Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Wim Wenders' Yasujiro Ozu documentary is a contemplative journey to Tokyo in search of people, places, and situations connected to the Japanese director.

Akira Kurosawa's No Regrets For Our Youth (1946) stars Ozu's favorite lead, Setsuko Hara, in a prescient antifascist political vehicle. Kurosawa includes lots of dramatic action without a "pillow shot" in sight.

Roddy Bogawa's 2004 documentary I Was Born, But is named after Yasujiro Ozu's 1934 silent film and mirrors that film in specifics of identity formation, particularly how class, culture, and nation inform who we are. The film is parts quiet meditation on Japanese American identity, including thoughts on Pearl Harbor, and the formative influence of the punk rock scene. Through additional reflection on his childhood in California and Hawaii and its impact, Bogawa creates an entrancing narrative that feels very different from Ozu but still tells a similar story on how art and identity shapes us.

Yasujuru Ozu's A Story of Floating Weeds (1934) and its remake Floating Weeds (1959) are masterworks in drama. Each tells the story of a traveling kabuki theatre troupe visiting cities on the Seto Inland Sea. The films' primary conflict revolves around the owner's excursions to visit his former mistress and their grownup son, who believes that the actor is his uncle. The lead actress becomes jealous when she finds out. She pays a younger actress to seduce the son, an act that complicates everything. Meanwhile the troupe's fortunes take a downturn as audiences are more interested in newer styles.  Both films include an amazing scene where the kabuki master and his mistress shout across a rainy street while walking back and forth, which reinforces their alienation and disconnection. Like many of Ozu's pillow and low-angle shots, he deftly builds characterization and setting through placement. Perhaps, the character studies and relationships in each are at their must s...

The second movie in Ozu's Noriko Trilogy, a series of films that stars the fabulous Setsuko Hara as a character named Noriko, although none of the films have the same characters. Thematically, many of Ozu's later films feel connected due to their emphasis on women's roles in post-war Japan and their similar English titles. They often deal with relatives who want to help marry off their single family members. In this one, the character Noriko is living in her family's home when her uncle (Kokuten Kodu) suggests that since she is 28, she should get married. Ozu always handles this common theme with subtlety and understanding of family dynamics.  Complications arise fairly quickly, and the family's plans go awry. They want Noriko to marry her boss's forty-year-old businessman friend, Mr. Manabe, but she has different plans. The mother of her widowed childhood friend Kenkichi Yabe (Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi) asks Noriko to marry her son. When she says yes, it aliena...

I had never seen a Yasujiro Ozu film, including his oft-mentioned classic, Tokyo Story (1953), when I watched this movie a couple of years ago. I started with Good Morning  (1959) because I figured a comedy would be a good place to start and felt the premise of Tokyo Story to be somewhat daunting. It made me excited to see more examples of his famous "pillow shots," where Ozu cuts away from the narrative to focus on a landscape, an empty room, or a household item, and build his world. This interest in Ozu's framing was only a starting point because now I plan on watching his entire filmography for narrative as well as cinematography and everything else that makes his mise-en-scene and ideas so enjoyable. I will write about fifteen of them for the blog and rank them.  One of his later comedies,  Good Morning  examines how two young boys challenge their parents' rules because they want them to buy a television to watch Sumo matches. As with most of Ozu's ouevre, t...

I am going to start a new series on Yasujiro Ozu's films in the upcoming weeks where I rank and write capsule reviews for fifteen of his films. I have started watching a representative portion of his filmography, ranging from the silent comedies to his later works that deal with family, marriage, and society in the post war years, including the Noriko trilogy ( Late Spring , Early Summer , and Tokyo Story ) and all the movies he made with the incomparable Setsuko Hara. So far this project has been fun, and I cannot wait to share the results. Prepare for a discussion surrounding culture, dialogue, and the ever-present tatami shots.