Tokyo Story

Ozu, 1953, 135m
It is a long and slow movie, but never tiring. Although a drama of domestic life, it has many suspenseful moments. In one such, the father, having no lodgings, lands up at his daughter's house drunk, and is chided like an infant. They are people who do not fit into their children's busy lives in the big city. Boats floating past, rippling sea, smoking chimneys, railway stations, a mound of marble grave stones, a moth beats against a lighted bulb as an old lady breathes her last. The film was the director's top choice in the Sight and Sound poll 2012--it's always more difficult to see something as it stands on it's own, when it is so highly lauded. It's also a picture of life in Japan at the time, hypnotic in cinematography, steeped in the rhythms of time and place. We see the strange mixture of westernization and tradition.This is a gentle, powerful, beautiful film. 

Vertigo

1958, 124m, Hitchcock
Vertigo is the latest No 1 movie in the Sight and Sound poll, replacing Kane. I'm visiting it after a decade. It seems to have lost the magic it had. As a movie in which suspense is an important ingredient, the second view is different from the first. It has great cinematic beauty and haunting music--I had not forgotten the picturesque car drives along the sea side around San Francisco. It ventures into the inner recesses of the mind, in the Freudian manner. It is about fear, death and desire. The hero, Scottie, is obsessed to a point of sickness by a woman, or of a mental picture of one. It is a picture of dark, brooding, obsessive sexuality. Like most Hitchcock characters he is driven by forces over which he has little control. Death and desire, birth and cessation--are they not complementary? The movie delves into the eternal mystery, hazards into the region beyond the grave, conceding the possibility of existence beyond. Of course, it's devilish cleverness lies precisely in discarding all these conjectures and winding up as an ingenious matter of fact crime thriller. Whatever else one may say, this is not a film that can be forgotten. Every frame has remained imprinted for a decade. Hitchcock was never modest of his ability to mesmerize his audience. In a sense, watching it seemed superfluous, since it was already embedded in the mind. The plot is absurdly improbable. It must be full of loopholes. But that doesn't count. It is a dark and troubled portrayal of human nature, but I am left asking whether it is great cinema, whatever greatness means, or a disturbing piece of gimmickry? Among Hitchcock's films, it is among  the most memorable--one that has to be seen.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

1961, 115m, Maggie Smith
This is an extraordinary drama, set in a girl's boarding school in Edinburgh. It has an entirely British flavor. Maggie Smith as a charismatic teacher, Jean Brodie, gives the performance of a lifetime. Set during the Spanish civil war, she "inspires" one of her students to run away to join this war and to lose her life. She is perhaps intended to be an epitome of charismatic leaders, capable of leading their unthinking flocks down the lane of dubious causes. Indeed, as could have been common in her time, she admires Mussolini and Franco. Her fault would be to promote their own persona rather than empowerment and independence of her students. The film is a textured and a bitter parody of totalitarian leaders whom Brodie admires--in her awkwardly angular grandiose gestures as well as the brilliant unstoppable flow of words, she is a fascist of the classroom. I am reminded of Chaplin's film on the theme. This is a great film which Ebert missed out in his compilation.
The Great Dictator: NYT Review

Emperor

2012, 198m
Gives a picture of war devastated Japan just after the occupation. MacArthur and his aides have to decide about the guilt for the war, and particularly the fate of the Emperor. Though stereotyped in approach, sinking at times to insipid romance and sentiment, it does deliver a measure of historical content, in an entertaining fashion. As a bonus, we share the surreal tranquility of some Japanese gardens and homes. Not a film worthy of its theme, but something is better than nothing.

The Corporation

2003, 144m
This is a disturbing film. It describes the the power of corporations in the modern world. In legal terms a corporation is a "person". If so, it is a greedy person with no conscience. Being responsible only to the investors, corporations are driven by the single motive of earning profits, irrespective of the social and ecological damage they might cause. Specific examples like gene technology, privatization of natural resources as basic as water, pernicious effect of advertising are put forth in series of episodes, punctuated with the opinions of corporate representatives as well as critics of the system. The film is quite enlightening about these monsterss in whose vice we are obviously gripped.

To quote what Chomsky says in the documentary:

"It's a fair assumption that every human being...real human beings flesh and blood ones not corporations but every flesh and blood human being....is a moral person. You know we've got the same genes the same but our nature the nature of humans allows all kinds of  behavior. I mean everyone of us under some circumstances could be a gas chamber attendant and a saint. But it is the consequence of modern capitalism.....When you look at a corporation just like when you look at a slave owner you want to distinguish between the institution and the individual. So slavery for example or other forms of tyranny are inherently monstrous but the individuals participating in them may be the nicest guys you could imagine: benevolent, friendly, nice to their children, even nice to their slaves..... I mean as individuals they may be anything. They're monsters because the institution is monstrous. 

Then the same is true of corporations. The goal for the corporation is to maximize profit and market share. And they also have a goal for their target namely the population. They have to be turned into completely mindless consumers of goods that they do not want. You have to develop what are called created wants. So you have to create wants. You have to impose on people what's called a philosophy of futility...the insignificant things of life like fashionable consumption. I’m just basically quoting business literature. And it makes perfect sense. The ideal is to have individuals who are totally disassociated from one another. Who’s conception of themselves the sense of value is just how many created wants can I satisfy? These people are customers because they are willing to trade money for widgets. And all the customers take the widgets home to all parts of the country. Look at all the money the widget builder has taken in from the sale of his widgets......public relations industry, monstrous industry advertising, and so on which are designed from infancy to try to mould people into this desired pattern."