四月物語 April Story 松たか子

April Story is the cutest Iwai Shunji film. I re-watch this every year as it is only 1 hour long! A very simple story about a Hokkaido girl who enters a Tokyo University to be near of her high school crush. Such a lovely film work. Spring depicted at its best, all cherry blossoms and sunshine. How sweet it is to be in love during Spring.

I watched this as part of my winter blues fighting project, haha. I miss Spring!

「群青」長澤まさみ Cobalt Blue

Today I re-watched Cobalt Blue. What a beautiful film. It did strike me the first time I watched it and recently it came back to my mind. I put off watching it for a week for one reason or the other, daily life got in the way, but finally today I could not avoid it any longer. The shots of the island in Okinawa are so peaceful I couldn’t help myself from making some screencaps. I wish I had the Blu-ray version, must be breath taking. 

A sad teen love triangle, with a story that started 20 years earlier. Love, loss and heartbreak are a few of the themes this film touches. Set with a slow pace, it was a pleasure to watch, like a field of flowers softly dancing with the summer breeze.

I look forward to watch Starlit High Noon which is from the same director and cinematographer.

Wood Job! （長澤まさみ）

Wood Job, what a film! It is so beautifully filmed I just had to make some screencaps myself, I got the Blu-ray, so the quality is brilliant! I mainly watched this because  of Masami Nagasawa, without any expectations whatsoever, and I was pleasantly surprised. It is such a heart warming story, with a few funny parts. It is the story of a high school graduate who didn’t make it to uni and, following a touch of “fate”, ends up going for a forestry course far away from Tokyo. A city boy finds the usual hardships in adapting to the country side life, but it slowly grows in him.  This is not a love story, although there is one in the film. It is more about the good things that come with a simple hardworking life in a place where you can’t get a mobile connection, where there are no bus stops and not even supermarkets. I highly recommend it, if only for the beautiful visuals of the forest! And if you think the title sounds like a pun, wait until the end of the film, haha.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ~ 1938

What a darling film! Shirley Temple is so adorable I just want to squeeze her. And I made screencaps to prove it! Very entertaining, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is a coloured 1938 moving picture based on the novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin. You can watch it for free here.

Marriage Italian Style ~ 1964

*i do not take credit for any of the pictures, everything found via google*

I absolutely loved this filmed. I watched it for the first time a couple of years ago, it was my first Sophia Loren film. She is so beautiful, sexy and above all, such a talented lady it makes me a die hard fan. If you ever watched over 3 Sophia Loren films then you will know how incredible good she is at acting. Sure, not all of her films were fantastic, some of them were actually quite boring, but her acting was always top notch. She can play any role, it amazes me every time.

Marriage Italian Style is like a life long story of a woman, a prostitute, and man, a regular don juan. The struggles and length a woman has to go through in life until she finally gets what she wants and deserves, what always was promised but it took so long to arrive. It is a must watch classic, top performance by both Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.

Barefoot In The Park ~ 1967

Today I've watched this darling comedy Barefoot In The Park . I just adore Jane Fonda, no surprise there, and she was enchanting in this film. She starts off by wearing a perfect baby blue swing coat with fur trims and I fell in love. The 1st and last picture were the best I could find while being too lazy to screen cap myself. All pictures were found on google, so credit to whoever produced them on the Internets. And then Jane is wearing this mustard turtle neck with brown cord high wait trousers and I feel like I will not be able to fall asleep until I reproduce the exact same combination.

Anyways, onto the film rather than the costumes, it was such a sweet and amusing story, I was laughing out loud by myself. A young couple of newlyweds facing the first complications of living together combined with family and neighbour problems, while still growing up and discovering themselves. I highly recommend it for a good laugh and eye candy, and I'm not only talking about the clothes (I look at a 31 year old Robert Redford and find myself sighing endlessly...).