Category Archives: Film

Conflagration (炎上)

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  • 炎上 (Conflagration), 1/23/11 (Sun), Tokyo

Ichikawa Kon’s 1958 film version of Mishima’s then-recent novel Kinkakuji (The Golden Pavilion), a fictionalization of the notorious incident just a few years earlier when a crazed monk burned down the centuries-old structure. The novel is filled with ruminations about the nature of beauty versus reality by a narrator isolated from society by his own insecurities over his crippling stutter. His image of Kinkakuji (called here by a different name), described by his father as almost other-worldly, sets him up for a devastating letdown when he encounters the actual dilapidated structure. The temple in his mind represents an ideal that, when violated, prompts him to destroy the former to protect the latter.

The film can’t begin to compete at that level, but it is a dutiful recounting of the main events and is highly effective on its own terms. Continue reading →

Spielberg’s (!) West Side Story

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  • Spielberg’s (!) West Side Story 

Steven Spielberg’s intended film remake of West Side Story is apparently a go, for better or worse. While the original 1957 stage show was a modest success, it was the smash 1961 film that put the musical on the map with the second-highest grosses of the year and ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture. The love was not shared by its creators, who did not approve of the numerous revisions in song order and such, and it has not aged particularly well, coming off today as rather stagy despite its on-location shooting. Still, it is an historic work with a perfect cast, that amazing score and the iconic Jerome Robbins choreography, making the challenge of a remake formidable. The innovative approaches of recent musical films like Sweeney Todd and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (as well as the NBC Live musicals) do suggest a new path for musical film, and a creative look at old material is always welcome. (The stage show itself could stand some polishing if the Robbins estate would ever allow it.)

So why am I skeptical? Let us count the ways.  Continue reading →

Get Out

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  • Get Out

11/10/17 (Fri), Tokyo

A clever horror flick set in the here and now (like right now – the characters wish Obama could have had a third term) with a great premise and sly social commentary expertly woven in. A black guy visits his white girlfriend’s large family estate in what looks to be an updated Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (“You did tell them I was black…?” “Umm, don’t worry, they’ll love you”). But his isolation in their snow-white society and the clumsy attempts by whites to be hip (“I love Tiger Woods”) are the least of his worries as events take a sinister turn. Continue reading →

Battles Without Honor and Humanity (仁義なき戦い)

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  • 仁義なき戦い (Battles Without Honor and Humanity)

11/9/17 (Thurs)

Duty is the great theme of traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, with characters typically forced to choose between their all-important loyalty to their lord or society and a betrayal of that duty with an act of compassion or emotion. Compassion often wins out but only at great cost, usually death. The best known example of a pure loyalty tale is the ever-popular The 47 Loyal Retainers (忠臣蔵), where duty to a murdered lord leads to a meticulously planned, suicidal act of revenge by his former retainers. That sense of loyalty carries over as well into typical samurai and yakuza dramas, where duty is often itself the point.

The 1973 film Battles Without Honor and Humanity (the name would be punchier without the “humanity”’; also known by the much better title The Yakuza Papers) doesn’t just puncture that ideal but renders it a useless relic of a lost age. Continue reading →

Welcome Back, Mr McDonald (ラジオの時間 )

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  • ラジオの時間 (Welcome Back, Mr McDonald)

11/4/17 (Sat)

The prolific stage/film writer Mitani Koki has his good days [The Last Laugh (笑いの大学), Twelve Gentle Japanese (12人の優しい日本人)] and bad (most of his output), and this 1997 film, based on his 1993 stage show, is one of the latter. Continue reading →

Double Suicide (心中天網島 )

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  • Film: 心中天網島 (Double Suicide)

10/12/17 (Thurs)

Double Suicide (1969) is Masahiro Shinoda’s highly stylized take on Chikamatsu Monzaemon’s 18th-century Bunraku (puppet theater) masterpiece The Love Suicides at Amijima. Chikamatsu does not emerge from this well.

Continue reading →

Hana-Bi

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  • Hana-Bi

6/24/15 (Wed)

I wasn’t wild about the idea of a Kitano (“Beat”) Takeshi film given its reputation for over-the-top violence, but Hana-Bi is one of several flicks by him – “by” in a big sense, meaning directed, written and starring – that are widely considered modern classics, especially overseas. So I figured it was about time to check it out.   Continue reading →

The Closet; Loose Cannons

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  • Le Placard (The Closet), 5/31/15 (Sun)
  • Mine Viganti (Loose Cannons), 6/6/15 (Sat)

A mention in a newspaper column prompted me to look for The Closet. I tried to buy a download on Amazon and Apple, but they made it so difficult that I just watched it on YouTube.

An accountant in a large company is so dull as to be almost invisible. He is ignored by his colleagues, and neither his ex-wife nor his teenage son will return his calls. Furthermore, he overhears talk that he is going to be axed by the firm. Depressed and lonely, he contemplates jumping off his building. A neighbor aims to help by concocting a scheme: he anonymously mails the company a doctored image of the guy in a leather suit with his hands all over another guy, strongly implying that he is gay. That apparent revelation makes it impossible for the company to fire him, and more than that, makes him suddenly an object of fascination for the entire firm.  Continue reading →

Silent films: Kid Commotion, The Dawning Sky (子宝騒動、明け行く空 )

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  • Silent films: 子宝騒動、明け行く空 (Kid Commotion, The Dawning Sky)

5/19/15 (Tues), Tokyo

These were silent films by Torajiro Saito, evidently known in his day as film studio Shochiku’s “king of comedy”. They were narrated by a female benshi, Akiko Sasaki, who sat at the side of the screen and voiced all the roles as well as narrating non-dialogue sections in her own words. The music was newly composed and played live on a keyboard. The setup directly recalled (and perhaps stemmed from) Japan’s Bunraku puppet theater, where the narrator and musician sit in full view of the audience on a raised platform beside the stage and give voice to the voiceless puppets. The mixture of film and live performance seemed very modern somehow, so it’s interesting to note that Japan was doing it nearly a century ago.   Continue reading →

Two Sergio Leone classics

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  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 8/14/17 (Mon)
  • Once Upon a Time in the West, 8/19/17 (Sat)

These films, said to be the pinnacle of the Italian “spaghetti Westerns” (known oddly in Japan as “macaroni Westerns”), had been strongly recommended by a European friend. I was skeptical. The Western is probably the most distinctive film genre of the American cinema given the phenomenon at its core: the vastness of the landscapes, the lure of uncultivated and unknown territories, the opportunity to create new societies from nothing but soil and daring – there is nothing remotely comparable in the European experience. The bulk of settlers were not running from persecution or war but, piqued by curiosity or ambition or boredom, toward the infinite possibilities of a new life that they themselves would have to build. The courage of those willing to plunge into the void on the basis of sheer hope is a situation that lends itself to broad archetypal characters, and the best of the Westerns reflect this sense of a land still coming together, fueled by an optimism built into the American psyche that anything is possible. I was curious how a non-American would approach this.

The results were fascinating. The films, both by the Italian director Sergio Leone, reminded me of 19th-century Kabuki writer Kawatake Mokuami, whose tales of dried-up samurai and low-life villains punctured the heroics of classic Kabuki drama.   Continue reading →

Onibaba (鬼婆)

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  • 鬼婆 (Onibaba)

7/11/17 (Tues), DVD

This singular 1964 film by Shindo Kaneto about two country women scraping out a life in the turmoil of 14th-century Japan was described to me as a horror flick, but that description doesn’t seem quite right. Horror can be easily forgotten once the thrill is over. That is not the case with this movie.  Continue reading →