A movie whose main promotional hook is that it’s produced by J.J. Abrams and features dinosaurs is probably a sure box office bet for its opening weekend. Cinephiles who may need more convincing might be intrigued by the director of The End of Oak Street, David Robert Mitchell, whose debut feature was It Follows, one of the more inventive indie horror movies of the last decade. But likely the aspect that will attract the most attention, at least from people of a certain age, will be its setting: American suburbia in the early 1980s, thus raising the possibility, given its genre (sci-fi), that it will deliver classic Spielberg thrills and emotional payoffs to those with a nostalgia jones for that kind of stuff, like viewers who made Stranger Things the most successful streamed drama series of all time.
The Platt family is suitably generic, but Mitchell’s script tosses some dramatic spice into the stew by making them borderline dysfunctional. Unbeknownst to his family, dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) has been laid off from work and is “moonlighting” as a pizza delivery man, a job that irks his homemaker wife Denise (Anne Hathaway), who secretly channels disillusionment with her domestic lot into auto-fiction. Teen daughter Audrey (Maisy Stella) is for some unexplained reason put down for her obsession with astronomy, while her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery) is going through the requisite rebellious motions by acting out in ways that border on the violent. These soap opera elements get tossed one night when the earth shakes, the house is bombarded by strange lights, and the power and water shut down. In the morning, things seems to have changed, but it takes a few minutes for the Platts, as well as their neighbors, to realize that their street has somehow been transported back to the Jurassic Age and that big lizards are hiding in the newly emergent tropical flora. Chasing, munching, and screaming ensue.
Because It Follows, per its title, was centered on people being stalked by an invisible entity, Mitchell knows how to stage elaborate chase-and-run scenes, and the set pieces are quite clever; some, in fact, disturbingly graphic in the way they relieve tension, but nonetheless funny for the exact same reason. But while Mitchell throws around clues regarding the mechanism of the time-slip that brings all this mayhem about, everything feels arbitrary. A good fantasy does not need to explain itself in order to be effective, but The End of Oak Street keeps teasing a familiarity with hard science that it never delivers on, which means the Spielbergian sentimental ending, designed to resolve all the existential problems in the story, including the interpersonal ones plaguing the Platts, feels even phonier.
The gory humor in Matt Bettinelli-Olpin’s and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come is even more cartoonish and works more successfully within the narrow scope of its entertainment purview. The story begins at the exact moment the first movie, Ready or Not, ended, with Grace (Samara Weaving), having survived a night of being hunted almost dinosaur style by her new in-laws, the Le Domas family, as part of a bizarre tradition regarding new members, sitting on the steps of the mansion she’s just burned down, covered in blood and waiting for an ambulance. However, Grace’s delivery from evil is short-lived as members of the Satanic cult her in-laws belonged to assemble from across the globe at the order of the paterfamilias (David Cronenberg, of all people) to exact their revenge on the young, resourceful woman.
This time Grace is accompanied by her sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), who just happens to be at the hospital when the two surviving Le Domas heirs, Ursula and Titus (Sarah Michelle Gellar and Shawn Hatosy), come to abduct her. As in the first movie, killing is not really the point. Grace must be allowed a chance to elude her pursuers in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, but this time the firepower is more sophisticated, not to mention more internationally sorted.
The plot, as it were, mimics the first movie’s to a T in that it is nothing more than a series of violent confrontations between the cult’s various members and Grace, now aided—or maybe hampered is a better word—by her less savvy sister. What keeps the story interesting is the competitive rivalry among the cult participants to be the one who brings Grace down, an attitude Grace successfully exploits to her own superhuman advantage by tapping into her proletarian hatred of hubristic oligarchs. Here I Come doesn’t necessarily improve on the bloody shenanigans of its predecessor, but it does take it to the next class level.
The End of Oak Street now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald ) (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Ready of Not 2: Here I Come now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
It’s not taking anything away from director Tsou Shih-ching to point out that her debut feature was co-written, co-produced, and edited by Sean Baker, whose last movie, Anora, swept the Oscars in 2025. There’s some Baker DNA in Left-Handed Girl, from the iPhone cinematography to the focus on women living at the margins of whatever social milieu they inhabit, but that said, Left-Handed Girl is a better film than Anora or maybe any other Baker movie except The Florida Project. Tsou has been assistant director on many of Baker’s films, so in a sense it’s perhaps better to think of their work as a joint enterprise. Tsou, who lives in the U.S. but grew up in Taiwan, sets her movie in Taipei and obviously knows the city like the back of her hand. It opens with an assured montage of shots of a small rental truck entering the city by highway. The truck contains a family: the driver, Shu-fen (Janel Tsai), and her two daughters, 20-year-old I-ann (Ma Shih-Yuan) and 5-year-old I-jing (Nina Ye). I-ann lived in Taipei up until just before I-jing was born, when the three moved to the countryside, so to I-jing the city is brand new, a wonderland of colors and lights and hard surfaces, and Tsou gives us her viewpoint through the fractured prism of a kaleidoscope. It’s a bustling mix of images that perfectly sets the pace of the subsequent story.
Shu-fen is returning to Taipei to open a noodle stall in a busy night market in the center of the city. She is trying to reboot her life after paying off the debt of her ex-husband, who used to own some sort of factory and then disappeared when it went under. Her parents and two married sisters live in relative middle class comfort in the city, while her brother lords over a successful company that has business on the mainland. She is the black sheep of the family owing not only to her poor choice of spouse, but the inexplicable presence of I-jing, who, after all, is 15 years younger than her sister. Most of the movie’s through-plot addresses Shu-fen’s worsening financial situation, but the camera stays mostly on I-jing, who, as the titular character, dismays her old-fashioned grandfather (Akio Chen), who still believes that the left hand is the instrument of the Devil and tries to make her favor her right. These complaints lead the girl to believe that she actually is possessed, at least partially, by an evil force, but rather than try to exorcise it she allows it free rein in carrying out actions, like shoplifting, for which she feels no responsibility. Meanwhile, I-ann exercises her rebellious streak by securing a job at a semi-legal betel nut shop where she has sex with the owner for the worst of reasons, and Shu-fen is courted by a fellow night market operator named Johnnie (Brando Huang) who deals in a wide range of cheap sundries.
Tsou’s and Baker’s script nimbly weaves all these disparate threads into a satisfyingly dense tapestry depicting how modern urban sensibilities, not to mention the appetites they engender, can’t help but come into conflict with the filial virtues the characters pretend to honor. Though the story is closer to real life than Anora, Left-Handed Girl is still a movie in love with the kind of magical artifice that only movies can provide, and the facility with which Tsou propels her irrepressible story forward gives the entire production a sense of joyful immersion that’s impossible to resist. The characters go through hell, but the film is a kind of heaven.
In Mandarin and Min Nan. Opens Aug. 14 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
No movie franchise has genericized the high-concept plot dynamics and pop culture jokiness of post-Pixar American style animation as much as the Despicable Me series. It’s why the Minions, those yellow, oblong, goggle-sporting sidekicks have become an offshoot franchise in their own right: They perfectly personify the juvenile mindset that connects so readily to a certain audience sensibility that has proven to be more universal than we would like to admit. The third Minions feature—and the seventh in the overall Despicable Me universe—has been lauded as a vast improvement over the first two, which were characterized as merely a series of childish sight gags attached willy-nilly to skeletal plots. Actually, that pretty much describes this movie also. The difference, apparently, is that the plot flatters our affection for and knowledge of classic Hollywood films, and by “us” I mean viewers who are critics or pretend to be.
It helps that the movie’s scope is ambitious. It opens with a short history over millennia of the Minions tribe, whose age-old quest has been to find an evil entity—a “big boss”—to serve. Amidst the montage of slapstick battles and encounters with savage civilizations we are introduced to James and Henry, two Minions who possess a more creative mojo than their compatriots, whose interests rarely transcend fart humor. As the centuries roll up to the 20th, J&H manifest a taste for visual art that places them front and center when the yellow horde encounters its first silent film set. Accidentally setting themselves up as stars after becoming involved in a filmed runaway train sequence, they eventually decide to serve not a villain but rather the German-accented expat director Max (Christoph Waltz). From here the film adheres more closely to the Minions storyline credo, meaning episodic comic sketches based on well-known base material, in this case famous movies from the studio era, like Modern Times and Citizen Kane. However, once James and Henry decide to make their own movies they hit on sci-fi and creature features, the latter of which allows them to actually call forth a real monster from who-knows-where, a goofy blob called Goomi (Trey Parker) who proves to be a real terror. Predictable action-movie mayhem follows.
At no point do any of these disparate narratives gel into something organic, but the use of cinematic cliches is at least fresher than the aforementioned fart humor, which is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility. Minions are gonna Minion, so don’t expect anything out of the ordinary.
In Japanese subtitled and dubbed versions. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
The pleasures inherent in historical dramas usually lift them above the average movie in terms of what the viewer can take away from them, which mostly has to do with placing the viewer in an unfamiliar time and place and telling them how to feel in that milieu. More significantly, the details of a historical moment enrich the story by conveying knowledge about that moment the viewer didn’t possess previously. Fatih Akin, a veteran German director whose heritage is Turkish, has adapted a screenplay written by his late cinematic mentor Hark Bohm about Bohm’s childhood during World War II on the small titular island off the northern coast of Germany, where the inhabitants spoke Frisian and practiced agriculture and whaling for centuries. The protagonist, a 12-year-old boy named Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), has been evacuated from Hamburg with his pregnant mother, Hille (Laura Tonke), and younger brother due to the Allied bombing, leaving behind his father, who serves in the SS. Though Hille grew up on Amrum, she has since acculturated to the German mentality and is a staunch follower of Hitler and the Nazi cause. Her homecoming is fraught with awkward reconnections since the natives are not staunch followers. If anything, they identify more with the enemy owing to historical factors that forced a good many of them to migrate overseas after the whaling industry faded. As one former “cowboy” who used to live in the U.S. and returned to Amrum when the Great Depression hit, there are more Amrumers in New York City than that are on Amrum.
This set of circumstances provide enough dramatic substance for a movie that doesn’t rely on a conventional plot, but Bohm’s and Akin’s screenplay is built on one that is meant to be sturdy on its own. Nanning, a member of the Hitler Youth whose own belief in the cause is mostly determined by what he’s told by adults, spends the entire film trying to provide his mother, who, following the birth of the new baby, suffers post-partum depression, a small bit of luxury in the form of white bread with butter and honey, none of which is readily available on an island where provisions are scarce because of the war. Even worse, it is clear to most of the natives, if not the interlopers, that Germany is losing, but to say so out loud invites the wrath of the local military authorities, as evidenced by an impromptu visit by a stern officer to Nanning’s employer (Diane Kruger), who has casually revealed her relief at these rumored developments. Believing correctly that it was Nanning who spilled the beans, however inadvertently, she fires him, making his culinary quest that much more difficult.
The quest itself gives the movie structure and purpose, but tends to detract from those elements that elaborate on the unique way-of-life pursued by the Amrumers, and as a result the island’s place in German society feels frustratingly undersold. It’s not just in terms of the brute primal methods that inform survival based on the land and the sea (to get what he needs, Nanning must learn how to finagle his neighbors, as well as butcher livestock and steal eggs from wild geese), but also in how an isolated population can achieve a more worldly sensibility than that of the general citizenry, which in this case has been ground down by fascism. Akin only occasionally allows these matters to rise to the surface, thus creating even more questions that he can’t hope to answer. More successful is his depiction of the natural setting—the film was shot on Amrum, which seems to have changed little over the past century—which is vividly unique and wondrous, not to mention dangerous. Amrum is a gorgeously evocative film that leaves you rushing to find a book somewhere that might tell you more about the place than the movie does.
In German and Frisian. Opens Aug. 7 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
It’s difficult to screw up a coming-of-age story if you have good intentions. The indignities of puberty immediately lead to internal conflict, and while the physical changes an adolescent goes through is central to the attendant drama, filmmakers are often squeamish about showing how the human body counteracts the confidence of people that age. The Malaysian film, Tiger Stripes, confronts the physical challenges of puberty head on, and does so in a milieu that is both enlightening and discomfiting for those of us who have little insight into that milieu. The story mostly takes place at a Muslim girls school in the countryside, where the spirited and irreverent Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal, intense and totally believable) is the first among her peers to have her period. We first encounter Zaffan making a provocative dance TikTok in the school’s toilet, throwing off her hijab and gyrating ecstatically in a tank top. When one of her pals, the more dignified Farah (Deena Ezral), remarks that Zaffan is wearing a bra, she quickly takes it off so that Farah can try it on herself, albeit over her clothing. Naturally, the two, along with their other BFF Mariam (Piqa), are busted by a teacher.
Zaffan is presented to us as a free spirit whose inherent rebelliousness will surely rub any adults of authority in her orbit the wrong way, but once the cycle of menstruation kicks in her classmates find out (she’s banned from classroom prayers while bleeding) and quickly resent her, claiming she smells bad. These girls, of course, will very soon undergo the same physical change, but as anyone who has ever gone to school knows, children’s cruelty is not logic-based. Predictably, Zaffan acts out, talking back to her scandalized mother (her father is genial and hands-off) and lashing out at her friends when they start to shun her. Most of this kind of plot development is par for the coming-of-age course, but director Amanda Nell Eu goes farther, depicting Zaffan’s bodily maturation as a literal metamorphosis, wherein her anger is physicalized as a predatory life force, complete with claws, glowing red eyes, a ravenous carnivorous appetite, and even a tail.
Though tame on the body horror scale, the movie nevertheless realizes in visceral terms the inner turmoil a young girl may go through in trying to square her expanding understanding of the world with the discomfort of impending sexual readiness, and the results are startling. Western viewers will likely fixate on the religious elements of the story, but Eu is not afraid of bodily fluids and the kind of violent temper that repressed adolescent urges can produce. For me, the cultural disconnections are most interesting in the way Eu wields humor: the school principal decrying the fact that the Chinese students always do much better academically (“The Malays have to work harder”), and an opportunistic shaman (Shaheizy Sam) exploiting Zaffan’s “possession” as a means of expanding his brand (“Remember to tag Dr. Rahim on your videos”). The shaman’s comeuppance is simultaneously the most shocking and funniest thing in the movie. Tiger Stripes never lets you forget it’s an allegory, and some viewers will wonder if all the magical realism is simply taking place in Zaffan’s head, but it doesn’t make what happens on screen any less relatable.
In Malay. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
The weather forecast for this year’s Fuji Rock Festival hasn’t been encouraging. Rain pretty much every day, but right now the sun is out and the temperature is quite bearable. It was cloudy last night for the pre-festival party but I only felt a touch of mist around 11 pm.
The crowd wasn’t as big as it’s been for the past two years, which seems to mean the post-Covid “revenge” is over, though I’ve heard that Saturday is sold out. The free party last night, which is thrown mainly to thank the locals for their hospitality, seemed relatively low-key, and you could actually get food and drink without waiting. Even the fireworks, which officially kick off the festival, seemed subdued. There were no big break beats in the Japanese fashion.
That said, the live entertainment was as rowdy as always. The Mexican band Son Rompe Pera, started things off with a loud raucous set that fortified the group’s cumbia skills with punky determination. I mean, the main instrument was a marimba, played by a shirtless guy who seems to have copped his stage moves from Angus Young. Since the energy level started high and never flagged, there were no heart-stopping moments, but the prefest crowd is always raring to go so the band might be surprised today when they do their regular set at the White Stage and not that many people show up (they come on around lunch).
The second band I never heard of: FCO, who aren’t part of the official lineup. Apparently, they’re a side gig of one of the members of Tempalay, who are playing the festival. I was pleasantly surprised by the music, which had a solid pulse and some wild, caustic guitar work. I didn’t really care what the acronym stood for but once I found out I had questions.
Saturday morning
Contrary to forecasts, yesterday’s weather was almost perfect: partly cloudy and cool, with only a little drizzle in the early afternoon.
It being a Friday, the festival was not full, and I only experienced one bottleneck, which, of course, happened near the White Stage. They’ve actually opened up another forest path, supposedly to get around this problem, from the Gypsy Avalon stage to the Green Stage, but it still has to go near the White Stage where it connects to another forest path, so in a sense it’s not really a solution during times when certain shows at the far end of the festival grounds end at about the same time.
Today is sold out, so the bottlenecks will probably be worse. According to the Japan Times, the reason for the sellout is Fujii Kaze, who plays the penultimate show on the Green Stage. This repeats the pattern last year, when that slot on Saturday was filled by city pop veteran Yamashita Tatsuro, who rarely gives concerts these days. By that token, it would seem to be a kind of strategy by the promoter, Smash. The real headliner, Khruangbin, like last year’s headliner, Vulfpeck, isn’t nearly that popular in Japan, but I assume Smash still feels it has to put a foreign act at the top of the bill. Besides, if people are coming just to see Fujii, they have to have time to make it back to where they’re from afterwards.
I saw most of the acts I wanted to see yesterday. Three of them are nominally “ethnic music” groups whose members do not necessarily belong to the ethnicities whose music they play. Les Khmers, which performed in the early afternoon at the newly revamped Orange Echo, plays Cambodian pop of the 60s and 70s, though almost every member is Japanese, including leader Samut Nobe, who apparently was an exchange student in Phnom Penh some years back. I’ve always thought that Japanese kayokyoku (popular song) sounds a lot like other Asian countries’ pop music or vice versa and Les Khmers kind of fortifies that theory. The crowd really jumped, especially when the tempos revved up and Nobe started doing his awkward dance moves. He was helped enormously by a female vocalist who might have been Cambodian (her name was not listed on the festival program) and seemed to have the native moves down.
Altin Gun definitely has at least one Turkish member, vocalist and baglama player Erdinc Ecevit, but the band is headquartered in the Netherlands and, according to their bio, boasts members from all over. Still the music they play is very much based on Turkish psychedelia from the 70s that’s punched up with a more club-friendly rhythm sense. They’re one of the funkiest bands in the world at the moment, and while they held their own during the mid-afternoon at the Field of Heaven, there was a feeling that they were holding back—just as the music was building toward something monumentally ecstatic, the song would end. It was pretty amazing, but also less than what it could have been.
Antibalas is one of the foremost Afro-funk groups on the planet, and has been for almost 30 years, though they contain no musicians from Africa. Heirs to the rebel tradition of Fela Kuti, they use funk as a means to incite change, and baritone sax player Jake Pinto mentioned the current dire situation in the US. during their early evening set at Heaven. Unlike Altin Gun, they never held back and the field was jumping high during their vocal-less set, which consisted mostly of brand new material. The veteran ensemble, who haven’t played in Japan for nine years, seemed genuinely humbled by the reception.
As usual when there is too much good stuff on offer I tended to do a lot of running around from one end of the festival to the other and back again. At the far end of the grounds, where I saw the above mentioned acts, I also saw Arlo Parks, whose gently insistent dance music was heavily laden with a therapeutical component that I’m sure most of the audience, regardless of their spiritual wholeness, didn’t get, but they definitely got the groove. The Japanese electronic group Black Boboi, three women dressed completely in black, threw a hypnotic spell over the early evening crowd who had settled in the Orange Court for dinner. They held their own extremely well given the competition on other stages.
At the money end of the festival, Snail Mail delivered her strummy, personal rock songs to an audience that simply got off on the guitars—she’s quite capable on the instrument, even if she has a lead guitarist to do most of the heavy lifting. I’ve always been slightly dismissive of her songwriting, which sounds like what Taylor Swift in her post-pop phase is striving for, but the tunes stand up to scrutiny when played live. I was completely taken by a guy who was standing in front of me, dressed incongruously in a Mexican pro wrestler mask and flowered lounge pants. I didn’t have the nerve to ask him to turn around so I could get a photo of his masked face with Snail Mail in the background (depth of field challenge?). That would have been Pulitzer-worthy.
Like Antibalas, The xx were making their first return to Japan in almost a decade and seemed really stoked to be playing Fuji Rock. As the Green Stage headliner for the day, they had a lot to live up to and delivered more than enough to send the crowd out into the late night maelstrom of obscure bands and DJs in high spirits. By presenting their chillest songs during the first half of their set, they could dedicate the latter half to their dance music, and while Romy got the lion’s share of camera shots on the big screen, it was bassist Oliver Sim who clearly commanded the stage. The guy is truly a sexy beast. Jamie xx’s occasional solo break beats were few and far between, but this is supposed to be a group comeback, right?
Maya Ongaku, a Japanese psychedelic trio, was the first act for the late shift at the Red Marquee, and while I was beyond faded at that point, they held my attention with long-form repetitive melody dumps that never quite fell into jamming, though, as with Altin Gun, they seemed to stop right when they were reaching liftoff.
But the show of the day was definitely Turnstile. I saw them when they played Fuji two years ago and liked it a lot, but then they were the penultimate act on the White Stage on Sunday, and it took a while for the crowd to warm to their emo-hardcore shtick. What difference two years make! The audience in front of the Green Stage for their late afternoon show was already quite rowdy 15 minutes before they took the stage, and remained raucous yet indefatigably sentimental during the whole of the punishing hourlong set. These people know all the words to the songs as well as their meaning, and the cameras that fed into the giant stage screens were more often trained on the audience than on the group, whose diversity makes them almost faceless. I counted three distinct mosh pits forming spontaneously early on and the band members catered to the feeling, which only grew as the hour stretched on and each emotionally impacted song built on the last one. There was even one guy who must have been a plant, but the moment was too perfect to tell for sure. During “Dull,” when lead singer Brendan Yates talks about “waiting for the call,” a guy at the front of the barricades held up an actual red landline telephone. I mean, who prepares for such things except stoned obsessives? But that’s what the Turnstile show was, one of the best hard rock performances I’ve ever seen at Fuji, because the band and the audience worked as one. Exhilarating doesn’t even begin to describe it.
Sunday morning
It rained quite heavily Saturday morning, but when the time the festival opened at 11 am, the precipitation had turned to drizzle and by noon the sun was out. It didn’t get hot, since there was a stiff, cool breeze coming down the mountains. The rest of the day was near perfect, weather-wise.
Encouraged by the strength of my selections on Friday, I decided against my usual regime of checking out acts I knew nothing about when there was nothing I especially wanted to see, so the first set of the day for me was the Beths at 2 pm at the Red Marquee. The New Zealand band’s brand of jangly guitar pop is the kind of indie thing that goes over very well in Japan, and the shed was suitably stuffed with people who knew their repertoire. Elizabeth Stokes’ self-deprecating manner and matter-of-fact vocal style make her effortlessly likable, even to people who may not understand English, and she communicated real personality during the group’s hourlong set, which gave them ample opportunity to cover a good deal of their recorded output. Almost everything galloped forward at a rapid clip, and each song was met with an even louder ovation than the previous one. It was a pretty satisfying way to start the day.
I decided to trek out to the other end of the festival to check out the Korean power trio Cadejo and, along the way, score some coffee, because there are more stalls to buy coffee out there than there are in the Oasis food court. Of course, great minds think alike and every place I passed that sold coffee had real long lines. I opted for some cold green tea, which supposedly has as much if not more caffeine than a similar serving of coffee, but the line was much shorter. The stall was in the forest next to Gypsy Avalon, which has become a kind of woodland mall—juice bars, art galleries, Japanese confectioneries.
Cadejo was something of a bust. From the one video I saw of them I had gotten the impression that they were a kind of avant-jam band, and they are in the sense that they constantly improvise on very loose established patterns, going from strict reggae to punishing noise rock in the bat of an eye, but this lack of a consistent tone made their music more frustrating than involving. The guitarist is surely some kind of genius, but the rhythm section was often out of sync with what he was trying to do. Still, the crowd seemed to appreciate what they were attempting and cheered them on. Their Japanese and English were good enough that they could actually maintain communication throughout the set I saw. I left about halfway through.
Needing a rest, I found a grassy spot on the hill in back of the sound booth at the Green Stage to relax, but was shooed away by staff with bullhorns who were telling people who had set up tarps and little campgrounds to move higher up because the area was going to get crowded. I assumed they were talking about the act I was waiting for, Basement Jaxx, but they were probably talking about the act after BJ, Fujii Kaze, who was the reason Saturday was sold out.
But when Basement Jaxx started their late afternoon show, I realized that the tarp clearing was being done for the folks who wanted to dance, because everyone all the way up to the tree line was boogieing for the whole hour. I’ve seen BJ several times, and I’ve seen the Chemical Brothers just as often, and while it may be a chump’s game to compare the two, they emerged at the same time with a similar m.o.: electronic dance music delivered as unified shows. The difference is that BJ really does put on a show, with extra vocalists and dancers, elaborate sets, and numerous costume changes. More significantly BJ’s musical preferences shade definitely toward African-American R&B, while the Chemicals is more into purely electronic rave type bangers. BJ had three excellent singers who were able to bend the enormous crowd to their will with their gospel-inflected encouragements. They avoided break beats in favor of dramatic flourishes that always hit harder. And the camp elements only added to the entertainment value.
As it happened, the Chemicals were represented at this year’s Fuji in the form of half the brotherhood, Tom Rowland, who was the mastermind behind the day’s headliner on the White Stage, Tomora, his side collaboration with Norwegian pop singer Aurora. Having grown bored with Green Stage headliner Khruangbin’s noodling I decided to check out Tomora’s show instead, and at first didn’t know what to make of it. Rowland’s influence is palpable in the loud, almost industrial edge of his beats, but I couldn’t make heads nor tails of the visuals. The crowd made it difficult to get very close (I have a paranoia about being caught in a stampede at the White Stage, so I usually hover around the edges) and all I could see were pre-produced videos on the jumbotron screens. Aurora was obviously on stage, and I assumed she was singing, but it felt beside the point when you had these storyline videos telling you how to feel and what to think.
But after a half hour, the action moved resolutely to the stage and the music made much more sense. And there was a story there of a sort too, because Aurora was doubled by another woman who was dressed and made up to look just like her. Whether she was also a singer or just a stage accessory, I couldn’t tell, but it upped the dramatic component and the music was more exciting as a result. I really wanted to stay to the very end, but, you know, paranoia.
There were rumors that Rowland was going to do a DJ set at the tiny Naeba Shokudo stage in the Oasis after midnight, and a huge crowd materialized there around 12, but I didn’t stick around to find out if he really showed.
After BJ I caught Thurston Moore at the Red Marquee. Though he didn’t play any Sonic Youth songs, he might as well have given the makeup of his band: SY’s Steve Shelley on drums, a female bassist whose singing voice sounded a lot like Kim Gordon’s, and a lead guitarist who complemented Moore’s buzz saw strumming with pure skronk. He also stuck mainly to standard rock song structures except during those predictable codas when everything just sounded like shredded metal. Moore, a septuagenarian, seemed quite fit, though he had to read his lyrics from sheets on a music stand, which he’d toss on the floor whenever he finished with them. Exuding a clear peace-and-love vibe appropriate to his generation (even if his iconoclastic rep as a young musician didn’t align with that of an unreconstructed hippie), he communicated fitfully with the audience, which wasn’t as large as I anticipated considering how many times SY toured Japan in the past. Before playing the song “Cantaloup,” he told a story from that morning about eating cantaloup in the artist’s quarters at the hotel. He seemed to think it had some kind of mystical meaning.
Though I’ve seen Fujii Kaze’s videos and one appearance on NHK, I don’t really know much about his music, and assumed it could be categorized as Japanese R&B. But after seeing him perform in front of a sea of adoring fans representing a wide swath of ages (a photographer friend said there were middle aged female Fujii fans at the barricades for BJ, obviously staking their territory), he sounds more like what Americans would call yacht rock. Of course, yacht rock as translated into Japanese would be so-called city pop, whose main architect, Yamashita Tatsuro, was last year’s big draw, so there is some consistency here, the difference being that Fujii is about 40 years younger. He’s also incredibly beautiful, in a very feminine way, with high cheekbones, a delicate nose, and flowing brown hair. For his Green Stage set he wore a white suit whose enormous size would put David Byrne to shame.
But my biggest impression is that the guy is definitely talented and not just another manufactured pop star. Apparently, he was a child piano prodigy, and his playing was impeccable. More significantly, his songs had melodic depth and breadth, even when they sometimes sounded romantically corny, whether he was singing in English or Japanese. His English, by the way, is fluent, and I assume the reason he spoke half his stage patter in English is because he wanted to connect to the foreign element in the audience, especially the Asians. Or he could have been showing off. He seems to like to show off.
Though BJ was my highlight for the day, I did see several DJ sets that made me quite happy. Almost all the DJs playing the Blue Galaxy are old men, Japanese or English. They play only 45s, no music files, and almost nothing that was released after 1975, concentrating mainly on vintage ska/reggae, Japanese kayokyoku, and American R&B. The tent is always hopping, with most of the dancers being young people who may or may not know this music but definitely can feel it at a primal level.
But there was another DJ that made an impression at Gan-Ban Square over at the other side of the Oasis. Tempalay’s AAAMYYY (or “Amy” to people with dyslexia) did a short, action-packed DJ set with the help of a bassist/guitarist and a rapper/dancer that was startling in its originality and refusal to resort to quirk (outside of an opening cut that she sped up to produce helium-quality vocals). Her electronica instincts are peerless in setting up where her melodies have to go to reach catharsis, and she isn’t a bad singer, either. Actually, calling it a DJ set may be shortchanging her. It was a pure high-wire solo act.
Though clearly a vehicle for Jodie Foster and her Francophone talents, this chamber piece, directed by Rebecca Zlotowski, attempts to split the difference between Christiesque murder mystery and psychological melodrama, and whether it succeeds will depend on how much the viewer wants to invest in each side of the narrative equation. For me, the mystery is underdeveloped. Foster plays Lilian Steiner, an American old-school Freudian psychoanalyst who appears to have lived almost her whole adult life in Paris. Divorced from her ophthalmologist husband, Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), and barely on speaking terms with her adult son, Julien (Vincent Lacoste), Lillian is a bit of a cold fish. As a professional therapist she mostly cruises, recording all her sessions on mini-discs for later perusal that she never really carries out. As her patients unload themselves on her couch, she can’t be bothered with their travails, wrapped up in her own thoughts and inner conflicts. When she learns that one of her patients, an insomniac named Paula (Virginie Efira), has died, supposedly by suicide, she wakes up, as it were. Why didn’t she see it coming? The attendant guilt sends her down a deep and treacherous rabbit hole as she convinces herself that Paula must have been murdered.
The most likely suspect is Paula’s excitable husband, Simon (Mathieu Almaric), who accuses Lillian of malpractice by over-prescribing the sedatives that killed her. This suspicion is reinforced by Paula’s and Simon’s pregnant daughter, Valerie (Luana Bajram), who keeps pestering Lillian about an aunt whom Paula was particularly close to and who recently died herself. With a sizable inheritance involved and evidence that Simon has a mistress, the likely motive becomes money, but then Lillian, acting way against type, visits a hypnotist (Sophie Guillemin) and learns that in a parallel life she was a man who was in love with Paula during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Though Lillian’s Jewish heritage has been dormant most of her life, it becomes a matter of interest in her investigation as she learns that Paula’s aunt, also Jewish, was persecuted as a girl.
Zlotowski works her butt off tying all these disparate plot points together into something that mystery lovers might appreciate, but it plays havoc with the story’s more intimate dramatic elements as suggested by the title. Whose private life are we looking at? Obviously, it’s Lillian’s, and as it becomes apparent that her professional approach has been mostly a failure, you are supposed to wonder what is left for her? To say that the movie eventually cops out in this regard—the awkward comic moments give it away—is to realize that it really is just a vehicle for Jodie Foster and her Francophone talents. Why else are there all these heavy duty French stars in supporting roles, including Irene Jacob and Aurore Clement, not to mention the late Frederick Wiseman as Lillian’s mentor, another American in Paris. It’s as if the movie were thought up by the showrunners of that hit Netflix series Call My Agent: More of a stunt than a film.
In French and English. Opens July 24 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
Last week the Diet enacted a bill that would reinstate former lines of the imperial household into the chain of succession so that male descendants can be adopted and fill out the ranks of possible future emperors. In addition, female members of the imperial family will be allowed to remain as royals after they marry. The former measure would help ensure that there would be enough male candidates for the Chrysanthemum throne, since it is the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s (LDP) intention to not allow a female emperor. Much has been made in the media about how neither the public’s nor the imperial family’s opinion has been solicited in deciding these matters because surveys have shown the Japanese people overwhelmingly like the idea that the present Emperor’s daughter, Aiko, could be Emperor someday. As for the imperial family’s opinion, the Emperor has hinted indirectly that it’s a choice the citizenry should make in accordance with the Constitution, a document the LDP tends to consult only at their convenience.
The media has paid less attention to the part of the bill that allows female members of the imperial family to remain in the palace after they marry, presumably to a commoner since there are so few male royals on the dating market. These female members, if they were progeny on the male side of the imperial family, could then produce heirs to the throne, but according to several media there’s a more pressing issue at stake.
Because the imperial family is dwindling, there are fewer royals to carry out komu, or “official duties.” These tasks are distinct from kokuji, work that the Emperor does in line with his hallowed brief: opening a new session of the Diet, or carrying out religious rites associated with the throne. Komu is also distinct from diplomatic activities, such as the recent trip that the Emperor and Empress took to Europe to visit counterpart royalty in the Netherlands and Belgium.
But what komu is exactly is not properly understood. According to the business magazine President, “komu” refers to activities carried out by members of the imperial family that have been decided by the Imperial Household Ministry (IHM) after receiving requests from outside parties. The IHM decides whether to involve the royals in these public activities based on whether they “contribute to society,” an explanation that’s as vague as they come. In practice, an event organizer makes a request to the IHM for the presence and participation of a member of the imperial family. The IHM studies the event and the organizer in terms of past work and security aspects. If the IHM approves of the event, it then submits a proposal to the Cabinet, which has the final say. If the Cabinet approves, a schedule is formulated.
The events that are more likely to be approved are charity-related or have something to do with international relations. The IHM’s main criterion is whether the tenor and purpose of an event seems appropriate for the imperial family. It should be noted that activities deemed “private entertainment,” such as concerts and sporting events, are usually not approved, since the IHM deems that the royals should buy tickets for them just like everyone else, but it’s difficult to imagine that if the Emperor, who loves classical music, wants to see the Berlin Philharmonic perform Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony at Suntory Hall, he’s going to have wait on line just like any other punter.
On June 25, the National Film Archive of Japan (NFAJ) announced it was launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for its continuing operations and existence. The initial goal is ¥100 million, which is not nearly enough to keep the organization running. According to a recent article in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Nikkei), the government cut its subsidy for the archive by more than 40 percent for fiscal 2026 to ¥358.56 million (from ¥682.92 million in 2024), which means the archive will need to raise at least ¥249 million to cover expenses. The NFAJ has said that meeting this target only through admission fees and other revenues will be “extremely difficult,” since fixed costs for the archive exceed ¥400 million.
The NFAJ is the only institution in Japan whose job it is to preserve and exhibit Japanese films. That means not only collecting films, but storing and digitizing them for future use as cultural and historical artifacts. Without the NFAJ Japan’s film heritage would likely disappear, not only because film stock degrades easily over time, but because Japan’s film heritage is not considered a purview of the cultural agency. Regardless of lip service provided by the government with regard to Japan’s storied cultural uniqueness, it does not actively encourage the preservation of Japanese culture, preferring to assign that task to the private sector. This is true not only for film but for institutions like museums and zoos, which increasingly are called upon to support themselves; and, in a sense, they have an easier time of it since art exhibits, for instance, can easily find corporate and media sponsors, and zoos can publicize their charges—the global popularity of Ichikawa City Zoo’s orphaned monkey Punch is a good example. Film is more difficult since the public’s interest in a movie is by definition fleeting. Only a dedicated archive can keep films presentable so that anyone can see them at a later date, whether they be scholars or members of the general public. It’s assumed that government financial support for the NFAJ will eventually dwindle to zero.
In a June 30 article Nikkei outlined what’s at stake. Though the public interface for the NFAJ is its theater and viewing facility in the Kyobashi area of Tokyo, its actual archive is in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, where the NFAJ maintains three storage buildings. Film preservation requires strict climate control in terms of temperature and humidity to keep both film stock and negatives viable. The Sagamihara facility spends ¥58 million a year only on utilities, and the air conditioning system there is considered superannuated. There is no budget to update the system.
Sagamihara also carries out digitization, which is now the standard means for preserving films. Due to improvements of the process, requests to the archive to digitize films has also greatly increased, not only from film production companies, but other commercial and academic endeavors that want to preserve industrial and other films in their possession. But digitization takes time, and since the NFAJ is the only such facility that carries out film digitization in Japan, it can never keep up with the demand. The Sagamihara facility employs only ten people, nine of whom are on yearly contracts. In addition to digitization, the staff inspects and lends out films. Nikkei says that tens of thousands of films in cannisters are waiting to be inspected and analyzed. Generally speaking, when the archive receives a film for preservation, it first makes a physical copy, which is not only time consuming but expensive. Priority goes to new works, which the archive buys in order to keep them preserved from the start, but in the process older films waiting to be preserved often suffer.
National art museums regularly purchase high-value art, which in turn becomes a financial asset for the museum. The situation is different for films, which have no intrinsic value as an asset, especially copies of films. Consequently, the archive has to pay out of its own funds for all copying and digitization expenses.
As already noted, the archive’s brief extends beyond creative films to documentary footage. One of the NFAJ’s signature accomplishments is its comprehensive digital archive of moving and still images from the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake. Scholars and documentarians, including TV production companies, that cover the disaster can have free access to these resources.
Guillaume Brac came to filmmaking relatively late in life in that he didn’t study movies as an undergraduate (he went to business school). Consequently, his work has always betrayed a cautious hesitancy with regard to form and style. In his fiction films he comes across as a more subdued Eric Rohmer, leaning heavily on narrative realism and a lot of dialogue. He specializes in the extended human interaction, often while on summer vacation, which is why his latest work, a documentary that’s only a little over an hour in length, focuses on a group of high school students at a boarding school in the Alpine French town of Die as they finish up their last year. All the subjects are anxious about the future and hesitant to leave their friends behind as summer approaches and they enter the world on their own terms. Brac is the perfect fly-on-the-wall observer and captures these young people’s conversations with bracing candor.
For some reason, Brac only interviews the female students, though the school is coed. Many of these girls are from single-parent backgrounds. For them living away from home has turned out to be something of a comfort, and so they are afraid to leave friends who have become their family in all but name. Nours, whose divorced parents raised her on a boat as it traveled the world, says she already feels abandoned a second time as her classmates plan for college. “My father couldn’t handle being a parent,” she says, “so I always felt like a burden.” Jeanne’s own existential crisis is almost anti-natalist, as she assumes she was the product of an unplanned pregnancy. “My parents were educated,” she says, “so why did they decide to have me?”; as if intelligent people would, left to their own devices, not bring children into this terrible world. Diane is still trying to get over losing her sister at a young age, a trauma she’s only learned to confront by discussing her most personal thoughts with the people she met at school. Brac gives us the detailed psychological situation of these girls so that we can draw our own conclusions about their generation, which comes across as thoughtful, intelligent, and completely cognizant of how dangerous the world has become since their parents were their age. This quality is especially apparent in the boys who drift in and out of the frame, especially the dreadlocked, heavily pierced Louison, who speaks insightfully about the hazards of child-rearing and the pointlessness of capitalist striving.
Brac’s photography is invariably gorgeous, taking advantage of Die’s close proximity to mountains, rivers, and forests, where many of these conversations take place. Even in English class, the students discuss heavy philosophical subjects colloquially and clearly, all in a second language. Brac avoids adults as much as possible, and when a figure of authority does enter the picture their purpose seems to be to reinforce our perception that we would be much better off if these young people were in charge of the world right now, regardless of their emotional vulnerability and uncertain understanding of human relationships. I’m much older than their parents, and I felt privileged to be in their presence.
In French and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Eurospace Shibuya (03-3461-0211).
philipbrasor.com 