Only a Blockhead

Mars-Jones Failing

The Japan Times, quite sensibly, discourages reviewers from writing about books that are worthless.  Why waste the space?  Exceptions, however, are made when a book is overhyped or particularly egregious.  This was the case with Adam Mars-Jones's Noriko Smiling.  They let me take the gloves off:

"I can hardly be accused of being an expert on Japanese film," Adam Mars-Jones assures us early in "Noriko Smiling," his monograph on Yasujiro Ozu's "Late Spring." Such protestations at the beginning of a work are not, in an age that distrusts expertise and celebrates ignorance, unusual. In most cases, though, a writer who makes this move goes on to demonstrate, however obliquely, that he or she is not, in fact, ignorant at all. Mars-Jones takes a different approach.

Read the rest here.

—David

Julian's Best of 2011

I’m suffering from blogger’s block at the moment, but a best of the year list practically writes itself. This year I’m confining it to movies and books.

I didn’t watch many movies in the second half of the year, but saw some fine ones in the first. The year got off to a good start with two flawless works of cinema: Unstoppable, a tensely-filmed action suspense thriller, and The Social Network, the fascinating, superbly-scripted drama about the origins of Facebook. The King’s Speech was a cracking good drama about courage. Disney’s Tangled was a charming animated comedy romance, enhanced by 3D. The Kids are All Right, a funny and honest look at a family, was top-notch entertainment. In 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle—and some well-chosen music--keeps you on the edge of your seat in spite of the static situation.

Honorable mention to Hereafter, True Grit, Blue Valentine, The Adjustment Bureau, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (in 3D) and The Tree of Life. I’m also glad I went to see Tron, Super 8, The Town, How Do You Know, Morning Glory, Source Code, and Black Swan.

I read some terrific books this year, too. Revolution in the Head was a truly enjoyable look at both the 1960s, when Christian social values gave way to self-before-others consumer materialism, and the music of The Beatles that was a major component of those years.

Escapist reading doesn’t get any better than Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy (Total Chaos, Chourmo; Solea), noir policiers with a tough, tender, venal idealist hero, and all the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of the South of France.

A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book was an absorbing tale of growing up in England in the 1880s, with fascinating historical detail.

Best of all was John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, which suggests that our relentless human endeavors are an unconscious immortality project. Such truth telling is of great value.

Honorable mentions to non-fiction The New Economics (David Boyle), Justice (Michael Sandel), Whole Earth Discipline (Stewart Brand), Honey Money (Catherine Hakim) and Mrs. Woolf and the Servants (Alison Light), and fiction In This House of Brede (Rumer Godden). I’m also glad I read The Happiness Project (Rubin), and Nocturne (Attlee).

--Julian

I Think Terry Gilliam is on My Team

 

—David

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting

After reading this profile of the "mild-mannered maniac" director Raoul Ruiz I was eager to see some of his work.  The Internet came through for me.  This film, inspired by Pierre Klossowski, is full of delights, particularly for those viewers who like "films for those who prefer to read" (in my fellow blockhead NC Tate's formulation), or to look at paintings and think about them, or to read art criticism, or to wallow in beauty.

As with so many paintings, in the end this film is all about the light.

Watch it now.

 

That's the link to YouTube.  If you click it, I think you'll have to manually move between the seven parts into which the film has been divided.

If you use this link, which takes you to the film through mubi's page introducing it, it automatically moves you from one section to the next as you watch.

I think there's more Ruiz out there on the Internet.  I'm setting out in search of it.

—David

30: The watershed

I don’t want to be a 3D bore (too late –Ed.) but Roger Ebert was whooping and hollering at the end of his review of Cowboys & Aliens (“Oh, blessed joy! The movie is in glorious 2-D.”).

 Cowboys & Aliens? I can’t wait, even knowing it’ll be half the fun without the added dimension.

 Meanwhile I discover that at threescore and two, I am actually under 30. The Cultural Snow blog, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan's birth, has this quote from Douglas Adams: 

 Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

I can't see a career in 3D. But 3D blogger. There's a thought.

--Julian

"You begin to feel these people are your own family."

I got a long letter from a friend in Canada who’s been (re)watching Kore’eda’s films, and in particular Aruitemo Aruitemo. And absorbing Ozu movies in a way few of us have a chance to. Knowing that my fellow Blockheads are Kore’eda/Ozu fans, with his permission, I share some of his perceptive comments here.

 Kore-eda’s Aruitemo Aruitemo is a subtle portrait of the cruelty that sometimes lies behind good Japanese manners, and contains scenes of incredible coldness, as well as ones of great charm and humanity (such as when the mother suggests her daughter-in-law not have any more children, immediately after the apparently heartfelt gesture of giving her a cherished kimono). I think it makes quite a bitter companion to Ozu's Tokyo Story, which was clearly an inspiration. In Tokyo Story, it is the daughter-in-law (played by the utterly charming Setsuko Hara) who is most loyal to the aging parents, whereas in Aruitemo Aruitemo it is the parents that are coldest and most cruel - behind a smiling facade, of course - to the daughter-in-law who wants nothing but to gain their approval for herself and her son. Like the later Ozu, Kore'eda's sympathies appear to be with the younger generation.

 Of course, 'reading' Kore-eda is very much helped by being more familiar with Ozu, whose body of work - or the substantial portion of it that is available through the Criterion Collection - I have been working my way through at a feverish pace and with a great deal of pleasure. There's something quite hypnotic about watching film after film on very similar themes, with the same core cast of around 8 actors, constantly swapping roles. One film naturally blends into another, and you begin to feel that these people are your own family; you definitely begin to fall in love with them, and are left feeling strangely abandoned by them when their story ends abruptly with An Autumn Afternoon in 1962. I am particularly fond of Early Summer - it just shows off so much of what is great in Ozu: the gorgeous cinematography (including some stately tracking shots, later abandoned for a purely static cinematography), the inter-generational tensions, the self-confidence of a new generation of post-war Japanese women (and corresponding insecurity and irritability of some of the men!), the Jane Austen-ish obsession with marrying daughters off well, even the impishly authentic portrayal of mischievous and innocently rude little children. But the final few color films are also a great deal of fun.

 It's amazing to watch the early B&W talkies, made before the war, with their poverty, disappointment, and austerity, and to contrast all that with the growing affluence - but also the lingering resentments and regrets - of the immediate post-war period, and then the kind of triumph of cheerful materialism in the later films, where - despite the sometimes serious themes - life just looks a hell of a lot more comfortable and fun, for just about everyone. (In contrast to today's Japan, no one appears to be working too hard, fathers are home for evening meals with the family, and bosses freely grant days off for the most trivial engagements.) It's odd to feel nostalgic for something I never experienced, but the world he portrays - and, of course, it is partly a cinematic fiction - is quite attractive in its own way. (I feel no similar attraction to the 50s or 60s in North America, by contrast, and have no taste for the recent spate of extremely sentimental mainstream Japanese nostalgia films about the 50s, like Sunshine Over Sanchome.)

--(Curated by) Julian

"In Defense of the Slow and Boring"

Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott write a brilliant article about "boring" films—as opposed to films that, like "The Hangover Part II" (their example), are just boring:

Thinking is boring, of course (all that silence), which is why so many industrially made movies work so hard to entertain you. If you’re entertained, or so the logic seems to be, you won’t have the time and head space to think about how crummy, inane and familiar the movie looks, and how badly written, shoddily directed and indifferently acted it is. And so the images keep zipping, the sounds keep clanging and the actors keep shouting as if to reassure you that, yes, the money you spent for your ticket was well worth all this clamor, a din that started months, years, earlier when the entertainment companies first fired up the public-relations machine and the entertainment media chimed in to sell the buzz until it rang in your ears.

They certainly got that right.

They go on to discuss one of the most "boring"—also harrowing, also rivetting—films ever made:  “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles."

So, is boring bad? Is thinking? In Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” there is a scene in which the title character, a housewife who turns tricks in her fastidiously neat home, makes a meatloaf in real time. It’s a tedious task that as neither a fan of meatloaf or cooking, I find difficult to watch. Which is the point: During the film’s 201 minutes Ms. Akerman puts you in that tomb of a home with Jeanne, makes you hear the wet squish-squish of the meat between her fingers, makes you feel the tedium of a colorless existence that you can’t literally share but become intimate with (you endure, like Jeanne) until the film’s punctuating shock of violence. It makes you think.

I wrote a bit about it here.

They conclude their article:

Why is it, though, that “serious” is a bad word in cultural conversations, or at least in discussions of film? Why is thinking about a movie an activity to be avoided, and a movie that seems to require thinking a source of suspicion? It seems unlikely, to say the least, that films like “Uncle Boonmee,” “Meek’s Cutoff,” “The Tree of Life” or Jean-Luc Godard’s recently and belatedly opened “Film Socialisme” will threaten the hegemony of the blockbusters, so why is so much energy expended in defending the prerogatives of entertainment from the supposed threat of seriousness? I certainly don’t think fun should be banished from the screen, or that popular entertainment is essentially antithetical to art. And while I derive great pleasure from some movies that might be described as slow or tedious, I also find food for thought in fast, slick, whimsical entertainments. I would like to think there is room in the cinematic diet for various flavors, including some that may seem, on first encounter, unfamiliar or even unpleasant.

My fellow Blockhead, Julian, has made it pretty clear that he's no fan of art that requires thought, so I guess he will find much to disagree with here—and maybe, also, something to make him think.

—David

3-D Gets Serious?

In an article in today's International Herald Tribune about Takashi Miike's 3-D remake of Masaki Kobayashi's Seppuku (one wonders why a perfect film needs to be remade, but never mind) he says "When you think of 3-D, you think of a film that jumps out off the screen. But this is changing: 3-D will soon be like ordinary film," and later Joan Dupont, the author of the article notes that, "Jean-Luc Godard is using it to film his next project, as is Bernardo Bertolucci, who — in Catherine Cadou’s documentary on Akira Kurosawa that was shown here this week — said he thought that Kurosawa, were he alive today, would also be working in 3-D — and on simple and everyday themes," so maybe, just maybe, someone will, eventually make a 3-D film I want to see.

—David

Quintessence

Mark, Blockhead emeritus, is househunting, and emailed about one small place he’d viewed. 

The atmosphere inside the house was grim, and when I passed by later, I saw that there were many noisy kids running around outside, a snoopy oba-san, and a hungry meowing cat.  Also I listened to and watched the many trains going by. On time, every one.

 So I mailed him back that he had lucked onto the quintessential Japanese postwar urban dwelling/lifestyle. It would be like living in a Kore’eda movie! 

--Julian

Back to the future

3D is fast coming of age (There’s a good interview with Werner Herzog here about what films benefit from it [his new documentary; Star Wars-type spectacles] and which don’t [Herzog’s fiction movies]).

So it was time to explore new gim… ways to enhance the moviegoing experience. And--pace David--this one was too good not to revive.

See you at the multiplex! (or not, David & Garren)

--Julian