good movies, bad movies

It's been a while since I last felt moved to update this blog. That's not necessarily a bad thing, since having a busy offline life is nothing to be ashamed of. Nevertheless, it sometimes disturbs me to think that I have little to express verbally (or at least to the wider net), because it seems to suggest a certain failure to process what I am experiencing. But that's enough self-referential blogging.

I just finished watching two dislocated and plot-challenged movies, one of which was willfully wondrous, and one that somehow turned out on the contrary to be a horrendously pretentious cinematic exercise in superfluity. Oddly enough both movies feature the well-nigh ubiquitous Asano Tadanobu. As a quick aside, I had no idea that Asano is married to Chara, and is part native-American. I truly adored Last Life in the Universe, but his mere presence in a movie is no guarantee of artistic merit. As I have always said, it's silly to make assumptions about the value of a movie based on its actors; it makes far more sense to judge a movie by its director.

Cha no aji (Taste of Tea) by Ishii Katsuhiko (who by the way directed the animated sequences in Kill Bill vol. 1) was the spur to my sudden desire to blog again. It's a movie with too many characters, and too little plot, yet sustains itself with a gentle sense of human connectedness. It's comparable with the open-ended and gently inscrutable early writing of Murakami Haruki, especially his first novel Hear the Wind Sing. The story in Cha no aji follows a slightly off-kilter family living among the rice paddies of Ibaraki Prefecture as they individually try to find love through playing go, escape the haunting of a gigantic dopplegaenger, produce an anime short film, and (re)mix a manga tribute song. How does all this fit together? It doesn't. It really doesn't cohere into a trenchant message like Lily Chou-Chou though both films share a certain penchant for lingering over rice paddies. But it's no simple celebration of rural life either, as it shows how deeply otaku culture can permeate into Japanese society through the interconnecting power of the media. Ultimately, its a reflection on the magical realism of quotidien life, and a rejection of the movie temporality which collapses eternity into "The End" and vertical scrolling credits. There's no closure for the movie, and you may as well pause the film for tea breaks without really interrupting its aesthetic message. You are left with the sense that life probably goes on just as before even after the credits roll, that is, full of magic, inanity and quiet beauty. (Much like Cafe Lumiere, directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien).

Bright Future (Akarui mirai) by Kurosawa Kiyoshi on the other hand was a terrible waste of time and cinematic seriousness. I really did feel cheated after wading through its 2 hour, unpredictably paced, running time. Here, dispensing with standard plot development yields a disagreeably tedious and pretentious film. More stunning was how poorly Kurosawa develops his characters, mostly notably the roles played Odagiri Joe and Asano Tadanobu. Overloaded with obscure metaphor and imagery, the story seems to suggest very little. If there is any message on the surface, it is intensely negative; it's hard to see any redeeming value in teenage rebellion when there is no comprehensible motive. I'm half convinced that the director was too lazy to work any causality into the plot. . . (also inexplicable is the use of Gas Panic Yokohama as the setting for several scenes).

One interesting juxtaposition posed by these two films is their conflicting approaches to youth and family in contemporary Japan. The sense of crisis in Bright Future is shrill and unmistakeable. What it lacks of course is any concrete answer, or even question(!), regarding that crisis. The families are fractured, and the children live in a Charlie Brown world where the adults all seem to be speaking a language they don't comprehend. The only way out seems to be suggested by magical role played by hordes of poisonous red jellyfish, mystically thriving in Tokyo's river and sewer system. The Japanese countryside seems to be much better adjusted to modern life, where the joys of playing go (and the naive elation of sharing an umbrella on a rainy day) seem to coexist with acting out super-hero anime on the train (a dinky two-car rattler that only seems to run twice a day). Whatever. They're both fiction. But I'm getting tired of hearing of the evocation of crisis among the Japanese young. It's there to be sure, but the unilateral message seems to be aimed at producing a reactionary solution, suggesting that Japanese society is in decay and in need of a return to tradition. I've taught young Japanese (in the countryside, naturally), and my experience mirrors the playful oddity of Taste of Tea far more closely than anything in Kurosawa's piece.