Giant

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  • Giant

5/8/26 (Fri), Broadway

Mark Rosenblatt’s play is set around the time of Israel’s incursion into Beirut in 1982. Roald Dahl, the British author of Charlie & the Chocolate Factory and Matilda fame, has made some extreme anti-Israel comments in a book review that border uncomfortably on anti-Semitism. (The real-life situation was even worse: it appears that editors of the actual review substituted “Israelis” for “Jews” in some cases to tone down the hate.) His UK and US publishers, both Jewish, are afraid that the ensuing brouhaha will affect sales of his new book, and the latter, the fictional Jessie Stone, who Dahl insists pointedly on calling “Stein”, has flown in from New York to convince him to retract, modify or apologize for the remarks. She objects to his blaming the entire Jewish people for the actions of a government over which they have no control.

Dahl, however, is unrepentant, insisting conversely that she apologize for the brutality of a regime that claims to represent the Jewish “race”. The UK publisher, a Holocaust survivor, considers himself more British than Jewish and tries to avoid conflict, only to be accused by Dahl of being a “house Jew”, while Dahl’s long-time girlfriend does her best to keep his temper in line. Dahl appears to become more sympathetic when he learns that the US publisher, like himself, has a mentally challenged child. But his nice side doesn’t last long, his hatred of the Jews (“Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason” – a real-life quote) overwhelming even his feelings for his girlfriend in a horrific final-curtain betrayal.

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Season of the Sun (太陽の季節)

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  • 太陽の季節 (Season of the Sun)

5/2/26 (Sat)

Takumi Furukawa wrote and directed this highly successful 1956 adaptation of Ishihara Shintaro’s sensational best-seller of one year earlier, which gave the movement its Sun Tribe name.

The plot is not much different from the subsequent Sun Tribe masterpiece Crazed Fruit, also based on an Ishihara novel. As I commented there, the film

“features a group of bored rich 20-year-olds, who grew up in the shadow of defeat with no memory of Japan’s pre-war past and no sense of a future. They spend their time idling away their days in sailboats, nightclubs and cars in a bid to fight off tedium, devoted mainly to gambling, drinking, picking fights, dancing and especially hunting women, albeit just for momentary pleasure (including orgies) rather than anything as permanent as romance.”

However, Season, at least in its film version, is less focused than the later work. It tries too hard in its nihilism to a point that doesn’t make sense. The lead’s rejection of the main female character may have seemed cool on paper but is not realistic as presented, especially when she tells him she’s pregnant. I’m sure the idea is that he’s wedded to his all-embracing apathy – a protest against the passion that drove the previous generation to war – to an extent that destroys him and others around him. That is, the willful disengagement of the Sun Tribe generation is no better than the blind nationalism that preceded it. A powerful theme, suggesting that the young are as caught up unthinkingly in a national mood as their parents were. But the main character seems to be striking an attitude rather than feeling it. The film needs a more credible story to work, which Ishihara achieved in the later Fruit.

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All My Children (みんなわが子)

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  • みんなわが子 (All My Children)

5/2/26 (Sat)

Ieki Miyoji’s 1963 elegiac work follows several dozen kids evacuated from Tokyo to safer areas away from their families during the war, based on an actual record of children moved from a Tokyo elementary school. The filmmakers were themselves familiar with such experiences and have clearly recreated this with heart. The setting is a village in the Kanto region in what we now know were the final months of the war.

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Noh: Kan’yokyu (咸陽宮)

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  • Noh: 咸陽宮 (Kan’yokyu)

4/26/26 (Sun)

Kan’yokyu (Xianyang Palace), taken largely from a rendition in Tale of the Heike, is a rarely produced China-set Noh drama based on an actual attempted assassination of China’s first emperor. Info on the play is hard to come by, so I took advantage of the opportunity to see it.

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The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro)

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The Last Metro (Le Dernier Métro)

  • 4/16/26 (Thurs)

Truffaut’s 1980 film is set in Paris during the occupation years, which he himself experienced as a child. Marion (Catherine Deneuve), a noted film actress, is rehearsing a stage play, ironically titled The Vanishing Woman (La disparue, translated elsewhere more broadly as Disappeared), that was supposed to be directed by her Jewish husband Lucas (Jean Poiret). As being Jewish was hazardous to one’s health in Vichy France, she has made it known that he has fled to South America, and another director has taken the helm.

We learn, however, that she is in fact keeping Lucas hidden in the cellar, where he can hear the rehearsals taking place. He gives notes on the show to Marion, who manages to incorporate his vision into the work. Her lover in the play is being performed by a handsome and randy young actor Bernard (Gérard Depardieu), whose horniness was established earlier when he was seen trying to pick up a random woman on the street. (When he learns that she is part of the play’s crew, he continues to pursue her until discovering she’s lesbian, an interesting development for the times even for the French.) It also turns out that Bernard was a member of the Resistance, putting him in danger as well if his identity is revealed. Lucas, listening carefully to the dialogue, does not sense sufficient passion from the stage lovers and encourages his reluctant wife to put more emotion into it, unwillingly setting off flames between the actors.

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The Fifth Step (NT Live)

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·       The Fifth Step (NT Live)

  • 4/11/26 (Sat)

A National Theatre Live film of a two-man stage show of 2025. The title refers to Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12 steps toward recovery.

A nervous young Scottish man works with his older mentor at AA to overcome his addiction to drink. They are going through the 12 steps, approaching the fifth, which demands admitting your flaws to someone as well as yourself. He claims to be incel (involuntarily celibate, i.e., can’t get laid – they need a word for this?). He is generally obsessive, claiming to masturbate dozens of times per day and fixated over women. His calmer mentor appears to have his life under control: married, children, no drink in decades. The young man expresses envy, comparing marriage memorably to “pussy on tap”. (The mentor assures him that it’s not that easy.)

The young man seeks solace in religion, but the more skeptical mentor says that you can find God anywhere if that’s what you want to believe, even in a paper cup. At one point, the young man is hallucinating that his mentor is a rabbit. As their relationship evolves, the mentor becomes more controlling. When the young man develops a relationship with a woman, the mentor warns him that he is just exchanging one fixation for another and says he must wait until he is cured before venturing into romance. The young man is understandably peeved since it was the mentor who was encouraging him to find spiritual comfort in the first place. It then emerges that the woman who the young man is sleeping with might be the mentor’s wife. The men’s relationship begins to change as we discover that the mentor has not been entirely honest with the man – or himself.

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Out of the Past

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  • Out of the Past

4/4/26 (Sat)

Jacques Tourneur’s classic 1947 noir was adapted by Daniel Mainwaring (under a pseudonym) and others from his 1946 novel, Build My Gallows High, a phrase that appears memorably in the movie script. I was surprised to see Kirk Douglas as a featured performer rather than the star, but those were early days.

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Maurice

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  • Maurice

3/27/26 (Fri)

EM Forster’s book, considered a minor work in his oeuvre, was given this terrific adaptation by James Ivory in 1987. The novel was conceived in 1913 but not published until 1971, a year after the author’s death, due to his concern over the gay content. Ivory, who is himself gay, unexpectedly chose this after the success of his first Forster adaptation, the wonderful A Room with a View. While the gay aspect sets the film apart for its time, the question of identity extends as well to class, the perennial subject of the British arts, which makes it more complex.

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Bunraku: Ehon Taikoki, Kanjincho (絵本太功記、勧進帳)

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  • Bunraku: 絵本太功記、勧進帳 (Ehon Taikoki, Kanjincho)

2/23/26 (Mon)

These were the second and third shows of a three-part production this month. Part 1 consisted of the first few acts of Ehon Taikoki, with succeeding acts in Part 2. I considered seeing the first two together since the full show is not done often in Bunraku (this was the first time in the Kanto region for certain acts in 20 years) and not at all in Kabuki, which has preserved just the 10th act of the 14-act show. But that would come to over six hours of showtime, a bit too much to ask of my friend. Bunraku lost its permanent home in Tokyo when the National Theater closed several years ago and is wandering among venues with each production, shedding fans along the way; this one was not even in Tokyo, and the theater was way too large for a puppet drama. But Yokohama is a massive city as well, and with the rarity of the pieces, both shows were nearly sold out, which was nice to see. The overall theme seemed to be losers from turning points in Japanese history, namely the treacherous Akechi Mitsuhide and the tragic hero Minamoto Yoshitsune. (The first play uses different names due to shogunal restrictions, but I’m using the historic names here.)

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Imitation of Life (1959)

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  • Imitation of Life (1959)

2/12/22 (Fri)

I see where a musical version of the great Imitation of Life is in the works, drawn from the original 1933 novel and both the 1934 and 1959 film adaptations, all of which differ in significant ways from the others. It is being written by the estimable Lynn Nottage (Sweat) with music and lyrics by pop star John Legend in his first musical. What modern-day writers and audiences will make of the material is to be seen, but the two movies give some clue as to changes in perspective over time. The earlier and superior film rendition was melodrama that crossed into tragedy. Douglas Sirk’s remake a quarter-century later never made that crossing.

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The Gentle Twelve (12人の優しい日本人)

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  • 12人の優しい日本人 (The Gentle Twelve)

4/23/13 (Tue)

Nakahara Shun’s 1991 film version of a play from the previous year by the prolific Mitani Koki envisioning jury duty à la Japonaise based on the format of Twelve Angry Men – call it “Twelve Not-So-Angry Japanese”. While the jury system has since been introduced in Japan, Mitani seems less interested in politics than in showing the Japanese temperament at work. Twelve jurors initially dismiss a murder case in an eagerness to get their duty over with and return home, but one of them has second thoughts and forces a serious discussion, which proceeds in the movie roughly in real time. A man has been run over by a truck after allegedly being pushed into the street by his ex-wife. But was it premeditated or self-defense? Did the woman have murderous intent, or did she push him without realizing the truck was coming?

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