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.