Tag Archives: Japan

Tokyo!

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Tokyo! movie poster

 

Tokyo! is a port­man­teau film com­prised of three shorts set in the epony­mous city, all by direc­tors not them­selves from Japan: Michel Gondry and Léos Carax from France, and Bong Joon-ho from South Korea.

Gondry’s “Inte­rior Design” is based on the comic book “Cecil and Bell in New York” by Gabrielle Bell, with the action trans­posed to Tokyo. At first, her low-key love story doesn’t seem to bear Gondry’s char­ac­ter­is­tic whim­si­cal sur­re­al­ity, but by the end her col­lab­o­ra­tion with Gondry makes per­fect sense. Young cou­ple Hiroko (Ayako Fuji­tani, daugh­ter of Steven Sea­gal) and Akira (Ryo Kase) move to Tokyo, with the hope of find­ing audi­ences for Akira’s pre­ten­tious films. With­out prospects, they crash on the floor of a child­hood friend’s minis­cule flat and quickly out­stay their wel­come. Their opti­mism to find jobs and an apart­ment is quickly dashed — only Akira is suited to menial work, and they can’t even afford the city’s dingi­est rat traps. Like April (Kate Winslet) in Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Road, (read The Dork Report review) Hiroko doesn’t have much ambi­tion of her own beyond sup­port­ing her artist part­ner. After going to extra­or­di­nary lengths on Akira’s behalf with­out feel­ing appre­ci­ated, Hiroko under­goes a fan­tas­ti­cal trans­for­ma­tion and winds up lit­er­ally sup­port­ing a dif­fer­ent artist. The sig­nif­i­cance of title comes clear as she lit­er­ally becomes part of the scenery.

Ayako Fujitani and Ryo Kase in TokyoHiroko and Akira in Tokyo

In Carax’s scat­o­log­i­cal “Merde,” Tokyo is ter­ror­ized by a mad cau­casian with a twisty gin­ger beard and a rig­or­ous diet of flow­ers, yen, and cig­a­rettes. The “sewer crea­ture” (so named by the media) is rel­a­tively harm­less until he dis­cov­ers a cache of grenades in a for­got­ten World War II-era bunker buried beneath the city. Only after he uses Impe­r­ial Japan’s own weapons against them in a ter­ri­ble mas­sacre is he tracked down in his sewer lair and appre­hended. At this point, Carax’s short film becomes a court­room drama, in which eccen­tric French mag­is­trate Maître Voland (Jean-François Balmer) claims to be able to inter­pret the terrorist’s rav­ings, not least includ­ing his name: Merde (“shit”). His scan­dalous speeches incite Japan­ese self-loathing and racism, but the pop­u­lace curi­ously fails to ques­tion whether Voland is some kind of mad ven­tril­o­quist voic­ing his own prej­u­dices through the mouth of an idiot. Merde becomes a pop icon; duel­ing gangs of pick­eters chant “FREE MERDE” ver­sus “HANG MERDE.” Merde is sen­tenced to a Christ-like exe­cu­tion (which also very much resem­bles a sim­i­lar sequence in Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark), fol­lowed by a cap­tion that threat­ens a sequel set in New York.

Merde Tokyo!Free Merde!

Bong Joon-ho’s “Shak­ing Tokyo” is the tale of a unnamed hikiko­mori (shut-in) liv­ing alone in a totally ivy-covered house, finan­cially sup­ported by a father he hasn’t seen in years. The ago­ra­phobe (Teruyuki Kagawa) has become accus­tomed to a life of lone­li­ness and rig­or­ous rou­tine. One day he meets a cute pizza deliv­ery girl (Yu Aoi), out of his league in terms of looks, but appar­ently with her own share of crip­pling emo­tional issues. She passes out in his foyer dur­ing an earth­quake (not uncom­mon in the vol­canic islands of Japan), and the hikiko­mori reboots her using her self-tattooed but­tons on her body that appear to lit­er­ally con­trol her mood and health. The smit­ten loner escapes his self-created prison to seek her out again. He finds a city full of shut-ins, for whom even another earth­quake isn’t enough to keep them out of their own homes for long.

Yu Aoi and Teruyuki Kagawa in Tokyo!One large pie with extra neuroses

Offi­cial movie site: tokyothemovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Ridley Scott’s Black Rain

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Ridley Scott

Black Rain movie poster

 

Rid­ley Scott’s police thriller Black Rain (1989) opens in New York City at a time when The Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict actu­ally was a meat­pack­ing dis­trict. Tough cop Nick (Michael Dou­glas) is a ridicu­lously aggres­sive, foul-mouthed tough guy who tools around the city astride his crotch rocket. The despised Inter­nal Affairs depart­ment sus­pects him of being a bent cop­per (spoiler alert: rightly, it turns out!), and pres­sures him to name names. By sheer acci­dent, he and rookie part­ner Char­lie (Andy Gar­cia) wit­ness a Yakuza assas­si­na­tion in a Meat­pack­ing Dis­trict bar. After a thrilling chase through some vin­tage Man­hat­tan loca­tions since replaced by night­clubs, lux­ury con­dos, and The Apple Store, they man­age to appre­hend the per­pe­tra­tor. The Yakuza assas­sin Sato (Yasaku Mat­suda), being Asian in a Hol­ly­wood movie, is of course a mar­tial arts expert. Con­trived plot machi­na­tions result in Nick and Char­lie escort­ing Sato back to Japan, where­upon they imme­di­ately and embar­rass­ingly lose him. By this point, the plot has been con­structed in such a way as to raise Nick’s stakes to the high­est level pos­si­ble: the only two things that mat­ter to him, his honor and job secu­rity, depend on one task: catch­ing or killing the bad guy. If he returns to the States empty-handed, he’s almost cer­tainly to be disgraced.

Andy Garcia and Michael Douglas in Black RainAndy Gar­cia refuses to pass the edamame

In his Tokyo down­time, Nick enter­tains an uncon­sum­mated romance with gai­jin Joyce (Kate Cap­shaw). The sub­plot is a bor­ing dis­trac­tion. Joyce is a mere love inter­est in the worst sto­ry­telling sense: her char­ac­ter is not inte­grated into the main thriller plot as is the female lead in Scott’s Some­one to Watch Over Me. It strikes this Dork Reporter as some­thing of a copout on the part of Scott and screen­writ­ers Craig Bolotin and War­ren Lewis that their pro­tag­o­nist Nick goes all the way to Japan but doesn’t do as the Japan­ese men do (which is to say, Japan­ese women).

Nick and Char­lie part­ner with upright Japan­ese cop Masahiro (Ken Takakura). Cul­tures clash, and the suave Char­lie teaches the uptight Masahiro to party hearty, beat­ing the Japan­ese at their own game (that being karaōke). When Nick’s moral ambi­gu­ity becomes known, the right­eous Masahiro seems to con­vince Nick that theft of any sort is shame­ful. But in the end, it is Nick that teaches Masahiro that it’s OK to steal from crim­i­nals (in the moral uni­verse of this film, at least). I’d never say that any work of fic­tion has an oblig­a­tion to present morally-correct behav­ior (the kind of cen­sor­ship that Hol­ly­wood the­o­ret­i­cally left behind with the demise of the Pro­duc­tion Code). But Black Rain seems to present Nick’s amoral behav­ior as The Right Thing, instead of the com­pli­cated actions of an inter­est­ing com­plex character.

Michael Douglas in Black RainA back­lit Michael Dou­glas con­tem­plates a new hairdo

Scott stages a huge shootout sequence at a refin­ery, seem­ingly cho­sen for max­i­mum visual appeal (pic­ture the clouds of steam, show­ers of sparks, bursts of flame, etc.). In a kind of self-referencial closed cir­cuit, Scott’s aer­ial shots of Japan look just like Blade Runner’s futur­is­tic dystopian Los Ange­les, which was itself inspired by Tokyo. Another direct lift from Blade Run­ner: Nick dis­cov­ers sequins from Joyce’s dress at a crime scene, recall­ing the sequence in Blade Run­ner in which Deckard tracks down the ori­gin of syn­thetic snake scales — belong­ing, of course, to one of cinema’s most famous femmes fatale.

The open­ing cred­its state “In asso­ci­a­tion with Michael Dou­glas.” Dou­glas is of course a suc­cess­ful pro­ducer (for instance, One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest), but Black Rain has the feel of an ego trip. More trivia: the direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Jan de Bont was later to direct Speed.

One final cheap shot before I go. I don’t know what has dated more: the cheesy music or Michael Dou­glas’ big hair.

Buy any of these fine prod­ucts from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report:

 

Shichinin no samurai (Seven Samurai)

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Seven Samurai

 

Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samu­rai is awe­some and per­fect, and this most recent view­ing has affirmed its place among this Dork Reporter’s all-time favorites. It’s a big movie, by which I mean it makes the best use of its gen­er­ous run­ning time with just the right amount of every­thing: romance, com­edy, drama, sus­pense, and action. Nearly half the film is taken up by a mas­sive, expertly chore­o­graphed bat­tle rival­ing any­thing put to film by famous West­ern direc­tors of vio­lent spec­ta­cle like Michael Mann or Steven Spiel­berg. Long as it is, it’s about 15 min­utes shorter than Gone With the Wind but twice as epic, twice as sub­stan­tial, twice as… well, twice as good.

It is, in some ways, a sim­ple tale broadly told. A rice farm­ing vil­lage in 16th cen­tury Japan is under con­stant siege by a band of par­a­sitic ban­dits that abduct its young women and reg­u­larly steal most of its annual yield. With no gov­ern­ment or mil­i­tary to pro­tect them, the vil­lagers pool their mea­ger resources to hire seven ronin (mas­ter­less samu­rai reduced to sur­viv­ing hand-to-mouth as mer­ce­nar­ies) to fight on their behalf. The arche­typal char­ac­ters seem sim­plis­tic on the sur­face: vil­lains to boo and heroes to cheer. In case the viewer have any doubt as to who the bad guy is, the chief ban­dit wears a black eye­patch, for cry­ing out loud! Kam­bei (Takashi Shimura), the supremely capa­ble and wise leader of the samu­rai, essen­tially lays down a uni­ver­sal def­i­n­i­tion of “hero” with his recruit­ment call: “There’s a tough bat­tle ahead, lead­ing to nei­ther money nor rank. Will you join us?”

Seven SamuraiYou messed with the wrong ronin

And yet, many sub­tleties grad­u­ally unfold. Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is one of the great plea­sures of the movie, but also one of its great­est mys­ter­ies. He’s clown­ish and child­ishly impul­sive, yet pas­sion­ately moral. He’s a com­moner mas­querad­ing as a samu­rai, his only cer­ti­fi­ca­tion being his ridicu­lously long sword (pre­sum­ably the lib­er­ated for­mer pos­ses­sion of a very tall samu­rai). Kam­bei, whom in another life could have been a good shrink, cor­rectly deduces Kikuchiyo’s moti­va­tions for hav­ing attached him­self to the ven­ture; he him­self is a peas­ant farmer with pre­ten­sions for more. He directly iden­ti­fies with the farm­ers’ plight, yet his deep-seated class inse­cu­ri­ties fuel his a love-hate rela­tion­ship with them. As an essay by Ken­neth Turan in the Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion edi­tion book­let points out, medieval Japan was a fiercely delin­eated caste soci­ety, and the fact that a for­mer farmer might pre­sume to call him­self a samu­rai is a huge trans­gres­sion. For a very dif­fer­ent, more sub­dued dra­matic per­for­mance by Mifune, see Kurosawa’s Stray Dog.

As we learn more about Kikuchiyo, we like­wise slowly get a more and more com­plex por­trait of the vil­lagers. They are no doubt the vic­tims of a seri­ous crime. Yet they whine all the way and mythol­o­gize them­selves as help­less, saintly, vic­tim­ized salt of the earth that must resort to hir­ing dis­graced samu­rai to pro­tect them. But they har­bor a dark secret; they have robbed many fallen samu­rai of their armor and weapons over the years Their ver­i­ta­ble armory of pil­fered gear of war is use­less to them, and yet they shame­fully hide it from the samu­rai pro­tect­ing them (even though it would bol­ster their com­ing war). The seven samu­rai are deeply offended, and yet nev­er­the­less do the right thing and defend the vil­lage. But the gulf between the two classes, samu­rai and farmer, is reaffirmed.

Seven SamuraiHe’s a wild and crazy samurai

Seven Samu­rai is in the com­pany of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Cit­i­zen Kane, and Ver­tigo, a spe­cial class of film so famously influ­en­tial that even first-time view­ers may very well feel they’ve seen it before. Just to name a few of Seven Samurai’s first-generation off­spring: The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven is an unapolo­getic trans­po­si­tion of the orig­i­nal from feu­dal Japan to the Amer­i­can West. The Dirty Dozen and Ocean’s Eleven both bor­row the trope of recruit­ing a gang of mis­fits one-by-one, whom in con­cert become capa­ble of strengths impos­si­ble as indi­vid­u­als. Another American-produced remake is sched­uled for release in 2009, this time set in modern-day Thailand.

The 2006 Cri­te­rion Col­lec­tion edi­tion is a required library item, not one to merely rent. A mag­nif­i­cent restora­tion of the film itself is accom­pa­nied by a beau­ti­fully designed sleeve and book­let. A sur­pris­ing amount of dam­age remains in the long bat­tle sequence in the sec­ond half of the film, but Criterion’s rep­u­ta­tion for qual­ity ensures that these are almost cer­tainly the best avail­able mate­ri­als. Per­haps these reels were more fre­quently sub­jected to tor­ture over the years by scholars?

Why you need to read the booklet:

  • Ken­neth Turan on the full year of pro­duc­tion it took to make the film, mir­ror­ing the time that passes in the movie. On a prac­ti­cal level, the extended pro­duc­tion allows for greater real­ism like Kambei’s hair real­is­ti­cally grow­ing back after shav­ing his head in the begin­ning (the top­knot is a prized sym­bol of the samu­rai; not just a fash­ion but a require­ment of their caste). But also on a the­matic level, one year = the farm­ing cycle of life: plant­ing through harvest.
  • Peter Cowie on the mutual admi­ra­tion soci­ety between Kuro­sawa (a fan of the Hol­ly­wood West­ern) and John Ford.
  • Philip Kemp on 16th Cen­tury Japan. The feu­dal soci­ety had lit­tle dis­tinc­tion between ronin and bandits.
  • Peggy Chiao on Kurosawa’s influ­ences. Kuro­sawa was a Marx­ist in his 20s, but later mel­lowed. His older brother turned him on to Dos­toyevsky, but com­mit­ted suicide.
  • Alain Sil­ver on Kurosawa’s stag­ing and composition.
  • Stu­art Gal­braith IV on the his­tor­i­cal con­text of the con­tem­po­rary Japan­ese cin­ema, which was flour­ish­ing at the time.
  • Appre­ci­a­tions by direc­tors Sid­ney Lumet and Arthur Penn.
  • Toshiro Mifune’s quite funny and enter­tain­ing rem­i­nis­cences. Mifune claims he devised his char­ac­ter, as noth­ing had been writ­ten yet when he was cast.

Sup­ple­men­tal fea­tures on the bonus discs:

  • “Akira Kuro­sawa: It is Won­der­ful to Cre­ate” — an almost exces­sively hagio­graphic biog­ra­phy, but with sev­eral amus­ing anec­dotes. Shoot­ing all year meant con­tin­u­ing through February’s freez­ing mud, while Mifune was almost naked. Kuro­sawa duti­fully stood in the mud with his cast and crew, and was lit­er­ally frostbitten.
  • “Seven Samu­rai: Ori­gins & Influ­ences” — “The Story of the 47 Ronin” was a pop­u­lar pup­pet the­ater tale for hun­dreds of years, and was adapted into films sev­eral times a year in early Japan­ese cin­ema. One of those obser­va­tions that sounds obvi­ous in ret­ro­spect, but needs to be pointed out by some­body: Ronin (pro­nounced by some as “roh-ee-nin”) sto­ries are more pop­u­lar than samu­rai sto­ries because they are inher­ently more dra­mat­i­cally interesting.
  • “My Life in Cin­ema: Akira Kuro­sawa” — a long inter­view by fel­low direc­tor Nag­isa Oshima.

Must read: the Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review by Matthew Dessem

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

As You Like It (2007)

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As You Like It movie poster

 

I’ve been a Ken­neth Branagh fan ever since see­ing the joy­ous tri­fle Much Ado About Noth­ing on a date with my first girl­friend in high school. Prob­a­bly to my date’s dis­may, it was also the moment I fell pas­sion­ately in love with Emma Thomp­son. Later, I enjoyed his down and dirty Henry V, the Hitch­cock­ian noir Dead Again, the over-the-top-and-beyond bom­bast of Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, and even met another future girl­friend at Ham­let. But As You Like It is decid­edly lack­ing in Branagh’s proven flair for trans­lat­ing the­atre to the medium of cin­ema. In the US at least, it was orig­i­nally intended for the­atri­cal release through Pic­ture­house, but went straight to HBO.

Hav­ing never read the play nor seen it per­formed, I’ll cop to hav­ing done a lit­tle cram­ming on Wikipedia, the 21st Cen­tury answer to Cliff’s Notes. Branagh has relo­cated the action from a duchy in France to an enclave of expa­tri­ate Euro­peans in 19th cen­tury Japan, but to what advan­tage? There is lit­tle sense of a Euro­pean com­mu­nity abroad in an alien land; in fact very few Asian actors appear at all, even in the back­ground. A silently-staged ninja attack is a promis­ing open­ing, but ulti­mately dis­ap­point­ing to art­house audi­ences with high­brow wire-fu expec­ta­tions raised after Ang Lee’s Crouch­ing Tiger, Hid­den Dragon.

Bryce Dallas Howard in As You Like ItRos­alind & Celia’s pretty frocks

Obvi­ously a low-budget film, As You Like It suf­fers in ways that similarly-priced movies made virtue. Stan­ley Tucci’s The Impos­tors, for exam­ple, made the cheap sets part of the fun, and beat Branagh by a few years to the device of an epi­logue fea­tur­ing an ensem­ble cast break­ing the fourth wall by lit­er­ally walk­ing off-set and behind the camera.

As You Like ItClash of the diapers

Other mis­cel­la­neous disappointments:

• There’s an over-reliance on long, clumsy steady­cam takes, espe­cially one fum­bled shot in which Kevin Kline’s face is obscured through­out most of his deliv­ery of the play’s most famous mono­logue: “All the world’s a stage…”

• With a pri­vate Eng­lish gar­den stand­ing in for the forests of Japan, the over­cast weather mutes the color palette. The most vibrant col­ors are the occa­sional blos­som­ing tree and the pretty frocks worn by Ros­alind (Bryce Dal­las Howard) and Celia (Romola Garai).

• Brian Blessed (a reg­u­lar in Branagh’s com­pany) doesn’t do nearly enough of his trade­mark shout­ing. Per­haps he was afraid to rup­ture the del­i­cate Howard’s eardrums.

• The omnipresent score is really, really bad.

• And finally, As You Like It sports what must be the cheap­est fake lion in cin­ema his­tory; it was prob­a­bly pos­si­ble to stage some­thing more con­vinc­ing on the stage in Shakespeare’s day.

Offi­cial movie site: www.hbo.com/films/asyoulikeit

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

Paprika

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Paprika movie poster

 

There’s a huge inter­est in Japan­ese manga and animé in the us, but it’s rare for an animé fea­ture film to get a the­atri­cal release. From the name and poster alone (indeed, what caught my own inter­est), one might not even guess Paprika is foreign-language, let alone animé. Animé is a medium, not a genre, but it does have a cer­tain pop­u­lar per­cep­tion in the US: either the apoc­a­lyp­tic sci-fi of Akira or the fairy tale fan­ta­sia of Spir­ited Away. And that’s not even tak­ing into account the expec­ta­tions of a gen­er­a­tion of kids that grew up watch­ing the dubbed Robot­ech and Star Blaz­ers seri­als (which would be exem­pli­fied by… me).

The pop­u­lar per­cep­tion is not wrong; I’m not an animé expert, but Paprika has sev­eral of the super­fi­cial trap­pings: cyber­netic tech­nol­ogy (like Ghost in the Shell), a ghost­like female crea­ture (like direc­tor Satoshi Kon’s ear­lier Mil­len­nium Actress), and an expo­nen­tially grow­ing world-eating beast (like Akira and America’s own The Blob). But what sets Paprika apart is its psy­che­delic imagery, adult themes, and sheer weirdness.

PaprikaVal­ley of the Dolls

Like Blade Run­ner, it’s equal parts detec­tive story and sci­ence fic­tion, with a splash of hor­ror. The mys­tery genre pro­vides a struc­ture for the nom­i­nal plot: Paprika is the dream alter ego of Dr. Atsuko Chiba, a dream researcher build­ing a machine for use in psy­cho­an­a­lytic dream analy­sis. The device they’re build­ing is called the “DC Mini”, a name which, every sin­gle time, made this Dork Reporter think of DC Comics minis­eries. Chiba’s Blade Run­ner–esque mis­sion is to track down three miss­ing DC Mini devices, and their co-creator.

PaprikaI hate it when that happens

Paprika even shares a theme with Blade Run­ner: the moral reper­cus­sions of new tech­nolo­gies. If dreams are a kind of “place”, and can be a shared real­ity (like the world of The Dream­ing in Neil Gamain’s Sand­man comic book series), what is the dif­fer­ence between it and real life? The poten­tial of one world bleed­ing into another is very lit­er­ally dan­ger­ous. One of the film’s vil­lains uses the dream real­ity to com­mit a very dis­turb­ing form of rape, and another goes so far as to label the tech­nol­ogy a poten­tial form of ter­ror­ism: “Implant­ing dreams into other people’s heads is ter­ror­ism.” This is not hyper­bole in the film’s uni­verse: the city is almost destroyed by dreams.

Two final lit­tle things:

  • What’s the deal with the name? Is it a trans­la­tion issue, or some­thing about Japan­ese cul­ture (or cui­sine) I’m not aware of? A metaphor of spices and recipes is used at one point, but it still seems oddly random.
  • A key char­ac­ter is movie-obsessed cop, an ama­teur film­maker in his youth. His noirish dreams only fur­ther expand the Blade Run­ner par­al­lels. Paprika explic­itly equates movie watch­ing with dreams and memory.

Offi­cial movie site: www.paprikamovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.