Matcollis This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

valadas Sixteenth Century Japan. Civil wars. Military marauders and rapists. Rival clans fighting each other. The samurais, individual warriors following a rigid behaviour code and imposing themselves as an outstanding social groupThis movie develops itself in these surroundings in a half-poetic, half-realist atmosphere but very well succeeded in filmic and plot terms.Fancy and fantasy also shows up in some moments. A parallel story of two countrymen is told. One is a craftsman who Works on clay potteries, The other is a fool that wants forcefully to become a samurai though it doesn't have enough money to get the necessary outfit. Both leave their houses in a village later plundered by one of the armies above referred and go away where to make their dreams come true leaving their wives behind. This turns out to be very tragic and after several adventures including the love relationship of the potter with a ghost princess, they cone back home and meet several unhappy vicissitudes some of them having been caused by those violent soldiers. Enchanting film direction, seducing and sentimentally well presented.

Antonius Block Director Kenji Mizoguchi's film is based on the 18th century supernatural stories in the Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain), and takes place during civil warfare in 16th century Japan. Despite the concerns of his wife, a potter seeks to take risks and profit from the chaos of war. His friend has the desperate ambition to become a samurai, despite not being of the right class or even possessing the armor necessary. It's this desire for money and fame, as opposed to being cautious and content, that will prove to be the men's undoing. The potter will meet a young woman from a market who turns out to be an alluring phantom, a Japanese Circe of sorts, and so the desire for sensual pleasure is added to these temptations.Machiko Kyo plays Lady Wakasa, the temptress, and it's interesting as her true nature and emotions are gradually revealed. Unfortunately the role of the would-be samurai is comically overacted by Eitaro Ozawa, which took away from my enjoyment. There are some beautiful shots, such as a boat slowly disappearing into the mist and fog, as well as great moments, such as when the samurai reunites with his wife under very different circumstances (which I won't spoil), and the film is certainly well done and worth watching. However, the story is a bit too much of a morality tale for my taste: the men put their wives at risk through the temptations of money, fame, and sex, and, well, of course bad things happen. The film clearly has a place in film history, but I find it hasn't aged as well as other classics.

Andres Salama When this ghost story set in Japan's medieval era won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 1953, it showed the rest of the world that Rashomon was no fluke, and that something extraordinary was happening in Japanese cinema. Today we can see that Japanese movies during the 1950s are one of the highlights of the history of cinema, with directors like Kurosawa, Ozu, Mizoguchi and Naruse actively working (sometimes making several movies a year) as well as slightly lesser accomplished directors (Ichikawa, Masumura, Kobayashi, Kinagasa or Oshima and Imamura just starting their respective careers)Ugetsu was widely regarded as among the best films ever made during the 1960s and 1970s. Its reputation has slightly fallen since then, and many people consider now that Mizoguchi made better movies. Using the director's characteristic long takes, it is heavy going at times, especially in the middle section. But it has wonderful scenes, like the one with the trip by boat in a foggy night. It is a movie that any serious cinema buff should see.With Masayuki Mori, Machiko Kyo (they were respectively the samurai and his wife in Rashomon) and Kinuyo Tanaka, among others.

kurosawakira I'd like to think of the hobby of watching films as a journey through a forest. The films are the trees, and the path takes us down and around all sorts of vistas. Some are worth our time, some not, and some we mark down on a map so we could find them later and return to marvel at them.Film, for me, is just like the realities depicted in this film, where we wonder from one ghost world to another. We deceive ourselves; let ourselves be deceived. And what a marvellous poem is Mizoguchi's "Ugetsu monogatari" (1953), a film about twofold ambition: fame and money, and creating art. Art is always about risking everything, and continuing even if we might lose everything. As such, the film is a treasure trove of creativity, passion and genius.Ugetsu is also one of the most lucid meditations on the "what if". It seems like the film were made of short segments, each then plunging into the "what if" in an alternate dimension, and deeper we go so that by the time we escape the illusion of the manor, we arrive fresh at the illusion of a happy family, until the reality kicks in.The ghost story is central, too, but perhaps not so extensively as the reputation of the film might suggest. I'd consider it more as the matter through which Mizoguchi channels his meditations on art, death and lust, and I believe it actually benefits the first viewings of the film if it's not too strictly tied in the ghost story tradition, or at least keeping in mind that this is actually a mélange of three short stories, two from Ueda Akinari and one from Guy de Maupassant. Not that this isn't a powerful predecessor to "Onibaba" (1964), "Kaidan" (1964) and "Yabu no naka no kuroneko" (1968), it's always advisable to avoid generic categorization so as not to be led astray to see a film that doesn't really exist. As for the ghost story aspect, the Criterion DVD prints the stories it's based on, but I'd direct you to a wonderful collection of Chinese ghost stories similar in spirit, Pu Songling's "Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio," available through Penguin Classics. These stories unwrap the depth of the narrative at play in Ugetsu, too, and how the supernatural is like Lake Biwa through which the group travels in the spectral mist. I've written about this before, but I'd really love to know whether Mizoguchi knew Dreyer's "Vampyr" (1932), since that iconic Lake Biwa scene is so similar in atmosphere to a certain scene in Dreyer's phantasmagoria.But the real ghost is in the visuals. Cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo stated in 1992, as recorded by Phillip Lopate*, that they used a crane about 70 percent of the time. The camera, then, is the ghost, who sees everything and moves anyway it wants, joining the worlds together seamlessly as it hovers through the air in so many shots, so beautifully one wonders what superhuman skill it must have taken to make those things work. In Lopate's eloquent expression, "it is the movie's supreme balancing act to be able to move seamlessly between the realistic and the otherworldly."** The final homecoming, one of the most heart-rending of them all, is where all the worlds intertwine and become transparent planes atop each other.It's staggeringly past belief how much quality cinema was created in Japan during the fifties, even the few years from 1950 to 1955. Kurosawa was deservedly taking the world by storm, but in the quiet corner Ozu, Naruse and Mizoguchi were making the films of their lives, "Ugetsu" is rightfully grouped in that class of unique films.When Criterion released this on DVD in 2005, it was a one of a kind film event for me. It was the first Mizoguchi in the collection, and I already owned "Saikaku ichidai onna" (1952) on DVD, courtesy of Artificial Eye, and "Sanshô dayû" (1954) on videotape, courtesy of BFI. Having Mizoguchi on DVD was, at the time, almost as radical a thought as wishing now that one might find some Naruse on Blu-ray someday. But fans of Mizoguchi's art are well- catered to: not only do we have several DVDs, a large body of work is actually available on Blu-ray, as well: Criterion and Masters of Cinema have released "Sansho," the latter have also released Ugetsu and — let's count together — six (!) other Mizoguchi's on Blu (although it was a limited edition and somebody's getting rich by selling them nowadays), and Artificial Eye have released four earlier masterworks.* Phillip Lopate, "From the Other Shore," 12. Printed in the DVD booklet of the Criterion Collection edition of Ugetsu Monogatari, released in 2005.** ibid., 10.