Days of Youth

Days of Youth (学生ロマンス 若き日) is a 1929 silent comedy by Yasujirō Ozu. The seven or eight films he directed before this are considered lost, making Student Romance: Days of Youth, as it's also called, his earliest surviving picture.

This playful story follows two university students (Ichirō Yūki and Tatsuo Saitō) who, during winter exams, take a skiing trip to Akakura and compete for the affection of the same girl (Junko Matsui). Although what we can see is now blotchy, faded, and uneven, the film fortunately still exists. Countless others from that era have decayed beyond restoration, burned up, or were destroyed many decades ago to make space for new ones.

The snippets of 1920s Tokyo were the highlights for me, along with the slapstick scenes on the slopes, featuring some rather nasty spoilsport gags. The film also includes a number of delightful shots of smokestacks, automobiles, telephone poles, and other technologies of the time. Throughout the narrative, there's a subtle undercurrent of transience, as suggested by the title. This reflects the distinctive form of mono no aware for which Ozu would come to be known by some critics and audiences.

Ambivalent Zen

An excellent, entertaining and, dare I say, enlightening memoir by Lawrence Shainberg that I've been meaning to read since it came out in 1995. Took me so long to get around to it because Zen and its philosophy—its contradictions, like "perfect imperfection," maybe, but not maybe, maybe—stuff like that, twist up my mind and confound way worse than this sentence likely does for you. Had I read the book when it came out, I would've long ago realized I'm not alone. Though while I've barely scratched the surface of Zen, Shainberg went in deep and in Ambivalent Zen recounts his spiritual pursuits over decades, his endless effort to sit zazen correctly, with the perfect posture, and his experience with the rōshi Kyudo Nakagawa, who led the Soho Zen Buddhist Society in Manhattan. He covers a lot of other ground as well, family relationships, the business of Zen, history of Buddhism... We see him balancing his frustrations and ambitions, and these colliding too, which Shainberg describes for us with a masterful mix of wit and wisdom. A great book to read again.

T-Men

T-Men, a 1948 film starring Dennis O’Keefe and directed by Anthony Mann, is a noir procedural singed with greed and paranoia. In the style of a documentary the film follows the activities of two treasury agents who go undercover to infiltrate a counterfeiting ring run by the mob. The prologue includes a curious warning not to reproduce U.S. currency, then comes a rather lengthy exposition as we get to know the agents, not just who they are but also who they'll pretend to be. Things pick up around the halfway point, with chairs thrown, ears boxed (both ears simultaneously no less), a mean uppercut, murder by Turkish bath steam, and so on. The tension builds to a satisfying end. As far as 40s cop thrillers go this one is great for its noir shots and has an extra layer or two of complexity. The plot held my attention, with its sharper edges compared to, say, Naked City (also released in 1948). Or maybe Naked City tried too hard to be some palatable mix of gritty and cute, while T-Men skips the silly ba-dum-ching one-liners and gets down to brass tacks. Doing this, T-Men is more realistic and feels more sure of itself somehow. Also interesting is its 1940s portrayal of the Italian mafia, and two of the film's baddies are girls!