When it premiered at the Locarno Film Festival in 2015, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour revived interest in Japanese art house cinema among those who had mostly given up on it since the dawn of the 1990s. A long, intimate portrait of the current state of interpersonal relations in Japan, it struck a nerve by delving into matters that couldn’t be conventionally articulated. Hamaguchi, who is now hot stuff due to the award-winning Haruki Murakami adaptation, Drive My Car, co-wrote Happy Hour with Tadashi Nohara, a noted scenarist (he also collaborated with Hamaguchi and director Kiyoshi Kurosawa on Wife of a Spy) who is finally making his directoral debut with Third Time Lucky.
Comparisons to Happy Hour are inevitable, and not just because Third Time Lucky is also set in Kobe and features many of the same actors. It’s a domestic drama with interwoven plot threads involving connubial relationships. The central character, Haru (Rira Kawamura), is a divorced woman living with a divorced doctor (Yasunobu Tanabe) whose own daughter has recently moved to Canada to attend university. Haru has no children of her own, and feels abandoned after the move. When the doctor confesses to an affair, she leaves him and, feeling desperate, “adopts” a young homeless man (Tomo Kawamura) she stumbles upon who says he has no memory of who he is or where he’s from. She calls him Naruto, which was the name she chose for the baby she miscarried almost ten years earlier.
Her adoption of Naruto disturbs her extended family, including her mother, with whom she now lives; her brother, Takeshi (Katsuyuki Kobayashi), an aspiring rapper; and Takeshi’s emotionally unstable wife, Mikako (Hiromi Demura). None of these family units stay together for long, and the development of the story has to do with the various pieces recombining to create new relationships. However, Nohara doesn’t present it as a tidy whole. He understands that relationships are messy by definition, and much of the motivations behind the characters’ actions are not clear. Haru, for instance, spends an inordinate amount of time trying to explain her strange affinity for Naruto, whose own provenance isn’t made entirely clear either, despite an opening scene that would seem to explain a lot. Later, when a man enters the picture claiming to be his father, the viewer wonders if Naruto is really suffering from amnesia at all, but in any case by this point Haru doesn’t care. More than a substitute son (which he is too old to be, anyway), Naruto is a project, and one her friends and relatives resent. Nohara seems to be saying that what is a family if it doesn’t require a great deal of emotional investment?
There’s no doubt that Nohara can write very affecting scenes. The most potent involves Takeshi confronting Mikako’s illness as it has impacted their married life, and she rebuffs his professions of love by essentially saying that he will never understand her. The indelible truth of the argument as it applies to their specific circumstances is devastating, but Nohara doesn’t always seem keen on developing it, and we’re often left with powerful moments that never connect with one another, as if messy relationships are inherently impossible to convey. He may actually be too ambitious for his own good.
In Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
Danish director Anders Thomas Jensen’s revenge film manages to hit all the expected beats in terms of violent actions and righteous payback while undermining most of the narrative justification necessary to get the audience rooting for said violence. But unlike a lot of other unconventional Danish genre films, it’s not as subversive as it thinks it is, owing mainly to its uneven comic tone. But it is quite clever, and it’s the cleverness of the central plot idea that draws you in.
The tightly structured opening ends in a train accident that kills several people, including Emma, the wife of professional soldier Markus (Mads Mikkelsen), who is already guilt-ridden over how much time he puts into his work at the expense of his family. His teenage daughter, Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg), who was with her mother and survived the wreck, has never been particularly close to Markus, and now resents his presence even more as he arranges for the funeral and seethes silently because he has no one to blame for his wife’s death. Soon, however, he will have someone to blame. As it turns out, a statistician named Otto (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) was also on the train. In fact, he gave up his seat for Emma right before the crash. But he also noticed on the train a rather fearsome looking man and later found out that the man was on his way to testify against a notorious right-wing biker gang, Riders of Justice. After Emma’s funeral, Otto shows up at Markus’s door with a theory based on the odds that such a crash could not happen naturally. Otto thinks that maybe the crash was planned in order to kill the witness, meaning it was carried out by the Riders of Justice.
This is exactly the kind of news Markus, who is in the military because it’s the kind of life that suits his temperament, wants, and thus he embarks on a project to get revenge against the Riders, but he isn’t alone. Not only do Mathilde and Otto join in the carnage, but two other associates of Otto’s, probability expert Lennart (Lars Brygmann) and computer hacker Emmenthaler (Nicolas Bro), neither of whom are what you would call action figures but who have, buried in their respective pasts, sources of trauma that gives them reasons to take their frustrations out on the notorious Riders, even if the Riders themselves had nothing to do with those traumas. What sticks in the back of the mind of the viewer is, of course, the very real possibility that the Riders had nothing to do with the train crash, but as they say, once you start on a course of action that involves killing people, you just have to keep killing people.
What keeps the movie interesting is its unpredictability, not in terms of action, which is pretty rote, but rather in terms of motivation. Markus isn’t simply a rage-filled killing machine and Mathilde isn’t simply a rebellious teen who would rather punish her father than the Riders. More interestingly, the trio of eggheads are more than the sum of their resentments, but as noted above, the comical contours of their interactions sometimes lead to puzzling outcomes, and much of the intended humor falls flat as a result. But you have to hand it to Jensen: He has a weird way of telling a story.
In Danish and Estonian. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
After reading the synopsis for the American film CODA (Children of Deaf Adults) but prior to seeing it, I felt as if I’d seen this movie before, and, as a matter of fact, it is based on a 2015 French film called La famille Belier. However, when I looked through my files and then online to check out my suspicions I realized I hadn’t seen the original (which, for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem to have received distribution in Japan or, for that matter, in any English-speaking countries). Nevertheless, the high concept hook of the story—the only hearing member of a family of deaf people decides to pursue her love of singing—seems so readymade for a certain species of domestic drama that I’m sure variations on the theme are rampant. It’s the way the international movie industry works.
The American film takes place in Gloucester, a fishing town on the Massachusetts coast. Our hero, Ruby (Emilia Jones), works with her father, Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), on the family’s fishing boat. Ruby is the only member who can hear and speak, and thus is stuck with the job of interpreting for her family with the world of the hearing. She has a rough time of it, mainly because her parents have fully manifested the kind of Yankee bullheadedness ascendant in this part of the country, and they not only make great demands on the buyers and distributors they deal with, but have developed a kind of passe working-class attitude that embarrasses Ruby. (Farting and having loud sex are the questionable shorthand the film uses to convey this particular predicament.) For the most part, the familial relationships depicted have a natural appeal that the writer-director, Sian Heder, handles with care and imagination, but the movie is about much more; perhaps too much more.
Ruby loves to sing, and in early scenes on the boat we hear her humming and giving full voice to some familiar R&B lines, which her family can’t hear. So when she decides to join the high school chorus club as an extracurricular activity, her mother looks at her askance: Are you doing this just because your parents are deaf? It’s not an unreasonable question, and one the viewer has likely already asked themself. More problematic is how Ruby proves herself to not only be up to the challenge, but on top of it. At first, her self-consciousness gets in the way, but then the feisty, arrogantly confident, Motown-obsessed choirmaster (Eugenio Derbez), sensing something “unique,” essentially bullies Ruby into revealing her native talents, which the viewer may or may not buy since there is no prior indication that she’s had any musical or vocal training at all.
The rest of the movie writes itself, and by stressing Ruby’s musical triumphs—a public performance in which she shines, an audition for the Berklee School of Music—over her conflicts with her family, which need her to participate in their troubled business, the movie produces a conflict that is so automatic it could have been concocted by AI. Nevertheless, the family scenes maintain a healthy naturalism even in their sentimentality, thanks mainly to Kotsur, whose expressive range is formidable. Frank is by far the film’s most complicated character, a proud man who knows his deafness makes him a mark but is determined not to be taken advantage of. This pugnaciousness extends to his role as paterfamilias, and Heder has the good judgment to led him carry the movie, or, at least, carry it during those scenes where he’s on screen. The rest, which dabbles in first-love cliches and the inevitable heartbreak of leaving one’s home, is pretty trite.
In English and ASL. Opens Jan. 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060).
Director Tom McCarthy gives the viewer every opportunity to offer his painfully thoughtful movie every benefit of the doubt, especially in the beginning when he introduces his protagonist, Bill Baker (Matt Damon), a laid-off oil worker from Oklahoma who wears the exact same working-class, middle-American garb every day. Based on messages dispatched through the movie’s overzealous marketing campaign, Baker could be easily pegged as a MAGA maniac, though the actual portrait is more nuanced. For one thing, Baker confesses he didn’t vote in the elections of 2016, and his troubled past as an addict and felon (the reason he couldn’t vote), which destroyed his family, gives him a tragic cast that overshadows whatever sociopolitical modifiers you are tempted to attach to his personality. So when Baker goes to Marseilles to visit his daughter, Allison (Abigail Breslin), who is in prison for murdering her girlfriend, your expectations have not necessarily been set up to be subverted.
If that were only the case. Matt Damon’s supposed turn as a red state neanderthal isn’t the only pre-release PR that misguides potential viewers. The idea that Allison’s situation is based on the Amanda Knox affair misses the mark by a mile. Though there are surface similarities, they have less to do with the actual crime than with the attendant tabloid publicity, and, in any case, the story is not about Allison, it’s about Baker and his redemption. Realizing a long time ago that he failed his daughter and perhaps drove her out of the U.S. with his neglect, he feels he needs to make amends by being there to help her with her appeal. The fact that he doesn’t speak French and looks like the kind of American who wouldn’t know a baguette from a bratwurst is used against him while simultaneously forming the bedrock of his self-determined identity, and Damon pulls it off.
But a movie that tries to get by on this kind of ironic scrutiny inevitably needs a ringer to prove its point, and so we have Virginie (Camille Cottin), a dyed-in-the-wool progressive single mother who works with immigrants and constitutionally refutes everything we are supposed to assume Baker stands for. They meet serendipitously, when Baker suddenly needs an interpreter and she just happens to be standing there. McCarthy practically ties himself in knots trying to bring these two together without resorting to outlandish contrivances, and it’s the obvious effort that makes the match less than credible. If you end up ignoring your better nature and find the resulting romance affecting, it’s because Damon and Cottin make it work despite the cliches built into their characters, and not because of the subsequent detective story to find out the truth behind Allison’s conviction. Whatever you want to say about Damon as a clueless representative of Hollywood wokeness, he nails the melancholy at the base of Baker’s lack of self-awareness, so when he comes alive to the possibilities of—for want of a better word—diversity, it’s almost touching. McCarthy counts on that revelation to deliver the bittersweet denouement, but I still had my doubts about the convoluted plot. If it was just about Baker and Virginie, I might have even choked up a bit.
In English and French. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Ostensibly a romantic comedy about android love, this subversively heartbreaking German feature, written (with Jan Schomburg, based on a published short story) and directed by Maria Schrader, makes too much sense for a tale that, while remaining stubbornly cerebral to the end, is entirely speculative. It also remains consistently funny until its mid-point, when the ramifications of creating happiness inorganically overwhelms the lighter aspects of the plot. The opening scene is a corker: Archaeologist Alma (Maren Eggert) goes to a singles bar where she is formally introduced to Tom (Dan Stevens), a handsome, agreeable man whose flawless German has a slight British accent. He seems to already know Alma, though they’ve never met, and Alma becomes suspicious, not of his intentions but rather of his very being and starts plying him with ridiculously difficult mathematical problems that he solves with fluent ease. However, when he asks Alma to dance he starts repeating himself aimlessly: a glitch, because Tom is an android.
Alma knew this from the beginning and only agreed to meet Tom as a condition for receiving funding for her program to investigate cunieforms in the U.S. Her supervisor at the museum where she works, Roger (Failou Seck), is working on the android program that Tom is the product of, and needs a single woman to test Tom’s romantic capabilities. The requirement is that Alma spend the next three weeks with Tom. Only then will she get the money for her research. The setup is patently ludicrous, but within the context of the android-boyfriend dynamic, it opens up all sorts of possibilities that Schrader exploits to the max. The rub is that Alma is not that young and her romantic history is mostly taken up by one man, a fellow archaeologist named Julian, with whom she broke up only recently and who is now about to marry someone else. Later, it is revealed that Alma and Julian’s relationship was fraught with tragedy, which affected Alma much more than Julian. Tom’s programming and, by extension, his algorithms are specifically attuned to Alma’s biography and psychological profile, circumstances that form the basis for much of the comedy. The genius of this conception is that Tom’s AI immediately adjusts to changes in Alma’s mood and outlook, and he corrects himself in order to adapt to what he “thinks” pleases her, but, of course, Alma, understanding always that he is a “robot” (a term that seems to offend Tom), also understands these adjustments. (As a side note, Stevens’ German dialogue sounds post-dubbed, though it also sounds like his actual voice, and this slightly meta detail adds greatly to Tom’s credibility as a sympathetic machine.)
But halfway through, the emotional weight of Alma’s personal tribulations overwhelms her steely, anlytical resolve. Compounding her inner rage at Julian’s smooth ability to move on, she has to address her father’s encroaching dementia and a serious functional matter that may upend her research, which, after all, is the whole reason for her agreeing to be with Tom, who “comprehends” exactly what is going on but cannot approach these problems organically. Ironically, this inability to “cope” makes him more endearing to Alma, who eventually looks upon him not only as the kind of friend she needs (based, perhaps, on a childhood friend also named Tom that may have been imaginary) but also a sex partner.
Thoughout the film, even as it turns melancholy and slightly predictable, Schrader maintains a strictly utilitarian structure that never shortchanges the characters, no matter how peripheral they are to the story. Even when the nameless woman in charge of facilitating the android project turns out to be an android herself, she retains her individuality as a character. It’s just that she’s not a human being any more, and for some reason, you don’t feel there’s anything strange about that.
In German and English. Now playing in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264).
These two hour-long documentaries by Michael Blackwood, filmed in a verite style, follow the jazz pianist Thelonious Monk during several concert and recording stints in the U.S. and then Europe in 1967. There is no narration, and much of the footage has been cannibalized for other documentaries about jazz, so for the most part the films do little to give you any idea about Monk’s history and opinions. The original docs were broadcast on German TV and then never shown again until 1999. These current prints were taken from stock that was remastered in 2017, and what you get is mostly Monk playing, and that’s what you should want. Probably the most idiosyncratic pianist in a genre where idiosyncrasy is the norm rather than the exception, Monk is given plenty of room in these films to show his stuff. The production notes tell us he was at the height of his “fame” as a performer, and the awe with which he is met by fellow jazz musicians and fans alike is palpable, but the man himself is mostly incoherent and inadvertently comic, what with his extensive collection of headgear and a cigarette smoking style that kept his hands free to play. Monk comes across as an artist who is instinctual in that he has no need to explain much of what he is doing or even what he wants. Though one of the greatest jazz composers ever, he has people who transcribe what he does (including his solos) and translate his often incomprehensible ideas to the people he’s playing with. Monk, of course, could read and write music, but by this point he didn’t seem to have to—or he just couldn’t be bothered. During one studio session, some players ask about keys and tempos and he only responds viscerally. Of course, that’s how jazz musicians communicate, but Monk seems particularly dependent on the intuition of his interlocutors.
During the concerts that were filmed, especially in the Europe doc, which chronicles a tour by the Newport Jazz Festival, Monk often seems disconnected, sitting slightly offstage while others solo, smoking and thinking. He will then casually get up, sit down at the piano and just get into it without fuss, but the exactitude of his intentions are obvious. There truly does not seem to be any conduit between thought and fingers. He’s more like an athlete than a musician, except that the beauty of what he produces is directly affecting. Though Monk would live another 15 years, he reportedly didn’t perform much after this period, and the overall mood of the two docs is of a man who not only has nothing to prove any more, but seems somewhat put out by any demand that he should. (It also suggests a man who wasn’t in the best of health.) In any case, Blackwood got the goods. These are films for hardcore jazz freaks. You come for the playing. Everything else is distraction.
Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).
South Korean cinema has perfected the police procedural owing mainly to Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (still his best, I think), which set the bar very high at a crucial time when Korean directors were coming into their own internationally. Though there’s nothing particularly distinctive in terms of narrative about Korean cop movies, the industry’s fairly relaxed attitude toward excessive violence, sentimentality, and social criticism often combine to make them much more than just the sum of their foot pursuits and dogged interrogations. Moreover, the mysteries tend to be informed by something that transcends the mere solution of a crime.
Even by those standards, Park Ji-wan’s debut feature, which she wrote and directed, is extraordinary, and it’s not just because the featured detective is a woman, but rather how her identity as a woman affects her sleuthing. Kim Hyeon-soo (Kim Hye-soo) is a veteran cop who hasn’t been a detective that long, and her career as the latter has been interrupted by a traffic accident that led to what sounds like a recovery period combined with a temporary suspension. When she finally returns to regular duty, her colleagues welcome her back but something is obviously different, and not just because she still needs to go through an internal investigation. Her first assignment is to look into a cold case on a remote island that involves a teenage girl who went missing on the night of a big typhoon. Her shoes were found on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, and she left a note in the house where she was staying. The local police have determined it to be a suicide, but they need confirmation from Seoul headquarters since they have yet to find a body. Kim’s job is to close the case once and for all.
From the beginning, it’s clear that it’s a job no one wants to do, and Kim goes about the investigation at first in a desultory manner, checking with the local cops and persons who knew the girl. She soon discovers that the case is more complicated than what she was told. The girl was essentially in a witness protection program since she was ready to testify against her own father, whom she fingered as the ringleader of an elaborate smuggling operation. The prosecutors set her up on the island in an empty house to keep her as far away from her father and his associates as possible, but the longer the girl, Se-jin (Roh Jeong-eui), stayed in isolation, the more uneasy she became. Kim finds this out from the only person who was close friends with her, Sun-young (Lee Jung-eun), a deaf, middle-aged woman who bonded with Se-jin over the former’s comatose niece, whom Se-jin cared for on a part-time basis. Through Sun-young, Kim starts doubting the local investigators’ stories, and realizes that Se-jin’s connection to her father is more fraught than anyone originally imagined.
But as Se-jin’s story slowly reveals itself, so does Kim’s. She is in the middle of a contentious divorce whose contours align with those of her accident and casts a pall on everything she does. It’s not so much that her situation causes her to identify with Se-jin, but rather that Se-jin’s desperation seems to have sprung from the same sort of reaction that Kim is now feeling toward all the men in her life trying to tell her what she has to do. As such, she understands that she has been sent here to close the case as a condition for getting her own career back on track. And she resents it.
Steady command of atmosphere is one of the hallmarks of South Korean cinema, and Park proves herself to be more than up to the task. There’s not a whole lot of action, and some viewers expecting a thriller may be disappointed, but the emotional tension never lets up. Even if the mystery offers no big surprises, it provides something richer: A character arc that is both realistic and dramatically affecting.
In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).
The Day I Died: Unclosed Case home page in Japanese
Given that the elaborate set piece which sets the extravagant mood for this highly stylized retelling of the fall of the Gucci fashion brand is a wedding where everyone sports comically distinctive Italian accents, it’s tempting to approach Ridley Scott’s latest blockbuster as his inevitable tribute to The Godfather, but while the similarities don’t end there (intrafamily intrigue! organizational criminal intent! professional hit men!), the juxtaposition of thriller elements with comical characterizations that may or may not be inadvertent keeps the viewer off-balance. Does it deserve that coveted imprimatur of a “movie that’s so bad it’s good”?
Probably not, because it isn’t that bad, just confused. The aforementioned caricatures of the various members of the Gucci clan are compromised somewhat by Lady Gaga’s turn as the outsider/spoiler of this epic, Patrizia Reggiani, a social climber from a family that, at the end of the 1960s, just recently clawed its way out of the working class. Patrizia’s skillful if somewhat trite seduction of the heir-apparent to the House of Gucci, Maurizio (Adam Driver), is the lip-smacking hors d’oeuvre that sets the irresistible tone, and Gaga acts her ass off, thus also setting an impossible bar for the rest of the all-star cast—almost all Oscar-winning thesps-with-a-capital-T—that none, understanding the thrust of the script, endeavors to reach. At the dynastic head of this troupe, both as characters and actors, we have Al Pacino as Rodolfo, Maurizio’s father, Gucci’s CEO, and an actual actor by profession, and Jeremy Irons as Aldo, the creative brains of this particular generation who actually talks Maurizio into joining the family business. Initially, Maurizio wants nothing to do with shoes and bags and dresses, preferring to make his way in the world of business on his own. But then Patrizia enters and convinces him that shoes and bags and dresses are the way to go.
The problem is that Maurizio isn’t satisfied to sit at the top of the empire and rake in cash. He wants to make a difference, even if it’s not a difference the rest of family appreciates, and with his wife’s help and encouragement, he turns away from the cheap knock-offs that have allowed the extended family to cruise on their name only. This decision alienates Aldo, who feels betrayed, and sets in motion a game of legal hopscotch that eventually snares the family in an international investigation into racketeering and tax dodging. None of this is served particularly well by Becky Johnston’s and Robert Bentivegna’s script, which is more concerned with Patrizia’s desperation as the family fortune is put in peril, as well as her suspicions, which turn out to be well-founded, that Maurizio is cheating on her. Enter Salma Hayek as a fortune-teller who helps Patrizia secure some Goon-level “mechanics” to take out Maurizio, and you get what should have been a proper payoff to the kind of social comedy that Adam McKay specializes in. Scott obviously thinks he’s getting what he paid for, but the actors work at cross-purposes, none more than Driver, whose typical interiority makes him look like the only person onscreen who’s not in on the joke. His opposite is Jared Leto, confined to interminable layers of makeup, as the black sheep, Paolo, who owns every scene he enters by sheer force of wicked will. Either someone told him he was in a different movie, or he decided he’d just have as much fun as possible because no way will he ever win another Oscar. Ironically, he may actually end up with one here. That’s how wacky a production it is.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Walf 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).
Though Clint Eastwood has never officially stated when he plans to retire as a director, it seems to be that he once said something about leaving acting behind, but I may have imagined that. In any event, having entered his 90s, Eastwood still insists on starring in his movies, and it’s getting more difficult to justify these appearances, even when he’s playing a character that is sufficiently old. His latest takes place in 1979, so the viewer is spared the trouble of having to make concessions with the kind of post-millennial sensibilities that Eastwood isn’t very keen on representing. His character, Mike Milo, is a cowboy, more specifically a one-time rodeo rider who works in some capacity for a horse breeder named Howard (Dwight Yoakam), who fires Mike in the first scene because he’s a “has-been,” a line that I first took as a joke since Eastwood looks so frail to begin with. Apparently, Milo hurt himself badly some years ago and has since become dependent on pain pills, but it’s not clear if that’s the reason Howard is firing him. It’s a pretty incoherent scene, and becomes even more puzzling when the movie quickly jumps a year into the future and Howard is attempting to rehire Milo for a one-off job: Go down to Mexico and bring back his teenage son, who lives with his floozy of a mother in a perpetual state of delinquency.
Though Nick Schenk’s script is based on a novel by Richard Nash (who’s credited as co-screenwriter), it doesn’t really give us much to work with, and the questions raised by Milo’s mission—Why Milo? Why does Howard suddenly want the boy to live with him?—are simply tossed to the side because the movie isn’t really interested in the job Milo is carrying out. It’s all about the journey. Milo eventually finds the kid, named Rafo (Eduardo Minett), and discovers the mother, Leta (Fernanda Urrejola), living is luxury due to some connections she has with underworld figures. At first, she seems happy to get rid of Rafo, but she changes her mind, again for reasons that make little sense, and after Milo and the boy leave, along with his fighting rooster, which give the film its title, she sicks a bunch of bruisers on the pair to bring them back, but they manage to elude their pursuers by hiding out in a nice old Mexican town where Milo finds work breaking horses and Rafo learns how to be responsible. That’s pretty much as far as the “story” goes. The film, however, seems to be more or less a kind of refutation of Eastwood’s reputational style. Milo is, of course, anything but macho at his age, and while his romance of a middle aged Mexican restaurant owner needs to be taken with a sack of salt, it’s nice to see one of Eastwood’s stock cowboy personalities, with all his rough edges in tact, relax and look at the sunny side of what’s left of his life. But in the end, Cry Macho feels muddled, its clear sentimental intentions clouded by a lazy attitude toward narrative. Though I don’t begrudge Eastwood his desire to keep making movies, this one really does look like it was made by a nonagenerian with cognitive problems.
Opens Jan 14 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
On December 26, Japan’s public broadcaster NHK aired a special program on its BS1 satellite channel about the making of the official documentary for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics, which is being directed by Nara-based filmmaker Naomi Kawase. One scene depicts a man whom NHK described in the explanatory subtitles as someone who had participated in an anti-Olympics demonstration and received money for his participation. Then, on January 9, NHK Osaka, which had produced the special, issued an apology, saying that some of the information conveyed in the explanatory titles had not been properly vetted. That night, there was a two-minute message aired on BS1 explaining the problem and apologizing to viewers and those associated with the Olympic documentary.
According to Asahi Shimbun, the scene in question was part of a program segment in which NHK was following another director, whom Kawase had asked to cooperate on the documentary, as he interviewed anti-Olympic protesters. The subject of the interview was not identified, but the chyron (explanatory titles) described him as a demonstrator who had been paid for protesting against the Olympics. According to NHK the chyron had been written by the NHK director based on “supplemental materials,” but apparently he hadn’t double checked whether the man actually participated in any anti-Olympic demonstrations. After the special was aired viewers wrote to NHK to complain about the segment. Then, in early January, NHK somehow located the man and learned that even when he was originally interviewed for the documentary—in June, before the Games began—he actually said that in the past he had appeared at demonstrations, though none had been protests against the Olympics, and he was sometimes paid for his participation. The only thing he said about the Olympics during the interview was that he was “thinking” of participating in an anti-Olympics demonstration “in the future.”
NHK said it had no intention of “fabricating” information. The problem was simply the result of a misunderstanding and lack of rigorous checking on the part of NHK staff. However, Asahi Shimbun said that before the special was aired, it had been shown to people “related” to the production, and none requested revisions. Asahi does not say whether any of these related persons were working on the Olympic documentary itself, but in its apology NHK insisted that the special was completely the responsibility of NHK, and Kawase had nothing to do with it. It should be noted, however, that while the interview with the anonymous “demonstrator” was aired by NHK, the interview itself was carried out for the purposes of Kawase’s documentary.
Nevertheless, Kawase, who has cultivated an enviable reputation with documentaries and feature art films that have won prizes at prestigious international film festivals, has received a certain measure of criticism on social media from people who think her documentary is essentially pro-Olympics propaganda. According to a January 6 posting on the media watchdog website Litera, these critics mainly cite a statement Kawase made during the NHK program where she insisted, “It was we [meaning Japan] who invited the Olympics [to Tokyo] 7 years ago,” adding that the nation as a whole was pleased to win the bid and happy to host the Games. Actually, a fair number of people had advocated that it should have been cancelled outright after it was postponed in 2020, so Kawase’s recent social media critics begged to differ, saying that there had never been a strong national—or for that matter regional—consensus regarding the Tokyo Olympics.
The Olympics ended without any serious problems regarding the COVID epidemic, which was one of the main reasons that protesters demanded the Games be cancelled. So in that regard, the pro-Olympic camp was vindicated. However, there were other reasons for people to object to the Games—the snowballing costs being shouldered by the Japanese public, the displacement of long-term residents by the construction of venues, the diversion of funds from 2011 disaster victims in the Tohoku region—and the feeling among Kawase’s critics was that if she doesn’t address these objections in her documentary, then the film will end up being nothing more than a propaganda device. More to the point, it was wrong for Kawase to generalize that everyone in Japan was happy about the Olympics. (It remains to be seen how Kawase addresses the anti-Olympic movement in the finished documentary, or is she does at all.)
Litera is also suspicious of Kawase’s intentions, since her media appearances in relation to the documentary tend to contain glowing descriptions of the Olympic spirit and the International Olympic Committee charter. When confronted with the COVID issue, she said that any such anxiety in relation to the Olympics had no meaning, and while there was no appreciable increase in infections among people involved with the Games, Litera thought that her assurances regarding people’s fears came off as sounding tone deaf at the very least. After all, if the public really had been unanimously excited about hosting the Olympics, the fact that they were eventually barred from attending the Games due to COVID countermeasures should have been a crushing disappointment.
ADDENDUM, Jan. 11: Asahi Shimbun today published a statement by Kawase about the NHK faux pas, saying that she was not shown the footage of that interview in question by the director in charge of the interviews, and stressed that she was merely one of the subjects of the NHK special. Also, journalist Ryu Honma, speaking on the web talk show “Hitotsuki Mansatsu,” commented that the people NHK should apologize to are those who organized the anti-Olympics protests, not Kawase and the staff of her documentary project.
ADDENDUM, Jan. 14: On this week’s edition of the web program “No Hate TV,” activist/editor Yasumichi Noma talked about the video segment that NHK apologized for, and provided a bit more background. The director Kawase recruited to carry out the interviews is Kakuei Shimada, who attended film school with Kawase. According to Asahi Shimbun, Shimada was tasked with interviewing “anti-Olympics demonstrators,” though other media made it sound as if Shimada was just supposed to do man-on-the-street interviews in general. The Litera article said that in the controversial scene, NHK set up its camera at a distance and recorded Shimada talking to the man in question, so it’s not as if the interview was destined to be in the final documentary. In any case, as both Litera and Noma point out, the audio quality is poor. But Noma was also struck by the setting. If Shimada was trying to get comments from anti-Olympics protesters, then it made sense that he would go to a demonstration to seek them out, but the scene of the interview is not the new National Stadium, where most of the demonstrations took place in the month of June 2021. He says it looks like Sanya, the district in the shitamachi area of Tokyo where day workers traditionally gather for jobs. What’s notable about Sanya is that it is the preferred place to go to recruit anyone for purposes of mobilization, and that right wing groups have been known to go there and pay people to show up at their demonstrations in order to make it look as if whatever cause they are protesting/advocating has a lot of support. So Noma thinks that Shimada purposely went to Sanya to try and find people who had been paid to protest the Olympics, but this guy is the only one he found, and, from what was eventually discovered in a follow-up interview by NHK, he never attended an anti-Olympic rally. This, of course, brings up the question of NHK’s rationale for following Shimada to Sanya: Didn’t they think it strange he was going to Sanya, rather than to the National Stadium, to do interviews? Also, Noma brings up Shimada’s background. As a director, he is probably most famous for his music videos of Japanese punk groups with a nationalist bent, a related theme that is also touched upon in the Litera article, which mentions Kawase’s close association with Akie Abe, former prime minister Shinzo Abe’s wife and a fellow believer in “Japanese spirituality.”
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