woman in the dunes

so yesterday jaden and i planned to go see 'blind swordsman: zatoichi' which i cannot wait to see although dumbfuck me got the theatres wrong and so we ended up missing the last matinee. well next friday will be perfect.

anyway, jaden came over here then and we watched one of the most bizarre films around, hiroshi teshigahara's 'woman in the dunes'. this is a 1964 film that was nominated for best director and best film (foreign, of course) by the academy, and it deserved to win. touted as 'haunting. erotic. unforgettable,' the film surely is. it's about this woman who lives in a community underneath these sand dunes which keep falling on her house. she's all alone, as her husband and daughter were buried in a sand slide years ago. so this guy shows up, and the people who live above the dunes somehow get him to go down this rope ladder to visit the lady, and they take away the rope so he is stuck there. indeed there is a lot of erotic tension, although it lacked the sexual shenanigans i expected it to have. still, the tension was there and it kept building up.

meanwhile, the guy and the woman have to keep shoveling the sand every night for 12 hours to keep the house safe. 'why don't you leave?' he keeps asking her (and "why can't i leave?' is another query) and she never really answers him. she's always asking about tokyo though, making you think that she is scared to leave this strange, closed off community for it's all she's known all her life.

additionally, the cinematography is just amazing. the scenes of the sand falling remind you of a surf video when it focuses on the height of a wave and it crashing down. just amazing. and the film itself, as promised, is haunting and unforgettable. still has me thinking about it.

so next time you are at the video store or lining up your queue for netflix, check this one out. it's really good.

after the film, 'rabbit-proof fence' was on cable, so we watched that. i really like that film. i didn't really dig it when i saw it in the theatre, but the small screen made it have more impact. it's such an intimate film, this journey of 3 runaways. i recommend that one too.

oh, i also watched 'millenium mambo,' a strange little taiwanese film that amused me greatly. yes, it was a film filled day for me. but what day isn't? check out all these films. they're all good in their own ways....

"Is there no room in this world for the man with the 105 IQ?" -- Homer