Shohei Imamura

what films have you seen?

Damn Good: The Eel, Dr Akagi, Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (surreally funny stuff), his segment of the September 11 anthology

Imamura is genius, if sometimes a little wayward and maddening and hard to take if you aren't in the mood for him. But then again, that could apply to many great directors.

But you still have an "A" left over.

(actually I liked large chunks of Black Rain too, but nothing nothing NOTHING tops the sex-in-forest/decomposing-animals tomfoolery or the last half-hour. And I ended up getting pretty interested in his 11'9"01 short. Outside of that, I can pretty much take or leave his movies - I always feel like I can tell what's effective in his movies and how the effect plays out, but it never gets past the intellectual recognition stage. Even marijuana doesn't help.)

Didn't he do Tokyo Olympiad?

http://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/moc/017.htm

Vengeance Is Mine was substantial, and I'm not even sure I'm getting S.I.'s injections of morbid slapstick into the grim proceedings entirely; cultural? plenty of that in The Pornographers, Pigs & Battleships, The Eel too... the 'inn' madam's scene with her syndicate lover's feet in closeup esp. I did like that Ken Ogata was making funny faces and otherwise acting like a resourceful crazy man unlike the 'cool' killers so beloved by US filmmakers.

Good point about the way my namesake played crazy in that movie. I've liked him a lot in the films of that other Japanese director that nobody ever heard of until a few years ago- I still can't remember his name, but he directed "The Woman With Red Hair." There was one movie about a guy who wanted to divorce his dying wife to marry a young girl called "Love Letter" and another about a crazy poet who keeps getting involved in suicide pacts but failing to kill himself with a Latin/Italian title like "Enamorata."

def struck me as right to scrap the end color scene of 'black rain'

didnt know that miike worked with him, couldnt tell exactly if it was like a tongue in cheek, overworked admiration or whether miike was actually unhappy working as second ad on black rain......either way, he did say he learned a lot

> Didn't he do Tokyo Olympiad?

no, that was kon ichikawa