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Good Morning (1959)
Runtime: 1 hr 33 mins
Synopsis: GOOD MORNING, a slightly revised remake of his earlier film, I WAS BORN, BUT..., is Yasujiro Ozu's subtle yet madcaped tale of the suburban Japanese family in crisis. The threat comes in the form of a television, demanded by two young brothers and refused by their traditional suburban father.... GOOD MORNING, a slightly revised remake of his earlier film, I WAS BORN, BUT..., is Yasujiro Ozu's subtle yet madcaped tale of the suburban Japanese family in crisis. The threat comes in the form of a television, demanded by two young brothers and refused by their traditional suburban father. Upon being told to "shut up" in response to their ardent requests for a television, the boys do just that, refusing to speak even the customary small talk of "good morning", so essential to the social structure of Japanese culture. As a neighborhood-wide quarrel results, small vignettes of other miniature crisis of Western culture versus Japanese tradition are played before the camera; an old man is unable to get a job and gets drunk, a grandmother faces her uncaring extended family, a woman is forced to move out of the neighborhood because her morals are in question, etc. These tragi-comic portraits combine to evoke a radiant sense of life and end by displaying the threatened suburbia as a vital society. The boy's refusal to speak catalyzes a sharp and succinct portrait of the importance of the "small talk" and other banal details of everyday life. [More]
Genre: Foreign Films
Starring: Chishu Ryu
Reviews
It's Ozu's simplest and most schematic film, a lighthearted comedy that is built around the motif of changing values from the old to the new.
Ozu's delicate, wry comedy of manners takes a sympathetic but not uncritical look at life and etiquette in a small 1950s Japanese village community.
This is all potentially interesting, to be sure, but the ideas are wrapped in a surprisingly innocuous package.
comparable in spirit to Fellini’s Amarcord with its love of character, humor, and relentless fart jokes
This is a much more complex, ambiguous, and challenging film that most reduce it to.
An amusing joke on everyday civilized formalities and the sometimes inane nature of human communication, especially within families and between neighbors.


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