drunken angel Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Do you want to look forward or backward? Out on DVD this week are two Japanese films separated by more than half a century. Animation director Satoshi Kon first made his mark with Perfect Blue (1997), a trippy journey into a pop singer's psyche that transcended time and space. He reversed course with Millennium Actress (2001), which crossed decades to tell the story of of a reclusive movie star, and slid into the mainstream with the much more straightforward Tokyo Godfathers (2003) before returning to more familiar territory with the made for television multi-episode series Paranoia Agent (2003).

His most recent film, Paprika, is a "visually rich tale," wrote Kim Voynar, "about a group of private scientists at a research facility who have invented a device called the DC Mini that allows 'dream detectives' to enter other people's dreams." The DVD includes a "making of" documentary, several featurettes and a filmmaker commentary.

Is it possible to summarize the career of Akira Kurosawa? Suffice it to say that his 1948 noir Drunken Angel was his first step into personal filmmaking and his first collaboration with the great actor Toshirô Mifune. As is their custom, The Criterion Collection has produced a DVD that features a new, restored high definition transfer, audio commentary by Japanese film expert Donald Richie, a "making of" documentary, a new "video piece" on the challenges that faced Kurosawa, and more.

Quite frankly, Wilson Yip's Dragon Tiger Gate is an unholy mess that tries to pretend 40-something Donnie Yen is about half his age -- and that's just the starting point for the foolishness unleashed. It could be argued that the action and the dramatics are intended to be over the top, since it's based on a popular manga, but I think that's probably insulting to the source material, which I haven't read. If you're a glutton for punishment -- or just a sucker for any kind of martial arts action and/or pretty boys Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue -- you might like this more than I did. The DVD includes an audio commentary by Ric Meyers, a "making of" featurette and deleted scenes.

I've heard of people learning English from watching movies and television shows -- usually friends of friends, as the stories went -- but I didn't realize it was such a cottage industry until I typed "Learning English from movies" into a search engine. (Go ahead, try it. I'll wait.) The search results from Google show that a lot of people have put a lot of thought into this idea, far beyond teaching somehow how to say "I'll be back" with a menacing Teutonic air that might one day vault you into the California governor's mansion.

In a similar way, some movie buffs have learned French or Italian in hopes of better appreciating their favorite auteurs, while even I have picked up a couple of Cantonese phrases just from watching movies -- though when I've tried them out on native Cantonese speakers, they look at me as though I'm speaking Martian. So why not try to learn Japanese by watching Akira Kurosawa movies?

The folks at Mahalo.com have assembled what is, in effect, a lesson plan based on the notion that "listening to Japanese in a dramatic setting can provide an emotional and contextual background absent in textbooks." They outline activities for watching and learning from the Kurosawa classics Rashomon, Ikiru, Yojimbo, and Drunken Angel. In Rashomon, for example, it suggests noticing the difference between how an old man and a young girl might say "I don't understand," which might be a very useful phrase for a new Japanese speaker. Personally, I'd like to learn this quote from Ikiru: "I can't afford to hate anyone. I don't have that kind of time." That might be helpful if I get drunk in a karaoke bar and insult a yakuza. How about you? Have you ever learned any helpful foreign-language words from watching a movie?