Kwaidan (1964):
I rarely do well with Japanese movies, and sadly, this movie was no exception. Maybe it's just the different cultures, but I just don't seem to understand a lot of what seems obvious to everyone else in these movies. But, the good news is that
Tideland is no longer my least favorite movie in this HoF.
The bad news is that I just didn't get this movie at all. I couldn't connect to any of the characters, and I barely understood what was going on most of the time. I understand that these were ghost stories, but they just didn't make much sense to me. Each segment just left me with more questions than answers.
"The Black Hair" - They spent almost no time at all introducing us to the characters. I never got to know any of them, so I never cared about what happened to them. I wasn't even sure that the guy getting married was the same guy who left his wife until he went back to find his first wife. That made the whole segment emotionless to me. And the ending made no sense to me. Was it a dream? Did I see right? Did her hair attack him?
"The Woman of the Snow" - I couldn't figure out who the woman in the cabin was supposed to be. Was she supposed to be Lady Death? Did she kill the old guy, or did he die from the cold? How did the young guy know that he wasn't supposed to tell anyone about her? Did I miss her telling him not to tell anyone? And the only person he told was her, and he even said that he thought it was a dream, so why did she get so mad at him? He didn't tell anyone else. And in the end, she left him alone with their children? That made no sense to me because it hurts the children to not have a mother as much as it hurts him, if not more.
"Hoichi the Earless" - I didn't understand anything that was happening at the beginning except that we were being told a story about a war, and a mass suicide that caused the waters to be haunted. I didn't understand how that connected to Hoichi. Was the samurai a ghost from that war? How did writing all over him hide him from the samurai? And if the writing was supposed to hide him from the samurai, why did he wear a robe that covered most of the writing?
"In a Cup of Tea" - Why did the man appear in his tea? What did he want from the guy who drank the tea? Did the ghost attack him because he drank the tea, or because he didn't admit that he recognized him from the tea? Was the writer, (whose face we see in the water at the end of the segment), the same guy who saw the face in his tea, or was that a different guy?
So the moral of the first story is that money isn't important to be happy, but the moral of the third story is that money brought him happiness regardless of the pain that he went through to get it. (Seems like a bit of a mixed message to me.)