Berlin 2010: Play it Again …! Series

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg in Breathless

As per The Hollywood Reporter, the Berlin International Film Festival will mark its 60th anniversary with the retrospective "Play it Again …!," featuring 40 films compiled by British film critic David Thomson from previous Berlin festivals.
Among them are Curzio Malaparte’s The Forbidden Christ, Alf Sjoberg’s Miss Julie, Akira Kurosawa’s To Live, Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum, Niels Arden Oplev’s We Shall Overcome, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia.
Also, Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, which caused a furor in 1976. German authorities — who probably had better things to do (weren’t the Baader Meinhof running [...]

THE BAD SLEEP WELL Review II

THE BAD SLEEP WELL Review: Part I
The saddest thing is that the corruption detailed in The Bad Sleep Well feels so minor league today that it seems almost childish when compared to Enron, Worldcom, and the many others in the years since. In a sense, Iwabuchi isn’t even the top criminal in the film. That title would belong to the corporation’s little-seen president, Arimura (Ken Mitsuda), who, later on, when things seem to be going against the corporation, sends over a vial of poison for Iwabuchi to do himself in. Watching The Bad Sleep Well, one can see exactly how the militarists that arose in the early twentieth century were so easily able to lead their country down the [...]

THE BAD SLEEP WELL d: Akira Kurosawa

Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Direction: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni
Cast: Toshiro Mifune, Takashi Shimura, Masayuki Mori, Kyôko Kagawa, Tatsuya Mihashi, Kô Nishimura, Takeshi Katô, Kamatari Fujiwara, Chishu Ryu, Ken Mitsuda
 

 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 black-and-white Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru / The Bad Sleep Well, is often compared to William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s an inapt comparison. While Shakespeare’s play has a higher sense of poetry, Kurosawa’s film — though a high-class melodrama — has far more relevance, realism, and complexity.
Written by Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto, Eijirô Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, and Hideo Oguni, The Bad Sleep Well’s Shakespearean pedigree and the fact that [...]