Absolutely Fantastic

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

In 1974, manga writer Ryohei Saigan created a comic called "San Chome no Yuhi" ("Sunset on Third Street"). The comic revolved around the day-to-day adventures in a Tokyo neighborhood in the period of 1955-1964. The manga is now one of the longest-running comics in Japan, and created an animated series and a trilogy of live-action films, of which this is the first film. The film works best as a period piece. No expense was spared to recreate the era of 1958 Japan. The people of Japan are most proud of that era: it was after World War 2, when they had been broken and defeated; like a slow-burning phoenix, with hard work, ambitious dreams and their own indomitable will, they rise up to stand tall and proud. The film is filled with this spirit: whatever tragedies they may suffer, they will never give up but keep pushing onwards, filled with the hope of things getting better. The story and acting is good and solid. The great appeal of this film are its universal and optimistic cast; these are characters you feel you know your whole life: the man of the house who works to feed his family, the kindhearted housewife, the smart but innocent children, and so many others. This film gives a little more detail and background to the whole cast, while the next two films has two main families to focus on (which rather takes away from the ensemble story).The only real flaw with this film is that it's too intimate and anthological for a motion picture: it works better in a serial format, like a comic or a TV show (which it already was). Also unless you have an interest/knowledge of Japanese culture, it's not really anything interesting (I myself came across this only because of the reputation of the manga it was based on). The film ends with a sunset on the residents of Third Street, which both signifies the end of an experience and the promise of a new day and new experiences. That is, pretty much, the core of a slice of life work: it's all in a day's work, compiling of both the usual and unusual, the magical and the mundane, but always a day full of incident and adventure.

this is the best film i've seen. it emotes and moves you. Idealistic and simplistic (how can you avoid them in a two-hour media) but still captures the essence of Tokyo pre-economic boom and Japan's march toward materialism. Hope, innocence, inter-dependence, both individually and societally, are wonderfully captured in this film. Acting for the roles of Ippei, Tomoe, Roku, and Junnosuke are superb. The background music is excellent. Memorable scenes: Ippei and friends flying airplane, Roku and Ippei meeting for the first time and exchanging greetings in Roku's Tohoku dialect, Ippei noticing Roku crying in her room the first night at the Suzuki's and Ippei asks, "What happened? Do you have a stomach-ache?" Ah, the innocence lost. Where have you gone?

I went from cautiously liking this film in the first 40 minutes to despising it in the last hour or so. The schmaltzy sentimentality accumulates and creeps up on you, until towards the end you feel overdosed on insincerity to the point of nausea. The emotion portrayed is utterly hollow and manipulative in its dishonesty. By apparently trying to copy/compete with Hollywood at its most disingenuous, this film surpasses the worst of Hollywood hypocrisy. There is plenty of style in the technical aspects of the film-making, but for all the "realistic" computer graphics recreating the city of Tokyo in 1958, no amount of vacuous slickness can give any honesty, reality or authenticity to the people and situations. The empty "rebirth symbolism" of the construction of the tower is an appropriate reflection of the empty film itself; is the film's soullessness symptomatic of the soullessness of the country's "rebirth" since the destruction of 60 years ago?

I understand that some people love such retro film. But I think this film not at all a good example of the genre.There are good films in this genre--"The Sting",for example. In good retro films authors don't rely upon the nostalgic atmosphere,which is different by nationalities and which can not at all be the main problem of filmmakers. Good retro films have original, well-composed interesting stories and good actors, who can keep silent or simply walk around with absolute authenticity of the roles. And of course, director of this genre must understand that retro films are stylized genre in the end, because naive admiration of the past may easily turn into a conservative, nationalistic political manifesto(Really the campaign for this film's domestic sales,including DVD release, gradually have got such nuance, saying "We are happy to have been born in Japan"!). Not one of these important points was kept in mind or resolved by the authors of this film.As a results,this film seems very naive. The story is banal, actors are too easily overacting,and the worst of all, there are plenty of CG images, without which good directors could have told the same story more effectively.