The Movie: Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning came recommended to me from a friend some time ago. It was just recently that I'd received it from Netflix (I've been so busy I hadn't watched any Netflix DVDs for MONTHS!). I'm not exactly sure that I can say that I liked the movie, but I can say that I definitely loved certain things about the movie and what it was about.

In 1959 while Americans were busy censoring everything to make sure it wouln't be polluting our society, Yasujiro Ozu was making this movie which I'm pretty sure no American company would have been able to make at the same time. Why? Well a large part of the story is centered around these four kids who play fart games similar to "pull my finger" as they walk to school. There's a lot of farting going on in this movie, and I love that it has that sort of openness.

The film is I guess a commentary on communication and how polite society's small talk is hurting our community. The four boys play fart games. Their parents do a whole hell of a lot of gossipping... resulting in a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunication. Two of the kids take a vow of silence until their parents buy a TV for them. More communication blockages have near-fatal consequences. And so on and so forth.

The film to me seemed to drag on a bit, but it really did make a good social commentary. The cinematography was buitiful in its rigidity, mirroring the cramped world of a burgeoning Tokyo. Some of the shots had really amazing compositions, though the way the characters looked almost directly into the camera during dialog scenes was a bit disconcerting for me, haha.

And although there is a lot of over the top comedy, I really did feel like I came away with a taste of what life must have been like in the late 50's in Japan. Overall I'd say this film was very interesting... and leave it at that, haha.

The DVD: The video transfer was as clean as could possibly be -- in a few spots you could see where the DVD transfer had to be made from an inferior quality negative, but you have to expect stuff like that when it comes to older movies. The transfer was otherwise very clean and vibrant... almost too vibrant, but I imagine that the original film probably did actually look like that.

Sound quality was not the greatest, but the DVD faithfully reproduced all of the imperfections of the inferior recording technology of the time, haha. There are no special features to speak of on this disc. Except color bars. Oooh, color bars.