Hey Elizabeth! : more congratulations and another high-five are in order for the excellent interview you gave to the folks at StandardVision. You did a great job of explaining your inspiration from nature and also your methods of working on the film. Very articulate. :)
I think it's just great that your name and artistic reputation are getting out there more and more. Good things are happening, and I will be looking forward to seeing what you come up with for your Winter film project. :)
In the meantime, I will soon be heading Downtown to see Elemental on the StandardVision screen. That will be either this Saturday or next Monday, not sure which one just yet cause it will depend on whether I take the train or the subway (trains don't run on Saturdays), but it will for sure be one of those two days. :)
Today, nuthin' fancy just the usual. I did add another book to the Daily Reading Rotation, the new David Lynch biography "Room To Dream". Did I already mention that? Well anyway, that makes five books I am working on in the "between hours" of my daily work routine : "Energy From The Vacuum" by Thom Bearden. I feel like I'm getting a degree in electrical engineering with that one. "Regular Polytopes" by HSM Coxeter. The author's name sounds like a ship, and I am out to sea as far as understanding most of what he is talking about, but still I read, if only to absorb geometry at it's highest level, in order to try and understand the concept of the Fourth Dimension. "I Will Be Gone In The Dark", the late Michelle McNamara's first person account of her dedicated effort to try and identify the Golden State Killer. This book is a normal page-turning story, not a difficult academic work, so I have gone through it quickly and will finish tomorrow. "The Strangest Man", a biography of Paul Dirac. I think I already mentioned him too. He was a physicist, you can Google him. I am gonna read more about physicists in the future rather than serial killers, although the detective in me will always have a yen for the most well-known of the True Crime cases. And finally, the David Lynch book. In his art, Lynch kind of bridges the gap between physics and killers. I mean - not really - but you know what I mean. He is a very bright man who works in the dream world, between the dark and the light, but he also emphasizes both extremes, and especially the dark side David Lynch has been one of my very favorite filmmakers and artists (and maybe my favorite) for over forty years now. He has been with me for most of my life and has been a huge influence in every way.
So those are the five books I am working on, although after tomorrow it will be four. Two is the best number, where you can just switch from one book to another and back again, but sometimes, when you get your books from the Libe, you've gotta check 'em out when they arrive on the hold shelf or they will send 'em back.
So there you have it. To paraphrase Chick Hearn, you have "shot and scored" yet again. /////
I did watch a movie, "Drunken Angel" (1948) on Criterion, directed by Akira Kurosawa in his early Noir period. I am unsure if I will have the energy at this juncture to give an adequate review, but I am gratified that I was able to find a grammatical slot for "juncture", which I try to squeeze in to the proceedings a few times a year in honor of Dana Carvey and George Bush the First.
In "Drunken Angel", legendary Japanese tough guy Toshiro Mifune (in an early role) plays a Tokyo hoodlum, a wannabe Yakuza. He is young, well dressed and handsome, but stricken by extreme angst because he has tuberculosis, which he is trying to conceal because it would make him a liability to his Mob bosses. Also, he fears his diagnosis and would rather ignore it than face it. At the start of the film, he visits a local doctor, just to see what he will discover about the illness. The doctor is played by another legendary Japanese actor whose name you can IMDB.
The doctor is not a nice man. He is an alcoholic and his practice is located next to a toxic swamp, polluted with chemicals from nearby factories. This part of Tokyo is a slum, with muddy unpaved roads and prostitutes on the streetcorners, gangsters in the nightclubs.
The alcoholic doctor, the "Drunken Angel" of the title, hates what Tokyo has become, overrun with criminals, and yet he sees something in Toshiro Mifune's gaunt young hood that makes him want to help. He prods Mifune to show him the lung x-rays, taken by another doctor, that will reveal the extent of Mifune's disease.
Mifune plays his role ultra macho. He doesn't need doctors. He will go it alone, for he is a Yakuza.
Or so he thinks.
That is all I will tell you about "Drunken Angel" because I must shortly go to sleep.
But to sum up, I will say that, while it has all the cinematic qualities of a first rate Noir, all the shadows and canted camera angles and angry characters, it is a slow moving story, and in that respect it does not compare to the kind of classic Hollywood Noirs where the story moves at a brisk pace, such as in "The Racket" as reviewed last night. However, from an artistic point of view, "Drunken Angel" succeeds mightily, due mostly to the performances of Toshiro Mifune, who has a German Expressionist influence to the way he plays his character, and also due to the performance of Takashi Shimura (I Googled him), whose role as the doctor, trying to defeat tuberculosis in his town, anchors the film.
The movie is slow and very Japanese, with guttural male dialogue, where it sounds like the characters are angry even when they are making small talk. Japan was still emerging from centuries of male dominated Feudalism, even as late as the post WW2 period, and this is Kurosawa's point, which he makes at the end of the film.
It's not a classic noir because it moves too slowly but as an art film using noir techniques to describe the Japanese predicament at that time, in 1948, when crime ruled the cities, it is a very effective and engrossing movie. See it especially for Mifune's tubercular performance, channeled through Conrad Veidt in "The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari", for real. :)
Two Thumbs Up, then, for "Drunken Angel".
That's all for tonight. See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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