Lost In Translation

US Go Home

A few years back when I was trying to catch up with all the Claire Denis directed films I missed previously, I overlooked US Go Home (1994), which isn't really a film but a part of an Arte TV mini-series Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles de Leur Àge (All the Boys and Girls in Their Time). Ten film directors were invited to create a short film about teenagers in the era of their own adolescence, but with one stipulation – it must include a party using music from the era. It is a striking film that acts almost like a MTV video film with all the great 60s rock from the likes of  Otis Redding, Ronnie Bird and The Animals. It is a story of teenage angst as Martine (Alice Houri) of mixed-race heritage and lives in the dreary suburbs of France near a US airbase, discovers her best friend, the red-headed Marlene(Jessica Tharaud) , has lost her virginity, she decides to do the same. There's a curious encounter with an American soldier Vigo Brown (played by Vincent Gallo). It is an astute study of teenage disaffection, longing and misunderstanding.

Foster Daddy, Tora! (26)

Despite the unfortunate English title, Foster Daddy Tora! (1980) is another standout episode in the Tora-san series from director Yoji Yamada. The pre-credits dream sequence is another historical drama in which Tora (Kiyoshi Atsumi) defeats an evil magistrate and saves his sister Sakura (Chieko Baisho). When Tora returns he finds that Sakura and her family have moved into a proper house after borrowing money from her Uncle and Aunt's mortgage on Toraya with a guarantee from Tako (Hisao Dazai). There's an argument about Tora's moving gift money and he goes back on the road. He finds himself in Hokkaido and learns that a drinking buddy has died and goes to pay his respects at his grave in his hometown Okushiri island. There he meets the friend's daughter Sumire (Ran Ito) and takes a paternal interest in her and vows to help her move to Tokyo to work and go to night school. Tora's family helps her enroll in night school and Tako finds her a job at 7-11. Seemingly all is well until Sumire's ex-boyfriend, a carpenter from Hakkodate shows up on the scene to ask her to marry him. This is perhaps the first episode that Tora doesn't fall in love and get jilted, but suffers a kind of heartbreak nonetheless.

Aziz Asanari: Right Here Right Now

I'm not such a huge stand up comedy fan but I was intrigued by the Spike Jonze directed comedy special, Aziz Asanari: Right Here Right Now (2019). I am a fan of his Netflix TV show Master of None. Last year he was involved in a sexual misconduct controversy and earlier this year he did a show in Tokyo at a small British Pub in Shimokitazawa. In this performance he addresses the sexual misconduct issue and takes on the "woke" movements among other topics. So maybe the road back to the top won't be so long for him. So much of Right Now swirls around the question of what behavior, in the current climate, we’re willing to excuse and what we’re not. I felt he was unfairly raked over the coals compared to some of the other famous offenders and orange one in the white house right now. Most of the reviews I have come across also take pot shots at the comedian-not a great place to be at right now.

Outlaw: Gangster VIP

I recently acquired Outlaw Gangster VIP: The Complete Collection which contains Gangster VIP, Gangster VIP 2, Heartless, Goro the Assassin, Black Dagger, and Kill! The Arrow Limited Edition includes: Limited Edition Box Set (3000 copies) containing all six films in the Outlaw series, available with English subtitles for the first time on any home video format, High Definition digital transfers of all six films, from original film elements by Nikkatsu Corporation, High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentations, original uncompressed mono audio, newly translated English subtitles, audio commentary on Outlaw: Gangster VIP by Jasper Sharp, visual essay covering the entire series by Kevin Gilvear, original trailers for all six films, extensive promotional image galleries for all six films, exclusive gatefold packaging featuring brand new artwork by Tonci Zonjic, and a booklet featuring an interview with director Toshio Masuda by Mark Schilling, plus new writing by Schilling, Chris D and Kevin Gilvear. The first film in the series is Gangster VIP (1968) which was directed by Toshio Matsuda and stars Tetsuya Watari (Tokyo Drifter) in the iconic role of Goro Fujikawa. The series is based on the true life memoirs of one time yakuza Goro Fujita but  brings together many of the themes that were dominating Nikkatsu’s output at the time from their star led, youth appeal billboard cool to their noir inflicted, nihilistic crime thrillers as a kind of culmination of the types of movies they were making at the time. Goro is sent to jail for three years for for stabbing a hitman (Machida Kyosuke) who belonged to the rival gang the Aokis. Another well-known Nikkatsu star Jo Shishido plays Goro's right hand man. Once released from prison, Goro finds out his gang is in decline and learns that the hitman he stabbed is still alive. There are some great location shots and a montage of 60s neon signs that gives the film a noir-like visual style.

Filmworker

Being a fan of Stanley Kubrick, I was already predisposed to liking Tony Zierra's documentary on Kubrcik's assistant , Leon Vitali, Filmworker (2017). In fact it inspired me to order a copy o Kubrick's recent Bluray release of Barry Lyndon since that was where Vitali, he was a co-star with Ryan O'Neal, became a disciple of Kubrick and started working behind the scenes. The film shows what a major contribution Vitali made to the legacy of Kubrick, but it was also an opportunity to revisit Kubrick's amazing career as well.

Gentle Italian Restaurant & Sushi Bar

I won a seat at an opening party for Gentle a new Italian Restaurant and Sushi Bar in Omotesando courtesy of the Tokyo Weekender magazine. Super food salad with quinoa and organic vegetables, venison carpaccio, and the tin contains marinated organic chicken liver and gizzard

Quinoa risotto and spaghetti vongole with shell fish.

Lotus roots and vegan hamburger steak and sauteed dry-aged boar meat.

Otoro, kichiji, and anago nigiri

Salt grilled barracuda with ground water pepper sauce.

Grilled rockfish rice bowl with black truffle

Crab sesame tofu served in bonito stock-perhaps my favorite dish of the night.

iramisu, coconut truffle, yuzu chocolate cake, and frozen blueberry cheese cake.

Tora-san's Tropical Fever (25)

Yoji Yamada's Tora-san's Tropical Fever (1980) starring the intrepid Tora-san (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is a strong follow up to a superior episode, Tora-san Dream of Spring. The pre-credits sequence is a jidaigeki (historical) parody of "Tora Mouse" an accomplished thief who finds his long lost sister while fleeing the authorities. Tora-san is reunited with a previous crush, the night club singer Lily (Ruriko Asaoka) who appeared in the 11th (Tora-san Forget Me Not) and the 15th (Tora-san Rise and Fall) installments. Lily finds herself ill in Okinawa and asks to see Tora-san before she succumbs to illness, so his family at Toraya pool the money for Tora to go to Okinawa to see Lily. It is Tora's first time on an airplane and he barley makes it on board-intervention via JAL cabin attendants save the day. After Lily's recovery they stay in a a small inn by the sea and live an idyllic life until Lily threatens to go back to work. Yamada gets lots of great overage of the beauty of Okinawa and Tora's daily trips to the aquarium there. lily and Tora have a falling out and she returns to Tokyo and Tora follows and gets there a 10 days after her and there's something of a bittersweet reunion in Tokyo. Later the two meet up on the road near Kusatsu hot springs in Gunma as if nothing has happened. This is one of the standout episodes thus far in the series.

The Cranes Are Flying

I first encountered Mikhail Kalatovoz with his mesmerizing I Am Cuba (1964). So it was no surprise to find that Kalatovoz's The Cranes Are FLying (1957) is one of the landmarks of Soviet film and, according to film critic Josephine Woll: “the first indisputable masterpiece of post-Stalin cinema.” The film was seen as a revelation in the Soviet Union and became an international success, winning the Palmed’Or at Cannes. The somewhat melodramatic story starts on the day of Germany’s surprise invasion of Russia, when the hero, Boris (Alexei Batalov), volunteers for the front. The film depicts Boris’ reluctance to tell his lover, Veronica (Tatiana Samoilova) that he has volunteered, and shows the pain and anxiety felt by Veronica and Boris’s father, Feodor (Vasily Merkuryev), when they learn the truth.The story follows the pair through missed opportunities and near misses that result in pathos and tragedy. The most impressive aspect of the film for me is the camerawork of Sergei Urusevsky, the master cinematographer who first worked with Kalatozov on First Echelon (1956). Kalatozov and Urusevsky followed The Cranes Are Flying with The Letter Never Sent (1959), and the astonishing visual masterpiece I Am Cuba. One of the visual highlights of The Cranes Are Flying is the sequence in which Veronica, having been unable to say goodbye to Boris, rushes through a crowd of people seeing new recruits off to the front in search of him. This sequence is captured by a handheld camera. There's another impressive sequence, in which the camera rushes alongside Veronica as she runs after a train.In general, Urusevsky seem to utilize many types of masterful shots form birds-eye shot from a crane to moving shots and the impressively framed compositions seen throughout the film.

The King Is Always Above The People

I have been a fan of Daniel Alarcon for some time and have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed his latest collection  of short stories, The King Is Always Above The People (2017). In 2010, he was recognized by the New Yorker as one of 20 promising writers under 40. I think this shows his promise-all of the shot stories had their merits, but I think my favorite was "The Provincials," which also happened to be the longest. A father and his son return to the provincial town they escaped. He is now working at a job that seems useless to eh townspeople—Head Librarian of the Rare and Antiquarian Manuscripts division of the National Library—and has one son in America. The son traveling with him is an actor and is mistaken for the other son, so he assumes his identity and learns to value what the town has to offer. There were several poignant observations about life throughout the story for examples:

I was too young to recognize what would later seem more than obvious: that I was the greatest source of my old man's concern. That, if he was old old too soon, I was at least partly to blame.

His politics affirmed that all work held an inherent dignity. This was what he always reported, but of course no ideology can protect a son from the unwanted inheritance of his father's ambitions.

Grown men with hurt feelings are awkward creatures; grown men who feel dimly they done something wrong are particularly opaque.

As I mentioned earlier that I enjoyed all of the stories, but the other standouts for me included: "Abraham Lincoln has Been Shot," "Republica and Grau," and "The Bridge."

Retaliation

Yasuharu Hasebe's fourth feature film, Retaliation (1969), is a visually compelling B action yakuza film. It stars Akira Kobayashi as Jiro Sagae, a yakuza who was recently released from prison to find that his family has diminished in size and power since his lock up for murder. He is also confronted by Hino (Jo Shisihido), a rival who wants revenge for the murder committed by Sagae. There's a labyrinthine plot involving buying land from peasant farmers to sell to a construction company that wants to build a factory on the land which causes all kinds of power grabs among three yakuza families. Sagae's romantic interest, Saeko (Mieko Kaji who would later go on to star in the Stray Cat and Scorpion series'), is the daughter of one of the farmers who is forced to sell out to the yakuza. If the story is somewhat conventional, the visual style elevates the material. Hasebe uses long lens tracking shots from a variety of angles and behind a number of framing foreground. There's a memorable fight scene between rival yakuza factions taken from a birds-eye view atop an alley seen through the narrow opening between two buildings from the roof that minimalizes the action as a small part of what goes on in the metropolis. Yet his exploitation future seems clear here as this film mixes gratuitous violence with gratuitous nudity-it's still pretty tame at this stage but in the 70s it will be much more visible. The Special Limited Edition Blu-ray edition from Arrow includes the following: Restored High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation, on Blu-ray for the first time in the world!, original uncompressed mono PCM audio, newly translated English subtitles, interview with renowned critic and historian Tony Rayns, original theatrical trailer, gallery featuring rare promotional images, reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Ian MacEwan, and a booklet featuring new writing on the film by Japanese cinema expert Jasper Sharp, newly illustrated by Ian MacEwan and featuring original archive stills.