This documentary purports to reveal a more intimate side of the legendary pianist and big band leader through “private correspondence and home movies” that, supposedly, have never been made public before. Most of these documents seem to consist of letters he wrote home from the road, notes he was making for a memoir, and genuine home movies. However, as the narration, spoken by actor Clarke Peters, says more than once, Basie was a man of few words who wasn’t fond of talking about himself, and these personal materials are actually much less revealing than the requisite talking head interviews, which in this case include noted jazz critics like Gary Giddins and Will Friedwald, former band members like John C. Williams and collaborators like Quincy Jones, as well as relatives and family friends. In the end, the only real new information I gleaned from the doc had to do with Basie’s daughter, Diane, who was born with cerebral palsy.
The chronology is maddeningly inconsistent, often jumping from one timeframe to another in order to follow a theme and, in doing so, running over the same incidents (and using the same visuals) without adding anything fresh. Basie’s development as a pianist is shortchanged by the filmmakers. He goes from accompanying carnival acts and vaudeville productions in Red Hook, New Jersey, to hustling gigs in Harlem in the 1920s without any mention of how he got to that point professionally except to say that he greatly admired Fats Waller. And while Basie was an excellent stride pianist, it wasn’t what made him unique as an instrumentalist in the long run. More time is given over to the founding of his big band in Kansas City in the 30s and how he then brought that particular sound back east, where his reputation for “swinging the blues” made him more popular as a dance act than any other swing era ensemble The fact that he was not celebrated at the time with as much general fanfare as those other big bands was, of course, due to racism, a matter covered extensively throughout the film, as it should be, though Basie himself never complained that much being the kind of closed-off personality that he was. The doc finally comes into its own when it charts the band’s rise as a jazz institution in the 50s and 60s, mainly because of the available footage of the band and the man in action.
Occasionally, the narrative does get into areas that might have been ripe for their own dedicated documentaries, such as the Nazis’ secret obsession with African-American jazz or how the militant Black movement of the late 60s resented older successful artists like Basie for having made their peace, and their fortunes, with white patronage. If you know nothing about him, this is a good enough primer, especially about how influential his spare piano style and super syncopated rhythms were on all the jazz music that followed in his wake, but given how meticulous a professional William Basie was, the overall documentary is quite disheveled.
Opens July 3 in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu’s Gloaming in Luomu won the inaugural Busan Prize in the Competition section of last year’s Busan International Film Festival. Zhang, a mainstay at the festival for two decades, is a master of characterization and setting, though he’s a bit weak when it comes to plotting, even if fans will likely counter that storylines are not his main concern. His previous film, The Shadowless Tower, however, which delved into one man’s middle age dilemma in a wholly believable way, proved that he can fashion a solid narrative when he puts his mind to it.
The protagonist of Gloaming is Bai (Bai Baihe), a former dancer who visits the titular tourist spot in Sichuan Province because a boyfriend who ghosted her 3 years ago once sent her a postcard from there. Bai spends a lot of time drinking with the natives and wandering around the leafy town, which is striated with lovely, pristine canals. Bai’s purpose for being there—her visit stretches out into what some would call a long residence—seems to shift from one conversation to another, with the town’s beautiful ambient light providing a kind of counterpart to her constantly changing mood. Though the viewer is meant to think that Bai is searching for her old lover, or, at least, trying to find out what happened to him, not much detective work is accomplished, and not just because she tends to get drunk before any plausible answers can be discovered. Most of Bai’s conversations are with another day drinker, Liu (Liu Dan), who’s more cynical than Bai though her love for her ineffectual husband seems to provide a measure of inspiration for the newcomer.
The viewer will likely not share in this inspiration, mainly because so many scenes are repetitive and pointless. The slow rhythms point up Luomo’s attraction as a destination, which, in the end, may be the movie’s most salient selling point. It would be a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there unless you were an alcoholic.
Zhang’s even more recent film, Mothertongue, screened in the Competition section at last year’s Tokyo International Film Festival, where Zhang shared the Best Director prize with two other filmmakers. Bai again stars, this time as a struggling actor named Chunshu who manages to land a choice role in a major motion picture because the character she will be playing is from Chengdu, which is Chunshu’s hometown. However, when the producers learn that she has lost her facility with the local dialect in the years since she left, they drop her. Dejected, she returns to Chengdu to reconnect with her past, in particular the acting coach (Liu Dan again) who convinced her to lose her regional accent in the first place, telling her “only actors who speak standard Mandarin” can get work these days.
As with Gloaming, the purpose of Mothertongue seems mainly to be to promote its setting as a desirable tourist spot. Chengdu’s main claim to fame is the defunct Emei Film Studio, where many notable Chinese films of the past were made. Zhang was able to shoot the movie on the premises, which were abandoned and, by now, have probably been demolished, so the film has an intentionally marked sense of nostalgia. This sense is heightened by Liu’s retired acting coach, one of the few people who still live in the studio’s residential complex and who claims to be suffering from dementia, meaning she has forgotten much of the studio’s history, just as China has, Zhang suggests.
Mothertongue feels more coherent that Gloaming in Luomo if only because Zhang seems more engaged in the things he’s showing. It’s a more personal movie, which, to an instinctive filmmaker like Zhang, means everything.
Gloaming in Luomo and Mothertongue, both in Mandarin, open July 3 in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).
Horror movies have been ascendant for decades, but in the last few years, certainly since the end of the pandemic, they’ve become even more commercially viable since they seem to be the only genre outside of children’s animated films that can bring young people into movie theaters; which means, of course, that horror in and of itself is saving world cinema for the future. And it’s worth pondering just what it is about current horror films as opposed to horror films of, say, 30 or even ten years ago that make them appealing to Gen Z, and one inescapable factor is how independent-minded directors like the young men who made Obsession and Backrooms on shoestring budgets have refashioned horror cliches to reflect their own insecurities in ways that resonate with their cohort. The Outwaters, a horror movie by Robbie Banfitch, who not only wrote and directed it, but stars and did the editing and cinematography (not to mention most of the music), may actually be too subjective for the new generation of horror fans, and certainly lacks the narrative rigor that the most striking horror usually has to deliver, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t scary as shit.
The main narrative issue is that The Outwaters is another found-footage film in the style of The Blair Witch Project. The movie opens with audio from a 911 call against a black screen of a woman screaming hysterically while the operator tries to calm her down to find out what is going on. The call is being made in 2017, and this sequence is followed by a title card explaining that police found memory cards in the Mojave Desert in 2022. So what we subsequently watch is the content of these cards, which were from the camera or phone of amateur L.A. filmmaker Robbie (Banfitch), who plans a trip to the Mojave with his friend Michelle (Michelle May), a budding indie singer who wants to make a music video, and so, of course, Robbie thinks “desert.” To turn the job into a kind of jaunt, Robbie invites his older brother, the quiet, thoughtful hunk Scott (Scott Schamell), and another female friend from the east coast, Angela (Angela Basolis), to do hair and makeup, since she’s never been west. Most of the footage in the first half of the film is rote setup—what kind of people these characters are—and it’s obviously Banfitch’s intent to show them as not being particularly interesting. Once the movie gets into the desert, where the quartet will be camping as they make the video, things initially progress without incident as the characters adapt to the weird, forbidding environment. And then at one point the weather gets strange, odd noises emerge from the night, and everything goes seriously south without let-up.
Visually, Banfitch doesn’t stray from the found-footage template. The horrors are mostly suggested, especially since much of the action in the extremely disturbing last 45 minutes takes place in total darkness, with only Robbie’s iPhone flashlight illuminating tiny patches of seeming reality. However, the accumulation of disquieting images within these patches—frightened faces, insects, weird snakelike creatures, and lots and lots of blood—have the effect of forcing the viewer to draw conclusions that are very unpleasant but impossible to verify based on what’s available. Banfitch seems more interested in this effect than in telling a coherent story, since many of the images clearly could not have been recorded on the memory cards that the video is ostensibly taken from; which sets up Robbie, who is operating the camera, as the ultimate unreliable narrator, making us wonder if maybe he isn’t the perpetrator of these atrocities. For sure, he is definitely going mad without any indication in the beginning that he had the potential for madness, but the disconnect between his point-of-view and the content of the found footage is a problem that Banfitch the director doesn’t even attempt to solve, and perhaps for that reason alone The Outwaters—what does that title even mean?—is a new kind of horror movie, one in which logic itself becomes a terrifying uncertainty.
The Long Walk is a horror movie in the old school sense, since it is based on a Stephen King story, one he wrote in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. Like The Running Man, another Bachman story that’s been turned into a movie (several times), The Long Walk is premised on a game of life-and-death survival staged to distract a disenfranchised populace from the indignities of the dystopia they live in. The movie, as directed by Francis Lawrence, is more class-conscious than The Running Man, with most of the action actually focused on discussions among the contestants regarding social theory and the like, though couched in King’s peculiarly spiky vernacular.
The titular contest is one of eugenics. Fifty boy volunteers from across the U.S. take part in an endurance walking race until only one remains. Anyone who falls behind the established pace is warned to keep up and if he doesn’t is shot dead. That’s pretty much it, so what you have is various characters illuminated as to their mental state and backstories as they talk to one another while walking along an empty highway followed by truckloads of armed men and TV cameras. Predictably, the principals are a colorfully varied bunch: a kid with serious emotional problems (Charlie Plummer), a weak boy with an amazingly big heart (David Jonsson), and the obvious leader type (Cooper Hoffman) whose goal seems not to be winning but rather to prove to the powers that be that they can be beaten by the solidarity of defiance.
Lawrence means to comment on the current political climate, and not just in America, and so The Long Walk, for all its dramatic effect and excellent acting, often feels over-extended, lacking in the kind of subtlety that would make it thoughtful rather than merely provocative. And as a horror movie it adheres faithfully to one facet of the genre that is unavoidable, which is fantasy. It has compelling things to say about the terrors of authoritarianism and the power of resistance, but the fantastical trappings automatically make it less scary than the purely visceral terrors of The Outwaters.
The Outwaters now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).
The Long Walk now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).
We’ve often written about the discrimination that Japan-born-and-resident “zainichi” Koreans have to put up with in Japan, but as it turns out, they also face a certain amount of discrimination in Korea, too. A June 14 story in the Asahi Shimbun explained the situation of 71-year-old Kim Byung-jin, who lives in the city of Sakai in Osaka Prefecture, where he teaches Korean language and culture along with his wife. Kim was born in Kobe and attended university in South Korea. In 1983, while a graduate student at Seoul’s Yonsei University, he was arrested by state security police and his wife and two-month-old baby were placed under house arrest.
This was at the height of the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship, when anyone suspected of having anything to do with North Korea was tortured, imprisoned, and sometimes disappeared. Kim was accused of spying for the North in the 1970s and duly tortured for three months. His case was sent to state prosecutors with the expectation that he would be tried as a spy. However, according to the National Security Act, a prosecutor may suspend the filing of an indictment while considering the motive behind a violation of the security law and the circumstances of the suspect following the commission of a crime, and during that period the suspect is released pending a formal indictment.
During this period when the prosecutor supposedly studied his case, Kim remained in Korea under surveillance and forced to act as a Korean-Japanese interpreter for the Defense Security Command (DSC, now defunct), where he worked for two years. In 1986, the prosecutor had still not indicted Kim and he returned to Japan with his family, settling in Sakai. In 1988, he published a book in both Japanese and Korean editions about his ordeal that was heavily critical of the South Korean military government. As a result, the DSC subpoenaed him to return to South Korea for violating the Military Confidentiality Protection Law, but he ignored the subpoena.
Nevertheless, Kim’s wife, Kang Yon-mi, has said their son was being “observed” by strange men at his kindergarten and feared that he might be abducted. When Kim tried to renew his South Korean passport, he was turned down at the consulate. It wouldn’t be until 2000, when Kim Dae-jung became president, that he would be able to obtain a new passport.
In August of last year, Kim went to the Seoul prosecutor’s office with a lawyer to submit a petition to cancel the still pending indictment, explaining in an attached letter that he has been living in constant fear for more than 40 years. On May 28, the prosecutor’s office finally decided that there were no grounds to suspect Kim of spying and that he was cleared of all charges. However, this conclusion was reached in a rather roundabout way. Since Kim’s case had never gone to trial, there was no procedure in place to acquit him of the crime he was accused of. As it happens, another man who was accused of being Kim’s “accomplice” had been indicted and convicted, but after Korea underwent democratization in the late 80s, the man won the right to a retrial and was acquitted, so the prosecutor simply deemed that had Kim also been indicted and convicted, he would have been acquitted also. According to the Asahi, this was the first time in Korean legal history that such a set of circumstances led to the dropping of charges.
Kim says he didn’t even know he had an “accomplice,” but the information was not surprising. Under South Korea’s military dictatorship in the 70s and 80s, many young Zainichi Koreans were arrested as North Korean spies and sentenced to death or long-term prison stays. After 2010, many were retried and acquitted. Zainichi Koreans, who weren’t necessarily trusted by the Korean citizenry, were always stuck in a legal limbo between the country of their birth and residence, Japan, and the country of their heritage, which after the mid-50s was either South Korea or North Korea. They were thus easy scapegoats, especially those who originally declared themselves North Koreans for nationality purposes and then switched to South Korea when they wanted to attend a South Korean university, since they couldn’t attend a Japanese university and North Korea didn’t have any such programs. Kim’s lawyers told Asahi that there were other Zainichi Koreans arrested during the dictatorship and never tried, and that he hopes they can be exonerated as well.
According to an article that appeared last December in the magazine Shukan Kinyobi, in 1975, a number of Zainichi Koreans were arrested in South Korea as North Korean spies during the so-called Nov. 22 Incident, when suspected communists were rounded up by the security police in the wake of the collapse of Saigon. Zainichi Korean students were specially targeted because so many were studying in South Korea at the time due to an atmosphere of violence against Zainichi Koreans that prevailed in Japan, thus prompting many to want to learn more about their heritage. Nine were sentenced to death, and 29 were sent to prison. In 1987, when South Korea adopted democracy in the runup to the 1988 Olympics, many of these Zainichi Koreans were retried and acquitted. Those who were not retried had either died in prison or had not applied for a retrial and simply been released. The article states that the archive for the democratic development of South Korea is now housed in the intelligence offices where much of the torture of suspected communists during the military regime was carried out.
A lot of comedies, especially those that favor a blacker hue, posit worlds that are in and of themselves insane. The Danish writer and director, Anders Thomas Jensen, creates characters who are eccentric in weird and sometimes dangerous ways. In his previous film, Riders of Justice, the protagonist was a professional soldier played by Mads Mikkelsen who attempts to avenge the death of his wife in what he believes was a terrorist act by teaming up with a statistician played by Nikolaj Lie Kaas who survived the terrorist act and presents him with a meticulously calculated theory that the “accident” could not have been “natural,” thus setting in motion a revenge thriller that is both brutally violent and ridiculously improbable. In Jensen’s new film, The Last Viking, the two actors reverse the roles, so to speak. It is Kaas who now plays the character with the perilously short fuse, an ex-convict named Anker who is trying to find the stolen money his brother buried for him while he was up the river, and it is Mikkelsen who plays the pathetic accomplice, namely the brother, Manfred, who, suffering from dissasociative identity disorder, can’t or won’t help his brother locate the cash. It says a lot about Jensen’s world view that the constantly fuming Anker is the only character in the film who seems grounded in any kind of recognizable reality.
One of the reasons the preternaturally anxious Manfred is uncooperative is that Anker, to whom he was once very close, refuses to call him by the name he now prefers, John W. Lennon. Along with Manfred’s penchant for self-defenestration, this running joke is expanded upon by a psychiatric doctor, Lothar (Lars Brygmann), who, claiming he’s dying of cancer, wants to go out with a possibly world-shaking experiment by teaming Manfred with two other psychiatric patients who also think they are Beatles, convincing Anker in the process that it is the only way to get Manfred to cough up the location of the money, which is supposedly on the land of their remote childhood home in the woods that in the meantime has been converted into an AirBnB by a couple (Søren Malling, Sofie Gråbøl) who come across as just a few shakes of the ass more lucid than Manfred. Meanwhile, one of Anker’s old criminal associates, a psychopath named Flemming (Nicolas Bro), is hunting for Anker to claim not just his share but Anker’s.
As with Riders of Justice, The Last Viking alternates highly subjective comedy sequences with scenes of unspeakable violence, creating an ethically dodgy mix of intention that challenges the conventions of plot-oriented screenwriting in ways that are often intriguing but just as often thematically dissonant. Some movies just don’t deserve happy endings.
The Korean comedy Pretty Crazy is also set in a world that feels uncomfortably askew, though in many ways that world will be familiar to anyone who has seen more than a handful of Korean comedies. The protagonist is a certifiably unemployable young man named Gil-goo (Ahn Bo-hyun), whose only skill is beating those claw crane games so popular in arcades (and which are known as “UFO catchers” in Japan), but spends most of his days in bed and most of his nights wandering around. During one late sojourn he encounters a hysterical woman in the elevator of his apartment building and soon learns that she and her cousin have opened a bakery on the first floor, except that during waking hours, this woman, Seon-ji (Yoona), is perfectly calm and reasonable. It’s love at first sight during the daytime, so when he sees the crazed Seon-Ji being manhandled on a different night by a middle aged man, he runs to her aid only to learn that the man, Jang-soo (Sung Dong-Il), is her father.
Jang-soo, sensing that Gil-goo has a crush on his daughter, offers him a job as her nighttime caretaker. It turns out that Seon-Ji is possessed by a demon that only emerges during the wee hours. Gil-goo, perhaps unwisely, takes the assignment and over the course of the movie learns about the family curse that Seon-ji has inherited, a curse her daytime incarnation doesn’t know anything about, which means the demonic incarnation is the only one who has a full understanding of where she’s at. Naturally, Gil-goo tries to figure out a way to rid Seon-Ji of her demon, who isn’t really demonic, just mean to weaker people (she tries to convince a man contemplating suicide to jump off the top of a building). In the end, the demon has more of a recognizable ego than the Pollyannish daytime Seon-ji, and Gil-goo falls equally in love with it (her?). His romantic dilemma becomes no less poignant for the ludricrous position it puts him in.
The director, Lee Sang-geun, presents Seon-ji as the embodiment of the steady girlfriend who can be agreeable one minute and terribly contrary the next. But what he does that makes Pretty Crazy pretty appealing is showing the viewer how Gil-goo could be more in love with the devil than with the constantly accommodating baking enthusiast, and not for any overt sexual reasons (sex isn’t even alluded to). What Gil-goo does for love in the end is not only selfless, but rather smart given the consequences. The movie is equally smart, or at least as smart as a romantic slapstick Korean comedy can be.
The Last Viking, in Danish and Swedish, now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
Pretty Crazy, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).
It would be hard to name a recent movie that is more timely than Brandt Andersen’s feature debut, I Was a Stranger, which explores, in a granular manner, the circumstances that prompted many people living in wartorn areas of the Middle East to seek refuge in a Europe, which, increasingly, refuses to let them in. In Andersen’s case, the conflict is the civil war in Syria, particularly the city of Aleppo, which, in 2015 when much of the movie takes place, was where Assad’s army was most fiercely fighting rebel forces (not to mention the Islamic State). Andersen’s expository method is to follow a series of disparate characters whose experiences during a particularly fraught period of the war overlap in ways that compellingly illustrate how refugees are not only created but exploited.
The movie provides its own spoiler in the opening scene as its jumps ahead to 2023 to show that at least one of the refugees made it out alive, but once it starts following its own chronological logic it can become quite tense. A surgeon (Yasmine Al Massri), who treats wounded rebels alongside Syrian soldiers, is forced to flee Aleppo with her daughter after her family compound is bombed. Now targeted by her own government she has to sneak out of the country into Turkey. A Syrian soldier (Yahya Mahayni) whose father is a fugitive anti-government scholar becomes fed up with the regime after he is forced to witness the execution of a child for the crime of writing grafitti. A poet (Ziad Bakri) desperately tries to move his entire family, under cover of dark, out of the country. All these characters eventually find their fates in the hands of a gruff, glaring people smuggler (Omar Sy), who sneaks them out of the Turkish refugee camp where they end up and piles them into rubber boats for the perilous trip to Greece. Perhaps the most dramatic story is that of the PTSD-addled Greek Coast Guard captain whose everyday job is saving these refugees, since often he can’t.
Viscerally, I Was a Stranger can be a tough movie to sit through, though its structure sometimes undermines the drama just when it reaches its most climactic junctures. It also relies emotionally on trite plot points—the abandonment of a pet dog, the smuggler’s love for his ailing son, the Coast Guard captain’s foolhardy selflessness—that hardly seem necessary given the rawness of the experiences depicted. But if Andersen’s aim is to show us why these people risk their lives to go to a place that doesn’t want them, then he definitely succeeds.
The fantasy-satire Rich Flu follows a very different kind of refugee odyssey. Laura (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the protagonist of Galder Gatztelu-Urrutia’s movie, is a go-getting film production executive who, in the beginning, believes she is up for a hefty promotion at the conglomerate that owns her production company, but is rudely shunted aside by a rival, not to mention badmouthed by the owner-founder’s ridiculously callous son. These scenes set up the dog-eat-dog brand of international capitalism that provides the ripe atmosphere for the film.
Laura is in the midst of a contentious divorce from Tony (Rafe Spall), who wants their teenage daughter to live with him in Barcelona while Laura’s base of operations is London. The loss of the promotion muddles these plans even more, but then Laura is mysteriously summoned to the Alaskan wilderness by the owner-founder (Timothy Spall), who offers her and a chosen group of other employees stock in the company that will soon make them multi-millionaires if they join him in a “philanthropic effort” that isn’t convincingly explained (they are given copies of Walden as assigned reading). The story’s whiplash-inducing pacing keeps the jokes smarmy and pointed until people start dying off screen, and then the movie suddenly lurches into potboiler mode.
These people are dying of the titular malady, which for reasons that no one can explain, only affects those whose net worth is above a certain astronomical level. With her unexpected windfall, Laura believes she is now a member of this unfortunate club and is desperate to isolate herself from any traveling contagion that might make her susceptible, since it proves to be fatal. Consequently, it is rich white people manning rubber dinghys and going in the opposite direction—into Africa, where they believe the virus cannot penetrate—and risking their lives in the process. I’ll hand it to Gatztelu-Urrutia. He manages to reconstitute a totally stupid premise into a capable thriller, but the anti-capitalist theme, though deserving of attention, can’t really stand up under scrutiny. Given all the conspicuous consumption on display, you would expect at least someone with a science background to explain it all, and that person never shows up.
I Was a Stranger, in Arabic, English, and Greek, opens June 19 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).
Rich Flu, in English and Spanish, opens June 19 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
Unlike that sprawling collective of session musicians called the Wrecking Crew (a moniker many of them disliked) who played on practically every record that came out of Southern California in the 1960s, the Immediate Family, a mere five guys who did pretty much the same thing during the 70s, became pretty well known by name as individuals to aficionados of West Coast MOR rock/the Laurel Canyon sound simply because record companies were giving credit where credit was due on album jackets by the time they were working steadily. So it’s sort of rich to hear fans like actor/musician Billy Bob Thornton refer to them as unsung heroes who “nobody knew about.” Even I knew their names, and I wasn’t a fan of everything they played on.
To be specific, they’re guitarists Danny “Kootch” Kortchmar, Waddy Wachtel, and Steve Postell; drummer Russ Kunkel; and bassist Leland Sklar. Except for Postell, they mainly started as the backing band for James Taylor, whose pianist on his first major tour was fellow singer-songwriter Carole King, so, of course, they played on her best-selling album Tapestry, thus cementing their legacy even before supporting people like Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt, Phil Collins, Don Henley, and even Keith Richards. They were as much the creators of FM radio as the DJs who soft-peddled their wares. The documentary director Danny Tedesco, who previosly made a movie about the Wrecking Crew, here has much fewer personnel to cover, and sometimes you get tired hearing these same five dudes verbally high-five one another about some riff they invented that has since become rock gospel. Also, each member gets enough time to explain his background in detail, but except for Kortchmar’s, which involved meeting Taylor as a preteen during summer vacations to Martha’s Vineyard, they all kind of blend into one big amorphous success story achieved through ambition, luck, and what Nicolas Cage once termed “the enormous weight of massive talent.” It’s the same old story: the unmistakably accomplished talking at length about their accomplishments.
And it’s terribly entertaining, especially when they discuss flawed geniuses like Warren Zevon and Neil Young (they proudly cop to playing behind Shakey on his certifiably worst album, Landing on Water), but for the most part they sell their brand with slightly off-putting vigor. That they inevitably formed a touring/recording group called the Immediate Family comes across not as valuable intelligence important to their legacy but a commercial gambit that will see them through their dotage, as if they hadn’t made enough money as it is.
Opens June 19 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Yebisy Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
Here is a column I wrote about the late Ai Iijima back in 1995 for the Japan Times, which is not available online. At the time, Iijima was at the height of her popularity as a TV personality in Japan. I have not changed anything, so all the prejudices, rhetorical pratfalls, and stylistic faux pas are in tact.
“How to succeed in show business…”
Sallie Tisdale, in her book-long essay on pornography, Talk Dirty to Me, writes that “censors are concerned with how men act and how women are portrayed.” This has always been the crux of the sex industry debate: Because women are perceived as the commodity rather than the consumer, the images produced are aimed specifically at men who want sexual control.
Tisdale’s position in the essay, as a woman with an appetite for hard-core videos, is to deflate this notion of women as victims. She finds that the theme of most pornography is “virility, endurance, and lust,” rather than men wielding power over women. She says that “women in modern films are often the initiators of sex.”
Tisdale is talking about American porn. In Japanese “adult videos” (AV), the women, in order to project the coyness that male viewers seem to demand, either act passively or resist (the most commonly heard word in Japanese pornography is “yamete” [stop it]). “Act,” of course, may not be the most appropriate verb to use here, since another characteristic of adult videos is a lack of credible expression, a tendency that makes AV actresses interchangeable (the men don’t even merit video credits).
Many of these women occasionally wander over to mainstram television, either hawking their videos on late-night “information” programs or filling up screen space as background. Either way, they don’t stay long. The only AV actress who has made the transition completely is Ai Iijima. She is now a tarento in her own right, but that doesn’t mean she has more control over her career.
According to Tokyo Journal, which ran an interview with Iijima in its April issue, her managers won’t let her discuss her hard-core AV past. It’s hardly a secret, though, since her tapes are still readily available. In my local video store, her shelf is labeled “Ai Iijima—retired.”
Last year, Iijima replaced calendar girl Fumie Hosokawa as co-host of TV Tokyo’s late Saturday night soft-core “information program,” Gilgamesh Night. Given her background, Iijima is a much more natural choice for the role than the genuinely demure and totally unopinionated Hosokawa. Iijima can interview and comment on the models and AV actresses as someone who knows the business from the inside. She understands why these women do what they do: They want to make money, and some of them are making a lot of it.
This is important to remember, especially when you’re watching a show like Gilgamesh, which is really more about leering than sex. Women walk around in various states of undress while a bunch of soft-bodied male comedians drool and stumble over themselves. Iijima’s comments during the show have become increasingly candid about how fatuous she finds it all, but she at least treats the women as peers with not only brains but actual lives.
Iijima continues to co-host Gilgamesh, but she has, in the past year or so, moved even farther from her AV past. She’s achieved mainstream appeal as a TV personality because of her frankness, and not just about sex. She doesn’t suffer hypocrites lightly and, though she seems to know her place, as it were, she won’t allow herself to be bullied or humiliated. What’s more, she’s quick-witted, which makes her the ideal guest for quiz shows and “talk-variety” programs. These attributes have endeared her more to young women than to men, who still see her primarily as a sex symbol.
Iijima’s success is particularly striking when her situation is compared to that of other female talent with similar backgrounds. Natsuki Okamoto, for instance, has never appeared in adult videos or nude photo spreads. Before she became a talent she was a “race queen”—a woman who stands around in a “high leg” bathing suit at auto races representing a sponsor.
The media and TV producers are currently singling out Okamoto as their favorite bimbo. A tall woman with a full figure, she often appears in outlandishly ugly costumes that accentuate her cleavage and long legs. What’s more, she’s treated as a stupid woman. In a “scoop” about an alleged scene she made at a Chiba hotel, the magazine Shukan Josei actually called her “Heisei’s stupidest woman.” Several weeks ago at a celebrity golf tournament, she was heckled to distraction by a gallery that kept demanding she bend over and show her underwear. And she can always be counted on to come in last on Fuji TV’s academic quiz show Heisei Kyoiku Iinkai.
A few years ago, Okamoto tried to steer her career into less degrading territory, and was successful insofar as she was allowed to wear mature clothing, but then she dropped out of a movie because she didn’t want to do a sex scene. For a while she couldn’t be found anywhere, and there were rumors that she’d had a nervous breakdown. Since coming back, she’s been appearing regularly on Heisei and the Friday night “sexy variety” show Donmai, as well as in a number of commercials. She now seems resigned to the dumb costumes and the “stupid woman” sobriquet, as if it’s the price she must pay to stay in show business.
Which brings us back to the question of control. If Iijima seems to have more than Okamoto does, it’s only because she can say what’s on her mind. Iijima wouldn’t have held back as Okamoto did at the golf tournament, even though lifting her skirt for the masses was something she used to do for a living as a “T-back girl.”
But like Okamoto, Iijima is still an employee of a production company. Her outspokenness is part of her image, and therefore a commodity that must be managed just as Okamoto’s “stupidity” is. In the Tokyo Journal interview, she admitted that her recent book, which capitalizes on that image, was ghost-written and not something she wanted to do.
In the same interview she also said that she didn’t necessarily see herself remaining in show business 10 years down the road. Apparently, the 29-year-old Okamoto thinks she has no choice but to give in to her unflattering image, since she’s practically over-the-hill by Japanese show business standards. Iijima is only 22, so she could very well change her mind. But quitting is the ultimate expression of control.
I agree with the critical consensus that John Cassavettes’ A Woman Under the Influence is the definitive cinematic treatment of female mental illness in a connubial setting. The movie stakes its credibility on a marital dynamic that is perhaps specific to its time and place, but from Gena Rowlands’ harrowing portrayal of Mabel Longhetti emerges a universal understanding of just what it is about being a housewife and mother under those particular circumstances that can drive you crazy. Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love covers similar circumstances but tends to shade more toward post partum depression as its malady-du-jour, but if it comes across as less convincing than Cassavettes’ vision it’s mainly because of Ramsay’s expressionism, which in the end dilutes much of its power. A Woman Under the Influence was as raw as you can get, a mode of presentation that’s much more difficult to pull off, but if you can the results are devastating.
The couple in question is Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson), who aren’t married when we first meet them as they inspect a rural house in poor repair that Jackson has casually inherited from an uncle who we later learn killed himself. Grace subsequently becomes pregnant and a daughter is born, but even before the blessed event Ramsay provides haunting premonitions of psychic trouble to come, as if preparing us for the worst. Jackson’s occupation is never explained—he seems to spend a lot of time on the road in his pickup truck—and Grace is a writer, though it’s not clear if she’s ever been published or whether it’s a vocation she’s worked at. Ramsay’s script, which she wrote with playwright Enda Walsh and Alice Birch, is based on a novel by Arian Harwicz that throws out the idea that Grace’s emotional conflicts may be triggered by writer’s block, but as the movie progresses and the separation between reality and fantasy becomes blurred, the writer’s block theme feels more and more like an unfairly proferred red herring. She starts seeing a guy on a motorcycle (LaKeith Stanfield) who vrooms past their house and either has sex with him or imagines she does. She becomes willfully contrary to everyone she meets, including store clerks and hospital nurses, and her heightened sexual demands of Jackson are treated with suspicion, not because Jackson doesn’t want it but because the come-ons are theatrically creepy. The only person who seems to sympathize with Grace’s situation is her senile father-in-law (Nick Nolte), whose condition, it’s suggested, allows him to intuit her pain, and once he’s gone (again, Ramsay denies us any details about his death) it falls to his wife (Sissy Spacek) to assume the burden of being Grace’s sympathizer/confessor.
The tension never lets up, mainly because there is always an infant around and Grace’s unstable behavior makes the viewer fear for the child’s safety. If Jackson proves to be an even less reliable husband in terms of helping his wife get through her trauma than Peter Falk’s Nick in A Woman Under the Influence it’s mainly because he seems inert as a character. Lawrence and Pattinson are fascinating to watch, especially together, but the lack of backstory and vague indications of past trauma only serve to highlight the drama of Grace’s actions, not the actual sickness. There’s a lot of sound and fury here, but little of it makes much sense.
Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
Though Eleanor Morgenstein is only the second leading film role that the 94-year-old American actor June Squibb has ever done, the novelty of such an aged person playing the titular character in a major motion picture like Eleanor the Great—the directing debut of Scarlett Johansson, no less—draws attention to Squibb’s ubiquity on TV, screen, and even stage (she was recently nominated for a Tony) as a supporting player since her breakthrough in Alexander Payne’s 2013 road movie Nebraska. There’s a naturalness to Squibb’s screen presence that doesn’t feel gratuitous or phony, which means she can flow from comedy to poignancy and back without changing much in the way of dramatic gravity. She’s the perfect person to play Eleanor, a woman who rediscovers her Jewish background (though, in fact, she’s a convert) through a lie that is more of an urge than an act of purposeful deceit.
In her old age, Eleanor has made what seems to be her best life in Florida, where she shares an apartment with BFF Bessie (Rita Zohar), a victim of the Holocaust who sometimes wakes from nightmares at 3 in the morning and relates her PTSD-triggered memories to an always receptive Eleanor. These early, establishing scenes set up Eleanor as a natural dissembler, quick with a clever made-up story to get what she and Bessie need from naive younger people who don’t always know their place in the generational scheme of things. Eleanor clearly sees herself as Bessie’s protector and rises to each occasion fearlessly. So when Bessie dies suddenly, Eleanor is left adrift, without purpose, and moves back to New York City, where she raised a family with her husband and where she met Bessie, in order to be with her divorced daughter, Lisa (Jessica Hecht), and college age grandson, Max (Will Price). Bored and constitutionally out-of-sorts, she constantly annoys Lisa with her complaints and bitter asides, and Lisa signs her up for a singing class at the local Jewish Community Center. There, she accidentally wanders into a support group of former concentration camp inmates who mistake her for a fellow survivor. Intrigued by the attention, she tells them Bessie’s story as if it were her own, and from there the lie just snowballs, with a young journalism student (Erin Kellyman), who recently lost her own Jewish mother, adopting Eleanor as a class project and, in the process, attracting the interest of her famous journalist father (Chiwetel Ejiofor).
Tory Kamen’s script follows these developments to exactly where you expect them to go, and Johansson’s workmanlike direction only plays up the obviousness of the depicted dilemmas, which are not limited to Eleanor’s expanding falsehood. The contrivances are practically flown in by courier, thus undermining not only the film’s questionable use of the Holocaust as a plot device, but the various domestic melodramas it engenders. Which isn’t to say that Eleanor the Great doesn’t succeed in evincing sympathy for Eleanor and her situation, but rather that without Squibb it would have been insufferable.
John Lithgow is another elderly actor who was just nominated for a Tony and, in fact, won it for playing British author Roald Dahl as a raving anti-semite. The old man he plays in The Rule of Jenny Pen is also raving, but to different ends. Dave Crealey lives in an assisted living facility in New Zealand where he terrorizes the other residents, much the way a playground bully would terrorize fellow children who he senses are weaker than he is. The script’s allusion to one’s dotage as a return to childishness limits its scope to the most destructive adolescent impulses, an aspect of the story that Lithgow really gets into.
Though Dave is fairly indiscriminate in his domineering misanthropy, he reserves his cruelest intentions for Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), a judge who has suffered a stroke that has left him partially paralyzed but in full possession of his mental faculties. Though confined to a wheelchair, Stefan still acts like a judge, haughty towards other residents and condescending to the staff, who mostly ignore him because they’ve seen it all before. Stefan really isn’t much different from Dave in terms of attitude except that while Dave’s megalomania may be a side effect of dementia, Stefan’s intolerable pride is born of professional conditioning as someone whose word has always literally been law. As a result, Dave’s unspeakably crude persecutions, which are carried out by Jenny Pen, a plastic baby doll that Dave wields like a hand puppet, sometimes come across as being deserved, especially by other residents who hate Stefan only slightly less than they hate Dave. It also renders the staff less helpful when Stefan tries to get them to do something about Dave’s threats, which become deadlier by the day.
Director James Ashcroft, working from a novel, knows how to develop an atmosphere of ever-heightening dread of what Dave is capable of, but he never provides a reason for all the horrible behavior except that this is what old people can be like. The most terrifying aspect of the story is that none of the residents acknowledge the truth that they are in this place for the rest of their lives, since they all claim to be there “temporarily,” including the judge. Dave seems to be the only person who understands he ain’t goin’ nowhere, which in a way makes him as sympathetic a figure as Eleanor Morgenstein, something I wish Ashcroft had paid closer attention to.
Eleanor the Great opens June 12 in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211), Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).
The Rule of Jenny Pen opens June 12 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).
philipbrasor.com 