Shiroyama Dam
Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the government’s lack of preparation for the recent run of flood-related disasters. Though the conclusion I drew from all the information I gleaned in the media is that there’s really no ideal way to prepare for such disasters in the long run, it doesn’t mean the government is off the hook. The only genuinely effective solution would be to relocate people living in dangerous areas, but that’s hardly going to be a popular move in a free democracy. More palatable would be some policy that discouraged any new housing or development in at-risk locations, but nobody wants to tell someone else where they can and can’t live. Still, this kind of squeamishness seems to extend to existing water management policy. According to the land ministry only 51 dams in western Japan have formulated systems for pre-release of water when there is a threat of over-capacity from projected heavy rainfall, and only about half have ever carried out these plans. In eastern Japan, which, prior to the three storms that recently struck in rapid succession, had not suffered from major flooding in many years, there are almost no systems in place for pre-release. And one of the main reasons is that much of the water is conserved for waterworks. If a local water authority releases too much water in fear of flooding and the result is insufficient water capacity for households and agrucultural users, they might be subject to lawsuits. The land ministry also requires that local governments obtain permission from users to pre-release water in the case of possible heavy rainfall, but that’s easier said than done. In the end, many don’t even bother to make such plans.
That is one of the reasons why there was such confusion at Shiroyama Dam in Kanagawa Prefecture when Typhoon Hagibis was doing its worst. Water levels were approaching capacity, and the water authority kept announcing it would release water, possibly endangering households farther down the river, but they kept postponing the release. That’s because they were working without a plan. The dam was built 54 years ago and they’ve never been in this situation before. Eventually, they did release water, but almost five hours after they first announced they would. In those five hours certain residents didn’t know whether they should evacuate. Of course, they should anyway, considering the amount of rainfall, but it doesn’t instill confidence in the authorities if they don’t seem to know their own system and how to approach a critical situation that could have disastrous results. Managing water can be a perilous business, and if the public isn’t made aware of the real situation, then they have every right to be angry.
As the poster boy for post-millennial transgressive French cinema, Gaspar Noe has a reputation that precedes him by miles, and while his newest outrage does nothing to confound that estimation, its musical pedigree makes it somewhat less distasteful, at least on the surface. Ugly things happen as they do in all Noe films, but the glaze of manic terpsichorean energy lightens it up substantially, making Climax not only Noe’s most watchable film but perhaps his wittiest as well.
One surprising thing I learned while watching Julian Schnabel’s movie about the last year of Vincent Van Gogh’s life was just how many paintings he produced. Sometimes he would finish a dozen in a week. This sort of superhuman output clashes with our image of a great painter, who we tend to think hesitates over every brush stroke. Van Gogh, who admitted he was an “animated” painter, just couldn’t help himself.
Hirokazu Kore-eda is Japan’s master of the middlebrow, and in that regard Shoplifters, the movie that cemented his international cred, is an outlier. Most of what has sustained his career in Japan is what can be safely called domestic potboilers—tales of family secrets that coast along on unchallenging ideas and solid craft. Kore-eda’s first non-Japanese film fits this pattern. It is a perfectly executed French middlebrow entertainment, though lighter on the sex than your average French middlebrow entertainment.
Leigh Whannell’s seeming homage to David Cronenberg pits an analog holdover named Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), who likes to listen to blues music on vinyl and rebuild classic cars, against the already arrived cyborg technology that rules the rest of his life in this approximation of our immediate future. As it turns out, Grey is married to a woman (Melanie Vallejo) who is totally into tech, and, in fact, works for a company that has a huge stake in this brave new world of AI and total interconnectivity. Eventually, this clash of sensibilities comes to a head, and Grey is left paralyzed after an accident involving a self-driving car.
Here’s 
Damsel-in-distress movies still exist, but these days women in peril tend to be the heroes who defeat malevolent forces rather than their victims; though in many cases the deadly force is not malevolent, but merely hungry. In this vein, the gold standard was the 2016 shark movie, The Shallows, which traded in jolts and gore for a simmering suspense fueled by the intelligence of survival. Like that movie, Crawl has a hero who is good with water—she’s a champion university swimmer—but while horror master Alexandre Aja foregoes the usual tactics, he doesn’t quite find a proper rhythm, and the movie feels slack even at 87 minutes.
The most interesting thing about this pop star fantasy is that the Beatles estate agreed to license so many songs. McCartney I can understand, since he was always the band’s most fervent champion regardless of how his beloved “tunes” were used, but Yoko? In her dotage she seems to be slipping a little. Danny Boyle’s film, based on a script by the always annoying Richard Curtis, imagines a world without the Beatles, which, in fact, is pretty difficult to do considering how large the Fab Four figure in the history of the late 20th century—or in the 21st, for that matter. It’s a clever conceit as far as it goes, but Curtis and Boyle try to take it further with mixed results.
Todd Phillips’ odd superhero gloss has a lot of distractions built into it, the most obvious one being its non-relationship to the Batman franchise (or franchises, depending on how doctrinnaire you are) as a feature that is only tangentially relevant to the Dark Knight. The other distraction is the way Phillips uses our collective movie memory of New York City in the 70s and 80s. It doesn’t matter if you weren’t there at the time or even if you weren’t born yet: if you’re a moviegoer you know the grungy production values that are de riguer for movies set in the pre-Clinton administration Big Apple. Here, of course, it’s called Gotham City, and Phillips’ main goal seems to be to ride us through analogues of all that era’s big crime stories, from Son of Sam to the infamous garbage strikes to the Bernhard Goetz shootings. His ability to connect it all to our current crisis of income inequality is a neat trick.
philipbrasor.com 