3/17/26 (Tues)
Mervyn LeRoy’s well intentioned 1932 crime film was the industry’s third biggest earner that year after Gold Diggers of 1933 (which he also directed) and 42nd Street (which he was supposed to direct). It was based on the previous year’s same-titled autobiography (the state, i.e., …Georgia Chain Gang!, was removed for commercial and political reasons), though naturally taking certain liberties with the character and story.
3/1/26 (Sun)
A lonely gaijin (Brendan Fraser) living in Tokyo is struggling as a would-be actor since his starring role seven years earlier in a Japanese toothpaste commercial. He spends much of his time in his tiny apartment looking forlornly Rear Window-like at people in the various apartments on the other side. Summoned for a job one day, he is surprised to arrive at a funeral – and even more shocked when the corpse pops up from the coffin and thanks everyone.
It turns out that the mourners were simply actors, employed by the man to provide him comfort that he will be remembered and that his life was worth something. The bewildered Fraser catches the eye of a businessman, who turns out to be an agency for just such bit players. He hires Fraser to act out real-life roles.
2/20/26 (Fri)
I learned of Brecht’s 1935 short piece in researching Crooked Cross and found a performance online. The setting is again contemporary Germany. The first 20-25 minutes of the 30-minute work constitute a monologue by a woman who is calling friends to let them know that she’ll be leaving for Amsterdam for a few weeks – she tells her bridge partner to find someone to fill in, and ensures another friend that the planned dinner next week will go on despite her absence as her husband will still be there. She calls a servant to ask if she’ll take care of the husband, an eminent scientist, while she’s away, saying this time, though, that she’ll be back in a few months. We come to realize that this is no ordinary journey. We learn that she is Jewish, and her husband is not.
2/15/26 (Sun)
Mervyn LeRoy’s joyous musical celebration comes between two other Warner Bros backstage musicals the same year, 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, that pretty much define the era. The songs are performed as stage productions rather than character or narrative numbers and are essentially interchangeable, having nothing to do with the underlying story; the producers in fact switched out the final number for a new song with no effect at all on the narrative. The show is based on a stage farce from 1919 that already had two previous film treatments. This one apparently was supposed to be a drama as well but added musical numbers following the success of 42nd Street (they moved fast in those days). Its huge popularity spawned several sequels.
2/4/26 (Wed)
I was made aware of this startling 1924 silent film when the irreplaceable Mark Steyn featured the German novel from two years earlier in his column. The film had long been thought lost, but fragments were found in poor condition in Amsterdam in 1991, which were only shown publicly years later. Then, in one of those seemingly impossible coincidences, a full copy in excellent condition emerged at a French flea market in 2015. That was digitally restored and released three years later.
A large city – Vienna in the original, a limp “Utopia” in the film – is roiled by economic troubles and severe public discontent amid a stark divide between the decadent rich and the struggling poor. Looking for a scapegoat, politicians soon target the Jews, blaming them for all the city’s woes. The Jews are compared to a pest that must be exterminated to protect the roses. The government orders that all Jews be expelled from the city, though allowing second-generation Jews to remain if they agree to be baptized. It arranges stock cars to take them away along with all their worldly possessions, ripping them from their roots. The city is soon bereft of all Jewish life. It quickly becomes clear that its business and cultural life has been torn apart as well: the theaters are empty, fashion houses flounder, the currency plunges, businesses die. “When you expelled the Jews,” says one person, “you banished prosperity as well.”
1/27/26 (Tues)
Richard Linklater’s 2025 film is a credible fantasy about the great lyricist Lorenz Hart on the opening night of Oklahoma!, his long-time partner’s first venture with another lyricist – and his mixed feelings when the show, which he mocks as unsophisticated schlock, turns out to be a massive critical and popular success.
Hart’s numbers with Rodgers over the preceding quarter century were and are known for their urbane wit and intelligence and remain among the most golden songs of America’s Golden Age of Song. But in terms of musical theater, the lyrics always sound like the literate Hart, not like the characters on stage. While the team created numerous innovative musicals, the songs themselves remain New York-bound in sensibility. It was Hammerstein who took musical lyrics into the next dimension as specific expressions of character and story; his Oklahomans sound Oklahoman. His songs are integral to the story they are telling, and the story is inseparable from the songs, creating an American equivalent of opera. When Hart is watching the new show, he is viewing his own obsolescence. His reaction is complicated by his personal demons, including a midget-like stature (a miniscule 147cm or 4’10”) that complicates his desire for a romantic partner and his descent into alcoholism. The film examines him over the course of the opening night.
1/9/26 (Fri)
Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s 1997 film shows the influence of his mentor Kiarostami, who penned the director’s The White Balloon just two years earlier, in the breaking of the fourth wall. A simple story about a girl whose mother fails to pick her up from school, which takes up the first 40% or so of the movie, becomes something very different when the seven-year-old actress becomes miffed for some reason and, throwing off her costume, refuses to film the final scene. As she storms off, she forgets to remove her body mike, so the director, having film to spare, orders the crew to continue following and filming her as she maneuvers Tehran’s busy streets.
12/27/25 (Sat)
Hayakawa Chie’s 2022 work, amazingly her first feature film, is a beautiful and understated rumination on an aging society, an acute issue in Japan. The government has crafted a sweet-sounding plan offering incentives for those 75 and older to, in effect, kill themselves. Those who sign up receive a ¥100,000 cash payment (rendered oddly as $1,000 in the subtitles) and can spend their final hours wining and dining in a lovely facility, where they will then be gassed to death. Cremation and other costs are completely covered as well. While the program is nominally voluntary, the attraction is strong for lonely old people with nowhere else to turn, and there is considerable pressure to ease the burden on society by slipping peacefully away rather than dragging on unproductively for decades more.
12/12/25 (Fri)
A Miike Takashi film of 2025. An elementary school teacher is accused by a mother of abusing her son. We first witness a home visit by the teacher, who spouts racist comments about the mixed-blood kid and disparages his classroom behavior in outrageous terms. The mother is incensed and complains to the principal, who insists that the teacher apologize just to get rid of her.
Then, in imitation of Koreeda’s far superior Monster, it replays the event in question from the teacher’s perspective. Continue reading
12/3/25 (Wed)
I hadn’t seen this version of the film in decades, so I took advantage of the 10am classic movie series sponsored by Toho Cinemas to see it on the big screen. I especially wanted to refresh my memory after Spielberg’s remake a few years back. Continue reading
10/31/25 (Fri)
The Tokyo Film Festival was screening three films this year in honor of Shinoda Masahiro following his recent death. Shinoda has his highs and lows, and the selection reflected both sides, the former in Pale Flower, an undisputed masterpiece, and the latter in the ridiculous Demon Pond. So I chose this adaptation of a classic Chikamatsu Monzaemon piece, which I’ve seen on stage in both Bunraku puppet drama and Kabuki. Shinoda’s last Monzaemon work, Double Suicide, felt like a way-too-purposeful attempt to look avant-garde and totally cool, so I went to this warily.
The play is beautifully written, but the tangled web of societal obligations makes it hard to take seriously at times. I almost wondered if Chikamatsu was making fun of that. Gonza is a spearman in the employ of a large clan. He is informally engaged to a woman, but Sai, the wife of a famed tea master, wants to marry him off to her daughter. A mixture of misunderstandings and evil intentions leads to accusations of adultery, and the codified structure of society proves impossible to overcome.
10/28/25 (Tues)
A cabaret singer taking refuge in a convent with nutty nuns – but we’re a long way from Sister Act. Almodóvar’s 1983 film was his third feature but the first to win wide notice. The Spanish title refers to a Catholic service that takes place in the three days before Easter, commemorating Jesus’ suffering and death through a gradual extinguishing of candles and ending in total darkness.
A cabaret singer’s abusive boyfriend dies from some bad heroin that he scored for her. Afraid of the police, she takes refuge in a local convent, the Order of the Humiliated Redeemers. She is given the room of a former woman who ran away to serve in Africa, where she was eaten by cannibals. The latter’s newly widowed mother, the Marquess, has decided to withdraw her support from the convent, leaving it in dire financial straits.
Mother Superior is a masturbating, cocaine-snorting, would-be lesbian with fantasies about the new recruit. She believes humiliation is the only way to redemption (“Man will not be saved until he realizes he is the most despicable being ever created”) and thus gives her followers degrading names: Sister Rat of the Sewers writes trashy novels under a penname based on the stories of former penitents; Sister Sh*t is haunted by guilt from a murder for which Mother Superior lied in order to save her, and often drops LSD (the hallucinogenic view from her perspective is hilarious); Sister Damned is fond of playing the bongo for her pet tiger, a surrogate child; and Sister Snake makes fashionable dresses for the Virgin Mary statues along with the chain-smoking priest, who she secretly loves (he adores the costumes for My Fair Lady but is apparently straight).
sekenbanashi 