'BOBTAIL' REVIEW / JAPANESE FILMS

Love, Be With Humanity (1931)

Experience in a movie theater is not about the movie itself sometimes. It is about sharing time and space with total strangers. Most of the time, you don’t know who this person is sitting in the next seat. Sometimes it’s a guy munching on popcorn, sputtering the salver-coated debris whenever he finds something funny on the screen. Sometimes it’s an old fat lady who wiggles in the seat uncomfortably whenever a sexually-explicit scene comes up. Of course, there is always a soul who just snores through whole 2 hours of matinée. But somehow we share the time and space, – …

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'BOBTAIL' REVIEW / JAPANESE FILMS

The Trio’s Engagements (1937)

Star system is always the central piece of movie industry. A big star muttering horrible lines in an awful script is still better than unknown actors playing the performance of the decade in an excellent indie movie. At least in box office terms. When you need a boost in numbers, you are better off with two stars instead of one. Let’s make it three, then you have a sure hit.

 
JAPANESE FILMS

Seven Seas (1931, 1932)

Until recently, Hiroshi Shimizu was not a familiar name even among Japanese cinema aficionados. Though he had been well-regarded in Japanese movie industry during 1930’s and 40’s, and his works had been extremely popular among domestic movie-going public, Hiroshi Shimizu was eclipsed by his contemporaries after the war: Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kenji Mizoguchi. How many movies did he direct in his lifetime? Ever-exhaustive IMDb lists 57 titles as of today. More complete database for Japanese movies, jmdb, lists 166 tiles as his directorial works, large part of which are from 20’s and 30’s. As typical of Japanese films …

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