Madadayo
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Movie Reviews of Madadayo
Movie Review: Interesting Cultural Portrait
Summary: 4 Stars
I think this film would be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in Japanese culture. This film depicts the lifelong relationship between teacher and student over a course of many years. I think this is the kind of movie only an old man could make, but its implications for the younger generation are strong. It strikes me as the kind of film to watch when you are young and then watch again when you are old to see how your perception of it changes. On a purely practical note, this is a movie to be enjoyed when you are in a reflective mood and not looking for strong action or really even plotting. This is a film about character and ideas and those looking for samurai battles will be very disappointed.
Also, an important thing to know before watching the movie is that the whole "madadayo" ritual they perform is part of a japanese game of hide and seek. This is explained at the end of the film, but of course the original japanese audience would have known this cultural detail and so i think it would be less confusing for the Western viewer to know this in advance.
Movie Review: Enjoyable for Kurasawa fans and those with patience
Summary: 4 Stars
Madadayo - A movie about respect... for teachers, for elders, for friends. It's a movie about dedication to those that have influenced us. I couldn't help but think about those teachers in my life. How much I would like to be able to thank them for the gifts that they continue to give me long after I have left their classrooms.It's a movie about patience with those we may not want to be patient with. It's a movie about becomming more than we were, by respecting and caring for those we believe are worthy. It is a movie about being gracious to those that take care of us.
I wouldn't buy it for just anyone though.This is a movie for those who patient. If you like Kurasawa, a good choice.
Movie Review: A mellow final film by the world's greatest director
Summary: 3 Stars
My love for Akira Kurosawa knows no bounds. I've watched and rewatched many of his films a half dozen times, while I've watched SEVEN SAMURAI perhaps twenty times. As much as I love these others, I'm not a fan of MADADAYO. The story is a heavily didactic one, meant to inform Japanese youth (he stated that all of his films were directed to the youth of Japan) the joy of valuing one's elders.
It is hard to ignore the importance of this message for Kurosawa, since he felt that he had been unfairly neglected by the younger generation of Japanese directors. The roots to this feeling ran deep and originated in the late 1940s when he was was only in his late thirties. The studio at which he had received his apprenticeship, Toho, had been racked by a series of strikes. The heads of Toho were particularly concerned to rid the studio of leftist influences. Although Kurosawa himself was a man with leftist sympathies (though he was by no means a joiner of parties), his rather unsystematic politics involved embracing a mix of rather traditional liberal ideals in conjunction with a distrust of consumer societies and corporatism. Although he had been involved with the Communist Party in the early thirties and he had been pressured to be involved in a post-WW II socialist film (THOSE WHO MAKE TOMORROW) that he later dissociated himself from, his politics was personal and rather unsystematic. The studio certainly had no desire to fire Kurosawa and made no efforts to do so. The assistant directors, however, who had been among the leaders of the strike, were fired by the studio, and blackballed from further involvement in cinema in Japan. Kurosawa was heartbroken. The apprentice system in Japan, whereby a fledgling director learned at the feet of an established director (as Kurosawa had at the feet of his beloved Yama-san, Kajirô Yamamoto), was at the heart of Japanese cinema. Firing the assistant directors not only denied them an opportunity to make an impact on Japanese movies, it robbed Kurosawa of his chance to nurture his own apprentices. After the strikes, the apprentice system was not reinstated.
But this was not the only reason Kurosawa felt that his relationship with a younger generation of directors was strained. The Japanese New Wave directors had been scathingly critical of him. And after Toho severed their connection with him, his films would not come out consistently for the rest of his life (after 23 movies in the 22 years of his career, he would finish only 7 in the final 33 years of his life. Although some younger directors would patch things up with him - most notably Nagisa Oshima, who had been savagely critically of him earlier in his career, demonstrated a newfound respect for him, even conducting a two-hour interview for Japanese television - he nonetheless felt that proper respect had not been shown him.
Given all this, MADADAYO can be read in a couple of ways. One, it can be shown as a statement of regret that he had not been shown the kind of respect that Professor Uchida's students show him. Second, it can be read as a statement of the way in which students ought to show respect to their sensei. Japan's younger directors had not shown proper respect to Kurosawa, but they should have done.
Although the context for the one that anyone who loves Kurosawa can sympathize with, nonetheless this is not among Kurosawa's better films. It is not an out and out bad film. As Donald Richie has correctly said, Kurosawa never made any uninteresting movies, even though he sometimes made some that were not terribly good ones. I find many scenes in this one fail to hold my attention. Only a couple of scenes really moved me. I enjoyed the search for the cat Alley and it was interesting to see the professor to move from one house to another. I liked the students agreeing to buy the empty lot next door to the professor's house. I got a kick out of two of the students checking out the professor's house after they hear that the house had been broken into often in the past with previous tenants. They discover a sign reading for thieves. But there are no scenes that will remind anyone of Kurosawa's best films. Kurosawa changed cinema. But there is little of that brilliance in this film. The nearest to a truly interesting moment comes in the first large "Not Yet" parties. The scene is filmed with three cameras fitted with telephoto lenses. Two are filming opposite of each other, one from the back of the room toward the professor while the other is back to the room. It is fun trying to figure out where the cameras must be. Finally, it becomes obvious that they must be way up in the scaffolding shooting over the back of the wall over the back of each wall. But it was one of the few times when I felt challenged to figure out what Kurosawa was making magic.
Like DREAMS and RHAPSODY IN AUGUST, this was a relatively small film after the enormous challenges of RAN. Had he not broken his hip in 1995 he might have been able to make one last film, set in roughly the time period as his great 1957 film THE LOWER DEPTHS and dealing with the lives of streetwalkers. It was to have starred Mieko Harada, who had been so memorable in RAN as Lady Kaede. Even after breaking the hip he continued to plan the film, though one suspects more because he had the compulsion to do so rather than any real hope of getting it made. So instead of that final, ambitious film, we have this quiet, unambitious, mellow film. It could have been worse though I'm sure he could have done better.
Movie Review: at times, it was good, but half of it dragged too tiresome long
Summary: 3 Stars
this is the 'to sir with love' japanese version but all with male students who loved a german language teacher nicknamed 'professor', who could do funny or philosophic wisecracking almost on any occassion. a poor retiree but never faded away in the memory of his students for many many years.
it's a tough time for all the japanese during the wwii and the occupation years. it's a very heartfelt warm film, but sometimes the scenes were dragged too long and too slow to evolve into the next part. this film, in general, was a too overly exaggerated feeling-good film. the love and respect to the teacher was nothing but a whim. at times of such tough era, all the students still had the mood to assemble together to drink sake and beers, singing and dancing with such union form was nothing but too utopia-like daydream, a japanese harvest festival.
in the middle of the film, that drinking party was at first quite interesting, but as it dragged out so long and so slow, you'd feel like watching a musical, very pretentiously staged and not quite natural. there was integrated storyline threading out in it, but seemed to be just too tiny tidbits trivial.
kurosawa obviously wanted to give you an impression that the japanese people were tough to deal with the difficulties of life, yet at the same time could still enjoy certain amount of cultural and literary lifestyle. those singings dancings, jokings and laughters were just a resonant echo cover-up of the bitter sweet past, a memory of purity and innocence it could only exist in unrealistic novela or moviea, painted a false picture of the peace-loving japan and the japanese, yet quite contrary to what they did to other countries and their people during the second world war.
kurosawa adapted an unrealistic fantasia-like novel and made it into a post war 'shangri la', a lost dream and a lost horizon to most of the japanese who used belong to the empire of the rising then sunkened sun.
Movie Review: The Long Goodbye
Summary: 3 Stars
It pains me to write this but I was, frankly, disappointed with "Madadayo". For the final film of his illustrious career, Akira Kurosawa chose something that seemed like a mixture of "Goodbye Mr. Chips", "I Remember Mama", and "Lassie Come Home". Yes, it was a farewell film and, yes, it was probably intentionally understated, and yes, the ending was nicely done but I watch Kurosawa for the masterful way he bring his message to film. What I got in "Madadayo" was something "not with a bang but with a whimper." There are extended scenes in this movie that are practically embarrassing to watch. The main one was about a lost cat (could this be the Japan that he could no longer find? No, I think it was just a lost cat). Anyway, that's what I was left with. I had just finished watching a number of early Kurosawa films and I was left with the impression that anyone of them was better than his final film. There's a reason that this is one is rarely mentioned.