567 The Makioka Sisters

[Jack Phillips]

But I agree on the cheesy score. It hit me while listening to the main theme that it was pretty much a direct rip-off of the pretentious score for this TV miniseries about another decaying, aristocratic family made two years earlier (which was wildly popular almost everywhere).

To me it sounds like a tacky re-purposing of a theme from Handel's Xerxes, but you may well be right.

[zedz]

I finally watched the Blu of this the other night, and enjoyed the film more than when I first saw it years ago. Ichikawa handles things pretty well, but he lapses into safe, well-upholstered filmmaking for much of the duration. This is unfortunate, because there are passages - especially that opening scene, which begins with a series of intense, frontal close-ups and only gradually relaxes into more conventional medium and establishing shots - where he's trying some interesting techniques, and one of Ichikawa's great strengths is his willingness to reinvent / rediscover his style from film to film, according to the demands of the material.

However, the film's great demerit - and it's a grievous one - is the atrocious score. It's really unbelievably bad and absolutely wrong, wrong, wrong at just about every moment, both in terms of its anachronism and in terms of complementing to tone of the scenes. It turns the film into an object lesson about how much damage one misconceived element can do to a film, and it simply amplifies other missteps that might otherwise have been easier to overlook (such as the calibration of some of the actors' emoting in the big dramatic scenes).

[Michael Kerpan]

zedz -- I have yet to tackle the Blu-Ray of Makioka Sisters -- and the noisome (Webster's 2b definition) score is a large part of the reason. The vacuous quality of large chunks of the film itself isn't as much of a problems -- as things usually look nice. There are SO many wonderful Ichikawa films -- it really is a shame that so few of them are available in any subbed format.