Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [VHS]

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [VHS]
by Nagisa ?shima

Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [VHS]

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Actor: David Bowie, Jack Thompson, Ry?ichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano, Tom Conti
Director: Nagisa ?shima
Writer: Nagisa ?shima
Producer: Eiko Oshima
Producer: Geoffrey Nethercott
Producer: Jeremy Thomas
Producer: Joyce Herlihy
Writer: Laurens Van der Post
Writer: Paul Mayersberg
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language); Japanese (Original Language)
Format: Color, NTSC, Original recording reissued
Running Time: 124 minutes
Release Date: 1999-11-23
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Publisher: Live / Artisan
Studio: Live / Artisan

VHS Movie Reviews of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [VHS]

Movie Review: Awesome movie.
Summary: 5 Stars

I enjoyed this movie years ago on cable and now can enjoy it anytime I want.
Everyone in the movie and behind the scenes of this movie were awesome.

Movie Review: Prisoner of War Movie
Summary: 3 Stars

I watched this movie quite awhile ago, and while, it was interesting and sort of a different concept, I don't remember it exactly, as I watch quite a few movies. Before I purchased this, I reviewed it on IMDB and read the external reviews and users comments. I usually look for a movie that's moving, something that I shall remember and think about for a few days or every once in awhile you find a movie that changes your thinking or feeling. Of course, there are those special and rare movies, like 'Room At the Top', which has stayed with me forever. I am very moved almost every movie Tom Conti has done. After reading the reviews, it sounded like an unusual and different movie, which it was. I enjoyed hearing Tom Contoi speak Japanese and the whole concept of a prisoner of war camp was different for me to watch. I enjoyed it, and I recall parts being moving but after watching it, by the next day, it sort of left me. I think it was worthwhile seeing though. I had never seen Sting in a movie and he carried his weight.

Movie Review: An accurate presentation, within confines of an R rating
Summary: 4 Stars

This film presented in a fair manner the abhorrent mentality of the Japanese during the days of their Empire; depicting that reality on film would have required an X rating, because their treatment of non-Japanese humans was beyond atrocious. Things ended in August 1945 exactly as they should have.

Movie Review: Keeps on keeping on-curiously prophetic
Summary: 5 Stars

American critics took a lot of potshots at this film, since it doesn't have the usual Fascinating Fascism (a phrase of the late Susan Sontag's) of the war picture, in which the ego in the darkness can sit back and feel invincible. The leading character apart from David Bowie's daemon of righteousness, played by Tom Conti, makes womanish cries when he is beaten, and he gets beaten alot. He says, "I wish they would stop hitting me".

No Americans appear as does William Holden in the Kwai thing to make it all better by giving us a Winner with whom to identify. The English army mysteriously wins the war and presumably hands "Java" back to the Dutch, about which the less said the better (the Dutch were promptly ejected by the local folks).

But like most great works of art, this work is fecund in a way that the Philistine one to five stars types will never ever get.

It has strange relevance post 9-11. You see, the Japanese think it's womanish to obey the Geneva Convention. They are engaged in a death struggle for oil and other natural resources and so have created The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by nicking Hong Kong and Singapore from an embattled Britain and "Java" (Indonesia) from the luckless Dutch, who were overrun in Europe by the Germans.

The Japanese don't like prisoners and think them useless [...]. , rather like Jack Cellier's little brother who is tormented apparently at Harrow for knowing nothing except singing and gardening: a neat and quiet parallel is drawn between bullying, a problem then and now, and the international wrong.

A recent BBC production, "Horror in the East" historicises Japanese brutality in WWII. It wasn't, according at least to some historians, some sort of ancient racial characteristic and during the Meiji period of the 19th century Japan evolved to as civil a country as you could want.

However, in the 1920s, its leaders realized that their urban civilization was completely dependent on foreign oil supplies. The Republican idiots in the White House in the 1920s (Harding and Coolidge) neatly signalled exactly the wrong message to Japan, which was that America needed oil and for this reason Japan could go f**k itself, and Herbert Hoover was too preoccupied with the Depression to remedy this despite his greater skill at foreign policy.

This caused a collective madness in which mature and seasoned diplomats and military men were pushed aside by young officers who decided that Japan needed to conquer China, leave the British alliance without being able to form a new alliance with the USA, and in general roar off into Asia as a race of super men.

To cultivate the new Japanese man, a *Kulturkampf* was waged in the 1920s to return women to traditional roles and ensure that Japanese men didn't become effete cosmopolitan layabouts. The result was that Japanese conduct in WWII was completely different from its conduct in WWI, when Japanese treated their (primarily German) prisoners decently, or in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 in which the Japanese conformed to international standards in the treatment of their Russian POWs.

There are similarities to and differences from American history post 9-11. The threat of terrorism was added after 9-11 to the fear of running out of oil and a dialectical *kulturkampf* had been dialectically triggered by bimbo-feminist excesses of the 1980s. By 9-11 America was spoiling to make a fight out of an incident that was a police matter, and will never happen in the same way again, because airplane passengers would overpower any jerk with a boxcutter and toss him out the window.

9-11 was a Manchuria incident, a Reichstag fire, and thus a *casus belli* for an ambitious young careerist class that rather nihilistically make its mark upon history, in the manner of a boot stamping on a human face, owing to the brutalization of American culture by 20 years of conservative malarkey, malarkey in which 20% of Americans got rich and the remaining majority got poor, and were invited to ascribe this to their defective character.

The response to 9-11 has normed a new spirit of bullying, brutality and homophobia similarly to the toxic mix that existed in the late 1930s, and it's a job for the daemon saint to resist this as does Bowie when he saves the British commandant's life by deliberately shaming the Japanese commandant.

As such, the film is seriously hated by a lot of people. It's troubling in its implications. The ape in us wants to be on the side that's winning.

Yes, there is a rough and jagged parallel between Japanese prison camps of WWII and abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo. In both we see the coward's war against the feminine and against the threat to his comfort and pleasure. Although there is in this film a patriotic presumption that British soldiers are uniformly gentle, and soft spoken (apart from the drill sergeant and his lunatic commands on parade) and like as not to break into anthems, this presumption is well-earned by the typical British soldier,

Unfortunately, today this film could not be made as jingoism, Fundamentalism and malarkey return in phenomena such as America's foolish response to 9-11, the revival of the cult of military sacrifice in Japan, and, world-wide, a mad "return to my roots", roots that were long ago torn up and shredded.

Movie Review: All civilizations based on absolute subservience are dead
Summary: 5 Stars

This film was kind of cult when it came out. Because of David Bowie of course, but also because of the side of the Second World War it showed. In this case, the Japanese refused to apply Geneva conventions and forced onto their prisoners the code of conduct of the Samourai. The result is of course a great level of suffering, total disregard of death and dying, treating a hara-kiri execution as an honor, an honorable spectacle that any soldier should consider as a privilege to be able to watch ... For these Japanese soldiers it is a sign of a total lack of courage to accept to be the prisoners of those who defeated you. The only honorable course of action should be dying, and killing themselves in the last run. When Jack Celliers is captured, tried and sentenced to come to this prisoners' camp, he is bound to explode the whole situation because the commander of the camp, Captain Yonoi, thinks he is different and might be of the Samourai vein. In fact Celliers is a typical British officer: never yields, never accepts the unlawful rule of the enemy, resists and disturbs as long as he is alive in their hands. Yonoi decides a two day fast for everyone, prisoners included, Celliers will provide the prisoners with flowers for food. He will thus lead Yonoi to absolute mental breakdown and the final straw that will break the camel's back will be the double brotherly kiss Celliers will give him in front of everyone when condemned to die or nearly. Celliers revealed thus Yonoi was attracted, fascinated, hence in love even if only as a soldier with Celliers. So Celliers will die buried neck deep in sand and Yonoi will come and get a lock of his hair before he is dead. This lock will be brought in a locket and deposited in a shrine in Japan by Mr Lawrence, the interface between Yonoi and the prisoners, after the war and after Yonoi was executed. The film reveals thus the head-on and headlong confrontation of two military civilizations: the Samourais were obviously condemned by history, but also by life and war. They could not survive this clash. David Bowie is superb in his role and Sakamoto is just as perfect. Cult it is, but also somewhere sickening. How could such an old civilization as Japan come to such an end? We will forgive the film for the obvious fakeness of all violent acts.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

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Summary of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence [VHS]

A highly unusual war movie with as many detractors as fans, this English-language feature directed by Nagisa Oshima (In the Realm of the Senses) stars David Bowie as a silent, ethereal POW in a Japanese camp. Protesting--via his own enigmatic rebellion--the camp's brutal conditions and treatment of prisoners, Bowie's character earns the respect of the camp commandant (Ryuichi Sakamoto). While the two seem locked in an unspoken, spiritual understanding, another prisoner (Tom Conti) engages in a more conventional resistance against a monstrous sergeant (Takeshi). The film has a way of evoking as many questions as certainties, and it is not always easy to understand the internal logic of the characters' actions. But that's generally true of Oshima's movies, in which the power of certain relationships is almost hallucinatory in self-referential intensity. The cast is outstanding, and Bowie is particularly fascinating in his alien way. --Tom Keogh

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