Maybe is the some many differences between cultures, but i just couldnt comprehend many situations in the movie or their conversations. Things that made the character laugh their a..es off was totally withouth sense to me and such. Anyone experienced the same?
shareno. i am not japanese, but somehow it was just clear to me.
shareWhat i mean is, some scenes where the characters were laughing theyre asses off, I saw no funny thing about it.
Or the sillu moment theyre all singing, and he sings back "madadayo", the cafe, when curious people starts getting in just to check out wahts the noise. Very silly to me.
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good to know.
shareI am agree with gabrielh-1. I felt a huge cultural barrier when watching this film. I just couldn't understand many times why so many laughs about things that IMO were trivial or not funny at all.
This didn't happen to me with other Kurosawa films (except maybe with "Rhapsody in August") or other japanese films.
BTW I am from Latin America.
When you're with friends, people you have known and loved for much of your life, and you're partying, celebrating, having fun, don't you laugh a lot at things that are not really very funny? And if a stranger came in and asked what you were laughing about, it would be hard to explain? I hope everybody has shared in this at some point.
Laughter doesn't have to be in response to jokes, pratfalls, punchlines; sometimes it's just about spending time together and being glad of your company. I don't think there's any cultural barrier at all, it could be happening in your country or mine, or anybody's. This is a film about love.
You do have a point about laughing with long-time friends, but I still feel that there were way too many "inside jokes". That doesn't make good cinema. Kurosawa should have pulled us into the group instead of leaving us wondering what they're laughing about.
I've seen all of Kurosawa's movies and this is the one I had by far the most problems understanding. The missed jokes are just one part of it, the entire move translates poorly.
There is such a heavy use of wordplays, which the subtitles (Criterion 25 dvd box) try to translate/explain, but it's simply impossible. I wonder why Kurosawa chose to use them so much, since he had an international audience for decades before the movie was made.
The many stories and songs also fall flat for non-Japanese viewers.
But the thing I had the most problem understanding was the relationship between the professor and his former students. I don't think anyone I went to university with maintained a friendship with a professor after graduation, or even had a close relationship while being a student.
It was never explained why they held him in such high regard. Sure, he makes jokes, but it doesn't really justify everything they go through to please him. Maybe it was a custom in Japan, but there's no way for me to know it.
Other than the parts that translated poorly to an international audience, the movie had other problems too. Many scenes dragged on way too long and some were completely unnecessary. I'll use the whole cat-segment as an example.
We only see the cat for a few seconds before it goes missing. By then we haven't developed a relationship to it, so it doesn't matter to us that it goes missing and we are left feeling that the professor is way over the top. Maybe it can be argued that we're meant to be put in his student's shoes, who didn't have a relationship to the cat either, but that fails since we don understand their relationship to the professor. At the end of that long segment he gets a new cat and it is as if nothing happened. It didn't help develop the characters in any way but only showed what the students are willing to go through for their professor. But not why.
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Oh you mad cuz I'm stylin on you
From the various anime I have watched over the years, it's pretty apparent that a *lot* of Japanese humor is derived from puns. So if you consider that this is a Japanese comedy/drama about a retired language professor, is it any surprise at all that much of the humor is lost on non-native speakers?
shareNot a surprise. But worth a complain in this forums I guess. :-)
share