Popular reviews

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  Review by mike_sabathia ★★★★½ 7

  Has night ever looked both so cool and hot at the same time? It does in Pale Flower, an amalgam of noir and gangster/yakuza genres. It's not just Shinoda's visual aesthetic but also the content and the actors. Ryo Ikebe is the epitome of cool. We all want to be like him, secretly. Mariko Kaga is the epitome of hot. We all want her, even though we know it won't be good for us. These two shouldn't be compatible, but they are. They were made for each other. But the bond they share has no name. Beauty in destruction. That's what Shinoda is after. Gambling dens, night clubs, racetracks. The film is situated in this world. Toru Takemitsu amazing score suits it perfectly.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★ 4

  "I'm so bored with life."

  Depressive cinema

  Nothing ever changes, not for the better anyway; some people live, some people die; the mob modernizes, it gets better at killing, but even that doesn't change anything, not really.

  Gambling just to feel anything, trying desperately to live, but it's not working, just raising the stakes until they become deadly, because what value does life have, anyway?

  Finally find someone who makes you feel something, but she's more reckless than any of the men, she dives deeper into the cesspool of Tokyo nightlife than you dare follow her.

  "Isn't there some decent way for people to live?" is the question that Pale Flower despairingly implores, but all it can come up with is a disheartened "No."

  1960s | Japan | Film Noir

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  Review by claire 👁️ diane 17

  No Nonsense November #2

  I wonder how much Shinoda and people like Takeshi Kitano know about yakuza. Is there any connection to real life? Likewise in America. How exactly did crime become one of the dominant metaphors or languages of film? It feels like it stretches back all the way to expressionism. With how noir emerged in the cities and the shadows of German expressionist direction. Maybe it's the cities.

  I always take it as a language of revolt. If you consider that -- even when put together by companies like Shochiku or the studios in America -- cinema is something of an outlaw profession. It's a way of rebelling against life. There must -- I think to myself --…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★★½ 11

  Much of noir is about symbols — symbols and moods. Wet streets and dark nights; hungry women and malleable men. The march of fate; the desperation of the helpless. It's about the way men wear hats, and the way they look at women in black dresses, whose shoulders glow in dim light. And it's about the inevitability of death, and the pointlessness of faith.

  Masahiro Shinoda's Pale Flower is very much shaped by this mold, a story of two people gliding inexorably (contentedly; eagerly) toward their deaths, and the half-hearted, incomplete way they connect. They aren't really tied to one another, they're both just bored in the same way, and see the other as either a companion in listlessness, or…

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★★ 6

  Noir-November Challenge! Movie #14

  The Japanese "Le Samourai"

  A dark tale of a Yakuza gangster (Ryô Ikebe) whom experiences no joy in life unless he's risking his own life or is taking someone elses life! He lives life in the fast lane when he's not doing time in prison for a gang sanctioned murder!

  He finally meets his other half (Mariko Kaga), she's young, bored with life, and a bonafide thrill seeker! Her risky behavior sparks new life in him! Together they burn the candle at both ends, upping the ante each time they indulge their thrill seeking ways! Thumbing their noses at those in society who are content to lead a normal life when they choose to take a walk on the darker, wilder side of life that only leads the young couple that much closer to self-destruction!

  Breathtaking cinematography befitting a noir of this high caliber!

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★½ 3

  “I’ll show you something even better than dope; I’m going to kill a man.”

  Amid a turf war of rival gangs a doomed connection emerges between an unlikely pair of high-stakes gamblers—one an unrepentant killer fresh out of stir (Ryō Ikebe) and the other an inscrutable bourgeois beauty with an apparent death wish (Mariko Kaga)—in Masahiro Shinoda’s stunning noir Pale Flower (乾いた花), which not only brought him a deserved measure of eminence within the burgeoning Japanese New Wave movement but also helped repopularize Yakuza films as a genre that could address specifically modern concerns within Japanese culture. Despite the explosive and seedy nature of the diegesis, the film is shot quite sleekly in crystalline black and white by Shinoda’s regular cinematographer Masao Kosugi and is dominated by its chronically downbeat central characters—Kaga’s utter blankness makes her a chilling femme fatale, while Ikebe exudes a sort of weary psychopathy that feels all the more unsettling because of its resignedness.

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  Review by Remobo ★★★★ 15

  Tumbling out of the prison doors, Muraki finds the cushiony plushness of his vices waiting to soften his fall. The seductive, and always perfectly lit, Saeko (pronounced with a dash of Western irony) is the pea under his mattress that won't allow him to rest. He attempts, in vain, to endure the sleepless nights; tossing and turning in an attempt to find comfort, in a life that has been short-sheeted. And just when he starts to catch his second wind, he gets it knocked right out of him.

  A beautifully shot and hypnotically paced Japanese noir that retells one of the oldest stories ever told:
  Gambling and drugs are addictive. Double crossing the yakuza is suicide. But, it's the women that will kill you.

  Also includes:
  · works of art, masquerading as perfectly framed camera shots
  · an awesome "What-movie-does-this-belong-to" mid-movie dream sequence
  · the most confusing and frustrating car "chase" I've ever seen

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★ 5

  Nothing changes. Times passes, old faces are replaced by new ones; bets are laid, money is exchanged, luck switches hands, but nothing changes. The streets stay soaked with the same rain; the same cards are turned over, over and over again. It’s a cycle. It never changes. There are horses to be raced—more money to be lost and made. Same old same. Then, up out of the crowded streets through crepuscular corridors buds a flower. Unwavering in graceful mystique and beauty, the flower tries to anchor its roots among the shadows of this cyclical world, but a flower can’t bloom underground. Many have come before me and many shall come again, attempting to restart here anew, but only this wicked game…

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  Review by matthewcutchen ★★★★★

  Shinoda is just gratuitously aesthetic and I love him for that.

  Every single shot in this is immaculate. And there is something so tactile about that high contrast B&W cinematography, more than just the chiaroscuro style, but a kind of luminous, otherworldly quality. And the mix between the hyper-real sound design and the swelling, dissonant score is truly hypnotic.

  This is a film that I don’t really watch as much as dissolve into…

  
  
  
  
  

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  ( inspo for my short film ‘GOBY’ )

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  Review by Ben ★★★★½

  Day #26 of Japanuary!

  Continuing with the theme of watching Japanese films throughout January, I decided to watch a film of my own choosing. I decided to go with a film directed by Masahiro Shinoda.

  Well, I did it. Finishing this film means that I have officially completed all thirty-one categories that I came up with for the Japanuary challenge. I am proud of myself! I still plan to watch Japanese films for the rest of the month, and I will, of course, continue to watch and review them throughout the whole year.

  Anyways, about Pale Flower. It's about as cool as films come. Scintillating black & white cinematography, a jazzy score, and attractive leads whose dissatisfaction with the mundanity of…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★

  A state of moral breakdown through an aggressive use of lightning, sets and performance. There is a gangster plot full of vendettas, murders, gambling and matters of love and loyalty, but it is just a function of Shinoda’s phantasmagoria of early 60s Japan.

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  Review by matthewcutchen ★★★★★ 3

  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 out of 5 stars

  
  
  
  
  

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  ( japanese noir )