Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Tokyo Story is like if Curb Your Enthusiasm and King Lear had a Japanese baby together. Or perhaps it's more like an Oriental John Cassavetes film. Whatever the case, I had plenty of time during the film to think of these witticisms - it moves at a jarringly glacial pace. Detailing an elderly couple's trip to Tokyo to visit their grown children, the film is relentlessly mundane as their children take them around the city and are generally inconvenienced by their parents' visit. This pace is absolutely necessary and pays off in the second half. A film that could have very easily devolved into melodrama or mawkishness rises above both. Like Ikiru, it attempts to get at the heart of why we do anything at all.
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