Author Archives: Sekenbanashi

Pickpocket

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  • Pickpocket

2/4/24 (Sun)

I picked this 1959 film as a Bresson primer because it’s reportedly fairly straightforward for him and is just 90 minutes. The English word “pickpocket” turns out for some reason to be the original French title.

Michel, an ordinary man with no steady job, has taken to pickpocketing as a way of filling his days. He gradually comes to enjoy the thrill of the game and turns down opportunities for legitimate work, ultimately joining with a team of thieves who work in tandem under the guidance of an expert crook. He holds the firm belief that a certain class of superior man should not be bound by the same laws as the common flock (I know the type). He sends money to his sick mother but refuses to see her despite his insistence that he loves her “more than myself” (though that may actually be true given how he despises himself).

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It’s Always Fair Weather

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  • It’s Always Fair Weather

2/23/24 (Fri)

The 1955 film is a follow-up of sorts to On the Town, co-directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. The earlier show featured three sailors going off to war, whereas this opens with three soldiers returning to their lives after the war’s end. Comden and Green had conceived this, as with the earlier show, as a Broadway musical, but were convinced to write it directly for the screen instead.

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Okiku and the World (せかいのおきく)

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  • せかいのおきく (Okiku and the World)

2/25/24 (Sun)

When you hear a movie is about two guys peddling sh*t, you’d normally assume they were selling trivial products. But the guys in this movie are in fact dealing in excrement – and we learn that their job was an essential function in Edo society. Who knew?

The time is the mid 19th century at the tail end of the Edo Era, when the entire system of government is about to be overthrown – but the characters here don’t know that. Yasuke is a purveyor of manure, buying the product from homes (after digging it out of the outhouse pits) and selling it to farmers. The latter need the waste as fertilizer to grow food, which is eaten and processed through people’s bodies as new waste product in a virtuous cycle for the likes of Yasuke. The gathering and reprocessing of waste served a critical role in Edo in keeping the villages clean; while Yasuke was dirt poor and at the absolute bottom of the social rung, he was actually more important in the scheme of things then the higher-ranking samurai, who received money from the state for doing very little.

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Brigadoon (1954 film)

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  • Brigadoon (1954 film)

2/15/24 (Fri)

This 1954 film, made in the glory days of the MGM musical, falls well short of the dizzying standards that the studio had set. The wonderful Broadway version offers ample opportunity for big-screen treatment: it’s set in the lush highlands of an exotic locale with distinctive speech, clothing and culture, and has fantastic music and dance scenes that could easily be opened up for the movie. Unfortunately the filmmakers were apparently unable to film on location in Scotland because of weather and cost issues, so the production looks somewhat cheap, like The Sound of Music without the Alps. Also, Alan Jay Lerner’s dialogue comes across as dated and sappy. That’s not true of other MGM musicals at the time, including Lerner’s own films, and is certainly not the case for Lerner’s engaging stage script. The film feels of its time. Continue reading →

Bunraku: The Sake Shop, The Returning Palanquin (酒屋、戻駕)

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  • Bunraku: 酒屋、戻駕 (The Sake Shop, The Returning Palanquin)

2/11/24 (Sun), Tokyo

Bunraku has been homeless in Tokyo since the closure of the National Theater last October, leaving it to wander among venues. Today’s venue, a 1,249-seat theater, is way too big for puppets (the NT had around 800 seats), but I’ll take what I can get. They chose an audience-friendly three-part program of classics at just two hours or so each, a smart change from the usual two-part show of 4-5 hours each. This was the day’s second pairing. Continue reading →

Saltburn

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  • Saltburn

2/10/24 (Sat)

This wild takeoff on The Talented Mr. Ripley is more interested in shocking the audience than offering a coherent story or characters. The film is set in 2006. Oliver, a plain-looking student at Oxford claiming to be from a poor and broken family, gains the friendship of his hunky classmate Felix, who takes pity on him. When Felix learns that Oliver’s father has died, he invites Oliver to his family’s vast country home for the summer. Oliver is welcomed by Felix’s innocently snooty parents and loose sister as well as her eccentric friend. Felix’s bitchy half-black cousin, also a classmate, is sponging off the family and views Oliver, rightly as it turns out, as a potential threat to his privileged position. Oliver’s stay devolves into drunken parties, drugs, sex and several untimely deaths. We realize in the end that Oliver is not what he seems: he is exposed as having a perfectly respectable background, causing Felix to turn against him, and has plotted from the beginning to insinuate himself into Felix’s life and take over the family home and all its wealth. He succeeds through a mix of flattery, physicality and murder.

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The Boy Friend (film)

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  • The Boy Friend

2/1/24 (Thurs)

Ken Russell’s 1971 adaptation of the 1954 mega-hit musical, which was itself a pastiche of 1920s shows (Rodgers and Hart’s The Girl Friend would seem a pretty obvious source). Those shows tended to be forgettable fluff with lame stories, bad puns and interchangeable songs designed to show off the talents of its stars, an approach that the story-based Oklahoma! had rendered archaic by the mid 1940s. Few of the flapper-era shows were revivable by that time without significant rewriting. The original The Boy Friend is tuneful and fun but depends on a knowledge of what is being parodied, in this case the British variety of 1920s musicals, which would have been well within living memory for 1950s audiences. The plot, if you can call it that, is about a girl’s finishing school in Nice where the lovers who have presented themselves as poor discover in the end that each is actually rich and titled. The story is intentionally silly and delivered in mocking style, acknowledging its own irrelevance while offering lively characters and memorable tunes.

Film musicals were still alive if sputtering in the early 1970s, and Russell must have been looking for something enjoyable after the controversy over his provocative previous work. He evidently did not believe the campy original would translate to film (raising the question of why he turned to this show in the first place), so he did an even campier version where the musical is being performed at a seaside resort attended by a big American film producer there to scout out talent. The musical scenes in the show proper thus mix with backstage clashes within the troupe as the performers try to outdo one another to catch the producer’s eye. When the lead breaks her leg, the stage assistant is catapulted into the main role. (That parallels real life: the lead in the original London stage production fell ill just before the opening and was replaced by a minor performer, Anne Rogers, who rode the role to stardom.) She falls in love with the male lead, who to her frustration shows no interest in her.

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Noh: Basho, Mochizuki (芭蕉、望月)

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  • Noh: 芭蕉、望月 (Basho, Mochizuki)

9/30/23 (Sat), National Noh Theater (Tokyo)

Basho: A dialogue-heavy show by Zenchiku with an unusually beautiful text. A monk in rural China meets a woman who, overhearing him read from the Lotus Sutra, wants to discuss Buddhist precepts. He doesn’t allow her in his hut at first since women are normally prohibited, but gives in when she notes that they live in the same city and draw water from the same river, suggesting a karmic connection.

She turns out to be the spirit of a plantain tree (basho), a plant with large and particularly delicate leaves. They discuss how even non-sentient objects such as trees (“even women and heartless plants,” according to one translation) can attain salvation. Continue reading →

Perfect Days

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  • Perfect Days

1/28/24 (Sun)

Shibuya Ward (which encompasses Shibuya, Harajuku, Aoyama and other Tokyo hot spots) had apparently approached Japanophile Wim Wenders to make a documentary on its clean public toilet project, the Tokyo Toilet, which has installed some innovative and attractive facilities throughout the district (many of which I’ve used). Wenders decided to turn this into a piece about a devoted public worker, allowing him to show the facilities as background for something more profound.

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The Discarnates (偉人たちとの夏)

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  • 偉人たちとの夏 (The Discarnates)

1/26/24 (Fri)

I wanted to see Obayashi Nobuhiko’s 1988 adaptation of Yamada Taichi’s best-seller before the acclaimed UK remake, All of Us Strangers, arrives here in the next few months. The Japanese version’s unusual English title refers to a being that does not have a physical body, basically a fancy word for ghosts. That seems to give the game away; I prefer the Japanese title, literally “Summer with Strangers”. The Japanese film is described as a horror story.

*Spoilers Ahead*

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