Review: Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody

Posted on December 23, 2022 by philipbrasor

British actor Naomi Ackie plays the powerhouse pop singer in this latest bid to cash in on her legacy, and does a formidable job in creating a distinctive on screen character, lip-syncing to beat the band, a talent that may be overlooked in the critique of her performance. Sure, she was saved the humiliation of having to recreate one of the most superhuman voices of the last three decades, but the movie is all about recreation, not exploration. Written by Anthony McCarten, who also penned Bohemian Rhapsody, the script is a master class in standard musical biopic, which perhaps makes even more sense in Houston’s case since her whole life fits the formula scarily to a T: preternaturally gifted offspring of a seasoned gospel/soul professional, Cissy Houston (Tamara Tunie), is catapulted to fame by one of the most respected music moguls in the business, creates a whole new genre of R&B that easily crosses racial lines, wrestles with personal demons, and then dies young. Since we already have two different documentaries about Houston’s life that, together at least, seemed to cover every conceivable issue in her life, Wanna Dance is more than merely redundant. It’s the epitome of exploitation. The press kit I received at the screening was half filled with publicity materials for re-releases of her full catalogue.

Consequently, while much of the drama in Houston’s life is covered, the movie leaves a lot to the imagination, including her lifelong romantic relationship with road manager Robyn Crawford (Nafessa Williams), the DV implications of her marriage to Bobby Brown (Ashton Sanders), and her heavy drug use (which only figures in the end). The two themes that it does make an effort to sustain are her struggles in putting herself across as a Black cultural figure, as many Black people felt she too readily pandered to white audiences, and the bullying attitude of her manager-father, John (Clarke Peters), who may have been saddled with the bulk of the blame in the movie for Whitney’s self-esteem problems. Arista honcho Clive Davis (Stanley Tucci, whose portrayal amounts to the most entertaining aspect of the movie), of course, comes across as an avuncular saint, since Davis is one of the movie’s producers. He guides her career to the top and, even though he professes to “never get involved in my artists’ private lives,” tries to keep her on an even keel. The fact that he obviously failed, however, isn’t remarked upon in any way.

Musically, the film is marked by incidents that made Whitney a superstar, namely her singing of the national anthem at the 1991 Super Bowl, and her mesmerizing medley at the 1994 American Music Awards. Though these two episodes—the latter is presented in detail not once, but twice during the movie—certainly qualify as star-powering, they may mean less to people like me who don’t put much store in either football or music awards ceremonies, and in the end what keeps I Wanna Dance With Somebody, and Ackie’s impressive impersonation even without the singing, from making any kind of interesting statement about Whitney Houston’s life is its overriding assumption of American cultural significance. Show biz is the national pastime. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Shibuya Parco White Cine Quinto (03-6712-7225), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

I Wanna Dance With Somebody home page in Japanese

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Review: Flag Day

Posted on December 22, 2022 by philipbrasor

Knowing that Sean Penn directs and stars in this drama, based on a true story, and that he plays a truth-challenged, mostly absent father, the alert viewer will already be forewarned about the emotional drudgery in store. Taken from a memoir written by journalist Jennifer Vogel that is generally about her father, a counterfeiter in the 90s, Flag Day has all the earmarks of a vanity project, though not for Penn himself, who isn’t really on screen that much, but rather for his daughter, Dylan Penn, who plays Vogel as an adult (two other actors play her as a child and as a teenager). I have nothing against a famous father providing an opportunity for his child to prove her mettle in the same profession he has succeeded in, but by centering the action on Dylan’s performance rather than his, he inadvertently draws attention to himself, because in their scenes together she just can’t compare. 

Vogel grew up in a very volatile household: Her father, as she describes him, is a bred-in-the-bone “flim-flam man” and her mother an alcoholic who soon divorces him. Vogel spent much of her childhood and all of her adolescence shuttling back-and-forth between parents, neither of whom was prepared to devote any time to her; the mother (Katheryn Winnick) because she had already remarried and started a new family, and her father, John, constantly distracted by whatever illegal scam he was operating when he wasn’t serving time for arson or attempted robbery. Nevertheless, the script is structured in such a way that Vogel seems to be happiest when she’s with dad, whose penchant for the Big Lie is so obvious and prevalent that you wonder how Vogel would ever make it as a journalist, a vocation that requires a sharp radar for bullshit. Even John’s professed love of Chopin is framed as a con, shorthand for the kind of man he presented to the world. It didn’t fool his girlfriend (Bailey Noble), but seemed to convince his daughter. 

The main problem is that John is inherently unlikable and Sean Penn can still make him interesting because as an actor he’s fearless in depicting the worst human qualities, but in the requisite scenes of father-daughter strife that seem to reoccur like clockwork, Dylan Penn can’t keep up. Sean’s relentlessly hard-hitting direction only exacerbates this aspect, pumping oxygen into scenes that are already overextended dramatically. Flag Day tries to be a mordant study of middle American failure in the post-Reagan years, when the country’s sense of exceptionalism curdled into self-denial. In that regard, Sean Penn should have centered the whole movie on John, but then the script would have required an entirely different angle, and that wasn’t his purpose in covering this material in the first place.

Opens Dec. 23 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063).

Flag Day home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 VOCO Products, LLC

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Media watch: Welfare payments decrease despite inflation

Posted on December 21, 2022 by philipbrasor

The welfare ministry’s main task with regards to public assistance is to make sure individuals who receive government funds due to financial difficulties are not taking undue advantage of the system. Consequently, the rationale behind public welfare in Japan isn’t the same as it is in, say, Europe, where providing public assistance to the needy is considered a core mission of government. In Japan, those who require help must be proactive, even agressive, in securing that help. 

It’s therefore no surprise that since 2013 the amount of public assistance that’s been made available by the welfare ministry has been steadily decreasing, according to a recent report by NHK. The biggest drop, 10 percent, was from 2013 to 2015. The government has explained that this decrease was due to a concurrent drop in the consumer price index. As a result, throughout Japan 29 lawsuits were brought against the government by welfare recipients who demanded they be compensated for the loss of benefits, and Oct. 19 the Yokohama District Court found in favor of some of these plaintiffs, saying that the government’s decision to cut payments was arbitrary. No experts were consulted before the cuts were made and the CPI justification wasn’t convincing since the index is based on a wide variety of products and services, including big ticket items such as smart TVs and computers, which people on welfare don’t buy, so using the CPI as a referent was not “reasonable” since it didn’t properly gauge the cost of living for people already receiving public assistance. Food and necessary goods did not decrease in price appreciably.

NHK says that this was the fourth case so far that was decided in favor of the plaintiffs. In another case that is currently being tried in Saitama, the plaintiffs’ attorneys are arguing that cutting welfare benefits is a violation of Article 25 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to a minimum standard of living. If the suit is successful, it would make for a very strong precedent. 

Of course, in the past few years, inflation has erased any CPI decrease, but people who receive government assistance have not necessarily seen an increase in their benefits. In many cases, they have continued to lose economic traction in other ways. 

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Media watch: Bad conditions for technical interns persist

Posted on December 18, 2022 by philipbrasor

Despite the negative press that Japan’s overseas technical interm program has received in recent years, nothing about it has changed in any way. According to NHK, in fiscal 2021 there were more than 23,000 formal complaints made to the Organization for Technical Intern Training, most of which involved unpaid wages or unfair dismissals. As of June, there were some 327,000 foreigners in Japan working under the program, which ostensibly was set up to teach technical skills to people from overseas who would then “transfer” these skills to their home countries, but, as everyone has learned through media reports, almost all trainees work in labor-intensive jobs, usually for less than the standard minimum wage, in the agricultural and manufacturing fields. Though they may, in fact, acquire some skills, their main purpose in coming is to make money that they can send or take home. Even if their wages are lower than that made by Japanese workers doing the same jobs, it is usually more than they could earn in their home countries, so the program is essentially a means for companies and organizations to acquire workers at low pay. Consequently, these companies have become dependent on the program, and there are often disputes between employers and employees that goes beyond the usual cross-cultural friction. For instance, interns are often compelled to work overtime and their movement is greatly limited by their employers. Of the aforementioned complaints lodged by interns, 3,200 had to do with not being able to gain permission from employers to return to their home countries for emergencies or other reasons. 

As NHK reports, the number of complaints has continually risen since the complaint service was put in place 5 years ago, even during the height of the COVID pandemic, when Japan was effectively closed to outsiders. Interns who were already in Japan remained to work. Had they left, they wouldn’t have been able to return, even if they hadn’t completed their approved training period. The number of complaints in fiscal 2021 was 80 percent higher than in 2020 and 3.2 times higher than in 2019. The government obviously understands that the program is not being carried out properly and have assembled a panel of experts to review it. However, the panel has yet to schedule even its first meeting. 

The reasons for rectifying the program are not necessarily the obvious ones having to do with workers’ rights. Actually, it is becoming more difficult to attract interns. According to the Immigration Agency, 50 percent of the interns presently in Japan are from Vietnam, and while there are still Vietnamese who have applied to participate in the program, more and more are opting out to work in places like Taiwan, where the conditions and wages are often better than those in Japan. Consequently, many farmers and small factory owners are having a difficult time finding help, at least if they want to pay below-standard wages.

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Review: Tomorrow Morning

Posted on December 17, 2022 by philipbrasor

It’s impossible to underestimate the aspirational power of movies. The popularity of Hollywood cinema during the Depression was due to its ability to remove people from the anxiousness of their everyday lives for a few hours, usually by presenting characters in well-off situations. As Preston Sturges demonstrated so fundamentally in Sullivan’s Travels, what people want when they’re down-and-out is something that makes them laugh, and while cinema is capable of so much more it’s this idea of being transported that undergirds all films. Musicals are perhaps the purest form of this idea, since they are by definition fantasies that privilege the characters’ emotional lives. Nick Winston has adapted and directed a film version of Laurence Mark White’s stage musical about a couple getting a divorce, and while the situation depicted has its moments of insight and dramatic clarity, it’s set in a world that feels managed to provoke feelings that clash with what’s emotionally going on in the story.

The movie starts at the end, with the divorce of Jack (Ramin Karimloo) and Catherine (Samantha Banks) an almost done deal, and juxtaposes their sad and bitter interactions with those at the beginning of their relationship, when they were falling in love. Both have creative vocations—Jack is a failed novelist working for big bucks in advertising and Catherine is a successful painter—and live in a hip, sterile penthouse that only a tech baron could afford. The purpose of this annoyingly intrusive production design is to show how material matters have made the couple’s marriage untenable, which is an acceptable reason for divorce, but makes for weak broth with which to cook up a musical. White’s muscular pop songs seem written for an entirely different sort of story, one where people overcome adversity, but all the characters seem stuck in a limbo of romantic indifference. One reason may be that the original story was written for American characters and an American setting, but, due to the way the project developed, ended up anchoring a British production with West End actors. There’s a generic quality to the performances and the direction (not to mention the urban milieu, which is London but evokes nothing distinctive about the city) that make the whole movie feel perfunctory and featureless. In the end, what you mainly come away with is: These people seem to have a lot of money. What are they bitching about?

Now playing in Tokyo at Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715), Cine Switch Ginza (03-3561-0707).

Tomorrow Morning home page in Japanese

photo (c) Tomorrow Morning UK Ltd. and Visualize Films Ltd. Exclusively licensed to TAMT Co. Ltd. for Japan 

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Review: Never Goin’ Back

Posted on December 16, 2022 by philipbrasor

This seems to be the season in Japan for delayed releases of American comedies set in Texas and centered on female characters. Though I think Support the Girls, which came out here two months ago, is a better movie, Never Goin’ Back is perhaps more distinctive simply because it was directed by a woman, Augustine Frizzell, meaning its take on the protagonists is more naturally funny without sacrificing the emotional investment. Unlike in Support the Girls, the girls here are really girls in that BFFs Angela (Maia Mitchell) and Jessie (Camila Morrone) should be in high school but they’ve already dropped out and are working full time as waitresses while also sharing a house. They live more or less paycheck to paycheck, but their preternatural free-spiritedness means they also live exactly the way they want—it’s why they dropped out, and the film doesn’t judge them for it at all. 

The plot is very simple, and Frizzell uses it as a kind of frame with which to elaborate the socioeconomic circumstances that rule Angela and Jessie’s life. Jessie’s 17th birthday is coming up and Angela wants to treat her to a holiday on the beautiful beaches of Galveston. Since they live in Fort Worth, that wouldn’t seem to be a big deal, but they’re living on minimum wage, so it is a big deal, and the storyline involves their various machinations to make the trip a reality, which turns out to be more difficult than Angela imagined. For one thing, Angela has already blown their combined savings on transportation and reservations, leaving them without enough money to pay the rent that month. Though they seem confident they can scrounge the cash from their roommates, those roommates, being male and barely of drinking age, are patently unreliable. One of them is Jessie’s brother, Dustin (Joel Allen), a would-be weed kingpin who in the opening scene is robbed by some competitors. The other is Brandon (Kyle Mooney), a fairly gentle but addle-brained horndog who is an easy touch. 

Dustin’s sudden insolvency makes the household’s rent emergency that much more acute, and the rest of the movie, which finds not only Dustin’s hapless crew being threatened endlessly, but the girls getting fired and then thrown in jail, is what used to be referred to as a “madcap romp,” though one that is qualified by the aforementioned socioeconomic circumstances, not to mention the kind of loose, profane comic style that has dominated these kinds of youth movies since Superbad. A lot of this sort of thing is stretched uncomfortably thin—the humor derived from white dudes trading in Black-identified vernacular gets old fast, and while Frizzell sends up her redneck milieu with care and smarts, the various schemes concocted to deal with the crises at hand seem over-determined and often detract from the casual likability of the various characters, including Angela and Jessie. Frizzell could have just made a great comedy about their affecting friendship without all the narrative huffing and puffing, but, then, who would go see it? 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

Never Goin’ Back home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2018 Muffed Up LLC

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Number 1 Shimbun December

Posted on December 15, 2022 by philipbrasor

Here is our media column for the December 2022 issue of Number 1 Shimbun, which is about the media’s lack of scrutiny over the government’s push for a much larger defense budget.

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Review: Blind Ambition

Posted on December 15, 2022 by philipbrasor

Robert Coe and Warwick Ross’s subtly effective documentary about four Zimbabwe emigrants to South Africa walks a careful line in explicating the men’s difficulities in adjusting to new lives in a place fraught with risks for outsiders—doubly so in a country like South Africa, which retains many elements of its racist heritage while also throwing up economic obstacles for newcomers in general. The two filmmakers present the economic crisis in Zimbabwe as more than just an impetus to seek better circumstances. Moving was a life-and-death decision for these four men, some of whom had to leave behind family to make a truly treacherous journey to a place where they were not welcome but which then knew needed laborers.

But after these matters are neatly presented, the movie becomes almost carefree in its depiction of the men’s lives as they slowly settle in and adjust (thanks in no small part to the churches they join), and that brings us to what these four men have in common. All ended up in the service industy, specifically high-end restaurants where they had to learn from scratch how to please well-off customers, initially as waiters. As the title suggests, they made the most of whatever opportunities arrived, even if they involved understanding something totally outside their lived experience, and that’s how they all became sommeliers. As one tells the camera, when he first tasted wine he was grossed out. “I didn’t like it,” he says, “I was sick for two days.” But when he realized how important wine was to the customers he served, and how they depended on their waiter to recommend something good to go with their meals, he learned as much as he could, as did the other three subjects of the film. They studied and became good at their jobs, so much so that they eventually banded together to represent South Africa—a major wine-producing country, by the way—at the World Wine Tasting Championship in France. That South Africa would be represented not only by four Black men, but four Black migrants, did not escape the purview of the world of wine-tasting, and eventually their efforts were recognized by experienced coaches who offered to help them attain their dream of traveling to Europe to compete. Understanding what their profile at the contest can do for Africa’s image, they dub themselves Team Zimbabwe, thus representing not just a continent, but a phenomenon. 

If the movie loses some of its dramatic mojo in the second half, it’s mainly because Coe and Ross have no choice but to sit back and allow matters to run their course. The team adjusts with comic determination to the whims of their eccentric white coaches, struggles to generate funding, meets with the usual culture clash issues in France, and generally have a good time (without getting drunk, since none of the four like alcohol for that reason). Occasionally, one or more members wax philosophical about the meaning of wine, which to them is impressive because each bottle is a link to a specific piece of land at a specific point in time (the contest essentially boils down to blind-tasting wines and determining where they are from and what vintage), thus, in a way, mirroring their own situations. The movie doesn’t even have to try to be stirring and heartwarming.

In English, French and Shona. Opens Dec. 16 in Tokyo at Huma Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Cinemart (03-3352-5645).

Blind Ambition home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Third Man Films Pty Ltd.

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“2046,” October 2004

Posted on December 11, 2022 by philipbrasor

The movie reviews I wrote for the Asahi Shimbun between 1996 and 2010 are not available on the internet, so I am slowly trying to add them to this blog.

Someone once said that it wasn’t until Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express was screened at Cannes in 1994 that critics started saying Asia was the future of movies. Wong’s film was somewhat pretentiously hailed as the second coming of Godard, though Wong himself described Chungking as a “student film,” because he was still learning to direct the kind of movies he only saw in his mind. In the ten years since, his work has become increasingly assured, both visually and narratively. If Chungking and the follow-up, Fallen Angels (’95), seemed like collages of clever but disparate themes, Happy Together (’97) and In the Mood for Love (’00) were obsessive in their dedication to the idea that romantic love was the only theme worth making movies about.

Wong’s latest, 2046, is a sequel to In the Mood for Love–itself a sequel to Wong’s 1990 film Days of Being Wild–which chronicled a love affair between a married newspaper reporter, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), and a married woman, Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung), in 1962 Hong Kong. 2046 takes place five years later and focuses only on Mr. Chow, who remains psychically wounded by the memory of that affair.

Mood was about what happens to passion when it’s repressed. Mr. Chow and Mrs. Chan consummated their love only once, and their restraint lent the movie a palpable sexual tension that a more explicit film could never achieve.

The Chow that slithers through 2046 is almost a different being. He returns to Hong Kong after having lived for a time in Singapore, cynical and predatory. He’s something of a gigolo. He recently ended an affair with a dramatically melancholy woman (Gong Li, dressed for a funeral) who had a weakness for gambling. However, we only get to see him in action when he seduces a bar hostess named Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), a neighbor of his at the stylishly run-down Oriental Hotel, which is the same place he carried out his single sexual assignation with Mrs. Chan.

Wong presents this affair as a series of transactions, a zero-sum game whose currencies are money and time. After weeks of flirtatious jousting as “drinking buddies,” Chow finally gets Bai Ling into bed and pays her for it. Much later, when Chow’s passions have cooled and Bai Ling comes to visit his apartment for emotional comfort, he tells her she can stay “for a price.” It’s the same old story–boy seduces girl, girl falls for boy, boy loses interest–only here it comes with a balance sheet.

Chow isn’t a complete jerk. Jin Wen (Faye Wong), the daughter of the hotel owner, falls in love with Tak (Takuya Kimura), a Japanese businessman who’s living there temporarily. Her father hates the Japanese and forbids his daughter to see him any more. After Tak returns to Japan Chow helps Jin Wen correspond with him using his room number as an address.

He takes advantage of the situation for his own benefit. Having been downsized by his newspaper, Chow starts writing novels for cash. He uses Jin Wen and Tak as models for characters in his science fiction novel 2046. In the book, Jin Wen is an android with whom Tak falls in love.

2046 happens to be the number of the room where Jin Wen resides, and where Chow and Mrs. Chan had their moment. Chow writes about a “train that leaves regularly” for the year 2046, where travelers can “regain their memories.” No one ever comes back.

Wong’s fractured narrative is full of loaded and obvious symbols, but isn’t meant to add up to anything storywise. Reportedly he had in mind a much different movie when he started it four years ago. It was to be a projection of Hong Kong fifty years after its reversion to Chinese rule. Whatever happened in the meantime, this certainly isn’t that movie, and one can easily see that Wong has mostly forced a plot onto bits and pieces of ideas that probably occurred to him as he went along. He is famous for not using written scripts, and was still adding and subtracting things days before it was shown at Cannes. That may account for the fact that Maggie Cheung, who receives a “special appearance by” credit, is only seen for a few seconds.

It’s important to remember that Chungking Express had a similar patchwork feel, but the pieces were of wildly varying character. Here, all the sequences, regardless of each one’s relevance to other sequences, feel equally intense. Wong wants to prove only one thing, that nothing conveys romantic passion better than the movies do. His greatest accomplishment in 2046 is a scene near the end where Tony Leung pushes Gong Li against a damp wall and kisses her long and hard, smearing her blood red lipstick all over her panting mouth. Wong simply wants to give us the greatest movie kiss of all time. They’ll probably still be impressed in 2046.

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Review: A Year-End Medley

Posted on December 9, 2022 by philipbrasor

I’ve never been a big fan of holiday movies, whether they’re Christmas-, Hannukah-, Thanksgiving-, or New Years-themed. There’s something a bit too circumscribed about them, and the effort to maintain a contextual holiday “spirit” is, I find, dispiriting. This Korean movie, made for TV, seems to take as its model the Love, Actually style of mutiple plot lines interwoven into a kind of holiday quilt. The timeframe starts on Christmas Eve and ends New Years morning, and while almost all the stories are romantic in nature, they cover enough ground to draw you in…up to a point. 

Almost all the action revolves around a high-end Seoul hotel, which provides the requisite luxury production design without having to dive into fantasy-land. The two main plotlines involve female staff. So-jin (Han Ji-min), the hotel’s catering captain, has to manage the wedding ceremony and reception of Seung-hyo (Kim Young-kwang), the guy on whom she’s had a crush since they were in a pop band together in university. Lee-young (Won Jin-ah), an aspiring musical actor who works on the housekeeping staff, is put in charge of the executive suite when the hotel’s new, young CEO, Yong-jin (Lee Dong-wook), has to use it for a week after his home is made uninhabitable by an exploding boiler. These two stories blend in with other, lesser tales that explain the economic situation of the hotel and the various characters’ back stories, some of which involve relatives or acquaintances of the principals with their own stories, like So-jin’s high school age brother (Jo Joon-young), who has a crush on a classmate, a champion figure skater (Won Ji-an); or the hotel’s middle aged widower doorman, Sang-gyu (Jung Jin-young), a former student activist who runs into his first love (Lee Hye-yeong) before the wedding rehearsal of her daughter at the hotel. Then there are some stories that are basically untethered, the most potent of which is about an up-and-coming pop singer (Seo Kang-Joon) who is performing at the hotel while being wooed by a powerful talent agency, which wants to cut out the singer’s long-time loyal manager (Lee Kwang-soo), who himself seems to be in love with the singer. Then there is a self-defined loser, Jae-yong (Kang Na-neul), who decides to blow all his money on a nice room before committing suicide on New Years Eve. 

For the first hour or so, the filmmakers do a pretty good job of juggling the various storylines, and while some are better than others, they gel in a satisfactory manner as they make their way to the fateful date, but in the end they actually remain in their separate lanes and are thus entirely predictable, which is another thing I don’t like about holiday movies. You always know how they’re going to end.

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6868-0075). 

A Year-End Medley home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 CJ ENM Corp., Hive Media Corp.

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