My Review of A Man Escaped (1956) directed by Robert Bresson

Robert Bresson's films are about people trying to find their way into some sort-of grace or salvation. About dealing with the mystical or god-like in everyday situations and often through dirty or unpleasant means. In this film we find a member of the French Resistance (based on André Devigny) being housed in Montluc Prison while awaiting to be executed during WWII. The fighter (called Fontaine in the movie) is not content to wait for his death and immediately plans to escape, but the Nazis are not about to make it that easy. He now has to make it out of this heavily-fortified prison alive with every move under close watch.

This film is an A to Z of what one gets in a Bresson film. Anonymous actors (who Bresson always referred to as his models) do not act so much as recite the lines with as little emotion as possible. There is a "holy minimalism" in how the action is portrayed in these films (and yes, despite how restrained the actors "models" are, they're the ones that drive the plot). The sparse use of music is another thing that distinguishes this and other movies of Bresson, because of how precise he uses it is use. We get some music during the movie's intro and then none for about 30 minutes until a random scene where the prisoners are emptying their slop jars in the prison yards. He said that he wanted this to represent a precise moment of ritual for the characters lives. This all goes back to Bresson's quest to purge cinema or movies (which Bresson unhelpfully calls "cinematography") of as much of the influence of the theater or plays as possible. That's why he calls his movie actors "models": in his mind actors belong in places like Broadway, film has to have its own language distinct from what came before it. Other directors like Andrei Tarkovsky and Mohsen Makhmalbaf thought on similar lines, but neither took it as far as Bresson to try and remake the basic language and function and cinema as we know it. Even his devoted fanbase of film-makers in the French New Wave were not prepared to "transgress" (though Bresson would probably see it as a purification) in the way that he was.

This film, and all of Bresson's films, is an experience unto itself and you either going to like it or hate it. This is a film about prisoners escaping the Nazis, there were countless films with that plot before A Man Escaped, and have been countless since, but I guarantee none of them look like this.

My Review of Late Spring (1949) directed by Yasujiro Ozu

Yasujiro Ozu's career can be divided up quite neatly: there's everything before Late Spring and everything he made after it. Though Tokyo Story (1953) is his masterpiece, this film marked the turning point in his career where his post-war style crystalized and the majority of his greatest films were made. Ozu had spent the majority of his films up to this point exploring generational conflict in Japanese families—mainly with The Great Depression as the back-drop. Starting with this film he would use the aftermath of WWII as the back-drop to exploring these conflicts and this movie set the tone of it involving a daughter being matched-up for marriage by her family. It all begins here with the story of a widower and his single daughter named Noriko.

The synopsis is that a widowed father and his young adult daughter Noriko are living happily together in post-WWII Japan. When an aunt decides that Noriko needs to get married before she gets "too old" (i.e. 30), it kicks-off the drama of the film as the daughter was happy were she was at and had no thought of getting married. The conflict is started by the aunt, but is really between the father and daughter as they struggle to understand their place in this "new" Japan. Though one could speculate what Ozu's thoughts on the characters' motivations, it never 100% certain who is truly right (though in the world of 2021 it would make more sense that the woman's opinion is the most important, this was not so in 1949). The ending is one of the most quietly devastating endings I have seen in a movie solidifying it as one of the great father-daughter movies. 

This film would kick-off the first of the many "Noriko" films of Ozu that would involve this female character (usually, but not always, played by Setsuko Hara) caught over whether she should get married (Hara would play a Noriko in Tokyo Story, but the circumstances of that movie are very different). These films would provide variations of Late Spring and some would be remakes. When Ozu found a story he liked, he stuck with it over-and-over. It is amazing how many angles he examined this topic from 1949 until his last film An Autumn Afternoon (1962).

We need to talk about the two main actors. Setsuko Hara was for Yasujiro Ozu what Toshiro Mifune was for Akira Kurosawa. She was Ozu's primary actor and no actor performed more dedicatedly for him than her. The father in the film is played by Chishū Ryū—who was for Ozu what Takeshi Shimura was for Akira Kurosawa. They were part of the Shochiku stock character ensemble. It is interesting to see these two actors, both established actors in the Japanese movie industry by 1949, as they were approaching their creative peaks. Ryu was, as always, playing a character older than he was since he was "old-looking" by design. 

Ozu was well-known by now for his camera-style and it is what most folks know about him at first glance. He shot most of his angles at near-ground level and he liked to put scene transition elipses in his movies. At this point he also had eliminated 99% of tracking shots in his movies. His career-long relationship with cinematographer Yūharu Atsuta helped make this style so iconic.

I don't know if more can be said on this film at this point. In a world where a woman's right over her body is still highly contested, this film was the beginning of Ozu's decade long examination of it in Japanese society. Though Ozu is certainly not the proto-feminist that his contemporary Kenji Mizoguchi was and definitely not the feminist that Kinoshita would turn-out to be in the early 1950s, he reflects part of a conversation that Japanese society was having in the post-WWII era about what place women (who got the franchise after the war) would have in it and what rights they could expect. 

My Review of The Inheritance (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 A year after completing one of the great epic achievements of epic cinema and Masaki Kobayashi was not done even a little at showing the dark side of Japanese society. The Japanese Economic Miracle had now officially begun in earnest and everybody was trying to get rich after thirteen years as a war-ravaged third world country. Though the war was over for most of Japanese society and its economy, one man was not through with showing his society how sick it was. This movie would be the last contemporary film or "Shomin-geki" by Kobayashi for 6 years. He would follow this film-up with one of his greatest–Harakiri–later that year. This a film that would set the tone of the more darker tone that emerged over the course of The Human Condition.

This story is as hardcore an allegory as Kobayashi could offer. A terrible industrialist is dying and decides to leave his fortune to his illegitimate offspring. His young wife and all his cronies decide to scheme him for as much they can. That is the movie in a nutshell. The point of the film is to show how each person sets about doing it and to analogize it for Japan at-large. This film maybe smaller in scope that The Human Condition, but it is as anti "feel good" as that film saga. There are no good people or heroic folks in this movie. It is a game of thrones of greed. Also, it is interesting to hear Toru Takemitsu doing a jazz score as oppose to a Western or Japanese classical score.

My Review of Where is the Friend's House? (1986) directed by Abbas Kiarostami

 I definitely needed to revisit the Iranian New Wave given all that's been happening in the world and my own life. This story is the first of Kiarostami's "Koker Trilogy" of movies that revolve around Koker, Iran. This first movie is a straight-forward neorealist film involving the protagonist trying to return the homework journal of his friend so that he does not get kicked out of school by his hard-ass teacher. There is no experimentation with the style here so I will talk mostly about the movie.

This movie is one of the last of Kiarostami's kid films where the protagonists are children and it is like a book-end of his second feature film The Traveler (1974). In the earlier film it was an evil little hellion that goes around looking for people to scam and goes on a journey only to get his poetic justice in the end. In this film it is a much more forthright kid who goes all over the province where he lives to find his school friend and return the book he picked up by mistake and the film also ends with poetic justice, but in a different way. Both films have jackass families, but this film sees the protagonist do right despite this while The Traveler's protagonist does the wrong thing. Where is the Friend's House?  makes you have to watch until the very end for the satisfying pay-off and just goes to show the beautiful humanism of the Iranian New Wave cinema at this time. A good ending can just make a film!

Eva is Done, FINALLY!! My Review of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (2021) directed by Hideaki Anno

 Thanatos - If I Can't Be Yours ("10 Years After Remix") by Loren & Mash

Finally!! After 14 years of these "Rebuild" films and 26 years of the franchise overall, Neon Genesis Evangelion has ended. This franchise has spanned nearly 2.5 generations of anime fans. I first heard of it when part of the original tv series was featured on Toonami's "Robot Week" back when I was still in grade school. Now I am way older I have seen everything and had to wait over a decade for this crazy, beautiful-looking, overloaded with pop-philosophy, glorious mess wrap-up. I'll let everybody else talk about the "message" behind this movie and the franchise as a whole (you have 25 years worth of that to read/watch), but I'll just try to give my very short takes on the movie and the franchise.

Everything You Ever Dreamed (Alternate Version) by Arriane

The movie is basically trying to one-up and undo the art and message of End of Evangelion (one of the most controversial films in anime history) respectively. The question that folks had going into the "Rebuild" films was is Hideaki Anno going to let Shinji & Co. have a happy ending compared to how the franchise originally ended in 1998 or was he going to screw them all again? Thankfully, he chose the former: let them have as happy an ending as possible and send them on their way. The story is very much what you expect from Eva, but the ending allows everyone to get on with their life. The true wonder of this movie is the visuals. This being the last Evnagelion property means that they went all out and it looks amazing, no other way to put it. The music likewise is pretty much what you expect and want from Shirō Sagisu at this point and his original music and the pop songs used in this film (both English and Japanese) are what you want from this franchise. On a different note: did you know that Sagisu made a British R&B/Hip-Hop album remixing his music from Eva to coincide with the release of EoE in 1998? It is official out-of-print, but you can find the whole album on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/evangelionvoxflac 

Promised Land (F-2) by Loren & Mash

While Shinji Ikari will always be one of my least favorite protagonists in fiction as a whole, this franchise pretty much re-wrote the rules of anime and is one of the most well-know properties this sides of the format. So much anime that we have now simply would not exist if a man did not think: "what would really happen if we put traumatized teens into giant 'robots' to fight supernatural aliens?" Well, 26 years later and I guess we have the answer...and it ain't just more fanservice.

One Last Kiss by Hikaru Utada

My Review of Seven Samurai (1954) directed by Akira Kurosawa

 Seven Samurai (1954) is one of the greatest movies of all time. It pretty much invented the language of the action film and the posse film. It is also one of my top 5 films. This is a film that ask what we fight for in life. This film takes place at the end of the Sengoku era as 100 years of disunited civil war was being replaced with unification and a re-establishment of feudalism under the samurai-class. According to the film, the action specifically takes place during 1587 when the Japanese government under Toyotomi Hideyoshi was involved in the Kyushu Campaign to unite the last of the main Japanese islands. While this is going on, a coalition of 7 ronin (master-less samurai) come together to defend a village from bandits. This movie is a swan song to the sort-of co-mingling of different social classes in Japan before the Tokugawa-era ends that forever. This movie has everything in it--it meditates on everything and it still is filled with action and drama. It was the start of Kurosawa's re-imagining of the samurai film and it is still the benchmark of any film that shows a bunch of heroes coming together to save the day.

As I stated in my review of Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954 was the greatest year in the history of Japanese cinema: if one made a list of every acclaimed Japanese film that year it would make an essential cinema list (Ozu missed out). The fact that this film was supposed to have come out a year earlier, but was delayed because the weather and Kurosawa's perfectionism was near-divine fate. While this film was ranked the third best film by Japanese critics for 1954, this has easily been the most celebrated film internationally of that year. 

When reviewing a film like this, one does not know where to begin or end so I'll just bring it all to a close here.

My Review of Muhammad Ali (2021) directed by Ken Burns, Sarah L. Burns, David McMahon

 This is one of the best, if not the best, of Ken Burns' biographical documentaries. This is also, production-wise, the most modern of Ken Burns' documentaries even compared to his Vietnam War documentary. It is an excellent introduction to the 21st century of the figure of Muhammad Ali. Ali was considered by many as one of the greatest athletes of the 20th Century. There have been infinite documentaries surrounding the life of Muhammad Ali examining every factor and detail imaginable. Including this doc, we've had three alone in the last 12 months (Sep 2021) so any new documentary had to be either be a very well intro or a doc that had some sort-of new info on Ali that no one has heard about in the last 44 years. This doc smartly went the route of the former and it has paid-off well.

This documentary uses the "Ken Burns style" with Ali masterfully. This doc in a way benefits from Ali's  own decades of myth-making by now having a template. The challenge for Burns & co. was sorting through the myth and showing the actual histories. Luckily we have quite a few people very close to Ali including his brother, 2nd & 3rd wives, and 2 of his daughters as well as a host of friends and associates and archival photos and films that help aid in this. If you are someone who is familiar with Ali's story than you will not learn anything new here, but if you are new to him or not very familiar to him than this is a perfect place to start. There will be hundreds of other documentaries to watch afterwards concerning him, but this may be the perfect starting place.

Shifting to the documentary itself, I have to say I was impressed at the new modern feel that it gave off. I had just watched Burns' previous documentary on Ernest Hemingway and it feels like the production went ten-fold into the future. This is the second documentary Ken Burns has done on a famous boxer after his excellent documentary on Jack Johnson the first black heavyweight boxing champion (who's legacy figures throughout this documentary). I'm not sure if it was the addition of his daughter and son-in-law as co-directors with Ken Burns (Burns was the primary producer and his son-in-law David McMahon was the head writer). For me, it was mainly the use of music that lifts this documentary. The incidental/filler music was made specifically for this  documentary by Jahlil Beats, while the musical selection consulted/curated by Peter Miller (the producer for Burns' Jazz doc) is possibly one of his best musical soundtracks ever for one of his documentaries. It elevated this documentary for me in a way that none of his docs have done since Jazz (the first Ken burns doc I ever watched). I also enjoyed hearing Keith David back as the narrator—a very appropriate choice here.

It is interesting seeing the evolution of Ken Burns' career from 1981 to now. When he first started, his documentaries were wedded to the romantic notions of America: the myths, the Dream. As he kept going and kept learning—and kept being held accountable when he dropped the ball, his willingness to look American history straight in the face and look at the ugly parts with as much passion as the pretty parts has made him a better film-maker and dare I say a better person. It is interesting to see how the same man who made The Civil War, made The Vietnam War. The guy who made the romanticized-documentary on Huey Long in 1985 made a 1000-times better one on Muhammad Ali. True evolution, true growth, true awakening of an artist. Just like Muhammad Ali.

Short thoughts on the Ken Burns' Hemingway documentary

It's always a bonus for me as both a cinephile and a bibliophile when I can talk about both at the same time. Unfortunately, not so much here as I have read only a few of Hemingway's short stories. I've never been really big into Hemingway and this documentary, while raising my interest some, has not done so much. I tend to be more into white modernist writers like Faulkner or Joyce. But I am sure I can muster up the strength for at least two Hemingway novels. Toni Morrison writes about Faulkner at length in her book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination in-which she was trying to make an argument to read Hemingway with a very meta-critical eye, but it sort-of turned me off to the guy. This documentary confirmed to me that, indeed, Ernest Hemingway was a very terrible person who could write. 

As far as this documentary itself, it is what you would expect from Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Their biographic documentaries all seem to follow the same 3-part pattern that they have perfected over the years. I have observed that there is sightly more archival non-Ken Burns interview footage used here than you usually see in a Ken Burns doc, but if you can use it, use it. I probably won't watch this doc again for a long time simply because the subject has no interest to me, but it is what I like in a Ken Burns doc style-wise.