Cheap Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [Region 2] (DVD) (Nagisa Oshima) Price

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Customer Reviews of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [Region 2]

Keeps on keeping on-curiously prophetic
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". <
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>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). <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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, <
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>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.

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East vs. West Once Again!
"Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" (1983) is a very special war movie, product of an atypical collaboration. <
>Let see: film director is multi-awarded Nagisa Oshima, his most notable opus are the present movie; "Empire of Senses" (1976); "Empire of Passion" ((1978) winner of Cannes Best Director Award and "Taboo" (1999). <
>Two of the main characters are impersonate by actors that are more known as musicians & score composers: Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie. <
>The story is based on South African Laurens Van der Post's novel "The Seed and the Sower" reflecting his actual experiences as POW. <
>From this rich international talents mix emerge the present film. <
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>The story narrates the daily life in a Japanese prison camp where cultures collide and confront. The Japanese assumes British military are despicable because they have surrendered instead of continue fighting until death. <
>The British resent and resist the brutal treatment they receive and scorn their captors as "uncivilized barbarians". <
>Among the two groups strong undercurrents of a different sign circulate. It is a "positive perception" of the enemy's "qualities" even against their own internal logic. <
>Capt. Yonoi empathizes with Maj. Celliers and Col. Lawrence with Sgt. Hara, even if their daily confrontations lead them to more and bleaker ones. <
>This attraction-repulsion phenomenon is shown in other great POW camps films, most notably "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957) and "To End All Wars" (2001). <
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>David Bowie delivers a very good acting piece, his best IMHO and Ryuichi Sakamoto is very convincing in his characterization of the troubled samurai. <
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>This is an interesting film, which cast a new light over these difficult relationships. If you are interested in war movies you can't miss this one! <
>Reviewed by Max Yofre.

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an awful film
I'd been meaning to see this film for many years, so I was glad to finally get it out. What a disappointment! It's a badly made film: poor script, an awful sense of rhythm, visually ugly and frankly boring. The performances are quite often wooden, though that's because the characters are poorly written. Tom Conti is relaxed and natural, but the material is so thin there's not much he can do. <
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>The filming looks quite amateurish, and as far as I know, the director never made anything spectacular. If you're interested in Japanese prisoner of war stories, get out 'River Kwai' or the Australian miniseries A Town Like Alice. I've also heard the English TV series Tenko is quite good. But skip this film.