Midnight

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  • Midnight

2/2/25 (Sun)

Mitchell Leisen’s underrated 1939 film is one of the best screwball comedies ever, distinguished by a sparkling script by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett in their sophomore effort as a team. All character traits and plot developments are logical, if nutty, and the pieces fit together beautifully. It boasts the funniest repartee since Trouble in Paradise, and its tone is dry but not as cynical as their later works. Leisen’s direction is flawless, moving with buoyant pace throughout in complete service to the story.

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Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島)

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  • 宮本武蔵完結編 決闘巌流島 (Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island)

1/31/25 (Fri)

The final film (1956) in Inagaki’s Musashi trilogy (here are Parts 1 and 2) is by far the most straightforward, disposing of most pointless subplots as the story builds relentlessly from the start to the climactic duel with Sasaki Kojiro. The island, known in the film by its old moniker Funajima, was later renamed after Kojiro’s Ganryu fighting school due to the fame of the real-life battle in 1612. The trilogy thus stops at the midpoint in the career of the 28-year-old Musashi, who remained active as a warrior, artist, and author (most notably The Book of Five Rings) until his death in 1645.

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Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (宮本武蔵)

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  • 宮本武蔵 (Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto)

1/26/25 (Sun), home

Inagaki Hiroshi’s 1954 remake of his now-lost wartime epic about the legendary swordsman, adapted from Eiji Yoshikawa’s popular 1930s novel. The novel is a highly romanticized look at the elusive Miyamoto’s life, where the known facts are thin on the ground, and has done much to establish his swashbuckling image. The film is the first in a trilogy, as made clear in the English title. It proved a huge hit both at home and abroad. It was honored by Hollywood at the Academy Awards as the year’s best foreign-language film. I don’t think it was even the best Japanese-language film that year (its competition included The Seven Samurai, Sansho the Bailiff, Chikamatsu Story, Late Chrysanthemums, and Blue Ribbon and Kinejun winner Twenty-Four Eyes), but no arguing with success.

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Love Never Dies (Tokyo)

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  • Love Never Dies (Tokyo)

1/17/25 (Fri), Tokyo

This show, a sequel of sorts to Phantom of the Opera, flopped big time in London and again in a significantly rewritten version in Australia; it never made it to New York. The revised show has had more success in Tokyo, where it has played on several occasions since 2015. The theater in this opening-night performance appeared nearly full. The lead roles are all double- or triple-cast. For the opening, veterans Ichimura Masachiku (now well in his 70s) and Hirahata Ayaka are back as the Phantom and Christine. Interestingly the show is not being produced by Gekidan Shiki, which has made the Japanese Phantom an immense success for the past three decades, but by the smaller Horipro.

The setting is said to be ten years after the original musical (though there’s some confusion in the timeframe). The Phantom, who was left for dead in the original, has somehow survived with the help of Madame Giry and Meg and has moved from the Paris Opera to Coney Island – a good metaphor for the musical’s own journey. Continue reading →

A House in the Quarter (五番町夕霧楼)

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  • 五番町夕霧楼 (A House in the Quarter)

1/14/25 (Tues)

Tasaka Tomotaka’s 1963 version of Minakami Tsutomu’s novel was being shown as part of a celebration of actress Sakuma Yoshiko, whose performance in this weepy transformed her virginal image and propelled her to stardom. It offers a rather sanitized look at a brothel full of happy hookers overseen by a kindhearted madam. While this was hardly Japan’s first work about brothels, its salacious marketing strategy and portrayal of sex, however mild by today’s standards, raised eyebrows at the time and (along with Imamura Shohei’s The Insect Woman) triggered an “erotica boom” in Japan’s film industry.

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Rocketman

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  • Rocketman

1/12/25 (Sun)

Dexter Fletcher’s 2019 film biography of Elton John from childhood to his recovery from drug addiction some 30 years ago. It’s pretty standard fare for this type of film, starting with a difficult upbringing by disinterested parents to a success that he was not prepared for and ultimately to redemption.

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The Ghost of Yotsuya Parts 1 & 2 (新釈四谷怪談)

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  • 新釈四谷怪談 Parts 1 & 2 (The Ghost of Yotsuya)

1/11/25 (Thurs)

Kinoshita’s two-part 1949 work is one of more than two dozen film versions of the evergreen Kabuki classic Yotsuya Kaidan since the silent era. The first eight minutes or so of Part 2 simply repeat the final minutes of the first half, so I assume that this was originally intended as a single film, broken up either for excessive length or just to make an extra buck (the second one opened in theaters just two weeks after the first). The original Kabuki version was also split into two days, mixed with scenes from Chushingura (it was a spinoff of the latter), so I suppose it follows tradition in a sense. In any case, the film could and should be reedited into a single 2.5-hour film and should certainly be seen that way.

The Japanese title is literally “Yotsuya Ghost Story: A New Interpretation”. New is right – for one thing, the ghost story has no ghosts. Oiwa appears only as a figment of the guilt-ridden Iemon’s imagination rather than an actual spirit as in the play. The film cleverly has Tanaka Kinuya playing both Oiwa and Oiwa’s sister Osode, so that the latter represents for Iemon a haunting manifestation of Oiwa after her murder.

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Stereophonic

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  • Stereophonic

1/5/25 (Sun), Broadway

I had hesitated to see this widely praised show, the most Tony-nominated play in history, because of the obscene fees tacked on to the ticket price on some sites. I eventually managed to find something closer to reasonable as the date got closer, but the whole process is exhausting. Worse, I overheard the guy directly behind me saying that he got his ticket for an even lower price for essentially the same seat. Something doesn’t feel right about that.

The show, set in a Sausalito recording studio in the 1970s, is about the making of an album by a newly formed band combining a three-person British rock group with an American duo. That sounds an awful lot like Fleetwood Mac, though the writer denies it. In any case, the show not only covers the mechanics of creating an album but the dynamics among the players, where relationships already on the edge are being further frayed by the clash of egos. The problem is that musicians may be artists but are human too, and the ideal of leaving one’s musical mark for posterity can jar with the ephemeral emotional needs of the people involved.

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A Look Back: Premium tickets: Don’t bring us your poor

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At this point, Broadway may as well rename itself Martha’s Vineyard. The NY Times reports this weekend that the still-previewing production of Othello with megastars Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal has a top price of $921 for a single seat and has attracted an average — average! — ticket price of $361.90. That’s before the show has even opened or been reviewed. Its lowest-priced ticket for full-view seats is $197, and even those seats are reportedly scarcer than usual.

Yes, it’s a star vehicle, the producers are simply responding to demand, costs are high, there are other lower-priced shows, and so on. But basically this is a show for the rich; the rest of America need not apply. While it’s heartening in a way that Shakespeare can command the highest prices on Broadway, the message that this is sending is going to drive away a large segment of the population, an ominous development for the industry. People may go to specific shows, and tourists will always be there. But is there going to be anything like a theatergoing habit in the future? Producers have created a cost structure that is going to strangle them in the end. Continue reading →

Maybe Happy Ending

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  • Maybe Happy Ending

1/4/25 (Sat), Broadway

Korean culture, having triumphed in music (K-Pop), television (Squid Game) and film (Parasite), has now reached Broadway with this oddball musical set in Seoul in the near future. I had no intention of seeing musicals on this trip given the exorbitant prices and way too many disappointments, but the Asian origins proved irresistible, especially after its favorable critical reception. Word of mouth seems to be turning this quiet show into a sleeper hit. A Japanese version played in Tokyo a few years back, and I wish now that I had caught it.

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