Protraph
Lack of good storyline.
LouHomey
From my favorite movies..
Stevecorp
Don't listen to the negative reviews
Huievest
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
Vonia
The Ballad of Narayama (Japanese: Narayama bushikô) (1983) (Not to be confused with the superior original version from 1958) Not my type of film, Cruel ubasute custom, Harsh graphic sex scenes, National Geographic, Cringed through significant film. http://all-that-is-interesting.com/ubasute/2 (Tanka (短歌 tan-kah) poems are unrhymed short poems that are five lines long, with the 5-7-5-7-7 syllable format. #Tanka #PoemReview
zetes
The film documents a feudal village in the distant past that lays below the mountain Narayama. By tradition, when people reach the age of 70, they are carried up the mountain by their oldest son and left their to die. Sumiko Sakamoto starts the film as a 69 year-old woman, and the film takes place over the final year of her life. The film ends with the aforementioned trek. The rest of it just shows how these people exist. There is a horrible threat of starvation for everyone there, and their entire lives revolve around it. Only the oldest child (Ken Ogata in Sakamoto's case) is allowed to marry and reproduce. The second child (Tonpei Hidari in the main family) only exists to help with farm work. Any other male children are generally left to die from exposure as infants. Girl children can be sold to salt merchants if a family so decides. I really like stories about societies that are forced to live in harsh conditions. This film is reminiscent of things like Man of Aran and Kaneto Shindo's The Island. It's quite a bit harsher than those, actually. Yet Imamura finds a deep humanity in these people, and he weaves a beautiful mosaic of how they exist within the natural world. The world of the film is so vivid that it really draws you in. Kinoshita previously made a film of the same novel in 1958 which I would love to see, but Imamura's version is pretty much a perfect movie.
kwindrum
I was a little surprised by a few of the negative comments below since I don't consider this film to be at all slow or dull. Many foreign and Asian films (Tsai Ming-Liang, Apitchatpong Weerasethakul, Hou Hsiao-Hsien for example)are far more grueling and slow whereas this film is loaded with narrative events, humor, eroticism (of various sorts, not all involving contact between humans and other humans)and a profound meditation on community, responsibility and mortality. If one finds this slow then I'd imagine most foreign films besides Amelie would be off-limits. I have rarely seen a film that forces one to confront such disturbing yet important subjects. In this village where scarcity forces all over 70 to be taken to Narayama mountain to die, a 69 year old woman who is still energetic and capable must settle her son's affairs before taking her final journey. Pondering how one would live in a place where for years one would know that at 70 this would happen is one key question. Further, what are the final things one must do before dying. Finally, the film makes us confront the literal truth of bodily decay and corruption in the scenes at Narayama Mountain.
flautist_englishdork
This is actually an extraordinarily beautiful film, if one has even the remotest understanding of Japanese culture around that time period. The harshness of life in Japan made the sort of society in which people went to "be with their loved-ones" and "be with the God of the Mountain" at age 70 completely necessary. The focus of the film is the struggle for survival, and more than that, prospering, in the harsh environment of c. XIX Tohoku. The exploration of this topic takes the viewer into a study of survival through strict rules, and prospering through sexual relationships. The scenes of sexual intercourse serve to portray that even in sexual situations, the Japanese as a people have never viewed nature and animals as separate from ourselves.
