[Shadow community thread, you may bring your snack ] - Page 8

D'oh, you've beaten me this time, Parker, but IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII'llllllllllllllllllllll be baaack!...

Did you upload your pick earlier this week noob? I don't see it in the folder this morning.

i've tried to watch hana bi 3 times now ... each time i get distracted ! Takeshi is a great director, maybe i've watched too many of his films recently. But I can't get over his twitchy blinking that keeps bringing me back to the blind swordsman, i keep thinking he's blind in every movie

Not yet. I was sort of waiting for further/a little discussion of Fireworks, which I am/we are too busy for (despite apparent prolific posting habit experienceses). If threatened, I do have a fun pack at the ready.

Okay let's see if we can move things along. The biggest thing sticking out in my mind with Hana-bi is the imagery. The drawings of the flower-head animals, guy winding up and throwing the ball away like a third base pickoff, the girl at the end in the rain boots with the kite. I guess what I'm trying to say is it was an impressive film visually.

For me, it was sort of a film split in two. For every striking visual, there was an equal and annoying misstep. For every shot that went towards characterization, there was a roiling sea of exposition, one so gd choppy it would embarrass a WB pilot episode. Overall, I'm not sure the occasional flashes of brilliance were enough to save the film; if it hadn't been pointed out, I would not have guessed this was a canonical work.
Edited by noob - 3/24/13 at 9:25pm

^Some of the exposition was outright terrible. (I'm not native to Japan, but I sense the mafia does not walk around saying, Hello, viewer, I am in the mafia, and would you pass me that cherry, for we mafia types are known to be hungry!)







Many, many opportunities for solid characterization were just outright squandered; what could have been shown was lost in an ocean of telling....







The film did get me thinking, though, about what kind of character could be created out of a sort of negative space, the reports of others, and little else. I wondered, in the beginning, if that was the director's goal, but in the end, I felt it wasn't. It just felt clumsy and sort of took me out of things....








Here we sort of see it in the extreme: they assemble the characters, they drive them down to the dude's house, big dramatic moment, and... they sit in the car and tell, tell, tell. Then the scene ends.






Contrast all that with the scene above. Here, in an instant, with no dialogue, and through the perfect combination of setting, action, and demeanor, we know everything about these characters, their situation, and their relationship to one other.

It's masterful, but also frustrating. How to read the rest of the film, I wondered. Intentional? Not? Eh.





Another example of a scene well-done.
Edited by noob - 3/24/13 at 9:41pm

Problems of perspective. So many head-on shots straight out of Spike Lee... some straight up 1st person or character POV's, then...





...occasional lapses into....what?Who? Another character? Man on the street? (Woman at the table?) How? Why? Very inconsistent, and in the end, confusing. Again, I've seen it work in other films; here, I just don't know what point it's serving...

I did fall asleep before the end...hopefully it'll all come together as I see the rest.

One thing I did like about this movie - that very few movies actually do - is that it showed some of the consequences of on-screen violence. It's not often in a movie like this where you actually see the, for example, wheelchair-bound victims of violence. Think about an action movie like Commando (a movie I like, but...) Matrix mows down 74 soldiers in that climactic firefight. You do not see any of the consequences of this: you rarely see any actual injuries - and certainly none that are "realistic", you don't see the rehabilitation from a gunshot wound, you don't see grieving families, etc.
So I guess what I'm saying is that it was nice that this movie actually took the lives of its characters seriously enough to care about what happens to some of them, even if that does't hold true for all of the characters (e.g. the various Yakuza).
I guess it's also a bit of a problem with the medium of film itself. You only have about 90 minutes to tell a story, so a lot of stuff that is morally important, but not necessarily crucial to the narrative, gets left out.


Maybe I'm rambling here.

Great thoughts so far on Hana-Bi. Will hopefully make my own contribution later on today.

I do think a lot of the issues noob had with it are pretty fair and could probably be applied to a lot of Kitano's movies. I am sure a lot of them are as a result of him basically working without a script or shot list on most of his films. Having said that, I do believe that a lot of the exposition seems to be a distinctly Japanese thing that I have seen crop up on a number of movies with characters rambling on and on about their lives and environment. Then again, maybe it is just the Japanese directors I like that do this?

Anyway, thoughts later.

Most excellent. Will absorb and let marinate. (Definitely looking forward to more of this director's work [and more Asian films in general]) Thanks, LB!

EDIT *** Shadow Community Party Pack is now available ***

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Edited by noob - 3/27/13 at 11:59pm

I like the song you gave sipang, but I think a Sukora track might be more apropos.

EDIT: This is kind of baffling so far. Is that a Walking Dead teleplay?

sorry for not participating that much - been swamped with work. I liked the film, and I wonder how many of the exposition issues were a result of translation. I liked it though.

Noob, you are posting your movie soon? I will need..a lot of space.

loving the party pack so far