Nishi Ginza Station

Part of my Japanese New Wave Top 200 The second film directed by Shôhei Imamura (and one of three films he made in 1958!) is a short and charming comedy, quickly forgotten after the end credits have rolled but enjoyable enough while it lasts. Imamura’s socio-political…

Daniel

Review In A Nutshell: Nishi Ginza Station opens and develops in a manner that recalls the 1955 feature from Billy Wilder, The Seven Year Itch, depicting the fragility of the modern day husband, bottling a great abundance of angst that have reached far its limit, spilling…

feedingbrett

A comical not-quite-fable about a salaryman's desire to paper over his feelings of Man in the Gray Flannel Suit alienation by having an affair and the hallucinatory circumstances that see his wildest dreams manifest. This doesn't really hang together even at its trim…

Jake Cole

Imamura's irreverence to taboo and classical filmmaking are applied to an overtly comedic narrative in Nishi Ginza Station. Jokes about castration and constipation are cleverly at odds with the film's intentionally naive design. The style sways from Chaplin-esque…

Zach A

An odd little movie. Not particularly amazing, but under an hour and quirky. Oyama (Shinichi Yanagisasa) is an aloof man with an overbearing wife. When she goes on vacation, Oyama’s womanizing friend (Ko Nishimura, giving the film’s best performance) encourages him to have…

Pachinko Pop

This is only the second film from Shohei Imamura and there is no indication that I noticed that would foretell his later experimental edgy films as part of the Japanese New Wave. Earlier he has assisted Ozu on a few of his films but I don't see much of that here either.…

BrianNaas

Generic comedy writing, blaming the boredom of middle-class monotony on women, and giving the alienated salaryman an out in daydreams about an imperialist fantasyland, complete with blackface 'natives,' that seems to comment obliquely on veterans' lived experience of WWII.…

Lencho of the Apes

Early Imamura. Uneven, out of control, but full of inventive touches.

Filipe Furtado

Surprisingly dull film from Imamura - post-war mess about identity; men returning from war not as patriarchal kings but kinda pathetic and castrated. There are dark undertones to this and it admirably focuses on the fact that it should be high time for men to adapt to the…

V. Lepistö