Review: Crazy Rich Asians

Posted on September 28, 2018 by philipbrasor

As some of my colleagues have noted, the Japanese arm of Warner Bros. has dropped “Asians” from the title of this surprise box office hit, and while we can probably surmise the reason for the elision, the Japanese socio-historical relationship with its continental neighbors is so fraught with problematic baggage that any attempt to parse it would likely result in the inflation of bad stereotypes.

In any event, the movie is pure product, and we know what Tinsel Town has done to any Japanese subject matter. Here, the principals are Chinese-Americans and Singaporeans, none of whose economic circumstances place them below what used to pass for the upper middle class in New York City, where Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) grew up and where she met her future fiancee, Nick Young (Henry Golding), the scion of a wealthy Singaporean real estate dynasty, though Rachel doesn’t really know that until Nick flies her home for the ostensible purpose of attending the wedding of his equally privileged cousin, Colin (Chris Pang). The real reason for the long, expensive journey is to introduce Rachel to his domineering mother, Eleanor (Michelle Yeoh), who, predictably, doesn’t approve of Rachel, and not just because of the class and nationality differences. There’s a clear indication that Rachel’s brand of Chineseness is not acceptable to Eleanor, whose own relationship to her ethnic heritage is so narrow as to comprise a separate country.

But since this is a classic romantic comedy, these charged themes are played for laughs more often than not. The Youngs’ extravagance mirrors that of Katharine Hepburn’s family in The Philadelphia Story in that it’s easy to poke fun at from an average person’s standpoint, most of which is alluded to in the jokey exchanges that Rachel has with her college pal Peik Lin (Awkwafina), a native Singaporean who knows both sides of the divide only too well. Even more ridiculous is her father, who, as played by the already insufferable Ken Jeong, is as cartoonish as a Chinese character can be without being played by a white person.

Of course, the reason Crazy Rich Asians is a hit as a movie (I can’t comment on the novel, not having read it) is that it seems to say something to Chinese-Americans about their situation (maybe not so much to Chinese living in Asia) while giving them characters and actors who represent them wholeheartedly. Consequently, I got little to chew on from the scenes about mah jongg and moon cakes, though the slapstick and absurdist circumstances surrounding the actual wedding reception and ceremony rise above cultural signifiers. There’s actually nothing that’s really surprising about Crazy Rich Asians. It’s a standard rom-com-at-the-wedding storyline highlighted by dozens of extremely beautiful people occupying opulent sets and acting in character. It’s the most Hollywood movie I’ve seen in a long time.

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Marunouchi Picadilly (03-3201-2881), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Crazy Rich Asian home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and SK Global Entertainment

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Review: Skyscraper

Posted on September 22, 2018 by philipbrasor

It’s no scoop to say that the IMAX format dictates the production of certain movies, since it’s difficult to imagine a Hollywood conference call where, after a movie has been greenlighted and cast, someone thinks out loud, “Hey, maybe this would work on a towering screen!” The latest Dwayne Johnson vehicle, in which the former wrestling hulk shares top billing with a 4,000-foot CG Hong Kong office-and-residential building, was obviously made with the IMAX format in mind, and after you think carefully about it, Johnson is the only A-list actor at the moment who could have starred without wilting in the shadow of the titular edifice.

Of course, that greatly reduces the appeal of the movie when it isn’t giving the viewer vertiginous shots that highlight how high up we are. Though the obvious template here is The Towering Inferno, basically director Rawson Marshall Thurber is just trying to one-up that WTC novelty, The Walk, wherein Robert Zemeckis attempted to get audiences to puke without resorting to horror movie images. Thurber assumes that by putting his star, who plays a former FBI agent now being interviewed as the yet-to-open skyscraper’s security chief, in constant danger and forcing him to leap across empty space a mile or so above the ground, he’ll get the reverse peristalsis reflexes churning as well, but since he isn’t much on building suspense—the action in Skyscraper is relentless—there isn’t a whole lot of fear generated, either.

Even the script’s one attempt at high concept—Johnson’s Will Sawyer is an amputee thanks to a botched hostage situation that’s actually the most exciting thing in the film—is never taken advantage of fully. Also, the disaster that forces Sawyer into superman mode is completely man-made and on purpose. Some sort of terrorist organization has planted devices that start fires on multiple high floors, which shouldn’t be of much consequence because nobody has moved in yet—except, of course, Sawyer’s wife (Neve Campbell) and kids. Would he have tried to save the building if they weren’t there? Probably, but now we’re getting into suppositions that make absolutely no sense outside the bailiwick of Hollywood.

And that brings us to the film’s most egregious missed opportunity. Johnson has proven that he’s adept at self-deprecating comedy, even in the purview of action films, but Thurber seems uninterested in anything but depicting The Rock’s body mass and how extraordinary the character is in moving that bulk nimbly throughout a burning high-rise. Johnson really was just cast for his body. Consequently, the set pieces are thrilling but instantly forgettable, the stakes high but dismissed as soon as the next hazard is conquered. In the end, the skyscraper wins, even if it isn’t fit to occupy any more.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (03-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Skyscraper home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Universal Studios

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Review: Faces Places

Posted on September 17, 2018 by philipbrasor

Collaboration is more than just the theme of Agnes Varda’s latest curiosity. Teaming up with the tall-glass-of-water visual artist JR both on camera and behind it, the veteran nouvelle vague director expands her late career discussion of the French polity by engaging it in one of JR’s art projects, thus freeing herself up as more than just an enthusiastic observer of what is mostly rural life.

During the course of the film, the two artists travel the French countryside in pursuit of meaningful encounters with average people. The entry point into these people’s lives is JR’s very large prints of the individuals they encounter, which are then plastered on surfaces in very public places. Sometimes the photos are of faces, sometimes they are of full body shots. Many include more than one person. They are then affixed to buildings and even vehicles. The point is that each work of art is attended by a true story related by the subject, the overall result being a portrait of a people that becomes more indelible with the addition of semi-permanent visual aids.

But that isn’t the real appeal of the movie, which is Varda’s and JR’s interaction with each other. The pair putter around in a large truck listening to pop songs and talking about anything that comes into their heads. There’s a playfulness to these interactions that defies the age difference and informs their conversations with the farmers, factory workers, and village bureaucrats they meet on the road. Their collaboration is mainly with life, and they extend it to everyone they encounter. The goofiness is built into the contrast between the two principals: Varda is short, plump, pixieish, with a drastic two-tone bowl cut, while JR is tall, lanky, insouciant, his head constantly encased in a fedora and dark shades (a running joke throughout the film). Varda is also 88, and she is happy to bring her experiences into the discussion, dropping names like crumbs of bread and plumbing her exceptional memory for anecdotes that apply to any situation she finds herself in.

And there is drama. JR drops his flippant air when they visit his 100-year-old grandmother, and a visit to an ophthamologist reminds us of Varda’s encroaching decrepitude, since it appears she is going blind. But even that sequence is leavened with a joke—he eye-slashing scene from Un Chien Andalou, a movie she apparently had something to do with. For once the purposely shocking image is revealed for what it is: a prank against conformity, which is a stirring rebuke to the idea that the average person is a slave to normalcy. The people we meet are widely varied in their appetites and needs, and as our hosts continually expound, the mission of film and photography is to open us up to that possibility. JR’s project is a willful exaggeration of this premise. His works are intended to crush the notion of the commonplace: How can a dockworker’s face stretched across the side of a building be considered “normal?” How, for that matter, can a goat’s?

In the end, Varda and JR attempt to visit the man who perhaps best represents all they have tried to accomplish in their unique movie: Jean-Luc Godard. They fail to make the connection, though the aborted visit does lead to another wonderful anecdote about a weekend Varda and her late husband, Jacques Demy, spent with Godard and his wife, Anna Karina. Every moment in life is magic. Few movies drive that point home as well as Faces Places does.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Cine Swith Ginza (03-3561-0707), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Uplink Shibuya (03-6825-5503).

Faces Places home page in Japanese.

photo (c) Agnes Varda-JR-Cine Tamaris, Social Animals 2016

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Media Mix, Sept. 16, 2018

Posted on September 16, 2018 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the Asia Games basketball scandal. As I tried to say in the last paragraph, the media response has been dual—the MSM expresses shock and disgust, while the tabloid press shrugs and winks—even though the same impulse feeds both reactions, namely a belief that men cannot control their sexual desires. The former finds this a problem while the latter accepts it and even celebrates it sometimes. The jokey tone of the Shincho article I referenced is representative of the tabloid attitude—one source thinks buying prostitutes is no big deal and wonders why the Asahi photographer didn’t join the group (“they probably could have gotten a bargain”)—and conveys a deeper feeling that as long as women offer themselves in this way it’s only natural for men to take it. Such transactions are only the business of the two parties involved, but, especially when money’s involved, the notion of coercion still has to be factored in. Neither Shincho nor Asahi said anything about the women these players bought because no one talked to them, but it isn’t far from credible to think they might not have been prostitutes willingly. I say that not to demean sex work but rather to point out that the transaction isn’t necessarily as clean cut as Shincho makes it out to be. While the magazine has a point in ribbing Asahi for its puritanical approach to the story, the reporter also writes that the newspaper “revealed its priorities” by publishing it. “After all,” he writes, “that’s how they covered the comfort women issue.” This is a reference to Asahi’s sex slave coverage, for which it has been lambasted on the right, mainly for one instance of fake news. Those who maintain that the comfort women were all professional prostitutes and thus were not coerced into servicing front line soldiers during World War II implicitly hold that monetized sexual relationships are only negotiated with the complete willingness of the female side. Males have no conscious agency; they are just a jumble of confused, incontrovertible urges. Rape is one of these urges, and in the heat of combat it becomes acute. That’s why front-line brothels were supposedly necessary. Disregarding the evidence that Japanese soldiers—like all soldiers throughout history—did their fair share of raping, this narrative assumes that the comfort women could have only been willing participants in this endeavor because the purpose was practical and the military’s intentions therefore pure. But this narrative also indicts prostitutes for providing the service that allows men to indulge in their least admirable trait, which is why prostitutes, both as a group and as individuals, are hated by the general public. Despite documented historical proof, not to mention logical thinking informed by familiarity with human nature, the former comfort women who have come forward later in life to say they were forced into serving Japanese soldiers have been called blatant liars. Any problems having to do with sex are still the fault of women.

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“The Fog of War,” Sept. 2004

Posted on September 14, 2018 by philipbrasor

I recently realized that almost all of the movie reviews I wrote for the Asahi Shimbun in the 90s and early 00s are not available on the Internet, so I will remedy that by slowly, methodically posting them here on my blog. I have not edited these, so all the prejudices and dumb assessments remain. Enjoy. Continue reading →

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Review: Asako I & II

Posted on September 8, 2018 by philipbrasor

I have yet to see Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s previous film, the internationally lauded 5-hour domestic drama Happy Hour, which, probably due to its length, hasn’t been picked up by WOWOW. But having read about its charms for almost a year I was intrigued to see his latest, which premiered in competition at this year’s Cannes. It’s much shorter and, based on a popular novel, apparently more manageable than Happy Hour. In fact, it’s pretty conventional in terms of plot and characterization. Hamaguchi’s strong point is his attention to personality detail. Despite the hackneyed dialogue and thin motivation that’s built into the story, he manages to make the people on screen seem familiar in a three-dimensional way, though, in the end, it isn’t enough to lift the narrative out of the pedestrian.

The title is cleverly misleading. There are not two physical Asakos (Erika Karata), but rather two completely different men with whom she falls in love in tandem. The first man, Baku (Masahiro Higashide), she meets in Osaka. Baku is carefree and irresponsible and pretty much forces his way into Asako’s life. Her friend, Haruyo (Sairi Ito), warns her about him, but they become a couple of a sort, despite the fact that Baku, who has longish hair and a distracted demeanor, tends to disappear and not show up for appointments. One day, he goes off to buy some shoes and never returns.

The story resumes two years later with Asako transplanted to Tokyo, where she meets Ryohei (Higashide), who looks a lot like Baku but, due to his retiring manner, obviously isn’t. Thanks to a second chance encounter, the two become friends and then lovers, and it’s mostly up to the viewer to decide if Asako’s attraction is based on Ryohei’s inherent qualities or his resemblance to Baku. Most likely it’s a bit of both.

Hamaguchi’s handling of the romantic give-and-take is more satisfying than the intrigues that eventually materialize. You feel like you’ve seen these intrigues done before in better movies, even if you can’t name them off the top of your head. Asako I & II is better than most Japanese films of its ilk only because Hamaguchi is a more interesting director. He allows the story, whatever it’s flaws, to reach its own conclusions without clever tricks or narrative prodding, but he necessarily misses something with his casting. Higashide, a well-respected star of stage and screen, is quite good in the dual roles. I, for one, didn’t even find the resemblance that obvious because the two men were so different temperamentally. Karata, a newcomer, is more problematic. She underplays Asako’s emotional development, but it’s hard not to think that she’s doing so because she doesn’t feel ready for the part. She’s a very slight presence in a movie where she’s supposed to be the main focus.

In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Theatre Shinjuku (03-3352-1846), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

Asako I & II home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2018 Eiga Nete mo Samete mo Seisaku Iinkai/Commes des Cinemas

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Review: Ant-Man and the Wasp

Posted on September 3, 2018 by philipbrasor

It’s a good thing the second Ant-Man movie is above average, because it’s becoming quite a chore to fit all these Marvel superhero movies into the Marvel universe, at least as it applies to the Avengers movies, which seem to be the focus. Much of the plotting of Ant-Man and the Wasp is dependent on both the last Captain America movie and the last Avengers flick, though temporally they exist in different relative dimensions, and I found myself uselessly trying to recall the details of Avengers: Infinity War, which hasn’t taken place at this point, when I should have been concentrating on Captain America: Civil War, which is the reason our hero, Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), is under house arrest as the movie begins.

He’s actually just finishing up his sentence, which doesn’t seem so harsh: He still gets to see his daughter, and lives in a very nice San Francisco Victorian. He’s even on pretty good terms with his FBI handler (Randall Park), who is a bit of an airhead otherwise. Naturally, he’s jerked out of this little piece of paradise by the call of duty, which, if you remember from the first movie, wasn’t exactly Lang’s forte, being a minor criminal and all before he became Ant-Man. Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), who devised the suit that makes Lang small, and his daughter, Hope (Evengeline Lilly), contact Lang to help them find Hank’s wife, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), who has been lost to the so-called Quantum Realm for years. Lang is the only other person who has reached that small a size, but he was able to come back, so they require his experience, which calls for his slipping his ankle bracelet and risking his freedom.

Hope is the Wasp, who, due to her father’s fugitive status and the government’s mistrust of superheroes in general, is also laying low, and the relationship between her and Ant-Man is comically tense, since they have a certain amount of skin in their reputations as heroes, though Lang’s persona is mostly bluster covering up a lack of real knowledge about what his powers entail. In addition to literally getting down, he can also summon insect friends to help him get things done. But he also has two criminal sidekicks to take care of logistics. Since a villain is required we have two in the over-complicated Marvel style. One is Sonny Burch (Walton Goggins), who wants to steal Pym’s nanotechnology and sell it to the highest bidder. The other is Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), a woman who herself passed through the Quantum Realm and as a result is literally immaterial, in that she can pass through solid objects. She needs Pym’s technology to save her from disintegrating into countless random molecules.

Director Peyton Reed doesn’t belabor the already overloaded story and lets it play out naturally while investing his attention in the set pieces, which take more advantage of the extreme possibilities of scale than any other Marvel movie has made out of their respective relationships with peculiar super powers. He keeps the humor churning as actively as the action, melding them in ways that might have been models for the series if that damn Thor movie hadn’t been so funny. It’s not as good as Ant-Man and the Wasp, but it’s much more irreverent, which these days counts for something special.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Ueno (050-6868-5066), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002).

Ant-Man and the Wasp home page in Japanese.

photo (c) Marvel Studios 2018

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Media Mix, Sept. 2, 2018

Posted on September 2, 2018 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the weekly magazines’ pursuit of royal scandal for the hell of it. The point I was trying to make, and which wasn’t really reflected in the headline, is that while the weeklies buck the Imperial Household Agency simply because they can, at bottom they support the conventional idea of the royal family. Kei Komuro is portrayed as a kind of interloper, despite the fact that he appears to be an intelligent, responsible person who truly loves Princess Mako. If he and the princess had been “matched” through more traditional means, the weeklies likely wouldn’t have said much of anything, even if his mother were in debt (though an omiai would have implied vetting that might have disqualified him in the first place). The weeklies didn’t have problems with the matches made for Princess Ayako or her older sister, though they seem delighted now that the sister’s marriage has hit the skids. Likewise, former Princess Sayako’s marriage may be less that perfect, they imply, but in any case, this is all after the fact, meaning after the marriage has taken place and the women have left the royal family.

In fact, the rule that says women must leave the royal family after wedding commoners is one of the reasons the IHA has pushed Mako and Komuro to put off their engagement. The weeklies want to make it about the IHA and Mako’s father objecting to Komuro as husband material, but likely it has more to do with bureaucratic convenience. A survey by broadcaster JNN in January found that 71 percent of the public said that they would accept a royal family “based on female members,” meaning that the female line could produce heirs who may one day become emperors–or even empresses. The IHA and the government is pondering allowing female members who marry outside the royal family to stay in it, but they have their hands full with next year’s abdication of the present emperor and the succession of his son, so they don’t have time to discuss the female line until that’s over with. This affects Mako and Komuro’s engagement, because if they decide to allow her to remain in the royal family after they marry, it might be to their advantage. The royal family has become quite small since not too many male heirs have been produced. With every female member who marries a commoner (and who else are they going to marry after the peerage was abolished following World War II?) the royal family loses a valuable employee, because only family members can credibly carry out the “activities” (komu) expected of the royal family. It’s a human resources problem. The IHA probably wants Mako to stay, but if the weeklies are raising questions about her intended partner, they may want to put off any developments in that direction until the public’s presumed concern for Komuro’s fitness as the partner of a royal has cooled. If that’s making way too much of the matter, well, that’s the nature of any office whose job is to rationalize the existence of a monarchy.

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Review: Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

Posted on September 1, 2018 by philipbrasor

Thanks to Japan’s complicated publicity machine, the sequel to the successful movie version of the very successful ABBA-inspired jukebox musical Mamma Mia! arrives well after most of the rest of the world has decided it’s a better movie than the original. The first thing that strikes me is pity for Meryl Streep, who basically saved the first movie from  mawkish amateurism with her native ability as a stage performer and willingness to parlay her appreciation of the songs into a silly nostalgia romp. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything at this point by saying that Streep’s character is deceased in the sequel, a move that may have been production-oriented (Meryl may have simply thought once is enough) but was probably strategic, since the plot is divided into two parallel storylines taking place in different time periods. In the present, we have Donna’s (Streep) daughter, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), preparing to reopen her mother’s Greek hotel, with or without the aid of her famously three fathers, Sam (Pierce Brosnan), Bill (Stellan Skarsgard), and Harry (Colin Firth). The other storyline depicts the early 20-ish Donna, played by the other young blonde go-to actress of the moment, Lily James, coming to the Greek island in question for the first time and meeting the three men who will seal her fate as not only a single mother of distinction, but a popular travel destination entrepreneur.

What most people find more agreeable about the sequel is that the musical numbers have been more carefully integrated into the plot, but only barely. For one thing, the two storylines don’t necessarily speak to each other in meaningful ways, and could have easily been spun off as separate films (a lost box office opportunity, I’d say, since the success of the sequel indicates it could be turned into a franchise). Considering that that producers decided to reprise some of the big hits from the original, it’s obvious they don’t think people will be put off by any redundancy. Jukebox musicals, in fact, thrive on redundancy, on the immediate satisfaction of the overly familiar. But the one thing that Here We Go Again definitely has going for it is that it also has a lot of what might be called ABBA’s “deep cuts,” songs that weren’t hits but nevertheless are familiar to anyone who bought their albums. And that’s the real appeal of the movie: Regardless of how wince-inducing the story and the characters become, the viewer anticipates the next production number, which arrives pretty quickly in a movie like this. “Instant gratification” would have been a more appropriate subhead than “Here We Go Again.”

And, again, everyone by now knows that Andy Garcia plays the Spanish love object to Christine Baranski’s horny pre-doddering Tanya if only to provide a contextual excuse to revive “Fernando,” and Cher shows up at the end as Donna’s still-living mother to convey dispensation to her granddaughter’s project, as well as (it’s implied) a lot of money. That Cher gets to sing not one but two ABBA songs is more than just gravy. Of all the big stars who have appeared in these two films she’s the one best suited to deliver the Swedish group’s outsized pop anthems. Whoever decided to hire her is a genius.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Picadilly (03-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Ikebukuro Humax Cinemas (03-5979-1660), Toho Cinemas Ueno (050-6868-5066).

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again home page in Japanese.

photo (c) 2017 Universal Studios

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Media Mix, Aug. 26, 2018

Posted on August 26, 2018 by philipbrasor

Mitsuyo Hoshino’s book “Moshimo Maho ga Tsukaetara”

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, about children orphaned after World War II. As described in the column, the Japanese media has avoided the topic for years and most likely decided to finally cover it because, as with many controversial subjects related to the war, the generation that experienced it firsthand has almost died out. The war orphans were quite young when the war ended, but they’re now in their 80s. Of course, some freelancers and smaller media have talked about the orphans for years, and one of the people who has been instrumental in drawing attention to them is Mitsuyo Hoshino, who is not a reporter but rather a woman, now 84, who lost her parents and four siblings in the Tokyo air raids. Like many children in the capital during the war, she was evacuated to the countryside. According to various media who have interviewed her, she kept her memories of that time to herself until 2013, when she visited a war archive in Sumida Ward. The experience prompted her to convey her memories through drawings, many of which were of war orphans she saw on the street after the war when she returned to Tokyo. (She herself was not a street child) In 2016 she self-published a book of these drawings and later the publisher Kodansha commissioned a larger book that supplemented the drawings with Hoshino’s writings about orphans in Tokyo, Yamagata, and Kobe. Hoshino has told reporters that her motivation was simple: Nobody had written much about these children and so she wanted to record their experiences “so future generations will understand” what happened. In the sense that her book may have opened the door for major media to finally approach the subject, her hope wasn’t in vain.

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