SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

BoardChiri Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Manthast Absolutely amazing

Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

WILLIAM FLANIGAN Viewed on DVD. Subtitles = one (1) star. A pot boiler with sumptuous production values. Exterior location and interior sets look/are authentic. The kimonos are stunning. Acting, direction, and cinematography are close to (if not) first rate. Authentic Western Japan dialect (now and then). That's the good stuff. Now the rest. If you were native-born Japanese and lacked English language conversational skills (more and more a rarity today), imagine how, say, a BBC soap opera would come across based on subtitles? Without being able to catch and enjoy much in the way of acting nuances, subplots, etc., would it appear to be just plain tedious, repetitious, and boring? Probably. Also an apt description of this Criterion disc version: it's tedious, repetitious, and boring. The subtitles are vacuous and often incorrect. The disc cries out for extensive supplemental material on what the film is about, the culture it recreates, the author of the source material, backgrounds on the director and lead actresses, etc. If you lack Japanese conversational skills, work on your Japanese, and then re-visit the film in a few years. You might be amazed at how much it has "improved"! Except for the cheap synthesized music. WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

Hez I will first declare myself a fan of the book. As an adaptation this film is something of a hack job, and taken on its own merits borders on melodrama. The novel has been described as photo-realist and so the affected acting and melodramatic additions of the script are particularly jarring. Further, the sneering, satirical tone that hangs above many scenes implies actual disrespect of the source material. There is almost complete disregard for the characters of the novel, apart from their most basic profiles. The women are rendered feminine stereotypes via almost constant tears (totally absent from the novel), and the men tend to just shout and lust. For some reason the characters are always at each others throats. The portrayal of Yukiko is particularly shallow, and the most bizarre addition of the script is a salacious and thankfully slightly executed romance subplot between Yukiko and Teinnosuke, which seems to serve only to give male audience a sexual object. On the positive side all the technical aspects blah blah

tieman64 Kon Ichikawa's "The Makioka Sisters" (aka "A Fine Snowfall") centres on the lives of four upper middle class Japanese sisters during the lead up to the Pacific War. The sisters belong to the Makioka family, a once powerful house which is now witnessing its declining years.The film opens with various misty landscape shots, before settling upon close ups of flower blossoms and petals. Throughout the film, like Ozu, Ichikawa uses ripening fruit and flower buds to suggest impermanence, transience and the passage of time. As Japan awaits change (and bloodshed), the sisters mourn the loss of their parents, fret over their family's finances and battle over tradition. One sister must be wedded to a man before she reaches a certain age, but her moxy and fiery independence (shades of Jane Austen) are at odds with both her biological clock and Japan's customs. Another sister wants to use the family's money to start a doll-making business, but the venture soon gives way to conventional, Western style sewing. All the while, time spirals away, inexorably towards...Much of the film focuses on rituals and customs, most of which are drawn out to the point of parody, or shown to be archaic, laborious and ridiculously inflexible. Holding on to these customs, the eldest sisters believe, will preserve their house's greatness. But these customs, the film shows, are already dead, entombed buds desperately awaiting the new blooms promised by the two youngest, somewhat dissident sisters.The film is stately, melodramatic, lush and colourful, but at times conjures up the spooky lavishness of Kobayashi's "Kwaidan". Ichikawa films the sisters in such a way that they are at times made grotesque and ghostly by ritual. Like John Huston, Ichikawa's filmography is comprised largely of adaptations of highly-regarded literary works. "The Makioka Sisters" was based on a novel by by Junichirô Tanizaki, a major Japanese novelist.8/10 - Worth one viewing.

gordon-31 One should first read The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki to better understand this film. It is a very great novel about the life of four middle-class sisters in Osaka, Japan in the 1930's. The book describes in great detail the many subtleties of life in Japan which a Westerner can miss understanding in the film. The film rather closely follows the book and is very beautifully photographed.