10/20/23 (Fri)
Tod Browning’s 1932 film is usually described as a horror flick, but that doesn’t feel quite right. It deals with a deformed cast – Siamese twins, a man without a torso, another without arms or legs, pinheads, dwarfs – but they are not monsters: they are real people with normal feelings and emotions. The title is deceptive, as it’s not clear at the end just who the real freaks are.
10/29/23 (Sun), Tokyo Film Festival
A female judoka from Iran has a good shot at winning the gold at the world championships in Tbilisi, achieving the dream to which she has devoted her life. Blessed with size, strength, technique and deep determination, she quickly disposes of her opponents in what seems an unstoppable path to the finals and glory for her and her country. Things change dramatically, however, when it looks as if she might face an Israeli opponent in the finals. She comes under intense pressure from her government to throw the match, including threats to her family and her future. A fan asking for a selfie proves a government agent who shows her in a video that her father back home has been taken into custody. Her coach, warned by the government that she too will lose everything if she does not stop her protégé, tries desperately to persuade the girl to give up her ambitions and bow to reality, creating a serious rift between them. The coach herself, a former star, is known to have suffered an injury years earlier just before a big match against an Israeli that might have made her a world champion – but the judoka now comes to wonder if that was really an injury. The judoka reaches her own decision, and events spin out in an unexpected way.
This superb Israeli-Iranian co-production (you read that right), playing at the Tokyo Film Festival, is less a sports film than a thrilling suspense story set in the Japanese world of judo. Continue reading
This column from 2014 provides some background for the horrors inflicted by Hamas on Israel this past weekend. I said regarding the tunnels that Israel “should not have to wait for its citizens to be killed to rid itself of this horrific threat”, and that applies as well to Hamas itself. The wanton slaughter of teenagers attending a “concert for peace” speaks for itself, not to mention the stripping and parading and spitting on captives and corpses and the depraved celebration of death. I would like to say that the utter barbarism of the terrorist group’s latest actions has exposed it for what it is, but its nature has been sadly clear for years. It’s time for Israel to deal with the issue definitively.
This is being billed as the last Bunraku puppet drama in Tokyo’s current money-losing National Theater, which will shut down for reconstruction at the end of next month. The government plans to replace the aging theater, built in the mid 1960s as a showcase for Kabuki, Bunraku and other Japanese traditional performing arts, with a large hotel/retail/theater complex, a PFI project reportedly due to cost some ¥80 billion. However, the plan hit a big speed bump last month when it failed for a second time to attract a single bidder, i.e., private developers see no commercial prospects for a building of this type in that location. Kabuki has consistently failed to draw audiences in recent years, while Bunraku, the theater’s one bright spot, only visits from its Osaka base for 2-3 weeks each quarter, which is insufficient to sustain the property financially. The government has not explained why it thinks that rebuilding the theater in this location will attract Kabuki audiences who aren’t showing up now, and as the project is supposed to take an inordinate 6-7 years to complete, the big question for Bunraku, which will be relegated in the interim to a distant corner of the city, is whether there will be any fans left at that point. This is less death than suicide. Continue reading
9/18/23 (Mon), Yokohama
A Japanese production of this lesser known 1980 drama by Arthur Miller based on his own family’s experience during the Depression. Continue reading
9/3/23 (Sun)
This is the final film in Kiarostami’s so-called Koker Trilogy. The second was a recreation of the director’s search for the stars of the first film after the deadly earthquake in the region. This one deals with trouble that the director had when making the second film, especially that between the man and woman who played the newlyweds in that film’s most memorable scene. The unplanned trilogy is like Matryoshka dolls emerging from inside one another.
8/30/23 (Wed)
The alternative English title of this 1992 work is “Life and Nothing Else”, which appears (courtesy of Google Translate) to be the literal translation of the Persian. The official English title is taken from a line in the film.
The director revisited the location of his 1987 film Where Is the Friend’s House? after the colossal earthquake that decimated the area in 1990 to confirm if the children in the film were safe. His experience led him to turn that quest itself into a documentary of sorts. Continue reading
8/27/23 (Sun)
I happened upon Kiarostami’s 1987 work after seeing his fascinating Close-Up from a few years later. The devastating 1990 earthquake in Iran apparently led to two follow-up films, producing what is called the Koker Trilogy after the town in which they’re set. But obviously that wasn’t planned when this film was made.
8/21/23 (Mon)
Karel Kachyňa’s 1970 work, co-written by him with his long-time activist screen partner Jan Procházka based on the latter’s story, came at the wrong end of the Soviet invasion that put a halt to the Prague Spring and, consequently, to the subversive films of the Czech New Wave. Procházka’s good relations with the president were no help in preventing this film from being banned even before its release. It did not appear in public until 1989; it was entered into competition for a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival the next year.
A bickering couple right out of Virginia Woolf, here the deputy minister of construction and his floozy wife, return from a party function late at night to find strange happenings at their home. Continue reading
8/17/23 (Thurs)
Pierre Étaix, who wrote, directed and starred in this 1965 comedy, is apparently considered a comic genius in France alongside the better known Jacques Tati. He had already won an Academy Award for Best Short Film by this time, but a legal dispute with his distributor prevented his full-length films from being seen by the world until well into the 21st century. This film is held to be his masterpiece. The English title seems to be Yo Yo, but I’m going with the French in this case. It refers both to the main character and his favorite toy.
8/13/23 (Sun)
Kinoshita Keisuke tries his best to be cynical in this 1963 film about a small village in Hokkaido in the closing weeks of WWII, but his sentimental streak inevitably intrudes. The unfortunate English title is sometimes rendered more literally as Legend of a Duel to the Death.
8/12/23 (Sat), Tokyo
The two-month run was completely sold out well in advance of the opening. I was curious about the show because of the unusual use of music – not the original songs but the brief clips from well-known numbers that sprang up so often throughout the show. Those range from “Nature Boy” and “The Sound of Music” to “Lady Marmalade” and “Material Girl”, encompassing standards, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Queen and more, and I’m sure there were more up-to-date numbers that I simply didn’t recognize. Some were just a few seconds long, quoting a line or two, while others, most notably Elton John’s “Your Song”, were quoted extensively.
I was wondering if the older numbers would even be familiar to Japanese audiences, especially in the age group that they’re catering to. Because the songs are crucial to the action, they have all been translated into Japanese. As with Mamma Mia, the songs are fun to hear in a different context, but that assumes a knowledge of them in the first place; we know instantly what the song is referring to and thus respond to that memory, since the songs are rarely played in full. Translating them also takes the fun out of it. That said, Mamma Mia has been hugely popular here as everywhere, so what do I know?
The show, it turns out, is tremendous fun. Continue reading
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