Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953)
Tokyo Story is an early example of the Japanese style of films with introverted protagonists and reflective critiques on modern society. It's one of the films that popularized the style but now it's all over the place. Films like Yi Yi, Nobody Knows and Still Walking take the same approach. They have a way of implied character development where characters express their thoughts and motives through subtleties of their expressions and actions. Characters are rich and realistic, and ask you to make the effort to figure them out, without the usual melodrama.
The plot is about an aging couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children. They want to have a full week of fun and family reconnection, but their children don't have the time in their lives to spend entertaining them. They treat them like a burden and calculate ways to entertain them while putting in the least money and effort. The parents are stoic and patient, never revealing their frustration, except for one scene where the father gets together with old acquaintances and gets drunk.
I was prepared to give the movie five stars, but near the end the movie betrays it's subtlety by stating it's whole point a little too outright. The first ninety minutes of the film expressed it's point so beautifully without any big speeches, then suddenly at the end, the youngest child makes a big speech saying outright everything you already got from the rest of the movie.
Rating: **** 1/2 / 5
35/101
From now on when I talk about new movies, I'm going to do it on a 1-10 scale instead of rating against the 'best movies of all time' standard I'm using for the top 100.
Vincere: 6/10
Vincere is a movie about a mistress of Musollini's who refused to deny that Mussolini was her child's father, and got put in a mental institution for it. The cinematography and the music are incredible. Unfortunately not a whole lot happens in the movie you couldn't have guessed from a thirty second summary. I also have questions about some of their historical assumptions.
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