fuyuno

If you are Japanese, this would be the funniest movie you had ever seen. But like so much of the best Japanese humor, it simply doesn't translate to the Western culture. "How much do you pay the monk?" That dialog was so funny, everyone was talking about it for months. Judging from the responses here however, I suppose most foreigners don't get it. Could be a good litmus test if you want to see how proficient you are in your knowledge of Japanese culture.

This is a fairly faithful translation of the novel into a well filmed movie. As such it deserves full credit.

A lot of people were disappointed by this movie for various reasons. The little details were omitted, for one. Uncle Vernon and the Dursleys were not as terrible as in the book which subtracted from the urgency behind Harry's need to fit in at the strange school and his need to avoid being expelled and, consequently, his courage in defying Draco Malfoy and other "established" students, for another.

But the thing that kept the movie for soaring like the novel is the absence of the "Huckleberry Finn Moment". That's the moment when Huckleberry makes the transition from boy to man with the words "All right then! I'll *go* to Hell!" That moment is also in the original novel of this Harry Potter story, when Harry gives his reasons why he must risk expulsion *and* danger to his life and go after the Philosopher's Stone. That inspired speech is conspicuously missing from this movie version.

You might say that what went wrong is the absence of emotional tension. In the book Harry, Ron and Hermione are all walking an emotional tightrope for different reasons. The book was a stage where childhood trauma meets Greek Drama with lots of enchanting hocus pocus thrown in between. In the movie, the hocus pocus was well represented, the Greek Drama was subdued and the childhood trauma was nearly absent.

I hope that Chris Columbus, or whoever will direct the next installation, will take the advice of all the disappointed viewers who posted here because a lot of excellent points are made about what went wrong. I hope he will ask himself why stories of orphans have continued to capture our imaginations over the centuries even though so few of us are actually orphans.

Overall, I give this movie a fair seven out of ten. But it could have been better.

Any movie buff knows that later moviemakers borrow scenes, characters or entire plots from earlier great works. Many people can recognize short parts of new movies that are identical to parts from other movies. This practice is so commonplace that in some cases you can see a "classic" movie for the first time and feel that you have seen something similar many times before.@ Add to this the fact that older movies tend to be slower paced than the newer films, and that they have unimpressive visual effects by today's standards, and you are likely to get disappointment from younger viewers. This movie *was* great. Unfortunately, you would have to exercise your imagination to understand just how great this film once was. Today, letfs just call it entertaining.

This was a terrific movie waiting to happen. It just keeps waiting. I cannot put a pin on what went wrong along the way. Very good characters, funny dialogue, great acting, lots of action... The problem is probably how the story unfolds. Maybe the script was re-written once too often, or maybe it needed more re-writing. Nevertheless, the ingredients are great. You can love this movie for that. This movie had a great deal going for it, which was not quite realized. You can hate this movie for that.

This movie is, to those who are familiar, a remake of Shintaro Katsu's formulaic "Zatoichi" series. A blind swordsman must transport a little boy to his captive father (for Katsu, it was usually *from* a captive *mother*). Along the way, they must repel pursuing villains. An action packed road movie during which the little boy grows up a little and the stone-blind warrior gets in touch with his tender side. The transplantation from medieval Japan to modern America was handled well. A sequel may have worked better because it would not have had to explain how the swordsman lost his vision and such. Too bad a sequel was never made.

There is really no reason to flame this movie for its lack of intelligence. Only a moron will seek intelligence in a movie of this kind. Show this movie to the 5-year-old kid you are baby sitting and it will be an excellent diversion that will let you concentrate on the work on your laptop. In fact, I think IMDB and Amazon.com could do worse than have a category of movies labled "baby-sitting". "Pokemon" and "Home Alone" series will top the list. These movies do not entertain grown-ups, but they serve the purpose you are renting them out for.

Naoto Takenaka plays the best Hideyoshi ever played. This is saying quite a lot, since this historical character has been played more often than most, always by the best.This was a one-year series produced by Japan's public broadcasting. The senior director was Rintaro Mayuzumi, director of "Rampo" also starring Takenaka. Too bad audiences out side of Japan will have such a hard time finding the video for this series. It really is quite good.

Many movies involving crime hinges on the question "What could go wrong?". We see the building of conflict, the planning of an improbable crime and its haphazard execution. It is inevitable that something will go wrong, but we do not know what. This film has preceded many such movies. (Most recently "Fargo") Art movies of this kind center on the psychology of the criminal rather than on the crime it self. Although this may not be the first movie of its kind, it is certainly one of the best.

This is not just a movie about post war blacks in America, but an universal story about oppressed honest people everywhere and the moral corruption they must live with to survive.

The movie is so enjoyable that you can easily miss the underlying truths of this great film. The oppressor is seldom hurt or even morally debased as the oppressed are. Even when it is clear that it is the oppressors who are driving the oppressed into misery and violence. Easy Rawlins is fired from a factory job because he refused to work another shift after working two shifts in a row. Then, he is hired to track down a girl by a shady character; a white man who dares to walk into a black bar. The job leads him from one example of injustice to another, each threatening to get much worse if he trips over the wrong hair-trigger. Densel Washington plays Rawlins with the dignity of manhood that the role requires. See the movie. This will be a heavy experience that you will talk about for the rest of your life.

19 years after Kurosawa's "Rashomon" a very different director took another story by the inimitable writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa and adopted it for a movie. "Jigokuhen" is a more complicated tale than even "Rashomon" and consequently must have been more difficult to film. @

Be warned that I am giving away the story.@

This is a story of a medieval painter (Nakadai) commissioned to paint the portrait of paradise on the wall of a palace of Lord Hosokawa (Yorozuya) the most powerful aristocrat of the time. (He is powerful enough to name the next emperor.) The nobleman wants the mural to demonstrate the glory of his power. The artist, who unlike the aristocrat sees the squalor of the world just outside of the palace, refuses. He would rather paint a portrait of hell. Confronted by the only man who would dare contradict him, the arrogant nobleman challenges the artist to paint a portrait of hell, on the strength of which he will decide whether paradise or inferno will be painted on his palace walls. The painter is the sort of genius-madman who would cut off his ears to paint a better self-portrait. Obsessed with his art, he goes to great extremes, such as actually torturing his apprentices to capture the expression of agony. In the end, even that is not enough. He wants the nobleman's gold-plated carriage set on fire so he can see what the fate of vanity in hell really looks like. The carriage is a symbol of the nobleman's power and position, but he cannot refuse because he is too proud to backtrack on his promise to provide anything the painter needed. The aristocrat instead puts the painter's daughter (whom he has taken under some pretence as his sex slave) bound in chains inside the vehicle and proceeds to have the carriage dowsed in oil. Then he hands a torch to painter and dares him to set the carriage on fire. The aristocrat is triumphant for only a few seconds. As she burns to her death, the daughter screams "I knew it would end this way!" Some time later, a finished portrait of hell is delivered to the palace. The painter commits suicide the same day and the nobleman, haunted by the ghost of the painter, is driven to madness. Only the brilliant artwork, a picture of hell, remains.

This is a treatise on the nature of art and the conflict between the artist and the patron. It is also a story about the pride of an obsessed artist and the hubris of the man who thinks he owns him. A very complicated tale.

The movie gets sidetracked by an unnecessary sub-plot involving rebels. Also the prolonged wandering of the painter through famine-ravaged Kyoto could be rather dull if you did not understand that much of the pantomime represent other stories by Akutagawa set in the same period (including Rashomon).Otherwise, this is a great movie and a rich experience to watch.

One pet theory of mine is that the garish colors of the films of the 50's and 60's actually helped Japanese cinema. The Caucasian woman is the most beautiful kind of human in a black-and-white movie, which probably helped consolidate their position as the epitome of human beauty. The Japanese, strangely, look very good in the hues of early Technicolor. It may have contributed to the popularity of Japanese films of the era. You will see what I mean when you see this exceptionally beautiful movie.

How many of the people who have given this movie negative comments have seen it more than once? I suspect quite a few.

Everything that needs to be said about this movie has been said already. The pros and cons, the putdowns and the comebacks, the attacks and the defences, the criticisms and the praises.

So, tell me, will you dish out another ten dollars to see it again?

I agree with all the negative comments. The movie could have been a whole lot better. It didn't live up to the expectations created by the earlier films, not to mention the hype. It had more special effects than good acting. The story was too difficult for the kids and too dumb for the grown-ups at the same time. I agree with all of that.

But I think I will go and see the movie again. I don't know why. Maybe it is because if I were to waste my time, I could do worse than wasting it on a dream revisited.

A child of a chauffeur is mistakenly kidnapped in the place of a businessman's son. The businessman, involved in a high-stakes takeover of his company from his erring bosses, chooses to risk losing his shirt to pay the ransom for a child not his own. While the clock is ticking on both the businessman's fortune and the child's life, the police decide that they want a sure conviction rather than a quick arrest.

A suspenseful crime story based on a novel by Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) transported to 1960's Japan. The soon to be famous "Economic miracle" is in full swing as Japan rebuilds its war-ravaged landscape. The mix of optimism and despair of the people in the thick of this economic transformation is palpable beneath the multiple story lines of scrappy cops following their hunches, the inventive kidnapper and the businessman.

Toshiro Mifune shines as the businessman while Tatuya Nakadai makes a fine appearance as Inspector Tokura. Tsutomu Yamazaki as the kidnapper debuts into a glorious career. Many of the bit players who appear only briefly eventually became big stars notably Eijiro Tono as the worker in a shoe factory and Nekohachi Edoya as the charming engineer who identifies a train, gesturing with chopsticks, by merely listening to recorded sounds.