69 Alone Across the Pacific

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The Digital McGuffin
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69 Alone Across the Pacific

#1 Post by The Digital McGuffin » Sun Dec 07, 2008 9:12 am

Alone Across the Pacific

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A powerful hymn to the human spirit, Alone Across the Pacific – by renowned Japanese director Kon Ichikawa (An Actor’s Revenge, The Burmese Harp, Tokyo Olympiad) – tells the extraordinary real-life story of one man’s obsessive quest to break free from the strictures of society.

In 1962, Kenichi Horie (Yujiro Ishihara) embarks on a heroic attempt to sail single-handed across the Pacific Ocean. Leaving Osaka in an ill-prepared vessel – The Mermaid – the young adventurer must overcome the most savage of seas, the psychological torment of cabin fever, and his mental and physical breaking point, if he is ever to reach the fabled destination of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.

Using Horie’s best-selling logbook as his source, Ichikawa portrays the epic struggle of man against nature. ‘Scope cinematography – with Horie isolated in the oceanic expanse of the frame – and a score by celebrated composer Toru Takemitsu, add to the drama of a film for which Ichikawa received a Golden Globe nomination, among other accolades. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Alone Across the Pacific for home viewing in the UK for the very first time.

Special Features

- New high definition digital transfer, anamorphically encoded, original 2.35:1 aspect ratio
- New and improved optional English subtitles
- Original Japanese trailer and two teasers newly subtitled
- A lavish 24-page booklet featuring a colour reproduction of the original Japanese poster, archival publicity stills, and an essay by Brent Kliewer (Film Professor at the College of Santa Fe, and curator of The Screen, Santa Fe, New Mexico)

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#2 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Dec 07, 2008 1:04 pm

I've watched this unsubbed -- it's an interesting (and good looking) film and definitely worth seeing. But my favorite Ichikawa films still are the black-ish comedies (like Ten Dark Women and Crowded Train).

I don't know anything at all about Kokoro, however.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#3 Post by Scharphedin2 » Tue Dec 09, 2008 6:41 am

I am extremely happy with MoC's choice of titles. It is really nice that they selected Ichikawa films that have not appeared anywhere else in the West on DVD. Alone In the Pacific was always one of this director's films that I was looking forward to seeing based on the things I have read about it.

Kokoro I have never heard about, but the novel is lovely, and Soseki is a great author. It will be very interesting to see, how Ichikawa adapted the book.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#4 Post by Finch » Tue Dec 09, 2008 4:51 pm

I was hugely impressed by Fires on the Plain and the synopsis for this and Michael Kerpan's recommendation have me intrigued. I'm a bit amazed at how very little has been written about this film; imdb lists a single review from the Village Voice which is more of a summary of Ichikawa's career with just a few lines devoted to Alone Across the Pacific even though the critic calls it a major work (checked stricly film school and they've not reviewed it either). This looks like a worthwhile blind-buy and I placed my pre-order for this and The Devil and Daniel Webster.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#5 Post by lubitsch » Tue Dec 09, 2008 8:15 pm

I just read Alexander Jacoby's "A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors" and noticed with mild horror how bad the situation on the DVD/VHS market regarding classical Japanese film really is. I mean Kurosawa and Ozu are available, Mizoguchi was made available this year by the combined efforts of MoC, Criterion and DigitalMeme and Naruse at least surfaced with six films, but then it gets really, really bad. I read with great interest about all the Golden Age directors, many names I never heard of like Yoshimura.

It's dreadful that even a very renowned director like Ichikawa was so underrepresented on DVD and I just thought yesterday that I'd love to see ALONE ACROSS THE PACIFIC. And here it is :D .

Thanks very much to MoC and please continue with the exploration of classical Japanese cinema.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#6 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Dec 09, 2008 9:24 pm

There are many great and very very good (if not "great") directors whose work is almost entirely unknown in the West today.

I consider Tadashi Imai and Tomu Uchida two of the most regrettably neglected post-war directors (though a little of Uchida's work is out on DVD in France). Yoshimura comes from a less naturalistic tradition -- but his work can be quite impressive too. Then there is Shiro Toyoda -- whose Gan used to be available on video. And there are solid craftsman like Nomura (who does have a couple of films available). And this is just a small handful of the many directors who have been ignored.

Ichikawa is better represented than these -- but in a hit and miss fashion, with lots of his most interesting work totally unavailable (except as part of traveling retrospectives).

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#7 Post by BB » Tue Dec 16, 2008 10:52 pm

I'm really looking forward to seeing this.

In the San Francisco Maritime museum they have among other relics this man's boat. It's got a little plaque with a brief description of Kenichi Horie and his journey to SF bay. I've stared inside that cramped little rowboat err.. ship, and marveled at the idea of living in it for days on end.

Also apparently Eiji Tsuburaya (the miniature model/special effects guru responsible for Godzilla etc.) did some work for this film. So I'm curious how Ichikawa incorporates such stylized effects.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#8 Post by Cash Flagg » Mon Jan 19, 2009 8:27 pm


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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#9 Post by Tommaso » Tue Jan 20, 2009 7:57 am

The Beaver caps look fine indeed, though as the reviewer notices, indeed a tad on the soft side.

Friendly question (not a complaint) to Nick or others who know about these things: I wonder why this is single-layered and whether the softness might have disappeared with a really high bitrate, i.e. a DVD-9. I'm well aware from a former discussion with MichaelB on the Quay Brothers set that bitrate isn't everything when it comes to the quality of a transfer (and "Alone across the Pacific" seems another example), but especially recently I noticed a curious trend from several companies to put longer films or films with a load of extras on a single-layer disc. The new Michael Powell set from Sony comes to my mind immediately ("Age of Consent" having about 145 min. all in all on a single-layer disc), but also "Seventh Heaven" (119 min. plus gallery and three audio options). Is it still so much cheaper to use a DVD-5 instead of a DVD-9, or have compression methods increased so much in quality that the difference/loss can be considered negligible?

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#10 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Jan 20, 2009 11:48 am

The other Ichikowa just released along with Alone Across.. was a DVD-5 as well. I thought the image there was a bit soft, too, to be honest.

I'm so happy this director is finally getting his due. He was the Robert Wise of Japan.. dude could handle virtually anything and turn it into a masterwork. What could be more different than Fires On The PLain and.... well anything?

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#11 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jan 20, 2009 12:09 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:I'm so happy this director is finally getting his due. He was the Robert Wise of Japan.. dude could handle virtually anything and turn it into a masterwork.
Well -- he could do this IF his wife wrote (or revised) the script. Otherwise, his career is pretty spotty (even lackluster).. (Some non-Wada films during the Wada era are still pretty decent, however -- though even there Ichikawa's average was not so good as when he worked with his wife).

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#12 Post by Tommaso » Tue Jan 20, 2009 12:30 pm

HerrSchreck wrote:The other Ichikowa just released along with Alone Across.. was a DVD-5 as well. I thought the image there was a bit soft, too, to be honest.
Well, in the case of "Kokoro" I didn't worry, because it's just slightly over 80 min, and I found the slight softness there totally in accordance with the image of other 50s Japanese films.

Anyway, I'm looking forward very much to see both these new discs, though/because I still don't know where to place Ichikawa as a filmmaker, perhaps because he could, as you say, probably indeed handle everything. So there's a vast stylistic difference between "Fires" and "Burmese Harp" already, and even more so between those two films and "An actor's revenge". So learning that he made a film about a guy travelling alone over the Pacific at roughly the same time as these other films only increased my curiosity. I guess it will be a rather different film again.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#13 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Jan 20, 2009 2:36 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:
HerrSchreck wrote:I'm so happy this director is finally getting his due. He was the Robert Wise of Japan.. dude could handle virtually anything and turn it into a masterwork.
Well -- he could do this IF his wife wrote (or revised) the script. Otherwise, his career is pretty spotty (even lackluster).. (Some non-Wada films during the Wada era are still pretty decent, however -- though even there Ichikawa's average was not so good as when he worked with his wife).
Well, this lack of an ability via the critical mass to assign auteur status to Ichikawa has no doubt gone a long way in keeping his profile as low as it has been. Naturally a good director blossoms under the auspices of a good script. This is especially true of Kurosawa, who I find a bit of a snooze in his color era (Ran, Kagemusha, Maddadayo, etc, do VERY little for me) owing to his excess of control at the script level, and lacking the good fortune of a Hashimoto to keep his worst impulses towards blatancy and progressive political pathos in check.

Of course a good script can sit amid a bad film, certainly we must credit Ichikawa for the direction within his best films. I don't know what Wada's contribution to Tokyo Olympiad was for instance-- Ichikawa's handling of the mataerial was nothing short of genius. And here even with Wada's best scripts (Fires On The PLain is really remarkable on her part, in how she has brilliantly condensed the material into a series of incidental touchstones) we see Ichikawa stylistically adjusting his mise en scene and stylistic voice to correspond to the differences in the material, whereby one feels that he's become quite nearly an entirely different person.

I find this conceit highly salutary and valuable-- outrageously beautiful as Ozu's films are (the highest heights of cinema of course), we must confess that in the postwar era, modulations of tone aside (the grim pathos of Tokyo Twilight vs the effervescent fun of Late Autumn, for example), Ozu found a cozy little box and hewed to it... the polar opposite of a man like Ichikawa. Very VERY few filmmakers are permitted to get away with-- by studios I mean-- what Ozu did, which is to find many different films within the same old story, on top of which are repeated the same gags at the same time at the same place and by the same actors. It's really quite extraordinary how it all worked out for him.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#14 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jan 20, 2009 3:11 pm

I don't know that anyone has really documented (in any detail) just how Ichikawa and Wada worked together -- but the results of their joint efforts are so striking (and so much better, on average, than the rest of Ichikawa's work), that I now tend to view them as co-auteurs (rather like Huillet and Straub). All I can imagine is that she structured her contributions in a way that helped (pushed) her husband to develop striking images.

For a sad comparison to the many wonderful Ichikawa-Wada films, see Ichikawa's Makioka Sisters, which is mostly a series of visual cliches (illustrating a truly rotten adaptation of the source novel).

I would note that both Imai and Naruse were both master literary adapters. And part of their success might well have been an unusually close association with superb women writers -- particularly Yoko Mizuki (who I might admire even more than Wada). (Naruse also depended on Sumie Tanaka -- but she never worked for Imai). Naruse's adaptations weren't as varied -- but did range from a neo-kabuki adaptation (of a play by Kawabata) to late Meiji/early Taisho masterworks to film biographies to neo-noir. Imai also covered a wide range (with a greater emphasis on historical material in his late career). Of course, Uchida and Gosho were notable literary adapters too (among others).

Probably Ozu was the best of the non-adapters (Munekata sisters, which WAS an adaptation, was NOT terribly successful).

One of my favorite American directors is John Huston -- who at his best is extraordinary -- and at his worst could be pretty dire. I see a great deal of similarity between his situation and that of Ichikawa.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#15 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Jan 20, 2009 3:50 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:I don't know that anyone has really documented (in any detail) just how Ichikawa and Wada worked together -- but the results of their joint efforts are so striking (and so much better, on average, than the rest of Ichikawa's work), that I now tend to view them as co-auteurs (rather like Huillet and Straub). All I can imagine is that she structured her contributions in a way that helped (pushed) her husband to develop striking images.

For a sad comparison to the many wonderful Ichikawa-Wada films, see Ichikawa's Makioka Sisters, which is mostly a series of visual cliches (illustrating a truly rotten adaptation of the source novel).

I would note that both Imai and Naruse were both master literary adapters. And part of their success might well have been an unusually close association with superb women writers -- particularly Yoko Mizuki (who I might admire even more than Wada). (Naruse also depended on Sumie Tanaka -- but she never worked for Imai). Naruse's adaptations weren't as varied -- but did range from a neo-kabuki adaptation (of a play by Kawabata) to late Meiji/early Taisho masterworks to film biographies to neo-noir. Imai also covered a wide range (with a greater emphasis on historical material in his late career). Of course, Uchida and Gosho were notable literary adapters too (among others).

Probably Ozu was the best of the non-adapters (Munekata sisters, which WAS an adaptation, was NOT terribly successful).

One of my favorite American directors is John Huston -- who at his best is extraordinary -- and at his worst could be pretty dire. I see a great deal of similarity between his situation and that of Ichikawa.
About how many of his approx ninety films (excluding, I believe, his animation days?) have you seen btw? Such a long and fruitful career, spangled with such lofty masterworks, would require a full appraisal before making any kind of firm pronouncement regarding his skills as a filmmaker minus this or that screenwriter. It's certainly the routine assessment in entrenched critical annals that his best work blossomed from the 15 yrs with Wada. But we all know (particularly in terms of silent cinema, and Western appreciations of Japanese cinema) how problemmatic these assessments can be. This is not to say you've not seen, let's say, forty of those 90 films to form your own opinion? Knowing you perhaps you've seen them all... I don't know!

But certainly-- were I to see those 90 films and come to the same 'Wada' conclusion (history likes 'pat' explanations for complex and nuanced histories)-- that he worked better with one co-screenwriter or another is no strike against him or even unusual in the annals of cinema. Ozu's best films are those co-written films with Noda. FW Murnau's best films are those written with Carl Mayer. Scorsese's best films were written by Schraeder. Fritz Lang's glory years in Germany rested on the pillars of Thea von Harbou. Ichikawa's best films may be with Wada.

God bless you Mike, as much as I admire your sense of urgency and gusto in pursuit of an aesthetic love (eastern cinema in general, a pursuit which in it's acute thoroughness mirrors my own in the world of silents), and as much as I find our sense of taste converging in many areas (particularly in the favorited works of Kurosawa, Ozu, and-- Repast in particular-- Naruse) I'd have to reserve judgement in the case of Ichikawa's work unfavored by you.. for we have many rolling hills of cinematic nonconvergence between us (you can't get with Renoir, don't like Dreyer's Joan, are cool on Mizo's Sansho & Ugetsu, etc). I'd be especially cautious of assigning co-auteur status (expanding the role beyond that of writer I mean) to someone like Wada, any more than I'd assign it to any other brilliant co-writing partnership. Even in the case of someone like Carl Mayer, who I think was the greatest/most important screenwriter in history, with the extent of his visualizations and literal indications of where and when to move the camera in films like Sylvester and Der Letze Mann which are considered touchstones in the "unchained camera"... despite all this, the medium of cinema, and all the juggled conceits it brings together-- and the extreme difficulty of crafting such sublime high art out of these in coordination-- lessen not one iota the mastery of FW Murnau in the eyes of history. And you must realize from such brilliant scripts as lets say Fires on the Plain, other filmmakers would have crafted entirely different films... certainly from the highly unique specimen that is Ichikawa's film.

Vive la dif'.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#16 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jan 20, 2009 4:46 pm

I think I've seen 20 or so Ichikawa films. And I have read many reviews of other films (obviously, not at all the same as SEEING them).

In any event, I consider the Ichikawa-Wada collaborations some of the glories of Japanese cinema (and this even applies to relative "larks" -- like Ana / the Hole).

I would say that the best post-Wada film I've seen was "I Am a Cat" -- and while it was not at all a "bad" film (in fact it was quite interesting), it was colder and more abstract than the I-W norm -- and less purely visually interesting.

There is almost NO pre-Wada Ichikawa filmography. She entered the picture in 1949, just as Ichikawa's (post-animation) career was starting. Even in the Wada period, non-Wada films tended to be less "inspired. For instance, Anata to watashi no aikotoba: Sayônara, konnichiwa (only IMDB credits Wada on this -- other more reliable sources do not) is entertaining, but much more generic than much of the work during that time. However, Ototo (scripted by Yoko Mizuki) IS up to the overall I-W level (though it has a noticeably distinct look and feel).

What makes Wada so unique (compared to Yoko Mizuki and Sumei Tanaka -- and the various important male writers of the period ) is that virtually all her work was done with Ichikawa (there is one Tanaka film, which struck me as a bit clunky but interesting -- and a pre-Pigs and Battleships Imamura film). So it is basically impossible to really evaluate Wada sans Ichikawa.

I wonder about some of Ichikawa's later films that list Wada as a writer (after her death), I haven't seen these -- but I suspect that she contributed more to the success of Ichikawa's films than simply her written scripts.

I think I have seen a good enough sample of Ichikawa (and Ichikawa-Wada) work to voice a hypothesis that on average, Ichikawa-Wada works are far more likely to be rewarding than Ichikawa without Wada ones. Like all averages, however, this doesn't rule out exceptions (like Ototo, mentioned above). All I can say is that, so far, I have yet to see a disappointing Ichikawa-Wada film And I can't think of any other Japanese script writer I would "trust" more than Wada (though Yoko Mizuki would pretty much be tied with her).

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#17 Post by HerrSchreck » Tue Jan 20, 2009 6:07 pm

Certainly one of my biggest "in-cinema" disappointments was missing much of the Nakadai retro at NY Film Forum (did get there to see the glorious Seppu Ku aka Hara Kiri onscreen), within the past year or so... I Am A Cat was stuck in there which I really wanted to see.

With 20 under your belt you're ahead of me for sure. Remember that's about 70 unseen films, not counting his contribution to early animation in Japan! With the quantity of known masterworks on record (he needs no more to enter the pantheon alongside Naruse, Mizo, AK, Ozu, etc, and certainly for huge versatility he exceeds them all) just a few more beyond the plethora of "assignments" would be a great to discover.

You're right of course in one sense that his connection to Wada was deeper than most director-screenwriter relationships-- I mean this not in the Close Proximity sense (Ozu, Kurosawa, etc, as we all know went on retreats to spas etc and essentially shacked up with each other day in and day out living laughing drinking snarling and fighting until the script was done), but in the sense that when she died, she took a piece of his sense of his Life In Cinema with her.
Michael Kerpan wrote:For a sad comparison to the many wonderful Ichikawa-Wada films, see Ichikawa's Makioka Sisters, which is mostly a series of visual cliches (illustrating a truly rotten adaptation of the source novel).
To illustrate the vive la dif angle, here's MoC's Aquarello on
Sasameyuki, 1983 [Light Snowfall/The Makioka Sisters]

In the spring of 1938, the proud Makioka sisters, daughters of a prominent merchant family, have gathered in Kyoto for their customary annual viewing of cherry blossoms (hanami). The film opens to the serene and idyllic image of rainfall against the picturesque natural landscape, and is unexpectedly truncated by the spoken word okane (money) as the elder sister, Sachiko (Yoshiko Sakuma), addresses the headstrong, youngest sister, Taeko (Yûko Kotegawa). Socially progressive and independent minded, young Taeko wishes to claim her inheritance in order to finance her fledgling doll making business, against the advice of her older sisters who have set aside the money as her marriage dowry. With the arrival of the eldest sister, Tsuruko (Keiko Kishi), the discussion soon turns to recent complications that led to her decision to abruptly cancel Yukiko's (Sayuri Yoshinaga) proposed omiai (arranged marriage interview) after discovering that the suitor harbors a potentially scandalous family secret. Interweaving past and present, the film then chronicles the evolving lives of the Makioka sisters through the beautiful and enigmatic Yukiko as she engages in the outmoded, vanishing tradition and complex ritual of the omiai in search of enduring love and happiness amidst a profoundly changing society and national culture.

Based on the Junichiro Tanizaki wartime novel, the The Makioka Sisters is a poignant and affectionate elegy on the reluctant, but inevitable passing of a fading, cultural era. By correlating the changing of the seasons with the diverse geographic settings associated with the sisters' introductory encounters of Yukiko's potential suitors, Kon Ichikawa transcends the simple depiction of the dissolution of family to reflect the erosion of tradition and loss of culture in contemporary Japanese society. Note that the film opens with the Makioka family in the scenic, old world culture of Kyoto - the ancient capital of Japan - and ends with the head of the family, Tsuruko, accompanying her husband Tetsuo (Juzo Itami) to Tokyo - the modern, highly industrialized "new" capital of Japan (after the Meiji Restoration). Filmed in the early 1980s during the height of Japan's global economic dominance, The Makioka Sisters further serves as an ironic chronicle of the increasingly obsolete mercantile economy of prewar Japan and the rigid formality of social customs represented by the Makioka family. In the end, Sachiko's resigned remarks reflect the unarticulated longing and quiet tragedy of the transience of existence.

© Acquarello 2002. All rights reserved.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#18 Post by Michael Kerpan » Tue Jan 20, 2009 6:17 pm

I can't think of any movie I was more primed (and pre-disposed) to love than Ichikawa's Makioka Sisters. Consequently, I can't think of any other film that was such a massive disappointment.

I am utterly mystified by the raves by Aquarello (and others). Compared to the book -- and to Abe's earlier adaptation -- this glossy and colorful made-for-TV-ish version misses the point (events are compressed in a positively ridiculous and unbelievable fashion) -- and replaces any sense of real time and place with a sort of gaudy nostalgic orientalism. And the cheesy synthesized music is atrocious.

Many of the most interesting and appealing Ichikawa-Wada films are still missing in action (though the upcoming release of Alone Across the Pacific fills in one missing piece) -- so I hope that priority is given to these.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#19 Post by MichaelB » Thu Feb 12, 2009 9:43 am

The transfer isn't quite as stunning as Kokoro, but it's still very good indeed for a colour Scope film of this vintage. One slight peculiarity, explained by this being Nikkatsu's own transfer, is that the English dialogue comes with burned-in Japanese subtitles - though they're small and discreet and easily tuned out, nowhere near as obtrusive as the electronic ones on Silence. (There's also very very little English dialogue - just two scenes, if I remember rightly).

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#20 Post by FerdinandGriffon » Thu Feb 12, 2009 10:58 am

HerrSchreck wrote:Certainly one of my biggest "in-cinema" disappointments was missing much of the Nakadai retro at NY Film Forum (did get there to see the glorious Seppu-Ku aka Hara Kiri onscreen), within the past year or so... I Am A Cat was stuck in there which I really wanted to see.
Am I with you on this one. I was desperate to see I am a Cat during that retro but just couldn't make it. I did manage to catch Seppuku, The Face of Another, and, after hours spent on the sidewalk outside the theatre chatting with a Ken Ogata lookalike, Tatsuya Nakadai's Q&A. I sat in the front row, directly in Nakadai's eyeline, and blushed like a schoolgirl whenever he looked at me. I may have even batted my eyelashes a little.

Does anyone know of a way to see I Am A Cat without learning Japanese? The stills I've seen (with Nakadai looking uncannily like Marcello Mastroianni in Divorce Italian Style) are just too much for me to resist.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#21 Post by sir karl » Fri Feb 20, 2009 4:37 am


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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#22 Post by Tommaso » Wed Feb 25, 2009 7:56 am

Have received the two Ichikawas, too, and started with "Pacific". As expected, a totally different fish from films like "Fires on the Plain" or "An Actor's Revenge". This one feels quite surprisingly like a good adventure/exploration movie with some thoughts about Japanese vs American culture thrown in. That these considerations are never really pronounced and are used in the film more in passing might be seen as a disadvantage, making Horie's trip over the ocean more into a youthful adventure possibly motivated by the (subconscious) wish to get away from his parents in the first place. That the film is only 97 min. helps to keep up our attention and interest (it feels like it's over even more quickly, honestly), but I would have wished for a little slower pacing sometimes to underline the epic quality and the backgrounds of the story. The quick pace also keeps those great actors like Mori and Tanaka from leaving more than a passing impression.

Anyway, there's a lot to enjoy in the film, especially in the visual department. Much of it is filmed simply in a strikingly beautiful way. It's also one of the few films in which I find the general flashback structure quite convincing, and there are a lot of nice ironic touches, especially when Horie meets with the Americans near the end of the film. So, well worth seeing I'd say; a good film, nothing more nothing less.

The transfer is quite strong, and as usual with MoC, very film-like. As has been noted before, it looks a little soft though, which is most apparent in some scenes when we see the family members in long shot, where details of their faces appear more indistinct than they should be. I'm sure this could have been improved if this had been a double-layered disc. But apart from this, it looks beautiful, detailed, and completely unmanipulated.

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Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#23 Post by Yojimbo » Wed Feb 25, 2009 10:08 am

Tommaso wrote:Have received the two Ichikawas, too, and started with "Pacific". As expected, a totally different fish from films like "Fires on the Plain" or "An Actor's Revenge". This one feels quite surprisingly like a good adventure/exploration movie with some thoughts about Japanese vs American culture thrown in. That these considerations are never really pronounced and are used in the film more in passing might be seen as a disadvantage, making Horie's trip over the ocean more into a youthful adventure possibly motivated by the (subconscious) wish to get away from his parents in the first place. That the film is only 97 min. helps to keep up our attention and interest (it feels like it's over even more quickly, honestly), but I would have wished for a little slower pacing sometimes to underline the epic quality and the backgrounds of the story. The quick pace also keeps those great actors like Mori and Tanaka from leaving more than a passing impression.

Anyway, there's a lot to enjoy in the film, especially in the visual department. Much of it is filmed simply in a strikingly beautiful way. It's also one of the few films in which I find the general flashback structure quite convincing, and there are a lot of nice ironic touches, especially when Horie meets with the Americans near the end of the film. So, well worth seeing I'd say; a good film, nothing more nothing less.

The transfer is quite strong, and as usual with MoC, very film-like. As has been noted before, it looks a little soft though, which is most apparent in some scenes when we see the family members in long shot, where details of their faces appear more indistinct than they should be. I'm sure this could have been improved if this had been a double-layered disc. But apart from this, it looks beautiful, detailed, and completely unmanipulated.
agreed about the flashback and the way the film is structured helps to make it far more enjoyable than if had been a straight narrative. I also thought there were some nice gentle humorous touches, not least the final scenes, and the scene with the passing liner. Also the way the various 'disasters' he experienced were filmed you never felt he would have any problem dealing with them. His motives for making the trip were sketchily dealt with, not least because he expected to get sent back. Perhaps Ichikawa deliberately only wanted to skim over criticisms of Japanese mores, while at the same time making his point. Not up to the standards of the other Ichikawas I've seen but still an interesting and enjoyable movie and further evidence of his skill and versatility.

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Tommaso
Joined: Fri May 19, 2006 10:09 am

Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#24 Post by Tommaso » Wed Feb 25, 2009 11:28 am

Yojimbo wrote:Perhaps Ichikawa deliberately only wanted to skim over criticisms of Japanese mores, while at the same time making his point.
I rather had the feeling that these criticisms (if one can even call them such) are in the film because they probably were the motivation of the real-life person on whose experiences and whose book the film is based, and not because Ichikawa himself had much of an issue with Japan, at least in this film. Just compare it to the intensity of his criticism in "Fires on the Plain", for instance. So, I don't know: perhaps the film would have been stronger if Ichikawa had embraced the adventure aspect completely and had made a straightforward 'boys film' out of it. But nevertheless, still a nice film, and I completely agree about the scene with the ocean liner. Surely a highpoint, and very funny.

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Yojimbo
Joined: Fri Jul 04, 2008 10:06 am
Location: Ireland

Re: 69 Alone Across the Pacific

#25 Post by Yojimbo » Wed Feb 25, 2009 12:08 pm

Tommaso wrote: But nevertheless, still a nice film, and I completely agree about the scene with the ocean liner. Surely a highpoint, and very funny.
the actor reminded me of the actor in such as 'Bloody Spear At Mount Fuji', who generally played comic roles.
btw, that ocean liner scene also reminded me of a scene in 'Taking Of Pelham One Two Three' where Walter Matthau hadn't realised that his Asian visitors understood English quite well

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