Review: The Cord of Life

Posted on September 23, 2023 by philipbrasor

Chinese director Qiao Sixue has said that her debut feature is semi-autobiographical. Qiao studied film in France and intended to remain in Europe, but eventually returned to her childhood home in Inner Mongolia in order to make a movie about her mother, with whom she had always had a fraught relationship. In the movie, her avatar is Alus (Yider), a club musician who has achieved a level of success in Beijing by combining electronics with native Mongolian instruments he mastered as a child. In the big city he has essentially thrown off the trappings of his rural upbringing and remade himself as a vanguard artist, but then he hears from his brother that their mother, Naranzug (Badema), has descended into a state of dementia and has practically “destroyed” his urban household. Given that the brother has a family and Alus does not, Alus feels guilty and goes to his house to address his mother’s fervent desire to return to her real home, though it takes some time for him to determine exactly where this home is.

The film takes the form of a road movie, with the Mongolian steppe providing a dramatic background for Alus’s slow and painstaking reconsideration of his relationship with Naranzug, whose cognitive impairment becomes more acute along the way. The title refers obliquely to the colorful rope that Alus uses to connect him to Naranzug, who mostly doesn’t recognize him as her son, so as to prevent her from stumbling off into the vast, empty plains, but along the way it becomes a metaphor for the ties that bind him to his homeland as he discovers not only what it is about the place that made his mother the person she is, but also how much it has informed his own character. As Naranzug almost reverts to a feral state—at one point delivering a lost lamb back to the corral from which it wandered—Alus has to resort to a more primal form of care, playing his music in order to lure his mother back into his control. 

All the while, the idea of where Naranzug’s “home” is keeps shifting, and as the pair move further into the wilderness it becomes clear that home is more of an idea than a place. It’s the people they encounter, the smells and sounds that connect her with something she can still somehow recall; though in the end it’s a landmark she identifies from her childhood. Though the mysticism invoked by Qiao’s camerawork and sound design, not to mention the romance that Alus encounters along the way, occasionally trespasses into the realm of corn, Alus’s newly generated link to a culture he thought he knew but really didn’t is made palpable. When he joins in a grasslands festival by playing his own music, it doesn’t feel anachronistic or odd. His artistic sensibility has always been rooted in this place, and his mother reacts with pure joy, despite her affliction. The connection is complete, thus allowing them to let go of each other forever. 

In Mongolian and Mandarin. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku K’s Cinema (03-3352-2471).

The Cord of Life home page in Japanese

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Review: John Wick: Chapter 4 and Confidential Assignment 2: International

Posted on September 22, 2023 by philipbrasor

Having missed the third installment of the John Wick series I assumed I would have trouble getting up to speed with the fourth, but given the limited stylistic requirements that the series has set for itself I had no problems. I obviously missed the explication of the worldwide criminal underground cabal called the High Table for which our assassin hero toils, but anyone with any experience in the hit man sub-genre will immediately be able to suss the implications. This back story simply provides a bit more justification for the series’ meat-and-potatoes violent set pieces, each of which involves the slaughter of dozens if not hundreds of anonymous henchmen of whichever bad guy Wick is up against. Though I have my aesthetic-moral principles, I’m as much of a sucker for the old ultra-violence as the next hack, but at close to three hours, this kind of thing, regardless of how “balletically” it’s staged, can start to feel pretty redundant.

The travelogue quality of the series seems to have been prioritized. Wick (Keanu Reeves, more monosyllabic than ever before) has apparently pledged to destroy the Table once and for all in order to gain his freedom, and embarks to the Middle East to take out an “elder” who sits at it. This occasions yet another contract on Wick’s head that every assassin in the world aims to claim. Meanwhile the Continental Hotel in New York is punished because its proprietor, Winston (Ian McShane), helped Wick do something against the Table in the previous film. Winston is left homeless and directionless, while Wick journeys to another Continental franchise in Osaka whose proprietor (Hiroyuki Sanada) is an old friend. By any stretch of the imagination, this is a mistake, since a horde of assassins, most of them led by the blind Table factotum, Caine (Donnie Yen), descendd on the establishment to take him out. Hundreds die, including some characters sympathetic to Wick’s cause, thus making you wonder what Wick hoped to accomplish by traveling to Japan. It’s then off to Berlin, where Wick has to reestablish himself with the estranged “family” that can give him certification as a bona fide assassin (no ronin for the High Table). They require he kill a fat club owner with metal teeth. Then it’s on to Paris—where there are 3-count-em-3 set pieces, only one of which elicited an “ooh” from me—to fight an old-fashioned duel with the duplicitous Table placement, the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård).

Each set piece is characterized by a distinctive motif—in Berlin it’s the boogieing masses being oblivious to the carnage around them; in Paris it’s a car chase with guns on the roundabout surrounding the Arc de Triomphe and a long tumble down the steps leading up to the Sacre-couer. Despite the additions of ringers (Shamier Anderson as a lone-wolf-with-dog assassin who keeps complicating matters; rock star Rina Sawayama as the aggrieved daughter of Sanada’s character) it’s up to Reeves to keep things moving and the extended running time doesn’t help his dour demeanor at all. If the movie is saved by anyone it’s Yen, whose grace is not only economical but witty. It would be nice to see him return for what appears to be a fifth installment, but the requisite stinger seems to indicate otherwise. 

I also didn’t see the first Confidential Assignment movie, in which comic standby Yoo Hae-jin plays an everyman police detective who teams up with a North Korean agent played by Hyun Bin to do something. That movie was released in 2017, before Hyun became an international heartthrob by playing another North Korean in the Netflix hit Crash Landing on You. Consequently, this sequel seems to be targeted more toward a global audience, but the “International” in the title ostensibly refers to the notion that the pair’s action moves have more worldwide repercussions. Also, they are joined by a Korean-American FBI agent (Daniel Henney).

Unlike Wick 4, Confidential is purely plot-fueled: a rogue North Korean agent, Jang (Jin Seon-kyu), has taken his brief as a drug smuggler for the Hermit Kingdom into the US criminal underground, where he’s attracted the notice of the Feds, and after relocating to South Korea becomes the target of the Seoul police, the North Korean military, and the FBI. Hyun’s Im Chul-ryung is tasked with bringing Jang back with his ill-gotten gains, while Yoo’s Kang Jin-tae pushes back against the arrogant American interloper for dibs on Jang’s ass. The three end up working together, but not before a lot of mayhem entails of the John Wick variety, including a very well choreographed shoot-out on the streets of New York. 

This being a blockbuster South Korean actioner, it leaves plenty of room for broad comedy, which is mostly provided by Hyun’s fortified status as a hunk. In the first movie, apparently, Kang’s sister-in-law, Min-young (Im Hoon-ah) had the hots for Chul-ryung and anticipates his return with salacious abandon, but once she gets a gander at the Yank she shifts loyalties, though not really in a convincing way. Still, if I prefer the action set pieces here to those in Wick, it’s not so much because they’re original but because they’re distinct from one another, and the people who die have actual personalities—evil personalities, for sure, but that gives you something to root for. 

John Wick: Chapter 4 now playing 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 Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

John Wick: Chapter 4 home page in Japanese

John Wick photo (c) 2023 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc.-Murray Close

Confidential Assignment 2: International, in Korean, now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024.

Confidential Assignment 2 home page in Japanese

Confidential Assignment 2 photo (c) 2022 CJ ENM Co., Ltd., JK Film

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Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Posted on September 21, 2023 by philipbrasor

Like the Spider-verse reboot, this new animated take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise completely reimagines the vibe for a more discerning target audience, namely young people who have a stake in the culture that the source material ostensibly addresses. By bringing in people who have proven ability to appeal to actual teenagers, from soundtrack composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to co-screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the producers allow the characters’ adolescent freak flag to fly freely, with the result being a much more entertaining movie than any of the previous ones, which mostly tried to be something for everyone. Rightly, they also went back to the beginning, and the origin story is funnier for the kind of animation used, which looks like stop-motion but seems to be a synthesis of different styles. 

One thing’s for sure, the frantic pace likely matches the brain function of teens who play video games and surf the net at breakneck speeds. If I hadn’t seen the previous Turtle movies I might not have fully appreciated how adept director Jeff Rowe is at telling a story with such economy and precision. We get the weird scientist, Baxter Stockman (Giancarlo Esposito), losing a vial of his mutation agent down a New York City drain, where it gets into the sewage system and creates a whole menagerie of mutants. Our heroes are babies rescued from the sludge by the kung-fu practicing rat, Splinter (Jackie Chan), who has been traumatized by his ventures to the surface world and raises his four boys (voiced by non-famous actors) to shun that world. They do have to occasionally go up top to filch supplies, including their beloved pizza, and so Splinter teaches them Asian martial arts for self-defense purposes. As adolescent boys do, they long for connection to their own cohort and secretly aspire to going to school, things they know about because they spend so much time on the internet, but of course their “father” would forbid it. After they meet April (Ayo Edebiri), a nerdish girl with journalistic pretensions, they can’t get the idea of integrating out of their minds, and together the five take on Superfly (Ice Cube), a mutant fly that plans to use some kind of farout machine to turn all the inhabitants of NYC into mutants.

What’s particularly attractive about the production is how seamlessly it integrates the furious action elements into a typical goofy teen self-expression story. Rogen and Goldberg bring the same spirit of irreverent abandon to the presentation that they did to such classics as Superbad, and the humorous back-and-forth, not only among the Turtles but among the nominal villains, in imbued with a crackling, throwaway wit that never flags. Even the scatology and gross-out stuff (April tends to throw up without much warning) is done with a light touch. Let’s hope there’s more of this to come. 

Opens Sept. 22 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 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).

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem home page in Japanese

photo (c) Paramount Pictures

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Review: The Lost King

Posted on September 20, 2023 by philipbrasor

There’s a lot going on in Stephen Frears’ dramatized retelling of the story behind the discovery of King Richard III’s grave beneath a parking lot in Leicester, UK, in 2012. There’s the attempt to revise the accepted historical record surrounding Richard from that of a usurper to that of a responsible monarch. There’s a study of the misunderstood affliction known as chronic fatigue syndrome, which affects Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins), the woman who locates the grave. And there’s a fascinating but rather dry exposition of how such archaeological projects are funded and carried out. Frears and his screenwriters, Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, try to bring all these elements together in an entertaining way, and succeed only up to a point.

Early in the movie, Philippa takes a leave of absence from her public relations job after a promotion that should go to her instead goes to a younger colleague. In any event, her illness makes a daily grind difficult and she’s grown frustrated by the job anyway. With nothing to do she attends a performance of Richard III and, intrigued by the controversy over the conventional biography outlined in the play, plunges into research that leads her to a group of literary revisionists who meet regularly in a pub to discuss how to prove that Richard was a legitimate monarch who did not, in fact, murder his nephews—a version of his story rendered canon by the Tudors and, later, Shakespeare. Sympathizing with Richard because his own illness, like hers, was vastly misinterpreted, Philippa sees the revisionists’ point but disagrees with their methods of going about their task. While entertaining visions of Richard (Harry Lloyd), who endeavors to tell her what he’s really like, Philippa throws herself into the search for his actual grave so as to prove once and for all that he wasn’t a hunchback madman. 

A good portion of the movie is given over to bureaucratic and academic hurdles that Philippa is forced to overcome with almost superhuman rectitude and patience, and while I usually enjoy this kind of wonky development, there isn’t enough dramatic substance to create sufficient tension. Though Coogan is on hand as the ex-husband who supports Philippa’s project unconditionally and adds his own characteristically wry humor to the mix, he can’t lift the movie out of its rut of middle-brow respectability. In the end, there’s not enough action to justify a narrative movie rather than a documentary, which likely would have achieved the same satisfying payoff that The Lost King does but with more excitement along the way. 

Opens Sept. 22 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Lost King home page in Japanese

photo (c) Pathe Productions Limited and British Broadcasting Corporation 2022

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Media watch: Johnny’s fans complicate matters for advertisers and broadcasters

Posted on September 17, 2023 by philipbrasor
Travis Japan for Kagome

The main concerns for the media right now with regard to the sex abuse scandal surrounding the male idol production company Johnny & Associates is the loss of advertising gigs for the company. There have already been announcements of certain companies cancelling contracts to use Johnny’s talent, which could have serious ramifications for its bottom line. Though the male stars that Johnny’s represents make money for the company doing many different things, appearing in print and broadcast ads may be the most lucrative. Various reports say that Johnny’s earns ¥80 billion a year from ads. The pay for appearing on variety shows and acting in movies and dramas is notoriously low in Japan because of all the time spent, and concerts involve lots of expenses and extra personnel that cut into profits, but TV commercials can be done in a day or less and the contracts are usually huge. In order to take some responsibility for the sins of their founder and show their seriousness, Johnny’s current management has offered to not take their usual share for advertising contracts, meaning all the money goes directly to the talent themselves. Nevertheless, advertisers are dropping the company.

However, according to an article that appeared in the Asahi Shimbun Sept. 15, there are other considerations at play that complicate the calculus used to determine whether holding on to Johnny’s talent is still worthwile for advertisers and, by extension, broadcasters. In the article, a 27-year-old female fan of an unnamed Johnny’s boy band explains how she has been following some of its members even before they formed the group, when they were members of the company’s stable of idols-in-waiting who basically support the banner stars by being backup dancers and other things. When these young idols finally debuted as a bona fide group, she attended their first concert and felt fulfilled herself that they had realized their dream.

So when the group—Travis Japan, in case you’re interested—did an ad campaign for Kagome vegetable juice, she wanted to “pay them back” for the happiness they had brought her and ordered a case of the beverage. “Now, everybody in my family drinks this juice,” she said. Of course, she has no particular opinion about the quality of the product and doesn’t even mention whether she drank vegetable juice in the past. She simply wants to “contribute to the sales of the juice” so that the members of Travis Japan will “get more jobs in the future.” 

This fan’s succinct rationale for patronizing a company that uses Johnny’s charges in its advertising—she’s doing it to help her idols—is what makes it difficult for advertisers to cut their relationships to Johnny’s. As an executive of a major advertising company points out in the article, it’s very easy for advertisers to project sales increases when they hire Johnny’s idols. And the effectiveness of the ads is exponential, since fans of a particular star not only buy the product or service advertised, but, using social media, spread the word to other fans and potential fans. The executive claims that only Johnny’s idols provide this kind of effectiveness. And as the above-mentioned fan herself said, she essentially infected her own family with her love of Travis Japan. One professor of pop music history told the Asahi that, in fact, advertisers tend to hire Johnny’s talent in order to sell products and services that specifically target families. 

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Review: No Bears

Posted on September 15, 2023 by philipbrasor

Between the time this movie was shot and its release date in Japan, its director, Jafar Panahi, was jailed and then released by the Iranian government for engendering “propaganda against the establishment”; and this on top of the 20-year ban on filmmaking imposed on him a decade ago for the same charge. During the ban, Panahi has continued to make movies in semi-secrecy, and they have been as formally rigorous and thematically thought-provoking as any movies made in Iran—or the world, for that matter. No Bears, at the very least, is his boldest comment on the role of art under a repressive regime, though it’s also his most plot-dependent story in years, which is a function of the situation he created in making it.

Panahi plays himself making a movie remotely from an Iranian village on the Turkish border. Unable to travel abroad legally, he sends his crew to a town on the other side and, through his MacBook, directs his actors and sets up shots as long as the cell coverage cooperates. The movie he is making is about a dissident couple, Zara (Mina Kavani) and Bakhtiar (Bakhtiar Penjei), who are trying to secure fake passports in order to emigrate to the West. As we eventually find out, the actors are themselves trying to do the same thing, and Panahi is basically fictionalizing their situation to make a dramatic film, a strategy that backfires with unfortunate consequences. Meanwhile, in the village where Panahi is temporarily resident, the locals look at him with a mixture of awe (his reputation as a director proceeded him, but mainly because his mother is from this area) and suspicion that grows to a certain level of contempt when rumors spread that he has accidentally taken a photo during his stay of a couple who are forbidden from seeing each other because the female half has been betrothed to another man ever since she was born. Panahi dismisses this claim by saying he did not take any such photo and gives the village elders his data card to prove it, but the tensions within the community are so strained that he must go the extra mile to convince them that he is telling the truth, and, as with the movie he’s trying so desperately to complete, his sense of righteousness gets the best of him and ends up making the matter much worse.

The central plot thread is Panahi’s cordial but nonetheless defiant approach to local customs that he doesn’t believe in (“I don’t get the rationale”), an attitude that mirrors his defiance of the Iranian government. But the director doesn’t let himself off the hook. His status as an artist who looks at things from a position of objective intelligence has made him arrogant, and just as the poetic license he possesses prompts him to miscalculate what his machinations are actually doing to the couple who portray his principals in the Turkish movie-within-a-movie, his sense of aggrievement at his own circumstances leads to a second tragedy in the village that affects innocent people who have no involvement in his affairs, be they political or professional. Though No Bears has a rambling structure that’s often frustrating to follow—probably owing to the fraught circumstances of its production—it’s one of the most emotionally affecting works in Panahi’s filmography, and that’s saying something. 

In Persian. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

No Bears home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022_JP Production

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Review: Gran Turismo

Posted on September 14, 2023 by philipbrasor

As a studio, Sony Pictures is relatively light on IP product, though the one they do have, Spider-Man, is a heavyweight. I’m not sure if the race driver simulation game Gran Turismo is franchise-worthy, but the whole presentation here is geared toward endurance. In one significant way, however, it’s a one-off: The movie is based on the true story of Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a British kid who went from a stone talent for the GT game to an actual career as a racer. And while I’m not sufficiently attuned to gaming lore to understand how close the connection is between GT and Sony’s Play Station, the company that gets the most attention and product placement here is Nissan, one of whose Japanese racers came up with GT as a simulator for drivers and which eventually sponsors an academy that invites the best sim drivers in the world to compete for a chance to drive the real thing. Apparently, Mardenborough’s story has been liberally altered in order to sharpen the movie’s dramatic arc, which is only to be expected, and there’s a rote quality to the storytelling that leaches whatever tension the movie might offer outside of the actual racing scenes, which are the best that money can buy.

Much is made of the disconnect in actual experience between racing sim cars and racing real cars. Jann’s father (Djimon Hounsou), a retired footballer, doesn’t see his son’s pastime as a “real sport,” but even the salty Jack Salter (David Harbour), the old school racing coach who is talked into working with the half dozen sim hopefuls who want to join the Nissan race team, never quite buys the idea that skills on the console can translate to skills behind an actual engine. Jann and the other students in the academy are constantly being told “you’re only gamers” and then, of course, they prove everybody wrong, but director Neill Blomkamp has to show this with a lot of CGI that itself looks like it was designed for video games, like when Jann imagines the real race car around him as a set of separate interlocked parts (one of the features of GT is that racers can design their own cars), though exactly how that translates into victory is not clear. Jann’s obstacles are multivalent. Orlando Bloom’s Nissan factotum, the man who came up with the academy idea, isn’t keen on Jann as the best representative of the brand until, of course, he is; and Jann’s competition, especially a smug McLaren racer (Thomas Kretschmann), refuse to take him seriously. As a result, Jann’s string of victories feels vindicating in a pleasant way, but the sailing, to use a completely different sports metaphor, is way too smooth, despite the fact that Jann at one point is involved in a horrific crash that almost kills him.

If I said the racing scenes make Gran Turismo worth seeing, it’s not going to convince people who are already averse to such sports films to buy a ticket, but Blomkamp, who made his name with the sci-fi curiosity District 9, is a very visceral director, and it’s when Jann and the other characters are in actual race cars on a track that the movie comes into its own. Obviously, the makers of the game Gran Turismo are hoping more people will be turned on by this aspect to join in the fun, but I imagine anyone who has ever had the potential of being a sim gamer is already one. And as for Nissan, no one is going to buy a Skyliner after seeing this movie. Sony Pictures should just be happy they got one decent film from this particular IP.

Opens Sept. 15 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).

Gran Turismo home page in Japanese

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Review: Brother and Sister

Posted on September 13, 2023 by philipbrasor

This is at least the third new film by a major French director released in Japan this year that focuses on adults addressing their elderly parents’ pending deaths. Being that the director is Arnaud Desplechin, whose metier is family-centered black comedies of manners, it should be the best of the three, but ever since his heyday in the 00s, Desplechin has wandered thematically outside his comfort zone and he seems to be having difficulties getting back into it. There’s a feeling of desperation to this tale of siblings who hate each other with a passion, as if Desplechin believed he had to follow the more hackneyed guidelines established for melodramas premised on parental mortality. The opening two scenes are over-wrought for purposes that seem unnecessary and the movie never really gains its narrative bearings despite the script’s attempts to explain the feud’s background through flashbacks that pop up in a random fashion.

The reasons for the principals’ mutual enmity is never explicitly clarified. Alice (Marion Cotillard) is a successful stage actress with mental health issues that may have been the result of an abusive childhood, though her resentment of her younger brother, Louis (Melvil Poupaud), springs from envy of his own early success as a writer that she believes came at the expense of the family’s dignity—there’s much talk of a defamation suit that Alice brought against Louis back in the day. The particulars emerge piecemeal over the course of the movie, which opens with Alice trying to attend the wake for Louis’ young son and being told to leave in the most unpleasant way possible. This scene is followed by one that takes place five years later on a country road where Alice’s and Louis’ parents (Joel Cudennec, Nicolette Picheral), stopping to help a young woman who has had an accident, are themselves hit by a truck, thus leaving them with life-threatening injuries that compel the two warring siblings, along with their ineffectually neutral younger brother, Fidele (Benjamin Siksou), to converge at a Paris hospital and wait for the worst. Much of the movie’s action has to do with Alice and Louis pointedly avoiding each other, thus necessitating multiple episodes from their separate lives and how they cope with their anxieties and rages. Alice, who is in the middle of a production of Joyce’s The Dead, drinks and downs anti-depressants she obtained through tactics that can only be described as bullying (and from Louis’ psychiatrist, no less); while Louis also drinks but prefers the more organic salve of opium. Marginal characters, like Louis’ inexplicably tolerant wife, Faunia (Golshifteh Farahani), and a Romanian immigrant fan of Alice’s, Lucia (Cosmina Stratan), are obviously on hand as sympathetic sounding boards for the siblings’ respective bitter ramblings, but it’s hard to get worked up over their feelings of persecution when they’ve lead such charmed lives. Desplechin’s decision to make his two main characters people who have made decent livings from their creativity (though Louis, apparently, hasn’t published anything of note in recent years) effectively undermines his dramatic goals, especially when he constantly trades in cliches about writers and actors. 

The viewer waits, of course, for the truce, which comes in spurts, and while such a reckoning seems more like real life the overall film never coalesces into a credible story. Alice and Louis remain such dislikable, unsympathetic characters throughout that any reconciliation is going to be difficult to pull off, and I didn’t buy it for a second. What’s even more frustrating is that I’m not sure I was meant to. 

In French. Opens Sept. 15 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (03-3477-9264).

Brother and Sister home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Why Not Productions – Arte France Cinema

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Media watch: To survive, ex-cons have nowhere to go but back to jail

Posted on September 8, 2023 by philipbrasor

In an essay posted Aug. 23 on Magazine9, activist Karin Amamiya wrote about “someone the same age as me” (48) named Hiroshi Yamada who is currently on death row for the murder of an elderly couple in Nagoya in 2017. Prior to his sentencing in March, Yamada had already received a death sentence last year when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Consequently, the court-ordered death sentence had little meaning for him because he already knew he would die in prison. “So what?” he thought when the judge sentenced him to hang, according to an article Amamiya read in the magazine So written by Yamada. The article was in the form of a memoir, and Amamiya, whose life work is helping people who live at the margins of Japanese society due to economic hardship, found his story to be not only affecting, but representative of a situation that is all too common in Japan: the ex-con who is prevented from reentering society due to systemic and cultural barriers. 

Yamada, it turns out, is not his birth name, which was Matsui. After he was sentenced to death, Matsui was adopted by another man on death row named Koji Yamada, for reasons that Amamiya does not explain. Amamiya admits that she was unaware of Yamada’s case, even though he has already posted various essays about his life and situation on the blogsite Note through various people on the outside. Amamiya went back and read these essays and was struck by the chain of events that led to the murder for which Yamada received the death penalty. He attributes the killing to a sudden burst of resentment when the male half of the couple he killed, who lived near him and knew he was collecting government assistance, said something to the effect of “It must be nice living so well when you don’t have to work.” 

Yamada has been in and out of prison most of his adult life. He was born in 1974 to a single mother who worked in bars and was always dating married men. Yamada started working right after junior high school, and was kicked out of the house he shared with his mother and sister after he stole some of her then-boyfriend’s alcohol. He lived on his own and worked a string of jobs in the electrical trade, often clashing with superiors and having to change employers. Then, when he was 24, he was hit by a truck, causing permanent damage to one of his legs. After his release from the hospital, he tried to move back in with his mother but she refused, so he slept under the overpass of a train line. There, he attempted suicide once and, desperate for cash, stole a wallet. He was caught and spent time in jail awaiting trial. It was the first time in his life that he had a secure roof over his head and guaranteed three meals a day. He was released when he was given a suspended sentence, but soon, at the age of 30, he was arrested again, convicted, and sent to prison. After 3 months he was paroled, and the only work he could get, given his criminal record and his bad leg, was in the sex trade working mainly for underworld types. Carrying out his job often entailed illegal actions, and he was arrested again for theft and given a 5-year sentence. After completing his debt to society, he was released and tried to become a taxi driver in Tokyo. He even managed to pass the test the first time, but his leg made it difficult for him to work long hours and he had to quit. 

He turned to his underworld acquaintances but even they couldn’t provide him with enough work to get by, so he applied for welfare, and the official who handled his case at the local government told him he first had to have an address and steered him to so-called hinkon bijinesu (poverty business)—shady companies that find lodgings for people on government assistance as long as they sign over most of their payments to the company. Obviously, the local governments and these companies are in cahoots, because hinkon bijinesu is an already well-documented racket that preys on desperate people. Through the company he contracted with, Yamada was given personal space in a room with others in exchange for most of his welfare payment. In the end, he had only ¥20,000 left over per month. He eventually got sick of it and left the lodging, thus effectively forfeiting his welfare payments. It occurred to him that the only place left for him was prison, so he shoplifted some confections from a supermarket and reported himself to the nearest police box. They told him to go away, and so he went to a bar and stole a handbag, and then reported himself to another police box, but the woman who owned the handbag didn’t want to press charges. He ended up spending only 10 days in jail.

His mother then allowed him to move in with her and the man she shared it with. Yamada applied for welfare again, and, as with the first time, was steered to a hinkon bijinesu. He stole ¥4,000 worth of pachinko balls and was arrested “on site,” and finally got what he wanted, another stint in prison, where he attempted suicide twice. Upon release he went right back on welfare, but this time he lived in a shelter, which had lots of rules. Even hinkon bijinesu was better, so he signed over his welfare payments to another company. 

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Busan International Film Festival 2023 press conference

Posted on September 6, 2023 by philipbrasor

It seemed somewhat telling that the first question from reporters attending the online-only press conference for the 2023 Busan International Film Festival was about the Zoom format itself. Prior to COVID, the press conference, traditionally held the first week of September to announce the main features and participants, was held in person in two locations, Seoul and Busan. The pandemic forced it to go online from one venue, but now that the pandemic is officially over, why still do it that way? asked one journalist. The interim festival director, Nam Dong-chul, answered that the Zoom format was “more reasonable” logistically, since more press people could attend, especially those, like myself, who lived outside of Korea. 

I think it’s not unfair, therefore, to approach the press conference from an aesthetic standpoint. Unlike the past two PCs, this one was framed as a middle distance shot, with the two presenters, Nam and the interim managing director, Kang Seung-ah, sitting at the dais some distance apart within the frame. Usually, the presenters are shot as tightly as possible, so the framing here had the effect of making the observer feel as if they were in the actual room where the PC was taking place and sitting some ways away. There was a sense of spatial separation, and it was difficult to gauge the expressions on the two officials’ faces. Since what they were doing was essentially reading the press kit out loud, the event itself seemed to have little meaning. However, there were opening remarks and the Q&A, which ended up revealing perhaps more than what the official pronouncements have done.

For one thing, Nam did not avoid the elephant in the room, which is the scandal that precipitated his and Kang’s elevation to “interim” leadership status. As everyone knows, former executive director, Huh Moon-young, resigned in May after he was accused of sexual harassment, and the festival itself then apologized over “mishandling” the scandal, since it didn’t initially reveal the allegation when it announced that Huh was leaving, thus implying that it wanted to cover up the reason. Sexual harassment in the Korean film industry is an open secret, so the festival said it would investigate the allegations (which Huh denies), but since then the whole administration has been in chaos because co-founder and chairman, Lee Yong-kwan, also quit to take responsibility. With this year’s edition of the festival at risk, the administration named Nam, the lead film programmer, to the director’s post, and Kang to the newly minted managing director job, which is mainly in charge of budgeting and administration. That Kang is a woman is significant since insiders have told the trades that what they are basically raging against is the culture of male cronyism that pervades the Korean film industry, as well as BIFF.

After a brief video rundown of the film highlights of the festival, Nam admitted that the festival was going through a “difficult time,” but that only meant he and his colleagues would have to “work harder than ever” to make the festival a success, “though we shouldn’t get our hopes up.” This unnecessary feint to fatalism may have been a hedge against any future problems that crop up, but he was sure to thank the sponsors and the mayor of Busan for their support. Later, during the Q&A, Kang talked about the budget and how it had been difficult to attract sponsors due to the scandal, so some cuts had to be made. The most obvious result is the lineup, which is much smaller than it was in 2019, before the pandemic: 209 films from 69 countries, though it should be noted that there are 87 World and International Premieres. Another casualty of the budget issue is there will be no BIFF Forum this year, where noted filmmakers hold forth on their work in lecture or interview-style settings. 

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