Shinji Somai

[thethinwhiteduke]

feihong -- I have it somewhere but finding it could be tough. My recollection is also that it looked bad -- much worse than Ohikkoshi (of similar vintage). So any new release has to be a big upgrade, I guess.

I think the rights-holder that would have supplied this to them is Odessa, who released the Japanese blu ray and provided the source for the Wowow TV broadcast. And yet, I saw film grain on the 4k restoration when I watched it theatrically––the screening did look bright like on the Third Window disc––and at times I wondered if the image looked too bright (I should say that P.P. Rider, which I saw later in the day, never sparked such questions––it looked absolutely great). But I didn't see the edge-sharpening or the flattening and grain reduction in the theatrical version.

Odessa is a home video distributor, not the rights holder of the film/supplier of materials for Typhoon. The Third Window blu ray is sourced from the same 4K master that Cinema Guild is distributing for theatrical.

[feihong]

Odessa is a home video distributor, not the rights holder of the film/supplier of materials for Typhoon. The Third Window blu ray is sourced from the same 4K master that Cinema Guild is distributing for theatrical.

So was all of this image manipulation done after Third Window received the 4k master? The film I saw in the theater did not look like it did on the Third Window disc.

[feihong]

Gonna share some screencaps here from the Tokyo Heaven blu ray released by Bandai Visual. Either this or Luminous Woman has to be the best Japanese blu ray transfer of a Somai film so far? There's visible film grain––though the grain looks a little different in different scenes. Sometimes it's a bit softer than in other scenes, but in general, when I saw this disc I jumped for joy.



Riho Makise is so intense in this movie. She's supreme when creating the feeling that her character is hiding her discomfort, anger, pain, or love. So great.













These last two are effects shots, and those shots tend to look softer.

[feihong]

A few more shots from Tokyo Heaven...

[feihong]

[feihong]

[feihong]

A much better composite shot late in the film, which looks a lot sharper...









Some really crisp motion shots––in that the motion blur is in the film, not in artifacts on the disc––you can see the grain structure is intact on these images. The first shot is so crisp there isn't even much blurring.

[thethinwhiteduke]

Odessa is a home video distributor, not the rights holder of the film/supplier of materials for Typhoon. The Third Window blu ray is sourced from the same 4K master that Cinema Guild is distributing for theatrical.

So was all of this image manipulation done after Third Window received the 4k master? The film I saw in the theater did not look like it did on the Third Window disc.

It's not image manipulation. My first post was delayed in approval (it's now showing up in page 8), but here's what I said:
"This seems to be a question of the disc authoring process, and its ability to retain detail and grain while also compressing the film to fit on a disc. This is all to say, it's not a poor restoration, or that Third Window DNR'd and denoised the master, but that the encode on the blu-ray simply wasn't the best, which happens quite often. The film itself doesn't have as heavy grain like the Odessa transfer might suggest, it's much finer and that can be difficult to retain when taking a 4K master that is 1TB in size and squeezing it into a 30 GB file"

In response to the above posted stills from Tokyo Heaven, the transfer is likely more an HD master but not a full-fledged restoration. It definitely looks weaker in medium and long shots, but is stronger than than most Somai blu ray releases (Luminous Woman is likely the strongest).

[AxeYou]

This seems to be a question of the disc authoring process, and its ability to retain detail and grain while also compressing the film to fit on a disc. This is all to say, it's not a poor restoration, or that Third Window DNR'd and denoised the master, but that the encode on the blu-ray simply wasn't the best, which happens quite often. The film itself doesn't have as heavy grain like the Odessa transfer might suggest, it's much finer and that can be difficult to retain when taking a 4K master that is 1TB in size and squeezing it into a 30 GB file

This cap feihong posted above really looks more like DNR than weak compression to me though. I don't think even YouTube-level compression would produce such a waxy effect. (To be fair, the encode appears to be weak as well.)

[feihong]

This seems to be a question of the disc authoring process, and its ability to retain detail and grain while also compressing the film to fit on a disc. This is all to say, it's not a poor restoration, or that Third Window DNR'd and denoised the master, but that the encode on the blu-ray simply wasn't the best, which happens quite often. The film itself doesn't have as heavy grain like the Odessa transfer might suggest, it's much finer and that can be difficult to retain when taking a 4K master that is 1TB in size and squeezing it into a 30 GB file

This cap feihong posted above really looks more like DNR than weak compression to me though. I don't think even YouTube-level compression would produce such a waxy effect. (To be fair, the encode appears to be weak as well.)

No expert on how discs are authored, I was struggling to articulate something like this, but I think AxeYou gets to my own doubt at this suggestion that some sort of bad encode is the principal reason the Third Window disc looks so bad. thethinwhiteduke, you say this happens often; is there an example I can look at? In still image editing compressing a photo wouldn't result in sharp edges and flattened color shapes–-though I'm aware that different codecs compress the images differently.

Incidentally, I had another look at the wowow TV broadcast version of Typhoon Club. It's color and grain matches the Odessa bluray very closely, except that the image on the TV broadcast is less dark. It's possible to see figures in the background during the first scene, for instance, when the girls climb over the fence into the swimming pool. It's nowhere near as clear as in the restoration, but I guess I was surprised that the bluray would be darker than the TV broadcast.

[feihong]

I've screencapped some of the other Somai blurays from Japan, and I can see that, as thethinwhiteduke says, Luminous Woman looks the best. Before posting those caps, though, I wanted to get my caps posted for Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow, just because it's maybe the least-known of Somai's movies, and might get a bit eclipsed by the wilder-looking Luminous Woman, with the better-looking bluray transfer. Lost Chapter came out in Somai's banner year, 1985, after Typhoon Club and Love Hotel. There's a two-year gap after that, presumably for filming Luminous Woman. Like a number of other Somai movies (Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun, The Catch, this film, and Luminous Woman), it's written by Yozo Tanaka, member of Seijun Suzuki's Guryu Hachiro writing team and credited author on all of Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy (also the writer of a lot of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno films, including Wife to be Sacrificed). It's also an early film vehicle for pop singer and star of the Sukeban Deka TV show, Yuki Saito. She is an odd actress, not as ready-for-camera as Hiroko Yakushimaru in Sailor Suit Schoolgirl and The Terrible Couple, not as artistically successful at creating verisimilitude as the actresses in Typhoon Club. She seems very unaware of where the light is falling upon her, of where the camera is––yet at the same time a kind of self-consciousness in her frequently makes Somai's long takes feel unusually awkward. But she nevertheless succeeds in conveying a real depth of emotion––her specialty at the time is a sense of sincerity, in the face of the surreal situations that Sukeban Deka called for, and she uses that sincerity to real effect in this strange, raw murder-mystery/fairy-tale, about a Cinderella-like little girl named Natsuki, rescued from an abusive family by a young employee of their company and his friend. She's raised by this young company man, and she falls in love with him, though he is engaged to another woman. When her abusive stepsister invites her to just about the weirdest birthday party ever put to film, and she suddenly dies in the midst of her party (after an insane interpretive dance), Natsuki is drawn in as the main suspect of the crime.

I didn't much like this film when I first saw it. It begins with its most famous element, a 13-or-so-minute extended take, which binds up all of Natsuki's early life into a kind of surreal swirl of scenes filled with garishly fake snow. I wasn't very convinced by this when I first saw the film, and I thought the whole picture lacked a vividness I'd associate with Somai's most successful movies. As I've gotten older and watched the film a number of times, I've come to like it as much as any of Somai's best movies. It has an unusual emotional flavor to it, a kind of melancholy for an abandoned girl, with a black hole for a future (the film lives in a kind of suburban Japan with a touch of old-fashion-ness about it, in which we understand Natsuki's estrangement from her family as limiting her future opportunities), yearning for the attention of her ad-hoc guardian for love, but also desperately hurting for her improvised place in the world to be something a little less tenuous than it is. Right away, Natsuki has an idea of who the murderer is––either her adoptive father or his best friend––one of these guys would be her lover, another her protector, but it's hard to tell which would be which for a lot of the runtime. Thus pursuing the case means Natsuki may lose one of the two people closest to her––and yet, if she can't offer the police another suspect, they are busy fitting her for the rap. The central role of Natsuki is exceptionally good for Saito, who sometimes seems like a dreamer, drifting through an unending nightmare. I've come to find this melodrama of a potentially forgotten young girl very moving. The stylish Somai flourishes are kept to a pretty low ebb, but there are a few shots where Saito is mounted on a dolly, or oblivious to clowns trundling by on stilts, or riding in what seems to be an invisible plane––some of this is pure Somai style, but the clowns especially seem like a touch provided by Yozo Tanaka, if I had to guess. Natsuki appears to be thickly ensconced in a chauvinist world, but the film is enlivened with its resolute focus upon her. None of the things Natsuki does are treated as frivolous; her emotional needs are the backdrop from which the film springs, and the film always privileges her viewpoint on any given situation––making the film more an observation of a sexist milieu than a chauvinist film. Yuki Saito's earnest, vulnerable presence is the lynchpin by which any part of the film works––probably the ultra-long-take setup for the film is less impressive simply because it doesn't feature Saito herself––the scene immediately afterwards, where she is leaning backwards on the back of a motorbike, with a ridiculous garland of flowers, singing and shouting with joy to see Yuichi, her guardian returning is immediately charged with Saito's energy––the energy which sustains the rest of the picture.

Lost Chapter had spotty home-video representation. Between the VHS released in 1986 and the DVD/Bluray releases in 2021, there had been nothing, so far as I can see. So the bluray was a big step up in quality from the greymarket versions which were originally fansubbed. That said, the disc isn't great, and it isn't great in this infuriating way. The film clearly has some issue which is softening the grain and dulling the colors. But there's a trailer for the film on the disc as well, which doesn't have any of these deficiencies. The trailer has saturated color and the grain is much clearer. I'll share some comparisons here. Not all the shots will be direct comparisons, however––a lot of the footage in the trailer seems to come from alternate takes of the scenes, and in some cases entirely different versions of scenes, or scenes which don't appear in the final edit of the film. But in these cases, you'll see footage which was clearly shot at the same time, just at a slightly different angle, or something to that effect. I'll mention them when they come up:

Comparison:

Even just on the logo you can see considerable differences. There's sharper grain on the trailer, more saturate color, and we can see a little more image, as if the master on the full movie was zoomed in a little more. This will be constant throughout the movie. There's also a noticeable green bias on the full movie which is evident even in the logo. I think the fact that it appears in the logo suggests that it's part of the color of the transfer, rather than any kind of color-correction the filmmakers wanted for the movie. That, combined with the low-contrast palette makes the feature film look just a bit off on the disc, all the time.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




On my TV the difference between these different versions of the shot are quite pronounced. The depth-of-field on the trailer version is significantly enhanced by the added sharpness of the grain. The image looks alive with depth, and rich with color. On the full movie it looks washed-out and, worst of all, very flat. Looking at the two of these, I know the film wasn't meant to look like the full movie does on this disc, and it's maddening to think it could have looked at least like the trailer does.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Here, a different take is used in the final film. In the trailer, the framing is further back, much more stable (the full film uses a shot which begins tracked and zoomed in on Natsuki's face, and then pulls back into the less-wide wide shot. We also never see the movement Saito is doing in the trailer in the finished film. But the differences between the trailer and the feature are still easy to see. The grain is softer on the feature, making the depth-of-field flatter and making it harder to visually separate objects. The color and contrast are lower-key on the feature, making the scene far less vivid. The green bias also flattens out the riotously vivid color of the flowers in Natsuki's garland. Of course, the feature and the trailer come from different transfers of different elements. But I think the trailer gives us a good idea of what more we could be getting from the film, had the transfer on the disc been handled better.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




The full film, as it appears on the disc, looks much better in closeup and much softer and more swimmy in wide shots––I guess this is, as thethinwhiteduke suggests about Tokyo Heaven, an older transfer of the film? The effect when watching the two different versions on my TV is that the trailer has much more pleasing depth-of-field and more real-seeming color than the full movie does. The disc has not turned out looking as good as the Tokyo Heaven disc does. But the trailer has, as you can see in this shot, pops and scratches on it––and the full movie doesn't. Of course, with the reduced sharpness, it would be harder to tell if they were there, anyway.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Same scene in these caps, but taken from different angles. The scene as it plays in the final film is a single-take from this frontways angle, never cutting away to the closeup from the trailer.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Here Somai has clearly shot the scene from one angle, and another 180 degrees opposite. In Tom Mes' commentary on the Third Window disc of Typhoon Club, he says Somai preferred to use versions of a scene with the best energy from the actors, and would put up with almost any visual imperfection in pursuit of good performances. Here, he sacrifices a beautiful scene of the sea for a shot with only a boathouse background.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Just analyzing the differences between the trailer and the finished film provides a lot of insight into the kind of decisions Somai made on-set. The scene in the trailer with Natsuki and the detective sitting on the floor of a house is substituted in the final film for this much more unorthodox staging, where Natsuki walks down the road and the detective is waiting for her, sitting atop a fence. I would say the two scenes might have existed side-by-side in the script, with Somai cutting the one where the characters moved indoors, except that the scene as it exists in the finished picture feels extraordinarily complete, beginning with the characters meeting and ending with them departing one another's company.

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Again, Somai uses a different take from the one in the trailer. I tried to get as much of the same background, and of the same expression from the actor, but you can at least see how dull the full version of the film looks in comparison to the lively color and light visible in the trailer:

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Unfortunately, no direct comparison here, either, since Somai uses different takes of the scene, with different camera positions. Still, the brightness and sharpness of the trailer makes the full film look anemic:

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




In the night shots, the trailer footage really shines, and the full movie wanes. Unfortunately, the movie has a preponderance of night shots:

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




One of the film's signature scenes, with Natsuki walking a tightrope between the sidewalk and the curb. The take used in the trailer is from a lower angle, with more of the street background visible in the background. To my eyes, the depth-of-field in the full movie is flattened considerably with the softer grain:

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE




Here's an interesting one, where the trailer utilizes this beautiful–looking scene of the main characters in this hazy shower together (the film is full of this kind of imagery, of people deluged with water). This scene doesn't appear in the finished film, But I've included screenshots from the two scenes I think this one sat between. Natsuki gets released from the police station, then in the finished film is walking down these steps with her guardian. The scene from the trailer makes it seem like she's persuading her guardian that they should walk instead of taking a cab home––leading to the next scene, where they walk through a park in the pouring rain:

TRAILER



FULL MOVIE






These last two are just really pretty shots which appear in the trailer and that appear nowhere in the final film. The one of Natsuki looking at her reflection in the window I think must follow the scene where she gets on the train. I looked everywhere in the finished film for that closeup of Natsuki's guardian, Yuichi. Not only does it not appear, he never appears in the film wearing that costume. The film is very consistent about time sequence––you can follow the sequence by following the costume changes throughout. He just doesn't wear this ensemble, so I'm guessing this scene was entirely excised as well.






One last funny thing about the trailer: it closes with these end cards, advertising what I presume is a double-bill with Nobuhiko Obayashi's Four Sisters. These two pictures would make an interesting pairing: both pretty, both artfully-made, but otherwise they couldn't be more different from one another. Somai's picture feels subtle and sensitive next to the brickbat melodramatics of Four Sisters––all people dying of cancer and stuff. Very over-obvious by comparison, again underlining Somai's sophistication and his deft hand.




Next post I'll share a few more screencaps from the full movie, just because I think few people even here have seen the film.

[feihong]

Here's some more screencaps from the Toho bluray for Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow, starting with a couple from the full-mag extended take from the beginning.

Without sharper grain, the snow that is everywhere in both background and foreground in the shot looks just terrible––sometimes without definition when it gets close to camera––and the darker look to the feature as it appears on the disc means that this scene, which seems to fill a whole soundstage, and which sometimes has very diffuse pools of light available, ends up much mushier than I think would even be required:





Then here are some more shots from the rest of the film, where it begins to feature Yuki Saito and the movie really comes alive:







A lot of the film is Yuki Saito gazing at things. Somai seems to recognize he gets a lot of the drama out of these moments, and that they're some of the most captivating material in the movie. There is a lovely score for the movie that accompanies these scenes––this film seems to start the trend towards a more active non-diegetic score for Somai's movies––a trend which will continue all the way through Kaza-Hana.















Yuki plays detective in the movie, but in a fairly existential way. You feel like she already knows who did the murder, and just has to confirm it. In the meanwhile, she does a lot of casework looking for clues that she matters to anybody as more than a culprit or a runaway scullery maid.

[feihong]

Last set of caps of Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow. Pretty sure the clowns are Yozo Tanaka's idea. Clowns and dolls and stuff like that appear frequently in his films.















Regardless of how it looks here, it's not an Obayashi film. By comparison, Four Sisters is such an unbelievable downer. But nothing so bad happens here, except for the murder of that despicable modern dancer.





Kind of a classic Somai composition (there's a very similar one of the main trio tossing a ball to one another in P.P. Rider), where the architectural nature of a space is transcended by the characters, in the process of forming their own Jules-et-Jim-like bond. When Somai characters go "off-the-beaten-path" like this, he often has them moving through social spaces in unconventional ways to underline it.







You gotta watch out for puppets in this movie like it's Where's Waldo.

[Calvin]

More Somai coming from Third Window! Luminous Woman out May 20th and Love Hotel is out July 22nd.



This strange work from Shinji Somai (Typhoon Club) is presented with a brand new 2K restoration from the original negatives

A burly hulk of a man (pro-wrestler Keiji Muto) makes his way from Hokkaido to the decrepit trash heaps of outer Tokyo in a quest to find his beloved fiance, but meets a nightclub diva who has lost the ability to sing. When he finds himself pulled into the gladiator pits of a Tokyo nightclub, the mountain man agrees to fight in exchange for information on his lost love, yet also finds himself drawn to the various pulls of the big city.

BLU-RAY CONTENTS
• New 2k remaster from the original negatives
• Making Of (50 minutes)
• Deleted Scenes (50 minutes)
• Trailer
• Slipcase with artwork from Gokaiju
• ‘Directors Company’ edition featuring insert by Jasper Sharp - limited to 2000 copies



After mainstream success, Shinji Somai (Typhoon Club) returned to his Nikkatsu roots for this mournful Roman Porno scripted by Takashi Ishii (writer of Evil Dead Trap and director of Gonin). After Tetsuro loses his business, the yakuza collect his debt in the most violent, shocking way imaginable. Honorably, he divorces his wife and becomes a taxi driver. Existing bereft of meaning or support, he eventually encounters Nami, a part-time prostitute who has undergone similar tribulations. An existential study of two lonely and tortured souls, Somai’s melancholic roman porno follows the pair as they kindle a newfound friendship amid the chaos of their broken and dispirited lives.

BLU-RAY CONTENTS

• Feature length audio commentary by Jasper Sharp
• Shinji Somai at the Director’s Company: Video essay by Josh Slater-Williams
• Archival interview with actor Minori Terada and assistant director Koji Enokido
• Original Trailer
• Slipcase with artwork from Gokaiju
• ‘Directors Company’ edition featuring insert by Jasper Sharp - limited to 2000 copies

[knives]

Are there multiple versions of Sailor Suit out there? I see the runtime cited as 131 minutes in several places, but the version available on streaming is about 112.

[sabbath]

Are there multiple versions of Sailor Suit out there? I see the runtime cited as 131 minutes in several places, but the version available on streaming is about 112.

Yep, Arrow Blu-ray has two versions: Original Theatrical Version (1:51:45) and Extended Director's Cut (2:10:27)

[knives]

Are there any authoritative differences between them and is there an edit people prefer?

[Michael Kerpan]

Purely subjectively, I felt the longer version worked better (and felt more "powerful").

[feihong]

Looks like there's a thread on Bullets 'n Babes forum, a user named "HungFist" details the scenes included only in the complete cut:

https://www.bulletsnbabesdvd.com/forums ... php?t=3388

The post is midway down the page. I don't see a way to link to the specific post.

[knives]

Thanks all for this information.

[feihong]

Apparently there's even another version of The Terrible Couple that Somai preferred to the theatrical. I guess it was part of a DVD set in Japan, but I don't know which version of the film I've seen.

I'm not surprised we're not getting the extended version of Luminous Woman on the Third Window disc, seeing as there doesn't seem to be a clear guide for how Somai wanted that footage cut, and there's no audio. I did find that the extended version of the movie made it play better in general. The journeys the characters undertake seemed more substantial in the longer cut, and the idea that the hero's village is going away and needs to be rejuvenated comes through much more strongly in the extended version––whereas it seems like an afterthought in the theatrical version. Looking forward to seeing the discs of Luminous Woman and Love Hotel, though. I have caps of Luminous Woman, so I figure I'll save them for when the Third Window disc comes out in order to compare the two.