James Mangold's The Wolverine was said to draw a great deal of inspiration from ten films, including Ozu's Floating Weeds (a remake of the director's earlier silent classic). Mangold's camera never goes static like that of Ozu, far from it. His shot composition instead does a beautiful job of evoking Ozu's depth of field, where the very architecture of Japanese buildings dictates the geometry of the camera angle and position. The opening shot (above) is evocative of many landscape shots throughout Ozu's color films. Including this post, you'll see more from my chronological retrospective Discovering Ozu this week.
Mangold's commentary on The Wolverine, and the longer cut of the movie itself, improve on what I already considered the best X-Men movie in the series thus far. That the extended cut and commentary are only available on the most deluxe version of the movie doesn't bother me.
That there's a retailer exclusive, half-hour-long featurette doesn't bother me too much, since there's only one retailer exclusive extra. What does bother me is that you can only watch it through Target's flavor of UltraViolet storefront. It's more a retrospective of the X-Men series thus far than anything to do with this movie, so it isn't a huge loss.
