TV Asahi & TBS on Youtube

It has been all over the news today that TV Asahi and TBS have struck a deal with Google to stream news programs on Youtube. Most of the articles, however, don't have links. I found it pretty tricky to find TBS's channel because someone else was already using their acronym. I hope they find a way to make it financially viable to stream more than just the news in the near future, but for the time being, check out tvasahi (who have celebrated the new deal with a cute little cartoon - which unfortunately they won't let me embed) and tbsnewsi. Of course, if you love alternative Japanese animation as much as I do, you should also be subscribed to NHKonline, because they post the latest Digista shorts regularly. For example, check out Mirai Mizue's latest animation below:

DVD review - THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is another one of those films that Steven Soderbergh (OCEAN'S ELEVEN, TRAFFIC) makes on a low budget to indulge his auteur-fantasy. The first was a lo-fi, hi-def, amateur-cast drama called BUBBLE. BUBBLE was about brutal jealousy among factory workers. With the deadpan amateur cast and hokey script, I was utterly unimpressed. THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is another beast entirely. For a start, it looks much better - indeed, it's just as glossy as Soderbergh's mainstream films and the static framing works well as a distancing device that matches the emotional distance between the characters. If BUBBLE was about inappropriately extreme emotion, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is about lack of emotion. Real-life prostitute Sasha Grey plays a high-class hooker who sells not just sex (indeed, we never see it) but fake relationships. All this, while trying to maintain a relationship with her real-life boyfriend. This film could've been amazing. The concept of using a real-life prostitute to play an imaginary prostitute who's playing a girlfriend to the detriment of her real (qua movie) boyfriend, is fascinating. The movie also serves as a small slice of life at the height of the boom - a mirror to that craziness - where people were obsessed with investment returns and status symbols and everything could be bought. But ultimately, THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE is a failure. Casting an amateur leads to line-delivery that is painfully flat and fake. The dialogue (from the screenwriters of ROUNDERS and OCEAN'S THIRTEEN) also feels stilted and fake. As a result, at the point in the film when we're supposed to empathise with the hooker as she takes a chance on love with a client, we're so distanced from the action that it's impossible to care.

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE played Sundance 2009 and opened in the US, Canada, France, Brazil and Australia earlier this year. It was released on Region 1 DVD yesterday. It opens in Russia on October 22nd and in the UK on November 27th.

Tokyo Loop (2005)

Tokyo’s centre for experimental and art cinema, Image Forum, under the guidance of program director Takashi Sawa and coordinator Koyo Yamashita, has a knack for putting together some clever screening packages together for the Image Forum Festival every year. Many of these packages, such as Thinking and Drawing, make their way into international festivals, and in some cases even onto DVD. Such is the case with the 2006 omnibus Tokyo Loop featuring the work of both established artists like Yoji Kuri, Taku Furukawa, Keiichi Tanaami, Nobuhiro Aihara, as well as exciting younger artists such as Kei Oyama, Mika Seike, Tabaimo, and Tomoyasu Murata.

Tokyo Loop came out of Image Forum’s desire to do something to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Stuart Blackton’s animation “Humorous Phases of Funny Faces” (1906), considered by many the first publicly screened animated film. Sawa and Yamashita commandeered the help of Furukawa who contributed to the project with a film of his own and helped recruit other independent animation and experimental artists.

The 16 artists were asked to contribute a short film inspired by the city of Tokyo. The films would also be linked by the participation of Seiichi Yamamoto, a well-known musician from Osaka’s underground music scene who composed the score. Yamamoto corresponded with the artists during the production process. He composed the music in advance based upon the sketches and storyboards provided by each animator, then revised them to fit the final edit of the film. During a discussion that I attended following a screening of the film at Image Forum on the 12th January 2007, Yamamoto spoke of the difficulties posed by trying to compose the music in advance of seeing the films. In the end, he was very successful at using his music to complement the wide variety of styles and imagery that each artist brings to this collaborative process.

Masahiko Sato, renowned director of animated TV commercials, and his partner Mio Ueta kick off the omnibus with “Tokyo Strut,” an homage to the original line drawings of Blackton and also recalls the 2D experiments with line, shape, and motion done by Norman McLaren at the NFB. Sato and Ueta’s playful depiction of people and dogs out for a stroll reminds us of the advancement in technology since those early days of animation by shifting the image from 2D to 3D using CG animation at one point during the film.

“Tokyo Trip” takes us on a psychedelic ride through the colourful, trippy imagery that has made Keiichi Tanaami famous. While the nightmarish, often sexualized characters with exaggerated features are a trademark of Tanaami, he does weave in the theme of Tokyo subtly through his use of metaphors such as rain and train travel.

Tanaami’s work is followed by Mika Seike’s feminist parable “Fishing Vine” which depicts a woman as the object of male desire and voyeurism. Like her earlier films, two of which featured on the earlier Image Forum DVD Thinking and Drawing, “Fishing Vine” has been constructed through the scanning and laying of drawings, photographs, and real objects like leaves. Seike’s films are instantly identifiable by the black and white newspaper-like quality to the human figures.

Another artist also featured on Thinking and Drawing, Kei Oyama offers yet another disturbing but mesmerizing short film “Yuki-chan” about the death of a young girl. Yamamoto’s layered soundtrack complements the textured visual style of the animation and also conveys the somber tone.

The melancholy of Oyama’s work is countered by Kotobuki Shiriagari’s comical first foray into animation “Dog & Bone,” which keeps it simple with pencil drawings and cut-outs. The visual style is in keeping with the child-like scrawls he uses in his deeply subversive manga. A human line-drawing form with a cut-out dog head chases a spinning bone through various scenes from both contemporary Tokyo (Tokyo Tower, train crossing, movie theatre) as well as Tokyo’s past (rural scenes, fire bombings). The cheerful melody contrasts with the often violent imagery.

Tabaimo’s “Public Convenience”, which she also presented as a video installation at the Hara Gallery in 2006, takes place in a women’s public toilet. The setting is typical of the grungy public facilities generally found in JR stations. The colour palette and style is typical of Tabaimo’s work and is heavily influenced by ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). A scene in which a turtle tries to crawl out of the Japanese-style toilet recalls Hokusai’s famous work The Great Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa Oki Nami Ura, 1832) in the way she draws the wave of water flushing the turtle back down. A fascinating piece that depicts the grim every day realities of public lavatories in the style of a moving painting.

Atsuko Uda won the newcomers prize at the Image Forum Festival in 1999 for her digital video film “Fukuda-san.” Her Tokyo Loop title "-blink-TOKYO-blink-" is creative nod to html script (the title is actually written with html brackets, but they were messing with with script on this page & had to be nixed). She was inspired by the city lights she remembers from her childhood growing up in the late Showa era. Her use of lights reminded me of the Lite-Brite toy that was all the rage in North America when I was growing up. Uda’s film captures all the motifs associated with the seasons with nods to traditional Japanese cloth and paper design.

At first Nobuhiro Aihara’s “Black Fish” gives the impression that it is an abstract interpretation of the music like Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart’s Begone Dull Care (1949) or Oskar Fischinger’s Motion Paintings and early abstractions. However, as the piece progresses, the camera moves back to reveal that the black swathes of ink are not random, but animations of strange faces that metamorphosize into the moving images of black fish.

Renowned experimental filmmaker Takahashi Ito’s work is not traditional animation. Rather, it is animation in the sense of ‘manipulation of moving images’. “Unbalance” depicts a dark vision of Tokyo as a place where people suffer under intense emotional states. An intense film with nightmarish imagery.

Maho Shimao’s “Tokyo Girl” starkly contrasts Ito’s deeply anguished film with a more light-hearted vision of Tokyo as a place of female sexual freedom. Shimao is perhaps most famous for her manga “Goriko, High School Girl” which she wrote as a teenager and has a popular teenage girl fan following. She comes from an artistic family, with both her parents working as freelance photographers. Her father, Shinzo Shimao is also a novelist, and her grandfather Toshio Shimao (1917-1986) was a renowned writer.

With “Nuance”, Tomoyasu Murata captures the rhythms and imagery of the city using a variety of different animation techniques, many of which were reminiscent of Norman McLaren. Taku Furukawa and Yoji Kuri both demonstrated the minimalistic pen & ink styles for which they are renowned to capture typical Tokyo scenes with black humour. Furukawa’s “Hashimoto” features a group of smokers on Hashimoto JR platform who transform into crows to peck to pieces a ‘rat’ smoker who does not conform to the ways of the group. His sin? Talking on his keitai! Kuri’s “Funkogarashi” also takes on socially unacceptable, yet commonplace behaviour: people who walk their dogs and don’t scoop the poop.

Many of the contributions to Tokyo Loop are abstract in nature. Atsushi Wada’s “Manipulated Man”, for example, presents a poetic dissection of the highly pressured salaryman using metaphors of manual manipulation, repetition, regurgitation and sheep. Koji Yamamura’s highly allusive, dream-like contribution “Fig” features a block-headed man with Tokyo Tower for a nose, while interactive media and installation artist Toshio Iwai plays with the concept of time flying by in the city by animating a clock with a series of images resembling a kaleidoscope in “12 O’Clock”.

The extras section of the DVD features ‘Making of’ profiles for ten of the artists. This gives a behind-the-scenes look at the wide range of techniques employed by the artists, from Aihara and Tanaami hand-drawing on paper and filming frame-by-frame on 16mm to Mika Seike scanning found objects into her computer for animation. The DVD comes with a book containing stills from each short film, bios for the artists as well as a short explanation of their inspiration for each piece. A CD of the soundtrack is also available.

For an interview with the producers, read this article from PingMag (an online bilingual art mag that I miss terribly since it succumbed to funding shortages at the New Year). Many of the artists featured here have their own homepages, so look for them in the sidebar.

Tokyo Loop

Animation

Thinking and Drawing

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - GIGANTIC

GIGANTIC is the debut feature from director Mark Aselton and writer Adam Nagata. It's a refreshingly ambitious, original, bizarre romantic-comedy. That said, it's a complete failure, and is only worth watching insofar as it whets your appetite for what this film-maker will do when he gets a proper editor and starts to better structure his whacky ideas. The movies sees Paul Dano's mattress salesman sell a high-end mattress to John Goodman's back-pain afflicted millionaire. His daughter (Zooey Deschanel) picks it up, and wants to start a romance, but the salesman is too busy avoiding a madman and trying to adopt a Chinese baby. So, we trudge through 100 minutes and the movie never coheres and never engages. It's a tremendous shame, because the film-makers are obviously trying to break with the Hollywood identikit rom-com and the performances are great.

GIGANTIC played Toronto 2008 and was released in the US and UK earlier this year. It is available on DVD. It will be released in Portugal on October 22nd, in France on November 18th and in the Netherlands on March 25th 2010.

Eventual tags: adam nagata, clarke peters, daniel stewart sherman, edward asner, ian roberts, jane alexander, john goodman, matt aselton, paul dano, peter donahue, robert stanton, zach galifianakis, zooey deschanel

FAME: I've had more memorable turds

This review is brought to you by Daniel Plainview.

We went into this film with very low expectations, which it constantly failed to live up to. At the very least, we expected some effort to remake the original FAME – instead we got a mish-mash of seemingly (and as it turned out, actually) unconnected scenes interspersed with disappointingly crap dancing, singing, acting and tunes. The original’s themes of sex, drugs, racism and disillusionment were replaced by a wank-a-log of superficial, pointless, middle-class “problems”, inconsequential relationships and breakups, and needlessly worried black parents. Even the songs from the original were depressingly absent.

The set-pieces were damp squibs, they were more about tits-n-ass than production values or choreography. The cardboard-cut-out so-called characters failed to develop in the audience even one iota of engagement or interest. The dialogue descended into meaningless drivel or saccharine monologues (“success is love” – “if you don’t open up you’ll never be an actor”). The camerawork was lazy, and like the rest of the film insulted the viewer’s intelligence.

10 minutes in, I asked myself, “is this as good as it gets?” Sadly, it was. An hour later I asked reviewsmoviebook whether I’d fallen asleep during the part that contained the point. She confirmed that I hadn’t, and she suggested we leave. Stupidly I declined. We waited until the bitter end, and were rewarded with an unintentionally hilarious finale, complete with slow-motion ballet to a song called “Don’t Be Afraid to Succeed!” I laughed – but the £8.50 I’d spent on a ticket wasn’t laughing with me.

Perhaps most damningly of all, an hour later as Mrs Plainview and I wrote this review, neither of us could remember a single name of a single character in the movie. The only disagreement we had was when Mrs Plainview thought the strapline to this review should be: "gives a bad name to the word 'shite'" As you can see I over-ruled her, but still went for a suitably poo-based slogan.

This was execrable. Rent the original on DVD, or better still, buy the “Best of the 80s” CD from Woolworths Online, turn up your ghetto-blaster, put on a red head-band and rock away. Whatever you do, don’t go and see this – it’s the worst film I’ve seen this year – and by far the most awful remake I’ve ever seen.

Really, truly shocking.

FAME is on release in the USA, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Canada, Estonia and Singapore. It opens next week in Greece, Israel and Belgium. It opens in October 7th in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Italy and Sweden. It opens on October 15th in Slovenia, Brazil, Cyprus, Finland and Norway. It opens on October 30th in Austria and Spain. It opens on November 19th in Germany and Bulgaria. It opens on December 10th in Russia and on January 7th in the Czech Republic.

SURROGATES - weakly plotted sci-fi thriller

There have been a couple of movies recently that tackle the issue of avatars and virtual relationships. In GAMER, an updated version of RUNNING MAN, the ability to pilot real-life chip-implanted humans brings out the worst in humanity. As with today’s plain vanilla internet, advanced IT is used most commonly to allow humans to indulge vices as old as time. You can disapprove of the nasty, misogynistic, bleak depiction of humanity at the core of GAMER, but sad to say, the numbers support it. By contrast, the new Bruce Willis sci-fi thriller SURROGATES, posits a world in which the ability to pilot robot avatars has resulted in a safer, if anodyne, world. Humans have retreated to their pyjamas and their lounges, steering robots through life instead. Of course, the robots are our younger, idealized selves, but the exploitation at the heart of GAMER is absent. Indeed, in a world full of robots, crime rates have dropped dramatically. There is, however, a resistance movement that wants humans to get back into actual contact with each other. The plot of the movie sees two cops (Bruce Willis and Radha Mitchell) hunting for a new weapon that has been used to kill real people by killing their surrogates. The existence of such a weapon threatens the very point of having surrogates in the first place – cocooning people from harm. There are some shenanigans involving the resistance movement and the original creator of the surrogates (James Cromwell) - and stakes so high, and motivation so iillogical, as to be ludicrous. It's all as uninteresting as the premise of a crime-free robot-induced future is unbelievable. The only impressive thing about the film is the make-up. They really did a great job of creating the life-like but ever-so-slightly plastic look of the surrogates.

SURROGATES is on release in Australia, Hong Kong, Israel, Kazakhstan, Russia, Canada, Poland, Turkey, the UK and the US. It opens next week in Egypt, Hungary, singapore, South Korea, Bulgaria, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Itopens on October 9th in the Czech Republic, Brazil, Denmark and Estonia. It opens on October 15th in the Netherlands and Spain. It opens on October 22nd in New Zealand, Slovenia and the Ukraine. It opens on October 28th in Belgium, france, Argentina and Portugal. It opens on November 5th in Greece and Italy. It opens on January 5th in Italy; January 21st in Germany and January 22nd in Japan.

Tomoyasu Murata's Tomorrow (2007)

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

Tomorrow is a very upbeat little puppet animation by Tomoyasu Murata. It would not be out of place in the NHK’s Minna no Uta series. Animated to the song ‘Tomorrow’ (uncredited, sung by a girl), which children of the 1980s will remember from the Orphan Annie musical, the three-minute short features a young girl with a red kerchief on her head. She has set up a picnic blanket in a European-esque town and prepares to throw a party. The town has that slightly bleak, worn-out feel to it that is very typical of Murata (ie Indigo Road), but it has been cheered up a bit by pastel touches to doors and shutters.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

Using crayons and paper, the doll-like girl draws all of the food necessary for the party. She then opens her bag and some magical CGI stars fly out to decorate the invitations. She delivers the invitations to all the doors in town, but as night falls she grows sad as no guests have joined her yet. As she embraces her doll and closes her eyes with sadness, a 2D animated character tugs on her dress. Suddenly the sky is filled with 2D translucent characters that float down to join the party.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

Most of Tomoyasu Murata’s films are for an adult audience, but this one appeals to all ages. My four year old daughter simply adores it. The song is very catchy and she is enraptured by the colourful array of dolls that join the girl’s party. There is an interesting mixture in this short film of the kawaii (cute) and the creepy (canted angles, the ghostliness of the towns and the 2D characters), but all great children’s work seems to balance a bit of both. It’s a beautiful, very memorable little piece. I have been particularly enjoying Murata’s mixing of media (puppet, cel, computer animation) in his recent films. Like the late, great Tadanari Okamoto, he doesn’t like to do exactly the same thing twice.

Tomoyasu Murata Sakuhinshu - Ore no Michi

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

Kinuyo Tanaka Centenary

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Japan’s first woman film director Kinuyo Tanaka (田中絹代, 1909-1977). As an actress, she was indisputably at the top of her profession starring in (according to imdb) 24 Gosho films, 15 Mizoguchi films, 10 Ozu films, 8 Shimazu films, 6 Naruse films, and even a Kurosawa film (Red Beard, 1965) . Her career spans both the silent and sound eras. She has the distinction of having starred in the first Japanese talkie: Madamu to nyobo (The Neighour’s Wife and Mine, Heinosuke Gosho, 1931) as well as starring in the only film directed by Hollywood legend Sessue Hayakawa (Taiyo wa higashi yori, 1932). Tanaka won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale for her portrayal of a woman forced into prostitution during World War II in Kei Kumai’s Sandakan No. 8 (1974). Her final appearance on screen was in another Kei Kumai film Kita No Misaki (1976) in the year before her death.

In honour of Kinuyo Tanaka’s outstanding career, the National Film Center in Tokyo is holding extensive screenings of her films from October 8th until December 27th. The screenings will be accompanied by an exhibition about her life and career. The exhibition opened earlier this month and will run until December 20th. The materials come both from the NFC collection as well as from personal belongings from the collection in her hometown of Shimonoseki.

Screenings will include 9 silent films and 44 talkies. This may sound like a lot, but as the Japanese Movie Database suggests that Tanaka was involved in the production of over 200 films, the screenings are really just a taste of Tanaka’s illustrious career. The screening series’ official title is ‘Film Actress Kinuyo Tanaka at her Centenary (Part 1)’ (生誕百年 映画女優 田中絹代（１）, which suggests that a second screening series is planned for the near future, which I presume will feature her work as a director.

Madam to Nyobo / Shunkinsho Okoto to Sasuke

Japanese Movie

Rikugun [Limited Pressing]

Japanese Movie

MANAGEMENT- Finally!

Finally! After what seems like endless twee, smug, in-love-with-their-own-kookiness hipster rom-coms, with about as much authentic emotion as a Barbie doll, along comes a quiet little independent movie called MANAGEMENT. Part bittersweet relationship drama, part broad comedy, the movie is hard to define (and presumably hard to market). Sometimes characters do crazy cute things that only really happen in rom-coms. Some characters are so exaggerated they couldn't possibly exist in the real world. But for every purely funny scene, there's a scene of real emotional warmth and truth.

Jennifer Aniston plays Sue Clauson - a really nice woman who's somehow still single and fills up her life with worthy causes. On a business trip she meets a guy called Mike, another lonely, nice person, stuck working in his parents; motel. The two hook up and so it should end, but Mike rather fantastically, and immaturely, starts following Sue across the country, finally parachuting into her pool and serenading her. She's stuck between being flattered by this insane "rom-com" behaviour and being creeped out by his semi-stalkerish immature antics. What I love about the film is that there is no quick Hollywood ending but actual personal growth. Jennifer Aniston in particular turns in a convincing, modulated performance, while Woody Harrelson and James Liao are very funny indeed.

MANAGEMENT played Toronto 2008 and was released earlier this year in the US, Israel, Iceland, Romania, Belgium, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Singapore and the Philippines. It opens today in the UK and on October 29th in South Korea.

GAMER - sporadically interesting Running Man remake

GAMER is a remake of the seminal Schwarzenegger sci-fi flick, RUNNING MAN. It's set in a dystopian future, where sex and violence are commercialised in computer games, allowing obese couch potatoes to fuck beautiful women and teenagers to control ultra-violent prisoners in live-action shoot-em-ups. Why have a virtual avatar when you can remote control actual people? The game is controlled by billionaire Ken Castle (a typically mischievous Michael C Hall) and peopled by set-up con Kable (Gerard Butler) and his wife turned hooker Angie (Amber Valetta). As in the original flick, the action really takes off when the "running man", Kable, escapes the game, aided by revolutionaries (Ludcaris, Aaron Yoo and Alison Lohman).

Despite all the CGI, GAMER doesn't have the visceral thrills of the action sequences in RUNNING MAN - for a start, there are no ridiculous baddies - remember the ice-hockey guy with the chainsaw?! In fact, the action sequences were pretty dull, which has to count as a big negative in a summer action movie. It was more interesting seeing how the film-makers had updated the dystopian future to capture the full weirdness of modern gaming. In terms of style, I was pleased to see Neveldine calm down the frenetic style of the CRANK movies, delivering a film with a nice bleak, almost monochrome look, while retaining their ability to mesh computer graphics and standard live-action film. I also like the fact that this film has more layers to it than the CRANK films - simultaneously critiquing and glorying in the voyeurism and nastiness of modern entertaining culture. And let me not forgot, a song-and-dance sequence in which Michael C Hall plays to Sammy Davis Junior's I've Got You Under My Skin. Worth the price of entry alone!

GAMER is on release in Greece, Canada, Finland, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the USA, Belgium, Estonia, France, the Philippines, Russia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cyprus, Denmark, Latvia, the UK, the Czech Republic and Austria. It opens next week in South Korea and Bulgaria. It opens in October in Brazil, the Netherlands, Iceland, Croatia and Lithuania. It opens on January 7th in Germany.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER - twee

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER is a hipster movie in love with its own kookiness. It thinks it’s being truthful about modern dating, and daring in its fantasy sequences. But what we really have is a romantic drama about a vapid, irritating woman and her schmuck of a boyfriend. The schmuck is played by Jospeh Gordon Levitt, taking a break from his typically grittier fare with an outing in G I JOE earlier this summer, and now this confection. He plays a greeting card writer and geek, who falls for the cute office girl. He wants a relationship – indeed he thinks he’s in one already. She refuses to “put labels on it”. You could interpret Zooey Deschanel’s character as emotionally scarred and, therefore, afraid of commitment, but then, right after dumping the schmuck, Summer marries another guy. The schmuck is understandably dismayed, as was I. It also doesn’t help that we don’t meet the guy who is so she’s suddenly so sure about it. Because of this rather opaque writing, the girl’s motives are unclear and her behavior hard to understand. The result is that, despite the innate charm of Zooey Deschanel, Summer came across as basically a bitch, and I just wasn’t interested in her, or in any man content to be screwed over by her. Harsh, but there it is.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER played Sundance 2009 and opened earlier this year in the US and Canada. It is currently on release in the UK, Australia and Italy. It opens next week in the Netherlands and on October 1st in France, New Zealand and Taiwan. It opens on October 8th in the Czech Republic, Singapore and Turkey. It opens on October 22nd in Germany, Russia and Spain, and on October 30th in Finland and Norway. It opens in November in Belgium, Croatia, Brazil, Poland and Argentina. It opens in December in Slovenia and Estonia and on January 9th in Japan.

DORIAN GRAY - a mess

In recent years, filmgoers have been treated to some rather lovely adaptations of Oscar Wilde's work, not least director Oliver Parker's AN IDEAL HUSBAND. Therefore, I was rather hopeful about Parker's adaptation of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, Dorian Gray is a very different beast to Wilde's society plays. They dealt with issues of contemporary morality, certainly, but in light atmosphere. By contrast, Dorian Gray is a pyschological novel, dealing with debauchery and corruption, using the genre tropes of gothic horror. The key question was whether Oliver Parker's directing style - high-gloss Merchant Ivory with whimsical modern touches - would be flexible enough to grapple with a meatier book.

The novel opens in late nineteenth century London. Talented artist Basil Hallward falls in love with handsome young Dorian Gray while painting his picture. Of course, there is no crude declaration of love given that homosexuality is taboo, but sublimated "ownership" of Gray's social life. This is put under threat when Dorian becomes fascinated with Basil's friend Lord Henry Wootton - a man who, while a member of the British establishment at the height of Victorian prudery, preaches a life of unrestrained sensuality. Encouraged by the man he admires, falling prey to narcissism seeing the finished portrait, Dorian starts to value beauty and art above all else, casually wishing that he could remain as young and beautiful as his portrait. He callously rejects his young lover Sibyl Vane when her talent fades and learns that his casual wish has been fulfilled: the wages of sin show on the portrait but he remains outwardly youthful and innocent.

With this apparent freedom, Dorian degenerates into a life of excess and cruelty - sexual encounters straight and gay, and eventually to blackmail and murder. It is here that Wilde most brilliantly takes aestheticism to its logical conclusion - positing that crime is merely, as art, "a means of procuring sensation". Eighteen years later, returned from his travels, Dorian tries to turn his life around, looking to his portrait as the ultimate barometer of authentic repentance. In this latter portion of the book, we are privy to some of the most high-stakes soul-searching in modern literature. Wilde, an artist who turned his life into art, simultaneously warns us of the dangers of so doing - themes he later explored in De Profundis. A the end of novel, order is restored: art is restored, in its frame, beautiful - life is separated from it, real, variegated.

The new movie of Dorian Gray is, essentially, a failure. Director Oliver Parker and debutant screenwriter Toby Finlay, fail to translate the feeling of menace and corruption to screen, condensing crucial episodes (Sibyl Vane) and introducing new material that amps up the Hollywood action and romance for crass commercial reasons. Ben Barnes is mis-cast as Dorian. He just doesn't have the acting chops to depict inward moral disintegration in the way that, say, Al Pacino did in the GODFATHER movies. Colin Firth is also mis-cast as the corrupting Sir Henry Wootton. He just can't play sinister. Imagine how much better this movie would have been with Eddie Redmayne and Jeremy Irons in the lead roles. In terms of execution, the movie features some of the most unsexy orgy scenes since EYES WIDE OPEN and some of the cheapest CGI. The only plus points are the lovely costunes, settings and the breath of fresh air that is Rebecca Hall's performance as the newly invented daughter of Sir Henry.

DORIAN GRAY is on release in the UK and played Toronto 2009. It will be released in Italy on October 23rd, in Australia on November 12th and in Finland on Christmas Day.

JULIE & JULIA - boring and brilliant respectively

JULIE & JULIA has the dubious honour of being the first movie based on a blog - the blog of a thirty-year old failed writer called Julie, cooking her way through the legendary cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child. I say legendary, and there's even an SNL spoof by a young Dan Ackroyd showing how far this 6 foot 2, preppy woman had entered the American mainstream with her cooking show. I'd never heard of her.

The movie, written and directed by Nora Ephron of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY fame, is a bit of a mixed bag. To my surprise, I was utterly captivated by the story of Julia Child. Meryl Streep is absolutely enchanting as Julia - no-nonsense, up for any challenge, relentlessly optimistic, and yet hard-working too. In Paris after World War Two, she took Cordon Bleu courses designed for professionals and peopled by men. She studied hard, tested and tested recipes, honed her skills, and many years later received great success. All this with the unfailing support of her charming husband, Paul, a US diplomat, played by Stanley Tucci. They seemed to have a rather wonderful marriage, appreciating each other's eccentricities. Indeed, this is one of the most wonderful depictions of a happy marriage I have seen on screen (and stands in contrast to the mawkishness of AWAY WE GO.)

I would have loved a proper biopic of Julia Child. But, the price we pay for this new-found interest in Julia Child is dealing with Julie Powell, the blogger. Now I know that there is no little criticism of Julie Powell on the blogosphere - that she exploited Julia Child for fame* - but that strikes me as partly envious of her ensuing book deal, and overlooking the naive and casual ways in which most of us start blogging. Okay, she didn't study like Julia, and so maybe didn't deserve her success as much. But she never claimed to be a master chef. No, my objection to Julie Powell is more simple. She takes time away from Julia Child. A mousy Brooklyn wife, who can't really cook and throws temper tantrums and moans about how poor she is really isn't any competition for Julia Child - a pioneer, self-taught expert and true-life eccentric.

The result is a movie that's still worth watching, purely for the Streep-Tucci segments, but which is boring during the Amy Adams segments. My only other criticism is that, unlike BIG NIGHT, this movie never had me drooling over the food, and surely that's a must?

*Judith Jones, senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, and Child's editor and friend, shared Child's sentiments with Publisher's Weekly: "Julia said, 'I don't think she's a serious cook.' ... Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn't attractive, to me or Julia," Jones said. "She didn't want to endorse it. What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt."

JULIE & JULIA was released earlier this year in Canada, the USA, Germany and Austria. It is currently on release in the UK, France and Argentina. It is released next week in the Czech Republic and Estonia. It opens on October 2nd in Finland and Norway. It opens on October 9th in Australia, Bulgaria, Poland and Sweden. It opens on October 15th in Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, the Ukraine, Brazil, Denmark, Romania and Taiwan. It opens on October 22nd in Greece, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy. It opens on October 30th in Croatia and Mexico. It opens on November 6th in Spain, on November 19th in Portugal and on November 28th in Japan.

Late review - LITTLE ASHES

LITTLE ASHES is a delicate little costume drama/biopic about Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and Federico Garcia Lorca. Set in an exclusive Madrid university in the period between World War One and the Spanish Civil War. Dali immediately stands out as the new boy because of his archaic dress, beautiful paintings and sensitive soul. Bunuel immediately spots his talents and introduces him to his set of iconoclastic cool kids, who reject establishment authority and want to live life to the full. Here, Dali meets Lorca, and, as alleged in Ian Gibson's biographies, they fall for each other, but Dali is too scared to actually consummate the relationship. He is, ultimately, more in love with himself.

The movie has a lot of things going for it. It looks beautiful, in the Merchant Ivory tradition of beautiful people in beautiful costumes and beautiful settings. Javier Beltran is wonderful as Lorca and Robert Pattinson doesn't disgrace himself as Dali. Problem is, the movie is as repressed as the lovers themselves in dealing with homosexuality, and while a pleasant enough watch, never gets to grips with its subject matter.

LITTLE ASHES was released in Spain, the US and UK in May 2009 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

ADVENTURELAND - surprsingly sensitive

ADVENTURELAND is a quiet little drama focusing on the love-lives of a bunch of teenagers working in the eponymous lo-rent amusement park for a summer in the late 80s. Indeed, it's such a sweet, real film that it's hard to believe it was directed by the same guy who made the crass SUPERBAD. Jesse Eisenberg (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE) plays a nice kid, smart, with dreams of summer travelling through Europe. When his parents can't pony up the cash, he ends working in an amusement park. He falls for an emotionally distant girl called Em (Kristen Stewart), who despite her difficulties is also intelligent and sensitive. But, true to life, our hero is distracted by the standard-issue hot chick egged on by the guy (Ryan Reynolds) who Em is already seeing. I love this film because it feels real - anyone who's spent a summer working a shitty job, feeling that their life is on hold, feeling under-appreciated can relate. And anyone who's ever made a dumb decision in a relationship, knowingly, but unable to resist can relate to. Jesse Eisenberg impresses again, but it's Kristen Bell who really struck me as a good actress, in a nuanced performance so much more interesting than that TWILIGHT schtick.

ADVENTURELAND played Sundance 2009 and opened in the US, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Iceland, Argentina, South Africa, Estonia, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Ecuador and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Spain in two weeks time.

Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008)

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

Lemon Road (檸檬の路, 2008) is the latest installment in Tomoyasu Murata’s contemplative My Road series. Previous films featuring the pianist as a central character include Scarlet Road (朱の路, 2002), White Road (白の路, 2003), and Indigo Road (藍の路, 2006). Last month, I reviewed the film Sky Colour Flower Colour (空色花色, 2006) which also ties into the series of puppet animations. Like my other reviews of Murata’s work, this is really more of a ‘reading’ of the film than a proper ‘review’. Although I do call this blog a ‘review’, I do really see it more as a journal of my viewing habits and reactions to Japanese film, art, and literature.

Tomoyasu Murata creates a wide variety of animation and other art, and his Road series is among the most personal and introspective of his work. The films are also, perhaps the most iconic images of Murata’s for the average Japanese because footage from White Road was re-edited into a music video for the song ‘Hero’ by the popular J-Pop band Mr. Children. The films require several screenings because they don’t give up their secrets very easily. There is no dialogue or narration, but a great deal of emotion is imbued into the films by music. Most of the Road films have loss as a central theme: the death of a child (Scarlet Road), the death of a pet and lost friendship (White Road), and the loss of a partner (Indigo Road). Lemon Road, by contrast, is a film about recovery and starting anew.

The first indication that something different from his previous puppet animations is afoot comes with the startling open sequence which subverts our expectations both aurally and visually. Instead of the romantic music of the other films, Lemon Road (aka Lemon’s Road) opens with an avant-garde soundtrack that draws attention to the film as a film. The sound of a 16mm film projector whirs while a cacophony of sounds weave in and out mimicking the editing of the avant-garde style opening. Pastels on paper create, scribble out and recreate what we later learn to be images from the main narrative of the film. Sounds include a harmonica, a piano, and radio or TV feedback (from the days of turn-dial tuning). As Murata cuts to a wider shot we see that the images are actually appearing on an old-fashioned TV screen. The final images are done with cut-outs. We see a lemon being sliced, then a coffee and a tea appear on the screen with a lemon slice falling into the later. The scene then shifts to a rural scene with a gaping hole in the middle of it. As a ringing phone joins the cacophony of noise on the soundtrack, the cutout figures of a human and some animals get sucked up into the hole.

The TV turns off and we are introduced to a stark motel-like room as the soundtrack quiets down to just the sound of the phone ringing. The pianist character sits contemplatively on the sofa looking towards the sunlight coming in the window. On the whole the room is quite dull in its colours – greys, browns, blacks – but on the wall are two colourful paintings that add a glimmer of cheerfulness to an otherwise melancholy scene.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

This seems to be general theme of the film: a gradual lifting of the melancholy that pervaded the previous films. After several viewings of the film, I have come to interpret it as a kind of literal and spiritual road trip that the pianist is going on. Whereas Scarlet Road had an Asian setting, and Indigo Road seemed influenced by the architecture of Eastern Europe, this film is set in the countryside of Arizona. From his lodgings, the pianist takes his scooter to and from a library across a typical North American roadside landscape with a wide open sky. The passing of time is indicated by the changing of the weather and it seems that the pianist has come to this location to do some kind of research.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

Thematically, the library is a great location because it is a place where people often go alone, as shown in the film and it emphasizes the theme of solitude. The solitude that the pianist experiences in all of the Road films is a part of the spiritual journey of the character. The melancholy nature of this quest is emphasized by the theme music, which is composed by Tatsuhide Tado, who also did the music for Indigo Road. The music starts when the pianist opens his journal. The music recalls the theme music of Indigo Road but it features a guitar rather than the usual piano. The piano (joined by a bass and an electric guitar) does return in key sequences such as an extended dream sequence which occurs when the pianist falls asleep while watching TV. It begins with the ringing phone being dragged by the cord out of the window and into a gaping hole in the earth, then goes on to reprise many of the images from the opening sequence. In particular, the image of everything and everyone being swallowed up into the hole.

The dream sequence ends back in the pianist’s room but with a giant lemon filling the space. The lemon spits out a piece of paper like a ticket vending machine, which we later learn has a telephone number on it. The lemon fits with the theme of starting anew for the pianist because of its cleansing properties and its association with freshness. After he wakes up, the pianist takes the piece of paper to the phone booth on the side of the highway and tries dialing it. Although there is no answer and he leaves the paper behind, the film ends on an optimistic note with the pianist sitting in the sunshine outside his room drinking coffee.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

Murata leaves the Road films deliberately ambiguous, so the film’s meaning is really open to numerous interpretations which would be influenced by whether or not one has seen the other films in the series. My own view, when considering this film together with Indigo Road and Sky Colour Flower Colour, is that the woman in Indigo Road did not die like the child in Scarlet Road or the dog in White Road. Rather the pianist and the woman have separated. The ending suggests to me the possibility of a reconciliation between the two. This idea is implied by the sound of the bird that one hears singing when the pianist makes the phone call. It is the hiyodori (brown-eared bulbul), whose call was also a key theme in Sky Colour Flower Colour. Now the hiyodori would not be found in Arizona, so I am reading it as an aural reminder of the woman. This may sound like I am reading too much into it, but I feel that this interpretation is supported by the fact that a butterfly (which a theme in Sky Colour Flower Colour) flies out of the phone booth as the guitar theme song returns. Even though the phone call does not seem to be answered, perhaps the pianist has made peace with whatever problems there were between them. Another image that points to this are the red flowers that are growing up out of the cracks of the concrete outside the door of the pianist’s room. The red flowers are another image that thread through the Road films.

© Tomoyasu Murata Company

I really enjoyed the dream sequences in Lemon Road – not only are dreams are an important metaphor in Murata’s work they are also a recurring theme in films of many great filmmaking artists from Hitchcock to Cocteau. The dream sequences in Lemon Road give us many clues into the psychology of the mysterious pianist whose silence and sad eyes are so beguiling. The optimistic ending – the first time full sunshine has been used in the series – increases my desire to see what will happen to this fascinating character in the next installment. I do hope that his journey continues.

Lemon Road can be ordered online at tomoyasu.net (within Japan only). Customers outside of Japan should send requests to Murata's company by e-mail.

Tomoyasu Murata Sakuhinshu - Ore no Michi

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009

AWAY WE GO - twee

AWAY WE GO is a great step forward for Sam Mendes, whose previous directorial efforts (AMERICAN BEAUTY, REVOLUTION ROAD) have been story-boarded and designed to within an inch of their lives. In this film, he hangs loose, allowing his story and characters room to breathe. The movie looks and feels lo-rent, almost casually thrown together, rather than distracting us with a high-gloss finish. Great.

Problem is, Sam Mendes hasn't moved beyond his other fatal flaw as a director - being patronising. I have yet to see a Mendes movie that does carry with it an air of smug self-satisfaction. AWAY WE GO features John Krasinki and Maya Rudolph - two actors better known for comic roles on TV - in a semi-serious character driven drama. They are well-adjusted, right-thinking, warm-hearted, in-love and pregnant. When his parents decided to move to Antwerp on the eve of the birth of their child, this prompts a crisis. Well, no, they are too banal to ever have a crisis. Rather, the young couple are concerned that they haven't figured out how and, indeed, where, to live. So follows a road trip, visiting friends and family, hoping to learn.

The couple are basically good people (and indeed, are portrayed by good actors). As shown here, they don't really have anything to learn. This is a road-trip with no real emotional journey. The couple are confronted with a series of increasingly caricatured couples, and it's a no-brainer that these are not the guys to learn from. In particular, the hippie couple depicted by Maggie Gyllenhaal and Josh Hamilton were so absurd they completely took me out of the film. And then it all winds up with an ending that is as schmaltzy as it unbelievable.

AWAY WE GO was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, Greece, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Israel and the Netherlands. It is currently on release in the UK and opens next week in Belgium. It opens in October in Finland, Norway, Germany, Australia, and Romania. It opens in November in New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, Argentina and Spain. It opens in Russia on December 10th.

MADEA GOES TO JAIL - bipolar

The number one movie at the US box office this week is I CAN DO BAD ALL BY MYSELF. With an estimated budget of USD13m, it has already grossed USD27m. But this film is unlikely to be released in the UK, catering as it does to what the studios might have termed a niche market, African-Americans, until they saw the numbers. So, in order to get a peek at this apparent phenomenon, I took a look at writer-director-actor Tyler Perry's previous film, MADEA GOES TO JAIL.

As with BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE and too many Eddie Murphy films to name, MADEA GOES TO JAIL features Tyler Perry in prosthetics as an old, fat, black woman, with an "anger-management problem" and a brutally simple philosophy on life: don't blame people, don't be the victim, suck it up, fight your corner, and get on with your life. Her segment of the film sees Perry/Madea refuse to turn over a new leaf and go to Church, finally ending up in jail, where she rules the roost. The segment is played for broad laughs - Madea trashing the car of a woman who stole her parking space - and mostly works. In particular, there is very funny and indeed, very clever scene where Madea goes to therapy with Dr Phil.

The strange thing is that rather than just create a broad comedy that's all Madea's own, Tyler Perry chooses to create a movie that is tonally very different indeed. Worse still, those two movie are inter-cut with each other with hardly any relationship to each other, until almost the last fifteen minutes of the film. In this second segment, Derek Luke plays a warm-hearted DA whose ambitious girlfriend resents his involvement with an old friend turned prostitute and drug addict. This segment is very earnest but also very preachy indeed and speaks to why Perry is so popular with the Christian community. It preaches, quite literally, getting clean, moving on, and allowing Jesus to save us.

I'm not entirely sure why the movie has been so derided by the critics. Each segment works well on its own terms, and it's rather nice to see a film-maker who actually cares about the message he is giving and the audience he is catering to. And if the two segments sit uneasily together for mainstream sensibilities, it reminded me very much of the kind of genre-shifts Bollywood has been dealing in for decades. The idea being that, if you want people to pay over their hard-earned dollars in the cinema, you need to give them a little of everything.

MADEA GOES TO JAIL was released in the US in February 2009.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE KILLING ROOM

Director Jonathan Liebesman followed up DARKNESS FALL and TCM: THE BEGINNING with a quiet psychological thriller called THE KILLING ROOM. It's an austere, tightly made, well-acted film that, while mining familiar material, still manages to hold our attention. The movie takes the same kind of approach as DAS EXPERIMENT - creating a fictional exploration of a real psychological experiment - in this case, the CIA's infamous MK Ultra programme. In the real life version, "volunteers" were subjected to mind-control experiments, often drug-induced, of the kind that led to Manchurian candidates. In this fictionalised version, four men have volunteered for a medical experiment run by the ruthless Dr Phillips (Peter Stormare) and the ambitious but morally uncertain Miss Reilly (Chloe Sevigny). They have to solve puzzles, and the man with the least correct guess is summarily executed. The prisoners try to outwit the system, and even escape, while the audience try to figure out what purpose such a sadistic experiment could serve. I liked the stark production design, gathering sense of claustrophobia, and Timothy Hutton's performance as one of the "volunteers". This movie is well worth a watch.

THE KILLING ROOM played Sundance 2009 and went straight to DVD.

YEAR ONE - sporadically, funnier than I'd been led to believe

YEAR ONE had such a critical basting that I didn't bother watching at first. Good news is that it's really not as unwatchable as I'd been led to believe. Indeed, there were scenes I really liked. Maybe it's just a question of low expectations?

The movie is basically a puerile comedy vehicle for Jack Black and Michael Cera. They start of as a couple of Neanderthals, a hunter and a gatherer respectively. The best contextual and verbal humour is found in these early scenes, and I though Black and Cera worked well together. Both have crushes on girls they can't get so Black eats the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge. This catapults them into a biblical epic, which the movie then tries to spoof. The Cain and Abel is pretty unfunny and underwritten, but the movie picks up when the protagonists end up Sodom. There's a brief skit by Hank Azaria as Abraham, but the real humour in this session comes from Oliver Platt as a libidinous High Priest.

Overall, I'd say the movie really is worth DVD and pizza night, if entirely forgettable. Still, you'd have hoped that actors of the profile of Jack Black and Michael Cera could find scripts that weren't essentially strung-together skits of variable quality.

YEAR ONE is on release in Australia, Iceland, the USA and the UK. t opens later in July in Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Denmark and Norway. It opens in August in Belgium, Egypt, France, Brazil, Bulgaria, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, Germany, New Zealand and Singapore. It opens in September in the Czech Republic, Greece, Russia, Estonia, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. It opens in October in Italy, Mexico, and Romania.

SORORITY ROW - cinematic pot noodle

SORORITY ROW is cheap and nasty. Still, once in a while, typically after a few drinks when there's nothing else in the house and you need to carb up, it's just what you need. It is, in short, a guilty pleasure.

So when I tell you that I had a surprisingly good time watching SORORITY ROW, you'll see where I'm coming from. This movie is pure trash - full of gratuitous tit shots; a risible plot; unscary scary scenes.... It's a slasher movie so bad, it has to be deliberate. But, in the spirit of honesty, it's only fare to 'fess up and say that I laughed hard and long watching SORORITY ROW and positively bounced out of the cinema. And no, before you ask, it had nothing to do with the large gin and tonic at The Imperial beforehand.

The plot is simple. At the start of the university year, a practical joke goes badly wrong and a bunch of sorority sisters hush up the death of their friend, dumping her body rather than call in the cops and getting bounced out of school. Fast forward to graduation day and someone is killing anyone who knows the secret. Is Megan back from the dead? Is her little sister seeking vengeance?

Production values are pretty decent. Indeed, there's an impressive tracking shot that takes us through the sorority house during the opening night party. The acting is also fairly decent, given how hard it is to say so-bad-it's-good lines with a straight face. Perhaps most surprising is that Rumer Willis (daughter of Bruce and Demi) is fine - although she pretty much only has to whimper for the whole film. Best of all, we have Carrie Fisher in a cameo as the House Mother in full on psycho-bitch mode. Genius. As you can imagine, it's the willingness of the movie to spoof its own target demographic that makes it a success. Basically, it's an exercise in depicting - nay lavishing in - the Daily Express' vision of hell: promiscuous teenagers, high on booze and drugs, with too much money, too few scruples, and high-speed internet connections.

We've seen the future, and it's wearing a crystal lip-gloss, a mini-dress, and driving daddy's Porsche Cayenne over a troublesome ex-.

SORORITY ROW is on release in the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA. It opens in two weeks time in Brazil. It opens on October 8th in the Czech Republic and Singapore; October 15th in Argentina; October 22nd in the Netherlands and Venezuela; November 5th in Russia; and November 19th in Portugal.

G. I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA - cinematic TVR

The British, god bless us, do many things well, but building sports cars isn't one of them. We used to build a car called the TVR - a car so uncool it's name was a shortened version of "Trevor" - a car so insane it put a v8 engine inside a light-weight chassis - a car so loud and shouty that Jeremy Clarkson famously said of it, "it will kill you". Further, "my wife loves this car. She loves the noise and the vibrations and the sense of danger and the way that when you over-rev it, the whole dash lights up like a baboon's backside. Richard Hammond on the other hand, he pretty much hates it. He says its too difficult and too complicated and that all the stitching in here looks like the kind of stitching you find when someone's tried to mend their own shoes."

I feel the same way about G I JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA. Your teenage kid brother might like it, but what does he know, eh?

G I JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA isn't so bad, it's good. It's so bad, period. Much like the TRANSFORMERS flicks, similarly spawned from shitty kids toys, the movie is heavy on ludicrous CGI special effects and loud-shouty battle scenes. In the brief spaces when the fighting stops, there's a lot of rather convoluted plot crammed in. Essentially, there are bunch of baddie arms dealers who've created nano-bot super-soldiers. On the other side, there are a bunch of tooled up soldiers who are trying to stop them. In the middle, there's a chick who used to be in love with the good guy but who is know kicking ass for the baddies. But hey, apparently even a woman scorned can't resist beefcake Channing Tatum.

The resulting movie is just no fun. It's actually pretty boring being brutalised by non-stop loud battle scenes. All of which is a crying shame, because idiotic, puerile premise apart, this movie has pedigree. The DP is Mitchell Amundsen, of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE III, BOURNE SUPREMACY, and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN fame. The script was written by Stuart Sommers, who wrote the far funnier MUMMY movies. Not to mention the fact that you have people who can actually act - Joseph Gordon Levitt, Christopher Eccleston - in major roles. God knows why they went for this flick. Let's hope they, Tatum, Miller et al, have paid for their respective new houses and can now all get back to the indie flicks they're known for.

G.I. JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA is on global release.

Repast (めし, 1951)

Women form the central concern of the films of Miko Naruse (成瀬 巳喜男, 1905-1969). Women play the main protagonists, the thematic concerns usually revolve around issues concerning women, his audiences were mainly women, and the narratives are often based on stories by women writers. Naruse’s 1951 hit film Meshi (めし/ Repast) is adapted from the final, unfinished novel by popular writer Fumiko Hayashi (林 芙美子, 1903-1951). He would later to go on to make five other films based on her literary output including Hourou-ki (A Wanderer’s Notebook, 1962) which was based on her autobiography.

If I were a teacher of Japanese, I could imagine using Naruse’s Meshi to teach students about one radical difference between men and women in Japan: the use of language. The different usages of language between men and women in Japanese is apparent in all family dramas, but in Meshi it is foregrounded by film’s title, which is also a key motif throughout the film. The difference between men’s and women’s Japanese rarely comes across in the subtitles because it is difficult to translate. The translators of Meshi had a real problem translating the title in particular and I’m not sure that they were successful. ‘Repast’ is a rather formal-sounding French loan word and it's in my estimation, a bit of an archaic word for a meal in English. In contrast, the Japanese word ‘meshi’, as I will elaborate in a moment, is very informal. I can’t really criticize whoever came up with the title ‘Repast’ though, because there would also be the complication of the different usages of words for meals among different regions of English speakers (supper and tea have very different meanings depending on what side of the Atlantic you are one for example). The noun ‘meal’ itself also has multiple meanings just to add to the translation difficulties.

Focusing on the Japanese meanings of ‘meshi’ though, the first dilemma when translating the title of the film is that it can mean both a meal and rice. As rice is the staple of all traditional Japanese meals ‘gohan’, the synonym for ‘meshi’, also means both a meal and rice. ‘Gohan’ is the word that most students of Japanese will learn and it is what women will use with each other and when talking to men. It is more polite than ‘meshi’, which men will use with each other and when talking to their wives.

In Naruse’s subtle depiction of a marriage, the husband Hastsunosuke ‘Hatsu’ Okamoto (Ken Uehara) often uses very blunt expression ‘Meshi ja nai ka’ to ask his wife Michiyo (Setsuko Hara) if supper is ready yet. It would be similar in English to a husband asking his wife ‘Isn’t supper ready yet?’ in a tone that implies that the meal should already be on the table. After five years of marriage, the shine has worn off. Their relationship is strained due to troubles making ends meet and Hatsu, worn out from his job, doesn’t see how the long, lonely days working as a housewife are affecting Michiyo. Her one solace is in the scraggly, tail-less cat who seeks her affection.

Michiyo’s feelings about living in Osaka are emphasized through the theme of ‘meshi.’ She finds that the imported , overpriced rice sold by a local woman tastes funny and longs for rice from back home. Without family in Osaka, Michiyo has grown tired of the endless chores of cooking and cleaning and wonders if she should return to Tokyo and find work for herself. Her husband works long hours and has become distant from her, leading her to lavish all her love on a mangy, tail-less cat.

The catalyst for change comes in the guise of a niece, Satoko, who drops in unexpectedly from Tokyo. Satoko has come to escape her parents and their marital expectations of her and seems to have a little crush on her uncle. Flirty, young, and naïve, Satoko’s presence reminds Michiyo of the woman she used to be, as does a reunion with her Tokyo friends. These women are important because they show the limited chances women had in the 1950s. Each suffers from their own situation (single vs. married) and thinks that the others have it better. After this interlude with her friends, Michiyo comes home to find that Satoko and her husband have done very little to contribute to the day’s chores and she decides that the time has come to make a change in her life.

From a modern perspective, Hatsu seems like a real jerk of a husband and in a lot of reviews of this film, Hatsu is described as being a stereotypical patriarchal husband. Thinking about him in the context of 1950s Japan, I actually found him quite a sympathetic character – especially when contrasted with the husband in Yama no Oto (Sound of the Mountain, 1954), another Naruse film starring Ken Uehara and Setsuko Hara as a couple with marital problems. Hatsu shows early signs of being a good guy – although he is curt in the usual way with his wife, he shows great patience when she’s angry with him and never responds with anger himself. Apart from his lack of contribution to household chores (which is sadly even today typical behaviour for men in many Japanese families), he also shows good judgment for the most part throughout. For example, he is always honest with his wife, telling her where he goes and with whom. He does not spend money overly rashly and avoids bad business decisions (ie the Marugaki scheme) despite heavy peer pressure. He also seems completely oblivious to the women who throw themselves at him during Michiyo’s absence.

While Naruse does give the husband’s perspective lots of screen time, our thoughts are never far from Michiyo. Unlike Fumiko Hayashi’s unfinished novel, which was written in the first person, Michiyo’s motivations throughout the film seem deliberately ambiguous. In doing so, Naruse allows his audience to use their own experience to interpret Michiyo’s actions and thoughts. This is only broken in the final scene on the train (no spoilers follow), where Michiyo is given a voiceover narration that explains her ultimate choice. This final scene was reportedly tacked on by the studio producers, much to the dismay of many critics. I think that it could have been left ambiguous with no voiceover dialogue. For me, the scene in the restaurant with Michiyo and her husband made the ending satisfying – especially when Michiyo laughs through tears as only Setsuko Hara can. This is a film that can be really appreciated by people, especially women, who have been married for a long time because it asks its audience to consider what happiness in marriage really means to them.

Setsuko Hara ¤ Michiyo Okamoto
Ken Uehara ¤ Hatsunosuke ‘Hatsu’ Okamoto
Yukiko Shimazaki ¤ Satoko Okamoto (niece)
Yōko Sugi ¤ Mistuko Murata (Michiyo’s sister-in-law)
Akiko Kazami ¤ Seiko Tomiyasu
Haruko Sugimura ¤ Matsu Murata (Michiyo’s mother)
Ranko Hanai ¤ Koyoshi Dohya
Hiroshi Nihon’yanagi ¤ Kazuo Takenaka (cousin)
Keiju Kobayashi ¤ Shinzo Murata (Michiyo’s brother)
Akira Ōizumi ¤ Yoshitaro Taniguchi

Mikio Naruse The Masterworks I / Japanese Movie

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2009