ILX Film Club, The (1924-2019)

Also gonna do that annoying reductress "men gets little charge out of telling ppl John Lennon beat his wife" thing and mention again that, when Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka embarked on her (very good) directorial career, Ozu and Naruse supported her in the press and during shooting, while Mizoguchi went to the papers to decry his star actress as "limited" and tried his best to blackball her from working altogether.

He also tried to get a 13-year old John Lennon to intervene.

For many years, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu were the big three Japanese directors, so it's natural that they'd be pitted against each other. I'd take Oshima over them all myself.

Which ones?

Yojimbo and Dreams, I think, but it was a while ago.

I find them boring too.

Ikiru
Throne Of Blood
Stray Dog
Dreams
Yojimbo
Kagemusha
Seven Samurai
One Wonderful Sunday
Rashomon
Drunken Angel
Sanjuro
Ran
The Men Who Tread On Tiger's Tails

Haven't seen the rest yet. Even the bottom choice here is still far from a bad film tho.

It really needs a reissue (and a restoration) to bring it back into print, but Rhapsody in August is worth catching. Haven't seen it in a long time (maybe high school?) so I'm not sure how the filmmaking would come off now, but at the time it was the first film I saw to really address the use of nuclear weapons to more or less end WWII. Plenty of famous examples pre-date it and according to Wikipedia there was controversy with some vocally criticizing the film's political stance, but at least to me I didn't think it was defending Japan's wrongs with regards to WWII - simply on humanitarian grounds it made a deep impression.

i've bought a copy of that in the last year (currently unwatched)

(the two i'm missing are The Idiot and Dreams)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_vs._the_Spider

why is this not titled "A small town sheriff and high school teacher vs. the spider"