Review: September 5 and Captain America: Brave New World

Posted on February 14, 2025 by philipbrasor

Having watched the ABC Sports coverage of the hostage ordeal at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games live while I was in high school, I am surprised after seeing this recreation of the event that the entire thing lasted only 17 hours. In retrospect it felt much longer. Tim Fehlbaum’s movie has to focus on something more direct than the situation in the Olympic Village, since that has already been thoroughly covered by Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September, so he keeps the action limited to the on-site ABC Sports control room. At only 90 minutes, the movie maintains tension easily, though often the drama has more to do with the journalistic decisions being made than with the hostage ordeal. For those who might have forgotten, a Palestinian organization, Black September, invades the Olympic Village and takes the Israeli wrestling team hostage, demanding the release of imprisoned compatriots in return for the athletes’ freedom, with one athlete being killed every hour until these demands are met. There were no US network news crews at the Games, so it was up to the ABC Sports team to cover the standoff as it happened, a task for which it received ample praise, though Feldbaum’s film shows what they were up against, and not just in terms of staying on top of the story as it unfolded.

In fact, much of the challenge was technical. The broadcast link is via satellite, which ABC can only access during predetermined time periods, so the on-site producer, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), has to do some serious voodoo to keep the link valid. Meanwhile, the assistant producer, Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), has to direct the operation in real time, and he has absolutely no news experience. There is a great deal of back-and-forth between the crew and ABC honchos back in New York, who aren’t convinced these sports guys are up to the task, and one of the film’s most pertinent points is that the crew doesn’t really think they’re up to it either, but they’re the only people available who have the means to cover the action. It quickly becomes clear that Mason is more resourceful than he appears, but he is helped considerably by operations manager Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) and the crew’s German translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), who has to multitask to beat the band. The need to uphold trite journalistic standards (a lot of precious time is spent discussing whether they can call Black September “terrorists”) gets the better of the hostage story, which can sometimes fall by the wayside, and the viewer might wonder where the priorities lie. 

As Macdonald so convincingly showed, the terrible outcome was significantly a result of the German authorities’ inexperience and fear of being seen as not properly cognizant of the Jewish hostages’ safety. This Olympics was, after all, the first real international event held in Germany since the Holocaust. If that aspect of Feldbaum’s recreation seems insufficiently addressed, it’s because the people involved thought they were on top of the story, but the information kept changing and a worst-case scenario played out in front of their eyes (or, in this case, ears). Feldbaum does a good job of conveying the horror the ABC Sports team felt as they realized what was really going on.

While September 5 works from the DNA of a journalism thriller, the new Captain American movie, Brave New World, is being touted as some kind of political thriller. Having not kept up with the MCU for the past several years, I couldn’t see where the story was going since I didn’t really know where it was coming from. I knew that Steve Rogers had passed the Captain America title on to the Falcon, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), but wasn’t sure what that entailed other than the iconic shield. So there’s a new Falcon (Danny Ramirez), an Hispanic dude who is basically Robin to Wilson’s Black Batman, thus giving this pair some DEI cred that would seem to be out-of-favor at the moment.  Still, I couldn’t quite figure out what their take on world-saving was without the Avengers in tow for context. 

But there’s this new super mineral that was discovered by the Japanese navy and the American president (Harrison Ford) wants to finalize a treaty that would guarantee all the world access to it, but then some super gangster (Giancarlo Esposito) steals it and Cap has to get it back. So far, so predictable, but then there’s an assassination attempt on the president, and it seems that somebody is manipulating minds remotely for ends that are never clarified except to say that that’s what evil people do. According to background I read, the script, written by five guys, has gone through a number of heavy changes in the past two years owing to certain real world events, and the only halfway compelling element I could find in the story is Shira Haas as an intelligence aide to the president who seems to be on loan from Mossad. But even she sounds confused as to who exactly she’s supposed to be fighting against. 

Of course, it wouldn’t be an MCU movie without a bid to end the world, so Cap and his new Falcon sidekick get to prevent the Japanese navy from starting war with the U.S., a hilarious idea if you know anything at all about Japan’s Maritime Self-Defense Forces. And then there’s the Red Hulk, which is exactly what you think he is except that he isn’t who you think he is. If I found the action set pieces less than exciting it’s because they seem divorced from the general import of the story, as it were. It makes you sort of miss the Avengers, and I don’t even like the Avengers. 

September 5 now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). 

Captain America: Brave New World now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

September 5 home page in Japanese

Captain America: Brave New World home page in Japanese

September 5 photo (c) 2024 Paramount Pictures

Captain America: Brave New World photo (c) 2025 MARVEL

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Review: The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Troll Factory

Posted on February 13, 2025 by philipbrasor

The Iranian government issued a warrant for the arrest of filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof while he was at Cannes last year, effectively making him another exiled Iranian director, and I imagine he expected such a reaction considering the purport of his latest film. The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which screened at Cannes, addresses the recent protest movement in Iran sparked by the death of a woman in police custody for violating the head-covering law with actual footage of police violence. But that element is basically a subplot. The main action centers on Iman (Missagh Zareh), a civil servant who has gotten a dream promotion to Judicial Investigator, the step right before becoming a full-fledged judge. However, Iman quickly learns that he is expected to do little investigating and just rubber stamp the prosecutors’ indictments, including those for capital crimes. When the hijab protests explode, he is swamped by cases, a situation that complicates his home life, since he has two daughters, university student Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and high schooler Sana (Setareh Maleki), who get caught up in the protests, mostly as sympathetic bystanders, but it makes them wonder about their father’s role in these horrors. 

The Maguffin is a pistol that Iman has been given by the court for protection, since judges are often the targets of public enmity. One day, the gun goes missing, and Iman, who has become increasingly paranoid, believes Rezvan has stolen it. It’s an extremely serious problem, because the gun’s disapperance will not only destroy Iman’s career, but could land him in jail, and so he’s determined to get to the bottom of things. His means of doing so is to treat Rezvan as just another suspect of a state crime, with all the unpleasantries such a situation brings with it. And he becomes increasingly less hesitant to resort to Draconian measures, since Rezvan, with the help of her sister and even her mother, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), has aided a friend who was injured by police during the demonstrations, an act that itself could be considered a crime. So what at first seems like good fortune—Iman’s promotion—unleashes a crossfire of conflicting moral reckonings that tear the family apart. 

The premise is brilliant, but Rasoulof gets carried away with it. The film works itself into a thick lather over the course of its nearly 3-hour runtime, and the final section, which some say mimics the dynamic overdrive of The Shining, is extreme in a pulpy sort of way. Still, Rasoulof’s rage is both genuine and comprehensible, and his willingness to hold nothing back in his indictment of the Iranian judiciary is what gives the movie its power. Normally, intentions aren’t enough to make a movie great, but I might make an exception with this one, because Rasoulof had to know that once they realized what he had created, those in charge would never be satisfied until he was buried. 

In the Korean movie Troll Factory, the overarching authoritarianism is not public, as in The Seed of the Sacred Fig, but private, which makes it feel even more insidious, since it isn’t readily apparent as being purposely oppressive. A newspaper reporter, Im Sang-jin (Kim Dong-hwi), has written a story about a tech company that invented a new transponder whose test goes awry in ways that can’t be explained, and the company loses out on market penetration to a competitor. The CEO thinks the competitor sabotaged the test, and Im writes a story that is later blasted as fake news by the internet. Suspecting he’s the target of a concerted effort by the same corporation that ruined the tech company, Im investigates further and comes in contact with a trio of young gamers who are experts in manipulating comments on social media, and one of them tells him how they came to be recruited by the biggest corporation in Korea to help that corporation stave off competition and nosy reporters like Im.

Supposedly based on a true story (the big corporation in the film, Manjun, is based on Samsung), Troll Factory is densely plotted by director Ahn Gooc-jin, and while a lot of the computerese is left untranslated for the layman, he makes it easy to follow the intrigues to their natural ends. However, the nature of the danger being posed by these large, invincible conglomerates is that they can effectively render any negative intelligence as mere hearsay or worse, so the viewer is constantly bombarded with plot developments that they can’t really trust, and by the time you get to what could be understood as the denouement, you wonder if you’re headed for a Usual Suspects kind of twist ending. It’s not that pat, but because it’s a true story the screenplay is open-ended, which can be frustrating for people who demand that the forces of evil receive their just due. Unlike the Iranian government, Manjun/Samsung doesn’t really have a human dimension, which makes the conflict even more frustrating, but Troll Factory is engrossingly tense and believable. 

The Seed of the Sacred Fig, in Persian, opens Feb. 14 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Troll Factory, in Korean, opens Feb. 14 in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

The Seed of the Sacred Fig home page in Japanese

Troll Factory home page in Japanese

The Seed of the Sacred Fig photo (c) Films Boutique

Troll Factory photo (c) 2024 Acemaker Movieworks & KC Ventures & Cinematic Moment

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Review: Daddio

Posted on February 12, 2025 by philipbrasor

Not sure about what this title refers to. The formal premise is more theatrical than cinematic, but all indications are that the writer-director, Christy Hall, made it expressly for the screen, which means she has to be creative with her camerawork in order to counteract the static action, all of which takes place within a taxi cab. There are only two characters. One is a young woman (Dakota Johnson) who is not given a name, and the other a late middle-aged, dyed-in-the-wool New York working class cab driver named Clark (Sean Penn). The title could refer to him, but the arcane term Hall uses doesn’t really describe the dynamic between the two. Is he supposed to be a beatnik or something? And while the two actors do a fairly good job of fleshing out the often risible dialogue with verbal/gestural insights into their respective personalities, the road to mandatory epiphanies, for both, is paved with over-determined cliches.

The woman, a successful IT professional who lives in midtown Manhattan, is returning from Oklahoma where, we eventually learn, she was visiting a half-sister from whom she’s been estranged since they were teens. She gets into Clark’s cab at JFK. He’s a voluble soul, but at first his attempts at conversation hit a wall as the woman assumes a perplexed, downcast mien. Clark is assertive with his Boomer or Gen X druthers (“It’s nice that you aren’t on your phone”), and his natural charm eventually breaks through as they feel each other out in a playful kind of way. It becomes apparent that she actually is on her phone, receiving provocative sexts from her boyfriend that she is reluctant to respond to—at first. Picking up on her distracted air, Clark fearlessly probes her personal life, and, being in a vulnerable place after her journey, she slowly opens up and Clark guesses right: She’s having an affair with an older, married man that she’s thinking of ending. And while this guy could conceivably be the “Daddio” of the title, that explanation doesn’t jibe with the thrust of their ongoing conversation, which becomes extended due to an accident-related traffic jam. But she demands satisfaction, and Clark is forced to dredge up his own romantic history, which is more jaded. “I used to be that guy,” he admits, referring, presumably, to her lover. 

The gamesmanship of the conversation is cleverly developed but goes nowhere in the end because both parties have to learn something from their interaction, and it’s difficult for the viewer to make an emotional connection to whatever lessons are being imparted. The only credible aspect to the story is the notion that these two are being candid because they know they will never see each other again. I was glad that, while some of the dialogue was suggestive, there was never a chance that they would end up romantically involved. Sometimes being predictable is a blessing.

Opens Feb. 14 in Tokyo at Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5552).

Daddio home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Beverly Crest Productions LLC

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Review: The Hyperboreans

Posted on February 8, 2025 by philipbrasor

The Chilean filmmaking team of Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña is probably better known outside of Chile for the animated sequences they made for Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid than they are for their brilliant 2018 debut animated feature The Wolf House, but that isn’t saying much since not as many people saw Beau as Aster probably hoped. The duo’s second feature, The Hyperboreans, will likely win them even fewer fans due to its convoluted narrative and often confounding mixture of media, but it’s still fascinating in its own rarefied way. The title refers to beings of the “extreme north” that the Nazis glorified as a master race, a theme that only really gets going about halfway through this movie. Ostensibly, it’s about a youngish woman (Antonia Giesen) who is trying to recover a movie that she made ten years earlier and in the process ends up investigating the life of Miguel Serrano, a Chilean diplomat and philosopher who admired Hitler while he was in power and believed the führer had survived the war and was hiding out in Antarctica. As ridiculous as this premise sounds, Serrano drew a considerable following, and was said to be intimate with Carl Jung and Hermann Hesse. He was also big on Hinduism after he was posted to India in the 1950s. His pertinence to modern Chile is that following Pinochet’s coup he headed the country’s neo-Nazi faction. Giesen relates all this in a swift, almost comical fashion using lots of papier mache objects and stop-motion animation on a constantly evolving sound stage as she relates Chile’s late 20th century history as it applies to her own life, the movie she never finished, and her subsequent career as a psychoanalyst.

It’s a lot to cover in a movie that’s just barely over an hour long, but León and Cociña, whose own mannequin-like avatars act as the villains in the sci-fi adventure that Giesen’s story turns into, are as interested in the comic aspects of Chile’s political tribulations as they are in the tragic impact those politics had on the people. Though the pair’s visuals often evoke the textural weirdness of Jan Svankmajer, the overall thrust is overtly political without necessarily making the movie dramatically coherent. The development mimics that of a 1950s William Castle potboiler, an approach that often works against the duo’s thematic goals. The Wolf House trod the same territory, but was more narratively concise—and scarier. The Hyperboreans is all over the place, and ends up nowhere definite. 

In Spanish and German. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5776-0114) along with the short subject Notebook of Names.

The Hyperboreans home page in Japanese

photo (c) León & Cociña Films, Globo Rojo Films

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Review: The Wild Robot

Posted on February 7, 2025 by philipbrasor

Chris Sanders has become the default American animated filmmaker of our present age, and not just because he’s made movies for both Disney and Dreamworks. His themes are generically wholesome while his means of storytelling feels ever more fantastical with each production. His latest is another robot story, meaning it’s about how a programmed entity “learns” to be human, and while it works well enough on that level, it doesn’t always reach beyond its own contrived purview toward something sublime. It’s enough just to be touching. 

Based on a book series, the movie distinguishes itself as a Sanders project with its humor. The titular android is a disarmingly commercial thing, a robot made by a big company to be sold as a consumer good, an all-purpose helpmate that is nothing without someone to serve. During an ocean-set typhoon, a cargo ship loses the container in which ROZZUM 7134 is packed, and the box washes ashore on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Northwest; uninhabited, that is, by humans. There is plenty of wildlife, perhaps too much, in fact, and all manner of species interact with the suddenly operational Roz, as “she” is called (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o), whose first “impulse” is to find something to help, but, of course, none of these animals—though anthropomorphized to within an inch of their instinctual existence in the American animated manner—need help, but Roz herself has no existence otherwise. Certainly the cleverest thing Sanders does to get past this problem is to have Roz’s A.I. function process the sounds the animals make to interpret them as English speech, so we’ve got the expected menagerie of cutups, including a cynical fox, Fink (Pedro Pascal), whose predatory proclivities extract the most jokes; a mother possum who seems to have the strongest grasp of the island’s zoology; and a gosling whose natural need for imprinting provides Roz, who inadvertently has killed his mother and siblings, with the “customer” she needs for self-actualization. In other words, Roz herself must become a mother, and Brightbill, as the gosling is named, eventually grows up and has to be a goose (Kit Connor) who migrates, a learning curve that Roz, which is programmed to “complete tasks,” and Fink attempt to facilitate in what turns into a very interesting partnership. 

The goal, as it is for every animated robot character from Wall-E to the smiling tin can in last year’s Robot Dreams, is for Roz to override her programming, and in the end she is called upon not only to let Brightbill be the goose he is, but to protect herself and the island that has become her “home” from the automated outside world whose own impulse is total control. Though I’m sure the source material is where the idea of instinct versus artificially bred values comes from, Sanders has become nothing if not adept at wrangling this sort of conflict into a workable story that’s exciting for kids and edifying for adults. The central irony is that these animals and this robot convey more humanity than the nominally “human” beings who run the world outside—and whom we never really see—even if it’s not an irony that feels at all distinctive. 

Now playing in Japanese dubbed and Japanese subtitled versions in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Wild Robot home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Dreamworks Animation LLC

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Review: Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)

Posted on February 6, 2025 by philipbrasor

Occasionally film projects come together where the director and the subject are so perfectly matched as to have been designed by God. This documentary about the graphic design house Hipgnosis was made by Anton Corbijn, who has already directed many well-regarded music videos as well as narrative features about British musicians like Ian Curtis, but he started as a still photographer who specialized in pop music artists, and Hipgnosis is by far the most influential album cover creator in the history of British rock, having created iconic graphics for Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Peter Gabriel, and, most relevantly, Pink Floyd, who gave them their start. Corbijn honors the company’s legacy by serving up a visually lush presentation in silvery black-and-white. 

The Hipgnosis story is told on film by Aubrey “Po” Powell, who founded the company with his partner, the late Storm Thorgeson, in the late 1960s, mostly be accident. Involved in the London acid scene as students, they lived for a while in a kind of “colony” with friends, some of whom would go on to form Pink Floyd, including Syd Barrett, who famously flamed out on LSD and quit the band after its second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, whose cover was Hipgnosis’s first commission, and a startlingly famous one. Thorgeson was the arrogant brains of the outfit (one substantial montage features famous people going on about how difficult he was to work with) while Powell, who studied photography at Thorgeson’s insistence, was its creative facilitator, and after the pair started getting more work that challenged the very idea of album art (Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother is touted as the first major album that included no mention of the band or title on the cover, an idea that scandalized the record company) they kept going further and further, an artistic trajectory that would mirror the capitalist triumph of major label rock in the 70s. Consequently, Hipgnosis’s ideas became ridiculously expensive, as Powell admits several times. Those were the days, as it were.

Corbijn knows what the audience for this type of film demands, and it’s chock full of anecdotes of how some famous covers came together, told not only by Powell and Thorgeson, who died in 2013, but by big names like Jimmy Page, Paul McCartney, and Roger Waters, the kinds of stars who know that Corbijn can be relied upon to make them look very good, regardless of what they say. As counterpoint, there are occasional insert comments by Noel Gallagher, who mourns the loss of the striking album cover with the demise of the LP, complaining pointedly that the artwork for Oasis’s biggest selling album is a piece of crap that can never be redeemed. For once, Noel’s honesty shines through in a correctly self-deprecating manner.

Opens Feb. 7 in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

Squaring the Circle home page in Japanese

photo (c) Cavalier Films Ltd. 

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Media watch: Government refuses to remove names of Korean soldiers from war shrine because that’s just the way it is

Posted on February 5, 2025 by philipbrasor
Yasukuni Shrine

In the middle of January, Japan’s Supreme Court decided against a lawsuit brought by a Korean family against the Japanese government for refusing to remove the name of their deceased relative, who died in the service of Japan’s emperor during the Pacific War, from Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine. The family resented the fact that the government had given their relative’s name to Yasukuni for enshrinment without notifying them, insisting that they would have refused enshrinement because they believe that the existence of Yasukuni, which honors Japan’s war dead as a representative of prewar state Shintoism, “justifies” Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula from 1910 to 1945. Their relative was pressed into service to fight for Japan because he was a Japanese subject at the time, meaning he had no choice. However, after the war, Korean veterans of the Japanese Imperial Army did not receive pensions the way Japanese soldiers did, and the surviving families of Korean soldiers who died during their service did not receive compensation, though families of Japanese soldiers who died did. Many still do, in fact. 

The Supreme Court’s rejection of the suit was based on its interpretation of the statute of limitations. The Koreans in question were enshrined in 1959, and the statute of limitations to bring such a lawsuit is 20 years, which expired a long time ago, thus voiding the suit. But since the family did not learn that their relative were enshrined until the late 1990s, they contend that the statute of limitations does not apply in this case. To confuse the matter even further, the original district court finding against the bereaved family did not cite the statute of limitations but rather judged that the government had not infringed on the rights and benefits of the plaintiff. According to Mainichi Shimbun, in the original 2013 suit, lawyers for the family argued that the enshrinement violated the Constitution’s prescribed separation of religion and state. This was not the first suit brought by a Korean family against the government for the enshrinement of a relative at Yasukuni. A similar suit was also rejected by the Supreme Court in 2011.

The decisions of the District Court and the Supreme Court in this case differ, and in the end they imply pretty much the same thing, which is that no one can remove a name from Yasukuni once it’s been enshrined, though no one has ever convincingly explained why that is. The District Court did not elaborate on its reasons for rejecting the suit, but the Supreme Court said it was because of the statute of limitations, which would seem to be a means of shutting down the matter once and for all. But as Mainichi pointed out, according to the Civil Code, the statute of limitations, at least when applied to a civil suit, does not begin until the party that brings the suit, in this case the bereaved family, is made aware of the “harm” they say has been caused by the defendant, which, in this case, is the Japanese government. As a matter of fact, in appeals last year by the government against a number of successful suits brought by citizens who say they underwent forced sterilization many years ago, the government based its defense on the statute of limitations, which all the courts except one judged did not apply for the same reason that the Yasukuni suit shouldn’t apply: The plaintiffs were not made aware that they’d been sterilized until much later than when the actual sterilization took place.

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Media watch: Government to punish UN office for having opinion similar to that of Japanese citizenry

Posted on January 31, 2025 by philipbrasor
Princess Aiko, daughter of the present Emperor

On Wednesday, Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) held a press conference to announce it would freeze funding for the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which is managed by the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (HCHR), in response to the committee’s report, issued last October, saying that Japan must end its male-only imperial succession policy. The MOFA spokesperson, Toshihiro Kitamura, said that the Japanese government every year grants funding to HCHR to the tune of ¥20-30 million that is earmarked for CEDAW, but it has informed the CEDAW that, according to an AP report, “it will be excluded from a list of [Japan’s] annual voluntary contributions” from now on. In addition, Japan is suspending a visit to Japan by CEDAW members this spring. 

Thursday’s print edition of the Asahi Shimbun said that the CEDAW’s opinion in its October report recommended that Japan “amend the Imperial Household Law,” which specifies that only males from the imperial line on the male side can become emperor, saying that it violates the spirit of the CEDAW treaty, which Japan ratified in 1985. Kitamura said that if the CEDAW does not remove the part of the report citing the male succession matter Japan will withhold its funding, but MOFA also admitted that since 2005 none of the grant money that goes to HCHR has actually made its way to CEDAW, so, for the most part, the threat is only symbolic. Nevertheless, Kitamura insisted that the government wants to make sure none of the money is used to fund CEDAW “so as to clearly express the government’s position.” 

The reason given for the government’s displeasure is that the concept of human rights cannot be applied to the Imperial Household and imperial succession, so, according to government logic, by definition the Imperial Household Law does not discriminate against women. To put a finer point on it, members of the imperial family do not possess basic human rights, so the law cannot be prejudicial against female members. In addition, imperial succession is “fundamental” to Japan as a state, so it is inappropriate for CEDAW to involve itself with the issue, meaning the treaty does not apply. 

It should be noted that CEDAW has been badgering Japan for years over the status of women, and that in the most recent report male-only imperial succession was just one of several concerns. Others had to do with the unfairness of requiring married couples to adopt the same name, which the CEDAW has cited five times already. Previously, the Japanese government never threatened to withhold funds with regard to the same name matter and didn’t condemn the CEDAW’s recommendation, but merely repeated that it was still under study, which is the exact same thing they say to the Japanese public. Other issues the CEDAW wants Japan to address is the relative paucity of women in elected office and the law that requires spousal approval for a woman’s abortion. 

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Review: A Real Pain and Dreamin’ Wild

Posted on January 31, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though Jesse Eisenberg taps every anxiety joke in his second directorial feature and does nothing particularly fresh with them, A Real Pain is quite funny in the way some of Woody Allen’s post-Annie Hall comedies were funny. Characters you’re familiar with act out in ways that highlight life’s essential unfairness, and the ironies hit home via the chuckle reflex. As with much comedy, whether narrative or standup, it seems easier to mine this vein of suffering if you’re Jewish, and Eisenberg’s premise is both a gold mine of comic possibility and inherently tragic. Two cousins who were once very close embark on a Holocaust tour of Poland in the twilight of their youth in order to honor their beloved grandmother, who recently died and was a survivor of the camps. The emotional friction between David (Eisenberg) and Benjy (Kieran Culkin) was abraded by various individual adult choices, David’s being a life as a salaried employee and responsible husband and father and Benjy’s being the kind of dedicated cynic who doesn’t take to gainful employment and conventional civic uprightness. The first joke after the two land in Poland and check into their hotel room sets the stakes: Benjy has airmailed himself a bag of weed, which scandalizes David to no end, though he eventually partakes.

Nevertheless, Benjy is more proactive about the organized tour than David is, meaning that Benjy sees it as a way to discuss the Holocaust in all its dimensions. Eisenberg has concocted a brilliant set of tour mates, including Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who has converted to Judaism, and Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a single middle-aged American who finds in Benjy the perfect vessel into which she can pour her personal disappointments. The tour guide is a non-Jewish Brit named James (Will Sharpe) whose grasp of tempestuous Jewish temperaments isn’t as impeccable as his understanding of history, and whenever Benji hijacks the itinerary—such as staging an irreverent photo tableau at the Ghetto Uprising Memorial, or refusing to ride in the first class train car in principle on the way to the next stop of the tour—James is forced, on the fly, to readjust his bedside manner in accordance with the members’ various insecurities. No one, of course, is as insecure as David, whose adherence to propriety is checked by Benjy every step of the way, causing more than a few dustups between the cousins, especially once they leave the tour to find their grandmother’s childhood home. The bottom line, however, is that for all of Benjy’s instinctual desire to upset whatever equilibrium David would prefer to maintain, his presence is undeniably stimulating and not just provocative. It surfaces that Benjy attempted suicide not long ago, and this added intelligence, already known by David but not by the viewer, doesn’t dampen the laughs at all, but nevertheless adds the bittersweetest subtext to the cousins’ roiling camaraderie. It’s the greatest joke Woody Allen never had the guts to explore fully.

A brotherly love equally fraught forms the dramatic lynchpin of the biographical Dreamin’ Wild, which attempts to come to grips with a nominally feel-good story that, in fact, is shot through with regret and resentment. Based on the lives of Donnie (Casey Affleck) and Joe Emerson (Walton Goggins), two Oregon brothers who grew up on an orchard and recorded, with the help of their father, Don Sr. (Beau Bridges), an album of pop songs that did nothing when it was released in the late 70s but was rediscovered by the internet in the mid-2010s, the movie, written and directed by Bill Pohlad, does a capable job of showing how late success is not necessarily better than no success at all. 

Eschewing the music biopic template of rise-and-fall-and-rise, Dreamin’ Wild (the title of the phantom album) is mostly about the way Donnie’s ambitions as a singer and songwriter outstripped both his brother’s merely passing interest in music and his father’s more potent desire to see Donnie excel at what he loved. What makes the story different is that Don Sr. never discouraged Donnie’s dream of musical fame and, in fact, was so charged by what he rightly understood to be exceptional talent that he mortgaged his farm in order to build a studio to properly record Donnie’s music when no label seemed interested, a decision that placed an incredibly heavy emotional burden on Donnie over the course of his life when the gambit didn’t pan out financially. Joe was the good-time sideman who never felt sufficiently appreciated or acknowledged, and while Donnie remained a demanding taskmaster both in the studio when they were teenagers and later in life after the brothers’ names were being shouted from indie music’s rooftops, their differing sensibilities could never be joined in common cause, thus extending their intramural bitterness into middle age. 

As with his biopic about Brian Wilson, Pohlad tells the story through a carefully schematicized script that goes back-and-forth in time, an approach that sometimes works against the tale’s naturalistic drama. Though sad in the final analysis, there’s also a certain ecstatic undercurrent to the brothers’ relationship, which is just as subtle and poignant as that of David and Benjy—the enigma of male bonding through blood. 

A Real Pain now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Dreamin’ Wild now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

A Real Pain home page in Japanese

Dreamin’ Wild home page in Japanese

A Real Pain photo (c) 2024 Searchlight Pictures

Dreamin’ Wild photo (c) 2022 Fruitland, LLC

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Review: The Room Next Door

Posted on January 30, 2025 by philipbrasor

As with two of his previous short subjects, The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life, Pedro Almodóvar’s use of the English language in the feature-length The Room Next Door has a stilted, scripted quality that doesn’t necessarily indicate the pitfalls of second-language skills. Even the dialogue in his Spanish language films, as rendered in subtitles at least, has a theatrical cadence that betrays a distinct authorial voice. In this particular case, that voice feels even more artificial due to the subject matter and the refined sensibilities of the people through which it’s channeled. Ingrid (Julianne Moore) is a successful writer of what what sounds like auto-fiction, though her latest work is a book-long essay on the topic of “sudden deaths,” which she approaches with sensitivity but at an intellectual remove. The subject of death is more immediate, though anything but “sudden,” to an old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), who reconnects with Ingrid seemingly by accident and eventually informs her that she has cancer. As the two reacquaint themselves after years of not being in touch (they had the same lover, but not as the same time), Martha is undergoing an experimental treatment that fails, and is thus understandably devastated. She then asks Ingrid to be with her when she commits suicide.

As already implied, there’s nothing in the script that feels spontaneous. If anything, Almodóvar is one of our most deliberate directors, and it follows that, just as Ingrid’s latest work is about death in the literal sense, Martha’s profession is that of war correspondent, a vocation that Almodóvar is keen to show has not really prepared her for the end, no matter how much she was forced to confront it in her work. The two women’s conversations continually circle this dialectic while constantly alluding to relevant works of art and social issues that have always concerned them, meaning that the desperation of Martha’s situation is constantly mediated by an overarching mindfulness, which the director tries to pass off as a means of putting off the inevitable. This distraction is intensified by the material comforts that Almodóvar is so famously fond of. The two women’s Manhattan abodes are designer perfect and look way too expensive for the kind of writers they profess to be. When Martha bows to her fate and rents an upstate vacation property where she will take an illegally acquired pill to put an end to her misery once the pain becomes too much, the idyllic apartment is like something out of a Frank Lloyd Wright catalogue. But the loaded conversations continue, because Martha asks Ingrid to be there until the end.

Almodóvar obviously knows how much the viewer can tolerate and ties his philosophical musings to a real plot that can be disarmingly natural at times. Ingrid’s clandestine meetings with their mutual old flame, Damian (John Turturro), a stuffy, ineffectual professor, work to fill in a lot of the backstory that’s necessary to understand the two women’s relationship and Martha’s domestic difficulties in the meantime; and the entrance of Martha’s adult daughter in the final scenes provides the emotional ballast that had mostly been missing while Martha was merely fading. And I didn’t expect the harsh legal confrontation that Ingrid has to deal with in the end. As is often the case with Almodóvar, the braininess of his stories almost always gives way to urgent melodrama of the most elemental kind. He always knows what movie lovers want.

Opens Jan. 31 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Room Next Door home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment (c) 2025 El Deseo, Iglesias Más

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