Review: The Moon

Posted on July 3, 2024 by philipbrasor

Last year, this big-budget production was the whipping boy of the failed post-pandemic Korean box office, whose unexpectedly low numbers were initially blamed on a movie-going public still stuck on streaming. Actually, the crappy performance of The Moon, the flagship domestic release of the summer of 2023, had more to do with hubris and the inability of big studios to read its audience. Watching the movie a year removed from the debacle it’s easy to see why. It essentially has all the ingredients that stereotypically make a successful mainstream Korean movie—a plot built around retribution of some kind involving characters who are related by blood, suicide as an act of taking responsibility, self-flagellating nationalistic sentiments, scene upon scene of people weeping uncontrollably, forced comic relief, even the requisite car chase (on the lunar surface!)—and Korean movie lovers, obviously clued in on these attributes, decided they’d stay away. 

The plot and the set pieces are mostly lifted from other, better space travel movies, namely Hollywood productions like Gravity and Apollo 13. The back story, in fact, shows more potential: sometime in the future, South Korea’s small but determined space program attempts a moon launch and ends up killing its astronauts. Chastened but still determined, the program tries again five years later without the approval of NASA, which is portrayed here as a bullying global space overseer who doesn’t want competition. The movie begins in the middle, as two of the three astronauts happy-go-luckily repair the solar panels on their moon-bound spacecraft that have been damaged by solar flares. During the repair, the two men are killed, leaving their younger colleague, Hwang (Doh Kyung-soo), a former Navy SEAL who lacks much of the technical know-how to pilot the ship, on his own. While mission control tries to figure out how to bring him back to earth in the damaged craft, Hwang decides unilaterally to complete the mission and land on the moon’s far side. When Kim (Sul Kyung-gu), one of the designers of the previous, disastrous mission, is called in to help Hwang in his seemingly wrong-headed endeavor, we learn that Kim quit the program because his engineering partner—and Hwang’s father—killed himself in shame. From that point, the story lurches from one impossible feat to another in a spiral of alternately heroic and desperate moves on the part of various characters to keep both Hwang and the mission alive, and while director Kim Yong-hwa demonstrates more than the usual comepetence with the film’s action prerogatives he can’t assemble them into a credible whole. The production itself feels as desperate as the fictional moon shot, as if South Korea’s entire international image is riding on this movie. Moreover, the CGI is inferior to that which featured in the above-mentioned Hollywood films. 

The retribution that is often baked into these Korean blockbusters centers not only on Hwang righting the incompetence laid on his father, but also on Korea showing up its masters at NASA (where Kim’s ex-wife works under racist management that clearly views her participation as suspicious by default), and the combination of the two wears the drama down to a dull nub. There’s only so many tears one can shed for 130 minutes, and The Moon means to wring every last one out of you. Korean audiences, apparently, have had enough of that sort of thing. 

In Korean and English. Opens July 5 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

The Moon home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., CJ ENM Studios, Blaad Studios

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Media watch: Will the new bills make their own existence unnecessary?

Posted on July 1, 2024 by philipbrasor

On July 3, the Bank of Japan will start circulating new paper currency, which is something it does every 20 years or so. The ostensible reason is to check counterfeiting, a Sisyphean task since the fact that the bank has to redesign the notes every two decades automatically indicates that counterfeiters eventually learn how to work with the new design and its attendant technology—in this case, holographic images incorporated into the paper. We can assume that North Korea is already on it. 

However, if you read various business-oriented media there are other purposes this time around: reducing cash hoarding and promoting cashless payments. At first blush, this latter purpose sounds odd. How would printing shiny new bills push people into using e-money and credit/debit cards? More to the point, why go to all the trouble and enormous expense of circulating new bills if the endgame is not to use them?

A relevant newsletter from the Nomura Research Institute, which is attached to Nomura Securities, explained the basics of the new bills, including the holograms and their use of “universal design,” meaning that they are easier to use for “everyone” because vision-impaired people can recognize the bills by touch and the numbers are printed larger than they were in the past. 

The newsletter also says that the new bills will boost the economy, though one has to wonder at whose expense. As has already been reported by many mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, companies that rely on vending machines as well as ATMs and ticketing machines will need to spend a lot of money either adapting their current devices for the new bills or buying all new machines. The fortunes this change will boost is that of companies that make and service these machines, but it may be a significant tradeoff. We’ve already seen how users of such machines mostly put off updating them when new ¥500 coins were circulated in 2021. Because many companies decided the expense wasn’t worth it at the time, they didn’t adapt their existing machines for the new coin’s changed material and design since they were aware that new bills would be coming in 2024, so it would be cheaper to make both changes at the same time. According to NRI, only 70 percent of all machines that accepted cash at the time were adapted or changed for the new coins. Of course, ATMs couldn’t refuse the new coins, so banks had to swallow the expense, not to mention public transportation companies, but you still come across many vending machines and stand-alone change-making machines that don’t accept the new coins. A 2021 article in the Minami Nippon Shimbun reported that it cost between ¥30,000 and ¥40,000 to adapt a machine to accept both the old and new ¥500 coins, which sounds reasonable until you realize that companies that use vending machines tend to use a lot of them. Particularly problematic is beverage retailers. Of the 2.2 million drink vending machines in Japan, only 30 percent had made the change after the new coins came into use. In contrast, changing a machine to accept the new bills will cost about ¥100,000 per machine. 

To put the expected boost into numbers, the Japan Vending Systems Manufactures Association calculated that it would cost ¥770 billion to create the technology needed to accept the new bills, compared to ¥490 billion already spent to design the tech needed for new coins. Changing ATMs to handle new bills will cost ¥371 billion. Nomura estimates that all this spending will add 0.27 percentage points to Japan’s nominal GDP. 

Another hoped-for effect of the new bills is that they will reduce the amount of cash that Japanese people keep at home. This phenomenon has always been a problem for the BOJ, which would prefer that people keep their money in a financial institution or, even better, invest it. So far, they’ve been unsuccessful in getting the public to trust fully in such institutions and practices. In 2004, the BOJ estimated that households held about ¥44 trillion in cash. This amount grew to ¥78 trillion by 2014 and ¥109 trillion by the end of last year. It’s not clear from the various media how the new bills will persuade people to either spend their cash or put it in a bank, but the most likely idea is that people might mistakenly think the paper money they keep in their wardrobes or underneath the tatami is no good any more, but even in that case there’s no reason to think they wouldn’t just do the same thing with the new bills. 

Then there’s the purpose of spurring a cashless society, and the media that has explained this idea the best is the home page of office automation manufacturer Ricoh, which thinks that companies presently using machines to handle cash may ponder the above-mentioned cost of changing over and decide it might be cheaper to adopt a cashless system. For instance, many retailers now, especially supermarkets, use self-checkout systems to deal with the labor shortage, so rather than adapt all their checkout machines for the new bills, they just adapt one or two of them and make the rest cashless. The same could eventually happen with ticketing machines and even vending machines, many of which already handle cashless payments. Though retailers would still have to bear the fees that credit card companies and other cashless payment systems charge, this solution to the expense of adapting machines to accept the new bills could still be a nudge toward a cashless society. The real issue is whether the Japanese public would think it’s a nudge or a shove.

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Review: Walk Up

Posted on June 28, 2024 by philipbrasor

Hong Sangsoo’s newest Japan theatrical release could have been titled Quitting, just like Zhang Yang’s criminally overlooked 2001 feature about an actor on the verge of actually cracking up. It’s one of the few Hong movies of recent memory where dramatic themes take precedence over form and style, and for the most part the main characters are all in the process of giving up something, namely their vocations as creatives. The title he chose describes the small apartment building where all the action takes place, a structure without an elevator, thus necessitating ambulatory movement between floors, which sort of mimics the life trajectory these people follow. Real estate as real life. 

Byung-soo (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo) brings his adult daughter, Jeong-su (Park Miso), to the building to meet the landlord, Mrs. Kim (Lee Hye-yeong), a successful interior designer, to see if she might advise Jeong-su on pursuing a similar career. Jeong-su studied painting in university but decided that there’s no money in art, or, at least, not in fine art. During one of Hong’s typical, prolonged drinking sessions, we learn that Byung-soo, a moderately successful film director, has been estranged from Jeong-su’s mother, and, effectively, from Jeong-su, too, for about a decade. When Byung-soo is called away temporarily, Jeong-su and Mrs. Kim continue drinking and opening up to each other about Byung-soo, but also about Jeong-su’s uncertain future (“You just need to have taste”), and Mrs. Kim drunkenly takes her on as an assistant. However, when Byung-soo returns, we soon realize that it is years later, and that Jeong-su has quit her job with Mrs. Kim and is now doing something entirely different. Byung-soo is merely dropping in to see his old friend and, again, they start drinking, this time with Sunhee (Song Seon-mi), the proprietor of the small restaurant that rents space in the building. Like Jeong-su, Sunhee once wanted to be a painter but found it wasn’t for her, and as the wine flows she becomes overly solicitous of Byung-soo, claiming she’s seen every one of his films and found them very enjoyable. (“There’s lots of dialogue, so I drink while I watch them”) At the same time, Byung-soo expresses frustration with the whole business of making films since he has to spend so much time finding financial backers. Following another time slip, we see Sunhee driving Byung-soo’s beloved vintage Mini Cooper and understand they are now married and renting an apartment in the building. Moreover, Byung-soo has essentially given up films and is taking time off for his health, a situation that causes friction not only between him and Sunhee, but between the couple and Mrs. Kim, who it turns out is a lousy landlord.

This elliptical journey of dissipation doesn’t end there. Sunhee is eventually replaced in Byung-soo’s life by a real estate agent, Jiyoung (Cho Yun-hee), who happily indulges all his worst habits, thus sealing his fate as a has-been who not only has no future, but no real past, because everyone has abandoned him and he doesn’t seem to care. That is, except Mrs. Kim, who herself gave up interior decorating, but is still a bad landlord. Hong’s tone throughout is resolutely sardonic, nowhere more so than during a non sequitur scene in which Byung-soo, napping off a late afternoon alcohol buzz, imagines in voiceover how he will either break up or make up with Sunhee, a fantasy whose manifestation we don’t see. As others have already pointed out, Hong banishes the most important incidents of his plot offscreen, and all we see is the intentions leading up to these momentous decisions and what it is they leave behind. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645). 

Walk Up home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Jeonwonsa Film Co. 

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Review: Anselm

Posted on June 22, 2024 by philipbrasor

Wim Wenders’ portrait of Anselm Kiefer sketches in several biographical details of the septuagenarian Austrian-German multimedia artist, but for the most part dwells on his work and what that work means in the world. Consequently, there are holes in my understanding of Kiefer that would probably require a bit of in-depth reporting, such as how does he afford the cavernous warehouse-ateliers he uses as workshops—he uses bicycles to get from room to room—not to mention the staff they require. Anyone familiar with Kiefer’s work understands that the most apt adjective to describe it is “enormous,” with some mixed media paintings taking up entire walls and requiring movable platforms to work on, not to mention the vast outdoor installations. I know it’s crass to talk about the financial aspects of how art comes into being, but the documentary makes clear that Kiefer’s work is not designed as decoration, and the political subtexts, if not the overt content, is meant to be discomfiting. The movie made me appreciate the art and therefore I want to know more about the commerce.

Wenders’ concern is the way Kiefer incorporates into his art 20th century German history, whose depiction is referred to by one reporter as an “open wound.” Using relatives of the artist and the director to play him at various times in his life, Wenders dramatizes how his environment—he moved from Austria to Germany after the war when he was a boy—affected his creative impulses. An excellent draftsman as a young man who used some prize money to make a pilgrimage to study the life and work of Van Gogh, Kiefer eventually confronted his heritage with an infamous series of staged photos of himself giving the Hitler salute at various European landmarks related to Nazism as a “protest against forgetting.” And he didn’t stop there. “Germans have always had a problem with it,” he says of his art, which just became bigger and bigger over the years. Some of his museum installations are so large they have to be cut a certain way in order to allow people to enter and leave the room. Wenders doesn’t show the mechanical process of the installations, though he does show Kiefer working on parts of individual pieces. He also inserts archival footage, mainly of ruins after the war, sometimes with children playing in them, without comment as counterpoint to some of Kiefer’s “landscapes,” which can be forbidding, but more in what they suggest than what they show (“This is a scene where tanks have already driven through”). 

Kiefer’s spiritual indebtedness to the Jewish poet Paul Celan and his obsession with the Nazi-tolerant philosopher Martin Heidegger are covered mainly to provide points of influence on his thinking but come across as arcana in relationship to the art we see. Wenders obviously thinks we should draw our own conclusions, and he’s right in thinking that difficult art can’t be properly explained in a 90-minute film, but Kiefer’s work is so confrontational that I think the viewer can stand a bit more contextual explication without feeling as if they’re being led by the hand. Given that portions of the doc are filmed and presented in 3D, some of this stuff is bound to be overwhelming (the press screening I attended was in 2D), and in that regard you will probably want to know as much as you can about what drove the artist to create it. 

In German and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (3D, 050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (3D, 03-5468-5551).

Anselm home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Road Movies

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Review: Bad Boys: Ride or Die and The Watchers

Posted on June 21, 2024 by philipbrasor

Since the last installment in this bombastic comedy-action franchise practically determined that its two heroes, the buddy cop team of Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowery (Will Smith), were on the retirement track, this fourth episode feels kind of desperate, as if it were custom made to bring Will Smith, who’d effectively been cancelled since that Oscar slap, back to box office glory, which it did. More likely, the folks behind the franchise have been planning this movie since before the slap (which, by the way, is awkwardly but effectively incorporated into the action near the end) since there were a few loose ends at the close of the previous movie that could justify another go. Most critics I’ve read so far have been charitable with the movie probably because the filmmakers and the cast seem so invested in the appeal of the characters, their sardonic give-and-take, and the patently ridiculous action set pieces. It’s nothing if not earnest, and may be a step less intolerably loud than the two Michael Bay-helmed installments, but it’s still teeth-gratingly convoluted and, at times, downright stupid. 

And while the duo’s put-upon mentor, Captain Conrad Howard (Joe Pantoliano), is already dead, his spirit keeps the plot going in the new one. With Mike marrying his sweetheard, Christine (Melanie Liburd), who barely appears in the movie after the ceremony, and Marcus suffering a heart attack at the wedding that puts him in a temporary coma, the two are haunted by the captain in their dreams just as an investigation into his aborted search for a cartel mole in the Miami police force is instigated, threatening to soil Howard’s legacy, which Mike and Marcus won’t stand for. The increasingly involved plot eventually takes in an evil cartel enforcer, McGrath (Eric Dane), who is framing Howard’s memory; Mike’s criminal son, Armando (Jacob Scipio), who has inside knowledge of the cartel in question; a Miami politician (Ioan Gruffudd) who is now going out with Mike’s ex (Paola Nunez), who also happens to be his new boss; and Howard’s daughter (Rhea Seehorn), a U.S. Marshall, as well as her daughter (Quinn Hemphill), because the movie is nothing if not a family affair. 

The Moroccan-Belgian directing team of Adil & Bilall try to leave their stamp on the action with funny camera moves and colors you’ll remember from 90s techno raves, but the best you can say about the style of the movie is that it isn’t as nerve-wracking as what Bay produced. Then again, I don’t really think people come to Bad Boys for that kind of thing. They come for the Lawrence-Smith chemistry, and in that regard Smith’s annoyed straight man shtick remains effective, while Lawrence’s increasingly unhinged purchase on reality (Marcus believes here that, having survived a heart attack, he’s now invincible) will either have you in stitches or looking for the nearest exit. I left a long time ago.

Though fantasy fever dream The Watchers isn’t part of a franchise, it was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, and produced by M. Night, so it also feels as if it takes place in the Shyamalan alternate universe, where pretty much anything weird can happen. The source novel by A.M. Shine doesn’t seem to lend itself to an easy transfer to the screen, and a lot of the plot points feel forced, the most glaring one being the lead character, Mina (Dakota Fanning), a depressed young American woman living in Galway on the west coast of Ireland, a fine city that nevertheless would be the last place a depressed young American woman would probably choose to live. Mina spends her days working in a pet store and her nights dressing up as someone else and hanging out at bars. Ordered to deliver a parrot, she gets lost in a dense forest and her car breaks down. While being chased by some unseen force, she comes across a bunker, where she is met by an older woman named Madeleine (Olwen Fouere).

There are two other people in the bunker, Ciara (Geortina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), who inform the new arrival that they are trapped in what they call “the coop” and must display themselves in front of a bunker-long one-way mirror for the denizens of the forest after nightfall. During the day, they can go wherever they want, but at night they must be in front of the mirror. If they aren’t, they are promised a violent death. 

Basically, Shine’s story is about mythical creatures and how they’ve entered our folklore, but the younger Shyamalan doesn’t seem to know how to work with allegory. Everything about Mina is trite and obvious, from her trauma-filled back story to her habit of talking to herself as a means of providing plot exposition. Though there are a few tense scenes the scares never make a deep impression. Most annoying is the lack of any real substance to the titular monsters’ existence, which is explained every which way but coherently. And the suggestion that they may, in fact, be creatures of somebody’s imagination is just insulting. 

Bad Boys: Ride or Die 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).

The Watchers now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Humax Cinema (03-3462-2539), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Bad Boys: Ride or Die home page in Japanese

The Watchers home page in Japanese

The Watchers photo (c) 2024 Warner Bors. Ent.

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Review: The Holdovers

Posted on June 20, 2024 by philipbrasor

Though he’s made a number of movies I don’t like much—and I couldn’t get past the first episode of Billions—Paul Giamatti for me is maybe the most pleasurable American film actor to watch. He never resorts to realism, and, in fact, exudes a kind of contagious joy in his creation of a character. He obviously had a ball with Paul Hunham, the curmudgeonly, generally reviled (by both students and administration) history teacher at Barton Academy, an elite New England male boarding school where he’s been on the faculty forever. When he lights into a class of “rich and dumb” (“a popular combination around here”) students who bridle at his assignments he savors every stinging insult as if he’d been saving it up for just such an occasion. He sprinkles his observations with pointed anecdotes from classical history and adheres to the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius because he’s an unabashed atheist. Hunham doesn’t mind being pegged as an intellectual snob because he has nothing else to show for his life, so of course everyone hates him, which is how he ended up being assigned the task of babysitting the “holdovers”—those students who, for one reason or another, have no place to go during Christmas break. It’s a thankless job and since Hunham actually lives on campus full-time it’s not as if he’d be put out, but, of course, that’s how he feels. In the end, he’s stuck with only one student to watch, Angus (Dominic Sessa), whose newly remarried mother is on her honeymoon. 

Since the story takes place in the early 70s, there are no cell phones, internet, or much in the way of visual entertainment to take up time, and Angus, we’ve already come to understand, is an angry young man whose future prospects are not assured despite his mother’s money since he possesses a temperament that could easily sabotage those prospects. He’s already been thrown out of three other boarding schools. Naturally, he and Hunham rub each other the wrong way on a nearly constant basis, with the school cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), their only other companion, acting as reluctant mediator. As it stands, David Hemingson’s script is extremely well structured and predictable, and Alexander Payne, the director who essentially made Giamatti a leading man with Sideways, tries too hard to fashion a work that looks as if it were made in the 70s, from the shock zooms to the fonts of the title and ending credits, not to mention the wintry hues of the film stock. It also has the leisurely pace of those New Hollywood films that allow the characters to reveal their most intimate details over time, and all three leads take full advantage of it to deliver extremely well-defined characters. The pleasures just multiply as the story progresses.

Eventually, the traumas and mistakes that bolster each character’s outward bitterness are disclosed with unnerving assurance, and while the plot resolves itself accordingly, the characters feel less credible and, for that matter, likable, though we’re now meant to see them as more fully human. Hunham’s story is particularly moving, and his means of owning up to it with a late act of moral courage is satisfying without being particularly momentous, which, in a way, is the most surprising thing about The Holdovers. Losers will always be losers to those who look down on them, which will never include audiences for this kind of drama. I just wanted the funny stuff to continue indefinitely. 

Opens June 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

The Holdovers home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Focus Features LLC

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Review: One Life

Posted on June 19, 2024 by philipbrasor

The unsung historical hero is irresistible, though it takes a discerning interpreter to make such a subject both relevant and moving to sensibilities that have developed in the meantime. Spielberg set the template with Schindler’s List by going big in every way. James Hawes’ One Life comes across as Schindler lite, or, more charitably, as a movie whose mood attempts to mimic the staid, unassuming character of its hero. And Nicholas Winton, played by Anthony Hopkins, really deserves to be called a hero. He rescued more than 600 Czech children, mostly Jews, from the Nazis during the months after Hitler annexed the Sudetenland but before England declared war on Germany. 

The reason we know about Winton and his exploits is because of a British TV morning variety show that invited Winton to sit in the audience of a live production where, unbeknownst to him, he was surrounded by dozens of the people he saved as children, now grown up, but had never met. It’s a very powerful sequence in the movie, even more so than the real thing, which you can easily find on YouTube. But because the TV segment is what drives the story—meaning the whole movie leads up to it—and will attract an audience, history is short-changed. Hawes creates drama by juxtaposing the excruciatingly drawn-out process of Winton securing visas for refugee children whom England didn’t want with his retired life in late 80s rural England, where he keeps busy cleaning up all the files he kept of the adventure because that was the past. A friend suggests he donate his scrapbook of the operation to the local newspaper, which doesn’t seem interested in it, and then to Betsy Maxwell (Marthe Keller), the wife of media powerhouse (and, later, convicted fraudster) Robert Maxwell, who was a Czech refugee himself. Betsy knows what to do with it, especially since her husband has deep television connections.

In the contrasting sections we see the young Winton (Johnny Flynn, a good cognate for Hopkins as he seems versed in the latter’s familiar acting tics), working with his activist mother (Helena Bonham-Carter) cajoling and begging British bureaucrats to issue the precious visas while the invading Germans are still mildly tolerant of allowing Czechs to leave the country. Though Hawes does fairly well in keeping all this paperwork-oriented plot development intriguing, he neglects to show the larger picture of how the Germans carried out the invasion and why the British were so reluctant to admit that it was an invasion—until, of course, it was too late. In its alternately leisurely and tense lead up to the money shot of Winton meeting his “children,” One Life can feel rather pedestrian, even if the stakes are life or death. 

Opens June 21 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku PIccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

One Life home page in Japanese

photo (c) Willow Road Films Limited. British Broadcasting Corporation 2023

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Review: Louder Than You Think: A Lo-Fi History of Gary Young & Pavement

Posted on June 15, 2024 by philipbrasor

Here’s a documentary that develops its thesis on several levels of lowered expectations, as if the director, Jed I. Rosenberg, felt he had to hedge his bets owing to the central focus of attention, Gary Young, the first drummer for the indie rock band Pavement who only played on their early singles and first album before being dropped for reasons that the band’s followers know by heart but which Rosenberg and his team of fanboy filmmakers believe will be of interest to a wider cross-section of music lovers. That’s debatable, though in the end I found that the almost obsessive attention afforded Young and his story helped me appreciate Pavement’s singular achievements in a new way. In retrospect, and even while they were extant, the group has been hailed as the seminal indie band of the 90s, and this movie drives home that point, albeit a bit tangentially.

Young, who was almost 20 years older than anyone else in Pavement, is introduced as he was at the time the doc was made (he has since died): a slurring alcoholic who takes oodles of medication to regulate his shaky physical plant. A quick summary of his musical background ensues, illustrated with well-executed recreations of anecdotes using puppets, which includes stints as a drummer in various hard rock bands that served as the recreation of choice by transgressive types in the 1980s Central Valley blighted suburb of Stockton, California. He managed to transpose his slight reputation for creative integrity to a homemade recording studio called Louder Than You Think, which proved to be the only game in town for the budding punk outfits who thought they could break out of there. Stephen Malkmus and Scott Kannberg, who called themselves Pavement (Kannberg had studied urban planning in Arizona), solicited Young’s help in recording some songs and when those songs proved exciting to the ‘zine and college radio crowd, they enlisted Young as their drummer for concerts, which sealed their reputation as the next big thing after Spin magazine—a “real” music publication—gave a glowing review of the demos for their as-yet unreleased debut album that Young engineered and produced. Malkmus and Kannberg were cautious and canny about their career prospects, but Young was, to paraphrase a pop credo, prepared to rock and lent their live shows a visceral component that went beyond his prog fills and aggressive time-keeping and into the realm of theater. Rosenberg provides plenty of shot-on-the-fly video to bolster Young’s reputation as a booze-fueled wild man whose on-stage antics contradicted the rest of the band’s image as slacker savants. However, the rep always endeared him to fans who eventually supported a short-lived post-Pavement indie rock career (which he also destroyed by dint of his own uncontrollable urges), including a stint as an advice columnist for none other than Japan’s own Rockin’ On magazine.

Both Malkmus (via Zoom) and Kannberg, as well as all the subsequent members of Pavement except Steve West, the drummer that replaced Young, profess their love for Gary as well as their frustration that, as great a drummer as he was, he didn’t fit in with the band’s artistic outlook. In fact, the move that got him canned was his attempt to get Columbia Records to sign the band against their wishes. Though it may sound pious to say that Pavement really tried to maintain the 90s indie ideal of defying the music establishment, their principled decisions turned out to be wise in the long run and even remunerative. In any case, those principles also held that they wouldn’t betray a friend, even one who attempted to betray them, and Young continued to receive substantial income from the band until he died, according to Gerri Young, who had been with Gary since they were sweethearts in high school in upstate New York. Though Gary Young never fully “got” Pavement and bristled at the lo-fi label they engendered (“Why would I make it sound shitty on purpose?”), he was always grateful that they supported his right to drink himself to oblivion and be the outsized Spinal Tap-like caricature he wanted to be, and in that regard this is a fitting testament. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Louder Than You Think home page in Japanese

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Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Posted on June 14, 2024 by philipbrasor

Some movies are so carefully conceived and worked out that they can feel contrived due to their meticulous attention to detail. The script of this eco-thriller by director Daniel Goldhaber, based on a manifesto by Andreas Malm, brings together a disparate group of people driven less by idealism than by personal angers that make it impossible for them to exist in today’s world the way the rest of us do. Such emotional contours are difficult to depict, especially since they justify, dramatically speaking, an act of terrorism that Goldhaber obviously feels is justified, and what saves the film from its own slickness is the way it makes the varying plot points play into the suspense-action premise that keeps the viewer tense and alert at every turn.

Malm’s thesis is that organized pacifist protest against the generators of climate change will never have any effect because the corporate mind that makes such destruction possible will never be receptive to moral arguments. If we take it as a given that climate change leads to global self-destruction, then we in fact have a moral responsibility to stop it by any means necessary, including violence. The people in the movie who plan to destroy an oil pipeline in west Texas are adamant that their actions not hurt people, only property, but the stakes are so high in terms of what could happen if they fail or are caught that the viewer automatically assumes their burden of anxiety. The leader of the group, which is brought together carefully through clandestine connections both online and off, is Xochitl (Ariela Barer, who also co-wrote the screenplay), a woman who tried the pacifist route and quickly realized it was a dead end. Having grown up near the refineries of Long Beach, California, she’s seen how an accepted toxic environment destroys lives, including that of her friend Theo (Sasha Lane), who is dying of cancer and joins the sabotage team to make one last statement. Theo brings her lover, Alisha (Jayme Lawson), on board because that’s what lovers do. Shawn (Marcus Scriber) is Xochitl’s college friend who bonded with her over ecological concerns and has long harbored a desire to get back at the faceless monolith that is the energy industry. Branching out from this core quartet is the explosives expert Michael (Forrest Goodluch), a Native American from North Dakota who has seen his tribal home despoiled by capitalism; the older Dwayne (Jake Weary), a good ol’ boy from Texas whose land has been seized by the owners of the pipeline by means of eminent domain; and a young couple of hippie firecrackers (Kristine Froseth, Lukas Gage) who are drawn to the dangers of the project with a palpable sexual energy. 

Goldhaber provides just enough backstory to elucidate each member’s rationale without diminishing the thrust of the main plot, which is laid out like clockwork. As with all great thrillers, there are sequences of heart-stopping suspense and even several late twists that keep you guessing (Is there a mole? Are the authorities already hip to the scheme?) as to the real purposes of some of the characters. It’s a movie that doesn’t let up, thus providing no window of opportunity to question these people’s motives and practices. And in the end, it’s only a pipeline. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

How to Blow Up a Pipeline home page in Japanese

photo (c) Wild West LLC 2022

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Review: IF

Posted on June 13, 2024 by philipbrasor

Though the title of this family fantasy stands for “imaginary friends,” the purport of the conditional conjunction lends the film a wistful character that suits its dramatic purposes more adequately. By rights, the plot is a downer. Twelve-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) lost her mother some years ago and now her dad (John Krasinski, who also wrote and directed) is about to go under the knife for a heart problem. Living with her over-solicitous grandmother (Fiona Shaw) and bombarded with painfully obvious optimism on the part of her father, Bea is constantly reminded of the precariousness of her future, which gives her anxiety an edge of irritation that feels more realistic than such feelings would normally evoke in this kind of movie; and Krasinski winningly puts over the dark humor of the situation.

But the movie is really concerned with something else entirely. Ryan Reynolds plays Cal, a guy who lives upstairs from grandma and who Bea quickly learns, after hearing all sorts of weird noises and seeing phantom shapes, is a caretaker for imaginary friends who have nowhere to go and nothing to do after their human hosts grow out of their supposed need for them. One of Cal’s tasks is to find new gigs for the IFs, a job he seems temperamentally unsuited for, since he tends to fly off the handle easily; but Bea, intrigued by the vocation, volunteers to assist in the placements and quickly becomes close to the various figments of somebody’s imagination, which range from a big, purple, overzealous hairball named Blue (Steve Carrell), to a ballerina-cum-bumblebee named Blossom (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Krasinski has great fun exploring this premise and the production design crew comes up with some eye-popping visual ideas to bring the concept to life, including one of the better musical numbers of the year that is meant to present Bea’s own imagination with regard to what she envisions as the ideal retirement home for these creatures. But while the fantasy sequences channel some of the poignancy of the framing story, especially with regard to Bea’s frustration at intitially not being able to successfully understand how kids like her “create” imaginary friends, the two plot strands never come together in a meaningful way.

The obvious problem is that Krasinski had too many good ideas and not enough collaborative input to realize one or the other was good enough for a feature film. As it stands, Bea as a character (not to mention Fleming) is over-extended, since she has to do double work as both an adolescent victim of circumstance and a go-getting figure of youthful entrepreneurship. In the end, the two personalities cancel each other out. 

Opens June 14 in subtitled and dubbed versions in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

IF home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Paramount Pictures

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