Akimi Ota, a doctoral candidate at Manchester University in ethnology, made this intimate film when he lived in the Ecuadorean rain forest with the Shuar, a group of native people with their own unique language whose indigenous territory covers a large land mass that extends over most of the Amazon countries. Ota lived in one village and recorded the footage himself, since he had no crew. The result is highly professional to the point where it not only transcends its ostensible purpose of documenting the daily lives of its subjects, but realizes a cinematic narrative structure and aesthetic that conveys its own sensibility apart from that of its subject. Strictly speaking, I’m not sure if that’s what ethnologists are supposed to do, but it also may explain why the movie has been shown at several international film festivals and is receiving a theatrical release in Japan.
In any case, Ota tried to stay out of the picture as much as possible, and though you hear his voice once or twice, there is no narration. The main subject is the Tsamarain family, whose patriarch, Sebastian, takes up most of the screen time, acting as a guide to the forest and a kind of professorial lecturer on Shuar culture. Though much of what he says will probably go over the viewer’s head, Sebastian is often a riveting presence: funny, articulate if not always coherent, and genuinely photogenic. The reason he seems out of reach most of the time is that he is a shaman, and while Ota, owing to his long-term contact with the village, seems to understand the spiritual world Sebastian expounds upon, I, for one, became fidgety with all the metaphors and vague descriptions that came with the lectures. The main focus is his use of two psychotropic plants that have a wide range of purposes in the village, though it’s not clear from the exposition if anyone on screen has partaken of the drug during filming. There’s also a lot of imbibing of something called “chicha,” a fermented drink that seems to accompany almost every activity, including those partaken for survival, such as building huts and searching for food. In fact, halfway through, I came to the conclusion that much of footage depicts people who are constantly stoned, which is a pointless observation, of course, since if they are always stoned then that is their “normal” state of being, which means I may never really be able to appreciate the mindset that seems essential to understanding Sebastian’s discursions about the universe.
Still, it isn’t all exotic ephemera. The family buys clothing from the outside world and there’s even a TV. At one point Sebastian’s wife (at least, I think she’s his wife) talks about running for office, so it’s not as if the people being observed are completely off the grid, so to speak, and in that regard, I wish Ota has pointed his camera farther afield to capture how the Shuar fit into the larger scheme of Amazon society, but that’s perhaps asking too much of an anthropologist. Nevertheless, I wonder what his doctoral advisor thought of the movie.
In Shuar. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).
In the past decade-plus, a handful of Romanian directors (Christian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, etc.) have created a body of dramatic work that is perhaps unmatched in its ability to come to grips with the way official actions (i.e., bureaucratic behavior) undermine the institutions that are supposed to support a workable society. From abortion to educational opportunity, the topics these films tackle have a universal relevance even if the particular horrors exposed are specific to Romania. Collective, a documentary by Alexander Nanau, provides insight into the kind of obstacles truth-seekers are up against in Romania because it addresses a real-life tragedy by following the players whose aim is to expose the corruption that not only led to that tragedy, but exacerbated it afterwards.
At the center of the story is a fire that broke out at the titular Bucharest nightclub in 2015 at a heavy metal concert that killed 27 on the spot and injured 180. The club had no fire exits, and while such a lapse in public safety protocols is enough to warrant its own hardline investigation, the movie’s real target becomes something larger and more insidious. In hospital, many of the survivors ended up dying anyway, but not because of the burns they suffered in the fire. They died of bacterial infections they contracted while in intensive care. The government as represented by the health ministry puts up what looks like the usual PR stonewall to hide the fact that the company that imported the disinfectants diluted them to one-tenth their normal strength in order to increase profits, and a small group of journalists (mostly working for a sports tabloid), activists, and victims advocates refuse to allow the coverup to proceed without pushback. Nanau covers it all in real time, keeping his cameras in the thick of the fight rather than summing up the story through retrospective interviews with principal players, the way most documentaries would handle it. Consequently, the movie is not only relentlessly compelling as drama, it’s edifying in the way it treats each element of the tale as its own unique factoid. When a health official uses language to obfuscate some deeper truth, we see the statement given and then the immediate reaction from a journalist who tells the camera that it’s all bullshit. As the authorities try to play down the ensuing disinfectant scandal, we see the key reporters doggedly keeping it in the public sphere even while the mainstream media, especially TV, paint their journalism as mere scaremongering to sell more papers.
Though Nanau also reserves sufficient time to spotlight the victims and their suffering, the gist of the movie is its slow, methodical revelation of the rot that permeates the entire health infrastructure. And while the viewer may find it heartening that the reporting on display brings down much of this infrastructure (one official commits suicide), thus paving the way for a new health minister who was once a victims’ advocate himself, the idea of “resistance” is so prevalent on every side that it’s easy to wonder what kind of effect the new man will have on a system in which doctors cannot be expected to get ahead in their profession without taking bribes to make sure the “old ways” stay the way they are. Nanau is blessed with almost unbelievable access, not only to the people fighting the system but to those defending it, and yet his movie doesn’t feel like a happy accident of being in the right place at the right time. It’s a fully engaged work of truth-telling, deliberate and fiercely intelligent.
In Romanian. Opening Oct. 2 in Tokyo at Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608).
Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about Sanae Takaichi’s candidacy for the leadership of the Liberal Democratic Party and, by extension, the prime minister’s office. Since I wrote the column, her chances of achieving that post have increased greatly. Though she is still way behind Taro Kono in polls of LDP members–the only people who get to vote (and not all of them)–she’s now neck-and-neck with Fumio Kishida, meaning she could be the contender if there is a runoff. So the possibility that Takaichi could be Japan’s first female prime minister is very real, and, as pointed out at the end of the column, something that many women may find disappointing due to Takaichi’s conservative bent. Still, some women have said that although they don’t agree with Takaichi’s policies they still hope she wins because they think that having a woman in such a powerful position is enough to change the environment for the better. (Strangely, these women don’t bring up the fact that Takaichi once did an internship in Washington for representative Patricia Schroeder, a famous liberal Democrat, though it’s obvious why other LDP members don’t mention it.) The things that bother feminists, such as Takaichi’s opposition to elective surnames for married couples, are not uppermost in the electorate’s list of interests, and while she has not made any distinct comments about addressing the wealth gap, an issue that does interest the electorate, she would have to say something about it if she became LDP president and had to lead the party in the upcoming lower house election. Given the usual disarray among the opposition, the LDP will likely hold on to its majority in the lower house and thus continue to control the government, so, in a sense, it may not matter what she says about the wealth gap, an issue that was also sidelined by her mentor, Shinzo Abe, when he was prime minister. It says much about Japanese politics that the perception among the public is that there is a huge difference in policy outlook between Kono and Takaichi, who both belong to the same party. Kono is seen as someone who, despite the compromises he has made since announcing his candidacy, stands for change, while Takaichi is considered an LDP hardliner, meaning she won’t veer too far off the path that Abe and Suga have trod. Real life has a way of mixing things up, especially in politics, but whether Takaichi’s being a woman will make any difference is anyone’s guess. Still, it would be a shame if it didn’t.
There seems to be a certain type of indie film that only premieres at the Sundance Film Festival. Ostensibly black comedies with quirky, often disagreeable protagonists, they usually take place in the US heartland, but what makes these movies distinctive is that they vanish immediately afterwards. And one more thing: they always seem to find a Japanese distributor.
Adam Rehmeier’s Dinner in America is set in Lincoln, Nebraska, sometime in the 90s. It’s likely semi-autobiographical since the protagonist is the leader of a local punk rock band and Rehmeier had a hand in writing the songs performed. Simon (Kyle Gallner) isn’t just a punk rocker. He’s an anarcho-nihilist who is unabashed in his hatred for everything conventional, a sensibility that comes to a head during the titular family ritual, of which there are three extended examples in the film. Two of the three end up in very violent free-for-alls sparked by Simon’s provocative mouth. The third results in his receiving an invitation to stay the night. Unbeknownst to his hosts, he needs a place to hide from the police, who want him for arson and assault. While on the lam, he comes across Patty (Emily Skeggs), a college dropout and social misfit who has just been fired from her job in a pet store, and gets himself invited to dinner at her house with her clueless parents and hormonally confrontational teenage brother. Acting saintly, he fools the folks and then later, in Patty’s room, realizes she idolizes the masked punk singer John Q. Public, who happens to be Simon. He doesn’t reveal his identity, but is intrigued because Patty has been sending John Q. love letters with dirty pictures and song lyrics he finds compelling despite himself.
Whatever else Rehmeier intended his movie to be it’s basically a romantic comedy: two totally mismatched personalies meet cute and then find ways around their differences to fall in love. In that regard, Gallner and Skeggs make a nice couple but the humor relies too much on the viewer’s capacity to be shocked by Simon’s misanthropy and Patty’s gullibility. There’s also an unfortunate tendency to use the 90s setting as an excuse to forego any attempt at PC responsibility. Homosexuals and people with developmental disabilities get a lot of grief (Patty is repeatedly called the “r” word by her peers), and while the characters who wield these slurs are clearly assholes, after a while the device feels forced. More to the point, the requisite fulfillment of gross revenge fantasies provides no satisfaction. The difference between scrappy and crappy is only one letter.
Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
Probably one of the most fraught American movie releases of recent years, Minamata opens in Japan with its own set of caveats for people interested in both the truths it attempts to address and those who just want to enjoy an engaging film for its own sake. It’s already had its requisite major festival premiere followed by a limited release schedule worldwide, but the U.S. remains closed to the film owing to North American distributor MGM’s squeamishness over star Johnny Depp’s recent notoriety as an alleged wife-beater. In Japan, the city for which the movie is named has effectively disowned it because, according to local media, its “content is unclear,” a rather roundabout way of saying that there are too many sensibilities at risk of being offended, though ostensibly it is the victims of Minamata disease the city is worried about, since they are still targets of discrimination. Nevertheless, anyone who sees the film will conclude that the victims are really victims of corporate greed and official negligence, since it deals forthrightly with the discrimination issue.
Director Andrew Levitas tries to make the film work on two levels. On the one hand, he wants to explain what has since become known as perhaps the seminal example of industrial pollution in the history of environmental degradation, and on the other he wants to explore the personality of the man, photographer W. Eugene Smith (Depp), who brought the disaster to the world’s attention. Minamata is a fishing town in Kumamoto Prefecture where the Chisso chemical company had a factory that spewed methylmercury into the sea, contaminating the fish that the local people ate. Starting in the 1950s, more and more cases of nerve-related illnesses appeared among residents, but for two decades the company denied that its operations had anything to do with it. The people affected could not find relief from either local or national officials who were in thrall to large companies like Chisso that were spurring Japan’s postwar economic miracle. Long story short, Aileen Mioko (Minami), a Japanese national living in New York, approaches Smith on behalf of the small group of Minamata activists fighting Chisso, because Smith had a reputation for socially relevant work and, more importantly, that work was published in Life magazine, which in 1971 was still an influential publication. (Another reason Aileen approached Smith was that he had some kind of promotional deal with Fujifilm, a factoid I wanted to know more about.) As the film portrays him, Smith by this point had become the stereotypical suffering artist who turned down guaranteed money-making offers in order to follow his whims, which weren’t very distinct, though his drinking problem was acute. In any case, Levitas tries to get too much thematic mileage out of Smith’s problematic relationship with Life editor Bob Hayes (Bill Nighy), who loves the guy’s work but hates the stubborn personality and has people to please who have no use for a dinky fishing village on the other side of the world.
The heart of the film, and what makes it work better than it should, is Smith’s eventual relationship with the people of Minamata. Understanding his mission they help him obtain cameras, film, and whiskey and set up a dark room for him without really trusting him. Because Smith is a fairly outsized character, Chisso knows he’s there and tries to stonewall him at every turn. Smith has to be snuck into the hospital by Kiyoshi (Ryo Kase), an activist of the victims’ group, in order to take photos of patients, but due to Smith’s exacting aesthetic standards, he isn’t satisfied, and, in any case, it’s unlikely that Life will buy photos of people lying in hospital beds, regardless of what put them there. Still, Chisso is spooked enough that the company’s president (Jun Kunimura) offers Smith bribes and, when that doesn’t work, sicks hired goons on the house he’s staying in to destroy the dark room.
But the movie really comes into its own with the scenes outlining the activities of the victims’ support group, whose leader (Hiroyuki Sanada) at one point gives a speech about how the tragedy needs to be acknowledged by the world because he’s sure that big companies take advantage of local communities everywhere. “It’s happened before,” he says, “and it will happen again.” Though it’s very likely that Levitas fictionalized this component of the film in order to, as they say, make it more dramatically potent, it takes the focus off of Smith long enough to drive home the real meaning of the movie. Quite possibly it is also this component that bothers the city of Minamata now, but from what I’ve read the people with any say in the matter haven’t even seen the film.
In any case, this grassroots movement to bring their case to the world and Smith’s dogged, somewhat selfish approach to photojournalism dovetail effectively into the movie’s centerpiece scene, in which Smith produces the photograph that made Minamata famous, the “pieta” shot with victim Tomoko Uemura and her mother in the bath. The movie is quite up front about how this shot was not only staged, but essentially planned out. The victims’ group knew that they needed something dramatic and simple to make their case, and after many months of pleading from Aileen, Tomoko’s mother agrees and Smith is ready (though Aileen seems to be the one who choreographs the image).
The rest, as they say, is history, though Levitas doesn’t send Smith off into the sunset a hero. He doesn’t really know what to do with him any more, which is a negative function of Depp’s star power. Depp has always relished playing iconoclasts, and when they’re odd enough to disappear into (Willy Wonka, Edward Scissorshands), he can be phenomenal, but Smith’s idiosyncrasies are mostly treated as cliches, and what we come away with is basically Johnny Depp on a bender. As with many A-lister turns in unconventional movies, he’s more distracting than enlightening. The real star of the film is the Japanese ensemble—including Tadanobu Asano and Akiko Iwase—which juxtaposes the fierceness of the victims’ anger and disappointment against the smallness of their community. Levitas can’t possibly bring forth the enormity of their struggle, which continues to this day and is more comprehensively covered by Kazuo Hara’s documentary Minamata Mandala, which comes out later this year and mostly addresses the issue of discrimination that Minamata city is so worried Levitas’s film will somehow aggravate. Personally, I think the two films complement each other well, but be warned: Hara’s film is more than six hours long.
In English and Japanese. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
I slogged through the three seasons of Westworld on pure inertia. Though the basic premise of androids “evolving” self-consciousness and its attendant moral structures wasn’t particularly original, the extended series format gave creator Lisa Joy ample opportunity to explore all the possible ramifications, and within a fictional environment that was both hilariously uber-capitalist (a movie western theme park where the rich could indulge their worst impulses and appetites) and which encouraged creative narrative flights of fancy. The problem with the series was its attention to sci-fi and action movie formulas that eventually ground the characters down into dramatic stereotypes. Joy’s first film feature as director suffers from much the same lack of sustained rigor. The future of Reminiscence could be the same as that depicted in Westworld, only that we’re focused on a less affluent layer of society and a retail concept that’s cheaper and more malleable.
Miami is now a half-submerged city, like Venice but with skyscrapers. Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) and his partner Watts (Thandiwe Newton, the lone holdover from Westworld) run a service that allows clients to restore lost memories. Most want to relive pleasant experiences from their past, and there’s more than a hint that such indulgences have an addictive quality. One regular customer is behind on his payments but Nick lets it slide because, as a veteran of a terrible foreign war, he understands how important the salve of nostalgia can be for the PTSD-rattled mind. Conveniently, the memories can be stored on discs as reproducible holograms, an aspect that plays into the mystery that fuels the plot, which starts when the requisite mysterious femme fatale, here a nightclub singer named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), comes in for a very prosaic purpose — she lost her keys and wants to remember where she left them. The fact that Nick’s eyes light up when she first walks in the door indicate beyond a doubt that Reminiscence is designed as an exercise in old-fashioned film noir, and, as she has shown in Westworld, Joy is nothing if not faithful to the cliches she follows.
Long story short, Nick and Mae end up in a passionate affair from which Nick cannot possibly exit in one piece, at least not psychologically, when Mae disappears without saying anything. Like any noir detective whose sexual ego has been bruised (what’s love got to do with it?), Nick’s attempts to track her down involve him in the doings of underworld criminals and powerful plutocrats, not to mention the corrupt cops who always figure into these stories. In the end, Joy tries to tie it altogether, as she did several times on Westworld, by plunging her main characters into a morass of self-doubt that demands they question the reality they think they’ve lived. In other words, Nick eventually gets wise, as the old noir saying goes, but the viewer, always wiser, may not care.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Toho Cinemas Shibuya (050-6868-5002), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Living in Japan, where the treatment of politics and history by popular culture is a fraught undertaking, I find South Korean cinema’s willingness to confront the less edifying aspects of its recent past and current social mores almost astounding. Mainstream Korean filmmakers are so fearless in their desire to question authority that many times they go around the bend and make movies that almost seem to ridicule this tendency. Lee Hwan-kyung’s Best Friend (in some territories the English title is Next Door Neighbor) takes place in the mid-1980s when the government had declared martial law and regularly rounded up student demonstrators and political opposition leaders for torture and imprisonment. His dual protagonists occupy either side of this divide. Lee Eui-shik (Oh Dal-su) is the leader of a pro-democracy party who has spent the last several years in exile abroad. He returns home to South Korea to contemplate running in the upcoming presidential election, but is met at the airport by a group of thugs who cart him off to the headquarters of the intelligence services. Meanwhile, Yoo Dae-gwon (Jung Woo) is a fitfully employed ne’er-do-well who, while doing grunt work for the intelligence services, stumbles on a left-wing cell that gets him noticed by the slimy chief, who puts him in charge of eavesdropping on Lee while he’s under house arrest. Yoo moves into the house next door with two other spies to try to find evidence that ties Lee to North Korea so as to give them an excuse to put him in prison for life.
Despite the relatively serious purport of this plotline, the first half of Best Friend is a comedy, and a slapstick one at that. Yoo and his colleagues are supposed to lay low so as not to tip Lee and his family off that their house is bugged, and this dynamic leads to lots of awkward interactions that occasionally spill over into Three Stooges territory. The dramatic arc that is requisite for any mainstream Korean film follows Yoo’s changing sensibility, which goes from that of a simple man just trying to make enough money to feed his family to someone who grows as much of a conscience as necessary to understand that what he is doing is morally indefensible. Of course, this enlightenment is brought about by his inevitable relationship with Lee, whose own sensibility, based on fairness and trust in the human spirit, never changes at all.
Best Friend doesn’t break any new ground and its reliance on the kind of melodramatic devices that are almost mandatory in Korean cinema these days effectively dampens the political message. Korea is a Manichean society, according to the film, with the authorities as represented by the intelligence services incontrovertibly evil in their methods and intentions, while the liberal party that Lee heads, and in which most Koreans we’re led to believe have faith, is inherently virtuous. Nevertheless, the violence that pushes the plot to its inevitable conclusion in the second half is quite shocking. This 180-degree shift in tone is not surprising, but director Lee seems to be working under the assumption that he has to increase the volitility factor exponentially in order to distinguish his work from past anti-authoritarian dramas, so much so that the ending ends up being ahistorical, meaning it’s beyond revisionism. It’s pure fantasy.
In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).
Scathingly literal in the way it depicts the organizational failure of well-intentioned multi-national peace efforts, Jasmila Zbanic’s slightly fictionalized take on the disastrous UN intervention in the mid-90s Bosnian conflict evinces that nauseous feeling of inevitable doom you get with certain horror movies, but without the attendant jolts and gross-outs. It’s a potboiler in that the heat is applied so gradually and steadily that by the time the pot is actually boiling you sit there in numb acceptance that this was going to happen all along. Zbanic’s means to this end is the title character played by Jasna Djuricic, an interpreter charged with being the linguistic medium between the Dutch UN forces trying to keep the fraught situation in Srbenica from turning deadly and the Serbian soldiers whose intentions they don’t dare second guess. At this point in 1995, Serbs had started murdering Bosnian civilians indiscriminately, acting out their age-old hatred of Muslims. The Bosnian residents of Srbenica, knowing the Serbs were on their way, flee to the safety of the makeshift UN base camp in the belief the international community will save them.
With no food or resources to take care of the townspeople who made it into the compound, and several hundred unable to gain entrance due to space limitations, the UN is forced to confront the arriving Serbian army, who insist they will not harm the Bosnians and that the UN should allow them to return to their homes. As the go-between in these negotiations, Aida understands where each side is coming from—the UN commander is restricted by his own agenda, which did not take into account all these refugees; while the Serbian leader is talking out of this side of his mouth—but as a professional can only translate what each one says, though she wants to tell the UN commander not to trust the Serbs.
Aida’s situation is complicated by the fact that her own family is on the other side of the fence, unable to get in, and when not helping with desperate conversations between the two sides that accomplish nothing, she is running around trying to gain favors from her UN supervisors to allow her husband and sons into the compound. The horror, as it stands, is purely bureaucratic in nature; which doesn’t make it any less horrifying. Aida’s mounting panic is checked by her understanding that only coolness appeals to officialdom when it is confronted by chaos. Meanwhile, Zbanic interrupts this frantic through-story with occasional snatches of stories from the crowd both within and without the compound, thus further intensifying the sense of hopelessness. Of course, anyone who knows the history of Srbenica will know what is going to take place, but even if you do, it doesn’t prepare you for it.
If anything, the almost dry storytelling tone sometimes defeats the dramatic effectiveness of the movie itself. The acting is uneven, and the script is laid out so matter-of-factly that certain plot points are glossed over. Though the UN is boxed in by its ineffective chain of command, which is unresponsive because top brass are on vacation that weekend (!), it’s not convincingly explained why they give up on the Bosnians so easily even though they must know what will happen to them when released into the Serbs’ care. But maybe it’s that point which is the most horrifying of all.
In Serbo-Croation, Bosnian, English, Dutch and Serbian. Opens Sept. 17 in Tokyo at Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya (03-3477-9264), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Musashinokan (03-3354-5670).
As an American who was only physically present in the U.S. during the Trump administration for, at most, two weeks out of the year, I found former Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s comedy about the foibles of political gamesmanship both phony and too earnest. Essentially a Democrat’s owning up to the fact that he didn’t do enough to prevent Trump’s election, Stewart’s directorial debut plays both sides of the matter against the center, where he presumably exists, but in the end his even-handedness comes across as false, if not downright dishonest.
Steve Carrell is deep within his wheelhouse as Gary Zimmer, a successful Democratic consultant who was so blindsinded by the Trump victory that he thinks of packing it all in, but then he comes across a video of farmer and former marine Jack (Chris Cooper) giving a speech at a civic Q&A session in his small town of Deerlaken, Wisconsin, railing against the Republican mayor’s plan to force everyone to carry ID, presumably to check on illegal immigrants, saying that isn’t what he fought for, and Gary thinks he found his way back into the promised land. He immediately flies to Wisconsin and recruits Jack as a possible Democratic spoiler in the predominantly Republican town by stressing those values that Democrats usually have a lock on—or so Democrats think. Most of the comedy springs from Gary’s failure to navigate the cultural contours of Deerlaken while making Jack palatable to coastal elites. Of course, once Gary’s Republican counterparts, most prominently blonde GOP operative Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne), descend on the town as well and try to gum up Gary’s machine, problems accelerate. In fact, it’s the scenes between Faith and Gary, full of sexual tension and delivered with the kind of screwball accuracy that was once de rigeuer in Hollywood comedies, that prove Stewart’s bona fides as a promising filmmaker, but his real goal is trying to show how both parties miss what’s vital about real America.
If I don’t buy it, it’s because the kind of sentiments that Trump unleashed in the so-called heartland were genuinely scary, and Stewart does little more than make fun of them. The plan here seems to be to ridicule both-sidesism, but actually both sides are not equal, at least not in terms of how they will eventually affect the middle and lower classes, including many people who think they were better off with Trump. And by saving most of its ire for Stewart’s own industry, he basically falls into the trap that the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum have set for him and his liberal ilk, which is that it’s the media who are indeed the enemy of the people. The big joke that drops like a bomb at the end of Irresistible is also a big disappointment, since it succumbs to the age-old myth that plain folks are wise to the machinations of elites and thus know how to manipulate them to their advantage. That’s another Hollywood cliche, and one that takes on a particularly sinister cast in post-Trump America.
Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).
Here’s this week’s Media Mix, which is about the media narrative that young Japanese people are generally hesitant about being vaccinated for COVID-19. As part of the narrative-reinforcing process, the web magazine Litera went on about vaccine czar Taro Kono’s media campaign earlier this summer to change young people’s minds about the vaccine, when, in fact, they didn’t need changing. What needed to happen was making more vaccines available so that they could get vaccinated, but for a number of reasons, some of which I wrote about earlier this year, there weren’t enough doses. Litera, perhaps cynically, suggested that Kono’s media blitz was more about him promoting his new book than getting young people in line for a jab, and, in truth, I can see their point if only because Kono seems to be one of the rare public Japanese figures his age who not only understands the value of social media, but knows how to use it.
What seems to have set Litera off was not so much Kono’s perceived phoney appeal to young people but rather his avoiding some of the issues central to this role as vaccine minister. On Aug. 26, it was discovered that one batch of the Moderna vaccine amounting to 1.63 million doses was probably contaminated with foreign substances, which meant they would have to be thrown out. That’s a huge waste, especially cosidering the shortage that was already plaguing the government’s rollout program. But as Litera noted, Kono said nothing on Twitter that day about the Moderna problem, which isn’t to say he didn’t tweet anything. All he talked about was his new book (and, perhaps as a sop to responsibility, something about schools in Hiratsuka, his constituency, being closed until Sept. 3 owing to the pandemic). As a result, said Litera, Kono came off as “clueless,” though the implication is that he didn’t want to associate his position with the Moderna issue. In fact, it was the next day that the Shibuya pop-up vaccination venue opened, and the media clamor over the problems I described in the column both overshadowed the Moderna story and exacerbated the attendant outrage. Litera mentions a number of other embarrassing vaccine-related developments that Kono pointedly ignored on social media, including an instance where he seems to have manipulated data to make it seem as if Japan was in a “better position” than other developed countries with regard to immunization coverage. Actually, right now that may be true, but at the time Litera mentions, it wasn’t. Of course, Kono could be Japan’s next prime minister, and this tendency (or talent, depending on how you look at it) for dissembling on social media may come in handy. Neither Abe nor Suga seems to have been very good at it, but they had lots of flunkeys watching their backs.
philipbrasor.com 