Review: The Wolf House

Posted on August 19, 2023 by philipbrasor

Presented as an old film restored by the Chilean directors/animators Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León about a German colony with a very bad reputation, The Wolf House is a disarming excavation of proto-fascist tropes served up as surreal art. Based on the story of Colonia Dignidad, a real colony founded by a Nazi child molester that purported to achieve earthly happiness through the imposition of an iron fist (reportedly, the colony aided Pinochet in the persecution of his enemies), the movie, after a brief, almost comical précis about its own provenance, proceeds to tell the animated tale of Maria, a member of the colony who is punished for allowing three pigs in her care to escape, and who herself escapes confinement to the titular structure, which she finds abandoned in the woods as she flees what she believes is a wolf that means to devour her.

Cociñã and León shift between crude 2D animation painted on the walls of the house and 3D stop-motion animation using equally crude but nevertheless lifelike papier-mâché constructions, with the former morphing into the latter and vice versa. Most of the action takes place within Maria’s fevered mind, as she tries to keep the wolf at bay and protect her “children,” two pigs that shift into human form at Maria’s will. The house itself is depicted as a living thing, something that “promises to protect” Maria and her children while also occasionally betraying what trust the girl has invested in the place. Continually haunted by the voice of the invisible wolf, in both German and Spanish, she comes to accept the guilt of her betrayal of the colony and, in a sense, adopts its mindset in her approach to the children in her care. “Do you want to be something better?” she chides them in the tone of someone who is trying to put them in their places, and then forbidding them to leave, even after they’ve been maimed in a fire. Eventually, their own hunger sets them against Maria, who thus comes to empathize with the wolf. When she “feeds” some small animals to a tree, she feels a sense of accomplishment.

Cociñã and León’s style is grotesque and unsettling, but the development of The Wolf House makes good on its self-proclaimed purpose as a propaganda film to sell the virtues of the colony, and, of course, the effect on the viewer is the opposite. The overriding emotional parameters are fear and loathing, which are often inverted back on Maria as she loses her purchase on not just her common sense, but whatever moral foundation she may have once clung to. The need for sustenance and spiritual succor warps her perspective, a concept the filmmakers recreate with stunning imaginative assurance. It’s difficult to describe exactly what they pull off, since the visuals are in such a constant state of flux—mainly from integration to decay—that the viewer can’t keep track of where one image ends and another begins, even while it is happening. The production notes say the pair spent almost four years making this 75-minute film, which sounds too short to me. The Wolf House contains a lifetime’s worth of disturbing ideas. 

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

The Wolf House home page in Japanese

photo (c) Diluvio & Globo Rojo Films 2018

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Review: Crimes of the Future

Posted on August 17, 2023 by philipbrasor

David Cronenberg’s return to “body horror,” a genre he invented, after two decades of comparatively conventional, though by no means less disturbing, dramas has the same title as one of his earliest movies, so at first I wondered if he was remaking it. Though I haven’t seen that earlier movie, this apparently is nothing like it, so I have to assume he just likes the title and, perhaps, felt he wasted it on the other one. “Crimes” in this case are not necessarily the legal type, but rather the existential type. Taking place sometime in the future, the story centers on the idea of something called accelerated evolution syndrome, a biological condition in which humans develop new organs and systems to cope with the environmental degradation they’ve visited upon the natural world. In the opening scene, a depressed looking boy devours a trash can full of plastic, after which his mother kills him. Later, the boy’s father, an “anarchist” named Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), uses his son’s body in an attempt to show the world what humans have done to it. 

He accomplishes this by offering the corpse to a pair of performance artists, Saul (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Lea Seydoux), whose mode of artistic expression is surgery. Saul has a knack for producing “novel organs,” which Caprice removes from him for paying audiences. Dotrice offers his son for an autopsy, presumably to see what makes his digestive tract receptive to polyethylene. But before this happens, the viewer is subjected to Cronenberg’s patented gruesome visual style, which has to contend with an over-complicated plot and characters whose purpose often seem at odds with the logic of that plot. The “performance” scenes are the most compelling, and not just because they’re gross, but rather due to Cronenberg’s insistence that such actions can be considered art. Saul, as it were, suffers for that art in more ways than one. The surgery is painless because Saul, as well as most humans, has evolved away from pain, but he suffers from countless maladies that require creative solutions, including bizarrely designed furniture that eases Saul’s unique forms of physical inconvenience. In this regard, Crimes of the Future improves thematically on that earlier, more controversial Cronenberg film, Crash, in that sex has no appeal unless it is tethered to something more visceral, in this case scalpels cutting into flesh. 

But where there’s art there has to be politics, and the introduction of something called the National Organ Registry confuses matters with its determination, through the agency of two factotums (Don McKellar, Kristen Stewart), to monitor Saul’s performances. This subplot has a direct connection to the one in which Dotrice seems to be concocting an aesthetic revolution, the idea being that humanity has adapted to a befouled biosphere much too readily and needs some sort of comeuppance, but the two bureaucrats often come off as hastily conceived comic relief (Stewart’s character is clearly turned on by the surgeries), thus blunting whatever message they are meant to deliver. Cronenberg’s ideas about evolution and adaptation are intriguing enough by themselves without all the subtext, but what is a Cronenberg movie without subtext? It’s simply a horror movie like no other. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Crimes of the Future home page in Japanese

photo (c) Serendipity Point Films 2021

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Review: QT8-The First Eight

Posted on August 12, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though not strictly a hagiography, this thorough explication of the films that Quentin Tarantino made under the auspices of Harvey Weinstein presents America’s most celebrated auteur of the last three decades as a complete success on his own terms and anyone else’s. It also gathers enough famous talking heads to sing his praises that the director, Tara Wood, can talk about Tarantino’s relationship with the now-confirmed sexual abuser (“He was my best friend…”) in fairly frank terms without necessarily contradicting on-screen testimony to the notion that QT, as Jennifer Jason Leigh puts it, “wrote parts for women better than anyone.” To her credit, Wood doesn’t dance around the problem; but it does make the hero worship sound more forced than it’s probably meant to sound. 

What’s missing, of course, is QT’s own voice. The filmmaker seemingly contributes nothing personal to the documentary, even if his film geek persona permeates every frame. Consequently, the anecdotes and insights provided by his regular actors, collaborators, and hangers-on have a delicious insider quality to them that even non-QT enthusiasts should enjoy. There’s a running sub-theme about how all of Tarantino’s films comprise an alternate universe complete with its own unique commerce and human community, which, when understood properly, make the ultra-violence and the rarefied humor not only understandable, but acceptable. The actors who appear are self-aware enough that they’ve come to accept QT’s main working credo, which is that “you’re never cooler than the movies” themselves. Jamie Foxx is the only leading man movie star who talks to Ward, and he admits that Tarantino had to “bring me down” from his high perch to make him credibly convey a slave-like mentality in Django Unchained. And whereas he wasn’t always able to get the actors he wanted (Travolta, who definitely had his career revived by QT, wasn’t his first choice for Pulp Fiction), Tarantino knew more about the acting community in Hollywood than anyone in the history of the business, and once he blessed you with a role, you were kind of his. Tim Roth, Christoph Waltz, Michael Madsen, and Kurt Russell essentially say as much, pledging their allegiance not because of what he did for them financially, but how he guaranteed their street cred.

In amongst the delightful bits of trivia and heartfelt encomiums to loyal compadres (in particular, QT’s longtime editor, Sally Menke), Ward sometimes comes across as tone deaf in her presentations of those aspects of QT’s ouevre that rub people the wrong way. She actually handles the Weinstein connection fairly well, but despite Foxx’s and Samuel Jackson’s defense of QT’s love of the n-word (at the expense of Spike Lee and the more delicate sensibilities of Leonardo Dicaprio, who had to utter it multiple times in Django), the use of the word even in the documentary has a jarring effect that comes across as gratuitous. Uma Thurman’s permanent injury as a result of reckless practices during the making of Kill Bill is mentioned but not really explained. And while Ward’s description of the films as being both ground-breaking and highly influential is unimpeachable, her implication that they all were of the highest quality feels like a dodge. How anyone can sit through The Hateful Eight—70mm or no 70mm—with any sense of enjoyment is beyond me. The fact is, QT’s iconoclasm has helped him get movies made the way he believes they should be made, but much of the stuff he did after Jackie Brown was self-indulgent. That said, I still really like Death Proof. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

QT8-The First Eight home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2019 Wood Entertainment

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Review: Barbie

Posted on August 11, 2023 by philipbrasor

Greta Gerwig’s very popular movie, written with her life partner and fellow filmmaker Noah Baumbach, isn’t the first one to center on a toy or, for that matter, a very recognizable toy. Usually, however, the toy is a brand name used to spice up an otherwise rote genre exercise, as with Hasbro’s Transformers or even the board game Clue. Barbie the film, as everyone knows by now, basically tries to comment on the accepted narrative about Mattel’s iconic female doll and the way it shapes girls’ attitudes toward feminine stereotypes without actually subverting that narrative. What it doesn’t do, despite a moving soliloquy by America Ferrera as a mother and Mattel employee near the middle of the film, is make an emotional case for toys as instructive tools about life and actual companions, the way the Toy Story movies did. Though it may seem farfetched to compare Gerwig’s very original and thoughtful approach to Pixar’s, Barbie can’t help but feel less immersive, and not because it isn’t entertaining. It’s very entertaining, but actually in a more conventional way. 

The crux, of course, is Mattel, which bankrolled the film and allowed Gerwig and Baumbach to make fun of its image as a big corporation. Toy Story also had a few famous brands in its toybox, but it didn’t try to contend with their image any more than using it to make clever plot points. (I’m thinkng Mr. Potato Head and his removable body parts.) For the most part, Barbie‘s most appealing trait is the way it reduces those aspects of the doll and its “world” that have been analyzed by feminists and sociologists to simple jokes: There’s a Barbie for every type and lifestyle but they’re still all named Barbie; nobody has any genitalia; and in a universe designed to make little girls aspire to greatness, the guys are relegated to the background as eye candy. Within this universe Margot Robbie plays “stereotypical Barbie” who lives at the top of a non-existent pecking order in Barbie Land, which is at once a figment of our imagination and the end result of whatever values and goals Mattel was pushing over the years with their doll series concept. Her neighbors include Physicist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Doctor Barbie (Hari Nef), Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon, who prefers Birkenstocks to heels), and even President Barbie (Issa Rae), and they all live in perfect harmony, as the old Coke song went, presumably because they don’t have to worry about men lording over them. As it turns out, the Kens all live down at the beach and do little more than show off their bodies for no discernible purpose and compete with one another. That the main Ken (Ryan Gosling) is Sterotypical Barbie’s denoted boyfriend is the best joke of all since neither doll understands what that exactly entails, but in any case, Barbie Land is depicted as an idyll, and one that is eventually ruined by the premonition of death. (Actually, cellulite, but when cellulite appears death can’t be far behind.)

This realization leads to Barbie’s journey to the real world, with Ken in tow only because he feels some compulsion to join her as her designated male-identified companion. In the real world, which is Los Angeles, the pair get into a number of difficult situations that upset their decidedly narrow view of whatever they think existence means, with the result being that Barbie learns of her problematic role in the development of young girls’ self-image (via, mainly, Ferrera’s aforementioned soliloquy) and Ken learns about the patriarchy, which he is only too happy to export back to Barbie Land. But the most dramatic twist to their sojourn is Barbie’s encounters not only with older women—which, given her provenance as a plastic figure, she can never become—such as Ruth Handler (Rhea Perlman), the Mattel founder who invented Barbie to give girls something to play with other than babies, but also with the all-male board of directors of Mattel, including its CEO (Will Ferrell), who is desperate to get Barbie “back in the box” where she belongs. But as inventive and thought-provoking as this approach is, it is not as purely affecting as Gosling’s and the other Kens’ silly, self-important take on privilege, which is both hilarious and provocatively on-point. The all-male dance number is the high point of the movie, entertainment-wise. As a treatise on consumerism, sexism, and the commodification of girl power, Barbie is certainly smart, but it still has to contend with Mattel’s prerogatives. Ken comes out making the stronger impression in that regard not because he’s a guy, but because he’s funny. 

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).

Barbie home page in Japanese

photo (c) Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

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Review: Return to Seoul

Posted on August 10, 2023 by philipbrasor

What makes Cambodian-French director Davy Chou’s movie about a young French woman recklessly discovering her Korean heritage compelling is how attuned it is to not only to the character’s foibles, but how those foibles determine the purpose of her quest, which is never fully apparent, even to her. Unlike other stories of personal discovery, there’s a clear sense of matters getting away from Freddie (Park Ji-min) as she visits the titular capital over a period of some ten years, continually drawn back out of some inchoate sense of belonging. Even her initial sojourn seems serendipitous—she was flying to Tokyo on her own when her flight was diverted to Seoul, and decided to get off—though given the character that Chou and his co-writers, not to mention Park herself, develop, there may have been more calculation in her decision than she lets on. In a phone conversation with her adoptive mother back in France who is concerned about her being in Korea, it’s revealed that the two had planned to someday visit the country of Freddie’s birth together, so it’s easy to question Freddie’s motivation.

At first, it doesn’t seem that Freddie even wants to find the parents who gave her up for adoption as an infant, but while drinking with a bunch of new Korean friends one suggests an easy way of looking for them, and the fuse is lit. On the surface, Freddie takes a somewhat dim view of the Korean sense of propriety, especially when it comes to family, but after she visits the adoption agency and learns about the process of contacting her birth parents—who separated some time ago—she puts that process in motion. With the help of Tena (Guka Han) the French-speaking clerk at the youth hostel where she’s staying, she eventually visits her father (Oh Kwang-rok), a working class breadwinner living in a fishing village who is so wracked with guilt at having abandoned Freddie years ago (and insists on calling her by her given Korean name) that he goes around the bend and insists she move back to Korea where she will learn the language and he will find her a good Korean husband. Freddie, who was reluctant to meet him in the first place, rebuffs his entreaties and eventually breaks with him violently after he shows up drunk at the youth hostel. As far as Freddie’s birth mother goes, she doesn’t respond to the adoption agency’s letter of inquiry.

Though fraught with meaning, the first section doesn’t properly prepare the viewer for Freddie’s subsequent returns to Seoul over the next decade. At one point, she has found a job working for a French consultant and picks up foreign Tinder dates while living a dissipated lifestyle in Itaewon’s demimonde. She revels in her foreignness even while her Korean comrades see her as one of them, which is the kind of attention she doesn’t seek and rejects if offered. Years later, on another return with her French boyfriend, she has actually reconnected with her father and seems to want to make a relationship, though it is now he who wants to maintain a distance. All the while she keeps trying to contact her birth mother, despite the agency’s insistence that they can’t force the issue. Freddie’s life is at the mercy of cultural forces she at one time refused to acknowledge but now understands intimately, even if they are a constant shock to her system. What Chou has done to make this dynamic so direct is put the viewer in Freddie’s position at all times, no matter how uncomfortable it might be. There’s so much in this story to understand that you can’t help but feel frustrated with the parts that you know can never be explained. 

In French, English and Korean. Opens Aug. 11 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

Return to Seoul home page in Japanese

photo (c) Aurora Films/Vandertastic/Frakas Productions 2022

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Review: The Survivor

Posted on August 9, 2023 by philipbrasor

Barry Levinson’s retelling of the story of Harry Haft (Ben Foster), a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz by allowing himself to be used for entertainment purposes as a boxer, is a fairly conventional movie in that it plays on the viewer’s feelings about the idea of surviving. When Haft’s story was told in the media after the war, he was branded a traitor by fellow Jews for having beaten other Jews to death so that Nazi officers could bet on the outcome. Levinson goes deep into this story, both during Haft’s time in the camp (presented in black-and-white) and during his post-war career (in color) as a real competitive boxer, albeit one whose appeal was rather morbid due to the route he took to become a fighter. Though Haft, a brooding, thoughtful man, has plenty to feel guilty about, he keeps his eye on the prize, which isn’t money or fame, but the fiancee he lost when they were separated during the war. His search for her is the film’s through-line, and Levinson holds back on its melodramatic potential, keeping it at a safe distance so as to give the viewer something to look forward to in a life that seems pretty intolerable.

In Auschwitz, Haft’s “savior” is the opportunist Schneider (Billy Magnussen), a cynical officer who “doesn’t hate Jews” and gives Haft an offer he can’t refuse after Haft beats up a German guard. Rather than be killed right away, which is what happens to inmates who beat up guards, Dietrich represents him in boxing matches with other inmates—as long as he keeps winning, he’ll keep living. In New York after the war, Haft ekes out an existence as the “Pride of Poland,” and is being trained to fight heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano (Anthony Molinari), one of the most imposing fighters in the history of the sport. Feeling sorry for a fellow Jew, and a camp survivor to boot, Marciano’s trainer, Charlie Goldman (Danny DeVito), offers to coach Haft so he won’t be completely destroyed in the ring. The sequence where Haft, Goldman, and Haft’s own trainers (John Leguizamo, Paul Bates) go upstate for this secretive training session becomes more or less a treatise on how to survive in the white man’s USA, since non of the men there are WASPs. It also provides contrast to Haft’s troubled persona, since he can actually relax with these men—one Jew, one Puerto Rican, one Black man—and not feel that he’s a freak for what he went through in Auschwitz. In that regard, the New York cognate of Schneider is journalist Emory Anderson (Peter Sarsgaard), who pesters Haft to write his story for his own benefit and thus exposes him to the enmity of other Jews. Anderson is not a Nazi, but his opportunism isn’t that different from Schneider’s. 

As already mentioned, the film’s plot hook is Haft’s years-long search for his fiancee, which he carries out with the help of Miriam Wofsoniker (Vicky Krieps), an employee of the Jewish Center in Brooklyn whom he eventually marries. Though this line plays out as one would logically expect it to, it still leads to some surprising revelations, not only about the woman Haft left behind, but about what kind of man Haft really was. Levinson can only keep the melodrama at bay for so long, and once he lets it in, the film is very moving. Someone once said surviving is an art. In Haft’s case it is a constantly shifting process of self-renewal. 

Opens Aug. 11 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Survivor home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Heavyweight Holdings LLC

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Review: Myanmar Diaries

Posted on August 5, 2023 by philipbrasor

There are no credits at the beginning or at the end of this collection of short videos made by amateur and professional filmmakers in the aftermath of the coup in Myanmar that took place February 1, 2021. Obviously, they would be arrested if the authorities knew what they had done, but the Dutch producers who compiled, edited, and distributed the footage to the world in the form of a 70-minute documentary decided their own names weren’t important either. In “solidarity” with the Burmese contributors they remain anonymous as well. As a result, Myanmar Diaries comes as close as you’ll ever get to pure cinema.

Which may sound like an odd and irrelevant comment given the contents. A mixture of impressionistic staged dramas and actual live documents of demonstrations, arrests, and general chaos, the movie has an integrity that is almost impossible to describe. The movie opens with that famous video of a fitness instructor dancing to a techno track outdoors while, in the background, military vehicles proceed to the parliament to take it over. It sets the mood perfectly by juxtaposing a quotidian activity with an extraordinarily ominous one. Most of the dramatic sequences involve lovers or spouses whose lives have been torn asunder by the crackdown on freedom. Sometimes the lost lover is involved in demonstrations and just doesn’t come home; in one the boyfriend of a pregnant teenage girl has to go on the run when the authorities bust his underground pro-democracy group. In two of these sequence the left-behind lovers attempt suicide, and perhaps succeed. We never see faces in these dramatizations. One, in fact, only shows hands, but the story it tells is vivid and heart-breaking. Perhaps the most troubling video is about a man who works for the authorities and has come to wrestle with his conscience. Is the blood he washes from his hands allegorical? Is the bag he puts over his head a form of self-abnegation? In any event, his suffering is acutely felt.

However, the staged vignettes can’t compare viscerally with the documentary footage. We see plainclothes police thugs beating unarmed demonstrators literally to death. We see more than one arrest wherein family members plead with or attempt to cajole police into releasing their loved ones—the cry of a child to “let my mother go” as she’s dragged away by a particularly brutal officer gave me nightmares for a week. The longest sequence may be the movie’s most stirring: a 67-year-old woman walking up and down a line of police trucks yelling at the young soldiers to think of what they’re doing. “You could all be my sons!” she screams and puts herself at their mercy, though she isn’t going to go to whatever hell they dispatch her without emptying her soul first, and she has a lot on her mind. 

In Burmese. Now playing in Tokyo at Porepore Higashi Nakano (03-3371-0088).

Myanmar Diaries home page in Japanese

photo (c) The Myanmar Film Collective

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Review: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts

Posted on August 4, 2023 by philipbrasor

For what it’s really worth, this is the first Transformers movie I’ve seen that I found entertaining. (I didn’t see the Bumblebee offshoot, which a lot of people liked.) Don’t get me wrong, I’m not categorically against movies about trademarked toy brands or video games, but when you combine that sort of commercial ethos with the Michael Bay aesthetic you get not only overkill but overkill that numbs to the point of incomprehension. Rise of the Beasts is co-produced by Bay but directed by Steven Caple Jr., who did a fine job on the second Creed movie. Unlike Bay, he seems genuinely engaged with the story and takes more than a few beats to drive home each plot point so that the cacophonous mayhem and violence has some sort of organic sense to it. And while the script has five names attached to it, it also has a simplicity of spirit that implies you don’t need a Ph.D in Hasbro Studies to get the whole zeitgeist behind the franchise. I tend to forget that stuff anyway.

It’s also got halfway relatable human characters. Though there was obviously a certain logic behind making the two leads put-upon members of minority groups, the sympathy factor attached to this idea makes for more actual drama than the series deserves. Anthony Ramos is appealing as Noah Diaz, the ex-military tech head who can’t seem to get a decent job in mid-90s Brooklyn and turns to grand theft auto in order to make some quick cash to help his younger brother, who is suffering from sickle cell anemia. It’s during the heist that he comes in contact with Mirage (Pete Davidson), the punky sports car Transformer with whom he develops a kind of standup comedy routine. And the always reliable Dominique Fishback is Elena, a museum artifacts expert whose knowledge about Central American civilizations beats that of her white, tenured superiors by a mile, and which those superiors take advantage of. Though the social commentary these two characters spark is rather thin, it gives more context to a story about a race of robots, the Autobots, who are stranded on a planet far from home and which take it upon themselves to defend their new home from extraterrestrial invaders. The story has its own species of overkill—the invaders want nothing less than to literally consume planet earth—but since it takes place temporally before the action described in the Bay Transformer movies (thus making it a kind of prequel), we get a better sense of what’s at stake for these machines, and that happens to be a chance to return to their home world if they can get their mechanical mitts on a certain key that unlocks a space portal. If this sounds like the same plot device at the center of the new Mission Impossible movie, I can only say it must be a huge coincidence.

The Beasts of the title are another group of stranded robots who resemble terrestrial animals and which were created for a TV show I know nothing about. However, they are voiced by an impressive lineup of stars, including Michelle Yeoh, Ron Perlman, and Peter Dinklage. Most of the viewer’s attention, however, will be spent on the action set pieces, which are more comprehensible than what I’m used to but typical overkill nonetheless. Nobody expects Chekhov, but a few scenes of the Autobots reflecting on what violence really accomplishes might be refreshing. 

Now playing 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 (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Transformers: Rise of the Beasts home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Paramount Pictures TM Hasbro

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Review: The Inspection

Posted on August 3, 2023 by philipbrasor

Given that this first feature by director Elegance Bratton is clearly autobiographical to a certain extent, it’s surprising how little distinctive detail it offers into the mind of a young gay Black man who decides to join the Marines as a way to lift himself out of squalor. We can see that Ellis French (Jeremy Pope) has been living on the streets of New York for years, having been kicked out of his mother’s (Gabrielle Union, also producer) home when he was a teenager because his homosexuality disgusted her. These are compelling plot points, especially when they seem to be rooted in fact, but they require the kind of elaboration that would make them understandable beyond their function as dramatic devices, and Bratton never really makes them that believable. When an older gay homeless friend hears of French’s plan to enlist, he laughs and says they will never accept a “young queen” like him, and the rest of the movie simply sets out to prove him wrong.

Consequently, the bulk of the film is taken up by French having to live up to the Marine ethos, which means lots of the usual boot camp crap from screaming commanders, in this case a man named Laws (Bokeem Woodbine) who promises right from the start to “break” every one of the new recruits. At first, French seems more worried about concealing his sexual orientation from his fellow jarheads than he is about surviving basic training—he even pretends to call his “girlfriend” at one point—and the conflicting purposes aren’t delineated naturally. Bizarrely, French is revealed, so to speak, during a shower session as he falls into an erotic hallucination, and while the subsequent bullying he receives makes good (or, at least, better) on explicating the tribulations of a gay man in the military, it just becomes one more test of the character’s mental wherewithal rather than a pointed comment on the toxic mindset instilled by this sort of group dynamic. More interesting is the cruelty visited upon another recruit, Ismail (Eman Esfandi), for his Middle Eastern background—the movie takes place in 2005, with the military still operating in post-911 mode—and toward which French acts with admirable defiance.

The story is geared to climax at the titular ceremony, which is presented as a confirmation of French’s success at becoming a Marine, and as almost always the case with these kinds of “character tests,” this success is automatically presented as a triumph in its own right, regardless of what you think of the military. The outed gay man is suddenly accepted as he is, not only be his superiors, but by his equals, who, in another bizarre sequence, actually defend him to his mother, who attends the ceremony only to reestablish her position as never willing to accept his “lifestyle,” as she calls it. At this point, such a position is less infuriating than it is tiresome. It may be true, but without some effort to help the viewer comprehend what makes her resentment so intractible, it comes across as corny, an attempt to extract emotional capital from a hackneyed response. 

Opens Aug. 4 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).

The Inspection home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Oorah Productions LLC

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Media watch: Hiroshima native recalls fleeing the horror of the bomb only to end up in the middle of another war

Posted on July 31, 2023 by philipbrasor
Children during Korean War

For Japanese media, August is traditionally the month of war and remembrance, since Japan gave up the fight on August 15, six days after the U.S. dropped its second atomic bomb on a Japanese city. Regardless of your opinion as to whether the bombs ended the war or if they were necessary to do so, in the minds of many Japanese people the juxtaposition of the bombings and the surrender are irrevocable, and over the years every possible approach to how matters played out during the first two weeks of August 1945 have been explored, usually from a personal point of view, meaning by those who lived through it.

This year marks another milestone: the 70th anniversary of the Korean War armistice. A series of articles in the Asahi Shimbun recounted the story of Tsunehiro Tomoda, who was born in Hiroshima in 1935 and lived through both the first atomic bombing and the Korean War, thus making his story doubly illustrative of the total chaos that many Japanese and Koreans, who prior to Japan’s surrender were subjects of the emperor owing to Japan’s annexation of the Korean peninsula, lived through in the years just after the war. 

Tomoda was not Korean, but there were many living in and around Hiroshima during the war, mostly working in factories making munitions and such. He and a younger brother were raised by a single mother, since his father died when he was very young. His mother worked as a seamstress, and they were poor. In 1945, Tomoda was in 4th grade, and at the time the bomb exploded he was in the basement of his school just taking his shoes off. There was a very bright flash of light and he was thrown against the wall. His school was only 460 meters from the epicenter of the blast. The school building stood but was otherwise destroyed, and somehow he survived without much harm. When he emerged he saw burnt bodies everywhere. One of them might have been his brother but there were no features left to distinguish any of the bodies. 

He managed to make it with other survivors to a mountain a few kilometers away. From there he could see the entire city in ruins, still burning in spots. Some military personnel gave him bread and water, and eventually he left the evacuation area to look for his mother, but when he got to where his house was there was nothing there. He camped out at city hall, where he happened to run into a man named Saburo Kaneyama, a Korean who had rented a room from his family. He was a shoemaker. Tomoda had always gotten along well with him, and they moved together into an army barracks that had been repurposed as refugee quarters. Kaneyama would somehow procure food for the two. After some time, Tomoda made his way to his grandparents’ house north of Hiroshima Station. After a while it was clear his grandparents didn’t want him around, so he returned to the barracks and Kaneyama, who, now that the war was officially over, decided to return to Korea. Tomoda felt anxious because except for Kaneyama he had no one. Kaneyama talked to the police about bringing Tomoda to Korea with him but the police forbade it, since Tomoda was Japanese. 

In the middle of September, Hiroshima was hit by a powerful typhoon that partially destroyed Kaneyama’s dwelling. Tomoda clung to the older man as they made their way through the storm to the home of another Korean man named Kaneda, whose wife welcomed Tomoda and told him that he should go with Kaneyama to Korea. Despite the police’s warning, Kaneyama felt responsible for the boy and agreed to take him to Korea. On the day of departure they left together for the port, where hundreds of Koreans were boarding ships back to the peninsula. Kaneyama instructed Tomoda to not talk at all lest the authorities realize he wasn’t Korean. 

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