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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Shadow of Fire (火影)

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  • 火影 (Shadow of Fire)

11/9/23 (Thurs)

The latest overwrought work by provocateur Tsukamoto Shinya. The Foreign Correspondents Club was showing a subtitled version for the overseas press, and free sounded like the right price. That proved optimistic. There was an after-talk by the director (who produces his own films – no one else will), but we opted for dinner instead.

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Good (National Theatre Live)

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  • Good (National Theatre Live)

10/22/23 (Sun)

I was jet lagged when I saw this superb production of C.P. Taylor’s 1981 classic in London almost precisely one year earlier, so I wasn’t going to miss the chance to catch the NT Live recording. As Holocaust dramas are not necessarily a big thing in Japan, I figured tickets would be easy to come by and booked that morning, only to discover that the theater was nearly sold out; I was lucky to get two adjoining seats. I presume that’s due to the presence of David Tennant  in the lead role, though I’m not sure how they know him here.

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My Darling Clementine

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  • My Darling Clementine

10/7/23 (Sat)

John Ford’s 1946 version of the OK Corral gunfight shows a civilization in the throes of creation, a community coming together in a spartan desert territory as it sets the laws and values that it wants to live by. Much the same process was explored in the musical Oklahoma! just three years earlier.

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Unfaithfully Yours

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  • Unfaithfully Yours

10/5/23 (Thurs)

Unfunnily Yours is more like it. Preston Sturges’ 1948 film was apparently his last critical success after a string of flops, though it was a commercial failure at the time. That was partly due to the untimely suicide of Rex Harrison’s real-life suffering mistress, which creepily paralleled one of the plot points, and the studio didn’t help things by shifting strategy and advertising the black comedy as a thriller. It’s been reevaluated since and appears on many lists of best-ever comedies; it’s one of Tarantino’s 11 favorite films. Not on mine.

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Purlie Victorious (Gone Are the Days!)

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  • Purlie Victorious (Gone Are the Days!)

9/29/23 (Fri)

This 1963 film, which I never knew existed, popped up when I was checking out articles about the present Broadway revival. It’s a film of the Broadway original from two years earlier with many of the members of the original cast, including writer Ossie Davis and his wife Ruby Dee. It’s nominally about a black preacher in Georgia who recruits a random woman from Dothan to impersonate his late cousin in order to win an inheritance, figuring the white guy in control of the funds won’t be able to tell the women apart. Naturally events soon spin out of control. But as with any good satire, it’s about a lot more than its story.

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Lights in the Dusk

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  • Lights in the Dusk

9/25/23 (Sun)

The third offering (2006) in Kaurismäki’s Finland/Loser Trilogy. The Finnish title Laitakaupungin Valot is a takeoff on Chaplin’s City Lights (Kaupungin Valot), apparently meaning something like “Lights from the Other Side of the Tracks” – if that’s true, maybe they should have gone with an equally pun-filled Seedy Lights or Shitty Lights (pardon the language) or Far-From-the-City Lights. Both films end with the hapless protagonist getting out of prison and an uplifting clasp of hands with a woman. But the resemblance pretty much ends there, and maybe the English titlists were wise to ignore the pun.

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The Man Without a Past

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  • The Man Without a Past

10/1/23 (Sun)

This 2002 film is the second in Kaurismäki’s so-called Finland/Loser Trilogy. The films are only loosely tied together by theme; I accidentally watched the third one before this, but it didn’t really matter. Actually it seems that any of his films can fall into this category, so not sure what prompted the trilogy label.

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Drifting Clouds

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  • Drifting Clouds

9/23/23 (Sat)

The title of Aki Kaurismäki’s 1996 feature, the first in his so-called Finland (or Loser) Trilogy, has the whiff of Naruse’s Floating Clouds and even the same Japanese title (浮き雲 here vs. Naruse’s浮雲). However, the bleakness of the Japanese film is nowhere evident in Kaurismäki, whose dry presentation and pokerfaced characters deliver a black comedy with an unexpectedly upbeat ending.

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Japan’s fumbling National Theater grasps for relevance

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  • January 4, 2024

Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s largest dailies, recently published my article on the government’s scandalous mismanagement of the nation’s soon-to-be-rebuilt National Theater, dedicated to Kabuki and other traditional performing arts. The theater’s travails have been widely noted in the Japanese press, but there has been little analysis of why the troubles have arisen or how to resolve them. I offer my view below.

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20231228/p2a/00m/0op/003000c

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