Word: ozu
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...three of them meet up in Cleveland, then drive to Florida for two improbable plot twists. There are only 67 shots, each separated from the next by a few seconds of blackness, and three funny bits. Artfully done, with offhand references to directors ranging from Byron Haskin to Yasujiro Ozu, Stranger Than Paradise has the odd odor of something left too long behind Aunt Bela's chintz couch. Yet it has been extravagantly praised and is a box-office success in its Manhattan debut. Rarely has a movie so fetid been so feted...
...1950s Japan could boast not only a robust film industry but also a vibrant national cinema, with three directors-Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa-who could be counted among the handful of film-making giants. Mizoguchi died in 1956, Ozu in 1963, and no younger director has since achieved nearly their stature. As for Kurosawa, he has been able to realize only three films since 1965-all outside the studio system-and in 1971, frustrated by the industry's intransigence, attempted suicide. His latest project, a retelling of King Lear set in medieval Japan, was recently postponed...
...their success. "They are part of a new tendency among Japanese directors to visualize the 'irrational' elements of the Eastern world through Western-style intelligence. Once, when a Westerner looked at Japanese movies-at Kurosawa's kamikaze-type warriors in The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, or Ozu's gentle heroines in Tokyo Story and The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, or Mizoguchi's evocations of Kabuki drama in Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff-he, could tell himself, 'This is Japan!' He can't find that kind of false reassurance...