Lost In Translation

Zatoichi The Fugitive

I was impressed with the lush summer locations captured by cinematographer Chikashi Makiura in the fourth installment and second color film, Zatoichi The Fugitive (1963). In general I have been impressed with the direction of Tokuzo Tanaka's Zartoichi films and was compelled to find out more about him. And I learned that he had served as an assistant to two of the giants of Japanese cinema Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa. Furthermore, he was an assistant on some of their greatest films: Mizoguchi's Ugetsu and Sansho the Bailiff as well as Kurosawa's international breakthrough-Rashomon. Thus we have interesting moving camera shots using crane, pans, and tracking shots not to mention exquisite framing and shots from behind walls, gates, etc. There is a complex story of a bounty on Zatoichi (Shintaro Katsu), which is connected to a squabble over territory among yakuza gangs. It is complicated by star crossed lovers and the appearance of Zatoichi's lost love Otane (Masaup Banri) who is with a drunken ronin Tanakura (Jutaro Hojo). The tropes are starting to become a bit tiresome-evil yakuza bosses, drunken samurai who are savage with women, Zatocihi taking out legions of goons before fighting a duel with a worthy opponent before emerging victorious. However, this film begins with Zatoichi winning a local sumo tournament by tossing peasants to and fro like bags of flour and ends with him dancing to festival music-so some originality remains.

Les Mariages De Gaku

Tried a new casual French style restaurant in Ebisu, Les Mariages De Gaku, and thought it was an impressive menu, the set menu was just over ¥5000. There were a couple choices available for the main dishes and dessert.

This appetizer was really interesting:a savory doughnut made from seaweed and shrimp with American sauce (shrimp and crab based) matched with a cold green pea soup-think gazpacho.

This dish was also intriguing: at the top was squid on white asparagus, a sunny side up mini egg (quails?) on salmon, and saba (mackeral from Fukuoaka) on eggplant and a sauce amongst other assorted fresh vegetables.

This was a scallop with baby corn wrapped up in hamo (a daggertooth pike conger-a kind of eel) with an asparagus sauce.

I chose Iberico pork ground up and formed into a patty with a chorizo-based sauce with vegetable garnish-my favorite dish of the night.

My dining companion went with Aichibo (meat from the rump) wagyu beef.

Another engaging dish, tuskemen style cold noodles (noodles dipped into s separate soup before being eaten) to be dipped in a cold gazpacho soup.

I had the passionfruit creme brulet.

My dining companion's dessert-the top part was sort of a meringue-based dessert on a bed of fruit. All in all one of the best and most interesting meals I've had in some time.

Rome Open CIty Redux

I have re-watched Roberto Rossellini's neo-realist masterpiece Rome Open City (1945) as part of the Criterion Roberto Rossellini's War Trilogy.(It also contains Paisan and Germany Year Zero) The film is still a harrowing account of the Nazi occupation of Rome and those brave few who fought them. This series is loaded with great extras; this volume includes: video introduction by Roberto Roseelini from 1963, audio commentary featuring film scholar Peter Bondanella, Once Upon a Time . . . “Rome Open City,” a 2006 documentary on the making of this historic film, featuring rare archival material and footage of Anna Magnani, Federico Fellini, Ingrid Bergman, and many others, new video interviews with Rossellini scholar Adriano Aprà, Rossellini and the City, a new visual essay by film scholar Mark Shiel (Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City) on Rossellini’s use of the urban landscape in the war trilogy, and a new video interview with film critic and Rossellini friend Father Virgilio Fantuzzi, who discusses the filmmaker and the role of religion in Rome Open City. A great edition of a world classic.

New Tale Of Zatoichi

Tokuzo Tanaka's third installment of the Zatoichi series, New Tale Of Zatoichi (1963), is the first to be filmed in color. This film is also one of the most devoted to Zatoichi''s (Shintaro Katsu) back story. Zatoichi runs into his sword teacher, Banno (Seizaburo Kawazu) at a hot springs resort where a band led by the brother of Boss Kanebe, who Zatoichi killed in the previous film, tries to exact revenge. Banno intervenes and postpones the vendetta and brings Zatoichi back to his home where he reconnects with Banno's younger sister Yayoi (Mikio Tsubouchi) and is convinced to give up his wandering and marry. However Banno, refuses Yayoi's request due to Zatoichi's low standing as a masseuse. Banno is also involved in a kidnapping scheme with a segment of the Mito Tengu (a group of radical anti-shogunate samurai) who are terrorizing the countryside by robbing honest citizens. According to the film notes, this establishes the time period as sometime in the 1830s-40s before the shogunate fell. I found the utter avariciousness and lack of feeling toward Zatoichi by Banno somewhat unlikely and poor writing--it seems unlikely that a master swordsman teacher like Banno would be so worldly and lacking in spirituality. After his death, Zatoichi seems resigned to his fate as a wandering masseuse even though he is free to marry Yayoi now, which also seems somewhat unlikely if he was truly willing to settle as it was established earlier in the film.That being said Tanaka continues to frame his shots impressively and use interesting camera movements throughout the film.

Leviathan

Russian Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest work, Leviathan (2014) is a modern day fable based on two sources: the Book of Job and the Thomas Hobbes’ 1651 treatise of the same name. It is a story of the sufferings of Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov), a small town mechanic living in a small coastal village-a setting that is bleak, desolate, foreboding, and at times spectacular. Admittedly, the losses of Koyla begin with loss of his house to a corrupt public official and become more personal and devastating as the film progresses. There are some great cinematic sequences throughout for example, the scene above where Koyla's son goes out and meditates on the remains of the Leviathan and the scene where the boy's mother sees the Leviathan swimming in the ocean.  Others include filming a scene where Koyla's old army friend and lawyer from Moscow is savagely beaten-it is filmed from inside a car with loud music playing to muffle the brutality. Near the end of the film, a local religious leader preaches, “Freedom is knowing God’s truth,” to which Hobbes might have respond, “Hell is truth seen too late.”  “Leviathan” was the book in which Hobbes famously suggested that an ideal government would protects citizens from lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Zvyagintsev’s version questions how long a man can go on believing in a system that offers no hope.

Dragnet Girl

Dragnet Girl (1933) by Yasujiro Ozu, from Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu-Three Crime Dramas, might be the most American film by the director known for being the most Japanese of Japanese directors. This film's art design seems to ape the hardboiled film noir crime dramas of the 30s. As Michael Koresky's written commentary on the film points out, throughout the film the viewer can see a poster for Wallace Beery's The Champ and a Jack Dempsey fight flier in the boxing gym, English language house rules in the poll hall, and in the record shop the Victor logo and statues of the logo dog, Nipper as a promotional mannequin. It is the story of a gangster Joji (Joji Oka) and his office lady moll, Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka-Mizoguchi's muse) as tough talking dame with a soft spot. She is given to extreme fits of jealousy but can see the good in people and can even long for it for herself and Joji. Their relationship is jeopardized by the arrival of an up and coming flyweight boxer who wants to join Joji's illicit gang, Hiroshi (Hideo Mitsui) and his pure-hearted sister Kazuko (Sumiko Mizukubo) intervenes on his behalf with Joji. A bit melodramatic for my taste, but probably not uncommon for the time. This film has some of the most extravagant camera movements that match the flamboyant set design. For example, there a couple of great sequences in which Ozu focuses on a car headlight reflection as a car speeds on its way. There's a camera pan onto  a teapot. And there's a pool table level closeup sequence. There are some great location shots, the most impressive is the bluff overlooking Yokohoma that has been seen in films of his contemporary Hiroshi Shimizu. Of course there are the trademarks of Ozu's style: masterly framing and interesting still life transitions throughout.

Batting Against Castro

I'm a huge fan of the short stories of Jim Shepard, so I thought I'd search out his out-of-print, first collection of stories, Batting Against Castro (1996). I should have researched more about it, because there are only four stories that I hadn't read before: "Atomic Tourism," "Who We Are, What We're Doing," "Nosferatu," and "Ida." The rest ("Batting Against Castro," "Reach for the Sky," "Messiah," "Spending the Night with the Poor," "Eustace," "Mars Attacks," "Piano Starts Here," "Runaway," and "Krakatau") are included in his 2004 collection Love and Hydrogen. And there are certainly some gems among those reprinted stories. "Atomic Tourism" is a story about a couple who nonchalantly does some disaster tourism after America is nuked by the Russians. "Who We Are, What We're Doing" is a short story about jet pilots which employs the lingo of said pilots. "Nosferatu" reads like a fictional production diary of director F.W. Murnau during the making of his classic film of the same name. Incidentally, it seems that Shepard fleshed this story out to write a short novel of the same title, which was published in  1998. "Ida" is a metaphor of a family told through NFL football circa the late 70s as the protagonist quarterback and his mother are playing against the Steelers vaunted defense of the 70s and his mother continues to plow away at eh defense by running the ball as instructed by the father (her husband) and the uncle. What the metaphor is supposed to represent is beyond me though. I can see why the publishers included so many of the stories from this collect in the next-they are many exceptional stories in this book.

White God

I have to say that I wasn't really all that inclined to see Kornei Mundruczo's White Dog (2014) even after hearing a positive podcast review by Slate on the film. But then a friend recommended it to me, so I thought I'd give it a go. I must say I was drawn in by the opening sequence, first there is a quote from Rilke: "Everything terrible is something that needs our love." Before we get to the start of the story we get to see a cow being slaughtered! Then we see a sequence in which the main human protagonist, Lili (Zsofia Psotta) rides her bicycle through a seeming abandoned city until a pack of dogs turn a corner and race after her-it is a striking and powerful sequence and cold opening, from there it return to the beginning of the story where Lili is dropped off at he father's house with her pet dog Hagen. Unfortunately the film doesn't live up to the auspicious beginning, but the non-CGI dogs and individual scenes of dog actor are impressive. It is something of a muddled parable-that some suggest that it is a parable about separatism and Hungarian politics during democratic rule, I don't know enough about Hungarian politics to confirm this. But I have also seen suggestions that he has borrowed from Samuel Fuller's 1982 film White Dog, and reminds me that I still haven't seen it. This is definitely not for those who are queasy with animal violence and blood.

That Night's Wife

That Night's Wife (1930) is another Yasujiro Ozu crime film from Eclipse Series 42: Silent Ozu-Three Crime Dramas. And like other early films there are visages of his later style, for example, there are several still life transitions used throughout the film. However, it is the youthful cinematic experimentation that always strikes me in the early films: camera pans, close ups and camera pull backs, and crane shots, because they are used so infrequently in his later films. In this film a desperate husband (Tokihiko Okada) is driven to robbery to get money to pay for the doctor of his ailing child. During the man hunt the ensues after his crime, he stops in at a payphone booth to check in with the doctor in a dramatic scene in which the police are closing in. He manage sot escape by taxi home, but it turns out the taxi driver was an undercover detective (Togo Yamamoto) who is determine dot bring him in. A tense evening standoff ensues when, the man's wife (Emiko Yagumo) turns the tables by using her husband's gun to prevent the detective from bringing him in until the morning when the doctor will arrive and give his prognosis on their daughter's sickness. It is a simple and melodramatic story that is told in a brisk 65 minutes.

The Return of Eva Peron

A friend once mentioned that he had read an interesting book of essays by V.S. Naipaul with a major one about Eva Peron, The Return of Eva Peron with Killings in Trinidad (1980), and I found an out of print copy to read since the essay intrigued me. All of the pieces, according to the author's note, were written between 1972 and 1975 (save later additions to the two first essays), when Naipaul was not writing a novel. All the essays appeared in The New York Review of Books save "The Killings in Trinidad," which was published in the the London Sunday Times. The four essays are: "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad," "The Return of Eva Peron," "A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa, and "Conrad's Darkness."

The first essay and perhaps the most obscure for me, but obviously the most interesting for Naipaul, concerns murders that take place at a Black Power commune in Trinidad that is 92 pages in total. I can see why these event were of interest to Naipaul in particular since they concern race, class, the concept of the writer, and Naipaul's home country of Trinidad which he left for England not unlike the former criminal, would be writer-activist Michael X.

"The Return of Eva Peron" read like a New Yorker "Letter From ... Buenos Aires," in that it is a summation of that nation during the time of Naipaul's several visits between 1972 and 1977. Thus the essays has five parts: "1. The Corpse at the Iron Gate" from 1972 which discusses the legacy of Eva and Juan Peron, "2. "Borges and the Bogus Past," which doesn't come off as a tribute to the great Argentinian author-more like a character assassination, "3. Kamikaze in Montevideo," which looks at Argentina's little neighbor Uruguay and its financial meltdown in 1973, "4. Brothels Behind the Graveyard," written in 1974 is more about politics and the history of Argentina which decimated its Indian population early in the 20th century, "5. The Terror," written in 1977 and discusses torture, politics, and death and the legacy of these things in the country. One is being to see that Naipaul is drawn to developing countries that were former colonies of European powers that deep in the throes of identity crisis'.

In "A New King for the Congo: Mobutu and the Nihilism of Africa," Naipaul looks at the former Belgian colony of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, then known as Zaire and the despotic rule of its former leader Mobutu Sese Senko in 1975. Again one sees a trend in the interests of Naipaul-former colonies of European powers. He sets the scene from which in the recent past Muhammad Ali beat George Foreman in the "Rumble in the Jungle," of which Naipaul sees more as a publicity stunt for Mobutu. Mobutu ruled until 1997 when there was civil war in which Laurent Kabila wrestled power form Mobutu. Echoes of Conrad are seen in this report, as inexplicably they were present in the Eva Peron piece.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that Naipaul discusses that author's influence on him in "Conrad's Darkness." One might walk away from the essay with the notion that Naipaul has improved upon the author's work. All in all a fascinating collection of articles from the early to late 70s.