Brendan Fraser saves The Whale

Posted on April 8, 2023 by philipbrasor

During his Tokyo press conference on April 6 at the Ritz-Carlton to promote his Oscar-winning performance in Darren Aronofsky’s film, The Whale, Brendan Fraser, making his first trip to Japan in 15 years, used the words “courage” and “empathy” multiple times to describe any number of matters connected to the people who worked on the movie. “It’s about empathy and hard-won hope,” he said in an attempt to encapsulate the movie’s theme. When asked if he had maintained a friendship with former co-star (in one of the Mummy movies) Michelle Yeoh, the female counterpart to his Best Actor award this year, he said, prior to seeing her at the Oscars ceremony, he ran into Yeoh at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and lauded her as an artist with “a lot of courage.” He used the same noun to describe Aronofsky when he decided to tackle the play from which The Whale was adapted (by the play’s author), as well as his character, Charlie.

It was this last qualification that gave me pause. The comment about Charlie’s courage came during a particularly lyrical description of the character in response to a pointed question about how the film reflected certain uncomfortable truths about American society. Charlie, after all, is morbidly obese, a condition we are led to believe was caused by trauma: Charlie’s ex-lover, a former student of his, killed himself out of shame due to his religious upbringing. Charlie is essentially eating himself to death.

“Having courage—it means acknowledging there’s an obstacle,” Fraser explained in the hushed but clear tones he maintained throughout the press conference. “Charlie is a hero, but not the kind of hero who carries a sword and shield.” What Fraser was trying to say, using awkward psychobabble, was that by recognizing and “owning” his condition, Charlie was doing something heroic, a reading of the character that may mislead people who hadn’t yet seen The Whale to expect something it isn’t. Charlie’s misery is his most salient feature, and Aronofsky has highlighted it with prosthetics that turn Fraser into a mountain of self-disgust. The actor is often called upon to perform fits of gorging—on pizza, on sandwiches, on chocolate—that are meant to horrify the audience. In order to accept Fraser’s characterization of Charlie, you really have to readjust your understanding of the word “courage.”

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Review: Air

Posted on April 7, 2023 by philipbrasor

I’m a sucker for movies set in the business world, be they about finance (The Big Short) or sales (The Founder), as long as they center the drama on the transactional nature of commercial enterprise. This isn’t to say I’m a capital-C capitalist, but rather that the kind of dedication that goes into business dealings, especially when they are totally self-serving, makes for credible tension, and the more technical the dealings the more exciting it is. Ben Affleck’s Air satisfies that craving. It isn’t the first movie about marketing, but it may be the most single-minded. There’s a kind of religious fundamentalism to the way these people approach their jobs, and while often this obsessiveness is played for laughs, in the end it only succeeds when the filmmakers share in that obsessiveness, even to the peril of their own souls.

The story told here is not new, and to basketball freaks it’s probably gospel. In 1984, the running shoe leader Nike, headquartered in cool, green Oregon, trailed Adidas and Converse in the sales of basketball shoes by a wide margin. As with all sports equiipment companies they needed to tie their brand to popular athletes, and were stymied by their CEO Phil Knight’s (Affleck) penny-pinching ways, which usually resulted in hitching their wagon to second- or third-tier figures. Nike’s basketball division marketer, Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), as pure a sport head as you could find, wanted to go bold and spend the entire budget on one guaranteed star, and he saw in Michael Jordan, at the time still a college player who had just decided to drop out and go pro, the future. As it happened, Adidas and Converse also eyed Jordan as a potential asset, and they had more money and street cred, so Vaccaro had his work cut out for him, not only in terms of persuading Jordan to sign with Nike, but in getting Knight to allow him to court Jordan. 

Consequently, Vaccaro went around Knight and Jordan’s vitriolic agent (Chris Messina), talking directly to Jordan’s parents (Viola Davis, Julius Tennon), which was something of an ethical no-no, but that’s how many tough business deals are forged, and Deloris Jordan’s even-tempered, qualified encouragement prompted Vaccaro to go ahead and proceed as if there was a possibility Nike would get the endorsement. He even had their shoe designer (Matthew Maher) make a prototype. As played by Affleck, Knight is something of a false flag, a guy who acts all CEOey (though in a Buddhist sort of way) but in the end bows to the superior minds he hired to make him money, which in this case also included marketing chief Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), and idea man Howard White (Chris Tucker, in a role that is custom made for his peculiar talents). And when the movie settles in among these guys and their trash-talk meetings over strategy, it hums like a fine-tooled machine. But, of course, it has to be about more than just business, and once Vaccaro goes eyeball-to-eyeball with Deloris—Michael, like the deity he is, is never seen in the movie except from the back—it becomes something of a passion play and loses its spark; or, more precisely, it gets warm and mushy, mainly over matters of fairness. And while that’s a nice thing, if they really wanted to address the problematic side of sports paraphernalia they should talk more about Asian sweatshops, which is only mentioned in passing, as if it were expected but too much of a downer. For business-oriented movies, the vibe is everything. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Air home page in Japanese

photo (c) Amazon Content Services LLC

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Review: Knock at the Cabin

Posted on April 6, 2023 by philipbrasor

Faith is difficult to convey in a movie if the viewers themselves have to be persuaded of its power. Normally, the apocalypse is depicted as having a grounding in natural phenomenon—climate change, asteroids, shifting tectonic plates—but when the source is supernatural the audience has to already have some kernel of belief in a higher intelligence to find any sort of value in the story. In M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, it takes a while for the particulars of the end-of-the-world scenario to sink in, a strategy that is both a function of the story’s suspense and its ability to make us buy it, but if it fails in that endeavor the movie has no meaning, no matter how skillfully Shyamalan charts out the thrills.

For what it’s worth, his characters make the most of his problematic premise. Eric and Andrew (Jonathon Groff, Ben Aldridge) are a couple who, with their adopted daughter, Wen (Kristen Cui), repair to a rented cabin in the woods for a relaxing vacation. As soon as they arrive, the cabin is invaded by four individuals armed with makeshift weapons who tie them up. The quartet’s leader, the massive Leonard (Dave Bautista), explains in an extremely gentle manner that they have all experienced “visions” of the end, and have somehow been told to seek out this particular family, which must kill one of its members to appease whatever force is bent on destroying the earth. What’s disconcerting about this home invasion is that the perpetrators are not aggressive, but apologetic and pleading: They believe utterly in their mission and beg the two men to make this ultimate sacrifice, since they have to decide to die themselves. The intruders can’t kill them. Naturally, Eric and Andrew don’t believe it, even after Leonard turns on the TV to show them evidence of plagues and disasters.

Most of the movie is a psychological cat-and-mouse game, with Leonard and his three accomplices—none of whom knew one another prior to their visions—using heightened emotions and their own show of self-sacrifice to make their case for the preservation of humanity, while their two captives resort to logic and then pure rage (Eric at first believes they are homophobic psychopaths) to resist their entreaties. What makes the concept difficult to swallow is its arbitrary nature, as if it were thought up by some evil twelve-year-old and then translated into millennial-speak by a scriptwriter. The development is punctuated by some potent bits of violence and intrigue, but the story’s relentless drive toward a binary conclusion—will the world end or won’t it?—drains it of compelling drama if you don’t buy the faith premise in the first place. Because it’s a Shyamalan production, there is always the possibility of a twist, but by the time such a possibility makes itself clear you may have grown tired of the whole psycho-philosophical exercise. 

Opens April 7 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), Shibuya Humax Cinema (03-3462-2539), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Knock at the Cabin home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Universal Studios

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Review: Girl Picture

Posted on April 5, 2023 by philipbrasor

Though high school coming-of-age stories all adhere to a kind of universal vibe built on notions of sexual awakening and the burgeoning responsibilities of adulthood, each one is delineated by a specific socioeconomic milieu that must be carefully navigated to make the requisite conflicts credible. This Finnish feature focuses on three young women in their last year of school who seem to live in a world where they already function as adults, likely thanks to progressive social attitudes that prevail in Finland, and so the drama—as well as the comedy—is derived from the way they succeed or fail in this endeavor. 

Which isn’t to say they don’t suffer from stereotypical teenage angst. The first time we see Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) she’s barely participating in a field hockey game in gym class out of some inchoate hatred of all the things sports represents, and ends up busting a classmate in the shins out of frustration. Mimmi is thus prefigured as a cynical iconoclast whose bitterness stems from a feeling of abandonment after her mother remarries and has a baby boy who monopolizes her attention. Mimmi’s co-worker at a mall smoothie stand, Ronkko (Eleonoora Kauhanen), is a relatively excellent student whose hormones have gotten the best of her, and when she’s not busting out salacious sex talk at work with Mimmi she’s hitting up boys at parties without really projecting where that will get you. The third wheel is Emma (Linnea Leino), whom Mimmi meets cute at the aforementioned party and eventually gets into bed, despite Emma’s reluctance, which has less to do with sexual caution than with her disciplined life as a competitive figure skater. When Mimmi shows her that there’s more to life than triple lutzes Emma starts to doubt her career goals, which does a number not only on her head but on those of her French mother and her coach, neither of whom can imagine Emma not skating.

Director Alli Haapasalo juggles the three girls’ interactions and personal stories with admirable facility, but there’s not enough character distinction among them to make their material situations interesting. Though each girl does have an overriding emotional aspect, they seem cut from the same middle class, liberal-minded fabric. The dialogue is almost too coherent: This is how young girls talk as imagined by principled adults. Also, everybody drinks a lot and openly, and while alcohol is a common plot device in teen movies there’s no feeling here that it’s forbidden, unless Haapasalo’s intention was to contrast this “mature” content with the girls’ occasionally “innocent” behavior, usually depicted in trite montage segments of them laughing and clowning around. Simplistic psychology is understandable for addressing adolescent anxiety, but in Girl Picture the psychology is a function of the production design rather than the story. 

In Finnish and French. Opens April 7 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645) and Yebisu Garden Cinema (0570-783-715).

Girl Picture home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Citizen Jane Productions

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Number 1 Shimbun April

Posted on April 4, 2023 by philipbrasor

Here is our column for the April 2023 issue of Number 1 Shimbun, which is about NHK’s future as a public broadcaster.

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Media watch: Impossible to leave without a trace

Posted on April 1, 2023 by philipbrasor

For years, even decades, the big story surrounding Japan’s aging society is how to pay for people’s twilight years when so many grow old at exactly the same time. That time is upon us right now, and the story is changing. The dankai no sedai, or Japan’s version of the baby boom generation, is shorter in length than it is in other developed countries, technically comprising people born in the late 1940s, since the Japanese government successfully implemented a birth control system in the 1950s to address lingering postwar shortages. So while the bad news was that this huge cohort would all reach their dotage at the same time, once they started dying off, the fiscal challenges would subside.

But now we have another problem, which is that all these people are dying at the same time, and owing the the atomization of Japanese society a good portion of them have not made proper preparations because of poverty, lack of heirs, and no connections to their communities. An article in the March 29 Asahi Shimbun reported on a survey conducted by the interior ministry that found as of October 2021, local governments reported they were in possession of 60,000 sets of remains (i.e., ashes) of people who had died alone and without a will or any immediate contact information for heirs or relatives. Almost all of these remains were being stored in public facilities and had yet to be formally interred. Some were even being kept by private companies hired to clean up the living quarters of people who died alone. The survey report also points out that this number did not represent all the remains that were unclaimed, since ashes that had already been removed to temples or other religious facilities were not included. 

Local governments are thus in a difficult position, and the ministry identifies the problem as being due to “no unified regulation to confirm the desire of relatives [of the deceased] to accept the remains,” and thus local governments don’t know what to do with them if they can’t locate any relatives. According to the law, “relatives” in this case legally extend to the “third degree,” and thus include uncles, aunts, and even great grandchildren. However, even if local governments do contact these relatives, if they don’t respond to the request to claim the remains, the local government can do nothing. And that seems to be happening in quite a few cases. Beyond the 60,000 sets of remains that were in storage, the number of dead individuals that were unclaimed between April 2018 and October 2021 nationwide amounted to 106,000. This translates as a huge burden on local governments, which have to spend money on cremation, storage, and sometimes even funerals. They can ask heirs to reimburse them when those heirs are found, but the heirs cannot be legally compelled to comply. Often, it also costs money just to locate these heirs.

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Review: Tori and Lokita

Posted on March 31, 2023 by philipbrasor

What has always impressed me about the social-issue films of Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne is the way they incorporate an empathetic take on the lives of people living on the margins into stories that are both credible and dramatically affecting. In some of their most recent films, however, this dynamic has slipped a bit, usually on the side of storytelling. Their latest, about a pair of African refugees struggling to settle into some kind of orderly life in urban Belgium, is their most scathing social indictment in years, which makes the small plot blunders all the more frustrating. 

When we meet the titular characters, one an adolescent boy from Benin (Pablo Schils) who has been provisionally accepted because he is fleeing from terror, the other a young Cameroonian woman (Lokita) who slipped in via a trafficker to work and send money back to her family, they have both already finished what should have been the most arduous and dangerous part of their European journey, the trek from Africa by boat and truck. But danger is still at hand, especially for Lokita, who is trying to convince the authorities that Tori is her brother. For sure, their bond, obviously forged during the journey, is as tight as that of blood siblings, and when Lokita is away from Tori for any length of time she has panic attacks. Nevertheless, immigration doesn’t buy her story, and she more or less hangs in limbo, working as a drug courier for a restaurant chef. Meanwhile, the trafficker, a fellow African who helped her get to the EU, is demanding more money all the time and threatening her. Tori, as resourceful as they come, helps the best he can, and his efforts give Lokita courage under the most demeaning circumstances.

Eventually, Lokita has no choice but to obtain papers illegally, and the chef promises to help her get them if she works for his drug concern tending marijuana plants in an underground warehouse. She’s essentially a prisoner there, with no contact to the outside world, including Tori, who is trying to make a little more money on the side scamming the chef. Obviously, something’s got to give and when it does it hits hard. The bleakness of the turn of events is as believable as it is depressing, but the mechanics of how Tori and Lokita get to that juncture is painfully obvious and sometimes contrived. It’s a problem that’s evident in a lot of current cinema and TV—how exactly do criminal operations work in real life?—but if it’s in service to the thriller genre, then the viewer will cut the filmmakers some slack. The Dardennes are deadly serious about the situation they depict, and while the empathy is as strong as ever, the story is forced to travel a bumpy road. The brothers, it seems, are as liable to fall back on cliches as any action-movie hack might.

In French. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

Tori and Lokita home page in Japanese

photo (c) Les Films du Fleuve-Archipel 35-Savage Film-France 2 Cinema-VOO et Be tv-Proximus-RTBF (Television blege)

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Review: Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen

Posted on March 30, 2023 by philipbrasor

Daniel Raim’s lo-fi documentary on the film version of the Broadway play Fiddler on the Roof is about exploring a world lost to time, but twice removed. On the one hand, the musical itself, based on stories by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, depicts a lifestyle—the Jewish shtetl of Imperial Russia—that had all but vanished by the eve of World War I. But the documentary itself depicts a world of popular culture that is also gone. The film version of Fiddler was made in 1971, when Broadway was still dominated by conventional narrative-arc musicals that were considered, as Pauline Kael so memorably put it, “square” to more progressive theatrical sensibilities of the day. In that regard, Fiddler not only represented the last gasp of classical postwar American musical theater, but, as a film version of an extremely popular work of imagination, a kind of unicorn in the entertainment realm. As narrator Jeff Goldblum explains in almost mystical awe, Fiddler shouldn’t have been a hit in the first place. Based on stories almost 70 years old about an Old World community that only very few were likely to identify with even indirectly, it nevertheless found a huge audience due to the universality of its theme–the fragility of family. Tevye, the poor dairyman, has to marry off three of his five daughters, and in the process comes face-to-face with a world whose changes he doesn’t understand but must abide by. 

The central figure in the documentary is director Norman Jewison, whose credentials in musical film were impeccable, having worked in Canadian and American television on many music programs with people like Judy Garland and Harry Belafonte. However, as he explains so clearly (in footage that seems to range over several decades, thus indicating Raim’s doc is more or less an assemblage of stock interviews) he didn’t want to make a standard Hollywood musical, which in the 60s were mostly filmed on back lot sets. Though location musicals, like Paint Your Wagon, had been flops as movies, Jewison insisted on finding a place as close to the Ukrainian setting he could, and ended up in a village in Yugoslavia, which he points out is also gone. Much of the film is taken up with showing how this dedication to some kind of verisimilitude was both anathema to the concept of musical theater and challenging in its own right as a film production. But the real wonder of the doc is the way it approaches casting. Jewison (who also points out repeatedly that he is a “goy” nevertheless obsessed with Jewish culture growing up in Toronto due to his surname) was dead set against using Zero Mostel, who originated the part on Broadway, as Tevye because Mostel stole the show every night with his broad comic interpretation. Such a performance style was right for the theater but wrong for a movie, which was more intimate. Though many A-list actors, including the Italian Catholic Frank Sinatra, wanted the part, he chose the Israeli actor Topol, who played Tevye in the London stage production, and it made all the difference in the world. But even the other actors were virtual unknowns, and Raim spends a lot of time with the three women, now elderly, who played the three marriageable daughters. Though Fiddler made them famous for a short while, none really benefited from it in a big career way, because the parts were only iconic in the moment. The only possible exception in the cast was Paul Michael Glaser, who went on to stardom in Starsky and Hutch.

But there’s so much more of a techical nature that shows how, before CG and other filmic tricks, the making of a large-scale movie musical was a daunting task, and how resourceful the various staff were. John Williams, now the most successful composer in Hollywood, adapted the score for the movie, and his descriptions of syncing notes to visual cues is fasincating. Kael also said that the base appeal of Fiddler, especially for Americans, is the way it deals with the loss of home and community, but Raim’s documentary itself imparts a melancholy nostalgia that is difficult to shake, especially right now since the Japanese release takes place only a few weeks after the death of Topol.  

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).

Fiddler’s Journey to the Big Screen home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Adama Films LLC

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Review: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Posted on March 25, 2023 by philipbrasor

A book review that appeared in Harper’s about a year ago analyzed the movies of Nicolas Cage as a kind of literary exercise, and while the critic who tackled this assignment was careful to keep his tongue firmly in cheek he didn’t say anything about this particular movie, in which Cage plays himself as a figure of derision. The movie almost does a better job of placing Cage’s unusual career in context, but not quite. My understanding has always been that Cage does so many movies because he has so many debts, but according to The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage can’t help but overextend himself because his ego won’t let him stop. In the opening scenes, “Nick” Cage is trying to secure the lead in a movie by the director David Gordon Green (playing himself, presumably) that he anticipates will be a comeback of sorts, though his therapist wonders what he’s coming back from, since he seems to be working all the time. Here, Cage and the film’s writer-director, Tom Gormican, are clearly sending up Cage’s career in schlock, since he’s hoping to regain the artistic cachet he enjoyed in the 1990s. In any case, Cage overplays his hand by pestering Green to no end, all the while talking to himself via split personality that reveals his total lack of confidence, an observation that’s reinforced by his agent Richard’s (Neil Patrick Harris) total indifference.

Upon losing out on the part, Cage vows to quit acting but takes one last desperate job for a million bucks to appear at a birthday party for a billionaire Spanish fan, Javi (Pedro Pascal), who, unbeknownst to Cage, is associated with a European drug cartel that may have kidnapped the daughter of a politician. When Cage shows up for the gig, the CIA, who is watching Javi, recruits Cage to be a mole. But as it turns out, Javi isn’t the evil drug baron most people might expect; he’s actually at the beck-and-call of his family, who are evil, and just wants to write a kick-ass action flick. That’s why he invited Cage, to see if he can sell his screenplay in Hollywood. The two get on like gangbusters.

So what promised to be a Hollywood satire poking fun at one of the most unusual careers a bona fide movie star has ever enjoyed essentially turns into the kind of low-rent, direct-to-video potboiler that Cage is often accused of stooping to star in. And while those who really like Cage for his characteristic OTT performances will appreciate the way “Nick” Cage does Liam Neeson better than Liam Neeson (there’s even a fictional wife and daughter who are placed in peril), the movie is short on laughs and suspense. The Harper’s article was way more exciting. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Kadokawa Cinema Yurakucho (03-6258-0015), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905).

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 Lions Gate Entertainment Inc.

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Media watch: Consumers will be paying for Tepco’s mistakes forever

Posted on March 24, 2023 by philipbrasor

On March 22, the Fukuoka District Court dismissed a lawsuit brought against the government by a regional electrical power company that claimed a surcharge added to all electricity bills nationwide to pay compensation to victims of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in March 2011 is illegal. According to the Asahi Shimbun, the judge in the case ruled that compensation for the disaster should be “borne fairly by all electricity consumers.” The plaintiffs, Green Co-op Denki, a subsidiary of a Kyushu-based food cooperative that sells non-nuclear electrical power to co-op members in 16 prefectures, objected to the surcharge, which it is required to add to its electrical bills, by saying that it had been implemented via an order issued by the Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) without Diet deliberation. The judge said that the order was “based on the opinions of experts and discussions in the Diet.” The plaintiff’s attorney rejected this opinion, saying that the judge was merely parroting the government’s claims. “The fact that anything can be allowed through a ministerial order without revising the law” contradicts the principles of parliamentary democracy, the attorney said. “I can’t accept that.”

However, the issue goes deeper, as outlined in earlier Asahi articles, and addresses the way the government allows former regional power monopolies to do whatever they want in order to retain their exclusive grip on the grid. 

Green Co-op launched its electricity business in 2016, 5 years after the Fukushima disaster, for the purpose of providing its 420,000 members with electricity that doesn’t use any nuclear power sources. Subscribers understand exactly where their electricity is coming from. However, Green Co-op has to use existing transmission lines to deliver their electricity, and those lines are owned and controlled by the former regional power monopolies, in their case, Kyushu Electric Power, which adds a fee to every electric bill, regardless of the service provider, called takusoryokin, or residential transmission fee. When Green Co-op examined this fee more closely they discovered that it incorporated a surcharge permitted by METI in 2017 and implemented in 2020 that is used to pay for compensating the victims of the Fukushima disaster. 

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