Catangro After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Hayleigh Joseph This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

Payno I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Jackson Booth-Millard This Japanese film is one of many I found because it was featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and it was rated very highly by critics, so I was looking forward to sitting down and watching it, directed by Kenji Mizoguchi (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, Sansho Dayu). Basically set in the 16th century, in the farming village Nakanogō, on the shore of Lake Biwa in Ōmi Province, it is the beginning of Spring, during the period of the Japanese Civil Wars. Family man farmer and craftsman Genjurô (Masayuki Mori) travels to Nagahama, he plans to sell his wares and make a small fortune, he is joined by his neighbour Tobei (Eitarô Ozawa), who has a foolish dream to become a samurai, but he cannot afford the outfit. Genjurô and Tobei become greedy working together, manufacturing clay potteries, and selling the pieces to enrich themselves, but the army of the cruel Shibata Katsuie is invading their home village, Genjurô's wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) and Tōbei's wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito) are worried and warn their ambitious husbands. The village is looted, but the families flee and survive, Genjurô and Tobei decide to travel with them by boat to the city, however, following a pirate attack, Genjurô leaves Miyagi behind, promising to return in ten days. Genjurô, Tobei and Ohama make a good amount of money selling the pottery, but Tomei leaves his wife to buy the samurai outfit and seek fame and fortune. It is after presenting the severed head of an army general to a commander that Tobei is rewarded with armour, a mount, and a retinue, he returns looking for Ohama eager to show her, he is shocked to find she has been working in a brothel as a prostitute. Meanwhile female aristocrat Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyô) shows an interest in the pottery, invites Genjurô to her mansion and tries to seduce him. In the end, Tobei throws his armour into a river and returns with Ohama to Nakanogō, while Genjurō had been dreaming of reuniting with Miyagi, but after returning to reality his neighbour tells him that his wife is dead, but her spirit assures him she will always be with him. I did my best to concentrate as much as possible, carefully reading the subtitles and keeping up with what was going, it was a fairly simple story of two peasants trying to support themselves and their families, but having consequences in doing so, specifically for their wives, there are some really good visuals, and the costumes are indeed impeccable, what I can remember, all in all it was an interesting period melodrama. It was nominated the Oscar for Best Costume Design. Very good!

gizmomogwai Truly one of the greatest and most stunning films of all time, Ugetsu (1953) is a Japanese masterpiece, a ghost story- and so much more. Masterfully combining two stories from its source, Tales of Moonlight and Rain, Ugetsu is set during the Japanese Civil Wars and follows a farmer whose pottery takes off, sales booming in wartime. His ambition and greed inflamed, he leaves his wife and young son for business, ultimately seduced by a strange young lady- who poses a sinister threat to him.Ugetsu is a tale of ambition, desire and greed consuming men and leading to grief. This is tied in with the civil wars- in 1953, a lesson about the follies of war would have resonated with Japanese audiences. As a ghost story, the subplot of the potterer Genjûrô's buffoonish sidekick Tôbee pursuing a career as a samurai might ordinarily be an odd fit, but in this film the two stories don't seem to conflict. Like Genjûrô, Tôbee is chasing an unrealistic dream, and abandoning his wife destroys her. Seeing her raped and becoming a disgraced prostitute is dark, but in the end they get off easier than our hero and his wife.It's Genjûrô's story that's truly the outstandingly mesmerizing part of the film, at once surreal but very real and frightening. Our seductress, Lady Wakasa, presents herself as the survivor of a wiped out clan. She hints she may be an enchantress, she acknowledges spirits in the castle, but she entraps Genjûrô with a life of pleasures and makes him forget about his family. A holy man warns him his life is in danger and Lady Wakasa is a spirit- he finally sees it when Lady Wakasa is repelled by prayers to Buddha the holy man has painted on Genjûrô's skin. Lady Wakasa is revealed as an unholy abomination, but somewhat sympathetic, a girl killed before ever knowing love.Genjûrô returns to his home village as the family man his wife always wanted him to be- but now, his wife is a spirit herself, a casualty of war. Seeing him reunited and then losing the apparition of his lost wife is reminiscent of the later Soviet film Solaris (1972). It's nearly as frightening and devastating. The two ghosts of the film tie the story together as a motif, with the atmosphere helped along with spooky music and other supernatural allusions. Ugetsu emerges as a fantastic tale, universal in its themes and message and brilliantly executed. Like its ghost characters, it may live forever.

kurosawakira I'd like to think of the hobby of watching films as a journey through a forest. The films are the trees, and the path takes us down and around all sorts of vistas. Some are worth our time, some not, and some we mark down on a map so we could find them later and return to marvel at them.Film, for me, is just like the realities depicted in this film, where we wonder from one ghost world to another. We deceive ourselves; let ourselves be deceived. And what a marvellous poem is Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu monogatari" (1953), a film about twofold ambition: fame and money, and creating art. Art is always about risking everything, and continuing even if we might lose everything. As such, the film is a treasure trove of creativity, passion and genius.Ugetsu is also one of the most lucid meditations on the "what if". It seems like the film were made of short segments, each then plunging into the "what if" in an alternate dimension, and deeper we go so that by the time we escape the illusion of the manor, we arrive fresh at the illusion of a happy family, until the reality kicks in.The ghost story is central, too, but perhaps not so extensively as the reputation of the film might suggest. I'd consider it more as the matter through which Mizoguchi channels his meditations on art, death and lust, and I believe it actually benefits the first viewings of the film if it's not too strictly tied in the ghost story tradition, or at least keeping in mind that this is actually a mélange of three short stories, two from Ueda Akinari and one from Guy de Maupassant. Not that this isn't a powerful predecessor to "Onibaba" (1964), "Kaidan" (1964) and "Yabu no naka no kuroneko" (1968), it's always advisable to avoid generic categorization so as not to be led astray to see a film that doesn't really exist. As for the ghost story aspect, the Criterion DVD prints the stories it's based on, but I'd direct you to a wonderful collection of Chinese ghost stories similar in spirit, Pu Songling's "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio," available through Penguin Classics. These stories unwrap the depth of the narrative at play in Ugetsu, too, and how the supernatural is like Lake Biwa through which the group travels in the spectral mist. I've written about this before, but I'd really love to know whether Mizoguchi knew Dreyer's "Vampyr" (1932), since that iconic Lake Biwa scene is so similar in atmosphere to a certain scene in Dreyer's phantasmagoria.But the real ghost is in the visuals. Cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo stated in 1992, as recorded by Phillip Lopate*, that they used a crane about 70 percent of the time. The camera, then, is the ghost, who sees everything and moves anyway it wants, joining the worlds together seamlessly as it hovers through the air in so many shots, so beautifully one wonders what superhuman skill it must have taken to make those things work. In Lopate's eloquent expression, "it is the movie's supreme balancing act to be able to move seamlessly between the realistic and the otherworldly."** The final homecoming, one of the most heart-rending of them all, is where all the worlds intertwine and become transparent planes atop each other.It's staggeringly past belief how much quality cinema was created in Japan during the fifties, even the few years from 1950 to 1955. Kurosawa was deservedly taking the world by storm, but in the quiet corner Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi were making the films of their lives, "Ugetsu" is rightfully grouped in that class of unique films.When Criterion released this on DVD in 2005, it was a one of a kind film event for me. It was the first Mizoguchi in the collection, and I already owned "Saikaku ichidai onna" (1952) on DVD, courtesy of Artificial Eye, and "Sanshô dayû" (1954) on videotape, courtesy of BFI. Having Mizoguchi on DVD was, at the time, almost as radical a thought as wishing now that one might find some Naruse on Blu-ray someday. But fans of Mizoguchi's art are well- catered to: not only do we have several DVDs, a large body of work is actually available on Blu-ray, as well: Criterion and Masters of Cinema have released "Sansho," the latter have also released Ugetsu and — let's count together — six (!) other Mizoguchi's on Blu (although it was a limited edition and somebody's getting rich by selling them nowadays), and Artificial Eye have released four earlier masterworks.* Phillip Lopate, "From the Other Shore," 12. Printed in the DVD booklet of the Criterion Collection edition of Ugetsu Monogatari, released in 2005.** ibid., 10.

gavin6942 A fantastic tale of war, love, family and ambition set in the midst of the Japanese Civil Wars of the sixteenth century.Along with Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film "Rashomon", "Ugetsu" is credited with having popularized Japanese cinema in the West. And you can see why, with this strong, sweeping tale of a family struggling in the middle of war. The plot is almost epic (albeit brief), and the film ranges from the greatest joys to the worst sorrows within a short time.Donald Richie called it "one of the most perfect movies in the history of Japanese cinema" and especially praised the beauty and morality of the film's opening and closing shots. He is quite right, and this film really explains how important cinematography can be.