Kobayashi's "The Human Condition" @ Film Forum; Oshima series @ BAMcinematek; Mike Nichols survey @ NYC MOMA

Film Forum
"The Human Condition" (1959-1961)
April 8 -16

image c/o Reverseshot.com
"The Human Condition" will be presented in three parts, with a separate admission for each part (marathon screenings on Saturday, Sunday, and the final Thursday).

A.O. Scott, The New York Times:

"In keeping with the grandeur of its title, “The Human Condition,” adapted by Masaki Kobayashi from Jumpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, is anything but modest in scope and ambition. First released in Japan, in three parts, between 1959 and 1961, the film is a sprawling, crowded 10-hour epic of love, war, heroism and cruelty. Shot in a wide-screen format called Grandscope and set mainly in Manchuria during the Japanese occupation, it seems intent on leaving nothing out. Mountains, forest, marshlands; marriage, combat, hard labor; the call of duty and the obligations of conscience — that over-reaching title turns out to be a pretty fair description of what’s on screen.

But “The Human Condition” is also, and most memorably, an intimately scaled chronicle of individual experience. Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays its hero, an idealistic technocrat named Kaji, appears in nearly every frame, and it is his deeply personal anguish that provides an emotional anchor for this episodic, theme-heavy story. Mr. Nakadai, one of Japan’s great movie stars of the 1960s (and the subject of a fantastic retrospective at Film Forum that concludes with a three-week run of an immaculate new print of “The Human Condition”), looks a bit like a young Gregory Peck. And in this film he plays, as Peck often did, a liberal man of principle trying to uphold his ideals in difficult circumstances."

Click HERE for a synopsis of the film.

PART I: NO GREATER LOVE
(3 hours, 28 min., plus intermission)

PART II: ROAD TO ETERNITY
(3 hours, 3 min., plus intermission)

PART III: A SOLDIER’S PRAYER
(3 hours, 16 min., plus intermission)

Get tickets and showtimes HERE.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

BAMcinematek
The Cruel Stories of Nagisa Oshima
April 6 - 14

Violence at Noon (Hakuchu No Torima)
Sat, April 11 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
BAM Rose Cinemas

Double Suicide: Japanese Summer (Muri-Shinju: Nihon No Natsu)
Sun, April 12 at 2, 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
BAM Rose Cinemas

The Man Who Left His Will on Film (Tokyo-Sense Sengo Hiwa)
Mon, April 13 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
BAM Rose Cinemas

Gohatto (Taboo)
Tue, April 14 at 4:30, 6:50, 9:15pm
BAM Rose Cinemas

Tickets and showtimes HERE.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

New York Museum of Modern Art: Film Screenings
Mike Nichols retrospective
April 14 – May 1

To view a complete program and buy tickets, click HERE.

Carnal Knowledge
1971. USA. Mike Nichols. 98 min.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009, 7:00 p.m.
Sold out

The Graduate
1967. USA. Mike Nichols. 105 min.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009, 4:30 p.m.

Carnal Knowledge
1971. USA. Mike Nichols. 98 min.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009, 8:00 p.m.

Primary Colors
1998. USA. Mike Nichols. 143 min.
Thursday, April 16, 2009, 4:30 p.m.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1966. USA. Mike Nichols. 131 min.
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 2:00 p.m.

Mike Nichols in Conversation
Saturday, April 18, 2009, 8:00 p.m.

"Join Mike Nichols and a select group of his closest writing and acting collaborators for an intimate and informal conversation in celebration of his MoMA exhibition."

Working Girl
1988. USA. Mike Nichols. 113 min.
Saturday, April 25, 2009, 2:00 p.m.

Catch-22
1970. USA. Mike Nichols. 122 min.
Monday, April 27, 2009, 8:00 p.m.

"High and Low" remake in the works

Variety.com reports:

"Mike Nichols is set to direct a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s "High and Low" for Miramax Films.

Written by David Mamet and produced by Scott Rudin, the film hasn’t started casting. Martin Scorsese originally commissioned Mamet to write the screenplay back in 1999; it took two years for Rudin to pull the rights together. Scorsese likely will executive produce.

Kurosawa’s 1963 detective thriller starring Toshiro Mifune was based on the Ed McBain novel "King’s Ransom," about a businessman who is ruined when he honorably pays ransom to kidnappers who mistakenly nabbed his driver’s son."

"High and Low" is one of my favorite films of Kurosawa's and in general. I remember staggering out of the theatre after having seen this film and being unable to fully express its effect on me. How I got home that night is a blur, but I do remember writing about the film into the wee small hours that same evening. Unfortunately, my hard drive failed and I lost all of my documents. Otherwise, I'd inflict it on you.

Toshiro Mifune's performance in it is unlike those of his other films in which he plays characters who seem to have everybody's number down (the roving, opportunist samurai in Yojimbo, the Yakuza boss in Drunken Angel, the vengeful son-in-law in The Bad Sleep Well, etc). As iconic as Mifune has become to us, even his screen presence is overshadowed in the film by the constant reiteration of class disparities in post-war Japan and the poverty of the lower classes. High and Low anticipates the investigations of wealth, poverty and commodification in post-war Japan seen in the films of Shohei Imamura, Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Oshima. It's a cinematic masterpiece.

The people who have been assembled for this project reads like the movie industry equivalent of the Traveling Wilburys, but it doesn't neccessarily mean they can make a version better than Kurosawa's.