Category Archives: Film

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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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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Café Society

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  • Café Society

1/5/24 (Fri)

Woody Allen’s 2016 work is pretty standard fare for him. The young Woody type, here named Leonard, moves from NY to Hollywood seeking a job with his uncle, a powerful film producer. He falls in love with a down-to-earth girl, but her problem – she has a boyfriend. Bigger problem – her boyfriend turns out to be the uncle. After some back and forth, she goes for the money. The disillusioned Leonard goes back to NY and works at his gangster brother’s nightclub. He becomes a terrific schmoozer and meets another beautiful woman, who he marries. Then his ex turns up at the club with the uncle, now her husband. She has taken on the airs of a Hollywood insider, not at all the simple girl she was before. Nevertheless, Leonard can’t stop thinking about what might have been…

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Kuroneko (藪の中の黒猫)

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  • 藪の中の黒猫 (Kuroneko)

1/9/24 (Tues)

Shindo Kaneto’s 1968 horror film is less scary than it is spooky and moody. It takes place in Kyoto near Rajomon (known later as Rashomon), the massive gate that had become a dilapidated structure by the late Heian Period when, judging from the clothing and the presence of Lord Raiko, the movie is set. The gate was by this time known as a haunted spot good for disposing of corpses and unwanted infants. (The film’s full Japanese title, “Black Cat [or Cats] in a Grove”, perhaps intentionally recalls Akutagawa’s short story In a Grove that was the basis for Kurosawa’s Rashomon. I’m not sure why they chose Kuroneko as the English title rather than the translation, Black Cat.) Cats are supernatural beings in Japanese folklore in the form of “bakeneko” (ghost cats), so the notion of felines lurking somewhere in the woods immediately signals something shadowy.

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The Irony of Fate (Ирония судьбы)

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  • The Irony of Fate (or Enjoy Your Bath)

1/2/24 (Tues)

This two-part Soviet television film of 1976 reportedly proved an instant success, playing to an estimated 100 million viewers, and has since become a beloved New Year’s Eve ritual all around the ex-Soviet world, many of its lines and routines instantly recognizable to Russian speakers. It’s been likened to a Russian It’s a Wonderful Life, though I’ve also seen comparisons to Annie Hall since the characters are members of the intelligentsia (the leads are a surgeon and schoolteacher) rather than common laborers. I’d never heard of it until a few days earlier but was intrigued by the premise. I found Part 1 easily on YouTube.

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7th Heaven

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  • 7th Heaven

12/29/23 (Fri)

Frank Borzage’s 1927 film, based on a play that itself ran for nearly two years on Broadway, was apparently a massive hit in its day. It won the first Academy Awards for Best Direction and Actress (it lost Best Film to Wings), spawned several remakes over the decades (including a flop musical), and turned the pairing of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell into a sensation that carried over for another 11 films. Sawato Midori, the benshi narrator who voiced all the characters live for today’s show, noted that Ozu featured a poster of this film in one of his early works, so it must have been popular in Japan as well. A benshi would have presented the movie in this way back in its day (further explained here), so the event was very much a throwback to the silent era. Sawato performed to the accompaniment of a five-piece band.

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The Song Lantern (歌行燈)

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  • 歌行燈 (The Song Lantern)

11/26/23 (Sun)

A 1943 film by Naruse based on a novel by early 20th-century author/playwright Izumi Kyoka (which has the much more evocative English title A Song by Lantern Light). Izumi’s fantasy contents wouldn’t seem an ideal subject for the more grounded Naruse, but maybe the apolitical subject matter was a way for the director to get around wartime restrictions and censorship. The film opens ominously with an exultation for the “100 million to carry the burden for bereaved households” (i.e., homes whose sons have died in battle), but the story thereafter is completely war-free. The Noh-based story has similarities with Mizoguchi’s Kabuki-based Story of the Last Chrysanthemums (1939), and while it does not reach those heights, it has its moments. Hanayagi Shotaro repeats his lead performance from the stage version, where it became one of his signature roles.

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Battle Royale (バトル・ロワイアル )

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  • バトル・ロワイアル (Battle Royale)

11/19/23 (Sun)

Fukasaku Kinji’s 2000 cult classic about kidnapped high schoolers with a mission to kill is like a manga on speed. Fukasaku is best known for Battles Without Honor and Humanity, where the violence is grounded in reality of a sort. He abandons any semblance of reality here to give us a head-spinning series of murders, suicides and humiliations as the plot itself – the violence is the film’s entire reason for being.

That said, he manages to create unique and sympathetic characters who, despite the ridiculous plot, largely feel real within the world they’re given. Continue reading →

Billie

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  • Billie

11/13/23 (Mon)

A 2019 documentary about Billie Holiday by James Erskine based on extensive interviews conducted by an obsessed fan in the 1970s for a planned biography. The book was never completed due to the author’s untimely death, which was ruled a suicide but is considered suspicious (for one thing, who puts on a pre-bed face mask before jumping out a window?) given the many shady characters she was researching in connection with the drug-addicted singer. The tapes, which sat for years before the director rediscovered them, cover not only musical luminaries like Count Basie (who the film hints had an affair with the researcher), Sylvia Syms and Charles Mingus but peripheral figures like Holiday’s psychiatrist (who called her a “psychopath”), pimp (who bragged about beating her) and her arresting officer.

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