Here’s mud in your eye
Here’s this week’s Media Mix about news coverage of the rain disaster that hit western Japan two weeks ago. The column uses the “drinking party” attended by various high level LDP lawmakers as a framing device to show how the central government doesn’t really have any means to deal with such a disaster while it’s going on. In the context of what I was writing, the problem with the LDP’s lack of response was mostly administrative in nature, but that doesn’t mean it lacks a moral dimension. What struck me about writer Satetsu Takeda’s conversation on the Golden Radio show was how angry he was. It’s unusual for a reporter to express such vehement disgust on a mainstream media program, but he was clearly enraged by the way the LDP shunted aside responsibility for the delayed response to the destruction. As he pointed out, the party had been planned months in advance, and the prime minister’s presence was not necessarily guaranteed, though, actually, it turned out to be the launch of his campaign for a third term as LDP president. Abe famously doesn’t drink because of his fragile digestive system, but he apparently partook rather lustily (there was good sake from his home constituency), so, in Takeda’s eyes, the party was very important for everyone involved and they purposely ignored the Meteorological Agency’s warnings earlier that day. Afterwards, the chief cabinet secretary dismissed complaints about the party by saying that the prime minister’s “office” was monitoring the situation in western Japan as they developed so there was nothing wrong with the prime minister attending a party that had been on his schedule for months.
Takeda’s anger would be better spent on complaining about the LDP’s general hypocrisy. Abe has always been touted as a leader whose main aim is to “protect” Japanese people’s lives, which he has failed again and again, or, at least, when it comes to natural disasters. Of course, these crises can’t be sufficiently predicted, but by laying the responsibility on local governments, not to mention individuals themselves (the jiko sekinin, or “personal responsibility” angle), they avoid the toughest questions about their own responsibility. The same can be said on a micro level about the current heat wave, which has killed a dozen people. The media frets about the authorities’ lack of preparedness for such weather, but it seems the public understands that the authorities don’t really have that much skin in the game. The central government could easily scrap a few fighter planes it’s buying from the U.S. and use the money to buy every public school in Japan air conditioners, but that would be wrong, because the average person really must look out for themselves. The only real soul-searching the central government has done with regards to the rain disaster is saying that it hasn’t done enough to guarantee flood-preventing infrastructure. That’s a no-brainer, even if, as pointed out in the column, dams and levees are not the guarantees they’re purported to be. Politicians get a lot of mileage with construction-related donors when they shill for public works projects.
Though more photographically distinctive than the Go Pro-recorded factory ship documentary, Leviathan, Rahul Jain’s meticulous study of a huge textile factory in Gujarat, India, is similarly obsessed with the process of labor and how mechanization complements human actions rather than supplements them. Jain’s purposes are more activist, some might say political, since there are also interviews with workers and management that clearly show the class dynamics at work. Rodrigo Trejo’s beautiful cinematography almost aestheticizes the grind, and in the end it may turn people away from the film’s most powerful implication, that mechanization both demeans human effort and destroys everything that comes into contact with it. A similarly themed movie shot in Europe or North American might convey a totally different message, but by showing in clear detail the garbage and heat and dim working conditions of this textile factory Machines goes the extra mile to tell us that the industrial world still has a long way to go toward recognizing the human dignity of manual labor.
Though it wasn’t necessarily inevitable that the Jurassic Park franchise would get this far 25 years after it began, it was inevitable that if it did get this far the animals themselves would be portrayed as victims rather than whatever it is these days qualifies as the opposite of victims. When last we visited Isla Nubar, where the uber theme park Jurassic World imploded thanks to the double dealings of 0ne-percenters who saw money in cloning dinosaurs for nefarious purposes, it seemed obvious that humans and big lizards would never get along and so they were left to their own devices, so to speak. Now, it turns out, the island is undergoing volcanic activity that threatens a second extinction for the dinosaurs left there, so naturalist Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallace Howard) and her team of bleeding hearts once again enlist the help of dino wrangler Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) to help them evacuate the beasts to somewhere safer.
On the surface, Michel Hazanavicius’s decision to adapt a chapter in Jean-Luc Godard’s love life as a romantic comedy makes a certain amount of sense given the early New Wave crowd’s love of classic Hollywood screwball comedies, but Hazanavicius invariably falls into the trap that even modern American directors can’t avoid when tackling romantic comedey: the impulse to be cute. Though casting Louis Garrel, with fake receding hair and thick-rimmed glasses, as JLG was a minor stroke of genius, choosing Stacy Martin to play his first wife, Anne Wiazemsky, was a little too on the nose. There’s no doubt that this is a fictionalized version of their relationship, but the sight of JLG acting all super sophisticated and intellectual while Wiazemsky purrs and wrinkles her nose is only funny one time.
There are actually too many intriguing premises for this spiky documentary directed by two Scandinavians. The overall premise is compelling enough: a Slovenian art-rock band becomes the first foreign pop outfit to play a concert in Pyongyang that’s approved by the government. But even beyond that enticing possibility there are other questions that could very well form the basis of their own documentaries. The band, Laibach, for instance, is famous in Europe for being provocateurs in every conceivable way. They formed when Slovenia was still part of Yugoslavia and were an active thorn in the side of the government with their abrasive, industrial, strident, but no less melodic pop songs, many of which were ironic standards. For instance, they’ve played concerts that consisted of nothing but songs from The Sound of Music. They also appropriate Nazi imagery as a means of keeping everyone who sees them on their toes, because despite the martial frippery they seem opposed to both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum, as suspicious of communist ideals as they are of capitalist truisms.
Movies that realistically depict the 1970s force those of us who remember the decade as firsthand observers to slog through several layers of subtext. Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s film covers one of the seminal “progressive” events of that time, the contest between former professional tennis player Bobby Riggs (Steve Carrell) and the current women’s tennis champion, Billy Jean King (Emma Stone)—the first woman to be named Athlete of the Year by Sports Illustrated—which became more about personal PR than women’s rights. The more immediate problem with Battle of the Sexes is that Faris and Dayton’s direction doesn’t quite do justice to Simon Beaufoy’s nuanced script. The directing couple seem to be taking their technical cues from David O. Russell, who tends to substitute genre and period signifiers for potent plot points that would actually advance a story. Consequently, the viewer fixates on the musical cues, the automobile models, the wallpaper, the cheesy fashion sense, and relate it all to the story, as if those things determined character and attitudes rather than the other way around. Carrell and Stone, two actors firmly identified with the most recent decade of Hollywood, only intensify this cognitive dissonance.
Hong Sang-soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then, released in South Korea in 2015, is finally opening in Japan, though it should be mentioned that Hong’s films are not temporally fixed. Current events or even trends have absolutely no purchase on his stories. Even the fashion sense is strictly generic. Right Now is one of Hong’s experiments in bifurcated narratives, and while it doesn’t really do anything different with the form, it does show incremental improvements in his command of it when compared to past experiments, like In Another Country.
Here’s 
During the horror film’s formative heyday in the 80s, trashiness was next to godliness. Perhaps by necessity, the gory goings-on were delivered via hilariously ridiculous plots that were gentle on whatever degree of intelligence was brought to the proceedings. Even a fairly sophisticated shocker like Dressed to Kill was, at base, a comedy.
It’s often difficult to tell with Woody Allen where the satire ends and the pretension begins. The narrator of Wonder Wheel is a would-be writer named Mickey (Justin Timberlake), who toots his own horn often enough while relating the sad tale of the mess he made of the life of a married woman named Ginny (Kate Winslet). It’s easy to poke fun at Mickey’s pronouncements on Eugene O’Neill and Shakespeare, though after a while you begin to wonder if it isn’t the director’s own need for us to understand the allusions he’s making in his own script, which isn’t bad as far as romantic potboilers go, but you can only cut Allen so much slack when it comes to affairs of the heart.
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