Sisters of the Gion (1936)

Sisters of the Gion (祇園の姉妹) is one of Mizoguchi's early films about prostitution, and although it doesn't possess the high dramatics or suicidal tendencies of the famous bunraku plays (the songs of which one of the characters is constantly singing), Sisters of the Gion is, in many ways indebted to those stories of desperation and loneliness.

Still, I didn't love the filmmaking here – it's early Mizoguchi, and this is a film from 1936, so I shouldn't judge it the same as I would his later work, but it moves awkwardly, without really gaining a good flow – although the storytelling is excellent.

I watched this on the Criterion Channel. It's been a movie on my list to see for a very long time, since I saw my first Mizoguchi film back in the summer of 2007!

Stray Dog (1949)

Stray Dog (野良犬) is an analysis of postwar Japan and the disaffection and poverty experienced by many veterans and their families. It is a generational analysis of urban life like the kind Mizoguchi and Ozu were making in this period. I hadn't seen this movie before, so I hadn't known Kurosawa was making movies like this too. But Stray Dog blew me away. It's all of this hidden inside a detective movie. This film is atmospheric and rich – the entire film is sweat soaked, and you can feel the heat. It's easily comparable to postwar American films noirs. But Stray Dog has so much humanity! The ending is just devastating. It absolutely broke my heart. I loved this film. 

Also... Toshiro Mifune was, like, really handsome in the late 1940s.

Women of the Night (1948)

Mizoguchi's Women of the Night (夜の女たち) is a cautionary moral tale, but it is also a story of postwar Japan and the way that the state abandoned wives, mothers, and children of soldiers and forced them to fend for themselves. Mizoguchi's film is in bad shape – even on the Criterion channel where I watched it – but it's still finely realized and emotionally affecting.

Day of the Lord

I have a plan to do some cleaning today. But mostly I am following my new mandate to be not so hard on myself for the next two weeks or so. The plan is to finish more movies than books for the next two weeks and to not worry about doing a lot of research and work. We'll see how that goes. I did start Howard Barker's The Castle (which is a really awesome play so far) but I also watched two movies in the last twelve hours.

First: Werner Herzog's new film Rescue Dawn with Christian Bale is pretty good. I enjoyed the film, too, for the most part. I am being hesitant and I don't know why. I think I hesitate because Rescue Dawn isn't exactly Aguirre: the Wrath of God. Few films, of course, are Aguirre: the Wrath of God, so I guess I should just let that go and evaluate Rescue Dawn on its own merits. It's a harrowing, at times very difficult to watch story about a man in a P.O.W. camp in Laos during the lead up to the Vietnam war. It's excellently made, very well acted, beautifully shot and cleverly scripted. Definitely worth seeing if you like P.O.W. movies. Christian Bale is awesome, as usual, slimming down to a dangerous weight again. And Jeremy Davies, who costars, is as thin as I've ever seen him in anything (he looks disgusting, in fact.) Steve Zahn is excellent as well.

Lindsay Anderson's 1968 movie If.... with Malcolm McDowell was finally released on DVD recently (god bless Criterion) so I finally got to see this amazing film from Britain's angry sixties. This film deserves its cult status. It's a movie about a school with strict discipline and lots of corruption and McDowell plays a rebel who goes on a rampage at the school. It's a fabulous movie and a biting satire. Totally sexy, too, in a kind of queer, underage-boy, British way. I absolutely loved it.

Mizoguchi Kenji's Sansho the Bailiff (1954) is a social justice movie from the Japanese filmmaker. It's mostly an anti-slavery movie, detailing the evils of servitude and slavery on the Japanese islands. Our hero gets captured and sold into slavery as a young boy, and we watch as tragedy befalls him and his family. It's a fairly bleak cinematic adventure, truth be told. I think I've decided, too, that I like Mizoguchi the least of the Japanese masters I've seen so far. Both of the films of his that I've seen have been more didactic than anything else and my tastes run more toward the poetic.
(Oh yeah, and Sansho the Bailiff is not the main character. The title kind of makes no sense. Weird, too, because the title is the same in Japanese.)

Door-to-door Sales

A man came to my door today and knocked quite loudly. Truth be told, he woke me from a nap I had just settled down to about ten minutes prior And Ma in her kerchief and I in my cap... Anyway, he was hocking security systems. They do that door-to-door nowadays, doncha know? Maybe it's because I was off-guard (having just awakened), maybe it's because he was so darn persistent, maybe because it really is about time I got a security system for this house before I have to leave it all by itself again for an extended period of time, but I took the bait and signed on the dotted line with this guy. The contract—get this—is for a whopping thirty-six months! I don't think I've ever committed to anything for thirty-six months. I mean, even college doesn't count. You can change majors or cut classes or drop out, even. Three whole years of security monitoring, paid monthly. It's a long (gay) marriage.

Today, I'm reading a book called The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. I like it, for the most part. The author, Robert McRuer does this thing—a lot of intellectuals do it—where he makes up a word by combining two words. It drives me crazy. People do it all the time in academic prose and you've probably seen me do it once in a while (shame on me). Like this, from page 39 of the book:

A Boy's Own Story and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name were both published in 1982, when the cultural phenomenon I call "the Queer Renaissance" had only just begun. Through an examination of these two very different coming-out stories, I want to flaunt the ways coming out has been reinvented in the Queer Renaissance as a myth of queer (op)positionality.

See what he's doing there with (op)positionality. He is able to discuss the queer subject's positioning of him- or herself at the same time he is able to call to our attention the fact that this position is created in opposition to an already present normative (and contrary) position. Writers do it all the time. (This same writer keeps saying "an/other" too.) I'm not sure why this device bugs me so much. Anyway, it does bug me. Maybe because it feels like a kind of pun: something the writer thinks is funny or clever but at which I can only groan.

I took this book to the coffee shop with me to read today, but I also took a book of plays because I get so tired of reading only scholarship all the time. I need some plays in my life to help me swallow all of that difficult theorizing. So I took this book Fruit of Your Loins by Carl Morse with me to the coffee shop. And I turned it over just in case a passerby might happen to glance over at the table and see the book. I didn't want anyone to freak out if they saw the cover. It was rather closety of me, but I couldn't help it. The coffee shop is with the lord and I don't want to upset anyone innocently reading The Screwtape Letters. Sheesh! Maybe I'm regressing.

This afternoon I watched Ugetsu, a Japanese ghost tale from the 1950s. I liked it fairly well. It didn't have the fun technical flourishes to which I've become accustomed from clever 1950s filmmakers like Jean-Pierre Melville and Satyajit Ray, so I have to admit I was a little bored. Or maybe it was the story, which is a kind of conventional lesson-learning tale about greed. It was no Kon Ichikawa movie, that's for sure. (Have you rented The Burmese Harp yet? If you want a good 1950s Japanese film, go for that one.)