Some Like It Unauthorized

Shochiku Films may have been the studio that traditionalist Yasujirō Ozu called home, but in the 60’s the studio was also keen on supporting young new filmmakers, including the brash Masaki Kobayashi. His stylish genre-subverting Harakiri was an instant sensation and a critical success internationally, and now sits atop letterboxd as the most well reviewed feature length film, but you won’t find i...

Yasujirō Ozu could not have imagined the stature his films would take on some 60 plus years after his death in 1963. He lived in the present, in his process, making sure his japanese audience had a new film each year to go see in the theater. Wait, you could watch movies on tv by this point! I wonder if they put Ozu films on tv, and what did Ozu think if they did? Anyway, we reflect on the mystiqu...

At the Oscars in the spring of ‘63, host Frank Sinatra pleaded with hollywood to basically get out of an artist’s way, let them make their film, and the audience will come. He also threw shade at foreign films and implied they were eating hollywood’s lunch. Later that night, David Lean’s gargantuan epic won Best Picture, and seemed to prove Sinatra right. Or maybe it was the exception that could n...