Okay, okay, I confess to being a smart-ass.
Japan’s been on my mind lately, partly because of the way North Korea’s been jacking around, and partly because some really good films have been coming from overseas.
Toho, for instance, recently released a two-disc definitive DVD of Gojira (the 1954 all-Nipponese version) along with Godzilla, the 1956 redux with Raymond Burr. Additionally, classic animé series such as Cowboy Bebop have been remastered and re-released, there’s a forthcoming boxed set of the bizarre and beautiful flcl due out in November, and Criterion has begun really delving into some of the greats from Japanese cinema, including movies such as Ugetsu and Hara-Kiri.
The Kanji and Hiragana characters in this post’s title* spell the Japanese phrase warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru, which means, roughly, the worse you are, the better you sleep. The slimmer translation is The Bad Sleep Well, and it’s an overlooked rough diamond from the oeuvre of Akira Kurosawa, one of the most respected film directors of the twentieth century.
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Early in this movie there’s a conversation between Gregory Peck, who plays a Southern small-town lawyer, and his young daughter Jean Louise, played by Mary Badham. She asks to see his watch, then mentions that according to her brother Jem, the watch will one day belong to him.
“What are you gonna give me?” she asks — and the rest of the film stands as an answer to the question.
The answer: A sense of dignity; a presence of quiet, unwavering acceptance; a living illustration of courage; a willingness to do what is right regardless of what others may think.
The daughter’s preferred name — rather than Jean Louise — is Scout.
The father, Atticus Finch, is charged with defending a black man in the 1930s in Alabama against a rape charge leveled by a white woman.
The movie, To Kill a Mockingbird, earned Peck an Oscar — and the novel of the same name earned its author, Harper Lee, a Pulitzer when it was published.
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Two shows. That’s all you really need to know. Starting at 7 PM on Sci-Fi Channel…
Doctor Who — the BBC refit of the classic series. The first season was utterly spank. This season’s been good so far too. The show retains its exuberance and strangeness, but has received a massive upgrade in FX quality; fortunately the writing seems to be fairly high-standard as well.
Battlestar Galactica, seasion premiere. The “2.5″ split left cliffhangers galore. Now we get to see what happens to two undermanned battlestars when they have to figure out how to deal with a Cylon-occupied planetful of humans who’ve had a year to grow soft and lazy. Like Doctor Who, this is a total refit of an older series, and while the sets and settings include some highly questionable details — such as terrestrial foodstuffs and 12-hour clocks — the caliber of the writing is superb.
As for rentals this week, I’m afraid you’re on your own. I spent the earlier part of this week re-watching BSG 2.5 to make sure I was up to speed for tonight’s opener. I won’t be as committed next week, and should be able to take on a sweetly-made American classic based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel from the early 1960s.
Wherein I continue to flog the merits of movies made well before I was conceived in favor of the tripe produced by Hollywood today…
Sorcerers, crocodiles, ethnically-inappropriate mushrooms and overheated dinosaurs are just some of the things to be seen in Fantasia, a cartoon that’s never really found a niche.
Disney couldn’t really have been blamed for the commercial failure of the film. At the time it was produced, no one was really sure just yet what the demographics were for animation. Snow White had been quite popular, obviously with children; but adults were able to enjoy it as well, despite Walt’s apparent inability to properly pluralize dwarf.
Fantasia, however, wasn’t really made for children, and that might be one reason it’s been largely misunderstood and mostly unwatched. That’s really rather sad; Fantasia is easily one of the ten best movies ever made in the United States.
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I’ve more or less given up on American movies, or at least the stuff currently being spewed by Hollywood. There seems to have been one marketing focus group meeting too many of late. Movies are made by committee, cynically packaged based not on quality, vision or merit, but rather on what’s likely to sell.
It’s so bad now that even acknowledged classics are no longer safe from retroactive destruction — by their own creators! — as Lucas’s digital rape of the original Star Wars series shows.
So it occurs that maybe I can help counter the trend a little by pointing out movies that are, by cracky, worth seeing, rather than simply pissing and moaning about how much I hate, hate, hate Ben Affleck. (Oops, did I just say that?)
I think I’ll start with an acknowledged classic, Citizen Kane.
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