Shinjiro Koizumi and eco bags
Here’s this week’s Media Mix about the new rules for plastic shopping bags. As I say in the column, the rules aren’t going to make a big practical difference since shopping bags only account for about 2 percent of all plastic waste, which is now increasing due to the pandemic. The government has acknowledged this, saying that the main purpose of the rule is to heighten awareness, and in that regard, the highly visible, highly recognizable environment minister, Shinjiro Koizumi, is perfectly suited for the job of publicizing the rules. The Shincho article I cite in the column is actually mainly about Koizumi’s PR moves regarding the launch of the new bag rules, and it was typically unflattering about his efforts.
The title, for one thing, said something to the effect that minister’s “eco bag is empty.” The article begins by saying that the famously photogenic Koizumi hasn’t been much in the news lately since he became a father late last year, and seemed to need something to remind people that he was still around, so the shopping bag rule promotion was an easy and seemingly fool-proof way to get his face in front of cameras again, especially since, as Shincho put it, he has yet to register any kind of “achievement” as environment minister. It should be noted that he had little to do with the legislation for the bag restrictions.
From what I could gather in the main media, his PR activities came down to a public press event where he appeared with the helium-voiced TV talent and ichthyologist Sakana-kun where they rewrote a children’s song with lyrics having to do with plastic bags. He also patronized a convenience store in Nagatacho with the media in tow to show off his own eco bag, a blue plastic number recycled from tarp that had been used for cleanup purposes following the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake. To give credit where credit is due, Koizumi has been using this bag since the end of last year when he carried out a similar PR stunt to drive home the idea of refusing plastic shopping bags. However, this time Shincho made careful note of what he purchased at the CS: among his purchases were several beverages in PET bottles, a plastic waste scourge that has yet to receive its own legal sanction. Doesn’t Koizumi have his own reusable water bottle or coffee cup? Where’s the ministry spin doctors when you need them?
Actor Ma Dong-seok has carved an eviable niche in South Korean cinema as a kind of all-round hybrid tough guy/sympathetic everyman, thanks mainly to his turn as the working class hero of Train to Busan. He’s also a rising star in the U.S., where he made his mark as a physical trainer to American action actors and goes by the name Don Lee (he holds dual citizenship). The Gangster, et al, has been pegged by fanboys as probably his most enjoyable role, and while it’s supposedly loosely based on a true story, it’s hard not to imagine the movie was written and produced with his peculiar skills set in mind. I don’t know much about the movie’s box office in South Korea, but apparently it impressed Sylvester Stallone enough to buy the Hollywood rights and hire Ma to recreate his character in English.
Here’s 
Bruce Springsteen fans of a certain type often seem perplexed by their affection for his music, which is the opposite of subtle. While the themes hit on complex human connections, the emotions are big, the guitars loud, and the arrangements for the most part reach for hyperbole by default. No one who listens to a Springsteen song adds anything of themselves to it, because there’s already too much of it.
Rhythmic gymnastics is one of only two Olympic sports that are female-specific. Men do not partake, though there are men’s rhythmic gymnastic competitions outside of the Olympics. (Interestingly, it was Japan that developed the sport for males) This identification of the sport with women’s and girls’ bodies and, more significantly, feminine tropes is an important subtext of Polish director Marta Prus’s documentary about the Russian rhythmic gymnast Margarita Mamun. As with most sports docs, the focus is on how to become a champion, and Prus leads us through the grinding training regimen and the psychological strain of competition. Mamun’s goal is a medal in the 2016 Olympics, likely her last ever, and Prus, whether expectedly or not, captures the athlete during a particularly difficult part of her life. Though immensely talented, Mamun seems distracted and put off by the kind of effort she has been conditioned to understand by the keepers of the sport to be necessary in order to attain greatness, because she’s attained that level of greatness in the past. Maintaining it, however, is a different thing, and what we see, and what Prus insists we see, is how Mamun’s lack of focus and physical incapacities have less to do with the usual issues of aging and overwork than with a loss of will.
The story behind the making of this extraordinary documentary is perhaps even more fascinating than the movie itself. Filmmakers Ljubomir Stefanov and Tamara Kotevska reportedly were looking for a subject in the Republic of North Macedonia and heard about an older woman who still followed the traditional methods for honey-making, which does not require the keeping of bees, but rather relies on finding beehives in the wild and extracting just enough honey so as not to upset the lives of insects. In order to make their film, however, not only did Stefanov and Kotevska have to track down the woman, who lives in a remote valley that can’t be reached by normal transportation most of the year, but they had to follow her up steep mountains and into dense fields. They also had to somehow make camp in her village, which has no running water nor electricity save that supplied by battery.
Jim Cummings’ debut feature comes across as a piece of performance art extended beyond its original parameters, and surprisingly it works at that level consistently throughout its 90 minutes. Extrapolated from an award-winning short subject that has been reconstituted as an opening one-take gambit, the movie feels like a tightrope act, which is why you keep expecting it to fail in a big, dramatic way, but it keeps you going, and that’s because Cummings, who directs, writes, and plays the central character, seems to know exactly what he’s doing every second of the movie.
As laser-focused historical movies go, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s take on the rivalry between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over who would build the first electricity grid in the U.S. has an immediately appealing hook in that electricity is something we take for granted without really understanding how it came into our lives. The obvious pitfall in any presentation of this story is getting past the technical aspects, because, basically, the rivalry was centered on the two men’s respective favored approaches to current: Edison preferred direct current, while Westinghouse thought alternating current was more efficient, and, for sure, a good part of the movie, at least in the beginning, is a struggle to make sense of the differences in these two approaches.
In a year when world movie fans finally woke up to the consistent brilliance of Korean cinema through the vehicle of Parasite, it should probably be noted that in South Korea itself the movie that vied with Parasite in 2019 as the finest of the year, at least among critics, was the indie debut House of Hummingbird by Kim Bora. Purists will say that comparing the two films is a chump’s game, since Parasite is high-concept while Hummingbird is personal. They don’t compete on the same playing field, especially in South Korea where parameters like genre and financial backing have more meaning than they do in other film markets. But to those of us outside of Korea, the two movies have more in common than they do to people inside Korea, and having seen both in South Korea, albeit 12 months apart, I found Hummingbird more affecting and, even now, more memorable.
philipbrasor.com 