Here’s this week’s Media Mix about clothing that’s appropriate for work and other situations. Though dress codes are certainly not limited to Japan, there seems to be a feeling here, especially in media circles, that it’s only natural for companies and other organizations to demand their employees follow certain protocols with regard to appearance. Schools tend to be the most notorious in their demands, going so far as to order students with natural highlights to dye their hair black so as not to suggest they may be dyeing their hair brown. And in a real sense, the “problem,” if there is one, is that people in positions of authority feel they have a duty to socialize young people under their nominal care. The weird thing, as pointed out in the column, is that eventually such control becomes evidently counter-productive, as in the case of International Christian University trying to persuade its freshmen not to wear “recruit suits” to the school’s welcoming ceremony.
The most interesting example of this kind of shifting standard is tokkofuku, those baggy, elaborately monogrammed, and often colorful getups that were once—and often still are—associated with biker gangs of the juvenile delinquent type. Apparently, over the years, boys, as well as some girls, who are graduating from junior high schools attend their leaving ceremonies attired in tokkofuku, and the authorities are so alarmed that in some areas they’ve banned the clothing, saying that the mere association with potentially antisocial behavior is enough for concern and police involvement. What’s fascinating about this phenomenon is that kids originally took the tokkofuku idea as a means of perverting their mandatory school uniforms, by changing those uniforms in order to make them seem more dangerous and thus more idiosyncratic. Now, those tokkofuku themselves are a kind of uniform, since in many cases the kids who wear them are straight-A students who are simply having fun with their friends. It’s a fashion in and of itself—there are even shops that specialize in selling custom-made tokkofuku just for such occasions. In effect, kids who buy them aren’t antisocial at all. They even embroider their costumes with messages of appreciation to parents and teachers. It’s individualism, but only up to a point.
When Rikiya Imaizumi’s latest movie premiered last year at the Tokyo International Film Festival, the official English title, Just Only Love, sounded a bit like nails on a chalkboard. The IMDb lists the movie’s English title as What Is Love?, which is a direct translation of the Japanese title, Ai ga Nan da. Some months later, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that the TIFF-designated title more accurately reflects the movie—not so much its story or theme, but rather its somewhat incoherent take on infatuation.
Boosted as a welcome light touch for the DC Comics movie universe, this rambunctious, somewhat unfocused comedy doesn’t really pass muster as a proper superhero feature, and it’s difficult to tell whether that’s the point. If you broke it down as you would a normal story you’d find two trains of thought: a touching tale of a foster child finding a family that’s more supportive of his needs than he could ever expect, and a hackneyed fairy tale about the same boy being gifted with super powers he has a hard time dealing with. As far as the latter thread goes, the recent Into the Spider-verse already nailed that particular theme, and the former thread is never really given a chance to make its case since it’s always being interrupted by the superhero stuff. What’s left is mostly confusion, though quite entertaining as such.
Jon S. Baird’s loving tribute to the legacy of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy falls into a trap common to biopics of performers. The film focuses on an episode in the comedians’ career that occurred late in life, thus allowing the filmmakers simultaneously to provide an overview of that career and a comment on how it turned out. It’s the early 1950s, and Laurel and Hardy are obviously past their prime. They are touring music hall theaters throughout England, staging famous slapstick bits from their movies. Their fans are their age or older. Younger people, who don’t have widespread access to TV yet, barely know them and so aren’t interested in the show, which means the performances are lightly attended except in the larger cities. This background provides the narrative with its requisite bittersweet tone, and while Baird doesn’t force the point, he doesn’t seem to feel obliged to make any other case for their situation at the moment, which is made even more melancholy by the fact that the purpose of the tour is to drum up industry interest in a new movie, which Stan (Steve Coogan) is constantly working on by pitching new sketch proposals to his partner (John C. Reilly), who doesn’t seem particularly interested. Due to health problems and his relatively new wife (third? fourth?), Ollie has already assumed the attitude of a retired man.
In the press synopsis for his documentary, American director Miki Dezaki calls the comfort women issue “perhaps Japan’s most contentious present-day diplomatic quandary,” which is true to an extent but misleading in terms of scale. The issue of the comfort women, the euphemism used by the Japanese military to describe women who sexually serviced soldiers at officially sanctioned brothels during World War II, needs to be approached from the standpoint of overall responsibility for the Pacific War, which remains to this day unsettled in Japan while it has been mostly decided elsewhere. Though Japan was not alone in committing atrocities against civilian populations during that conflict, its acknowledgement of Japan’s primary role in instigating the war for purposes of territorial expansion has shifted over the years. The comfort women issue is simply one part of this problem.
Kudos to director Felix Van Groeningen for managing to fuse two different memoirs about the same topic into a movie that doesn’t become a mine field of conflicting points-of-view. The true story of Nic Sheff’s decade-plus battle with drug addiction was the subject of two books, Sheff’s own and another written by his father, David Sheff, a veteran journalist. Both were published in 2008 and recall events that started in the early 1990s. It’s both chronologically apt and a bit worrying that Nirvana plays such a prominent role in the beginning of the movie.
It’s tempting to imagine that the British director Andrew Haigh is encountering the milieu of his latest film with the same kind of fresh awareness that the audience encounters it as it watches his movie. There’s something about this depiction of the seedier parts of Portland, Oregon, that feels almost shocking in its unexpectedness. Based on a novel by the songwriter Willy Vlautin, whose band the Delines covers much the same kind of rustic waywardness as that put forth in the film, Haigh’s script always seems to be in the process of unfolding truths that don’t come easy. It keeps you off balance, and slightly on edge.
Though I rarely acknowledge such matters, Paul Schrader was royally screwed last February when he failed to receive the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his latest film. It was bad enough that Ethan Hawke, who won all sorts of awards from critics’ groups for his performance in the lead role, wasn’t even nominated, but Schrader was a screenwriter before he was a director, and First Reformed may be the most cogent realization of his distinct world view and approach to cinematic storytelling. In fact, the most brilliant detail in his screenplay is the provenance of the First Reformed Church that provides the setting for the story. Its main appeal in the 21st century is not its status as a sanctuary from material suffering or the lucid world view of its sympathetic pastor, Reverend Toller (Hawke), but its historical relevance as a main stop in upstate New York on the Underground Railroad during the days of slavery. It’s a tourist attraction, which pretty much sums up the way Schrader has come to rationalize his fundamentalist upbringing and the state of his own faith.
The comic challenge for Adam McKay, who made his name with Will Ferrell vehicles, in depicting the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney is not that no amount of satire could make the George W. Bush administration seem more ridiculous than it was, but that we already have a near perfect lampoon of the venality of Washington D.C. as represented by the second-in-command: Veep. Granted, McKay, as he did with The Big Short, is attempting to graft semi-serious real life matters onto frat boy stock situations, and there certainly wasn’t a bigger mess of frat boy toxicity than the Bush II White House. The real problem with this kind of approach is that the actors seem to be having much more fun than the audience is.
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