6/1/21 (Tues)
The wild 1961 film that put director Imamura Shohei on the map (and got him banned from studio for two years). It’s a black comedy mixed with social satire about Japanese civilians and American sailors in Yokosuka, a coastal town near Tokyo that hosts a major US naval base, around 1960.
5/19/21 (Wed)
Juraj Herz’s long-banned film of 1969 was part of the Czech New Wave, which largely disappeared when Soviet tanks rolled into Prague the previous year. The setting is the 1930s just ahead of the Nazi takeover of the country. The head of a crematorium adheres to the Tibetan teaching that death helps end human suffering and open the way to a new future life, making him feel good about preparing people for their end – both the dead bodies entrusted to him and the living humans that he took it upon himself to “liberate”. Continue reading
5/14/21 (Fri)
This film actually won an Academy Award?? A bit of exotica from 1959 surrounding a love affair in a Rio favela during Carnival based on the Orpheus-Eurydice legend. Continue reading
5/11/21 (Tues)
A 1966 Czech film by Jiří Menzel set in a small Czech town toward the end of the war. Continue reading
5/9/21 (Sun)
I was browsing through Criterion’s selection of Best Foreign Language Oscar winners and chose this 1965 Czechoslovakian film by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos without knowing much about it. It turned out to be a Holocaust comedy, not a crowded category, set in 1942 in the newly created Nazi puppet state of Slovakia. The Tiso regime has accepted the Nuremberg Race Laws, setting off the conflict that drives the drama.
4/29/21 (Thurs)
An amateurish murder mystery from 1961, based on a popular book, that wouldn’t pass muster even as a daytime television film. A woman is just a week into her arranged marriage when her husband mysteriously disappears. He is found dead at the bottom of a cliff, an incident that is ruled a suicide – but is it? The women comes to find that there is more to her husband’s past than she had imagined.
Three films by the unjustly neglected Shimizu Hiroshi. Continue reading
The year was 1603. By an historical quirk, on the very same calendar day (March 24*) that Queen Elizabeth I died and King James VI of Scotland ascended to the English throne, Japan’s Tokugawa Ieyasu received the title of shogun from the Emperor after his crushing victory on the battlefield three years earlier, marking the start of an unprecedented period of political stability in Japan known as the Edo Era. In that same year, while Shakespeare was penning Othello, Cervantes was working on Don Quixote and England’s first permanent settlement in the Americas was still four years in the future, a woman named O-Kuni danced on the shores of the Kamo River in Kyoto and inadvertently planted the seeds for Kabuki theater.
This is my Kabuki version of the Dickens classic reset in late 19th-century Japan. That setting is deliberate: Scrooge’s youth would be the Edo Era of samurai and shoguns; his present the Meiji Era, when Japan opened itself to the world; and his future the increasingly Westernized Late Meiji or Taisho Era, all visually very distinct periods. I originally wrote the show in Japanese for a Kabuki script competition by Japan’s National Theatre. That didn’t work out, but when a local English-language troupe took interest, I rewrote it in English. The show takes place on a Japanese New Year’s Eve, which shares many similarities with Christmas Eve in the West, but the producer insisted on retaining the “Christmas Carol” title for marketing purposes (the Japanese title is different). The production, performed in English by a multicultural cast at a central Tokyo theater, proved a huge success in a sellout run. The image above was created for that production. Here is a slightly revised version of that script.
**PERFORMANCE RIGHTS ARE RESERVED. FOR INQUIRIES, PLEASE CONTACT THE AUTHOR OF THIS BLOG.**
4/1/21 (Thurs), Netflix
Part of August Wilson’s 10-play cycle of the black experience in the US in the 20th century. A white-owned record company in Chicago has contracted to make a recording with the imperious Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), a real-life Southern singer from the 1920s known as Mother of the Blues. The record makers hope to broaden her appeal by commissioning new arrangements from Levee (a spectacular Chadwick Boseman), a young black musician who is more tuned in to the tastes of the broader public and sees this as his stepping stone to fame. Unfortunately Ma doesn’t take kindly to suggestions, well meaning or not, and takes every opportunity to stick it to the white man regardless of how that affects others, including the young kid’s future. The clash between Ma and Levee – over music, her various demands, her woman (over whom both are fighting; the real Ma was evidently an unashamed lesbian) – leads to fireworks.
3/17/21 (Wed)
The idea of The Prom was promising: a group of down-and-out actors looking for publicity decide to stage a protest in Hicksville (played here by Indiana), where a lesbian has effectively been kept from taking her lover to the school prom. I thought it was going to be a spoof on overzealous leftists and their any-cause-will-do attitude, and it starts off lively enough. But it quickly devolves into the usual flaccid material, a plodding story about identity and let’s-love-each-other and be-true-to-yourself platitudes. Yuck. Continue reading
2/14/21 (Sun)
The notorious director Suzuki Seijun has essentially torn his 1967 movie into pieces, thrown them into the air, and spliced them together wherever they landed. It’s as if Picasso and Dali were fighting for the same brush. This is a big inside joke for fans of yakuza flicks, an irritation to the rest of us.
