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il pleure dans mon coeur
comme il pleut sur la ville
it's raining in my heart
like the rain falling on the city
Paul Verlaine
It was raining today.
Black Rain has a meaning in Japanese - the fallout from a nuclear bomb. 黒い雨 Kuroi Ame was a 1965 novel by Masuji Ibuse about the aftermath of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. It was made into a movie with the same title directed by Shohei Imamura. The film was very well-received critically. The wikipedia entry about it says,
The film has a strong theme of the Buddhist beliefs on the suffering in life, that things are transient and the uncertainty of the time of one's death.
Then Hollywood used the same title for an action thriller directed by Ridley Scott. Black Rain is a cool title but in Japanese it's inextricably associated with the novel and with Hiroshima. The Japanese movie Kuroi Ame came out in May 1989 and the Hollywood movie Black Rain came out in September 1989. The American movie starred Michael Douglas, Andy Garcia, Yusaku Matsuda and Ken Takakura. It's not a great film but it is enjoyable and it's also memorable as the last performance of the cool and charismatic Japanese actor Yusaku Masuda. He had cancer and he died on 6 November 1989 soon after the movie's premiere aged thirty-nine.
03-21-2011 09:31 AM 
