August 30: Seven Samurai/Shichinin no samurai (1954 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★

Thought it was about time I checked this movie out, so I settled in for half of it….and couldn’t leave.  I think this film plugged into many of the themes I like: its warm humanity, its elder-teaching-youth theme, its plot of building a team to accomplish an ethical goals.  These are things I always enjoy in a film, and I thoroughly enjoyed them here. 

I like the breadth of Seven Samurai, too.  We follow not only the seven samurai but also some of the villagers.  And like Altman would later, Kurosawa develops a character arc for many of the characters instead of just one or two.  We follow the leader, Kambei; the youth, Katsushiro; the samurai wanna be, Kikuchiyo; Kambei’s friend, Shichiroji; kendo master, Kyuzo;   the villager, Rikichi; Katsushiro’s love interest, Shino; and many others.  It takes a 3.5-hour film to do that, and the movie doesn't waste a second.  Although it doesn’t develop any of these characters in real depth, they’re all more than mere ciphers for an idea or stereotypes as the movie follows their growing together to accomplish a goal.  And there are touching moments as we learn about them: Katsushiro’s tossing money to ensure the villagers can get rice of the samurai and Kikuchio’s unintended revelation that he has a farming background, for example.  These two characters in particular also tread along social class boundaries, putting them at the center of one of the themes of the film. 

I was also relieved that I wasn’t put off by cultural elements of the film.  The over-the-top theatricality that I sometimes find in Japanese film generally takes me out of the movie, but that didn’t happen in Seven Samurai.  Toshino Mifune’s Kikuchiyo is big here, and I sometimes found him too big; his actions go beyond what seems the norm for the movie.  But Mifune never takes him so far out that I can’t continue to see him in the film.  The ensemble models how to respond to Kikuchiyo, and I found that easy to follow.

If Altman had done an action movie, it would have looked like Seven Samurai.  Warm, human, engaging, deep, poignant, epic and ethical. And photographed beautifully.  I know this film is seen as the predecessor for many team-action films, but it has more affective complexity than any other I’m aware of.  Seven Samurai is a wonderful cinematic achievement and testimony to what cinema can do.  And worth many hours of rewatching.

August 30: Sanjuro/Tsubaki Sanjûrô (1962 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★
It seems this film gets short shrift when people talk about it with Yojimbo, but I like this sequel better than the first.  There’s a more action in this one, and there’s humanity in its gentle comedy.  Many of the smiles and laughs come from the contrast of earnest, impetuous youth contrasted and skilled, weary experience of maturity.  And this set-up even propells the story on several occasions.  There’s a similar deft humor in the courtly ladies, who emphasize conventional correctness over expediency at nearly every turn.  But their comic relief, too, has its warm and knowing truth, recognized by Sanjuro both when he has cascades of white camellias tossed in the stream and when he quotes the older lady about the sheathed sword.  In fact, despite all its violence, Sanjuro affirms the wisdom of maturity over the earnest strength of youth throughout.  Or maybe I’m just getting old.

I find Sanjuro himself interesting here as in Yojimbo.  Unlike today’s action heroes, Sanjuro keeps his strength in check until he judges he needs it, and he is a paragon of judgment.  Of course, he could take on Schwarzenegger if he needed to, but Sanjuro prefers to work in the realm of the trickster rather than the elephant, accomplishing his goals with his wit rather than his martial prowess.  In addition to his controlled strength, this samurai is another 60s antihero, rejecting the status quo and following his own high moral code.  He has more depth here than in Yojimbo, and that adds to the appeal of the film, too.

So Sanjuro is a fun action movie with a compelling hero and a moral focus.  I was a little surprised at how much I enjoyed it.  

August 29: Fistful of Dollars/Per un pugno di dollari (1964 -- Sergio Leone)

★★

I think I read somewhere that Kurosawa had sued Sergio Leone’s company for stealing from Yojimbo to make Fistful of Dollars and Kurosawa had won the lawsuit.  Kurosawa said he’d made more from Fistful of Dollars than he’d made from Yojimbo.  No surprise that that he won the lawsuit, but a pity that the copy did so much better at the box office than the original.    

Once again, I find myself no fan of the pop culture knock-off.  The things I like most in FoD come from Yojimbo or the Westerns that precede it, things like the cinematography and the grittiness.  You hear that FoD introduced this roughness into the Western genre, but I’m thinking Kurosawa deserves that accolade more than Leone.  Kurosawa made the conceptual leap of creating the gritty, action anti-hero; all I see in Leone is following Kurosawa’s direction.

And he really does follow it.  FoD lifts whole scenes out of Yojimbo.  A man stops at a fountain for a drink in the beginning of both, and the heroes in both pal up with the inn keeper in both to find out about the bands of bad guys in both.  Citation is rife, at least in some of the more surface elements.

But when I consider the depth and involvement I felt in the two movies, I really see the difference.  FoD is more a stylistic exercise than anything else.  In the many parallel scenes and actions in the two films, scenes like the rescue of the damsel in distress have genuine resonance in Kurosawa while, in Leone, Joe just goes through the motions. There’s a deep moral motive in Yojimbo, but Joe just does the rescue;  Joe’s hair is hardly messed up in his rescue, but Yojimbo can hardly walk or even breath after he is caught.  One character clearly reaches deeper and sacrifices more for a human value that does the other.  The depth of humanity that you find in Kurosawa is lacking in FoD.

So for me, Fistful of Dollars is more a historical curiosity than a work of art that moves me, that I recognize humanity in.  Good for what it is.

August 28: Yojimbo/Yôjinbô (1961 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★
This is my second time around with this Kurosawa film, too, and I still don’t see what everyone else does in it.  I get that Kurosawa adapts the conventions of the western into a Japanese context here, and I get that the movie is technically great. 

But I still don’t respond to it the way that so many critics do.  I find it clever – shots like the low-angle ones with architecture or the bell in the background are citations from so many westerns.  And the dusty street scenes shot from behind one group looking out the other, a classic shoot-out composition albeit using guys with swords and wearing Japanese clothes.  But I find this kind of cinematic borrowing more clever than insightful or creative.  Films like Yojimbo remind me of Quentin Tarantino’s approach to film; appropriate some distinctive film flourishes from an external source (Asian B-movies on Tarantino’s part; the Western on Kurosawa’s) and then put the borrowings together skillfully so the cinematic elements make some sense to the target audience.  This citation/appropriation, to me, never rises much above “clever.”

Of course there are Kurosawa touches here that are unique to him: there’s Lady Macbeth in the character of Seibei’s wife, and there’s the humanity at the center of so much of what I like about Kurosawa.  Yojimbo offers Sanjuro’s pity for the plight of the kidnapped mother as well as the endearing figures of the restaurant owner and coffin maker.  And Toshiro Mifune puts in another amazing performance here, too.

But these touches don’t make Yojimbo for me.  Maybe I have a limited sense of humor, but the horns and 60s flourishes of the soundtrack are unnecessarily heavy-handed intrusions to me, the drum roll behind a comedy routine, and the comedy often seems based in traditions or cultural values that are too distant for me to sense and respond to. 

So although Yojimbo was a hugely influential film in popular culture, I think I’d put my money on films like Throne of Blood and High and Low.

August 27: The Tree (2010 -- Julie Bertuccelli)

★★★

The French have a knack for truth in their psychological dramas that escapes our Hollywood.  We can usually manage cinema clichés and less-than-full characters when we do dramas here, and those dramas touch us, but whenever I head into a French drama, I know I’m going to be in the presence of truth.  And that I'm going to squirm.

I squirmed in The Tree.  There is a group of middling-aged French actresses who seem to fear nothing, and this film adds Charlotte Gainsbourg to that list.  Her Dawn O’Neil suffers through her grief so intensely that I feared for her children as she failed to cope; scenes like the one in the kitchen were almost suffocating.  The children, too, cope with their grief in ways that only show their pain to those of us watching.  The Tree doesn’t explain to us what’s happening in the children’s minds, but we watch their actions and understand that they’re coming from intense pain and loss.  Here, too, the French excel at showing the emotions of children.  This film has the best evocation I’ve seen of grief in a child since 1996’s moving Ponette.

Julie Bertuccelli also does a fine job of using Australia as a perfect environment for her characters’ grief, too.  Australia hasn’t looked this oppressive, unforgiving and harsh since Animal Kingdom.  It’s the perfect location for unmitigated emotional pain.

Unfortunately, other elements of The Tree don’t support the heavy lifting that the cast and setting do.  There are heavy-handed plot moments, like when Daddy-tree drops a bough on mommy’s bed after she’s been out on a date.  Or when the new boyfriend drips over Daddy-tree’s root.  Or when we get a one-dimensional secondary character like the arch villainess who lives next door.  Lapses like these undermine the other great efforts here.

Still, The Tree has truth in it, and it’s always a great experience to recognize that in a dark cinema.

August 25: High and Low/Tengoku to jigoku (1963 -- Akira Kurosawa)

★★★★★
This is the second time I’ve watched this movie but the first time I’ve really gotten it.  What mastery.  Kurosawa manages a wide range of characters here, all the while maintaining big stakes for everyone.  High and Low is theatrical, cinematic and even novelistic.  It’s among my favorites of his.

More than previously, I was impressed by the way Kurosawa uses the tools of the cinema here.  You have to watch the whole frame to get what’s happening in most scenes.  For example, when Gondo is talking with his evil assistant, the camera isn’t on the two faces in the conversation but on the scene, so you can see how the police, the wife and the chauffeur are reacting to the conversation.  That’s theatrical, but also very cinematic since the frame is communicating a lot of information about several characters at the same time.  I think of this in Altman or PT Anderson.  Or Renoir. I didn’t realize this technique was part of Kurosawa’s style.   One of the phone conversations is another great example of cinema economy.  The scene starts with Gondo talking on the phone, and the soundtrack continues with the conversation while the visuals cut from an image of Gondo on the phone to an image of everyone listening to a recording of the conversation.  Again, we can see how the conversation is affecting everyone in the movie with the screen full of characters.

High and Low also builds and builds the stakes until they are so high that you can’t imagine things could ever work out.  Not only is the kidnap victim at risk, but so is Gondo’s career.  And Kurosawa uses the Japanese culture of honor to raise the stakes even more, and to use this single kidnapping situation to question the entire economic development that Japan has undergone since the end of the war.  Early, the question is whether the corporate types will throw away quality and integrity in order to do business.  We learn that they will do so through the actions of Gondo’s assistant and through Gondo’s refusal to compromise on quality.  But the story then shifts to the question of whether Gondo will sacrifice his own material well-being for the life of the chauffeur’s son.  And when that’s decided, a large social question emerges; Will society respect and reward honor?  Throughout High and Low, we feel that nothing less than the culture of Japan itself is under stress, whether traditional values will bend to the demands of capital or not.  There’s a Shakespearean quality to the questions here as well as to the scope of the inquiry.

I like the range here, too, another Shakespearean element that makes even episode-based movies like High and Low feel epic in scope.  As the title implies, there is intrigue and conflict among those high on the hill, and there is grunt work, both among the police and the criminals, among those in the lower parts of the city.  In one compelling sequence, the police tail a suspect through honky-tonk bars and drug dens.  In this film, Kurosawa takes his camera through a big range of environments.

I also always respond to the humanity in Kurosawa, too, which can border on cute but which doesn’t  lapse into maudlin.  In the sequence on the train, the little aside when the policeman nods off captures both Kurosawa’s humanity as well as his use of comic touches to lighten the action.

I really liked this movie on the second viewing, and I’m sure it will hold up under subsequent.

August 21: Pale Flower/Kawaita hana (1964 -- Masahiro Shinoda)

★★★★★


Another great cinema experience here.  Pale Flower ranks with the beautiful films of bored existentialism from early 60s Antonioni, who deals with Europeans facing the same malaise as Muraki and Saeko here.  This Japanese pair see life as bland and uninteresting and seek thrill experiences to authenticate their existence. 

The thrills they seek include ever-higher gambling stakes as Saeko becomes used to risk and must wager more for excitement.  In fact, we learn that her intensity of living is so strong that even the other card players feel more alive when she’s there and look forward to her being in their game.  She also does a wild highway race with another sports car down Tokyo interstates in the middle of the night; the race ends when the driver of the other car stops and comes over to the couple, laughing hysterically.  He, too, had needed a thrill to feel authentic, and Saeko had shared that with him.  She even tries drugs as a way to feel, too, though we don’t see that scene.  I guess that if Masahiro Shinoda’s studio thought the card games were too graphic, they’d have definitely frowned on drug use. 

 Muraki is as bored as Saeko, as he says in voiceover at the film’s opening, but he’s experienced the intensity of truly living in killing another man; he explains to her that the feeling at the moment of killing is deeper and more authentic than any other thrill experience.  He feels some draw towards Saeko’s quest, but having felt intensely alive as he murdered the man, Muraki often doesn’t participate in Saeko’s seeking with the relish she does.  Having lived so intensely in doing his first killing, he finds that other thrills lack intensity, so he ultimately volunteers to do a hit for his gang even though he’ll return to jail because of it.  But before he kills his target, he seeks out Saeko so he can invite her share in the intensity of his moment.  It’s the climax of the film.

I like the ending of Pale Flower, too, sad and ironic as it is.  Muraki is in jail by then and unlikely to again feel authenticating thrill, while Saeko is dead, murdered in a scene which we hear involved sex and drugs; she was evidently continuing to seek intense thrill with the junkie Muraki had feared would lure her to her death.  We also see Muraki’s protégé show up at a card game in the suit that Muraki had given him, but the kid’s open face and body language tell the viewer that he has none of the depth of the man who'd previously worn the suit.  The young guy doesn’t understand what had been going on around him.

And layered on the philosophy, Pale Flower has gorgeous cinematography.  Shinoda uses intense blacks and whites and frequent strong composition in the frame, both two-dimensionally and leading into deep background.  The scenes of the (obscure-to-me) card games are tense and riveting even though a western viewer probably doesn’t understand the rules.  The films interiors are full and lit theatrically; its exteriors tight, creating the feel of characters trapped in a maze.  Even the clothes are remarkable with their elegance.  

Without the compelling characters and theme, I’d want to watch this movie just for its visuals.  With all of these elements together, Pale Flower if a great experience for the brain, the eye and the heart.

August 20: Topsy-Turvy (1999 -- Mike Leigh)

★★★★★

August 20: The Mikado (1939 -- Victor Schertzinger)

★★★

August 19: A Colt is my Passport/Koruto wa ore no pasupooto (1967 -- Takashi Nomura)

★★★★

This is the last in the Nikkatsu Noir series, and it’s a very fun time.  It drew a lot of things together for me.  The opening credits have music that is a western theme played by harmonica, and the blurry image behind the lettering appears to be a group of cowboys, though the distortion is so strong it’s hard to make out what you’re looking at.  And that would describe the movie as a whole.  It’s a western, with the hero taking care of his buddy, facing down the bad guys against overwhelming odds, and not expressing his love to his woman.  When I see the western-inspiring Yojimbo and Seven Samuri again, I’ll have a better understanding of how the flow in influences works.  Passport fills out a circle of influence, samurais going west, westerns heading east.  But Takashi Nomura doesn't see westerns as Americans do.  The western is history to us; in Japan (and most other places in the world), it’s a formal narrative pattern.  Now I get why it was possible for some directors to draw from the western and translate its elements into their own cinema.  I have to wonder if the opening music and image from Passport is a metaphor for how Nomura is using the western here.  You can’t easily make out the western elements in Passport since it’s a gangster film, but the outlines are there nevertheless.

And I get what mukokuseki film is about now, too.  This movie is a western (the dusty showdown ending was a by-the-numbers shootout), but it’s also a film noir with the strong shadows and contrasts, the threatening tone, and the overwhelming omnipresence of menace.  It’s hard not to imagine that the film is going to end badly.  And there’s a lot of stylized, over-the-top violence like you’d see in post-American New Wave film.  I think mukokuseki means blending genres, and Passport certainly does that.  And to very satisfactory ends.

There are even some sharp, self-reflexive elements in the film.  When the guys are casing the gangster in the opening of the film, they go through a series of scenes that are visual or cinematically noteworthy.  In each scene, you see the two men.  In the next sequence with Kamimura setting up the hit, the camera goes through the exact same shots, but there is no one in the shot.  This smart move not only gives the info that Kamimura is not planning an obvious hit, but it also makes us aware of the film’s composition and camera movement since we recognize all the cinematic elements on the second go-round.  Later, actors will look right at the camera, too.  Such breaking-the-fourth-wall gestures feel French New Wave to me.  As does the stylized, formal composition of many shots.

 This is the second film I’ve seen with Jo Shishido, and I think he’s an interesting presence on screen.  He’s long-legged tall, and his surgically-altered cheekbones make him distinctive.  He’s not handsome, but there’s always something appealing about him when he’s in front of the audience.  I’m looking forward to seeing him in other roles.

It’s also a little bit of a breakthrough for me to see these films and get an idea of where Tarantino is coming from.  I’ve thought for some time that Tarantino is doing a reverse Kurasawa; while Kurasawa takes western film language and uses it for Japanese cultural expression, Tarantino takes Asian and uses it for an American public.  Watching these Nikkatsu films, I’ve gotten a much stronger understanding of the material Tarantino draws from, and I find his work more accessible.

A Colt is My Passport is a fun film.  It might not be award winning (the exposition at the beginning is almost embarrassing), but it’s interesting to see how elements of styles that I think of as profoundly American can be appropriated for a different cultural expression.  What fun!

August 19: Cruel Gun Story/Kenjû zankoku monogatari (1964 -- Takumi Furukawa)

★★★★

This is a suspenseful, complicated, dark, existential caper film.  And the one in the Nikkatsu Noir collection that looks most familiar to my American eyes.  It’s got a lot of noir style — single-source lighting, low camera angles, contrasts, highlights and silhouettes.  And the settings of desolate environments like the abandoned American military base are appropriate for the dark mood.

I think it’s the mood here that feels most familiar to me.  Craggy-faced Togawa is a man of honor.  He’s been in jail for avenging a crippling injury to his sister, but he has a strict code of honor that inspires loyalty in those who know and have worked with him.  He can be ruthless – like when he guns down the two security guards – but this only comes out when he has to be so in the line of duty.  Otherwise, he’s a straight-up, honorable professional who does what he says, though as a professional, he doesn’t trust people and tries to cover all the angles.  And his main motivation is to get help for his sister.

But the world of Cruel Gun Story isn’t a world where honor is an advantage.  Nearly everyone here is involved in betrayal to some extent:  Togawa by his gangster boss, the boss by Togawa’s handler, Togawa by his  crew.  And Cruel Gun Story moves to dark ending where everyone, honorable and dishonorable, perish.  All have sinned in this film, and all suffer. 

A last element I like here is the suspense.  When the robbery occurs half way through the film, we know that the focus isn’t going to be on the heist but on what happens afterwards.  And the engaging story takes us into many different situations and contexts with unexpected twists and suspenseful coincidences.  Cruel Gun Story has a strong story.

This movie is one of the most enjoyable of the Nikkatsu Noir set.  I liked the familiarity of so many noir elements, and I enjoyed seeing them applied to the context of Japan, a different environment and culture that highlights the noir elements.  What a pleasure this film is.

August 18: Take Aim at the Police Van/Sono gososha o nerea (1960 -- Seijun Suzuki)

★★★★

Director Seijun Suzuki  is known for outlandish visuals and hipness in his films, and if I hadn’t known that, I’d have gotten it very quickly in this movie.  Take Aim is one fabulous, outrageous visual after another.  It starts with the sharpshooter firing into a police van in a jump cut ambush that is as riveting as anything at the beginning of an Indiana Jones movie, and it concludes with a nighttime shootout in a rail yard as clouds of brightly-lit steam pour out of engines.  In between, the hero and heroine are tied in the cab of a gas truck that is pushed down a hill side after the bad guys have opened the gas valve on the back.  The gangsters light the trail of gasoline, and a line of fire follows the truck across the countryside, down the hill and over a bridge, releasing a wall of smoke as the protagonists struggle to free themselves.  Oh, and a stripper is shot through the breast with an arrow elsewhere.  I’d have to agree with the description of Suzuki as visually “delirious.”  Films like this give me some insight into what Tarantino sees in Asian film.

But like in the other two Nikkatsu Noir films, I see a lot of French sensibility here.  When the cool Shoko is standing by the juke box, jivin’ with her friends, I see Nana from Vivre Sa Vie and Marianne From Pierrot le Fou.  Yuko is even listening to French accordion music at one point when she tells her maid to turn it off.  Whatever vibe Godard was picking up on, Suzuki was in tune.

Take Aim’s editing, with its contrasts and gaps, harkens to the editing that is coming in French New Wave, too.  In fact, the story itself is densely convoluted, so much so that Suzuki resorts to a voice-over to keep the viewer somewhat on target with what’s going on and why.  Those moments are not Suzuki’s best cinema, but he’s more interested in smoking lines of flame going across the countryside than in his story anyway.  The story here is a thin excuse to get from one striking visual to the next.

You can already see Suzuki’s attraction to cool in this film, too.  His bad guy wears sunglasses at night, and his sharpshooter puts his gum on the spotter scope before he starts shooting.  Bad guys are dressed immaculately in fashionable clothes, and hipsters pack into cars in their hippest.  The only unfashionable people here are the hero and the police, who are very square.

Take Aim is still noir.  The black-and-white contrasts and conspicuously low camera angles point to the source for at least some of the filmmaking, and there is (finally) a femme fatale here.  But the femme fatale is an unintentional problem-maker, and like the other Nikkatsu noirs, this film is aiming not only at a police van but also at a social goal, to protect young women from prostitution.  The social message is not something I find in American noir, but it’s in these Nikkatsus a good deal.  Even though Suzuki gives it short shrift in his pursuit of the cool and of arresting images.

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?