Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

Machiko Kyo and Masayuki Mori in Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953).

When I watch a film I ususally try to know as little as possible about it beforehand to avoid spoilers to really get to experience it without any prior knowledge about plot twists and to let the film set its own mood. With Ugetsu, knowing no more than that it's a ghost story was still a bit too much and made some of it very predictable, but what I didn't expect was how much I was going to enjoy it. I will be writing some things about Ugetsu that I'm not really sure of, but one thing that I'm certain of is that Ugetsu is a truly masterful film and since it is the first film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi that I have seen I have a lot of catching up to do.

When I first watched Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog (1949) I thought that it was mainly about the characters and their choices and not so much post war Japan's influence on them, even though, of course, it is there. I felt that the characters ultimately had their lives in their own hands, that it was their own decisions that decided their fate and society was never the cause for how someone turned out. But when reading a bunch of reviews online, they mostly talked about how Stray Dog was a reflection of the times it was made in than anything else. While watching Ugetsu I thought that this is probably more of an allegory for post-war society than anything I've seen so far by Kurosawa, but after finishing it and reading some reviews, everyone was just writing about the characters as individuals and their actions as reactions to the closed off, fictional film world they live in and nothing about the film as a mirror image of Japan at the time it was made. So I'm either reading in the wrong places or I don't know what I'm talking about and right know I'm leaning towards the latter since all my knowledge of Japan does come from watching Japanese films.

In Ugetsu, war is raging, and it has opened up economic possibilities for farmer and potter Genjuro and his friend Tobei to sell their goods at the market in a nearby town. After going there the first time and having made some easy money, Genjuro and Tobei, for different reasons, are prepared to risk anything and everything for more money. Genjuro to provide a better life for his wife and daughter and Tobei to become a samurai to impress his wife. One night while their village is being raided by soldiers all Genjuro can think of is keeping his pots safe so he can sell them the next day, even risking his life while doing so. The morning after, Genjuro and Tobei heads to the market with their wives in tow but after being warned about pirates Genjuro decides to leave his wife Miyagi and their child behind because of the dangers that might lie ahead. While at the market, Genjuro is invited by a Lady Wakasa to her mansion to deliver the goods she just purchased and while there Genjuro is flattered enough by her not to return to his family. At the same time, Tobei is finding fame as a samurai by taking credit for the killing of a general that he only witnessed but didn't perform.

Perhaps the actions of Genjuro and Tobei and the results they bring could be seen as a warning against blind obsession with economic growth, and that abandoning your family could translate into giving up on your old values in favor of quickly gained fortunes in a more modern Japan. Fortunes that can turn out to be nothing but illusions that come with a higher price than expected. Ugetsu does seem like a conservative film with the point being to know your place, remain in the old and for women to stay at home at take care of children but while watching it, it felt more like a cautionary tale, not telling you to stay put, but to not rush headless into something just because you feel flattered by it or a promise of easy money.

Robo Rock (Taikan Suga, 2007)

Taikan Suga's Robo Rock (2007).

In a way, I think Robo Rock (2007) was just what I needed. I've been watching a lot of films lately, but I think being too focused on work has left me kind of numb to them and stopped me from really enjoying them. Watching Crazed Fruit (1956), directed by Ko Nakahira, just made me think that despite the film's history, it just wasn't very interesting to see a bunch of spoiled, disaffected brats try to deal with every day emotions. Mikio Naruse's When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) left me as feeling as distant to the film as Hideko Takamine's character wanted to be to her clients, even though I did like the film. Seijun Suzuki's The Flowers and the Angry Waves (1964) almost bored me to death and it took me a whole lot of tries to get through it. I also watched a few pink films, Bitter Sweet (Mitsuru Meike, 2004), Empty Room (Toshiki Sato, 2001) and Tokyo X Erotica (Takahisa Zeze, 2001) and they all left me cold, wishing Artsmagic wouldn't have stopped releasing the films of Hisayasu Sato and Kazuhiro Sano a few years ago.

So this is when I popped Robo Rock in my player, a low-budget comedy about a loser named Masaru (Shun Shioya) who works as a handy-man, which means he's doing all kinds of odd jobs given to him by a mediator, in Masaru's case Ibume (Kenichi Endo). The jobs may include everything from stealing panties off of clotheslines to delivering drugs to South Americans. The latter is what gets Masaru into trouble. At the same time, a nerd named Nirasawa (Yuichiro Nakayama) who is obsessed with big machinery and robots in particular, is convinced that Masaru is the only one capable of commanding a giant robot named Land Zeppelin to protect the earth against an impending Saturnian invasion.

This all sounds stupid enough, so mentioning Masaru's girlfriend Kiriko (Minami) who's a tattoo artist with only one design and the horrible western actors playing drug dealers might not be neccessary, but inside all this stupidity is a very entertaining film. It doesn't matter that it seems to be stealing bits and pieces from other films to create a whole, that the acting isn't always top notch, or that they seem to have spent the entire budget on special effects in the last 10 minutes of the film, since the result is more than the sum of its components. Robo Rock is great fun and it has a giant transforming robot.