Ozu Oydssey #23: The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice

Writers: Kôgo Noda, Yasujirô Ozu A childless middle-aged couple faces a marital crisis. The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. A ponderous title until you've seen the film, a meticulous movie where everything fits elegantly, including that cumbersome title. What begins as a cheerful comedy, women lying to their men to have a catty girls …

Ozu Odyssey #20: A Hen in the Wind

Writers: Yasujirô Ozu, Ryôsuke Saitô A man returns from World War II to find his desperate wife had resorted to one night of prostitution to pay for their son's hospital bills. "That's it for me. I'm exhausted""Don't be like that. Dream like you used to." Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka) is trying to make ends meet while …

Saturday Night Shorts 2

Back with two more hours of eclectic shorts pulled from YouTube. Pick and choose what catches your eye or do what I did and watch the playlist front to back (embedded at the bottom of the page). #1: The Wanderer of Catabranca https://youtu.be/HbWf-LILXWk Director: Leonardo Rolla A couple of farmers receive a box from an …

Ozu Odyssey #12: A Story of Floating Weeds

Writers: Tadao Ikeda, Yasujirô Ozu A kabuki actor's mistress hatches a jealous plot to bring down her lover's son. I kept falling asleep to this movie. It's calm and serene but I found the real culprit of this langour to be the astoundingly soothing piano track that accompanies the film on Criterion Channel. After numerous …

Ozu Odyssey #7: Woman of Tokyo

Woman of Tokyo is a studio quickie, a fast look at what happens when a woman, Chikako (played dynamically by Yoshiko Okada) working as a prostitute to support her brother's eduction gets found out. Ozu's signature humor is missing from this hard-edged tale full of brooding and eventually huge emotional breakdowns. If it were longer, …

Ozu Odyssey #5: Tokyo Chorus

Writers: Komatsu Kitamura, Kôgo Noda A married Tokyo man faces unemployment after standing up for an older colleague. Tokyo Chorus is the type of domestic drama I was expecting when I began my uneducated Ozu marathon. Tokihiko Okada is Shinji, a family man planning to buy his son a bike with his bonus from work. …