日本のえいがをみました

わたしは　木よう日　と　登よう日に　日本のえいがをみました。　Kabei: our mother と　Tokyo Storyをみました。いい　えいがですよ！　There's a lot of people coming into houses or leaving houses, so I recognized many of the phrases we've been going over in class, such as, ごめん　ください、もう　いっぱい　いかがですか　and much more here and there. The highlight of watching these films was that in Kabei there is a scene where a professor is being interrogated by a former student of his (now a government prosecutor) and calls him X-くん (around 1 hour 09 minutes into the film)。 The prosecutor/former student gets very angry about the usage of -kun now that he is in an authority position over his sensei. The translation doesn't catch this at all. I was really glad that I was able to pick up that nuance!

Tokyo Story might be a little slow for most people, but it's a beautiful and touching movie which anyone from any modernized country can relate to (parents being ignored by their busy, now grown-up, children).

Kabei is a more dramatic film. It very subtly builds up your expectations that this will be a melodrama with a happy ending, then thwarts them with several scenes that look like typical happy ending moments at first, then turn out to be supremely devastating. Some people might criticize this film because it focuses on resistance to WWII in Japan and glides over some of the atrocities committed, similar to the way movies about the French resistance make it seem like everyone in France was cutting telephone lines and assassinating SS officers when in reality many were collaborating... Nonetheless, it is a touching film, especially for me, since it follows the plight of a radical scholar accused of being a communist/traitor and thrown into jail after he criticizes the war with China.