Michael Mortilla has created original scores for theater, dance, and film, and regularly performs for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Silent Society, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.

(Shukujo to hige). Ozu satirizes Taisho chic and nostalgia in this delightful comedy. Okajima, a young kendo swordfighter, passionately loves his beard and despises all modern ways. A mixture of disgusting machismo and studied chivalry, he employs the latter to save a young typist from a mugging at the hands of a female tough. But any other kind of employment is beyond his reach. The girl suggests that he might find a job if he shaved his beard, which he does (revealing the handsome Tokihiko Okada). But his attractive, modern face only complicates his life, even as it brings out the complex, even comical social melange of new and old, Western and Japanese all around him. The seemingly demure typist isn't, the moderns aren't so very, and our hero, when he's not bowing (a formality he's too poor and shabby to pull off), is admiring Abe Lincoln and Laurel and Hardy in his westernized apartment.