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There will be two documentaries released in Tokyo theaters this month about Laurel Canyon, the leafy residential adjunct to Los Angeles that acted as an incubator for the storied Southern California Sound of the late 60s and early 70s. This particular film, a distillation of a two-part cable TV program, is a more traditional music doc in that it straightforwardly explicates the development of the scene in a chronological fashion, and in that regard it’s the better choice if you are inclined to take in only one. The other movie, Echo in the Canyon, which opens at the end of May, is more like an excuse for rocker and narrator Jakob Dylan to pay tribute to his musical forebears without having to mention that his father was pretty much responsible for those forebears in the first place, though to me his main sin was not mentioning Joni Mitchell, one of the canyon’s most famous denizens. She even titled an album after the place. 

Though Alison Ellwood does a good job of delineating the source of the SoCal sound, she leaves out a seminal aspect of the scene, which is incumbent in the very title of her movie: real estate. The reason Laurel Canyon attracted so many musicians is that, at the time, it was cozy and cheap; certainly cozier and cheaper than Los Angeles proper. More importantly, its relative seclusion owing to its precipitous hills, winding roads, and prodigious vegetation offered would-be stars a sense of isolation that was not only vital to their art-making endeavors, but allowed them to mingle with one another in a relaxed manner that would have been near impossible in the city. Most of the visuals are supplied not so much by moving picture footage or video but by Henry Diltz’s still photography, which captures the communal sense of the place. Diltz, in fact, came to Los Angeles as a musician himself with the Modern Folk Quartet, a group whose rootsy sincerity provided an aesthetic foundation for most of the artists who would eventually represent the SoCal sound, in particular the Byrds, which were the Beatles of that scene if not of American pop music in general at the time. Of course, the gigs were in L.A., most prominently Sunset Strip clubs like the Troubadour and the Whiskey A Go Go. For a while, there was not a whole lot of stylistic distinction being made between folk, pop, and rock and roll until certain groups emerged to popular acclaim. Though Crosby, Stills and Nash (and, later, Young) are presented at the quintessential Laurel Canyon act, they wouldn’t have developed their own sound without the precedent of Buffalo Springfield, Love, the Mamas and the Papas, and even the Monkees, all of whose members lived in Laurel Canyon. Even Frank Zappa and the Doors, whose own unique styles sprung from that early scene, can be considered part of the mix, and while Ellwood gives Zappa short shrift, she makes a very good case for the Doors being not only the outlier of the scene, but its most influential and exciting act. 

The movie starts getting wobbly, however, when it moves into what the various narrators term “the 2nd wave,” which centers on artists like Jackson Browne, Gram Parsons, the various singer-songwriters revolving around Linda Ronstadt, and, most significantly, the Eagles, who started out as Ronstadt’s backing band. Though no one can deny the Eagles’ place in rock history, their effect, at least for me, is mostly contingent on the intensifying nexus at the time between rock music and capitalism. The movie makes the case that the explosive popularity of the Eagles essentially ended the Laurel Canyon scene, though their ascendance merely coincided with its demise. The money was already pouring in before “Take It Easy” changed things for the worse. Real estate, right? 

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

Laurel Canyon home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2020 Canyon Films LLC

Horror films that double as allegories have their work cut out for them. Most horror aficionados just want a good jolt or two and having to navigate the symbols and metaphors can be tiresome. Swedish filmmaker Hanna Bergholm’s debut feature announces its intentions right away by showing a perfect family sitting for a group selfie for the mother’s popular housekeeping blog. Everybody is dressed in spotless white or beige and surrounded by home decor that practically glows with the expression of upper mobility. This will be a movie about surfaces and people who move through existence trying to impress other people without actually cultivating an inner life. Then a bird rudely crashes through the window and the mother (Sophia Heikkila), all smiles and crinkly chiffon, picks it up and snaps its neck.

This lack of subtlety will persist throughout the film, thus robbing it of any suspense it might want to build up for the gross parts. The protagonist is 12-year-old daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna), an adept but not particularly game gymnast who does everything Mother (she isn’t given a name) insists she does in order to maintain the perfect family image for her blog. Shocked by Mother’s treatment of the bird, Tinja walks through the woods one day pondering life and death and comes upon an egg that seems abandoned and brings it home. Over time, the egg grows to enormous proportions while Tinja hides it from her family. Of course, eventually it hatches and what comes out is pretty disgusting, not to mention needy. The connection between this creature and Tinja is more than just that of hatchling and mother bird. The creature acts out Tinja’s subconscious impulses, including her resentment of her bratty younger brother, her jealousy toward a fellow member of the gymnastics team, and, inevitably, her buried hatred of her mother, who she recognizes as a hypocrite of staggering arrogance—not only does she have another family, but she advertises the fact, as if her domestic talents were just too much for a single brood. 

As the creature starts to not only mimic Tinja’s behavior but take on her appearance, the movie’s horror devices kick in without really making much of an impression, mainly because we’ve seen them before utilized to much more dramatic effect. What keeps you watching is not just the creature’s creepy metamorphosis, but Solalinna’s. As Tinja she has a demure innocence that seems almost preternatural, and when she changes, the effect is quite startling.

In Swedish. Opens April 15 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Cinema Qualite (03-3352-5645). 

Hatching home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2021 Silva Mysterium, Hobab, Film i Vast

Given what’s going on in Ukraine right now, many people may feel disinclined to take in a Russian movie, but the release in Japan of Dear Comrades!, a 2020 film by Andrei Konchalovsky, is timely in a chilling way. Based on a 1962 incident where factory workers in the small town of Novocherkassk peacefully demonstrated for higher wages when food prices spiked and were then killed by soldiers, the movie seems to take for granted the notion that Soviet authorities had no compunction about using deadly force just for convenience’s sake, even against their own people. As more than one person says during the course of the movie, life is pretty cheap under communism.

Of course, what’s going on now in Ukraine is not the work of the Communist Party, but a subtheme of Dear Comrades! is a kind of passive belief that Russia has alway been in thrall to authoritarianism. The protagonist, Lyudmilla (Yuliya Vysotskaya), is a Soviet functionary who blithely cuts the ubiquitous lines at retailers to collect her rations before anyone else can get theirs, but from the first scene it’s clear that just acquiring daily necessities is a full-time job that uses up everyone’s surplus energy. Lyudmilla carries her privilege with confidence and whenever someone even suggests that the food shortages are the doings of the party she puts them in their place with assurance. She even defends Stalin, who has already been in the grave for 9 years, replaced by a man who understood the destruction he caused even if he doesn’t say so out loud. To Lyudmilla, the state would be in better shape if Stalin were still running things.

The protest happens during a committee meeting that descends into chaos after the Kremlin calls them demanding they put an end to it by any means necessary. What follows is necessarily confusing because as orders make their way trough the byzantine Soviet bureaucracy anything that can go wrong likely does. The consequence is that lower officials quickly supplant their superiors and take out their grievances on them, thus multiplying the deadly toll initiated by the strike. At first, Konchalovsky seems to be aiming for some kind of dark satire, but once Lyudmilla realizes that her own daughter may have been involved in the demonstration, the movie’s whole mood turns deadly serious, with Lyudmilla doing double duty finding out the fate of her daughter and preventing her own arrest—or worse. Shot in black-and-white and framed with an eye for the austere beauty of Soviet brutalist architecture, the movie often feels calculated to the point of preciousness, and much of the drama of the second half doesn’t have as much power as the bleak comedy of the first. Dear Comrades! is sobering but it would have achieved more of its intended effect if it wasn’t telling us something we already knew. 

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

Dear Comrades! home page in Japanese

photo (c) Produced by Production Center of Andrei Konchalovsky Foundation for support of cinema, scenic and visual arts commissioned by VGTRK 2020