[film] old and new

[inulro]

It's been a fantastic film day for me.

First up was the DVD of Stray Dog, Kurosawa's take on film noir. It's about a homicide detective whose gun is stolen and the adventures he has trying to get it back. So far, so noir. But it's set in Japan in 1949 and is therefore really about post-war Japan. It's amazing how everyone in the film (except for the elderly mother of the femme fatale, and there's a whole essay in there alone) wears Western clothes and most of the women have their hair permed. Yet there is no sight of the US troops that were still occupying Japan in 1949. There's a lot of angst on the part of the detective, because his gun is being used to ruin lives and he thinks it's all his fault.

I'd only rented it to see what the Japanese take on noir would be, but it's a thoroughly wonderful film. I haven't seen a lot of Kurusawa's stuff, but this is definitely my favourite so far.

Then we went out to see The Golden Compass. I had some trepidation, because of how much I love the book, but I was not disappointed. It's visually stunning, and a jolly excellent adventure, and by translation to screen standards, the book is hardly mangled at all. If I have any quibbles, it's that the creepiness and disgustingness of Ragnar's trying-to-be-human court doesn't come across, but that would have probably lost their PG rating. Jason had no expectations (he thought I was dragging him to something along the lines of Harry Potter) and he was completely blown away.

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[mimmimmim.livejournal.com]

There was a series of documentaries about Kahn's photo library from the 1920s, where he paid people to go around the world and record ordinary people and events. A lot of the Japanese had western dress and items then - apparently there was a fashion for it. Perhaps traces of the fashion for western things lingered into the 1940s.