Pacionsbo
Absolutely Fantastic
Intcatinfo
A Masterpiece!
Keeley Coleman
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
overdarklord
The movie is a great example of japanese war dramas and definitly worth watching.However, I think this movie could have been a bit better and I will use this movie to talk about 2 things it and many other movies do wrong in my opinion.
For one, the movie uses extensive crying scenes to convey to the audience that the characters are sad and that we should feel bad about them. The funny thing is that the movie has great drama. I mean its war time, people are being cencored, people are dying and everything has this very depressing tone already. Seeing your characters burst out in tears during normal conversations is in my opinion cheesy and nothing else.
It is basically the idea between showing the audience sadness directly and implying it and only making the audience feel sadness through the tone. The latter one being hard to achieve but when it hits, it hits hard. The first one feeling more easy and forced in my opinion and therefore can not convey the same emotion. Of course there are some great drama scenes with people screaming and crying heavily but everything has its place and time to make it believable and subtle.This movie has this great moment, when after the war the teacher was on a boat with her son and told him one of her former students wanted to row the boat for her as well and then she mentioned that he died. It was a great moment because it implies that not only that one boy but many of her students died during the war and since the audience knows them cares about their deaths, even if we dont know every of her student by name, the lose of the war is implied... but then a few minutes after that they show her infront of the graves of EVERY single lost student of hers, crying while showing their name. One of those 2 drama scenes is done right and the other is forced and cheesy.The second idea i want to talk about is when to end your movies. Its a compromise between delivering a finished package, framed with perfect edges, or having it a bit raw and unformed open for the imagination or even interpretation. You know making an ending that is open but not too open is very hard, but so is having it complete but not too drawn out. I myself like it more when things are unfinished and I have the longing for more, because I know if I had gotten more I would have wished it had been shorter.
Often times films dont know when to stop and miss the perfect opportunity, which I find very frustrating.
In "twenty-four eyes" you have this perfect scene at the end where the teacher is in her classroom again, seeing faces that look very similair to the children she tought 18 years ago (for one because they were to same actors, but storywise they were the children of her former students)
This was right after the drama scenes that hammered in the loss this war created. Now we have this scene that conveys this message of hope and familiarity. The idea that there is a future and not everything is lost. Basically the perfect way to end. ....Execpt it went on for like 15 minutes with a reuniting scenes with all the former students and the teacher. It felt to me like the movie really wanted to hammer home the anti-war message more and show the audience how much the characters lost, even though we know that already. As if I was a child who has to be told that for like half an hour in order to understand it. You know this anti-war message is nice and all but dragging on your movie because of it and ruining the perfect ending for it really doesnt seem like a good idea.It must seem like I hated the movie, but I really dont. I dont give 7 stars out to every movie I see, you can see that by my scoring system. But i get really frustated when a very, very good movie get torn down by such small things.
lasttimeisaw
A lyrical reflection on WWII, Japanese director Keisuke Kinoshita's magnum opus TWENTY-FOUR EYES is prominently, steeped in his humanistic take on the solemn state of affairs, entrusts a good- natured school teacher Hisako Oishi (Takamine) as the cynosure, and the title is a metonymy for the 12 first-grade pupils who grow up under her auspices through the turbulent years from 1928 to 1946 in a bucolic Shodo Island. In 1928, Hisako is the new teacher of the village school and in charge of 12 first-graders (7 girls and 5 boys), she wears a suit (instead of a kimono) and commutes by a bicycle, regarded as too modern in others' provincial eyes, but in fact it is nothing but being pragmatic. Radiating a cordial devotion to each of her pupils (a roll call sequence points up their strong bond which would sustain through the shifting sands of kismet), the young Hisako consolidates the mutual affections through folk songs and Kinoshita hammers home to viewers that those kids' innocent visages can soften any impervious hearts, which will become his stock-in-trade in the subsequent jeremiad.Incapacitated by a jejune prank, Hisako's condition means she cannot ride a bicycle when one of her tendons is broken, so she accepts to be transferred to a nearby school for older students and promises that they will reunite in 6th grade, the touching farewell scene hits the mark of poignancy after a preceding snippet where the 12 tots play truant to visit Hisako in her home on foot. Then the time-line swiftly jumps to 5 years later, in 1933, a remarkable feat should be credited to the casting director, who has gathered the group of 12 six-graders possessing a stunning resemblance of their younger archetypes. Hisako gets married, while the teacher-student dyad becomes ever closer, extrinsic forces begin to assail the individuals: one girl must take on the duty of rearing up her new-born baby sister after her mother passed away, and a double whammy befalls when the said baby also dies, instead of returning her to the school, her father decides to send her away to work as a waitress in a restaurant; similarly another girl unwillingly withdraws from the class when it is her turn to assume the role as the family cook; for boys, that is another story, indoctrinated by the ultra-nationalism all the rage, they are hot to trot to volunteer as soldiers to Hisako's utter dismay, who resolutely values human lives more than any ideological fanaticism, after the school principal reprimands her for her "coward" and dangerous thoughts, a disillusioned Hisako also parts company with her lofty vocation. A fast forward to 1941, pupils grows up into adults, to whom Hisako stills holds very dear, and herself is a mother of three. The ongoing WWII conscripts all the militia, a harrowing tête-à-tête with a tuberculosis-inflicted former student tellingly conveys a pandemic hardship and dread hovering above each household. Personal tragedies will strike Hisako one after another, but those who survives must go on with their lives. Another five years go by, in 1946, after the damning war fizzles out, Hisako resumes her job and tearfully finds out among her new pupils there are offspring of her endearing first first-graders. A celebration organized by the remaining 14-eyes, including a pair of blind ones, brings them altogether, there will be tears, fond reminiscences, but also signifies a brighter future ahead, no doubt Kinoshita is a maestro of emotional manipulation but he has notch it up without betraying any trace of affectation, and the film's ultimate confluence really packs a punch to our tear gland. Also, sterling children performances are cogently elicited through Kinoshita's orchestration, sometimes to a fault of immoderation (with a combo of watery eyes and plaintive dirges), but as a whole, it is a pretty amazing achievement; in the central stage, Hideko Takamine superbly sinks her teeth into a character laden with a gaping age range, and her personable charm and sincere timber thrust an irresistible impact to our likings. Typically shot at a remove with a ritualistic respect to its characters and milieu, and forfeits any idea of employing front-line bombardments to mess with our sensorium, TWENTY-FOUR EYES is a potent tearjerker illumining with a sagacious anti-war message, but also an ode to the unflagging strength inside an ordinary woman, the very rudimentary but foremost essence that makes us a decent human being.
lyrast
Before I watched 24 Ey"es, I prepared myself for what I thought would be a Japanese version of Goodbye, Mr Chips" {a film I have never really enjoyed despite my appreciation of Robert Donat}. What I experienced was something much more realistic and emotionally moving. Rather than being a sentimental tale of the dedicated teacher earning the life-long love of her pupils, it is the greater and deeper saga of a loving woman who happens to be a teacher and who is also a moral mentor for those who need her devotion, guidance, example, courage and love during the lean, desperate, and sometimes frightening years during which she works. That time context is the difficult period beginning with the Depression and including the terrible years of the Second World War.Naturally a human focus is necessary because of the large time span covered in the film and the director chooses the twelve pupils who are part of Oishi's first experiences and with whom she relates at various times through her life. Kinoshita skilfully manages the contrast between the time and the person throughout the film. Everyone has the right to their own opinions which must be respected, but I can only disagree with the viewer who criticised the film as "unshaded and unshaped to the point of tedium". Yes, the film is long. But every incident has a function and the totality is far from "unshaped". Likewise the criticism that the heroine was well named as "Miss Cry Baby" by her students is unfair. I think that this perspective simply misses the fact that the cultural restrictions of the time {which included a major war} were such as made any proactive assault on social attitudes completely impossible.So this film is not at all sentimental in the Mr Chips mode. Miss Oishi has accidents, deals with the problems of unsympathetic and intractable parents, is regarded as possibly being a "Red", and has to watch her clearly well-meaning principal burn a book of literary works by students because they are not politically correct. She leaves teaching for a period, in part out of disillusionment and in part to raise her own family, allowing us to see another dimension to her character.The original twelve students continue to impact in various ways throughout her life, forming a rhythm and pattern which not only brings happiness and sorrow, but helps to inform her vision of life with its stoical, courageous strength—a strength she imparts to them in return.It is quite a beautiful film and the DVD has as an extra a superb interview with the Japanese film historian, Tadao Sato which is revelatory and sensitive. He mentions that when the children grew older, look-alike siblings were chosen by Kinoshita to play the roles! He explains a great deal about the cultural, political, and social contexts which make this film so effective and have made it a cinematic icon for the Japanese people.
cervus35
Those who like the movie Twenty-Four Eyes might enjoy the novel of the same title from which it was made. I found Sakae Tsuboi's 1952 novel in a used-book store some years ago and just got around to reading it. Its style is plain and unadorned. It is not at all sentimental. Bad things happen to good people and most victims (except the heroine) tolerate their bad treatment or bad luck. The novel's schoolteacher-heroine suffers from popular disapproval when she makes a few pacifist remarks during wartime. In the same way, Setsuko Hara was ostracized and punished in Kurosawa's "No Regrets for our Youth." This book illuminated Kurosawa's movie for me.Without lecturing, the author recreates the general population's obedience to the military government. The popularity of the novel and the movie in Japan imply that this was the kind of catharsis needed by a people who had over-reached, committed serious crimes, and suffered horribly on their way to military defeat.The novel has the odd trait (to this reader) of passing over many important moments in the lives of the teacher and the children without showing them. The book does not show Miss Oishi's resignation from her job in protest against the war, nor her marriage, nor the birth and upbringing of her own children. It refers to these only later, though they are important in her life.Unfortunately it has been a decade since I saw the film. I remember thinking it was quite weepy and 30 minutes too long, like most Japanese films. Except for Ozu's masterpieces, which are exactly the right length, as everything else about them is exactly right. Excuse the digression.The English title of the book is also Twenty-Four Eyes. It was translated by Akira Miura and published by Kenkyusha in Japan in 1957. There was a third printing in 1960 (the copy I have), so the book must have sold well in English, in addition to its huge popularity in Japan. I doubt it's still in print, but book-search web sites might offer it. There's no ISBN.
