Graham
I've been changing my top 4 every month
Recently I've been trying to read some of Chikamatsu Monzaemon's plays, spurred in part by how much I've enjoyed watching Masahiro Shinoda's film Double Suicide, itself an adaptation of Chikamatsu's The Love Suicides at Ajima. I checked out Donald Keene's 1961 book Major Plays of Chikamatsu, which collects 10 of Chikamatsu's plays, including The Love Suicides at Sonezaki and The Love Suicides at Ajima. To be honest, I don't know if I'll be able to get through all the plays…
A Margaret O'Brien vehicle in which she plays Alpha, an orphan raised by a team of scientists to be a sort of child genius. The ethical concerns over such an upbringing don't seem to concern the scientists, oddly. Alpha's life is shaken up at the age of 6 when she is visited by a reporter, Mike Regan (played by James Craig.) Mike tells Alpha of fairy tales and magic, causing Alpha to leave her home/institute at night to go find…
Watched the longer "gore cut". Very entertaining. Might not deserve 5 stars but I was so entertained that I can't give it anything but that. Really stupid but a lot of fun.
Excellent film! I was worried I had too high of expectations, given the seemingly universal high praise this has received over the past 55 years. Paul Schrader called it a masterpiece and Yukio Mishima likened it to a Greek tragedy. This film is full of sympathetic characters, bound by an often unfortunate code of honor and sense of obligation to that code. This code also clashes with their sense of pride, their friendships, and just their general sense of what…