Diplomatic: Meryl makes Maggie in Tokyo

Posted on March 8, 2012 by philipbrasor

Considering that Meryl Streep had just won the Oscar a little more than a week before, the Tokyo press coference for The Iron Lady, in which she portrays former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wasn’t as packed as one would have expected. It also wasn’t as long as one might have hoped: barely 25 minutes covering a grand total of six different questions, and since two of those were from media that are big enough to score individual interviews, it seemed like a wasted opportunity. Streep and her director, Phyllida Lloyd, had come a long way, and though I imagine the time limit was imposed for the star’s sake, I also imagine the only reason she came was to promote a film that needed all the help it could get, which isn’t to say The Iron Lady is a bad film or uninteresting; but, like most biopics of non-show biz personalities, it hasn’t exactly burned up box offices and the relatively late opening in Japan could rectify that somewhat since it’s so close to Streep’s Academy Award win, which many didn’t expect. (It should be noted that the p.c. was not unexpected. I received my invitation the afternoon of the Oscar ceremony.) But I wouldn’t count on it.

Entering to the strains of “Shall We Dance” from The King and I, which I vaguely recall from the movie was a favorite song of Margaret Thatcher’s, Streep and Lloyd struck a pleasing contrast. The American actress, wearing stylishly over-sized black-framed glasses, looked much more glamorous than she did the last time she was in Japan plugging Mamma Mia!, which Lloyd also directed but didn’t promote in person here. The director, with her Scandinavian features and sensible bob, looked like the wonky technician in comparison, and you could tell they were attuned to each other in a very natural way. It might have been interesting to hear them discuss frankly their views on the subject of their project, a “character” whom Streep described as being “both loved and reviled” in Great Britain “in equal measure.” The judiciousness of the remark would characterize the press conference in that neither woman betrayed any hint of her personal opinion of Margaret Thatcher. Given the even-handed coherence of the answers, this was obviously by design. How different from the Mamma Mia! press conference, where Streep riffed and joked and mostly exercised her theretofore unrecognized capacity for making fun of her straight-back image. Maybe it was just as calculated. I mean, anybody who takes Mamma Mia! seriously is a chump. Continue reading →

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Mar. 2012 albums

Posted on March 1, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the March issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo earlier this week.

Le voyage dans la lune
-Air (Virgin/EMI)
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
-Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross (Null/Pachinko)
Pop artists have been doing movie soundtracks for years, but they usually leave the pop at home, since the whole point of a soundtrack is to intensify or otherwise add something to the mood depicted on screen. The French electro-pop duo Air has written a soundtrack for a restored, hand-colored version of Georges Melies’s silent masterpiece A Trip to the Moon. (If you don’t know anything about that film, check out Martin Scorsese’s Hugo—reviewed elsewhere in this issue—for a full description) The playful, experimental nature of Melies’s movie affords Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Nicolas Godin leeway in terms of form, and the light touch they’ve demonstrated on their dedicated pop albums is an appropriate fit. The opening two cuts, however, seem very literal-minded; less soundtrack music than soundtrack commentary. Victoria Legrand of Beach House sings, “How long will it take you to reach the stars?”, a remark that sounds unnecessary, and then there’s a guy with a very official-sounding voice counting down to liftoff. From there, it’s one spacey track after another, featuring loose keyboard runs and sci-fi sound effects. Dunckel and Godin have too much experience as entertainers to let the opportunity slip, and for the most part it’s a fun, riff-filled ride, until Au Revoir Simone comes in with a second vocal performance meant to close the proceedings. Clearly, Air conceived of the project as more along the lines of a suite—a record album—than a soundtrack. In that regard, Melies’s film becomes the visual complement to the album, playing behind Air on the backdrop as they perform on stage. But if you buy the deluxe version, which includes a DVD of the movie, you get the complete experience, and Milies, pardon the pun, blows Air away. The opening cut on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s soundtrack album for David Fincher’s version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (also reviewed in this issue), has the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O tearing into Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song,” but it’s used for a very impressive credit sequence, so who blows who away is difficult to tell. After that, the formula is similar to the one the duo provided for Fincher’s The Social Network, a work that won them an Oscar and revolutionized the art of soundtrack production. Though unobtrusive when accompanying Fincher’s visuals, Reznor/Ross’s treated mood music stands by itself very well, though you have to be a real fan of mood music to sit through this whole album, which clocks in at three hours, or more than 30 minutes longer than the movie itself. Apropos the suspense/mystery subject matter of the movie, the music is mostly ominous in tone and Reznor only occasionally exercises the sort of bombast he’s famous for. Some passages are so tense and unsettling you think to yourself, “I’ve just got to see this movie,” and that’s the measure of a successful soundtrack album. Continue reading →

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March 2012 movies

Posted on February 26, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the March 2012 issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo yesterday.

Arirang
From 1996 to 2008 Kim Ki-duk was the Woody Allen of Korean cinema, putting out a movie every year (sometimes two) like clockwork. Kim could do that because he produced himself and was appreciated overseas for his original if somewhat eccentric vision. His reputation in Korea was a bit more erratic, and after he suffered a breakdown on the set of his 2008 movie, Dream, he went into self-imposed exile in a mountain shack. Arirang is a glimpse of that life but don’t call it a documentary. Kim takes on all the cinematic chores, and orchestrates the “action” as if a crew were recording his every move, which mostly involves eating food out of pots and drinking espresso brewed with a machine he made himself. He also engages in staged “interviews” where he gets drunk and rails against the Korean cinematic establishment as well as his own manufactured image. When he says “no one wants to work with me,” you understand why. Kim’s self-disgust comes across as self-regard, but for what it’s worth the emotions are real. It’s quite a performance. (photo: Kim Ki-duk Film Prod.) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Feb. 19, 2012

Posted on February 19, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about changing attitudes toward hospital care for terminal patients. In the column I only used the statistics I needed, but the issue is quite interesting in what it says about the government’s approach to medical care. Of course the government wants to cut expenses as much as possible, and hospital care costs more than home care, but in order to shift terminal patients out of hospitals and into homes they will offer an incentive by increasing compensation for home care from ¥42,000 to ¥50,000 and emergency compensation from ¥6,500 to ¥8,500 per visit. The strategy is extremely important since the health ministry wants to reduce the number of hospital beds, which may prove to be very difficult. Right now, about 1.2 million people die in Japan every year, and that number is expected to rise to 1.6 million by 2032, an increase of one-third. Another problem is the availability of physicians. Though Japan is supposedly suffering from a shortage of doctors, the main problem is distribution in terms of region and discipline. Hyogo Prefecture, for instance, solved its pediatrician problem in part by asking residents to not use resources at night or on weekends unless there was an emergency. Consequently, pediatricians’ work load became easier to manage. In order to realize more effective home care, clinics and doctors will have to become more flexible in terms of treatment and nurses and caregivers will need to take on more medical responsibilities. And while bringing families into the equation is basically treated as a cost-saving measure, home care is impossible without family participation, though, as pointed out by Dr. Yamazaki on the NHK program, the main job of nurses and caregivers will be to take some of the pressure off families. On the NHK show, the woman who was dying of uterine cancer was being cared for by her elderly mother, who was occasionally relieved by a nurse.

My own mother died at home, in 2006. Though her illness was not defined until several weeks before she died (and even that definition was not entirely clear), she had been in poor health for years. More than a year before she died she moved into an assisted care facility in Florida. For the first nine months she lived in a regular apartment, doing her own chores and shopping and cooking. She still drove. After a fall, however, she was moved into the assisted care wing, and though she improved somewhat it was not enough for the doctors to approve of her going back to her apartment. Since she had no family living in Florida, her sisters and my older brother talked her into moving back to her hometown in upstate New York. She resisted at first, but was eventually convinced that being near loved ones would be better for her welfare. So she bought a small house in her hometown, but her condition deterioriated almost immediately and within five months of moving she was in and out of the hospital. Eventually it was determined she had cancer (after several tests for cancer had come back negative) and since she had signed a DNR form some years earlier it was decided that she would leave the hospital and remain at home. The hospital and her insurance company provided a hospice nurse who coordinated her care at home (some of these nurses had been visiting her on a regular basis even before her cancer was discovered), and during the last week of her life her house was almost constantly filled with friends and relatives, who would sit with her and talk. My brothers and I flew in several days before she died and were by her side when she passed. So was the nurse, who told us exactly what to expect beforehand. When it was finished she prepared the body and arranged for its removal to the funeral home, where, in accordance with my mother’s wishes, she was cremated. The whole experience was sobering and, in its own peculiar way, uplifting. After going through that process, I can understand directly why anyone would want to die at home, but my mother was lucky. She had a large family and enough money. Many people have neither.

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Anniversaries

Posted on February 8, 2012 by philipbrasor

stars and stripes

Today is the 30th anniversary of the Hotel New Japan fire, which killed 33 people. It is also my 30th wedding anniversary. Here is an excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend some years ago describing that day.

“We woke up that morning to news that made M wonder if it might not be the most inauspicious day to get hitched. The Hotel New Japan, which happened to be in Akasaka, right down the street from the embassy, was on fire. It was one of the biggest hotels in Tokyo and all the TV stations were covering the blaze closely, since something like four floors were engulfed in flames and firemen were having trouble getting to the people stranded there. In the end, more than 30 people would die in the fire, at least half of them non-Japanese, but at the moment we had to decide on what we were going to do. Years later, it would always be easy to remember our wedding anniversary because the incident remains the biggest hotel fire in Japanese history and a contentious lawsuit against the owner dragged on for more than 20 years; always on the anniversay, there was some news report to remind everyone. It was, in fact, the first of two big disasters that week. The second was a plane crash at Haneda airport caused by a pilot who suffered from severe depression and almost dunked his 747 in the bay. A bunch of people died in that accident, too.

Perhaps I saw it as a challenge, but I convinced M to go through with it, so we did. We met Norie and Morimura in front of the embassy and went through the security, which even in 1982 was pretty tight. The visa section was crowded as usual but we used the notary windows. We had to wait longer than we expected because the place was temporarily understaffed. Some of the employees were down at the Hotel New Japan helping U.S. citizens who had lost possessions (or maybe even their lives) in the fire. We waited almost an hour for our turn.

There wasn’t much to it. Basically, I filled out a form and raised my right hand and swore that the information contained in it was true. Then M and our two witnesses signed on the proper lines. There were no “I dos,” no “I now pronounce you…” The woman who took my information did, however, congratulate both of us “on behalf of the United States government.” We went outside and had somebody take our picture in front of the embassy gates, and then we walked down to the Hotel New Japan and watched the excitement. It was sort of thrilling.

We registered our union at the Minato Ward office. For all intents and purposes I didn’t even have to be there. Since I’m not Japanese, I can’t be listed in the “spouse” column of M’s family register–the basic document that certifies Japanese nationality. I can only be written in as a footnote. At the time, I didn’t give a thought to this, though a month or so later I would learn what it really meant. Then, the four of us went to a restaurant and celebrated with pie. M’s idea.”

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February 2012 albums

Posted on February 3, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the February issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

The Dreamer/The Believer
-Common (Warner)
Freedom of Speech
-Speech Debelle (Big Dada/Beat)
Several times on Common’s new album, the Chicago rapper refers to his parallel career as a movie actor, boosting it as an accomplishment in illustration of the record’s “dreamer” theme. Elsewhere on the album, Common also lays claim to a newly realized vulgarity that, given the tradition of hip-hop hardness, contrasts negatively with the kinds of roles Common plays in movies. If Ice Cube doesn’t have the same problem it’s mainly because his initial gangsta persona was also an act, and a very convincing one. Common has always gotten by on his sincerity and frankness, so is he a hypocrite or a sellout? Such distinctions usually don’t matter in pop, especially for an artist who, despite his lefty underground origins, has had more major label releases than almost any other rapper; and despite a new sense of musical purpose exemplified by the employment of producer No I.D., The Dreamer/The Believer is so tonally disparate that it’s difficult to believe it all came from the same person during the same interlude of his life. Some reviewers see confusion. I see blind confidence. Common’s twin angels of cerebral rap, which have always fought for dominion over his soul, set gritty sociological storytelling against New Age pronouncements of empowerment, but he used to trade these ideas off on alternating albums. Here, they are forced to coexist against their wills through a more aggressive style. Common follows “The Dreamer,” a flighty ode to the starry-eyed kid he once was, complete with a cameo by Maya Angelou, with “Ghetto Dreams,” a qualifying rejoinder that benefits mightily from the cred of guest pontificator Nas. As hackneyed and false as the American Dream has become as a cultural trope, its sentimental power can’t be denied, even in the ostensibly cynical realm of hip-hop. However, the cussin’, derisive attitude of “Sweet” fails to make a similar impression as soon as he declares he is “to hip-hop what Obama is to politics.” Common isn’t that good an actor. Speech Debelle, another MC with a cerebral bent, would like you to believe she doesn’t need to act at all, that she’s the real thing. Debelle’s difficulty as a public figure has more to do with something she has no control over: Britain’s Mercury Prize, which she won two years ago for an album that was personal, jazz-inflected, and incredibly dense. In line with her higher profile since the Mercury win, her new album has a harder musical edge and ventures into more political territory. Whereas the subjects on Speech Therapy were disarmingly specific—how people worked in offices, how impersonal sex can sometimes be great, how absent fathers cast a spell on your life—on Freedom of Speech they’re more generic. The revolutionary rhetoric of “Blaze Up a Fire” is heartfelt but nevertheless all-purpose, and sounds sort of clueless subsequent to last summer’s riots. Debelle’s mission is to get her feelings out there. Cerebral ain’t in it. Continue reading →

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February 2012 movies

Posted on February 1, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the Feb. issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

Beginners
Personality crises are notoriously difficult to depict on film, which is why older directors didn’t bother to do it and younger directors use indirection. This reportedly autobiographical work by Mike Mills uses a lot of shorthand tricks to convey its protagonist’s self-professed inability to love the way he thinks he should, including talking dogs, speech deprivation, and impersonations of Sigmund Freud, all of which come across as cute before they make their respective points felt. However, the cutest trick of all is apparently the truest: the protagonist’s father declares he’s gay in his mid-70s, just several years before he dies of lung cancer. The son, a graphic artist named Oliver (Ewan McGregor), can’t quite process this news, which may not be entirely unexpected, but in any case Mills translates Oliver’s confusion with voiceover narration describing how the world used to be (people smoke cigarettes freely) and comparing it to the way it is now. It’s incomprehensible to him that things which used to be taken for granted no longer apply, though it was also obvious that when he was a child his father and mother had little meaningful interaction. What’s more disconcerting is that the father, Hal (Christopher Plummer), finds such unmediated satisfaction in coming out, taking up with a much younger lover (Goran Visnjic), and being part of a community. Oliver isn’t bothered by homosexuality as much as he is by the suggestion he doesn’t know himself as well and may not until he’s near death, too. Mills dispenses with linearity, alternating episodes of Oliver’s life after Hal’s death with episodes leading up to it. Coming to terms means taking possession of Hal’s uncharacteristically laid-back Jack Russell terrier (“You’re supposed to be hyperactive, you know”) and cleaning up Hal’s sunny apartment, which stands as an affront to his murky, unfulfilled existence. So when he meets a pretty young woman, Anna (Melanie Laurent), at a costume party who’s mute with laryngitis, he takes a chance. Oliver isn’t a virgin, but it’s implied his serial monogamy is characterized by large lacunae due to his belief that since things will likely go bad it’s best not to go there. This is a very definite diagnosis for what ails Oliver, but non-commitment is such a trite theme so Mills dresses it up in memory games and adorable scenes that show Oliver’s vulnerability and Anna’s compassion and understanding. The result is a life that feels like a movie rather than a movie that feels like a life. But, of course, we go to movies to see movies, and Mills gets his points across with humor and a light touch. He doesn’t take Oliver’s tribulations that seriously. I only wish my life were this perplexing—and cute. (photo: Beginners Movie LLC) Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Jan. 29, 2012

Posted on January 29, 2012 by philipbrasor

Seiko Noda

Here is this week’s Media Mix, which is about two recent Fuji TV documentaries. The subject of one of them, Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Seiko Noda, has been discussed in this column before, and more than once. Noda is a controversial public figure, but most of the media that “bash” her–basically the weeklies–do so, I think, because she fits their idea of a striving woman. She’s a tireless self-promoter who connects her personal struggles to a larger social purpose, usually in the area of family law and the Civil Code, but the immediate issue illuminated by the TV program “I Wanted to Be a Mother” has no real social-political relevance. Her son, Masaki, was born with multiple serious health problems. As one doctor implies, he should not have survived, and that is the basis of the program’s appeal, if you can call it that. Nevertheless, Noda, who is the real subject of the documentary, not Masaki, insists on justifying everything that led up to Masaki’s conception and arrival in the world. Since Noda has chronicled her decade-long road to motherhood in books and TV specials, those of us who have followed her journey already know why she has put herself through all these difficult, expensive medical procedures to produce an heir. The title of the show makes the case that her most pressing need was maternal, that she always wanted to have a child, “have” being the operative word here. Though she has discussed in the past adoption when it became obvious that her physical situation made it difficult to conceive and give birth under normal circumstances, her reluctance to marry her partner made that option almost impossible since single persons or cohabiting couples can’t adopt in Japan. And, of course, the reason she didn’t want to marry her partner was because she didn’t want to change her surname, and in Japan legally married couples must share the same name. Her previous partner, also a politician, didn’t want to change his name, but her present partner, a restaurateur, eventually agreed to change his, but apparently he did so after the adoption option was already discarded and his sperm was used to fertilize a third-party ovum, which was implanted in Noda’s body. Another piece of information that’s really none of our business is the race of the ovum’s producer. Noda understands the gossipy nature of the weeklies that have followed her saga and so preempts speculation by stating outright in the program that the donor was a white American woman. In fact, Noda seems to have insisted that she not be Asian so that it would make it easier for her to explain to her child later why she did what she did. To Noda, this sort of candor, toward both the public and her child, is an integral part of her responsibility as a public figure on the one hand and as a mother on the other, but as far as the latter goes it seems a huge burden to put on the child. Though she may want us to believe that Masaki will accept this explanation as proof of his mother’s determination to be a mother, the calculation involved would seem to indicate that it had more to do with achieving the goal of passing on her family name, which she received from her paternal grandfather, a powerful political figure in his own right who adopted her as his heir. Thus, Masaki will be expected to pass on the name himself. Hasn’t he gone through enough already?

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Media Mix, Jan. 8, 2012

Posted on January 8, 2012 by philipbrasor

Aya Ueto, doing what she does best

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the ever-increasing incidence of celebrity marriages precipitated by unplanned pregnancies. These “dekichatta” unions have become so common that whenever a famous person announces he or she is getting married a spokesperson usually has to clarify whether or not the bride in the equation is already with child, since it’s the first thing the show biz press thinks about. Beyond notions of prurience, it’s something that begs discussion, and for several reasons. Though I only touched on the matter, and in a rather flip way, the effect such “happy news” has on society can’t be underestimated, and the general acceptance of dekichatta marriages implies that the people involved aren’t very careful about their sexual activity. While surveys indicate that most people frown upon dekichatta unions and talent agencies don’t really like them either, the media ignore the whole sex education aspect of the phenomenon, probably because, for one, it’s not really in their purview to make such pronouncements (even if the tabloid side always tsk-tsks about it); and, second, any news about having babies must be met with congratulations and good wishes, because that’s just common courtesy. (Footnote: Kumi Koda, the main focus of the column, already proved her lack of gynecological knowledge several years ago when she remarked on a radio show that women had to have babies before they turned 35, at which point their amniotic fluid became “spoiled.”) Continue reading →

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January 2012 albums

Posted on January 3, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here are the album reviews I wrote for the Jan. 2012 issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo at the end of last year.

Take Care
-Drake (Cash Money/Universal)
Talk That Talk
-Rihanna (Def Jam/Universal)
For some reason those members of the hip-hop and R&B community who toil for major labels always wait until the end of the year to release albums, confounding lazy critics who want to finish their 10-best lists by Christmas. I didn’t get to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy until January, and with the delay Japanese labels usually add to releases, I didn’t get to Drake’s and Rihanna’s new joints until late November—forget Mary and The Roots. In Drake’s case it’s particularly problematic because his second album is 79 minutes long and dense with the kind of self-regard that often takes weeks to penetrate. Recorded in the same studio where Marvin Gaye did much of his late work—there’s even a track called “Marvins Room” that sounds nothing like the late soul great—Take Care is one long rant against past loves who had the nerve to leave the Canadian rapper for somebody else. Since Drake is markedly wittier than most of his peers, including Weezy, the solipsism is tolerable if not always enlightening, but I myself would prefer less insight into his love life and more into his quotidian affairs. “I’m sure there’s some taxes I’m evading,” he reveals on “The Ride,” “but I blew six million on myself and I feel amazing.” It’s an interesting contrast to his first album, which erred on the side of caution, musically as well as lyrically. Lusher without being enveloping, the production prettifies even the most caustic observations (“brand new titties/stitches still showing”) and makes it all (pardon the expression) go down easy; which is important for a 79-minute album. And if the record says anything about Drake’s work ethic it’s that he obviously takes his sweet time. Rihanna, on the other hand, always seems to be in a rush. Since the restatement of purpose Rated R, the Barbados-born singer has frantically reasserted her position as the world’s #1 R&B diva, releasing stellar singles and mediocre albums to deliver them. Last year’s Loud was generally received as a holding motion, something to keep Rihanna’s name in the public consciouness while she plotted her next move; which hardly seemed necessary when she was appearing on every other major urban artist’s records (she does a duet with Drake on the aforementioned opus). The subtext of Talk That Talk is raunch, a topic that’s as fresh as limburger but one that Rihanna may have thought was outside her comfort zone given her Top 40 rep and that unfortunate incident involving Chris Brown. The Eurobeat single “We Found Love” is probably the most heartfelt, innocent song she’s recorded, carried by a lovely, lilting vocal line. Once that’s out of the way, she unleashes the growl and the suggestive lyrics (“Cockiness”?), but the only convincing sex talk is Jay-Z’s bragging during the title track. As the album progresses the interest level, both hers and ours, flags. Obviously, somebody came too early. Continue reading →

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