Saturday, August 11, 2012

Movie Review: Tokyo Story

This review has been moved to the R. S. Martin website. Click here to read.
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3 comments:

DerikB said...

"Ozu concerns himself entirely with serving the story"

I don't believe that is the case. A lot of what Ozu does from a formal and aesthetic point of view has very little to do with the story. In many ways his visual style is such that it is in excess of the story. The strictly planned composition of his shots, the way he cuts, and shifts scenes (those wonderful sequences of cuts that he uses in many of his films to transition from one location to another), all of those do not serve the story in any conventional sense.

I have seen Tokyo Story in a few years, but I've watched a lot of his later movies multiple times in the recent past and I can't imagine it's that much different.

August 16, 2012 at 2:49 PM
R. S. Martin said...

This piece was more a quick impression of the film than a carefully considered review. That said, there's very little in the film that struck me as decorative, extraneous, or at odds with the story. Maybe we're paying attention to different things. The filmmaking seemed focused on dramatizing the script to the exclusion of all else. It struck me as quite austere. It certainly isn't flamboyant the way, say, Kurosawa's work is. I haven't seen any of Ozu's other films, so I can't say if this is atypical of them or not.

August 17, 2012 at 5:32 PM
DerikB said...

Like I said, haven't seen Tokyo Story in a long time and it is earlier than the ones I've watch most frequently.

I'd highly recommend some of his later color films like An August Afternoon (its own Criterion release) or End of the Summer (from the Late Ozu boxset).

August 18, 2012 at 9:03 AM

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