Wolverine monogatari (#167 & #168)

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.

Four Minutes of Ebert on Ozu

Criterion posted the first four minutes of Roger Ebert's commentary on their Floating Weeds DVD at the beginning of April, which I only noticed when they put a link to this post at the top of their most recent newsletter.

Daily Grab 117: Tea and Rain

I've chosen two stills from Yasujiro Ozu's Floating Weeds, the 1959 remake of one of the master's greatest silent films. One of the below was used in the piece I wrote about Roger Ebert earlier today.

My love of Ozu's work began thanks to his commentary on Criterion's DVD edition of the movie and his Great Movies article. Both frames below come from Masters of Cinema's recent Blu-ray release.

From Roger Ebert's touching, evocative, and nuanced examination of this Great Movie:

For me, Floating Weeds (1959) is like a familiar piece of music that I can turn to for reassurance and consolation. It is so atmospheric--so evocative of a quiet fishing village during a hot and muggy summer--that it envelops me. Its characters are like neighbors. It isn't a sad story; the central character is an actor with a healthy ego, who has tried to arrange his life according to his own liking and finds to his amazement that other people have wills of their own. He is funny, wrong-headed and finally touching.

The Daily Grab 31: Beautiful Weeds

Eureka/Masters of Cinema released Floating Weeds on Region B Blu-ray back in mid-December. It was Ozu's big color breakthrough. He'd done color previously at this point, but this is where the shot composition really used it most effectively for the first time.

The disc is locked for UK-region Blu-ray players, but it's readily available on Amazon UK (13.99 GBP or ~$23 USD).

The transfer is absolutely gorgeous, and the essay in the booklet by Ignatiy Vishnevetsky is very well-researched and written. If Region-B locking doesn't cause you problems and you don't care about the lack of disc-based extras, it's well worth your money (as it has been mine).

The movie is a reworking and remake of A Story of Floating Weeds, one of his big hits back in the silent days. This was one of the very rare times he made a movie at a different studio than Shochiku, which served as his home base for most of his career.

I'll be covering the silent original soon in Discovering Ozu, and will then double back on it (as I will with all his self-remakes) when I make it up to the color classic.