December film viewing

I borrowed schizopolis and cosmopolis from netflix at the same time to watch them as a double bill, back and forth if necessary, over a week or two’s time. although the latter was more cinematically engaging and personally challenging and disappointingly poignant, the former carried the intimate smell of the real, albeit burning, which has stuck around for weeks. a more catastrophic and inspiring double bill for schizopolis, destructively generative and ultimately fitting would be exit through the gift shop. these two films, particularly framed against one another, raise enough questions to fill anyone’s scrapbook.
“it’s like I’m playing chess—I don’t know how to play chess, but life is a chess game for me.”

I don’t think I’ve seen any other Kiyoshi Kurusawa movies and I can’t tell whether I want to. Tokyo Sonata is disturbing, as it constantly changes key. You can’t tell what kind of movie it is, even when it’s over, though every step of the way you know you’re in a movie and it’s working one way or another. So it seems like realism is punctured or trumped by surrealism that turns out to be an idealization of realism–an extraordinary representation of things as they just are. It seems to me to present the truth about middle class family life. What do they think of it in Japan?

The best rock documentary is all about music in Istanbul?
Crossing the Bridge induces that simultaneous self-consciousness and absorption in the other that one experiences on visiting a strange city, in another country, with a language of its own.

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