"Yoshimitsu Morita, whose films depicted the absurdity and vulnerability of everyday life in conformist Japan, has died," reports Yuri Kagayama for the AP. "He was 61." His breakthrough came with The Family Game (1983), winner of five Kinema Junpo Awards — Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Actor (Yusaku Matsuda) and Supporting Actor (Jûzô Itami) — in which Matsuda plays "an offbeat tutor who forms a heartwarming relationship with a young man in a stereotypical middle-class family."
"Though even its most perceptive commentators reduce Kazoku geimu (Family Game) to a critique of 'affluent, middle-class nuclear family life in the city and nose-to-the-grindstone education systems' [Keiko McDonald in 1989], Morita's most widely known film is before all else hilarious," wrote Bob Davis in Senses of Cinema in 2006. "Its laughs derive from inappropriate and idiosyncratic behavior, unseemly frankness, slapstick antics, gross-out tactics, repetitions, exaggerations, explosive contrasts, and unnatural pacing." In Davis's "brazen 'ranking' of Morita's films, Family Game, Deaths in Tokimeki, Sorekara [And Then], Keiho,...
"Though even its most perceptive commentators reduce Kazoku geimu (Family Game) to a critique of 'affluent, middle-class nuclear family life in the city and nose-to-the-grindstone education systems' [Keiko McDonald in 1989], Morita's most widely known film is before all else hilarious," wrote Bob Davis in Senses of Cinema in 2006. "Its laughs derive from inappropriate and idiosyncratic behavior, unseemly frankness, slapstick antics, gross-out tactics, repetitions, exaggerations, explosive contrasts, and unnatural pacing." In Davis's "brazen 'ranking' of Morita's films, Family Game, Deaths in Tokimeki, Sorekara [And Then], Keiho,...
- 12/23/2011
- MUBI
Japanese moviemaker Yoshimitsu Morita has died, aged 61.
The award-winning director passed away on Tuesday of acute liver failure at a hospital in Tokyo.
Morita started his movie career in the early 1980s after teaching himself to direct, and he won great critical acclaim for his 1983 film Family Game, which was voted as picture of the year by Japanese critics.
The dark comedy also won him the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award.
Throughout his career Morita also picked up the Best Director award for Ashura no Gotoku in 2004, as well as the best director trophy at the 21st Yokohama Film Festival for 1999's Keiho.
The award-winning director passed away on Tuesday of acute liver failure at a hospital in Tokyo.
Morita started his movie career in the early 1980s after teaching himself to direct, and he won great critical acclaim for his 1983 film Family Game, which was voted as picture of the year by Japanese critics.
The dark comedy also won him the Directors Guild of Japan New Directors Award.
Throughout his career Morita also picked up the Best Director award for Ashura no Gotoku in 2004, as well as the best director trophy at the 21st Yokohama Film Festival for 1999's Keiho.
- 12/21/2011
- WENN
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