しあわせ

暗殺　dir: 篠田正浩　1964

Another title in Eureka’s Masters of Cinema. This is by Masahiro Shinoda who was unfortunately eclipsed by his contempories Kurosawa, Ozu and Naruse outside Japan.

This is a jidaigeki, period drama, in the style of the Japanese New Wave. It’s set in Edo in the unrest after the Black Ships forced open the country. It was a time of impending civil war at the end of the hundreds of years of appartent peace of the Shogunate. It’s a fairly complex plot in some ways with a lot of political intrigue. So it’s definitely not an average Samurai movie.

What really attracted me was it’s look. Widescreen black and white, shallow focus, great composition, panning to cover dialog, freeze frames (I find this like the poses struck in Kabuki) handheld camerawork. For a film made in 1964 it still looks surprisingly fresh, maybe because it’s techniques have been mined by others.

Worth a rental.

二十四の瞳 dir: 木下恵介 1954

I saw this today on a Eureka Masters of Cinema DVD release. I quite liked it. I was interested in what film could beat Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in an Awards competition. However despite enjoying it I don’t think it has the classic quality of the former.

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Alex Chapin (MacGraw-Hill)

While waiting on a friend in a bookshop I wandered towards the languages section as usual. I found this reasonably priced little title from MacGraw-Hill. It effectively turns your iPod into a talking phrasebook. One less book to carry if you’re taking your iPod to Japan anyhow. (Although books don’t run out of power or break when you drop them).

The package consists of a CD with 1621 files on it, that’s 5.4 hours and 314.2MB of content, and a booklet of all the phrases and also some suggestions on using it. All the files are clearly recorded by a native speaker. They are broken down into sections using Artist and Album to make finding a phrase quite easy. The text of the phrase is in English and Romaji in it’s title and the Lyrics feature contains the entire section in English, romaji and kanji.

The way I tend to use a phrasebook is to check on something and refresh my memory before piling in to a language transaction like reserving tickets. I think this product would be as good as any print phrasebook for most uses.
For language learning I think it’ll help me expand my vocabulary a little and help give me phrases to instantly insert into my conversation attempts.

Well worth the £10 it costs.

I came across a new (for me) site today. Stage6 is high quality and less noise from people uploading phone clips.

They use the DivX codec to display video, so a full screen experience similar to DVD is possible. You will probably have to install the DivX components but it’s quick and available as a free download for MacOSX and Windows. The files can also be easily downloaded without the contortions you have to go through on YouTube. Searching and Tag filtering are also much better than YouTube.

For Japan otaku types there’s lots of stuff. jDrama, Anime, jPop, until of course it’s removed, but in the meantime enjoy and learn.

–update 28Feb08–
Since Feb28 2008 Stage6 is no more.
Between bandwidth costs, a fairly major hack and the dubious legality of most of the videos, I think the owners decided to call it a day. I expect that the above links no longer work.

I may end up deleting this post.

Judging by the title, A Day in the Life — University Student, this could be the first in a series of “Day in the Life” titles from JapanesePod101.
This is a slightly new departure for jPod101. Previously their method of raising revenue has been through subscriptions alone but recently they’ve opened a webstore and are now selling courses for a one off fee.

This 14Mb downloadable course consists of 8 MP3 audio tracks and an e-book of accompaning transcriptions, translations and notes. The audio is 28 minutes in total and is essentially a radio drama in Japanese. There are no explanations on the audio. All Japanese conversations all the time. The audio quality is excellent and the voices are quite clear. The main actor will be familiar to anyone going to JapanesePod101 on a regular basis. It’s Kuze Miki san of Miki’s blog fame. And Miki-san also wrote the script for this program.

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