Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (***1/2)

Everyone knows people they see all the time, often at work, but don’t know much about. What do those people do with their spare time? In the case of Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi, who has had roles in Babel, 47 Ronin, and Pacific Rim), a 29-year-old Tokyo office assistant, she spends much of time alone, watching an old videotape of the movie Fargo. Her curiosity is not idle, because she believes she has pinpointed the location of a suitcase full of money that the Steve Buscemi character has buried in the film. This perhaps does not seem like a promising idea for a feature film, but David and Nathan Zellner (brothers, like Fargo filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen) make it work. Lars and the Real Girl seems roughly comparable.

Kumiko is a fish out of water in America, where she barely speaks the language, but also in Japan, where she lives a solitary existence. Kikuchi is in every scene of the movie and creates a character who remains enormously sympathetic even as her interactions with Japanese and Americans are sometimes very funny, even as she behaves deceitfully. There are a couple of nits I could pick with the plot, but the character is always believable. Besides the unique story, I enjoyed this film for its portrayals of infrequent film subjects: naiveté, language barrier, and snowy northern Minnesota. Only the ending was a letdown, but maybe because I wanted to keep watching Kumiko (and Kikuchi).


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viewed 10/25/14 7:15 pm at Roxy [PFS Film Festival] and posted 10/25/14

The Wind Rises (***1/4)

It is perhaps fitting that the final feature by Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki looks back in time. Departing from the fantasy films that make up the bulk of his work, he tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, whose real-life counterpart designed Japanese aircraft used in World War II. Jiro literally dreams of flying long before the war. The charming sequences in which he converses with the dream-conjured Italian aeronautics pioneer Giovanni Caproni have a touch of the whimsy that characterizes Miyazaki’s other work.

A key element of the story captures the 1923 earthquake that nearly destroyed Tokyo, but most of the film takes place later, when Jiro has begun working for an aircraft-design firm. Looking at the more advanced work being done in Europe and America, he burns with an ambition born of what the film suggests was a national inferiority complex. Arguably, this complex translated into an ugly nationalism, but in Jiro it merely translates into a desire to build better airplanes. The contradiction between Jiro’s pure desire for engineering perfection and the military uses to which his designs will be put is a subtle theme of the film, and the understatement enhances rather than detracts from the bittersweet conclusion.

I don’t think this film is quite the masterpiece that Miyazaki was perhaps going for, given the historical sweep and dramatic themes. In the English-dubbed version, anyway, some the dialogue and its overly bright delivery gives the proceedings the feel of a old-fashioned “family” film. The love story is unusual in its particulars, but conventional in its telling, close to Nicholas Sparks territory. However, if this is the director’s last feature, as he has said it will be, it is not unworthy, and a good choice for those who will enjoy the lovely hand-drawn images but are wary of the spirits and demons that populate many of Miyazaki’s earlier films.

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viewed 3/16/14 3:45 at Ritz Bourse and posted 3/16/14

Jiro Dreams of Sushi (***1/4)

Everyone should be so lucky as Jiro Ono, who early on found his calling and has spent most of his 85 years doing the thing that he enjoys and that gives his life meaning. His life is simple and orderly; his Tokyo sushi bar is small, with ten seats, serving unadorned sushi and nothing else, save a slice of melon after the meal. His customers book a month in advance and pay a minimum of 30,000 yen for an experience that may last as little as 15 minutes. Jiro has two sons; the elder works for him, and the younger one runs a place that is the literal mirror image of Jiro’s, since Jiro is left-handed and he is not.

Except for the rumblings in your stomach, this documentary (by American David Gelb, but entirely in Japanese) provokes the calmness felt by its primary subject. We learn a little about his history (with gaps), a little about his techniques and his suppliers, and a lot about his philosophy, whose essence is to work hard and repeat until you achieve perfection. Jiro has not yet achieved perfection, he believes, but, according to the food critic interviewed here, who purports to have tried all of the sushi in Tokyo, he is the best.

Those indifferent to Gelb’s luscious close-ups of sushi may be less impressed with this film, but even the mildest of foodies will likely find something to appreciate in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, whose inspirational quality (heightened with music by Phillip Glass) is an alternative to the bustling Food Channel vibe.

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viewed 3/22/2012 7:00 pm at Ritz East [Landmark Film Club screening] and reviewed 3/22/2012

Parade (***)

Tokyo is such a densely populated city that it seems like a fair number of the movies I’ve seen set there have this a subtext. Here four roommates, two of each sex, share an apartment, each coming and going and living the haphazard lives of twentysomethings. The movie is divided into segment focusing on each roommate: one who’s fallen for his best friend’s girlfriend; one who spends her time hanging out, waiting for her movie-star boyfriend’s occasional calls and hatching plans to uncover the call-girl ring that might be operating next door; one who’s kind of a wild girl; and one, the oldest at 28, who seems more stable than the others and is the only one shown working. And there’s a fifth roommate, a skinny homeless kid who happily shows up one morning to the confusion of the others. In the course of the film, we find out a little about each character, and they learn a little about each other. If there is a unifying theme, it’s how well do we know the people we know? (At one point, a couple of the roommates speculate on whether the newcomer might be the local serial killer, but his crimes turn out to be more petty.) The film is intriguing, but probably aimless for some tastes. The ending is possibly shocking, open to interpretation, but kind of anticlimactic rather than satisfying. One woman I heard, walking out of the theater, put it more succinctly. “Bunch of looneys,” she said.

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viewed at Ritz 5 [Philadelphia Film Festival] and reviewed 10/17/10

Babies (**3/4)

Imagine that you had a baby and let a film crew follow film your child extensively throughout the first 18 months of life, and then edit the resulting footage down to the most adorable and/or comic 20 minutes. Multiplied by four, this is pretty much what director Thomas Balmes has done. Two babies are from wealthy urban centers, Tokyo and San Francisco, and two are from rural areas of poorer countries, Namibia and Mongolia. Two are boys and two are girls, but at this age you don’t notice so much.

The babies interact with parents, animals (pets in the cities, wildlife and domestic animals elsewhere), other babies, and objects. No narrator interjects. No onscreen titles explain anything beyond view of the camera. No subtitles translate the dialogue, but it’s minimal and obviously trivial anyway. Of course, one cannot help but observe the obvious cross-cultural differences and similarities. Western babies spend a lot less time naked. Japanese people apparently sing “Happy Birthday” in English. But, just as obviously, there is no agenda here, no point of view at all, really. Whether this makes the film beautiful, vacuous, or both is debatable.

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viewed 4/28/10 at Rtiz Bourse [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/7/10

Tôkyô Sonata (***1/2)

Just like the main character in Laurent Cantet’s Time Out, middle-aged Mr. Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his job but doesn’t tell his family, continuing to put on a suit in the morning as he heads to a job center and a free-food line. But where the French film mostly sticks with its main character, this is much more of a family story. At home, Sasaki barely communicates with his wife and seems mostly a disciplinarian to his two sons, a stern figure even as he is meek with others. The other members of the family have different dreams and desires—the younger boy wants to play the piano—but the father seems lost.

Mr. Sasaki has the mentality of a salaryman in an age where downsizing has come even to Japan, and in subtle ways director Kiyoshi Kurosawa draws a parallel between the character and the country. Just as Mr. Sasaki must painfully re-evaluate his life, Japan has had to re-evaluate its place among nations, including participation in military missions. This is more of a subtext than a theme, but worth noting. In fact, the movie as a whole is quiet and contemplative—until the last third or so. Then there is a surprising and strange turn of events that comes out of left field, but makes the movie more compelling, and even serenely beautiful, than it seemed like it would be. A performance of Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” makes a lovely coda.

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viewed 5/7/09 at Ritz Bourse

Tokyo! (**1/2)

Three directors, three segments.

The first part, Michel Gondry’s “Interior Design,” is probably the best, and for most of its length the most conventional. The Tokyo Gondry (Be Kind Rewind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) portrays is cramped and expensive, like many large cities. (The segment was adapted from a graphic novel called Cecil and Jordan in New York.) The main characters are a filmmaker and his girlfriend, who’ve just moved to the city and are temporarily sharing a friend’s tiny flat. Just as the plot and characters have been developed, though, it takes a turn for the fantastic, with the ending ultimately too abrupt and unsatisfying.

On the other hand, Leos Carax’s (Pola X) “Merde” was unsatisfying throughout. Featuring one of the most irritating central characters since Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered, a crazy red-haired dude who comes up from the sewers and creates mayhem, it’s the only segment featuring non-Japanese characters. Possibly it is saying something about the country’s cultural homogeneity. Or not.

Finally, Japan native Joon-ho Bong (The Host, Memories of Murder) presents “Shaking Tokyo,” the shortest and simplest segment, about the paradoxical isolation big-city residents can experience. Its central character is a hikkomori, a hermit who survives on a parental stipend and delivered food. A chance event leads to his first human interaction in ten years.

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viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 4/14/09

The Magic Hour (***)

This Japanese gangster comedy takes the premise of Bowfinger and reverses it. That is, instead of a film star not realizing he’s in a movie, the lead is a hammy bit-part player who thinks he’s gotten the role of his life. In a way he has; he’s impersonating a real hit man, and the “movie” is the ruse concocted by the “director” to save his own skin. (He’s been sleeping with the boss’s girl and can save himself only by arranging for a meeting.)

I didn’t care for Bowfinger in large part because I never really believed the scheme would have actually worked. I can’t really say I found this strictly believable either, but the scenes were crafted carefully and cleverly enough that for large stretches I was able to suspend my disbelief. The star’s mugging for the camera—not to mention his insistence on wearing makeup—translates into some behavior that’s pretty odd from the viewpoint of the very real gangsters, and pretty funny from the viewpoint of the audience. Overlaid on this is a gentle parody of old Hollywood, in particular the last scene of Casablanca. Even the setting, a town called “Sucago,” is an homage; it intentionally looks like a studio backlot. The intentional anachronisms and well-timed comic bits make strict believability beside the point. This is silly fun.

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viewed 3/28/09 at Prince Music Theater (Philadelphia Film Festival) and reviewed 3/29 and 4/16/09

Jumper (**1/2)

What would you do if you could instantly teleport to anywhere? This is the premise of this slick action fantasy. Directed by Doug Liman (Swingers, Go, Mr. and Mrs. Smith), the movie is stylish, like all of Liman’s films, but, as with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, this only emphasizes how shallow the story is. (Smith writer Simon Kinberg also had a hand in this one, adapated from a Steven Gould novel.) The cameras swirl as the jumper (dull Hayden Christensen) lands atop the Great Pyramid at Giza, or Big Ben in London, where he spends much time when he’s not “getting digits” from women in Rio, or counting stolen currency in his New York apartment. But it turns out there are other “jumpers,” and also “paladins” who try to kill them, because, you know, only God should have that much power. Samuel L. Jackson, with a weird white hair cut, is the paladin in chief.

There is much that is entertaining in the movie, especially if you’re into special effects, but also much that is bullshitty and fake, even the way, when the hero takes his childhood crush (Rachel Bilson) to the Colosseum in Rome, she doesn’t take out the camera. Okay, small thing, but the movie, like so many others, is so all about quick cuts and iconic locations that the human elements get lost. (So did I at times; with all those cross-planet chase scenes, it was tough to tell where the characters were.) Jamie Bell, as another jumper, seems like he would have made a more promising lead character, or maybe just a better lead actor. As for the ending, it’s most notable for setting up a sequel.

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viewed and reviewed 2/16/08

The Grudge 2 (*1/2)

? A sequel to a remake that is, however, not a remake of the Japanese Grudge 2, though it is nonetheless again directed by and written by the auteur of both versions of The Grudge, Takashi Shimizu. Got that? The important thing is that the creepy dead woman and child are back. This time they’ve got they’re sights on Amber Tamblyn, who plays the sister of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s character from the first film. She’s come to Tokyo to figure out what Sis is doing in the hospital, but it turns out that the ghosts are also doing some traveling. No longer confined to an old house, they’re also targeting some girls at the nearby English-language school and a family in a Chicago tenement.

+ Well, no doubt about it, the dead people are creepy. Decreasingly scary, but creepy.

- If the lengthy description above makes it sound like the plot’s complicated, fear not. You won’t fear much, actually, because if you’ve seen the first movie, you’ve seen all there is to fear. Other than the new characters (Gellar’s being just about the only holdover among the living ones) and the new settings, there is precious little to carry the story forward. Over and over, someone is looking at something that suddenly turns into a dead person, sometimes scaring them, sometimes killing them. Tamblyn finally finds the woman who can explain everything, and the woman says, in essence, sorry, you’re screwed. Indeed.

= *1/2 Even fans of the original are likely to echo the befuddled mutterings I heard around me when I exited the theater. I think they were confused by the plot, thinking that there would be one.

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viewed 10/14/06 at Moorestown