Equinox Flower

Ozu is one of the more interesting directors to address the issues of urbanization and modernization. This film looks at young women in postwar Japan who want to break the cycle of miai and the traditions that try to call them back to it.

Ozu has an amazing sense of the urban landscape and the contrast between the modern and the traditional. This film has the added bonus of color, a feature which Ozu uses effectively in the 1950s Japanese home and as well as at the office. His obsession with the ways in which modern people work and the buildings that facilitate this work leads to shots that set the scenes for his films in ways that other directors neglect. In other words, Ozu understands that a simple shot of men washing windows on a skyscraper, a row of green chairs framed in suits, or a home decorated with a printed cotton table cloth and a Bakelite radio provide us with an understanding of the setting that is difficult to achieve through simple dialogue.

I often see Ozu's films as remarkably feminist in their critiques of a paternalistic society where married women are servants to their husbands, but I wonder if this is my interpretation from a half of a century down the road. At any rate, they clearly examine gender in a critical and insightful way.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is the feel-good film of late 2008 that is sweeping the awards season. The triumphant story of an uneducated man who manages through luck to win the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire?” in his quest to win a girl, it is bland, apolitical, and uncontroversial. There is very little that would challenge our comfort levels or open our hearts to any cause short of nodding at the poverty of Mumbai’s slums. In other words, it is everything that Milk and Wall-E are not: a happy story that can be taken at face value and makes almost no comment on the current state of the world. In a dark time for the economy and global warming and in the wake of a major setback for gay liberation in last year’s elections, the film allows is sublimely neutral.

That said, there is not much else going for Slumdog Millionaire. It is a fairly routine rags-to-riches story of tragedy and struggle. Director Danny Boyle is careful to show the audience pieces of violence and tragedy without the gruesome details that one would find in the Coen brothers version or the sex that almost any other director would include. There is also precious little intensity or character development. There is nothing artful or interesting about the cinematography and the yellow lighting in the torture scene is sickening not for its mood but for its triteness.

Still, Slumdog Millionaire is better than almost anything out there and a fun albeit mild bit of entertainment for a Saturday night.