I Am Completely Serious

The movie is about a former professor, retired to focus on his writing, and his relationship with his students. The first part takes place during World War II, and his and his wife's house is destroyed in an air raid. They end up living in an old garden shack. There is a montage of the seasons, showing him inside the shack calmly reading at a little desk, and her outside doing all the work.

This montage reads - to me - like parody. Same with the scene where he leaves her in the shack to go to a lavish birthday party put on by the students, to which she isn't invited. It's just so ridiculous.

There's a scene in which he sits in the shack and calmly describes to his students the way all of their pet birds but one burned to death in the raid, deriding his wife's sentimentality in having rescued the last one. She's sitting right there, pouring sake for them. His students rescue them and buy them a new house with a garden built just to his specifications, and he gets a cat, which he loves. The cat disappears, and he falls completely apart, mourning extravagantly for the cat as he refused to mourn for his old life while living in the shack. Whenever there's bad weather, he sees vivid images of the cat trapped out in it, a projection of his fear of homelessness.

He stares at the cat's old bed and pets it; the bed's on the bathtub cover, and he won't let it be moved, so he doesn't bathe, and his wife has to go to the bath house. She makes desperate calls to his students and goes out looking for the cat. His students philosophically put his behavior down to his writerly temperament - but they don't have to live with the guy.

I mean, this seems like it ought to be parody. But maybe it's not safe to assume that. Maybe Kurosawa's ideas of what's culturally normal were so different from mine that this relationship didn't look at all dysfunctional to him. Maybe this is even true of most of the people watching it! (I don't think so for Japanese people under 30, but I honestly can't speak for the older folks.) The only other film of his I've seen is Rashomon, which isn't helpful for interpreting this one. I honestly cannot tell if he thinks there's anything weird about this couple.

...

Unrelated, but - please tell me there's more than one set of English subs for this. They spelled carp "crap." They spelled carp "crap" every time. In sentences like, "I'm going to keep carp in the pond!" and "Imagine a carp that big!"

elongated_tito just made me watch Sin City. I know it's kind of, like, done to complain about the movie's treatment of women, but. Yeah, okay.

( Eleven-year-old girl that Bruce Willis has just rescued from bad guys tells him, 'I'm still a virgin, thanks to you.' )

And I just ended up taking the movie a lot more seriously than I meant to, and I think I'm stopping here and putting this under a cut.

I just finished Rocannon's World, Ursula LeGuin's first published novel. It's definitely by LeGuin, so it's good, but it's also definitely early. It has a Huge Faceless Mystery Enemy Who Cannot Be Reasoned With And Must Be Destroyed. This isn't something you associate with LeGuin, and she clearly wasn't comfortable with it - they're the reason for the Journey, but just barely have a name, are there only at the very beginning and very end, and then are only kinda-sorta there.

The protagonist defeats them with the help of a Mysterious Wise Man On A Mountain, because, being a basically sensical character, he cannot overcome a nonsensical problem on his own, and thus requires an equally nonsensical deus ex machina.

In between, he deals with smaller and more comprehensible crises which are recognizably human, animal, or weather. Those parts are LeGuin. Fortunately, she learned to drop the end-paper.

Random note: I'll eat something generally thought inedible if Rosemary Kirstein hasn't read this book, because (elliptical spoiler for both Rocannon and the Steerswoman series) her Demon Cities are Rocannon's Angel Cities.

(This entry edited a few times over a few minutes after posting it, because my genius comes in spurts, like mustard.)