it as only the skeleton around which he built this piece of fiction, filmed with a documentary eye. The plot is simple: scatty single mum Keiko (television talento You) and 12-year-old son Akira (Yagira in the performance that made him the youngest ever Best Actor winner at Cannes) move into a nice new apartment in Tokyo. What the landlord doesn't know is that Keiko has three other children hidden in her flat, reserved Kyoko (Kitaura), rambunctious Shigeru (Kimura) and the youngest sister, Yuki (Shimizu). When Keiko takes off with a new boyfriend, Akira is left with the responsibility of managing the household and looking after his younger siblings. The documentary style that Koreeda is known for is more prominent here than in After Life (1998), and more successful than in Distance. While the camera is often static, it doesn't come across so much like a business training video as Distance sometimes could. However much that aesthetic may have suited the subject of that film, the camera work in Nobody Knows is easier to appreciate, catching beautiful moments of realism - childish realism, rather than stark or flat realism. One of Koreeda's great successes is to put the audience on a level with the children, not by hackneyed devices such as dropping the camera to kid height, but through focusing on their interests, habits and practices. Several shots in the film focus on their hands touching things, the kids fidgeting. For instance, Akira's dirty hands feeling the grooves on the suitcase, right at the start of the picture. The children of Nobody Knows are depicted as tactile beings who learn and explore through touch, taste, smell. The only words to come out of their mouths are exactly what they are feeling. The director has managed one of those rare feats, putting actual children on screen.'-- Midnight Eye
the entire film
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Hana Yori Mo Naho (2006)
'Set in 1702, Hana yori mo naho looks back a full three centuries to a time when samurai clans offered monetary rewards to the samurais who succeeded in taking on a revenge act. The central character is a young samurai, Sozaemon Aoki, who has come to Edo (now Tokyo) to avenge his late father. Although he searches the city for his father's enemy, he is hopeless with swordplay and reluctant to pursue his mission. Living in an Edo tenement, poverty-stricken but rich in human relationships, Sozaemon starts to cherish life and question the meaning of taking revenge.'-- Film Affinity
Trailer
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Still Walking (2008)
'The lyrical, profoundly moving Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) is contemporary Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s most personal work to date. Created as a tribute to his late mother, the film depicts one day in the life of the Yokoyamas, gathered together for a commemorative ritual whose nature only gradually becomes clear. Rather than focus on big dramatic moments, Kore-eda relies on simple gestures and domestic routines (especially cooking) to evoke a family’s entire life, its deep regrets and its daily joys. Featuring vivid, heartrending performances and a gentle naturalism that harks back to the director’s earlier, documentary work, Still Walking is an extraordinary portrayal of the ties that bind us.'-- The Criterion Collection
Trailer
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Air Doll (2009)
'Koreeda's latest effort Air Doll is both his most commercial film and one of his most accomplished. Beginning life as a work-for-hire adapted from a short manga by Yoshiie Gouda, Air Doll is the story of an inflatable sex doll that gains life and goes in search of what it means to be human. Straying from the cramped, rickety house of her owner, lonely mama's boy Hideo (Itao), the doll goes out on daily treks around the neighbourhood, befriending a variety of individuals, taking a job at a video store and even starting a relationship with her mild-mannered co-worker (Arata). Though the most immediate reference for Air Doll's search for the true meaning of humanity would be Pinocchio, the central theme is one recurrent in Japanese literature, Frankensteinian though it may be. Ian Buruma devoted an entire chapter of his best-known collection of essays, A Japanese Mirror (a.k.a. Behind the Mask), to "The Human Work of Art", in which he makes ample reference to the work of literary great Junichiro Tanizaki. Tanizaki's first published work The Tattooist (Shisei, 1910) deals with the transformation of an innocent maiden into a man-eating femme fatale through the manipulation of her body - in this case a tattoo of a spider that covers her entire back. Air Doll more closely resembles another such story of Tanizaki's, the novel Naomi (Chijin no Ai, 1924), in which a shy, unmarried engineer's attempts to groom a teenage girl into an ideal Western-style lady see her transforming instead into a loosely moraled, manipulative wench with a string of boyfriends.'-- Midnight Eye
Trailer
Excerpt
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I Wish (2011)
'Hirokazu Koreeda's I Wish has taken two years to come to the UK. It has been more than worth the wait. Like his earlier movie Still Walking, this is a deeply considered Japanese family drama in the tradition of Ozu, with echoes of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang – moving, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, often mysterious. The film is about the powerful imperative of family unity, but also about the inevitability, and even desirability, of families finally disintegrating and allowing everyone involved a painful kind of freedom. The original title is Kiseki, or "Miracle", and a miracle is being longed for by two brothers, around nine or 10 years old: they are Koichi and Ryu, played by real-life brothers Koki and Ohshirô Maeda, from whom the director gets terrifically natural and relaxed performances. Their mum and dad have broken up; Nozomi (Nene Ohtsuka) has returned to live with her parents and taken a demeaning supermarket job in her hometown of Kagoshima, within sight of the Sakura-jima volcano, which, with eerie calm, like a figure in a painting, is in a state of silent eruption on the distant skyline. It deposits a fine film of ash over everything, which the city-dwellers must continually clean away. Koreeda does not belabour the metaphorical quality of this volcano, or the Pompei-snapshot of ordinariness he himself records. Meanwhile the father, Kenji, (Jô Odagiri) stays in Osaka, where he pursues the laid-back slacker lifestyle that so infuriated Nozomi, failing to hold down day jobs while in the evenings trying to be a guitarist in a band.'-- The Guardian
Trailer
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Like Father, Like Son (2013)
'Kore-eda’s latest film, Like Father, Like Son, concerns a switched-at-birth scenario wherein two couples, the upright Ryota and Midori Nonoyima (Masaharu Fukuyama and Machiko Ono) and the laid-back Yudai and Yukari Saiki (Lily Franky and Yoko Maki), discover they’ve been raising each other’s six-year-old sons, the reserved Keita (Keita Ninomiya) and the aloof Ryusei (Hwang Sho-gen). Nature versus nurture is explored through tender melodrama, and, true to form, Kore-eda presents a wellspring of eye-catching frames and locales, each of them inviting their own thematic readings.'-- Filmmaker Magazine
Trailer
Excerpt
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Our Little Sister (2015)
'Koreeda’s sensitive yet lucid helming keeps the performances precise yet natural, and the presence of character actors in supporting roles — like Kirin Kiki, Lily Franky, Jun Fubuki and Shinobu Otake — adds flavor to the cast, even if they aren’t given much centrality in the story. Although they’re excellent actors in their own right, Shinichi Tsutsumi, Ryo Kase and Takashi Ikeda are short-changed as the Koda sisters’ love interests, to minimal emotional effect. The four distaff leads hold the screen by dint of their sheer beauty, but theirs are not career-breakthrough performances. Still, Ayase, who exudes a vivacious personality in most of the films she’s starred in, successfully conveys Sachi’s tightly wound mental state with her imposing posture and strong sense of self-discipline. This makes it hard for viewers to get under her skin most of the time, but she is radiant in scenes with Hirose’s Suzu, revealing another side of empathy and gentleness to the person she sees as her younger mirror image. Craft contributions, as expected of a Kore-eda film, is superb in an entirely unostentatious way. Especially worth noting is Yoko Kanno’s music, whose dulcet melodies and classical edge has a softening effect on the helmer’s usually austere tone. Lenser Mikiya Takimoto (“Like Father, Like Son”) captures the genteel charm of Kamakura while filtering out its more touristy spots; his pristine visuals, enhanced by an elegant color palette of blue, gray and olive, has none of the artificial glossiness suggested by his long career in commercials. However, some of the framing, notably the sisters’ upright poses and profile shots, strain to reference Ozu’s compositions. Kore-eda’s professed homage to the master of family drama (a longtime Kamakura resident) feels a little superficial compared with Still Walking which captures Ozu’s spirit rather than rigidly adhering to his technique.'-- Variety
Trailer
Excerpt
*
p.s. Hey. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Yeah, it's strange that in all of my searching I didn't find any Gary Lee Boas photos. Quite strange. Everyone, an amazing photographer who also shot sex workers but wasn't included in the post yesterday because there was nothing of his out there that I could find strangely is Gary Lee Boas, and this book of his photos, NEW YORK SEX, 1979-1985, which comes recommended by _B_A, is very worth seeking out. You saw 'Apocalypse'! I wonder if we were there at the same time. It was a fun show despite the YBA-offshoot aspect, yeah. And some odd choices too. I remember thinking Luc Tuymans? I really like Tuymans, but that was a weird pick. ** David Ehrenstein, Yep. No, I don't actually think I've ever heard of 'The Telephone Book'. Or maybe I'm spacing out. At first I thought you meant the Avital Ronell book. I know that. Well, I will go find out about the 'book' in a few minutes, Thank you, D. Everyone, Mr. E recommends this article called 'Call Me, Maybe: Looking Back at THE TELEPHONE BOOK as a Subversive Sex Satire' with the intriguing subtitle 'Why can’t porn be profound?', which is a question I personally have asked the universe innumerable times, and maybe you have too? Go read it, why don't you? ** James, Thanks, J. Wow, 'Gold by the Inch'. I haven't thought about that book in years. All I can remember is that I wasn't totally convinced by it, but I don't remember why. Huh. Yeah, I too have had to sell stuff that I so wish I hadn't at certain points, ugh. Art, mostly. Like I'm not that into Robert Mapplethorpe's stuff, but I owned a kind of uncharacteristic Mapplethorpe photo I really liked at one point. Let me see if I can find it. It's not one his famous photos. Nope, no sign of it anywhere. Odd. Anyway, time came when rent was due and I had none. But if I'd held onto it, now I could really get something for it. For instance. No, that fact doesn't surprise me actually. I'm not sure why it doesn't. Thanks for the article link. I'll read it. ** Tosh Berman, Life on the street eats people out, yeah. ** William George, Well, hi there. Same old Will, I see. Oh, gosh, they shouldn't make a trip to Paris to see me. I did my time in those trenches decades ago. ** Bill, Hi, Bill. Oh, exciting about the handbills. They said they were going to. Please save me one if it's easy. Patton does look really incredible. I'm going to keep my eye out heavily from now and try to do some kind of post using his stuff too, of course. Thank you, man. Cool re: 'The Sleep Garden'. Krusoe is a really unique writer and a real treasure and legend in LA literary circles. I published an early book of his poems ('Jungle Girl') through Little Caesar Press back in the early '80s. ** Jamie McMorrow, All hail and whoop, Jamie! Thank you very much. Tuesday for me was all over the place. Some work, dinner with pals at Chipotle -- which sounds boring, I know, but there's only one Chipotle in Paris, and going there is a rare treat. Wandered about in the perfect spring weather. But I found out that the owners of the apartment where I live are going to sell it, so I don't know how much longer I'll get to live here which really, really sucks because I really, really like this apartment. So that kind of dampened everything. See, functional sounds good. I wish mine had been purely functional. No prob on keeping the job thing mysterious. I totally dig not tempting the fates and all of that. But when it's time, my ears are wide open and tingling. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! Oh, I hope the post did the trick. Oops, ha ha, accidental pun there. I thought those 'Brian' photos looked like grabs from a youtube video. My day was a mess too! High five, or ... I guess low five! Working on your new project is all that matters. Well, maybe not 'all', but most, right? My day, such as it was, ended up in Jamie's comment just above. It was ... okay at best. Conquer Wednesday! ** Steevee, Hi. You think? Mm, yeah, probably. Even the idea is much more painful, to me at least. Strange that. I have to think more about that. ** Misanthrope, The evolution towards the possibility of escorting from home on the internet has definitely saved escorts' looks. And PhotoShop gets some credit too. Do you think The Rock and Stone Cold, et. al., had that electrifying charisma thing from the beginning? You don't think it's partially that they're legendary now and all of that? I don't know the answer to that, but do you? ** Flit, Hi, Flitster, if I may call you that. Man, Blogger spellcheck really wanted me to call you Flitter, but I refused over and over until it gave up. So maybe the Paris donut equivalent would be crepes, which are made/sold everywhere. Excerpt you can't buy crepes in markets. Wait, actually you can but they're pre-made and cold. So maybe crepes. Or croissants. Yeah, maybe croissants. You made nachos with your own two hands? You're a god. Maybe it's easy to do, but I never have. I almost got nachos at Chipotle last night, but I got two vegetarian burritos instead. And I was not sorry. I wish immense and infinite luck with the new video edit! Hook me/us up when it's edited. Awesome! ** Thomas Moronic, Greetings from across the water and some land too, T. I've never heard of 'Men for Sale'. Weird. You'd think I would have. And Tim Hecker did the soundtrack?! How curious is that? Huh. I'll find out more. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, the fairytale-like voice is just for one section. Most of the novel is this kind of 'rambling', impassioned, emotional, personal, discursive voice. With a couple of more fictional-type sections, and one or two hybrid sections. At this point. It's still early enough that I'm not sure what will come out of the wash. Thanks for asking. ** Raymond, Hi, Raymond. Thanks and cool about the galerie show's effect. There's that one series of unknown old photos taken by the same person of hustlers in his living room, which I found probably the most intense. Fascinating about you meeting a member of a European royal family. And what ensued and what that entailed and what your brain did. 'I felt a little like I was a figment of this guy’s imagination - like I could dissolve into a mist from one moment to the next and he wouldn’t miss a beat': I'm going to be thinking about that day. And, yeah, I somehow immediately felt I knew exactly of what you spoke, albeit without any examples immediately forefronting themselves. Huh. But his bathroom reading kind fucks with his power, no? Or I felt like that's where the fuse is. ** Okay. If you don't know the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, maybe you'll feel like taking today to discover them. Or, if you do know his films, I wold be very interested to hear what you think about them. Either way or even neither, I guess. See you tomorrow.