The Bicycle Thief, Goyokin, and Jiro Dreams of Sushi

The Bicycle Thief, by Vittorio de Sica, 1948


Vittorio de Sica's The Bicycle Thief (or Bicycle Thieves, depending on who you ask) is one of the best, most important, and most moving films ever made. That's not up for debate, it's earned that. Having seen the film, I can now acknowledge all those things, but I don't know, it was just so sad.

The Bicycle Thief is the relentlessly soul-crushing story of Antonio, an impoverished man who gets a job opportunity that requires he has a bike. He and his wife trade all their sheets to be able to get one, and even then, just barely. Antonio and his family treat the bike as their most precious possession. His son polishes it and has memorized every detail, down to a small dent. When Antonio goes to work for his first day, he carries his bike into the office, refusing to put it down. Then, on the job, which is riding around the city and gluing posters to walls, a man takes off with his bike.

Antonio goes to the police, who just trivialize the theft, as though it's not important. To Antonio, of course, it's the most important thing in the world. He, his son, and some friends go on a desperate search, combing the city for the bicycle. There are thousands of bicycles, and so on. The movie is just really damn sad. There are uplifting moments, and there's actually a lovely message of empathy and understanding to the whole thing. Though Antonio's desperation is blinding him to it, we can see that everybody is struggling, not just him. This is what drives people to steal bicycles.

I'm not NOT recommending the movie, it really is great, but just warning you, grab your hankies. No wait, don't use hankies, those are so gross, use a tissue. And watch something happy or fun afterwards, like cat videos or a cool-as-hell samurai movie or something.

Goyokin, by Hideo Gosha, 1969


I feel like Hideo Gosha was the last great director of the Japanese New Wave of the 50's and 60's. I don't know if this is a fact, because my knowledge is incomplete, but this is how it seems to me. While most of the other important directors of the time began making films in the 30's and 40's and were already well into their careers when they produced their seminal works, Gosha made his first film in 1964. Japanese cinema becomes a whole different beast in the 1970's, and I feel like Gosha kind of bridges the gap between the two styles.

In Goyokin, the great Tatsuya Nakadai (The Sword of Doom, High and Low, Kagemusha, among many others) stars as Magobei Wakizaka, an honorable samurai who looks on in shame as his clansmen slaughter an entire village to steal a shipment of gold. He can't go on as a samurai anymore and quits, but also promises his master and best friend, Rokugo (Tetsuro Tanba of You Only Live Twice and The Twilight Samurai, also among many others), that he won't report this transgression as long as it doesn't happen again.

Three years later, Magobei, living a peaceful life, is about to give up his sword for good when assassins sent to kill him tip him off that Rokugo is planning on butchering another village. Magobei decides to stop it from happening. Along the way, he stumbles across the girl who was the sole survivor of the massacre three years ago, and wins over a mercenary sent to kill him.

This movie is awesome. It's fun, with lots of action and adventure. Tatsuya Nakadai is totally badass as Magobei Wakizaka. There's a great scene where he is tied up and dropped into a deep pit of snow and left to die. The exact details of his escape are left to the imagination, but we're given enough of a starting point to marvel at how cool this guy is. Rokugo's plan to run a shipment of gold into the sea is pretty diabolical, and Wakizaka's plan to thwart this plan is equally clever. And of course, we get a deadly showdown between the two at the climax.

I've seen five or six of Hideo Gosha's films now, and dug them all. Though the film that follows this, Hitokiri, is a lot darker, the rest of the ones I've seen, such as Secret of the Urn have all had this kind of spirit of adventure. Goyokin is tons of fun.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, by David Gelb, 2011


We're going to stay in Japan for our next review, though this is a very different kind of movie than Goyokin. Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a documentary about Jiro Ono, an 85 year old man who owns a tiny sushi shop that purportedly makes the best sushi in the world. Jiro has spent close to his entire life making sushi, obsessing over every detail, honing his techniques, and looking for ways to improve it. He's like Van Gogh painting the same scene over and over again, trying to find the perfect colors to represent it. Or Stanley Kubrick obsessively looking through thousands of pictures of door frames, trying to find the exact perfect one to include in his film.

We also meet Jiro's two sons; the eldest is in his 50's and is still being primed to take over Jiro's restaurant someday. He has to live with the anxiety that even if his sushi is every bit as good as his fathers, people will somehow perceive it as lesser and thus put his business under. The youngest son has been encouraged to open his own sushi restaurant that is an identical mirror image of Jiro's place. Jiro was not the best father to his sons. He was too busy thinking of sushi, but I guess he's there for them now, in his way.

The documentary is fascinating, though it can be as repetitive and single-minded as its subject. Could you imagine living your life with your brain centered on all aspects of sushi and nothing else? Of course, he's not making the sushi alone. Along with his sons, he has several apprentices. They are given years and years of rigorous training. In fact, they said it takes something like ten years before they're even allowed to handle the eggs.

What's weird is, I'm not an adventurous eater in the least bit. I've never even had sushi, but I still could totally appreciate this movie and Jiro's work. I assume this sushi is the most delicious raw fish one could ever eat, if one were into such things as raw fish. It would be like if somebody in America would dedicate their entire life to cultivating the most perfect french fry in the world... Oh man, now I'm drooling. I've gotta go.

High and Low (Tengoku to Jigoku)

Every once in a great while, one has that feeling while watching a movie that they are watching one of the best movies they have ever seen. It's a thrill, and naturally, the older I get and the more movies I see, the less frequently I experience this rush. But as luck would have it, there are still a whole bunch of Akira Kurosawa movies out there that I have yet to watch.

High and Low, my eighth Kurosawa film, and the first I've seen set in the present day (1963, that is), is many different films at once. A kidnap thriller, a police procedural, a morality tale, and an examination of class disparity, and it's all filled with the same compassion and humanity that Akira Kurosawa brought to everything he made.

The story opens with Gondo (the legendary Toshiro Mifune), an executive for a shoe company, who is poised to take over the company and oust the other men on the board, who want to make cheaper shoes and charge more money for them. After a meeting with these men goes sour, he gets a telephone call, where an unknown voice tells him that his son has been kidnapped and demands a ransom of 30 million Yen. It quickly becomes apparent that it was not his son that was kidnapped, but rather the son of his chauffeur. The kidnapper tells Gondo that he must pay the ransom anyway, and Gondo must now come to the decision: must he give up his entire fortune for another man's son?

The first hour of the movie is almost like a play, the drama rarely leaving Gondo's home. What is truly amazing about this first hour is the way it's shot. Kurosawa uses long takes, sometimes 5 minutes or more, each shot carefully composed to maximize the emotional impact of what the characters are going through. He shows a mastery of spacial dynamics between the characters, often making social statements just with where they are positioned compared to each other in the frame.

Then, an hour into the movie, it makes an abrupt and complete change. The action leaves Gondo's home, and the focus shifts almost completely away from Gondo, over to Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai, the star of Kagemusha), the man tasked with hunting down and arresting the kidnapper. He and his team are good detectives, and what follows is a fascinating police procedural, as we watch them solve the mystery.

Amidst all this is a very large social statement. We learn that Gondo's large, air conditioned (a luxury at the time) home is located high atop a hill over the city of Yokohama, seemingly arrogantly looking down on the poor people below, sweating and suffering during a summer heatwave. There is a sense of local resentment toward Gondo and his place in society. Eventually, we follow the detectives and the kidnapper (played brilliantly and almost silently by Tsutomu Yamazaki) into the lowest place in the city, where heroin addicts lay in the gutter and writhe in agony.

I could go on and on how incredible High and Low is, but then you wouldn't really have any reason to watch it yourself. Kurosawa is, in my estimation, the greatest filmmaker who ever lived, and this is right up there with Seven Samurai and Rashomon as one of his greatest achievements. And those are just among the ones I've seen!

Kagemusha

This review is nine months in the making. I bought Kagemusha on Blu Ray in February. It took a long time to find three hours to watch it, but we finally got around to it in May. But then, every attempt to watch it was thwarted by my PS3. And now, in late November, after replacing my Blu Ray, getting my Playstation repaired, and buying a brand new damn Blu Ray player, I bring you, with great relief, my review of Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha.

Kagemusha is a sprawling samurai epic, set in the 1500s, following the Takeda clan, led by the feared and respected warlord Shingen. The film opens with a long, uninterrupted shot of what appears to be three Shingens having a conversation. In actuality, one is Shingen, one is his nearly-but-not-quite identical brother, Nobukado, who acts as his decoy (or Kagemusha). The third is a lowly bandit that Nobukado has discovered and saved from execution because of his uncanny resemblance to Shingen. He believes that this bandit could serve as Kagemusha better than he can.

His belief is soon put to the test, when Takeda Shingen is shot by a sniper and dies. If their enemies were to find out Shingen is dead, the clan would be done for, so the Kagemusha is made to replace Shingen. He must fool Shingen's clan, his family, and his enemies. Inspired by the kindness Shingen showed him, the double soon begins to carry on the ruse by choice, out of loyalty to the clan.

The legendary Tatsuya Nakadai plays the dual role of Shingen and his decoy. You may remember him as the gun-wielding gangster in Yojimbo, or maybe as the cold hearted protagonist/villain in Sword of Doom. He couldn't be more different in his roles here. Shingen is a smaller role, but must cast a huge shadow on the rest of the film. The decoy, stripped of any identity before the start of the movie, is never given a name. Where Shingen is regal and stoic, the decoy is crude and low born. It's kind of a The Prince and the Pauper situation.

Kagemusha is actually pretty delightful for the first couple of hours, before taking a dark turn, culminating in the true historical event of the Battle of Nagashino. Watching the decoy having to learn how to be another man, winning the love of Shingen's grandson, charming Shingen's mistresses, and ultimately earning the loyalty of Shingen's clan was really enjoyable and quite funny at times. The double is surrounded by many characters, and though they are not as colorful as those in Seven Samurai or some of Kurosawa's other early masterpieces, they are still interesting.

The pacing is slow and deliberate. There are many scenes played out in a long sustained single shot. Kurosawa also puts a heavy focus on the nonverbal interplay between his characters. It amazed me that sometimes he'd have like 10 different characters in a shot and you could just look at all of their faces and body language and feel like you could read them all. Pretty complex stuff.

Visually, Kagemusha is gorgeous and rich with detail. This is the first color Kurosawa film I've seen. I could tell from his earlier work that he composed every one of his shots like a painter would a painting. It turns out he paints them like a painting too. The colors are so vivid in Kagemusha, the reds and greens just leap off the screen.

I'm not sure if I would recommend Kagemusha to just anyone, however. It's probably not so much for the uninitiated. If somebody I knew hadn't seen any Kurosawa films, I'd certainly point them towards Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo, etc. and if they were still coming back for more, then I would show them the less accessible Kagemusha. Still, it's another great film from possibly the greatest director.

The Sword of Doom

It's been a while since I've done an old samurai movie, hasn't it? To be perfectly honest, that last one I watched, Samurai Rebellion, was such a downer that I was a little reluctant to watch another. Well, enough time has passed for me, so here comes The Sword of Doom, a 1966 classic directed by Kihachi Okamoto.

The Sword of Doom is dark, intense, and brutal, but it's much less of a downer than Samurai Rebellion for one reason: you are not supposed to like the main character. I'm not sure I've seen a samurai movie told from the perspective of such a bad guy before.

The Sword of Doom stars Tatsuya Nakadai, best known to westerners, perhaps, as the gun-wielding villain in Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo. Nakadai plays Ryunosuke Tatsue, a stone cold bastard of a man who is introduced to us by killing a harmless old grandfather for no real reason (OK, the old man was praying for death at a shrine, but it wasn't Ryunosuke's place to carry it out), and not registering a bit of emotion for doing so.

He goes back to the village, where he is participating in a Kendo tournament. A woman visits him, begging him not to defeat her husband in the battle. He scoffs, claiming swordsmanship is to a man what chastity is to a woman. He tells her he'll lose the battle if she has sex with him. She complies, her husband finds out and divorces her on the spot. The friendly, no-strings-attached tournament battle has now become a grudge match. Ryunosuke kills the guy and is exiled from his clan (killing many more guys on the way). The lady he nailed catches up to him, and says she has nothing and asks to go with him.

Two years later, he's living with her in exile, under assumed names. They have a baby from their initial encounter. He runs into an old servant of his family's who tells him that his own father, on his deathbed, regretting having unleashed such an evil man onto the world, has sent the brother of the man he killed to find and kill him.

There's way more, but I'll stop there. It's pretty complicated, right? I wasn't expecting such a complex story, most samurai movies tend to be pretty straight forward. But it was also engrossing. There are a whole bunch of characters surrounding Ryunosuke and his heinous acts, and they're all connected to each other somehow. It actually feels quite Shakespearean. There's the granddaughter of the man he slaughtered in the opening, her uncle who raised her, and Toshiro Mifune as a master swordsman of another school. Mifune doesn't have a huge role, but it's a very important one, and he owns it, and yes, he does get to mow some people down.

There's a whole lot of slaughter in The Sword of Doom. More than I've seen in most 60's samurai movies, but way, way less than the crazy ones of the 70's. In fact, the last 10 minutes or so is non-stop samurai sword action (my favorite kind of action).

The ending was a little confusing to me at first. There have been all these interwoven, complicated stories going on, and none of them pay off! I thought maybe they were trying to make a statement about something. I then did a little of research on Wikipedia and found out that The Sword of Doom was meant to be the first part in a trilogy of films, based on a classic piece of Japanese literature. The ending was a big cliffhanger that never got resolved. What a letdown it was to get so wrapped up in a story only to find out that I was never going to see it end.

Lack of resolution aside, I kind of loved The Sword of Doom. I got very involved in it, and never had any idea what was going to happen next. The cinematography, sound design, acting, and action scenes were all top notch. And the ending wasn't a total downer, because there wasn't really an ending! I hear the story was adapted a couple more times before this version was made. I'm wondering if those versions were any good, and if I can find them anywhere, so I can get a better idea of the full story.