The Bad Sleep Well ("Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru")

Directors: Akira Kurosawa
Starring: Toshiru Mifune, Keiko Nishi
Year: 1963

In Kurosawa's HAMLET-like story of corporate scandal in post-war Japan, a young man attempts to use his position at the heart of a corrupt company to expose the men responsible for his father's death, who was was driven to suicide by jumping out of the seventh floor of corporate headquarters. His illegitimate son exchanges identity with an old friend in order to marry the handicapped daughter of the corrupt industrialist he holds responsible.

Comments: The moral clarity of Kurosawa's other films is much more subtle in this film. Very good performance by Mifune.

Recommended.

Fear and Trembling ("Stupeur et tremblements")

Directors: Alain Courneau
Starring: Sylvie Testud, Kaori Tsuji
Year: 2003

Based on a novel by Amelie Nothomb, the movie shows the trials and tribulations of a Belgium-born woman (Testud) raised in Japan as she attempts to enter the Japanese working world.

Comments: Testud plays the role with sublime reserve and bewilderment, as she navigates through the clash between modern-day Japanese and western work place cultures. Note that office scene which depicts the boss's desk positioned facing all the desks of the subordinates in an open floor is shockingly similar to the Tokyo office of Steve's company.

Recommended.

Woman in the Dunes ("砂の女 ,Suna no onna")

Directors: Hiroshi Teshigahara
Starring: Eiji Okada, Kyoko Kishida
Year: 1964

One of the sixties’ great international art-house sensations, Woman in the Dunes was for many the grand unveiling of the surreal, idiosyncratic worldview of Hiroshi Teshigahara. Eija Okada plays an amateur entomologist who has left Tokyo to study an unclassified species of beetle that resides in a remote, vast desert; when he misses his bus back to civilization, he is persuaded to spend the night in the home of a young widow (Kiyoko Kishida) who lives in a hut at the bottom of a sand dune. What results is one of cinema’s most bristling, unnerving, and palpably erotic battles of the sexes, as well as a nightmarish depiction of everyday Sisyphean struggle, for which Teshigahara received an Academy Award nomination for best director.

Comments: One of Steve's all-time favorite films.

Highly Recommended.

Down By Law

Directors: Jim Jarmusch
Starring: Tom Waits, John Lurie, Roberto Benigni,
Year: 1986

Three men, previously unknown to each other, are arrested in New Orleans and placed in the same cell. Both Zack (Waits), a DJ, and Jack (Lurie), a pimp, have been set up, neither having committed the crime for which they have been arrested. Their cellmate Bob (Benigni), an Italian tourist who understands minimal English, was arrested for manslaughter. Zack and Jack soon come to blows and thereafter avoid speaking to each other. Bob has an irrepressible need for conversation. He hatches a plan to escape, and before long the three are on the run through the swamp surrounding the prison. The film discards jailbreak film conventions by focusing on the interaction between the three men rather than on the mechanics of the escape. A key element in the film is Robby Müller's slow-moving camerawork, which captures the architecture of New Orleans and the Louisiana bayou to which the cellmates escape.

Comments: Zhanna and Steve saw this movie on their first date.

Highly Recommended.

Other Films Viewed

Solaris -- Tarkovsky (1972)
Russian Ark -- Alexandr Sokurov (2002
The Passenger ("Professione") - Michaelangelo Antonini (1975)

The Ballad of Narayama -- Shohei Imamura (old people banished to die on top of mountain)

Black Rain -- Shohei Imamura (family's travails in the aftermath of hiroshima bombing)

Before Sunset -- Richard Linklater (couple meets in Vienna)

Diary of a Country Priest -- Robert Bresson (an idealistic priest arrives at his first parish only to face apathetic congregation)

The Hidden Fortress -- Kurusawa

High and Low -- Kurusawa (industrialist family becomes target of kidnapper)

Hiroshima Mon Amour -- Alain Resnais (Japanese Man and french woman meet in Hiroshima after the war)

In the Mood for Love -- Wong Kar-Wai (a man and woman move into neighboring apartments on the same day)

Osaka Elegy -- Kenji Mizoguchi (switchboard operator is entrapped in a ruinous affair with her boss)

Ornamental Hairpin -- Hiroshi Shimuzi (after forced to prolong his stay at a rural spa after accidentally cutting his foot on a hairpin, a soldier tracks down the pin's owner. Features actor Chishu Ryu as a young actor)

Twenty Four -- Keisuke Kinoshita (a chronicle of a young teacher and her unwavering commitment to her students in a rural island community in Japan)

Sword of the Beast -- Hideo Gosha (low-level swordsman betrayed by comrades goes into isolation, but finds motley group illegally mining shogun's gold)