i was born but Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Japanese-born director Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) is one of the most satisfying, yet complex filmmakers in history, and also the simplest. Early on he learned to eliminate anything extraneous, such as camera movements, flashy editing, or even camera angles (everything is shot head-on, eye-level with the actors), in favor of composition and pacing. (He only reluctantly made the jumps to sound, and later, color.) His films have a peaceful, tranquil quality, that leave me feeling relaxed afterward, and yet -- as I discovered last summer while devouring the Criterion Eclipse Late Ozu box set -- there's a dark side to Ozu. If his characters eventually find happiness, they find it by letting go, or giving up their values. It's a harsh message for Americans reared on fighting for our ideals, which is perhaps why Ozu's films were deemed "too Japanese" to be released here during his lifetime. Yet the films still work, and here we have a perfect example in Ozu's I Was Born, But... (1932), released as part of the Criterion Eclipse Box Set #10: Silent Ozu: Three Family Comedies. (The Eclipse series offers no-frills box sets of films that may otherwise never see the light of day.)

One of the joys of reviewing movies is the chance, every so often, to see a restored classic on the big screen. In 2006, I had the opportunity to see the restored cut of Alfred E. Green's nasty pre-code classic Baby Face (1933), with Barbara Stanwyck in all her glory. Better still, I saw Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1970) for the first time (both films screened at San Francisco's Balboa Theater). The Balboa also showed a recently uncovered war film, Stuart Cooper's Overlord (1975), a film with a simplicity and power lacking in most of the year's new pictures.

The great Rialto Pictures, the leading distributor of restored classics, gave us Jean-Pierre Melville's masterpiece Army of Shadows (1969); since it had never before opened in the United States, it has turned up on several critics' ten best lists for 2006. Also from Rialto we got Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Fallen Idol (1948) and Christian-Jaque's silly swashbuckler Fanfan la Tulipe (1952). And to far greater publicity, Sony Pictures Classics re-released a bundle of Pedro Almodovar films, including Matador (1986), Law of Desire (1987), Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Flower of My Secret (1995), Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Talk to Her (2002) and Bad Education (2004); I took advantage of the chance to see a few of these on the big screen. And each of them played on 400 screens or less.

Not always, but often, a re-release comes timed for a film's anniversary, and so I've made up a fantasy list of re-releases I'd like to see in 2007.