'BOBTAIL' REVIEW

Drive (2011)

He is a man, who is idle, uneducated, lonely and knows he bears a cross.– Shin Hasegawa The air is diffused with slightly burned smell of melted cheese and cellulose – the fluorescent sign, “Nino’s Pizzeria”, illuminates the cool dry night. The driver parks his car silently in front of the place. He pulls out a SPFX mask, a shabby plain-looking face made for movie stunt job. Let’s wait and see, until Nino comes out. Let’s wait and see. Pretty soon, he would come out, carrying smell of alcohol, rotten stomach and saliva around him. He would come out of …

JAPANESE FILMS

Musashino, the Landscape That Never Was (Part 3)

In THE LADY OF MUSASHINO, Mizoguchi features various images of water. When Tsutomu and Michiko take a long idle stroll in the area for the first time, clear water running in the canal introduces us to the world of Musashino. Later, a trip to the large reservoir (the Murayama Reservoir) definitely changes the fates of their lives. Transition from quiet water of the reservoir to violent, turbulent storm eloquently speaks the evolving emotions of the protagonists. These images remind us that the Musashino is abundant with natural water resources, as the mountainous area far north supplies the massive amount of …

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JAPANESE FILMS

The Dark Side of the Nation

This is part eight of “Films of 1949” series (Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7). In the previous post “Mistresses and Lovers”, I mentioned “There were many bloody incidents involving assassinations and terrorism, all linked to underground operatives of U.S. secret agency.” Alex in Florida asked me what this “underground operatives of U.S. secret agency” means. I’m afraid I dropped this historical trivia too casually, so I try to explain this. Before going into details, I would like to provide a little background. It’s about a railway system. The railway system in Japan was extremely important back in 1949. The Japanese Government Railway (Tetsudosho, J.G.R.) …