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The Eel Actors: Kôji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu Director: Shohei Imamura Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Pan & Scan Format: Color, Widescreen Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 117 minutes Studio: New Yorker Films Region Code: 1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2001-08-28 Buy from Amazon |
 "News At Eel Heaven"Stop now if you don't watch subtitled movies. That should get rid of the morons....Now, for the rest of you - rent this! It's too costly to buy now (June 2000), but worth a rent at Blockbuster if you liked Shall We Dance, Tampopo, A Taxing Woman, The Funeral, or any other rare splendid movie from Japan that Beat Takeshi did NOT make and star in.... Misa Shimizu plays two roles to the hilt, so to speak, and it represents the evil that men can do..... Otherwise, get a life, and find you own..... "a mesmerizing cinematic display"The Eel begins as a violent tale of sexual jealousy, then unfolds as a character study, and eventually a comedy. Koji Yakusho plays Takuro, a tranquil man who finds his wife in bed with another man. In a violent outrage, Takuro stabs his wife repeatedly, and then turns himself in to the police. Eight years pass during the credits, starting the movie with Takuro's parole from prison, and origins of his pet eel. Takuro retires to a village, where he encounters a woman whom resmbles his resemles wife. He eventually saves her from a suicide attempt; and from then on his character parrallels the characteristics of his eel. An excellent foreign movie, brimming with originality. also reccommended: Shall we dance?  "Sweet and low (key)"Welcome to Sawara, a small lakeside dormitory town a couple ofhours outside Tokyo. As nerdy local boys try to summon aliens with home-made crop circles, a quiet newcomer (Koji Yakusho) takes over the derelict local barber's shop. All he cares about is fishing, but when he saves the life of a local girl (Misa Shimizu) and offers her a job, everyone suspects they are having an affair. But he's a paroled wife-murderer. She's pregnant by her underworld ex-boyfriend (Tetsuo's Tomoroh Taguchi, in the role of a lothario loanshark). And his best friend is his pet eel. Imamura's first film since Black Rain is a gentle romantic comedy, where even the jokes are shy. The dashing Yakusho is charmingly miscast as ever in another emasculated salaryman role ... Even as a murderer, you can't help giving him the benefit of the doubt. As his would-be wife, Shimizu is a virtuous, hard-working girl-next-door who simply wants to find the way home. With madness in the family and a past she regrets, she's attempted suicide to `punish herself' for alleged misdeeds. This makes her a replacement for Yakusho's adulterous wife in more ways than one - not the least as a second chance. As he boats out on occasional fishing trips, it's she who fishes for him, dangling a packed lunch over the side of a bridge. The screenplay displays evidence of a script by committee, with the strong patterns and balances of Akira Yoshimura's original story `Glittering in the Dark' suffering mild wear and tear from three screenwriters. One wants an erotic thriller, another a comedy about fishing, still another a quirky romance. A couple of scenes recall the hallucinatory dreamscapes of Trainspotting, others the lazy pastorals of On Golden Pond. The basic plot, of a city boy finding happiness in the sticks, is occasionally ill-at-ease, with scenes of ... sex (hence the 18 certificate) and scenes of brutality towards women (and eels). Imamura holds these disparate elements together, but in doing so overstays his welcome with superfluous subplots. The considerate subtitling by Stuart J. Walton only suffers through the occasional annoyance of being printed white-on-white, and the dilemma of an ending that is only unambiguous if you know what a Japanese bridal gown looks like. It's a sweet film, and as revealingly `Japanese' as many others - but without the attachment of Imamura as director, it could have been made for television as Second Chances or The Eel Man & the Loan Shark, which might just have trimmed off the excess running time and left it just as charming.  "ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF 1999"When this foreign film came out in 1999, it got 4 stars from The San Francisco Chronicle. As a result, there were long lines at the UC Theater in Berkeley, which is where I saw this terrific movie! I don't know where to begin. The beginning of the film caught my eye and I knew that this was going to be great. All I remember is that the director shot a red street light from an interesting angle--very Bergmanesque. Everyone has already talked about what this film is about so I'm not going to repeat them. I will say this though--the characters were great: funny and perceptively drawn. After the main character is released from prison, he has no desire to go back to the City and instead chooses to live in a small village as a barber. All he wants is his own little space in the world. Is that asking for too much? Apparently it was because a woman throws a monkey wrench into his plans. This part of the film reminded me of the Ben Kingsley character in Turtle Diary (another excellent film!). I don't want to spoil the ending but there is a terrific scene in the barber shop that is totally hilarious. This part of the film reminded me of Tampopo and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. I can't wait for it to come out in DVD. |
