Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Kwaidan!

Theme: Transcendence - Crimson Glory

The most lavish and impressive horror production of all time actually shares something in common with video nasty Unhinged: both films are at times so languorously paced that you practically start to nod off before something jarringly frightening happens to shock you back into wakefulness. There, though, the similarity ends, because Kwaidan is more like Kurosawa's Dreams, and not just because both are Japanese anthologies, but also because they approach the Platonic form of cinéma. Entirely filmed within a huge warehouse set made up to look like all manner of locations interior and exterior, Kwaidan's constructed dream-world is as stylised and incongruous as it is hypnotically convincing. But then again, a third comparison suggests itself: like South of Heaven, Kwaidan uses obvious backdrops throughout, producing the same superreal dissonance as the painted shadows on the sets of Caligari.

No movie lends itself so hard to making those cinegrids they post on /tv/ sometimes.

Kwaidan is set variously in periods of Japanese history I couldn't possibly name or profess any knowledge of at all, and seems to be based on traditional folklore of that most obsessed-over country. Some instalments are quite straightforward morality plays in which a protagonist's pride or folly leads him to some paranormal ruin, while others are more whimsical, even comical ghost tales with cryptic or file-not-found meanings, but the three-hour whole runs entirely on atmosphere. Its ghostly apparitions probably seem spookier to western audiences with no frame of reference for why they take the forms they do or what the fuck is going on half the time, but why look a gift horse in the mouth? Moreover, Kwaidan features the best battle sequence of all time of the week, and probably the best naval battle ever filmed:

You guys, I think I'm a weeaboo now.

I think it's fair to say that Kwaidan is every bit as objectively the best horrorkino as The Road Warrior is the best actionkino or Apocalypse Now the best warkino*. You could compile a more-or-less objective top ten (or so) just by taking those GOATs from each genre, and it would be both more interesting to read and far more fun to watch than all those lists with Citizen Kane at the top you always see. But then, your list should be your list, which is to say it should be my list, because you have all the discerning taste of a village idiot. Watch Kwaidan.

*The theatrical cut, of course; French plantation scene apologists go back to r/criterion and kys.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Late Autumn!

The auteur theory, popularised by French New Wave critics-turned-makers-of-the-sort-of-films-a-critic-would-make, has been a disaster for the cinéma, not because their faves like Hitchcock and Ray weren't authors of a sort, but because after it became universal doctrine among the sort of person who makes video essays (bald), every hack filmmaker started self-consciously repeating motifs and turning his flicks into his own niche jerkoff material.

But long before the New Wave bores ruined everything, one filmmaker devised an authorial stamp so unique, and made such good use of it, that despite being acknowledged as the GOAT, he's almost never been ripped off. Video-essay Norwoods gush over such played-out hyperkinetic gimmicks as "the oner", but Yasujirō Ozu defied the crass culture of acceleration by increasingly eliminating camera movements from his ouevre as it matured from the silent era to the 60s, favouring tasteful minimalistic composition and a defiantly languid pace for his long succession of domestic dramas.

Strap the fuck in for some static noodle eating action like you've never seen.

"Boring!" you cry, throwing your rattle on the floor, kicking your stubby feet in your pram. Yeah, I thought so too, but Ozu is the rare filmmaker you grow into and not out of. His subject matter is the stuff of everyday life: generational friction, matchmaking, misunderstanding, loss, acceptance, shooting the shit about your college-age crushes, the fate of the old when left behind. His lengthy career captured changes in a society enamoured of tradition and the new in equal and irreconcilable measure. An Ozu film examines and observes, comments sparely and with room for ambiguity, and looks for the good in its conflicted characters. If you watch several back-to-back, you'll find they blur together in the memory, all variations on a theme, like eddies in a river always flowing down toward the sea.

Idea for a YouTube video: every Ozukino but it's just the establishing shots.

Late Autumn is my favourite one in part because it plays as a tribute to Ozu's frequent star and waifu, Setsuko Hara, once the young protagonist chafing against her elders' wishes, now the serene mother of another iteration of the same. Will she remarry? Will her daughter still find time to visit her when she moves out with her new man? You wouldn't care, you couldn't be compelled to care, but Ozu and his cast beguile you to care, because their neatly composed world is worth preserving. Many of his characters are Buddhist, many of the conflicts in his films about forgoing attachments and the transience of things: change is sad, but inevitable. But on the flipside, he very gently pushes back on that philosophy with the subtly radical rejoinder: it's inevitable, but sad.

Setsuko Hara > Mona Lisa

There is no order in which to watch the Ozu titles Late Autumn, Late Spring, etc.; it's just a naming convention he liked. None of his films are direct sequels to one another, but recurrences with difference, like the seasons themselves. Reject Hollywood; watch Ozu.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Ran!

Is this the most famous shot in cinéma history? It's pretty much this or Harold Lloyd hanging from that clock.

No doubt Akira Kurosawa is one of the canonical great filmmakers, universally respected for his 2,465 samurai movies, his disciplined camera movements, beauty-out-of-chaos mise-en-scène, and classical sense of tragedy. Yet his legacy in the west largely consists of fat neckbeards eagerly telling you Star Wars is based on his The Hidden Fortress, which is like if Michelangelo were mostly known for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle named after him. Fortunately, after ruining cinema with the runaway success of his Flash Gordon pastiche, George Lucas made some efforts to redeem himself by teaming up with his pal Francis Ford Coppola to fund Kurosawa's late-period epics, chief among them the master's adaptation of William Shakespeare's brilliantly edgy adaptation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's King Lear.

The run-on sentences will get longer in direct proportion to the pedigree of the project under examination.

Geoffrey's ostensibly historical account of Lear followed the same basic plot as Shakespeare's extremely unfaithful adaptation in having the old king give away all his lands to his obviously evil daughters named after venereal diseases, while disowning his one good daughter for having an autism attack and failing to jump through the hoops of flattery he lays out for her. The difference is that Geoffrey's account has a happy ending, with the evil daughters vanquished and the king and his good daughter reconciled. Because he was the original edgy boi, Shakespeare completely changed the ending to make King Lear his greatest masterpiece; a bleak, harrowing tragedy almost devoid of hope; a caustic and curiously Machiavellian cautionary tale against ego, resentment, and the folly of squandering your power and birthright to appease smooth-talking social climbers who tell you what you want to hear over the bluntly honest autismos who'll tell you what you need to hear. Macbeth may be more Gothic, Hamlet more metaphysical, but King Lear is the one that hits you like a horse kick to the gut.

Most of this kino was filmed on the slopes of active volcanoes, and the bitter, ashy waste of the landscape pervades each frame like a miasma out of hell.

So what could even Kurosawa add to such a bona fide masterpiece? Naturally he set it in feudal Japan, and made the three daughters sons, proving race and ""gender"" swaps can be based, presumably to the confused soyrage of both sides of movie YouTube.

This summer, Nicki Minaj IS Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

But Kurosawa also muddies the waters to intriguing effect by conflating the Lear narrative with a story about IRL historical daimyō Mōri Motonari, who taught his sons that individually they were easily breakable sticks, but together they formed a mighty faggot.

Zoomies will be shocked to learn I stole that joke from The Simpsons.

In this telling of the tale, however, the "good" son, Saburo (who is not a type of car) throws a sperg fit at this obvious metaphor and forcibly snaps all three arrows round his knee. While Cordelia's awkward autistry in Shakespeare's version contained a harsh but ill-timed truth, Saburo's meltdown actually undermines the potential unity of the clan and thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in its own right, which adds a further layer of 40Kesque unforced-tragicomedy-of-errors to the drama. Moreover, while Shakespeare's Lear quite plausibly claims to be more sinned against than sinning, Kurosawa's Hidetora Ichimonji (Tatsuya Nakadai) has clearly built up his dominion through bloody battle. The redemption he craves can only be attained through the unity of his sons ensuring what he's bought at the cost of his soul is a sustained peace. In this light the dissolution that befalls him damns him utterly. Like the boomers, like the ""greatest"" generation, he fails and betrays his own legacy. We're plumbing crushing, totally aphotic depths of tragedy here.

White westerners when they sense a drop of Twitter clout in the enthusiastic dispossession of their people.

The master also ""gender"" swaps another character from Shakespeare's Lear in the form of ascended bastard and master manipulator Edmund, here replaced by Lady Kaede (Mieko Harada). A superficial reading indulged for ideological reasons by most critics makes her out to be le ebin reddit Complex Sympathetic Villain, since her beef with Hidetora is grounded in his earlier campaigns that claimed her family and ancestral castle.

Media literacy enjoyers when the horrendously evil antagonist has a traumatic backstory like every murderer and pedophile in real life.

Anyone actually familiar with Shakespeare and human psychology, however, understands that she's entirely in keeping with the Bard's presentation of his villains: Edmund and Shylock (who are blatantly Ol' Bill's favourites, since he gives both of them a thoroughly unwarranted redemption arc right at the end of their respective plays) both have self-serving rants in the form of soliloquies that explain their grievances not to convince the audience, but precisely to demonstrate how delusional their self-justifications are. Most people in modernity are so morally, culturally and intellectually debased that they actually mistake "Hath Not a Jew Eyes" and "Now Gods, Stand Up For Bastards" as legit points, instead of the psychotic ravings of embittered narcissists. This misreading also explains everything about these people's engagement with contemporary politics. But Kurosawa surely understood the Bard's device, as he renders Kaede an almost supernaturally evil presence: only she and Hidetora use heavy Noh stylisation in their physical performances, rendering them archetypal.

Maybe this scene where she literally licks blood from Jiro's neck like a vampire should give you a clue.

It's the most important part of Shylock's soliloquy that's rarely quoted: "The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction" [emphasis mine (and Shakespeare's)]. In her pursuit of personal vengeance, Kaede destroys a kingdom and condemns thousands of lives, no doubt creating hundreds more Kaedes in turn. Kaede simps are the same BPD drones and soy orbiters who stanned the chick in Gone Girl when she went on her rant about men liking "the cool girl" over...BPD drones. Are you seeing where I'm going with this?

Soybeards will bore you with the standard take that this show was a heckin wholesome satire of heckin floofin boopin snootin toxic man-capitalismerino, but anyone with a triple-digit IQ and a human soul knows at a deeper (unconscious?) level, it was about men as the instruments of female proxy violence, and women as the instruments, in turn, of cluster B.

But finally we'd be remiss to overlook the sheer visual spectacle that Kurosawa brings to his and the Bard's magnum opus. Shakespeare said that all the world's a stage, but Kurosawa was able to use modern technology to paint on a much broader canvas, and his great work pops with the lurid colour of a fever nightmare, and teems with a cast of thousands Shakespeare might have pictured as he wrote, but never lived to see onscreen.

The colour-coded pāmitls alone are so cinematic all Japanese history might have been staged with just this film in mind.

Nor does our boi forsake the audio component of the format, with the famous silent battle, the sounds of screams and clashing weapons dipping out under an aching score, correctly lauded among the great sequences of the medium. How often does one of the greats of one art format remix and actually build on the best work of another? Ran is one of the essential films.

May we reach this point before it's too late.

007 Dreams: You Only Live Twice

As I wrote in my piece on Goldfinger, there are basically three Bondkinos that vie for first place in the lengthy series. You Only Live Twice is one of them. This is the one in which a helicopter picks up a car full of baddies with a magnet and drops it into the ocean, which Bond watches on a small TV screen built into his girlfriend's car.

>it's just so much more interestin'
>than what?
>than life

Naturally, this is superior surrealism. You Only Live Twice might be the Bondkino that tips its hand most obviously, with the title song stating "you only live twice/or so it seems/one life for yourself/and one for your dreams", and there's more pure dream logic in this one than ever. It's also the first instalment to completely disregard the plot of its source novel, keeping only a few names and concepts. The main plot, involving SPECTRE hijacking space rockets to push the US and USSR into nuclear war, is all new and all the better for it, not least because it allows for the creation of Ken Adam's greatest masterpiece: the volcano lair.

This might be the only series in which the auteur is the set designer, not any of the directors or writers.

Here Bond meets Blofeld for the first time, and he's clearly not the same person we nearly saw two times before at all. The back of his head was clearly visible with hair in From Russia With Love, but here he is completely bald and sports a massive scar, and dresses like Mao Zedong, which is ironic because, like Goldfinger before him, he's actually being sponsored by the Chinese, who he has the brass balls to try to extort more cash out of at one point.

What do the Chinese know about business and geopolitics, amirite?

No matter though, as he is played by Donald Pleasance and his personality and attitude are entirely in keeping with prior depictions: he's detached, emotionless and calculating, and has a Darwinistic approach to motivation and management that involves feeding his underlings to piranhas.

thot status absolutely patrolled lmao

It's this coldness that makes Blofeld Classic such a great antagonist and a counterpoint to the more venal, greedy or rage-filled Goldfingers and Largos, so of course they fucked it up and turned him into a pantomime baddy in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Nonetheless, here he is excellent and, despite neglecting to have Bond shot out of hand (of which Austin Powers would make much hay), pretty smart. Not only is his base guarded by helicopters and mounted gun turrets, but his control room is protected by steel shutters and he has a monorail prepped for escape and a failsafe switch to destroy the volcano should it fall into enemy hands. He's much better prepared than in Diamonds Are Forever, where he lets the goodies find his base because he literally added it to a floor map in the Willard White pent house.

DURR HURR I'M RETARDED

Twice also wins on musical score, with its inexorably building SPECTRE rocket theme, making it both the best looking and sounding instalment to date. On the minus side, henchman Hans is totally generic and the villainess seems like a less interesting rehash of Thunderball's Fiona, right down to the red hair. She does, however, go to the trouble of trapping Bond in a plane and parachuting out, leaving him to crash to earth, which is a wonderfully elaborate way of not shooting him that makes Blofeld and Largo look like amateurs. This makes no sense whatsoever. All I can think of is that maybe she was thinking of legitimately switching sides, then just decided not to at the last minute, which would at least be consistent with the powers of persuasion hitherto demonstrated by Bond's dicc.

it's not you it's meeeee

The Little Nelly chase is possibly the best Bond chase of all too, and the mass battle in the volcano is a lot of fun and mayhem, not to be matched until The Spy Who Loved Me's sub pen battle. Despite the training sequence (with live targets) shown in From Russia With Love, SPECTRE goons don't seem to have much of a head for strategy and mostly run around a lot firing randomly. Maybe Blofeld killed all the good ones for being late or mispronouncing things.

a cautionary tale of manlet rage.

What we can certainly say is that this was the end of the series as we know it, the last time continuity was observed until the Craig abominations. Connery would return to finish off SPECTRE in Diamonds Are Forever, but it wouldn't be the same. I guess we had to wake up sometime.