Some films I saw:
(October’s been a busy film month so far. More than September, anyways).
新宿泥棒日記 (大島 渚, 1968)
Diary of a Shinjuku Thief (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)
On 35mm with Lucía and John at the Walter Reade Theater on 8 October at 19:00.
There were no subtitles on the print for Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, so they projected the subtitles over the bottom of the film. The idea was good, but I guess there was no way to time the subtitles with the print and they had to be advanced by hand (by someone who seemingly hadn’t rehearsed). After a complete failure to advance the subtitles in a way that had any connection with the film at all, the rewound (about ten minutes’ worth) and started again, this time succeeding to get the subtitles mostly in time with the correct conversation, even if they rarely overlapped with the particular person delivering the line.
This was all very good for me, and I had to parse enough of the Japanese to be able to line the subtitle up with the correct line of dialogue, but it wasn’t so difficult that I ended up tuning the soundtrack out.
The film was a bit hard to like, being so self-consciously experimental and nonsensically erotic. It did have very nice touches however, and there were certain scenes or moments within the film that captivated me, such as when Umeko first catches Birdie stealing books from Kinokuniya, or when Umeko starts taking books off of the shelves after hours and piling them up, with voice-overs reading from all of the books at once.
There is a certain tendency in Japanese film (more than any other national cinema that I can think of) to depict acts of rape as sexual fantasy, and Oshima seems to do this more than the other directors. While it may make sense in terms of the character being portrayed, or it may even be appropriate for the film, there is something overwhelming and unappealing about the abundance of it in Japanese cinema.
…
絞死刑 (大島 渚, 1968)
Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)
On 35mm with Lucía at the Walter Reade Theater on 8 October at 16:30.
While much more coherent than Diary of a Shinjuku Thief, Death by Hanging is still very much a product of the 60s. Very much like a play, the film mostly takes place within the walls of a small house for execution. When a man of Korean ethnicity fails to die when hanged, and remembers nothing upon being revived, the other characters struggle to figure out how they can legally and morally go about hanging him again, given that he has no recollection of his crime. In order to revive his memory about his crime, they try to play out the scenes of his crimes in front of him, reading from his court transcript.
…
The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 1999)
On DVD with Lucía at Snee and Andy’s on 5 October after dinner.
I didn’t think too much of this film, although it did bring back a certain feeling of high school that I haven’t felt recently. Mostly, however, I was unable to really understand the profound mystery that was the basis of the film. It seemed to me that insofar as suicide can be explicable, the suicide of these girls was fairly straightforward. I felt that Coppola was trying to create echoes of Picnic at Hanging Rock, but this film had neither the mystery nor the extreme aestheticism of the other. And while I like Air’s music, I felt it didn’t come off so well as the soundtrack for this film.
…
Trafic (Jacques Tati, 1971)
On DVD with Lucía at Snee and Andy’s on 4 October after dinner.
The story here is not very interesting, and the main female character is pretty grating. But throughout the film there are many moments where Tati is in top form—when the convention planners are walking about the convention space, when the various drivers are all picking their noses when stuck in traffic, when the main characters are showing off Mr. Hulot’s invention to the Dutch police, when the cars go past in the rain and the windshield wipers reflect the mood or personality of the cars’ drivers, and during the glorious accident at the centerpiece of the film and when the various pull themselves together as out of a trance.
…
The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950)
On DVD with Lucía at Snee and Andy’s on 3 October after dinner.
Perhaps there is a lesson in this film, in the way that T. C. Jeffords issues currency based purely on his extremely reliable reputation and how that currency is in the end his undoing. This film felt so predictable at times, and yet I was constantly being thrown by the plot in unexpected directions. Barbara Stanwyck was her usual self, and was in good form for this film, but I think the photography and Walter Huston’s performance were the things that made this film the most memorable.
…
少林足球 (周星馳, 1950)
Shaolin Soccer (Stephen Chow, 1950)
On DVD with Lucía at Snee and Andy’s in late September.
Pretty silly. Kind of funny. I enjoyed it.
…
女が階段を上る時 (成瀬 巳喜男, 1960)
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)
The 20s, 40s, 50s, and 60s were an amazing time for film, and I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say that each of those decades contained as many truly enduring films as all of the decades since. This was no less true in Japan than in the US or Europe. Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse, and Kurosawa are all filmmakers whose films the world has never seen the likes of since their passings.
In this film Naruse is in top form, and he has worked very hard to create a very credible character and the world she inhabits. We see her at first from a limited perspective, as a hostess in a bar in Ginza. The narration gives us a little background on the profession, and we understand that as she is advancing in age (30!) she is faced with the two paths that most hostesses take: establish her own bar with her reputation and clients or find someone that will marry her or at least pay for her to be a kept woman. One of her protégées has gone on to establish what seems to be a very successful bar, and one of her clients makes a very compelling offer (financially, anyways) to be his mistress in Tokyo (he lives in Osaka). While not so interested in being a mistress, she does explore her options, and is burned a little in the process.
I don’t know how much I can say about this film. It is very simply and earnestly presented, and Hideko Takamine is absolutely riveting as the lead character Keiko. It is very strange to see Tatsuya Nakadai in this sort of a film, but it is also sort of fitting. He is a complex character of which we come to understand very little, and his Nakadai brings out his peculiarities in a way that is at once confusing and totally convincing.
I’ve been reading Dreams from My Father. Given the way the book is written, and how frank it is, it seems clear that when he wrote it, Barack Obama had no idea he’d ever be running for president. I’m realizing that Obama is a more radical departure from previous presidents than I’d ever thought. He is not only young, half-Kenyan, partially raised in Indonesia (in the bad old days), and with no family background in mainstream American politics—all things that I knew—he’s also someone that is deeply introspective, has a strong sense of his place in history (stronger, I suspect that almost anyone else in politics), and is keenly aware that there is much more at stake in this presidency than his own career (I’m not sure that could be said about any other major presidential candidate since… Carter?… ever?). I’m sure he has a giant ego like anyone else that takes on such extreme ambitions, but I do actually believe that his main reason for seeking the presidency is to make the world a better place, and he has enough determination, self-doubt, and experience in overcoming adversity and seeing things through to do it.
I’m not really the donating type. I once donated $250 to my alma mater. That’s about it.
In any case, I recently decided that presidential race was getting to be much closer than I cared for, and that I could not let this moment in history go by with the wrong candidate elected. McCain scares me. Palin scares me. Palin is ambitious, fierce, and I suspect largely self-serving. McCain, I think, wants to make his place in history, and doesn’t really care much about ideological stances, e.g., on abortion or taxes or gun control, so much as he wants to restore our country’s military glory and bring us back to better, more innocent times, as if that were somehow possible.
With all this in mind, I decided I would donate to the Obama campaign. I mentioned my thoughts to my brother and he, apparently, had been thinking along very similar lines. So he threw up a page and said that he thought it would be nice to see if we could get like-minded people amongst our friends and acquaintances to contribute and help get Obama into the Oval Office, preferably in a landslide. I’m not much into pushing these things, but the page he put up was so amusing that I felt I had to share it, and so I find myself pushing it where I otherwise would not. And here it is: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/LorinAndJunDai.
I’ve always wondered what the criterion referred to in the name of The Criterion Collection is. I like the name, as it seems to mysteriously imply that there is one single underlying criterion behind they use when choosing films to include in their collection.
There are other companies with the word criterion in the name, and in each case the implication is even more mysterious: Criterion Pictures, Criterion Catalysts and Technologies, Criterion Machine Works, Criterion Games, The Criterion Theatre, and a building near my work, Commodore Criterion.
Perhaps there is some older meaning of the word criterion that is at use here? Perhaps it’s just that the word sounds nice and gives off some implication of selectivity without actually meaning anything?
I think I’ll ask Jon Mulvaney.
Edit: “It’s on the site, stupid”. Turns out the criterion is that “each film in the collection be an exemplary film of its kind.” http://www.criterion.com/asp/faq.asp#FAQ26.
Thanks to all the well-wishers. I am now thirty. 30.
Not too sure what it means. Doesn’t seem too important. My brother threw me a dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then we went to a few bars, and I had a wonderful time. Tonight on my actual birthday, I cooked dinner for my aunt and uncle after a lazy day that consisted mostly of playing Wii Fit, surfing the Web, and talking to people on the phone. And tomorrow night we’ll have a big steak dinner.
I guess for most people the 30s are a period of increasing stability after settling down from the 20s. My 20s were rather stable, however (almost 5 years working at a bank), and starting in March of last year have become fairly unstable in interesting and mostly appealing ways. I am happily married to Lucía, and true to our wedding vows we seem to be in the very beginning of a long process of travelling the world and growing old together.
9 months ago I owned less stuff than ever before in my adult life, except maybe the start of college (and really, was I an adult then? Am I now?). I haven’t accumulated much since then. A bed. Two nightstands. A little clothing and a few books. I’m not sure if we will continue to live light or if belongings will gather around us like flies, or like metal filings to a magnet. My cousin just told me (while wishing me a happy birthday) that our grandmother used to say that three big moves was equivalent to one big fire as far as ones belongings were concerned. Is this from experience? I know she moved a lot…
Maybe we will live in Manhattan. Maybe we will live in Flushing. Maybe we’ll find someplace else in NY that we’ll want to live in. I still aim to find a place and move into it before winter really sets in. How long will we live there? I expect to live there longer than at any other apartment we’ve lived in (that would be 751 Taraval St., where we lived from something like February 2005 to September 2006), but not much longer. Two years? Probably not more than three. After that? Who knows. Will we rent or buy? Depends on what makes sense, I guess. I hope people will visit. I miss having roommates, but I think house guests are just as good. As long as there’s someone to cook for beyond just the two of us.
It makes sense to see landmarks in the transition from decade to decade. Ten years is a long time, but not too long to group into a comprehensible stage of one’s life. That 30 is a big number in this country is a tradition that makes sense to me. Nevertheless, it is a fairly arbitrary number in the context of my life, and I’d have to say I really began this latest stage of my life around the time Lucía and I decided to get married and move to Tokyo.
I have so many ambitions and so many things I want to do, and yet I don’t want to let go of anything either. I don’t want to stop playing piano, and I’d love to pick up the cello again. I want to do more photography. I want to do things with video. I want to do things with composing. I want to continue to watch lots of films. I’ve always wanted to read more, but I never give myself the time to do it. I want to cook more. I want to travel more. I want start software companies and build projects on the side. I want to see the Met, attend the NY Film Festival, see all the museums, see some live shows, see some plays, maybe even catch the first sports game in my life, spend more time with friends, get a cat, become fluent in Japanese, learn Spanish, resuscitate and keep up German, and take a course in Indonesian. I want to learn more about history, botany, learn how to write, learn how to draw, learn how to make bonsai, and maybe even get some exercise. I’ve always wanted to spend time sailing. All these things are important to me as activities or as dreams or as how I want to see myself, and yet there simply isn’t room enough in this one little life for all of them—at least not if I’m to take them as seriously as I’d like to.
I have wonderful friends, and a loving and huge family. I’m lucky enough to know and like second cousins on both sides of my family. I’m comparatively healthy, I was raised (I think) well, and I continue to learn about all kinds of things. I was lucky enough to have a knack for something that is capable of providing me with well-paying, intellectually rewarding, and fairly easy work. There is always more I could ask from life, and I will continue to do so, but it’s important for me to realize how lucky I am.
In addition to the other two already mentioned, we saw these since coming to NY (details to come? maybe?):
300 (Zack Snyder, 2007)
On Blu-Ray at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía on 7 September 2008 at around 22:30.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
I simply cannot believe how terrible 300 was. What a waste of… everything.
…
Panic (Henry Bromell, 2000)
On DVD at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía, Lorin, and Heidi on 1 September 2008 sometime after Andy went to sleep.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
Oddly, this was in the comedy section. It’s not really a comedy, even if the premise makes it seem like it should be one. How many films are there about killers that see shrinks? Grosse Pointe Blank, Analyze This/That, and, I hear, The Sopranos. Anyways, this is more of a slow, moody drama that has its moments, but is a little dull overall.
…
The Limey (Steven Soderbergh, 1999)
On DVD at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía on 3 September 2008 sometime after dinner.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
…
Udon (本広克行, 2006)
On DVD at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía sometime towards the end of August.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
…
Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993)
On DVD at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía sometime around the 23rd of August.
…
Seduced and Abandoned (Pietro Germi, 1964)
On DVD at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía sometime around the 26th of August.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
…
Bullitt (Peter Yates, 1968)
On Blu-Ray at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía sometime towards the beginning of September.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
…
The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)
On 35mm on 34th Street with Lucía on the 28th of August at 19:00.
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
Very dark for a mainstream Hollywood film. Good still prevails, justice is in some sense served, and some faith in humanity is retained. In these ways, I would argue that this film isn’t as dark as, say, Wall·e, which offers up an incredibly bleak premise shown in a mostly light, and at times romantic, way.
Nor is it quite like Sweeney Todd, which has more similarities in tone. In Sweeney Todd, justice is also in some sense served, but in Sweeney Todd we are meant to sympathize with a man that has given himself over to evil in order to seek his revenge on worse evil, whereas in The Dark Knight our protagonist, while tormented, self-doubting, and at times even self-loathing, is still essentially good and is able to remain incorruptible to normal Hollywood moral conundrums under even the worst of circumstances (not true for Harvey Dent, but once he switches to the dark side, he is also kind of lost to us as a real character). Sweeney Todd also explores the lighter side of darkness, with singing and a continual sense of humor laid out over an incredibly dramatic tale. It exists as a wonderful set of contradictions.
The Dark Knight is a better story than Batman Begins, and it certainly takes itself a bit more seriously. The action sequences are riveting, the plot development is relentless, the visuals are more painstakingly etched out in inky detail—grittier and more real—and the more distracting and mood-intruding elements (i.e., Rachel Dawes) are backgrounded. Aaron Eckhart is excellent as Harvey Dent, and each minute that he, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, or Morgan Freeman are on-screen makes up for ten minutes of Christian Bale’s unimpressive performance. The real star of the film, however, and what sets this film apart from any other Batman and most other Hollywood villains, is Heath Ledger.
In two months, The Dark Knight has made more money than God.
…
Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005)
On DVD at Snee&Andy’s house with Lucía sometime the week after we arrived.
Apparently I’ve seen this film before, and after watching it, I realize that I do recall a few of the scenes. Not a very memorable film, I guess. In fact, I’m forgetting it all over again as I write this.
Two movies I saw recently:
1. Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008)
On 35mm at the AMC Loews Lincoln Center with Lucía, Lorin, Heidi, and Chris on 22 August 2008 late in the evening.
1. めがね (荻上直子, 2007)
Megane (Naoko Ogigami, 2007)
[wikipedia] - [imdb]
On DVD at Snee & Andy’s in Port Washington with Lucía on 23 August 2008 after midnight (technically 24 August).
…
If there’s anything these films have in common, it’s that they represent a very national type of humor. Tropic Thunder is the sort of American comedy that had me laughing 30% of the time, bored 20% of the time, and groaning 50% of the time. Steve Coogan getting blown up by the mine was pretty much the high point of the film, and it was all downhill after that.
Megane, on the other hand, was very slow. The humor is sparse and relies heavily on the social awkwardness surrounding the strange circumstances that the characters find themselves in. A lot of time is spent exploring an unfamiliar physical and social space in which Taeko seems curious about the strange world she’s landed in, but her curiosity is held in check by regular affronts to her personal comfort zone.
[sfpl]
in the sun and in the rain
and in the day and in the night
pain is a flower
pain is flowers
blooming all the time.
Five movies I saw recently:
1. WALL·E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
On 35mm at the Balboa Theater with Lucía, Grampa, Ben, Barb, and Sunny in early July 2008.
WALL·E carries on the Pixar tradition by having an extremely imaginative premise and an intricately detailed setting, but a fairly formulaic set of plot devices. What really sets WALL·E apart from other Pixar films, or indeed any other children’s film I can think of, is how dark it is. What is clear is that the Earth is rendered uninhabitable through environmental disaster most obviously manifested in the form of garbage. Also, some percentage of the world’s population was stranded on an interstellar cruiseship for 700 years, over which time they became not only unable to care for their own basic needs, but pretty much unable to manage locomotion of any kind without the assistance of machines. Strongly implied, if not explicit, is that all the rest of humanity has succumbed to the environmental catastrophe of Earth, and that the population of the cruiseship is all that remains.
I take the suggestion of the film to be something along these lines: if we follow our current course of consumerism we will find ways of adjusting to and evading our problems until we lose self-determination and perish.
As much as I liked WALL·E, I recognize that it lacked cohesion, and that its sophistication was undermined at times by an inability to manage effectively a balance between bigger-picture issues and the individual characters. While the plot wasn’t particularly complicated, its various threads seemed to be pulled in and out of focus almost at random. The subtlety of the background details were weighed down by the complete lack of subtlety in many of the foreground details (a particularly awkward example being the captain’s revelation about dancing and hoedowns, a scene that provided no insight or comic relief and only helped emphasize the improbability of the entire situation humanity had gotten itself into). A number of people I’ve talked to preferred Kung-Fu Panda to WALL·E, and I can certainly understand, given how tight Kung-Fu Panda’s story is, not to mention its consistent flashes of brilliant comedy. Ultimately, however, I think Kung-Fu Panda is a largely forgettable work of perfect escapist fluff while WALL·E is a flawed but beautiful attempt at making a thoughtful work of lasting significance.
…
2. 十字路 (衣笠貞之助, 1928)
Crossroads (Teinosuke Kinugasa)
[wikipedia (no article as of this writing)] - [imdb]
On 35mm with piano accompaniment at the Castro Theatre with Lucía, Ben, and Sunny on 13 July 2008 at 18:10.
Not as experimental or memorable as A Page of Madness, Crossroads is unique presentation of Japanese theater through Kinugasa’s Expressionist stylings. I didn’t enjoy the film all that much (the main male character is too stupid to bear), but it’s very interesting to see the possibilities of the medium being explored by a director determined to push the boundaries of cinematic conventions even as they are only just being established. Fortunately the film escaped some of the plot twists that at various points of the film were beginning to seem inevitable (in particular, that Okiku opts for prostitution or is raped), but it would be difficult to call the story interesting.
…
3. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
On Blu-Ray at Evelyn and Vincent’s house with Lucía, Evelyn, and Vincent on 20 July 2008 at around 21:00.
I remember when the so-called “Director’s Cut” of Blade Runner first showed at the Castro Theater back in 1992. I don’t recall too much, but certain sections of the film left a deep impression on me—Roy Batty, shirtless in the rain with a dove, talking about C-beams and tears in rain; Pris, motionless under a veil with raccoon makeup, and then screaming a robot scream and thrashing on the landing after being shot by Deckard; Deckard having his fingers bent backwards by Roy Batty, who had just grabbed his arm through a tiled wall.
Later, back in March of 1997, when I was working out Tower Records, the first six DVD titles hit the shelves in six test cities, including San Francisco. I don’t remember what the other five were, other than that they were of no interest to me, but one of the six titles was Blade Runner. Using my employee discount, I immediately bought the disc, despite the fact that I had no device on which to play it and was lacking the wherewithal to buy one (they were several hundred dollars then, as I recall). I knew, however, that some day I would, and that in picking up Blade Runner on DVD I was somehow snatching a tiny piece of history.
It was many months before I eventually watched the disc in its entirety, and a year or two and many DVD purchases later, I actually bought a computer (the very first I could call my own) with a DVD-ROM drive and a Hollywood+ decoder card on which I could watch DVDs any time I wanted to.
So no surprise, then, that Blade Runner would also be my first Blu-Ray purchase, even if the format has been around for some time, and I no longer have any heightened sense of the importance of such an event. I’ve moved on from owning discs (I’ve given—or lent, depending on whom you ask—my DVD collection to a friend, built on credit cards purchases when I had no money and arrested around the time I started earning a salary), and I have no intention of owning a collection of Blu-Ray discs, but since I recently bought a PS3 so Lucía and I could play Rock Band, I thought it would be nice to have at least one film around that I could watch on it.
My good friend Vincent had never seen the film, and since they have a film capable of resolving 1080p (unlike the remote control-less 19″ RCA ColorTrak that came with our semi-furnished apartment), we brought it over to watch.
It’s been at least six years since I last saw the film. What immediately struck me within minutes was the thought that they don’t make films like this anymore. Despite the sheer limitless fantasy that computer-generated special effects is capable of providing, I can’t think of any film with such an immersive level of imaginative detail in the last ten years.
…
4. Hancock (Peter Berg, 2008)
On 35mm at the AMC Bay Street in Emeryville with Lucía on 27 July 2008 at 20:05.
Silly film. I always enjoy Will Smith’s acting. Nevertheless, if I remember anything about this film a year from now, I’ll be very surprised.
…
5. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (Guillermo del Toro, 2008)
While I’m much more likely to remember Hellboy II than Hancock, Hancock probably had the better story, and it certainly had the better acting and dialogue. Fortunately the acting of the little boy version of Hellboy was painful enough that the film could only improve from there. That said, Hellboy II was inventive enough in setting and costumes to make it the more interesting of the two films. The tooth fairies were particularly fun to watch, and on the other end of the spectrum, the forest god brought a moment of awe that the rest of the film could never quite live up to (it was more than a little reminiscent of the Night-Walker from Princess Mononoke).
Mongol (Sergei Bodrov, 2007)
On 35mm at the Piedmont Cinema with Lucía and Ben on 29 June, 2008, at 21:55.
The story of Mongol is interesting (and I was lucky enough to come into the film with no knowledge of the legends of Genghis Khan), although I got a little bored of the mystical aspects of the film (it wouldn’t have been too out of place for one of the characters to say “he is the one!”). Tadanobu Asano is very much his usual self, with his stoic Mongol leader-type characteristics rolled out a little bit to fit him into the character. I don’t know Mongolian, but it didn’t sound quite right coming out of his mouth. I’m quite impressed that he managed to pull it off, however. Khulan Chuluun, playing Temüdjin’s wife Börte, is beautiful and charismatic and she managed to steal the show from him a little bit. The fighting scenes were nice, although in the larger battle scene I felt at times as though I was watching a real-time strategy game played out in front of me. The beautiful landscapes of Inner Mongolia were captivating and I can’t imagine anyone writing about this film without mentioning them. How on earth did the characters find each other? As a whole, the film wasn’t particularly memorable, but many of the little details really caught me while I was watching it. Anyways, I’m done.
Supermarket Woman (Itami Juzo, 2006)
On DVD at home with Lucía on 25 June 2008 around 23:00.
Juzo Itami likes to make movies about self-improvement. About learning how to do something right, and about staying on the straight and narrow despite what obstacles you might find thrown at you. While much more focused than Tampopo, Supermarket Woman felt like a bit of an unwelcome refinement of his form. This not to say that I disliked the film, it’s just that where Tampopo was rough, experimental, meandering, and even educational, Supermarket Woman felt slick, formulaic, underdeveloped, and didactic. We never really came to know any of the main characters, or even really to get a good feel for them. All the background characters were mere caricatures and even the main characters were just more sophisticated caricatures.
The main story of Tampopo is not itself terribly interesting. What is interesting are the little side plots the characters get into, and even more so the little mini-stories that pull the film in this way and that. In fact, the ending of Tampopo makes me quite sad every time, because I know that the film is over and there are no more little stories to tell. Despite all of this, the entire film manages to be quite focused on a single theme: food. Aside from a short fist fight (and probably the best I’ve seen on film) and a redecorating job, the film never departs from the topic of food-making and food-eating. Supermarket Woman really suffers from being so similar to Tampopo that comparison is completely unavoidable. While a fine film in its own right (it is funny, Nobuko Miyamoto is as magnetic in her middle age as she ever was, the lessons are interesting and possibly even useful, and the dissection of the business of supermarkets is itself fascinating), it is inferior in every way to Tampopo.