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John Woo was once known as the master of action cinema. His knack for beautifully crafted and stylized violence made him an international sensation with hits like The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled before making the leap to Hollywood with Hard Target. His impact on the genre is undeniable, but following the critically panned, Ben Affleck-starring Paycheck the filmmaker went back to his Hong Kong roots and left the world of Hollywood behind him for two decades.

He returned to American audiences last year with the dialogue-free, Christmas-themed Silent Night — a film that I personally loved but that faced a rocky reception from most — and again in 2024 with The Killer, a remake of his ’89 classic. It’s always an interesting choice when a filmmaker remakes one of their own movies. Yasujiro Ozu remade his film A Story of Floating Weeds, and the second attempt is arguably the superior film; however,...

A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu on Blu-ray released to the Criterion Collection on May 7th, 2024.

This marked only my third and forth film by Yasujiro Ozu. I already owned the Criterion Collection releases of Tokyo Story and Good Morning, both of which I thoroughly enjoyed, with Good Morning instantly becoming one of my favorite experiences with Japanese cinema. Part of what makes the Criterion Collection so great is the way it makes important films easily accessible for collectors.

A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu Plot

An actor traveling with a theater group set up shop in a small village where he reconnects with an old lover and his estranged son. Emotions boil over as the former lovers rekindle their romantic flame.

The Critique

Floating Weeds

It’s always interesting when a filmmaker remakes one of their own films.

Throughout his career, Ozu Yasujirô regularly returned to core themes running through his work from different angles, and toward the end of his life he even made remakes of some of his earlier silent pictures. Of these, 1959’s Floating Weeds is perhaps the most closely faithful to the plot of its predecessor, 1934’s A Story of Floating Weeds.

Both A Story of Floating Weeds and Floating Weeds follow a traveling troupe of actors as they arrive in a seaside town to perform their kabuki plays. While there, the leader of the group checks up on an old mistress, and much to the jealously of his current one, who in turn hatches a scheme to have a colleague seduce and dump the man’s adult son. Further complicating matters is the fact that the son, the child of the ex-lover being visited, doesn’t even know that the troupe’s leader is his father.

The Criterion Collection follows an auteur-based diet of cinema, offering a wondrous variety of films from all over the world to sate your appetite. Case in point, consider what May 2024 will bring from the home video label. (All verbiage courtesy of Criterion.) "Three Revolutionary Films by Ousmane Sembène, three powerful 1970s works by the trailblazing Senegalese auteur; Anatomy of a Fall, Justine Triet's masterful examination of the line between truth and fiction; and Girlfight, Karyn Kusama's singular tale of a young woman's path to self-realization. "Plus: a Blu-ray upgrade of A Story of Floating Weeds / Floating Weeds: Two Films by Yasujiro Ozu, a silent classic from one of cinema's greatest directors alongside his color remake, and Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's still-shocking masterpiece of...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

Criterion’s got murder on their mind. This May will bring a 4K release of Michael Powell’s career-killing masterpiece Peeping Tom, supplemented by appearances from its biggest fans Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker. More recent (and less certain on questions of guilt) is Anatomy of a Fall, arriving on Blu-ray with a 5.1 surround DTS-hd Master Audio rendition of “P.I.M.P. (Instrumental).” Meanwhile, Karyn Kusama’s 2001 feature Girlfight gets a Bd.

Then there’s two sets. Sicking up the mantle of Janus’ career-spanning retrospective, Criterion will release a three-film Ousmane Sembène offering this May––Emitaï, Xala, and Ceddo spread across a nicely designed box––and Ozu’s Floating Weeds / A Story of Floating Weeds duology, which I honestly cannot believe has been stuck on DVD for decades. Color Ozu should be nationally subsidized, and this is a good start at least.

Find cover art below and more details...

Few filmmakers have captured raw family dynamics in motion as wonderfully as Yasujiro Ozu. Throughout his career, he solidified himself as a simplistic yet superb storyteller with an appealing aesthetic style while also capturing the societal climate of Japan at the time. In the later years of his career, with the jump from black-and-white to color, Ozu primarily did reimaginings of his previous features, some straight-up remade. The most obvious example is his gem “Floating Weeds,” a remake of his earlier work “A Story of Floating Weeds.” Yet even with the reinstating of familiar elements in his later projects, he still added unique aspects to them while having said films stand on their own merits. As a perfect example, familiarity and freshness are present in his beautiful swan song “An Autumn Afternoon.”

This would be Yasujiro Ozu’s final film which would be released in late 1962. A year later, he passed away on December 12th,...