Lost In Translation

Proxy War

Proxy War (1973) is the third installment of Kinji Fukusaku's yakuza series Battles Without Honor & Humanity. In this installment Shozo Hirano (Bunta Sugawara) comes to the forefront as yakuza power plays come into play and implicate Hirano who is caught between a weasel-like colleague Uchimoto (Takeshi Kato) and the most recent boss Yamamori (Nobuo Kaneko). There is lots of violence that is chaotic and recorded by hand held camera to suggest realism. This series is concerned with the power play within and between the different yakuza families, but it seems that more about how they make their money would make for more entertaining films ala Goodfellas. A lot of the plot involves yakuza gathering for drinks or gambling and discussing changes in the hierarchy or getting attack by a rival family. This one leaves you wondering what Hirano will do in the next installment since he has tried to be reasonable but has been pushed into a corner.

Sword Of The Beast

Hideo Gosha's (Meiji University graduate) Sword Of The Beast (1965) wastes no time in getting started with the action. Gennosuke (Mikijiro Hira) is a fugitive on the run after killing one of his superiors-he is revolting against the system that uses and abuses samurai. He ends up joining up with some illegal gold miners and ends up facing off with his former comrades but also fighting off would be assassins his new comrades. He has a great line when attacking the counselor of the comrade's clan, who says "Why kill me? We have no connection." To which Genosuke answers, "We do now, see you in hell!" (As he stabs the man). An entertaining film shoot on location complete with the sound track of summer complete with cicada and other sounds of nature.

Sweet Smell Of Success

Since I recently saw the film-noir classic Sweet Smell of Success, I thought I'd read the BFI book version of Sweet Smell Of Success (2010) by critic James Naremore. The book is divided into six sections. The first, Roman a Clef, is a discussion of Ernest Lehman's novella from which the screenplay was adapted. This is followed by "Twilight of the Gods," where Naremore looks at how Burt Lancaster's production company became interested in producing the film. Section three, "A Pain in the Stomach," discusses the planning of the film in which Lehman was removed as director much to his own relief, he was having a stress related disorder in relation to the production. He was replaced by Alexander Mackendrick. "Re-writing Re-writing Re-writing" looks at the constant adaptation of the original script by Clifford Odets, who was brought in to punch up the dialogue of the script, but was also successful in creating more tension and drama from the original script which relied too much on one on one exchanges. The fifth section, "Showtime" is a scene by scene analysis of the story. And "Aftermath and Retrospect" looks at the film's immediate reception, which was a disappointment. However, the film gained prestige over time and established a reputation as one of the better film noir movies of all-time.

Trouble In Paradise

Over the years I have read a lot of good things about Ernst Lubitsch and his famous "Lubitsch's touch" in regards to films. It seemed that Trouble In Paradise (1932), his most celebrated film, would be the place to start. And I think this was justified by his sophisticated modern comedy, from which all the other classic "screwball" comedies have evolved from. It treats sex in an adult manner and doesn't end with a moral-they criminals get away with crime. There are some great performances form the Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay Francis. Lubitsch is very innovative in how gets information across to the audience and avoids cliches and stand film making procedures. The Criterion special features include an informative video introduction by Peter Bogdanovich, audio commentary by Lubitsch biographer Scott Eyman (Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise), Lubitsch's silent film Das fidele Gefangnis (The Merry Jail 1917), 1940 Screen Guild Theater program, tributes written by Billy Wilder, Leonard Maltin, Cameron Crowe, Noah Baumbaugh, Wes Anderson, P. T. Anderson, Orson Welles, Roger Ebert, Frank Capra, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, Charlie Chaplin, William Wyler, author James Harvery, and Jean Renoir. 

In Flight Films

Cloud Atlas (2012) directed by the Wackowski brothers and Tom Twyker is another movie
I wasn’t sure I would like given the mixed reviews that it got upon release. That being said, I did mostly enjoy the novel. In fact I had trouble understanding how the parts I liked best about the novel would be translated in the film: the different styles of storytelling, but voiceovers were effective in that regard. In the novel I found the futuristic parts set in Neo Seoul exasperating and not very interesting, but they were among the better aspects of the film version for me. I will agree with most critics that it was a bit of a muddled mess, but it was much better than I anticipated. I must admit the fact that Tom Hanks had a major role in the film was also a bit off putting for me, but there are so many characters, locations, and scenes in the film his presence didn’t ruin it too much for me. It wasn’t one of the best films of the year, but it was also far from the worst.

I decided to watch Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012) mostly because I am a fan of the director. And I was expecting a fantastical tale of a philosophy-spouting speaking tiger-from my understanding of the novel. Whether that is true or not, I do not know, because it didn’t seem like my type of novel from reviews that I had read, so I didn’t read the novel. That being said, I enjoyed Ang’s film much more than I thought I would. That’s not saying that it didn’t have fantastical elements, but it was ultimately a feel good film and had some amazing iconographic moments throughout t. I even learned a bit about Indian colonial history. Again it was not a huge artistic success, but an enjoyable yarn.

Sound City (2013) started as homage to a little studio in the San Fernando Valley that ended up being the incubation site of some the greatest records of all-time. This includes Nirvana’s Nevermind, which introduces why Dave Grohl feels such a strong sense of kinship, because that record changed his life forever. But this was true for several acts starting with Buckingham and Nicks who found their way into Fleetwood Mac and their megahit Rumors via the studio. Others would follow, from Rick Springsteen and Tom Petty to more recent acts like Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails. Grohl saves a piece of rock history when buys the sound board for his own studio where he makes a tribute album with some of his favorite artists and people who had recorded at Sound City over the years. It is an informative and entertaining documentary about modern rock history.

I would have thought there would be little reason to make yet another film version of a
Tolstoy novel, but I have to admit I was very much entranced by Joe Wright’s film Anna Karenina (2012) written by Tom Stoppard. It is a classic tragedy and it is artistically wrought through the story structure, art direction, costumes, and acting from a who’s who of the top actors in great Britain today: Keira Knightley as Anna, Jude Law in a real-life role reversal playing the cuckolded Karenin , Kelly MacDonald as Dolly, Emily Watson as Coutess Ivanova, Olivia Williams as Countess Vronsky.

I saw another literary adaptation in Cary Fukunaga’s cinematic version of Jane Eyre (2011). It stars Mia Wasikowska as the resilient Jane Eyre and Michael Fassenbinder as the tormented Rochester. The cinematography of the isolated country house is given great expositon. It was another well-made film reveals Fukunaga as a name to watch in the future.  

Tokyo Drifter

Seijun Suzuki may be the director that has had the most lasting impact on contemporary film makers because of visionary film making techniques of his last films of the 60s before he was fired. Tokyo Drifter (1966) is one of those ground breaking films along with 1967's Branded To Kill. These are the films that influenced contemporary directors like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Wong Kar-wai, and Takeshi Kitano among others. Suzuki was usually given B movie scripts that forced him to think of inventive ways of spicing them up to make them more interesting to watch. Tokyo Drifter was a typical yakuza star vehicle for Testsuya Watari, but the fantastical inventive sets, 60s rock music, and memorable costumes help create a remarkable modern vision of the genre. In Howard Hampton's essay for the 2011 Criterion release (it also includes an interview with Suzuki from 1999), he identifies seven memorable scenes that reflect this vivid energy from the film:

1. The bubbleheaded girlfriend of a mobster is killed in the crossfire of an ambush gone bad; her death scene, shot as if looking down from on high at the rocking chair where she’s reading her comic book, shows her body pitching forward and crumpling poignantly onto what looks like a giant, speckled Jackson Pollock canvas. (Bonus points: the suite includes mock Roman friezes on some of its paneling.)

2. A car is destroyed in a junkyard as the Drifter’s theme plays: first torched in a fiery metal compartment, then disgorged and crushed into a twisted, tactile sculpture out of Ed Keinholz’s studio by way of the Cadillac Ranch.

3. “Nice hair dryer.” In the dressing room of Club Aries, where the Drifter’s girlfriend, Chiharu, is singing, another performer compliments her on her drop-dead hairdo; there’s a big advertise­ment for a Charm Lady hair dryer plastered on the wall as Chiharu toys with what appears to be a bouffant python coiled around her demure head.

4. Chiharu is snatched by hoods in broad daylight, only the driver turns out to be the Drifter. A few seconds of the car skidding and the hoods yelling and, voilà, it’s night, and he and his girl are suddenly having a fun date in an amusement arcade.

5. While the bad guys storm the hero’s sanctuary, he takes a nonchalant stroll on a snow-flaked back lot, singing the title song. The ensuing events are a riot of spatial displacement and fractured continuity: one second the Drifter gunning them down in a cavernous building; the next walking away through the snow (this time real snow, in the wide-open outdoors); then confronting his enemy the Viper on icy train tracks, with a locomotive bearing down, staggering away, cleaning up at a washbasin as his even more badly wounded antagonist bursts in, and so forth. The entire sequence has a giddy “What just happened?” melancholia, with exposition expunged for the sake of moodiness. Yet it has a visual order quite apart from any narrative “sense”—we infer what’s going on from our knowledge of genre dynamics, but the pictorial representation radiates the mischievous abstraction of the Drifter’s absurd white shoes set against the snowy ground.

6. The warring mob bosses meet in a circular pink room, planning to bury the hatchet—in the Drifter’s back: “Tetsu’s the thorn in both our sides.” Descending the yellow staircase at Club Aries, Chiharu is taunted by one of the Otsuka gang: “Tetsu’s dead.” Is this a fan­tasy? She swoons, collapses, a doll the gangsters have stuck with voodoo pins.

7. Pop singer Tetsuya Watari’s soulfully blank Tetsu (Suzuki says the actor had to be literally prodded to recite his lines) striding into the finale with glazed gusto. His suit is now white, the same make­over given to the club where his girl is being held hostage (“Sing,” the thug sneers at the frozen Chiharu, or he’ll shoot the piano player); what isn’t lit by spotlight is covered in creamy acrylic blackness, except for a red baby spot that creates a lunar beacon effect on a piece of sculpture. The Drifter enters—lights, gunplay, action! Bullets fly, yakuza dive for cover, Tetsu throws away his gun, then retrieves it and dispatches the henchmen. But his old boss, Kurata, has the drop on him, so he flips his gun over his head and then catches it before it hits the floor. Walking off alone into a night filled with neon signs (Suzuki originally had a white wall and a green moon, but the studio nixed it), Tetsu could be drifting toward Swinging London or Viva Las Vegas, Fellini’s Rome or Andy’s Factory or a pristine David Hockney swimming pool in Southern California.

It is an important film in the pantheon of Japanese film history. And although many Japanese film directors had their exile years (Kurosawa, Oshima, Imamura) none were blacklisted like Suzuki for 10 years after suing the studios and winning. However, his legacy has lasted much like like his predecessors.

Kuroneko

Kuroneko (1968) was Kaneto Shindo’s second supernatural horror film following the success of his previous horror film, Onibaba.  There are several interesting elements that differentiate it from his previous success, however there are similarities between the two films as well. The film again is set in the Sengoku (warring states) period, it concerns a young married woman and her mother-in-law, and the story also involves the murdering samurai. The last item is a somewhat unconventional portrayal of samurai, who are usually the heroes of jidaigeki rather than victims. The esteemed Japanese film critic Tadao Sato explains, in his video interview included as one of the Criterion extras, that in Shindo’s mind samurai were villains and were punished in his films. Shindo was from a wealthy farming family near Hiroshima and the farmers always suffered at the hands of the samurai who raped and pillaged their farms, and he hated them. Furthermore, Shindo’s films are filled with a powerful sexuality that stems from his rural upbringing, in which life cycles are necessary for continuation of life and this is true of both films. There is also a comprehensive interview with Shindo at age 86 (he was in the midst of directing a film, his last was doen in 2011 at age 99!) where discusses his career to that point. (He died last year at age 100!)  

The film begins with samurai raping and pillaging the farmhouse occupied by the middle-aged widow Yone (Otowa) and her daughter-in-law, Shige (Kiwako Taichi). Shige’s husband, Hachi (Kichiemon Nakamura-a famous kabuki actor), was not present as he was conscripted into the army of local warlord Raiko Minamoto (Kei Sato) while plowing in the field. Their black cat surveys the ruins and licks the two corpses and this is when a dark magic comes to play in the story. The two supernatural cat-woman wreck vengeance on samurai through a ruse of seeking their help and then offering them hospitality as their stately home, plied with sake and the promise of a roll in the hay, and then summarily killed. Sato points out that cats have different connotations in Japanese cultural since they are distinctive for their aloofness and individual nature. Sato also points out that animism (the worship of nature and animals) is an ancient aspect of Japanese religion and is reflected in the supernatural aspect of the cat women preying on samurai. The conflict arises when Hachi is dispatched by Raiko to put an end to the murder of his samurai near the bamboo grove. The story according to Sato was partially inspired by the same source as Kurosawa’s Rashomon, in fact the bamboo grove lies outside the Rashomon gate in Kyoto. Hikaru Hayashi’s percussive score is appropriately spooky and as essential to this film as Toru Takemitsu’s score was to Onibaba. The cinematography is equally impressive, and it is the the earleirst film that I can think of that uses wires to send the actors flying about like the modern Chinese martial arts films-Sato mentions that this was standard practicee in kabuki. As much as I enjoyed this film, I do feel as though I prefer Onibaba, if I had to choose between the two, however a fine film in its own right.

Deadly Fight In Hiroshima

The second installment in Kinji Fukasaku's The Yakuza Papers series (aka Battles Without Honor & Humanity) is Deadly Fight In Hiroshima (1973). Fukasaka's style is becoming more apparent in this the second of the five part series I am planning on viewing. It has a semi-documentary feel to it as there are freeze frames that provide identification of key players and the deaths or aftermath of skirmishes throughout the film. There is also a lot of violence. They scenes often seem chaotic to me, I often wonder how much of the action sequences are scripted.  This film is essentially the story of a single soldier in the yakuza forces, Yamanaka (Kin'ya Kitaoji) who becomes the tool of the bosses and is manipulated and exploited before he eventually kills himself when backed in a corner. Yamanaka is friendly with Hirano (Bunta Sugawa) a holdover from the first film who diplomatically tries to navigate the underworld when two families go to war without being forced to choose a side. Sonny Chiba is great as the over-the-top loose cannon Katsutoshi of the Ono family. Unfortunately, Chiba will not be in the next installment as he gets his comeuppance in this film.

The Secret In Their Eyes

I've been meaning to see Juan Jose Camanella's Oscar winning drama The Sceret In Their Eyes (2009) for some time and thought it appropriate to see it before visiting Buenos Aires this week. It is a compelling crime drama and love story rolled into one. The film revolves around a murder mystery in which is solved but doesn't result in the proper distribution of justice since there is interference from people with political connections to the Peron government. It is a film about retribution, justice, and true love. All of the principle actors put in fine performances and there is some interesting and inventive cinematography, especially the scenes that take place at the train station and during the chase sequence at the soccer stadium.There are some great interior scenes throughout of the beautiful European influenced architecture of the city.

Last night I also re-watched Wong Kar-wai's masterful Happy Together (1997) which was filmed entirely on location in Argentina. Wong was looking ot escape Hong Kong before the hand over and was a fan of Argentinian authors like Mauel Puig and Julio Cortazar not to mention soccer and Mardonna. There are some great images and some depressing images throughout the film, but i suspect much has changed in that city since the late 90s.

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence

I believe that Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983) directed by Nagisa Oshima was one of the first Japanese films I ever saw on recommendation from Roger Ebert on "At The Movies." I recently read a book about Oshima and was in the process of creating a syllabus of Japanese films for a class I was planning to teach on Japanese film. I thought it was probably the most accessible even though I am a fan of The Realm of the Senses and Empire of Passion, however both have some explicit sexual scenes that I was wary of showing in film class and decide to screen Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence even though I hadn't seen it in probably 20 years. It has held up exceedingly well. I had forgotten about he homosexual subtext and the punishment of the Korean guard who had slept with a prisoner, it seems as though it were a precursor for Oshima's homosexual samurai film Taboo.  There are some very good performances form first timers like David Bowie, RyuichiSakamoto, and TakeshiKitano. However, it is Tom Conti that carries the film since it is mostly from his point of view. Sakamoto's score is unmistakably from the 80s but appropriate and nostalgic inducing for me. Oshima is not afriad to show some of the unfavorable aspects of a Japanese prisoner of war camp warts and all, as well as seppuku. There are lots of great Criterion extras: The Oshima Gang, a 1983 making-of featurette, a new video interviews with producer Jeremy Thomas, screenwriter Paul Mayersberg, actor Tom Conti, and actor-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hasten Slowly, an hour-long 1996 documentary about author Laurens van der Post, whose autobiographical novel was the basis for the film, the original theatrical trailer, new and improved English subtitle translation, and a booklet featuring an essay by film critic Chuck Stephens and reprinted interviews with director Nagisa Oshima and actor Takeshi Kitano. I was fascinated by the documentary on teh author of the novel in which the film was based on by van der Post and planto read The Seed and the Sower soon. It was also interesting to hear that Kitano first thought about directing while working on the set of this, his first film, and Kitano would go on to become an internationally recognized director in his own right several years later. In addition first assistant director Lee Tamahori would go onto make the critically praised film Once Were Warriors. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a film classic and has stood the test of time.