Lost In Translation

Hollywood Burger

Hollywood Burger in Daikanyama has a serviceable burger, a step above Fresheness Burger. Went here last weekend when Blacows had a line, not bad.

NOTE: Closed as of 2015.

LaBrava

LaBrava (1983) by Elmore Leonard has all the aspects of the Leonard crime novel that I have come to admire. There's great dialogue, an interesting protagonist (Joe LaBrava-former Secret Service agent and now would-be photographer), nefarious criminals (swamp rat  Richard Nobles and his boat lifter Cuban accomplice Cuduo Rey) and a story that unfolds in South Beach, Florida. Throw in a young Jewish painter, an aging movie star and retired bookie and you have an entertaining crime story. I always enjoy the Miami area details and suppose that Charles Willeford set the bar for that kind of background detail, but Leonard does a good job of making you understand the area that allows you to transport yourself there for the story. I enjoyed this as much as any of the other Leonard novels I've read so and am looking forward to reading more. 

Ebisu

This is the statue of the Buddhist god of Good Fortune, the Ocean, & Fishing Folk, Deity of Honest Labor & Patron of Laborers, God of Fair Dealing, Maritime Tutelary: Ebisu. It is in fornt of the JR station I use.

The Grandmaster

Wong Kar-Wai returns to form after his brief foray with the English language film, My Blueberry Nights, with his martial arts epic The Grandmaster (2013) with Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang. It is essentially the story of Ip Man, Bruce Lee's kung fu instructor, which spans several decades of turmoil in China. It seems that an unrequited romance was grafted onto the action film that would give it that Wong Kar-wai romantic streak. There are several astonishing fight sequences especially at the beginning of the film where there is a battle show down in a rain pour (Akira Kurosawa would approve). It is Wong Kar-wai's second martial arts film (the other was Ashes of Time), but it still feels like something of a departure from his typical film project. I don't think it stands up to his best films, but it is a brilliant pageant of visually stunning set pieces.

Konno Hachimangu Shrine

I was walking home from Shibuya and found a shrine area. This is a grave site near Konno Hachimangu Shrine.





Here's the main approach to the shrine.



Inside the courtyard of the shrine.

This was a side entrance onto the shrine grounds.

Not sure if this is part of the shrine since it was across the street.

BFI: Detour

I followed up my viewing of Egar G. Ulmer's Detour with Noah Isenberg's BFI Film Classics volume on it, Detour (2008). It is an informative companion to the film. The first section, "An Unlikely Story" traces the beginnings of the film from a 1939 pulp novel by Martin Goldsmith who sold his rights to Producers  Releasing Corporation (PRC) aka "Pretty Rotten Crap" according to Isenberg. The basic of casting and assembling the crew are recounted. Isenberg points out that in 1992 it was included in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress. In the following section, he continues the story of production and recounts the story in "Pulp Fictions." In the section called "In Search of Meaning" he looks at three interesting critical theories concerning the film: the film as a male fantasy, the film as told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator, and the film as as an allegory of exile. The final section "Detour Redux" is fascinating as well as Isenbeg discusses several remakes or films based on the original including, oddly enough, an updated re-make from Ullmer himself called The Loser (1969). He suggests that the Coens brother's film The Man Who Wasn't There and David Lynch's Lost Highway were based on Detour. It is a well-researched and intriguing study of an American film noir classic.

Detour

Detour (1945) directed by Edgar G. Ulmer is known as a film noir classic among cinemaphiles, however, I ony learned that after watching it and reading Noah Isenberg's informative BFI book length study of the film. Ulmer was an Austrian expatriate director with a background in theater who made a name for himself in making artful B pictures for minuscule budgets of which Detour is a fine example. It is a very dark film with few sets and characters that tells the tale of a New York jazz pianist (Tom Neal) with classical ambitions who decides to follow his girlfriend out to Hollywood to make a go of it, however, he is too poor to fly or take a train, so he hitchhikes and runs in trouble. Especially when he picks up the cynical vicious Vera (played with menace by Ann Savage). Ulmer has some very artistic scenes throughout the taut 67 minute thriller. It truly is an entertianing American film noir classic.

Cicada

At the bar on a busy Saturday afternoon for lunch for my first visit to Cicada in its new location in Aoyama.

My lunch was roasted snapper with potatoes, olives and rosemary. It tasted great, but seemed a bit of a small portion for ¥1900. The outdoor patio looks great. It looks like a great place for a date.

I Will Buy You

The second film in the Eclipse Series 38: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System I watched was I Will Buy You (1956). This is a critique of the professional baseball industry. It is not a typical baseball film in that the baseball star is on the periphery. It focuses on the process to sign the college slugger Kurita (Minoru Ooki) as told by fictional Tokyo Flowers scout Kishimoto (Keiji Sada). He must maneuver in between his benefactor Kyuki (Yunosuke Ito), Kurita's  girlfriend Fueko (Keiko Kishi), as well as his family. It is not so easy to determine who  the villains and the honest people are by the end of the film, but it is a sort of criticism of capitalist society as writ by the pro baseball industry in Japan. Kobayashi is almost a forgotten breed of filmmaker-one who had something to say about society.

Tokyo: A Cultural History

Tokyo: A Cultural History (2009) by Stephen Mansfield is fascinating look at one of the most interesting cities in the world. Mansfield uses a variety of sources to chart the history of the world's biggest city. These sources range from obscure foreign travelers like Isabella Bird to more established critics and historians like Ian Buruma, Donald Richie, Edward Seidensticker to famous Japanese literary figures like Junichiro Tanizaki, Kafu Nagai, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima and famous foreign literary figures who have written about, traveled through or lived in the great city like Angela Carter, David Mitchell, William Gibson and more. The topics range from woodblock art to tattoos, architecture, geisha, city parks, poetry, and natural disasters. It seems much of the city's history was concentrated in shitamachi, the low city, where the pleasure quarters of Yoshiwara resided for so many years before being shut down in the 60s for the Olympics to the former entertainment district of Asaskusa. I plan to read a Nagai book based on the descriptions of his writings in this volume. There was a section in Chapter Six about Kiyosumi-teien that inspired a visit there. And I was inspired by Chapter Seven's "Upheaval and Millenarian Beliefs" to search out Shohei Imamaura's film version of the events of the Ejanaika movement where delirious mobs paraded Shinto images through the streets shouting quasi-religious slogans indulging in bouts of eating and drunkeness, wearing costumes, cross-dressing and openly having sex in alleyways. The discussion of the city carries on up to present day Tokyo. It has inspired me to search out other books on the subject like Donald Riche's Tokyo Megacity and Edward Seidensticker's two books Low City, High City and Tokyo Rising.