Aegean Disclosure

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Random Ozu Day

The number of Ozu films on DVD is kind of pathetic (there are only four on Amazon via Criterion), here are Ray Carney's thoughts when asked:

Flavor of Green Tea over rice

Must see, a critical work that brilliantly shifts from sit. com. to tragedy in mid-course

There Was a Father (Chichi ariki) (1942) 87min

skipable

Early Spring (Soshun) (1956) 144min

must see

Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya shinshi roku) (1947) 72min

skipable

Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo boshoku) (1974) 141min

should see, but not the ultimate highest supremo

A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori) (1948) 84min

skipable

Good Morning (Ohayo) (1959) 93min

must see

Floating Weeds (Ukigusa) (1959) 119min

should see, but not the ultimate highest supremo

Late Autumn (Akibiyori) (1960) 129min

must see....

An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji) (1962) 113min

must see
And where is Late Spring in your list? Add it to the Must See group!

Ozu IS amazing. All the films are interesting, but just as with any other artist, there are "roughly zones." Even Homer wrote some lines in haste. Even Bach has a few unnecessary repeats. So, yes, some of the early films in particular are "skippable." But the ones I've marked Must See you really should try to get to. Ohayo is the only one in that group that you might skip, but since it is comic and has fart jokes, I know you wouldn't want to, so I put it on the Must See custom for you! : ) Just kidding! It's a sweet, charming flic!

Keep making trouble!

Ray

"It is always easier to be a scoffer, a debunker, a skeptic, than to open oneself to unfamiliar insights. It is always easier to resist an experience, to hold oneself above it, than to put one's certainties at risk by deeply yielding oneself to it. There are twentieth-century critics who practice the hermeneutics of faith, but for obvious reasons they do not get as much attention as the other sort of critics. They are not system builders. They are not generalizers. Their work does not make self-aggrandizing claims about literature's complicity with repressive systems of race, class, and gender. They do not offer comforting, utopian prospects of escape from those systems through projects of literary and critical cleansing. What they do offer, in fact, is not what most people want: an unending course of work, conducted through arduous acts of sustained attention, without the promise of grandiose ideological insights and sociological generalizations at the end of the road."--Ray Carney

"squeeze your nuts and open your face." ee cummings