"Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees"—the title looks like its going to be a lyrical, maybe even romantic Japanese trip. Well, in a sense, it is romantic and lyrical—but with that punch of peculiar dark humour only Japanese can brew.

It is difficult to talk about it without spoiling it, but lets just say the movie is beautiful, surprising and a little kinky. I will spare you the details. The overal theme is how love makes us crazy, and how far can a man go to please a woman.

The woman, in fact, is one of the most interesting characters ever.
On the surface she's sort of spoiled, but in fact that may be her adaptation to her misfortune. Was she a demon, or was she open to the situation and found a way to show her captor the essence of what he was already doing? Her chanting of some Buddha's praise while indulging in even more psychotic behavior than her new husband is bloody twisted.

How could I not know about this? — A follow-up to Rikyu, one of my favorite movies ever.

Again we have the forces of art (in this case the aesthetic ideal of wabi-sabi, sad contemplative beauty resting on openness and the profundity of peculiarity — the ephemeral revealing timelessness by contrast) against the lunacy of kitsch authoritarianism and politics.

Oribo, the new tea-ceremony master, is not quite as strong as Rikyu, yet he also seems to bother politicians. At one point he talks about the compulsion of making new things which drives him. Novelty and freshness can coexist with nostalgia, and "nostalgia is such a powerful thing"¹. It can open many doors, since we, again, learn to dwell in timelessness while appreciating whatever flower is offered to us.

Almost on par with its predecessor, which is to say a lot. (By the way, Criterion must make an edition of this one. The english subtitles I got are terrible).

...

After this eye-candy I went and watched another one from Teshigahara, "Antonio Gaudi", a mesmerizing japanese eye on the many wonderful things Gaudi gave us.

My computer was just downloading it at home while I listened to Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche recommending it on the ngondro teachings he was giving at Khadro Ling.

This is a particularly brilliant Kurosawa, which is to say a lot. Rinpoche called our attention for the "genuine heart of sadness" (Vidhyadhara Trungpa's coined term), as the main point of the contemplation on the four thoughts (precious human birth, impermanence, karma and the ocean of suffering—the external preliminaries). The japanese are maybe the main culture to manifest the dignity of mono no aware, lacrimae rerum², as an aesthetic principle, that is, sadness connected with basic dignity.

In the movie a bureaucrat discovers he wasted 30 years of his life when he finds out he has stomach cancer. He then tries learning to live in the few months he has left. As with many japanese masterpieces, the depression one could get from watching such a story is surprisingly replaced with "genuine heart of sadness" and even moments of laughter.

The funeral at the end—a masterpiece of unabashed melodrama—would make Darth Vader himself come to tears. So beautiful, so true; how blessed to watch it under the auspices of Rinpoche. He said, quoting Jigmed Lingpa (that is, himself), "remembering death is the wealth of the sublime beings", even to wish to always remember death is like desiring a different kind of wealth, sublime wealth.

Teshigahara's masterpiece remains Suna no Onna, The Woman in the Dunes, but this is not a far shorter accomplishment.

Rikyu is a tea ceremony master that teaches a ruthless and loud feudal lord. The whole movie is like a flower arrangement or tea ceremony, with all its fine details and vivid colour.

"Black Rain" by Shohei Imamura. This one is extraordinary, faultless. It is not your regular (idiosyncratic) Imamura, but a prostration to Ozu and japanese classical cinema. It begins so fast you feel just like you were there, just doing your business as usual when somebody dropped an atom bomb in your city. I had checked imdb a few days before watching, but didn't remember the date when I finally came to watch if, and this made the whole experience quite awesome to me since, due to the black and white and purely classical cinematography, this looked like a movie from the fifties — in fact it looked like it was made just after the bombings (the book was written the sixties, based on true stories). I became a little suspicious when bodies, destruction and the whole situation was so well done it looked just like a filmed document of Hiroshima's actual bombing. But since it was made in 1989, it made sense that there where no technical faults making difficult the suspension of disbelief ("Was it really like that?" Yes, you will believe it was really like that). The black and white was a clever choice since it looks and feel like the forties or fifties, and the stunning contrast helps making clear with the darkest undertones what maybe is the darkest situation humankind has ever dealt with.

But this is just the beginning. Then we have the real meat of the movie with a family drama on the Hibakusha. Not only had these fellows to deal with horrible immediate tragedy, and chronic and fatal disease in the next few years, but were also discriminated by society at large! The basic story is about a girl, beautiful Yoshiko Tanaka, whom nobody will marry because she may get ill and die anytime since fallout, in the form a large black rain drops, fell upon her.

This is a tearjerker, but only because you will cry, since it is not any bit sentimental, and japanese irony (and even humour — crazy japs!) permeates the whole thing with anger and subtleness.