January 2012 movies

Posted on January 2, 2012 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the Jan. issue of EL Magazine. They cover films that were released in Tokyo between late Dec. and mid-Jan.

Animal Kingdom
The title of Australian director David Michod’s debut feature suggests an environment ruled by the laws of nature, but the world it describes is a small one and the game is actually rigged. The Cody family is a band of hardened criminals, and based on the attitude of the clan’s matriarch, Smurf (Jacki Weaver), it lays claim to some sort of pedigree. Her boys are bank robbers, a line of work as specialized as arc welding, but each brother has his own personal peccadillo that makes the work even more perilous. Around the time that Smurf’s teenage grandson, Joshua (James Frecheville), enters this volatile household, the Codys are under close surveillance by the local police, whose main object of desire is the eldest boy Pope (Ben Mendelsohn), who’s on the lam and off his medication. Josh’s mother, who had been estranged from Smurf since Josh was a little boy, has just OD’d on heroin in one of the most shockingly matter-of-fact scenes in the history of cinematic drug abuse. Shortly thereafter, a rogue band of cops offs a member of the Cody team, and the killing sets in motion a series of tit-for-tat reprisals that spirals out of control. Scorsese should probably sue for a royalty, but the defense would counter that Marty could never have countenanced Josh’s enervated voiceover. This is a kid whose damage goes way back and has rendered him a walking blank stare. The contrast between the adolescent’s open-mouthed incomprehension and his uncles’ macho bluster and drug-fueled desperation is so stark as to be antithetical. The contrast also gives Michod a plot device that brings out the worst in both sides of the battle. The brothers use their nephew’s passivity to their advantage, while the main cop (Guy Pearce) senses a hesitancy that he can tap once it becomes clear to Josh that his family isn’t looking out for his best interests. In the film’s most gratuitous display of depravity, Pope forces his survival prerogatives on Josh’s girlfriend, and you realize that the movie can’t go any lower, until Smurf, the very picture of a nurturing female, decides to sacrifice her grandson for the sake of her sons. After all, he’s not really a full-fledged member of the family. By over-reaching Michod squanders the viewer’s trust, since Josh is the only character with any recognizable moral perspective, and that includes Pearce’s detective, who understands what it means to lose your soul but doesn’t seem particularly troubled by the fact that he sold his long ago. Weaver got the Oscar nod mainly because of the character, but Pearce is the amazing one. At this point, his range seems boundless. (photo: Screen Australia, Screen NSW, Film Victoria, Premium Film Partnership, Animal Kingdom Holdings and Porchlight Films) Continue reading →

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Best albums 2011

Posted on December 26, 2011 by philipbrasor

During a year when my opportunities to hear live music decreased considerably, I would like to think I actually listened to more music. Having shifted my daily constitutionals from the morning to the evening in order to take advantage of the huge sky and dramatic sunsets in the place we moved to last June, I made more use of my iPod than I did of my stereo, thus creating a whole different set of circumstances for listening to recorded music for the purpose of actually listening to it. The difference was startling and for a while I was thrown off. As I said in last year’s best-of-year essay, while age hasn’t depleted my critical faculties it is has certainly made it easier to fall prey to distractions, but walking through the by-ways of Inzai I found myself more engaged by whatever it was that came through my earphones. In past years when compiling my Top Ten I usually had to take time out in late November to sift through the records I liked until I determined which ones I actually loved, or which ones actually made a deep impression. This time I pretty much knew what I loved because those long walks had the effect of focusing my attention on the things that did make a deep impression, over and over. The only real change in my short list was the exchange of numbers one and two. FOW was pretty much my summer jam, especially after seeing them at Fuji Rock, but I revisited Ms. Garbus’s album, originally released back in February, in November and it re-blew me away. Also, had I stumbled upon the Little Dragon sooner—I didn’t hear it until a few weeks ago—it might have ended up in the Top Ten rather than in the HMs. Continue reading →

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Best movies 2011

Posted on December 23, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here are my ten-best-plus movies of the year, which I wrote for the Jan. issue of EL Magazine. All were released in Japan during the 2011 calendar year. Though I saw fewer movies than I did in 2010, I believe 2011 was also a better year for movies. Since I no longer write for the Asahi Shimbun I was not compelled to see a lot of American movies that I wouldn’t have normally bothered with in the first place, so maybe my slightly brighter opinion had something to do with that. Nevertheless, there are still a lot of films that I would like to see that haven’t received distribution in Japan and don’t seem likely to receive any in the near future. And if I allowed the inclusion of TV movies on this list it would certainly contain Todd Haynes’ mini-series adaptation of James Cain’s Mildred Pierce, which was shown on WOWOW. It might have even topped The Tree of Life, in my estimation. (To those who wonder why there are no Japanese movies on this list, refer to the essay I wrote last year, which still applies.)

Speaking of WOWOW, they did a good thing by expanding to three channels full-time and dedicating one of those channels exclusively to movies. And while in terms of foreign films I would prefer less American low-brow content and a bit more edgier stuff from all countries (including the US) in order to take up the slack that’s resulted from the demise of so many theatrical distributors, they occasionally do good deeds, like that Bresson retro that keeps recurring every month. Now, how about one on Haneke? I still haven’t seen Code Unknown and Hour of the Wolf, and the DVD rental service nearest to my new apartment is basically a vending machine stuffed with episodes of 24 and Prison Break. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Dec. 18, 2011

Posted on December 18, 2011 by philipbrasor

Masato Uchishiba (Kyodo)

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the arrest of gold medalist Masato Uchishiba for allegedly raping a member of the university judo team he coached. Though the column references comments by journalist Yukari Yamada on the problem of coaching philosophy in Japan, which she believes is at the root of the Uchishiba affair, sex harrassment and sex abuse in sports, as indicated by the International Olympic Committee’s 2007 announcement, is a worldwide problem. The most prominent case is probably that of Paul Hickson, the swimming coach for the British Olympic team who was convicted of child molestation in 1995, since it led to the establishment of guidelines, in Britain, for how coaches should conduct themselves with younger athletes. The guidelines that Japanese sports organization are considering follow a similar way of thinking.

Such guidelines sound like common sense, though some people in the sporting world consider them interference in the special relationship that exists between coaches and athletes. Moreover, as the comments by Dewi Sukarno suggest, a lot of people think that the scrutiny of sexual relations that has become more widespread in recent years has led to an increase in sex harrassment allegations for behavior that is no big deal. Uchishiba, who is married and has a family, admitted that he had sex with his accuser, but insists that it was consensual. If the case proceeds to court, a judge will have to determine if it was, but lately there has been a lot of controversy about what constitutes actionable improper sexual behavior, prompted by the Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Julian Assange arrests. In both cases, famous men were accused by women of forcing them to partake in sex against their will. Strauss-Kahn has since had the charges dropped due to the unreliability of his accuser, a hotel maid; while Assange is still under house arrest. In relation to their predicaments, both men had supporters and detractors, with the former essentially taking the same tack as Sukarno but with more rhetorical rigor. Sometimes, this situation makes for strange–pardon the expression–bedfellows. For instance, the well-known writer Naomi Wolf, who calls herself a feminist, has received a certain amount of backlash for her support of Assange, which entailed denigrating the stories of his two accusers. The feeling is that Wolf is being swayed by her belief in Assange’s mission as the founder of Wikileaks, and so has to justify that belief by dumping on women who she feels are delusional about their sexual relations with him. This is not much different in substance than Dewi Sukarno imagining that the female judo-ka accused Coach Uchishiba of rape because he spurned her affections after sleeping with her during a night of drinking, since Sukarno seems somewhat in awe of Uchishiba for his Olympic accomplishments.

The fact that there is a controversy over the definition of sexual abuse in these cases points to their political nature; which is why they should be discussed in the media. If all the relationships at issue were, in fact, consensual, maybe the rest of us have no business passing judgment, but it’s difficult not to do so when powerful men are involved. If Strauss-Kahn’s, Assanges’s, and Uchishiba’s behavior still seems repugnant to some of us, regardless of their respective sex partners’ consent, then it only goes to show that there’s a long way to go before men get the message that just because they can have sex exclusively on their own terms it doesn’t mean they should.

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Mission accomplishable: Tom Cruise draws a crowd

Posted on December 4, 2011 by philipbrasor

Entertain me: Patton, Toda, Cruise, Bird at Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol press conference, Ritz Carlton Hotel, Tokyo, Dec. 1, 2011 (photo Lucian Capellaro/Paramount Pictures Int'l)

Who’s the biggest movie star today? If you say Tom Cruise or Will Smith, it’s not because they’re the biggest box office draws, but rather because they act like movie stars, and that’s because they love being movie stars. It’s what they always wanted to be and now that they are they’ll do whatever it takes to remain movie stars. It’s why they throw themselves so fully into promotion, why they answer every dumb interviewer’s question as if it were a matter of life or death, why they spend that extra few minutes with fans and give photographers whatever they ask for. Julia Roberts looks upon reporters the way the rest of see tax auditors, and while Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp do the press conferences, photo sessions are like dentists’ appointments, necessary but highly unpleasant. One assumes that they like being movie stars but would prefer the old-fashioned protocols, when personal appearances were purposely limited to preserve the mystery of personality. That model went out with the studio system and the subsequent stars of the 60s and 70s were born too early for the press junket. Tom Cruise was practically born into it. Except for the occasional European who somehow thinks that drilling him about his status as an alpha dog Scientologist counts as serious journalism, the press treats Cruise like a king because he treats them like old pals. Most Hollywood actors as seasoned as Cruise would cringe at the idea of the current whirlwind world press tour to promote Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol — 9 cities in 14 days, and Tokyo was the first. To Cruise, such a schedule is a challenge, something, he’ll be quick to tell you, that he thrives on.

Locals may grumble that Tokyo is the only one of these cities that isn’t getting a premiere, but actually Cruise did even better: He set up a fan meeting/screening at Roppongi Hills on Dec. 1, probably because he knows more about Japanese fans than most American movie stars. Whenever he’s in town to promote a movie, Cruise not only does the press conference, the interviews, and the premiere, all with that huge, sparkly smile and the sincerest form of flattery, but also a few TV shows where he invariably rubs shoulders with local celebrities and not-so-celebrities, happily making just as much of a fool of himself as they do.

Because he, as star and producer, along with director Brad Bird and costar Paula Patton, had to be in Seoul the next day, he didn’t have time for the variety shows this trip, so that’s why the fan meeting trumped a premiere. I didn’t make it to the fan meeting, and not because I’m not a fan, but because I saw the movie that morning and then went to the press conference, and there’s only so much Tom Cruise you can take in one day. Continue reading →

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December 2011 movies

Posted on November 29, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here are the movie reviews I wrote for the Dec. issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo on Nov. 25. The movies open in Japan between late Nov. and mid-Dec.

The Adventures of Tintin
Herge’s boyish Belgian reporter-adventurer and his terrier Snowy are brought to animated 3D life by Steven Spielberg, who looks to be making another Indy Jones franchise. The difference is worth noting. Whereas Jones was a completely original character, albeit one cobbled together from numerous pulp models, Tintin is somebody else’s creation, a comic book hero beloved by millions the world over since 1929. Not being a fan, I have no problem with Spielberg’s rendition, and while I doubt that followers will begrudge the changeover to English, will they tolerate the alteration of names that goes with it? The bumbling twin police detectives are no longer named Dupont but rather Thompson. More significantly, the script by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish inserts jokes that seem concoted for English accents and the Anglo behaviorisms attached to them. Consequently, the whole enterprise comes off as a generic action movie—a very well made action movie, but missing the bold eccentricity that made the Indy series special. What registers is that Tintin, voiced by Jamie Bell, is earnest and cocky, but nevertheless without his dog he’d be dead meat before the first reel is finished. In this presumably first installment, subtitled “The Secret of the Unicorn,” Tintin’s purchase of a model ship pulls him into a scheme by the evil Sakharine (Daniel Craig), whose ancestor, it seems, was the nemesis of the ancestor of alcoholic seafarer Capt. Haddock (Andy Serkis). The model contains a clue to the whereabouts of a sunken treasure that the two forebears fought over. Tintin and Haddock join forces in chasing Sakharine to several exotic locations, which was the main purpose of the Tintin stories during those days when overseas travel was impossible for most people. Except for the exaggerated noses, the CG/performance-capture figures look too much like real people to make the sort of funny impression the comic books are famous for, but Spielberg knows his action grammar, and with Peter Jackson lending production assistance this is certainly the best use of the technology for purely action purposes. Chase scenes on land, sea, and in the air are dialed up for maximum peril and drawn out with ridiculously outrageous detail. As a result, all the characters except Haddock seem that much smaller. Tintin could be any plucky kid, and Sakharine any snarling bad guy. Serkis, who’s had more experience with performance-capture than anyone, has learned how to dominate the pixels, and Haddock is such a believable drunk you hope the kids who lap this stuff up don’t get the wrong idea. The ending leaves matters open to a sequel (the story is based on three Tintin volumes), which will supposedly be directed by Jackson. He tends to have a better grasp of source material. (photo: Paramount Pictures) Continue reading →

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December 2011 albums

Posted on November 28, 2011 by philipbrasor

Here are the albums I reviewed for the Dec. issue of EL Magazine, which was distributed in Tokyo last week.

Crazy Clown Time
-David Lynch (Sunday Best/Beat)
The Less You Know, the Better
-DJ Shadow (Island/Universal)
If you came of age in the 90s you would know of David Lynch as a filmmaker but might think of him as something more due to his selfless promotion of transcendental meditation and advocacy of really good coffee. Whether purposely or not, Lynch is as much of a character as the characters in his films are, which is saying a lot if you’ve seen Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks. Though Crazy Clown Time is his first nominal solo record album, music has always been central to his films and he’s been central in the way they’ve been used. However, unlike the classic pop he utilizes to intensify creepy particulars, the music on CCT is forced to stand alone, and while one can be creeped out by the old man voice on “I Know” or the bizarre positivity of “Good Day Today” and “So Glad,” they aren’t resolute enough as songs and thus don’t stick in the imagination as tenaciously as, say, the Roy Orbison renditions in Velvet and Mulholland Drive did. Though not averse to melody, Lynch is overly fond of repetition that renders melody inconsequential, and since his vocals are heavily processed throughout the effect is more curious than inviting. He calls it “modern blues,” a description adhered to by guitarist Dean Hurley but hardly reinforced by Lynch’s lyrics, which are either sunny or schematically descriptive, like the droning essay “Strange and Unproductive Thinking.” The closest the album comes to the signature soundtrack work Lynch did with Angelo Badalamenti is not the Karen O-assisted “Pinky’s Dream,” but the actual blues “The Night Bell With Lightning,” which Lynch describes in the publicity material as inspired by Kafka. The fact that it has no vocal and therefore no physical input from the director has something to do with its unsettling power. Lynch himself isn’t half as disturbing as his thoughts are. DJ Shadow’s thoughts have always been congruent with his musicianship, and if it’s likely he will never top his first album Endtroducing, it has to be said that it’s impossible to top a work of art that is definitively sui generis. On the few albums he’s released since that 1996 monument he’s moved away from sample-heavy constructs toward straight production, and most of the cuts on The Less You Know are, like the cuts on the Lynch album, fully realized songs. The notion that half of them aren’t hip-hop shouldn’t be a problem, but Shadow’s taste in metal, acid jazz, and the sort of old-timey pop that Lynch probably dug first-hand is baffling in that he doesn’t seem to add anything to these tracks. When he invites Talib Kweli and Posdnous in for a rap, his value as a soundmaker comes to the fore; not so much when he teams with Tom Vek for standard 80s new wave album filler. The Little Dragon cut I like, but mainly because I think Yukimi Nagano is an arresting singer. David Lynch should call her. Continue reading →

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Media Mix, Nov. 27, 2011

Posted on November 27, 2011 by philipbrasor

Takarajima's anti-eBook polemic

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is mainly about eBooks, though near the end I also comment on newspaper companies’ relationships with their delivery agents. I talk about digital newspaper subscriptions in more detail in our Yen for Living blog, but publishers’ connections to their distributors have always been special in Japan. My partner worked in a bookstore when she was a lot younger and it seems each publisher had its own peculiar way of handling things like remainders and returns. Iwanami, in line with its somewhat stuffy image, didn’t even accept returns. If a retailer bought books from them they were bought. That’s why Iwanami books always came with those distinctive thin plastic covers, just in case they sat on the shelf — or back in the storage room — for years. And because of the resale price maintenance system I mentioned in the column, bookstores couldn’t reduce the price to clear their inventories. The fact is, publishers have it good with the retail system since many are practically guaranteed a good return — as long as sales remain stable. eBooks erode that guarantee, and though it would seem that publishers could make even more money with digital content, since so much overhead would be eliminated, the publishing industry, like all businesses in Japan, is averse to change.

But it’s the newspaper business that really relies on distribution, and not just to get their product to readers. The Shincho-Yomiuri suit mentioned in the column (Asahi, I believe, also sued the magazine) implies a relationship that goes beyond distribution. Ever since I first started working as a freelance writer in Japan I’ve heard about the oshigami scheme, which basically uses distributors to push up circulation numbers that are shown to advertisers as justification for the rates they pay. The media in general — most TV stations are either owned by or have strong connections to publishers — have ignored this alleged practice, so Shincho probably knew they would be sued. This is ironic since Shincho is itself a publisher and thus also has a stake in distribution. The main point seems to be that newspapers, because they deal with so many independent delivery agents, are more reliant on oshigami. Each delivery agent, though affiliated with a specific newspaper, is its own company. Some are family owned and even have dormitories for delivery personnel and salespeople. Where I’m from in the U.S., home delivery of newspapers was carried out by elementary school kids on bicycles to earn spending money. Here, it’s traditionally been high school graduates. In fact, many agents have systems set up with newspapers for delivery personnel who want to attend university while they work for the agents. Or, at least, they used to. The bad economy has driven more people to seek employment as delivery persons so there isn’t much incentive to attract younger workers, but in any case digital newspapers would mean the end of delivery agents, and I’ve heard rumors that some are demanding that newspapers reimburse them for every digital subscription they sell. How can they do that? Obviously, the oshigami system, if it exists, would indicate collusion between agents and publishers to defraud advertisers, so publishers are not going to want to make their distributors angry. The thing is, agents benefit from oshigami as well, since much of their revenue is derived from putting advertising inserts in the newspapers, and they charge by the number of papers they deliver. Too many people are making money from physical newspapers, so publishers are making it more difficult for readers who would prefer to receive their news online.

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Media Mix, Nov. 20, 2011

Posted on November 20, 2011 by philipbrasor

That's using your noodle

Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the B-kyu Gourmet boom. In the piece I try to make the case that the movement is, in a sense, an indirect rejection of the kind of food-centered promotional gambits that the media, particularly TV, have done to death. My feeling about this style of presentation is that, besides becoming increasingly meaningless with repetition, it’s also inherently elitist, because most of the food that’s presented is celebrated for its specialness. Because of its very name, B-kyu (B-class) refutes the idea that viewers and readers automatically assume that refined dishes — as exemplified by the much ballyhooed Michelin guide — are better than the stuff they buy at their local festival.

The media are not proud, though, and they’ve happily picked up on the B-kyu boom to the point where even NHK has hopped on the bandwagon with its “Michishiru” series, which basically cannibalizes archival resources that focus on regional specialities, including food. Nevertheless, most of the media interest in B-kyu sense and sensibility is already becoming as rote and stylized as the above-mentioned attention to fine dining. Consequently, they’re apt to look for — and perhaps invent — meaning where none exists. As someone who looks on food as sustenance first and aesthetic experience second (or third), I automatically receive such coverage with a touch of skepticism, but I’m obviously not the target audience. This isn’t to say that the Japanese approach to food is unique or even more obsessive than it is in other countries — I’m sure there are a lot of Japanese who are equally skeptical, thus the “backlash” I mention in the column — only that the media, in its laziness (which may be unique), has become so dependent on food-related content that it simply shifts the style it developed for coverage of high-class food to the coverage of low-class food. Such as shift provides inadvertent entertainment value for only a short time. Sorry, but stir-fry noodles are still stir-fry noodles, whatever the sauce.

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This is what I know: A tale of two press conferences

Posted on November 14, 2011 by philipbrasor

Like Johnny Depp, Brad Pitt would like you to admire him for more than his casual good looks and acting ability. He wants you to appreciate his mind, which is why Moneyball is such a gift for him as both an actor and a producer. In it he plays Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s baseball team who turned its fortunes around when he stopped listening to his scouts and started making decisions based on a different set of priorities that at first seemed counterintuitive. Though Beane didn’t come up with these theories, he and Michael Lewis, the author of the book Moneyball, made them famous, and now they are utilized by a number of professional sports teams. Pitt wanted to make a movie of the book for years, and had problems doing so since, as a wonky work of non-fiction, it defied adaptation to the screen. His perseverance paid off and the movie is one of the year’s minor hits; but more importantly it offers Pitt the sort of imprimatur he usually doesn’t earn, given the sorts of roles he takes. Like Beane, he’s something of an autodidact. The difference is that Beane, who opted out of university to become a major league baseball player, had to teach himself stuff to get his job done, whereas Pitt’s self-education seems earnest but non-intensive; which may explain why some of his responses during the Moneyball press conference at the Grand Hyatt in Roppongi on Nov. 10 were difficult to follow. What came through was the actor’s desire not only to put the movie across as something important beyond its entertainment value, but also to show that he understood its importance, even if he sometimes had trouble articulating it.

“It’s shameful how little I knew about baseball going into this film,” he said after taking his seat in front of the crowded but by no means packed ball room. What he picked up during the filming was the old cliche that “there are so many parallels to life itself,” and after clumsily conjecturing that this is the reason “why the game has become our pastime and part of the zeitgeist for the last century-and-a-half” he plugged Ken Burns’ famous baseball documentary, which Pitt called, “pure poetry.” Continue reading →

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