Zangiku Monogatari (The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums), Kenji Mizoguchi, 1939
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher, 2011
Images of the day, 4/23/12
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Took me ages to recall what the connection was between these images…
Lil help? I haven’t seen CHRYSANTHEMUM in ages so the connection isn’t apparent to me.
Might it be the man’s reflection in the mirror, along with the television monitor that’s mirroring Blomkvist?
Totally off topic, Glenn, but I thought you might be interested to learn that Lena Dunham seems to have come around on James Mason, as a man, if not an actor. She recently tweeted this: “…I’ve been regularly dreaming about sex with James Mason. Like, in his later years. I have no idea what interests me.”
Maybe now she’ll give BIGGER THAN LIFE a second chance.
I prefer the original Roueché article to Ray’s film, but don’t want to have sex with Christopher Olsen. Or somesuch.
@ Marc Basque: It’s that, to a certain extent, and also the way both directors place multiple frames within the frame…
@ J. Bryant: I missed that tweet, even though I follow Ms. Dunham. How interesting.
I remember reading a short front-of-the-book Q&A with Mason in Playboy in the late ’70s, and he was being asked about what kind of music he liked, and he went on at some length extolling the virtues of what he called “country and western” music. Aside from blowing my chauvinist punk-rock mind, it also struck me as decidedly un-Humbertish. It was around that time that I began to intuit that performers could in fact be quite a bit different from their personas and/or what we project on them. At any rate, I never wanted to have sex with him after that, myself.
And here I was thinking that putting frames with frames was Ozu’s racket…
I’ve only ever seen ZANGIKU MONOGATARI on muddy 16mm prints, but that image looks incredibly pristine- was it lifted from a DVD, by any chance?
Glenn: For me, it’s relative. If Mason was extolling Johnny Cash and Hank Williams père, I’d give him a pass. If it was Kenny Rogers and Marie Osmond, maybe not.
I’ve been thinking about Dunham’s tweet, and now I’m wondering what she meant by “in his later years.” Like THE VERDICT? Yikes. Of course, to someone her age, Mason probably seems ancient in ODD MAN OUT.
Does anyone else think that mirror in the first still looks like an iMac monitor?
Mizoguchi did at least make use of an eerie electronic score for his swansong, ‘Street of Shame’.
You mean 3/23/12
No, the date is correct, I just put it up early.
I love that scene from Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. He lights the cigarette, throws the pack in the trash, smokes, likes it, and then glances back at the pack that he just threw in the trash.