This is an odd one… or I suppose it’s not all that odd if you go into it expecting a 100 minute music video-cum-weird sort of hybrid documentary/infomercial for Japanese tourism in Hawaii. I was NOT expecting that, although there’s something about the tone of Rainbow Over the Pacific that hits about right for those of us whose earliest exposure to Hawaiian history and mythology was via The Brady Bunch.

Rainbow Over the Pacific was apparently conceived as a vehicle…

Can something be too beautiful to exist, and if it were, must it be destroyed in order for you to be free?

I have tried to sum up my thoughts on this film several times, and I always come up short on words to describe how affecting this piece of cinema is to me. 1956’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, the Mishima Yukio novel upon which Conflagration is based, is one of my very favorite works of fiction, and…

Dear God, this movie is breathtaking. Drop-dead gorgeous cinematography with some of the best blocking and composition I have ever seen in a film. Set in the eponymous Temple of Wild Geese, it tells the devastating tale of abbot Jikei, novice monk Jinen, and Satoko, a former geisha turned abbot’s mistress who resides there. At the outset, it seems the film is setting itself up to be a fairly straightforward story of a love triangle that develops between the three…