Arsaib
30Dec11
It's 'Hito shian' by the film's lead, a real-life pop singer.
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DT
30Apr12
Hou’s homage to Ozu is a harmonious blend of the two’s signature styles: the former’s slice-of-life naturalism with the latter’s warm humanism, the subsequent textures highlighting similar senses of spacing and time between the two. Likewise, the story features an archetypal Ozu fable transposed to the present, fused with Hou’s own recognisable plot devices. While the ensuing thematic strands fail to converge as lucidly as the film’s stylistic ones, the ambience of it all is just so lovely that such shortcomings become easy to excuse.
mirry
14Nov11
This is basically my kind of movie: simple and just about regular lives. I'd expected more from it and now that I've watched it I really wish it had focused more on Hajime's life (partly because I'm a huge Tadanobu Asano fan, but also because something about trains is so attractive to me). Overall a nice, calm film.
micah van hove likes this
Arsaib
27Sep11
Like many great texts, whether cinematic or otherwise, in which one major artist pays homage to another, Café Lumière informs us just as much about the architect of such an endeavor as the individual being acknowledged. Hou —who slyly incorporated a clip of Ozu's Late Spring in his remarkable Good Men, Good Women, also produced by Shochiku, a film that was similarly concerned with how the past does (and doesn't) have bearing on the present—largely deploys his own modernist formal and structural devices to discern a number of Ozu's thematic (the passing of time, the dissolution of the nuclear family) and visual (trains, laundry) motifs. A quiet, gracefully unassuming masterpiece.
Echydo
28Mar11
Dont try to look for a meaning, there is none (except maybe the train theme).This movie is pure slice of life. Watch only if you are in a really contemplative mood, otherwise you could be bored to death. I kinda see the Ozu homage, but except for the signature camera work, this movie doesn't have the wit, sharpness nor social awareness of Ozu's films.
Weaving Wave
31Oct10
А rare thing in cinema, a movie not about something (whatever it could be), but about how it goes by. And brilliant as an homage to Yasujiro Ozu.
Alvaro
18Apr09
Rarely have I seen a film containing such nuance and sense of solitude. In trying to make a homage for Ozu's work, Hou Hsiao-Hsien came out with something with a life of it's own. A silent testament of beauty that reflects the estrangement of modern Japanese society from their country, told in a most personal way.
Crap Monster
3Feb09
Generic in context to the rest of Hou's catalog but a nice work in its own right. Asano as always is quite memorable on screen.