Yoyo

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  • Yoyo

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.

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A Legend or Was It? (死闘の伝説)

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  • 死闘の伝説 (A Legend or Was It?)

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.

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Moulin Rouge (ムーランルージュ)

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  • ムーランルージュ (Moulin Rouge) 

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 →

Immortal Love (永遠の人)

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  • 永遠の人 (Immortal Love)

8/11/23 (Fri)

The Japanese title of Kinoshita Keisuke’s 1961 film is literally “the everlasting person”, which would at first glance imply a soul mate or life partner. Here, however, it is used ironically to indicate someone that the protagonist can never shake off – the memory of her true love, the reality of her spiteful husband, or possibly the resentful person that she herself has become. The British title, Bitter Spirit, comes closer to the sense of this relentlessly bleak film.

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The Killing

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  • The Killing

7/30/23 (Sun)

Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 film was his third feature (though he refuses to acknowledge the first, like Biden’s seventh grandchild) but the first to gather some acclaim, at least critically if not commercially. He’s credited with the screenplay, but Jim Thompson seems to have contributed the key dialogue and cynical tone of the characters.

Johnny (Sterling Hayden) comes out of a five-year prison stretch immediately plotting one last heist before his retirement, aiming to relieve a racetrack of $2 million in bets (“Five years have taught me one thing, if nothing else: Anytime you take a chance, you better be sure the rewards are worth the risk. Because they could put you away just as fast for a $10 heist as they can for a million dollar job”). That starts proceedings off with a bang. He gathers a team of insiders and concocts a scheme in which the lead horse will be shot (preventing the winnings from being paid out), a man will cause a fight in the bar (allowing another to slip unnoticed into the back room), the cash will be taken at gunpoint from the betting area, and a truck will quickly take the cash away. Trouble arises when one of the co-conspirators blabs to his wife, who immediately calls upon her lover to steal the money for themselves. The end result is not pretty, forcing Johnny to attempt to spirit the cash away by plane. That effort comes undone in a most ingenious way. The dispirited Johnny doesn’t even try to get away at that point, shrugging, “What’s the difference?”

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Roningai (浪人街)

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  • 浪人街 (Roningai)

7/23/23 (Sun), home, w/ Shinpei, 4:30-6:30p

Kuroki Kazuo’s 1990 film is the fourth remake of a silent-era epic by the legendary Makino Masahiro. Masahiro himself was supposed to helm the work as a tribute to his father Shozo, known as the founder of Japanese film, but became sick and passed the mantle on for some reason to Kuroki, not known for period pieces. Unfortunately his lack of experience shows.

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The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel)

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  • The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel)

7/20/23 (Thurs)

Having just seen Japan’s first full-length talkie, The Neighbor’s Wife and Mine (マダムと女房), which is best unmentioned, I decided to revisit Germany’s first major sound film after many decades. I never knew that Josef von Sternberg filmed his 1930 classic in German and English simultaneously; I had always assumed the English version was dubbed, but in fact the main actors were all English speakers and redid all of the dialogue scenes and songs in both languages. Both versions were being streamed, so I watched half of each. The English is a bit shorter – maybe the actors weren’t up to the material, or the material was deemed unsuitable for the US market. The German version is generally considered superior as the actors are more comfortable in their dialogue (some speak German in both). Still, the differences weren’t overly evident.

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A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

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  • A Look Back: La Cage Aux Folles (musical)

With the opening of the UK’s latest revival of La Cage Aux Folles at the wonderful Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, I figured it was a good time to rerun my modest rewrite. The musical is great fun, but I’ve always been bothered by its preachiness. It shakes a virtual finger to lecture us (rather than subtly lead us) to love gays and hate bigots and so forth. As I noted, the fact that the message seems so obvious “is partly a function of the changing times, a trend that the musical itself helped bring about”. But the show is looking more like a period piece than the pure farce intended in the French play and film. The French are clearly much more relaxed about sexual matters like this – the original work dates from the 1970s, when openly gay-themed shows in English were pretty rare – and their approach was more cunning in underlining the couple’s basic humanity. Continue reading →

A Look Back: Madame Butterfly (Japanese production)

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The NY Times ran a typically overwrought article today entitled, “Reimagining ‘Madame Butterfly,’ With Asian Creators at the Helm“. It talks as usual of the piece as problematic and describes how the Asian community in the US is trying to address that. It mentions in passing a production by Japanese director Amon Miyamoto, which I discussed a few years back. I also touched upon Japan’s own relationship with the work, which remains one of the nation’s most frequently performed operas. Here is a rerun of that piece.
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May 26, 2020

The iconoclastic Japanese stage director Amon Miyamoto has a problem with Madame Butterfly. The stereotypical image of a spurned geisha? The sexual exploitation of a 15-year-old girl? A warped Western view of his country?

No, he feels that the opera mistreats the American.

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The Sword of Doom (大菩薩峠 )

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  • 大菩薩峠 (The Sword of Doom)

6/27/23 (Tues)

Okamoto Kihachi is known for his offbeat approach to his material, so I wasn’t ready for this decidedly bleak 1966 film, which was apparently imposed upon him by the studio. The Japanese title Daibosatsu Toge (The Great Bodhisattva Pass), referring historically to an important mountain pass on the road to Edo, was also the title of an epic 41-volume novel that was published over a 30-year period and had already been filmed multiple times. The name of the peak, these days a relatively easy hike not far from Tokyo, implies the border between this world and a more exalted state and was presumably used in the book as a metaphor. It’s hard to judge that here since the intended trilogy ended with the first film after flopping in Japan (though it did better overseas). Okamoto soon returned to form in the wacky Kill!, but this work has gained in reputation over the years.

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Samurai Spy (異聞猿飛佐助)

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  • 異聞猿飛佐助 (Samurai Spy)

6/25/23 (Sun), home, 4:30-6:15p

Shinoda Masahiro’s 1965 Ibun Sarutobi Sasuke (literally The Extraordinary Tale of Sarutobi Sasuke) revolves around the fictional ninja character who had already been a staple of manga, film and television for decades. Supposedly inspired by a real person (or persons), Sasuke is the most famous member of an invented group of ten ninja who sided with the Toyotomi clan in its unsuccessful battle against the Shogun. He is often portrayed with magical powers and is sometimes said to have been raised by apes – Sarutobi means “leaping monkey” or “flying monkey”. The English title is misleading in that respect since the subject is really ninja, but it falls in line with the predilection for the word “samurai” those days in other drastically renamed Japanese period films (Samurai Rebellion, Samurai Vendetta, Vendetta for a Samurai). That’s Hollywood, I guess.

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