1953 ‘雨月物語’ Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
In 16th century Japan, peasants Genjuro and Tobei sell their earthenware pots to a group of soldiers in a nearby village, in defiance of a local sage's warning against seeking to profit from warfare. Genjuro's pursuit of both riches and the mysterious Lady Wakasa, as well as Tobei's desire to become a samurai, run the risk of destroying both themselves and their wives, Miyagi and Ohama.
Machiko Kyō Mitsuko Mito Kinuyo Tanaka Masayuki Mori Eitarō Ozawa Sugisaku Aoyama Mitsusaburō Ramon Ryōsuke Kagawa Kichijirô Ueda Shōzō Nanbu Kikue Mōri Ryūzaburō Mitsuoka Ichirô Amano Eigoro Onoe Saburo Date Fumihiko Yokoyama Ichisaburo Sawamura Koji Murata Yukio Horikita Akira Shimizu Shuntaro Tamamura Shirô Osaki Toshio Chiba Hachiro Okuni Shirô Miura Hajime Koshikawa Tetsu Mikami Jun Fujikawa Takaji Fukui Show All…
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🎧don't go chasin waterfalls
cuz a sex ghost at the end will seduce you🎤
A glorious cinematic feast for the eyes! A haunting tale with supernatural overtones that will beguile you with its powerfully seductive storyline about man's lust for money and power! And how easily they will sacrifice everything truly meaningful to get it!
A masterfully crafted fable filled with consequences, great loss, regrets and redemption!
65/100
This troubles me.
For as long as I've maintained a film log ("Since 1992"), I've made a point of noting theatrical screenings vs. any form of home video. That's because I don't fully trust the latter. The advent of first DVD and then Blu-ray has helped, to be sure, and I'm not one of those zealots who insists that you haven't seen the movie unless/until you've seen a good 35mm print. But I do often wonder, when underwhelmed by a classic that had previously made me swoon on celluloid, whether seeing it in a diminished condition is largely responsible for the shift.
Here's something I wrote on a private forum after watching Tsai Ming-liang's The River twice in quick…
Ugetsu is based partially from a classic Japanese folklore literature "Tales of Moonlight and Rain" by author Ueda Akinari. Upon seeing the film again I really want to venture out and find this collection of stories. Mizoguchi's film brilliantly and flawlessly mixes Japanese folklore and morality tales of war, greed, and consequence into an unforgettable film experience.
Japanese folklore and culture have always been a huge fascination for me. Ever since I begun developing a love for cinema, I had noticed my draw was mostly towards Japanese films and films by Ingmar Bergman. There is just something about the films from Japan, either that or it's a stated fact that Japan is just simply a cinematic prosperous country. As evidence…
For a film that remains one of the glories of fantastic cinema, Mizoguchi’s achievement in giving Ugetsu a strong sense of place is remarkable.
Weep. Ugetsu is Mizoguchi's horror film, a nightmare across this life and the next. A man, dirtied and shirtless, wanders across a burnt landscape. Ugetsu draws on folklore and classic Japanese literature to produce quintessential jidaigeki cinema. It is a departure from Mizoguchi's earlier work, being more expansive and complete, beyond just the humiliation and pain of women. The Life of Oharu represented his previous style perfected. But this is beyond, travelling to the abstract.
Ugetsu is morally and socially complex, with a heart that blackens as it struggles to maintain righteousness. It is about the ethics of war, especially the way women suffer. It is filled with needless, pointless deaths, carried out by unnamed, ubiquitous soldiers. In many ways…
Where do you even begin with a film like this? Every element of Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Ugetsu is baked in a staggering combination of both pain and beauty, never failing to outline the moral disparities between good and evil. It’s almost like Miyazaki meets Tarkovsky, peasants and workmen going about their daily tasks in the far away background as the camera flows in a swift, fluid (albeit eerie) motion across the eye-popping landscapes. Fog has never looked better. Trees have never looked better. 16th century Japan has never looked better, and yes, I’ve seen Seven Samurai. This is a tale as old as time, focused largely on the primal temptations which lead the best of men to a fixed state of greed. It’s…
Part beautiful morality fable, part haunting ghost story, part war film, part love story, part social period drama, and a full on fucking extraordinary piece of cinema.
I'm upset this wasn't bad or boring so I can't do one of those reviews where I write a version of the title that indicates negativity like "More like Poogetsu" or something like that
eyebrow | aɪˌbraʊ | supercilium // hikimayu
way up in the clouds. way higher than they were intended. way too high to be of any practical use. plucked eyebrows replaced with a smudge of rapeseed soot.
what. were. they. thinking?
Ugetsu then. A stunningly beautiful 16th century Japanese ghost story by Kenji Mizoguchi that illustrates the ravages of civil war, the plight of women, and the pride of men.
What a day! First Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters and now this. I feel like I've been prodded with the culture-stick and am now definitely more informed than before.
I could talk about how much I loved Mizoguchi's restrained, free-flowing compositions. I could talk about how haunting and epic the film's wonderful score is. I could talk about the elegantly rendered tragedy at the centre of this. I could talk about how once again, Mizoguchi makes us feel the pain of a woman's struggle.
I could talk about many things, but no words could explain the indescribable feeling I had during Ugetsu's stunning final shot, where Mizoguchi's camera pans up from the heart-wrenching tragedy we've just witnessed and overlooks the vastness of our past, and inevitability of our present. It's the kind of feeling that films were made for.
Masterful.
March Around the World 2021
Japan
Once again women are left to pay the consequences for decisions men make, and it's nice that the men all felt guilty at the end but still it's not enough. In this movie it's easy to see where the men are coming from and what the base of their ambitions are, but they throw common sense out the window and pursue those ambitions with so much energy that nothing and no one matters.
A classic that I wish I had seen sooner. The commentary on war, profiting off of it, and abandoning those you love to follow your personal aspirations are all powerful themes that come together perfectly in this film.
Ugetsu’s story revolves around some classic themes—family, greed, war—yet the way the film plays out these themes is pretty contemporary, especially for the 1950’s.
Even with a pretty transparent plot, Mizoguchi does a great job of building characters and blending narratives/realities into a really affecting story.
Ugetsu is an intimate and gentle film that explores the consequences of greed, pride, and envy in a manner that's mature and grounded.
Although all of the film was well composed, both the story and atmosphere particularly stood out; and rather than appearing ridiculous and awkward, the supernatural elements smoothly reinforced the film's themes and contributed to its already striking atmosphere.
If I hadn't been so damn tired I probably would be giving this 4 stars, but Ugetsu is definitely not something to watch if you're sleepy.
Criterion Challenge Film 25: Martin Scorsese's Top 10
I think if you were to go back to the very beginning of storytelling, you would find a morality tale about not being greedy. It probably went something like:
Ug saw that there were bigger berries near the tall grass. Mog told Ug that the other animals never ate those berries for a reason. Ug really wanted those berries. When he went near the tall grass a tiger ate him and the berries.
Every culture has their own version of this story. I'm pretty sure Japan's is the only one where a man meets a ghost with a singing, invisible dad and gets laid in a hot spring with such skill he…
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