August 17: Rusty Knife/Sabita knife (1958 -- Toshio Masuda)

★★★
This film is a black-and-white, widescreen romp in noir…and a lot of fun.  While not as over-the-top stylistically as I Am Waiting, Rusty Knife still has noir elements like smoke-filled police offices and a camera that tracks someone’s legs while they are walking.  And this film even opens with a scene replete with black, late-50s police cars.  It’s easy to see the American noir influences behind it.

Rusty Knife also brings in the noir staple of corrupt police, a noir element I missed in I Am Waiting.  While most of the police here are honest, corruption in law enforcement plays some role in how the action happens, and the corruption in the burgeoning economic development permeates many social levels and institutions, from the government though the police and on to the mob.  But the police corruption is only one part of the big stakes here – the well-being of the entire society is at risk.  We see from the opening crowd scenes that everyone is hurting and that cleaning up the pervasive crime will make the city a better a place to live. Both the prosecutor and our hero Tachibana say as much during the film. The corruption in society at large is pretty common in American noir, though I don’t recall seeing the noir hero as the savior of society.  He is usually pressed just to get himself out of the situation.

I also find the bitterness and loss in Rusty Knife to be appropriate for noir.  Tachibana endures one crushing blow after another.  He discovers his main flaw – his lack of control – but Rusty Knife condemns him to continually fail, to continually lose control of himself and to continually regret it.  And he discovers that he’s made a significant error in judgment, having avenged himself on an innocent man.  And then he loses his last, best friend.  By the end of the film, Tachibana is a lone, maimed, flawed hero walking off alone.  It’s a good, existential, noir conclusion, even after the hero has saved society.

I found it hard not to think of French New Wave in some of the scenes here, though Rusty Knife predates Breathless by a couple of  years.  There is cool fashion here, a straight-ahead soundtrack, and a great scene with a couple careening through the streets on a motorcycle with the wind blowing, them shouting and the camera waving from building top to building top like in Dassin's Rififi.  It’s a short scene, but one full of the promise of what is to come.

The story structure is not what you’d expect in a classic Hollywood story either.  It looks forward.  Through most of Rusty Knife, the story is focused on the Tachibana/Katsumata conflict, but when that’s resolved 75% of the way through, the focus shifts to Tachibana and Keiko's uncle.  While there is plenty of obvious foreshadowing about the uncle, it’s not classic Hollywood to lose a main character and move to a different focus ¾ through the movie.

Rusty Knife is pop entertainment, but there’s a lot of pleasure to be had from the social context and even from the narrative itself. I’m even turning into a fan of Yujiro Ishihara, who is almost a Japanese Alan Delon at this point.  This film is another worthwhile component of the Nikkatsu Noir Eclipse collection.  

August 16: I Am Waiting/Ore wa matteru ze (1957 -- Koreyoshi Kurahara)

★★★
I Am Waiting is the first movie I’ve watched from the Criterion Eclipse series Nikkatsu Noir, and it’s a discovery for me.  From the collection notes, I understood that the Nikkatsu studio did a series of movies that use the vocabulary of noir, and that the films had some success.

My interest here was in what elements of noir worked in these popular culture films and what elements weren’t deemed appropriate.  I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that some cultural structures didn’t make the transfer but that the Kurahara appropriated the noir visual style well.

In fact, a big source of my pleasure in this film was seeing all the familiar noir style in a Japanese context.  There are lots of low camera shots with large shadows thrown behind the characters, and the opening looks like it could have been done by John Huston with the characters filmed from behind and with the camera following a pair of shoes from one pool of street light to the next, going into darkness between the pools.  We don’t even see the faces of the characters until several shots into the movie.  And the dark, vaguely threatening dockside setting could be from any noir.

Thematically, I Am Waiting picks up on a few familiar noir ideas.  The movie concerns the underworld, and it’s not immediately clear who the criminals are or even what they’ve done.  To this extent, Kurahara addresses classic noir concerns.  But this Japanese noir goes off the trail in two, perhaps culturally significant ways.  First, I was surprised to find that the police weren’t involved in the hero’s quest for resolution; I’m used to seeing the police as bumbling if not flat-out corrupt in noir, but here they don’t do anything except, at one small juncture, provide some info.  No social commentary on the police in this film.

Then second variation concerns the woman in the hero’s life.  I’m used to a femme fatale in noir, the woman who brings about the destruction of the hero.  Here, however, Saeko actually aids the hero, providing him with the info he needs and helping him accomplish his goals.  I kept expecting some kind of reversal in her character, but that never happened.  Instead, she enables Joji to realize his goal with no double-cross.  It’s interesting to me that I Am Waiting had no room for the misogyny of noir; perhaps women’s subservient role in Japanese culture worked against their bringing down the hero.

I Am Waiting is a fun movie.  When it uses obvious noir style flourishes, it puts them with Japanese faces and Japanese settings, which highlights the style even more than when we see it in American films.  And there are points when Kurahara  even extends the style, like when Joji walks beside a chain-link fence with the links running in shadows on his back, an effect I’m more used to seeing with Venetian blind shadows.  And it’s fun seeing what cultural element transfer and don’t in this Japanese noir.  It was unique seeing the femme fatale who wasn’t, in fact, fatale.  I’m looking forward to others in the collection.

August 15: Toy Story 3 (2010 -- Lee Unkrich)

★★★★

This is the last of the series and the best in some ways.  Before this film, my favorite was the first, with its themes of friendship, inclusiveness and responsibility.  Toy Story 3, though, has the advantage of being able to draw on situations and characters from the first two films created to develop in a deeper way.  Unkrich uses this depth to go beyond the first two movies.

And the emotions do run deeper here.  You have Andy, transitioning into young adulthood but still holding on to his childhood, arguing with his sister and being hesitant to leave his toys.  The concluding scene of him and the young girl playing with the toys is touching, a young adult able to give up his favorite toy yet still able to engage his imagination in play.  He has assimilated his childhood by the end of that scene and is ready to move to the next stage as he gets into his car alone and heads to college. 

The emotions among the toys, too, are more intense.  The most intense scene in the film – and possibly in the trilogy – occurs when the toys ultimately fail to escape the dump and are being sucked into the incinerator.  At this point, all their ingenuity, valor and honor have failed them, and they join hands to face death, like at the end of The Wild Bunch or Butch Cassidy.  That would be an emotionally moving moment in any film, and that it’s able to pack that much punch in an animated film is especially remarkable. 

And Toy Story 3 shows what happens with failed personal transitions, too.  Like Shen in Kung Fu Panda 2, Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear in this film has been damaged by feeling unloved and abandoned, and rather than moving on from that pain, Huggin' dwells on it, building his whole life on his unassuaged hurt.  Not only does he create a repressive toy regime to compensate, but he forces his closest friends into unhappy brooding.  Andy’s toys, when they learn that they weren’t abandoned, immediately move to rejoin Andy and resume their happy toy role; however, when they reveal  that Huggin', too,  was loved, Huggin' rejects this truth in favor of his resentment, preferring his scruffy unhappiness to healing and even going so far as to try to destroy Woody and his friends.  Happily, Huggin’s friends embrace their opportunity for happiness and move out of his orbit of sadness.

And though it wasn’t a big emotional point in the movie, Woody’s decision to join his friends and stay with the little girl has some resonance.  Alone among the toys, Woody has the chance to stay with Andy, but just as Andy realizes it’s time for him to give up his toys, so does Woody come to know he that he’s a toy and needs to be played with.  And to stay with his friends.  His decision to let Andy go is a telling, touching moment.

Toy Story 3 isn’t all serious themes, though.  It’s replete with slapstick humor and witty asides.  The Ken and Barby dolls, for example, offer ongoing humor.  Ken is locked into the 70s and 80s, and he not only loves clothes but has nice handwriting.  If he’s not gay, he’s a strong metrosexual.  Barby has elegant, long fingers and poses her body with exactly the same awkwardness as the doll; she resorts regularly to tears until she hardens up under pressure, but even when capable, she’s humorously capable.  There is also a lot of humor when Buzz clicks into Latin mode, becoming macho and flirty.  And there are one-liners throughout.  “Don’t open your mouth,” a toy tells Huggin' as the bear is strapped to the grill of a truck. The movie is full of laughs.

And like so many movies today, there are obvious nods to other movies.  The droopy-eyed doll wandering the halls at night and staring sadly up at the moon owes more than a little to The Brothers Quay, and  I caught a clear reference to Cool Hand Luke when Huggin' lists transgressions of his rules, each time rhythmically repeating the punishment of “into the box.”

Toy Story 3 is a fine movie, a mature film about friendship and love.  And about transitions, growing up and moving on.  Another Pixar home run that is very worth a couple of hours of time.

August 12: The New World (2005 -- Terrence Malick)

★★★★★

August 7: Another Earth (2011 -- Mike Cahill)

★★★

August 6: Even the Rain (2010 -- Icíar Bollaín)

★★★★

Based on what I’d heard about this movie, I was ready for something tedious, self-reflexive, academic and slow.  It wasn’t….at all.  I was engaged all the way through, both with the action/characters and with the way the two main storylines of the movie reflected off each other.  It’s been awhile since I’ve seen a movie that was engaging on an entertainment level as well as on an intellectual.

The action level in itself has plenty going on.  A crew is making a movie about Columbus’ initial landing in the New World and brutal subjugation of the indigenous people that followed, but as the film crew is working on their movie, a full-scale rebellion breaks out in the city with some members of the film’s cast being involved.  Lots of risk, action and conflict there; it’s a rich story.

As Even the Rain continues, though, some wonderful parallels emerge.  First, it becomes obvious that he water company’s forcing the locals to pay for well water is a parallel to the exploitation of the colonists who forced indigenes to pan for gold.  Parallels are clear between the colonial military forcing the mining and the modern Bolivian army enforcing water payment; there's even a parallel scene concerning dogs.  And there are great scenes in Even the Rain with some of the local workers listening to actors delivering the lines like those of the 16^th century anti-exploitation monk Bartolomé de las Casas; these 500-year-old exhortations are as pertinent in 21^st century Bolivia as they were in the colonial period.  Capitalism has replaced colonialism, but the indigenes suffer all the same.

Suspended between these two areas of meaning is the filmmaking.  The filmmakers partly participate in the exploitation, having come to Bolivia to save money and pay a pittance for wages.  But parallels to the colonial era exist in the film company, too; the exploiting producer comes to sympathize with the oppressed locals, reflecting one reading of the trajectory of Columbus himself, and the lead actor has an instant sympathy with the local people like Bartolomé.  Thrown in for good measure is the director, torn between totally loyalty to his film and a strong moral sympathy to the exploited locals.  His situation is summed up well when he confronts the mayor about the poverty of the local population that works for as little as $2/day and the mayor responds that the film company was paying that itself.   

These several levels of parallel and signification make Even the Rain a hugely pleasing film experience.  I sometimes wished it were a little less hammer-to-the-head, but it so smart and often so beautiful that I was willing to look past that.

August 5: Horrible Bosses (2011 -- Seth Gordon)

★★★
I know it’s just conventional, summer pablum, but this movie had me laughing in many, many places.

Part of the appeal is the story, which is quite tight, and another part is the obvious chemistry between the leads.  As you learn from the outtakes in the credits, a lot of the dialog was improv, and these guys are very good at picking up on each other when they are all in character.  I was already familiar with Jason Bateman before the film, but here he mostly played the straight man to Charlie Day’s and Jason Sudeikis’ characters.  Day was simply hilarious, into his character and playing him with abandon.  Of scenes I remember, the little guy Day was hysterical playing the little guy who accidentally ended up on coke even though a scene like this is close to cliché.  No surprises in this film but very competent.  Just the thing for a summer afternoon.

I went with a group of former students who were leaving the country, and they all thought it was funny, too.  My question: How did they ever learn that vocabulary?