Category Archives: Comedy

Oh Lucy! (2017)

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As an American who made my home in Japan for several years, the transcontinental cultural space between the two nations fascinates me to no end. It occurs to me that Oh Lucy is a film that navigates the disparities between these two worlds.

One element is American culture and the linguistic differences between the English-speaking world and Japan. There are many, and they come into play in director Atsuko Hirayanagi’s adaptation of her eponymous short film. She comes at this subject matter from the other side. Namely, she was an exchange student in the U.S., who now makes her home here. It’s easy for me to appreciate the point of view she brings to the movie.

Something like the office environment is familiar to anyone who has worked in Japan. There are many salient features: the rows of desks, the paperwork, the stamps, and the gossip, which always has a way of coming out when people are stone-cold drunk after hours.

Setsuko (Shinobu Terajima) is our protagonist, a Japanese office lady who faithfully serves her company quietly and without much passion. She’s a cog in the machine. She also has a drawer in her desk full of “omiyage” (that is, treats and little souvenirs that people bring back from their vacations for the sole purpose of not feeling shame).

It’s a ritualistic action of altruism so ingrained in the culture that most everyone provides them to everyone else. Of course, this is resoundingly cynical, but there’s also some collective truth in this. Is Lucy’s uneaten stockpile an act of rebellion?

It speaks to something of her character. Maybe she’s one of those nails sticking out as the old proverb (or kotowaza) says. Eventually, she will be hammered back into place. However, if this is a silent act of nonconformity, her next leap of faith comes with agreeing to an English school that her spunky niece pleads her to join.

She goes to a trial lesson in a building that looks more dubious than its rather innocuous interiors. It’s in her first meeting with John (Josh Hartnett) that Setsuko is christened with a new name “Lucy,” and in a whirlwind of American forwardness, she learns how to awkwardly hug and enlist a more rounded pronunciation with a ping pong ball wedged in her mouth.

It’s the strangest English curriculum I’ve ever seen, but there’s also something disarming about it. “Lucy” wants more and she wants to see more of John too. Although she’s still contained in her shell and hesitant with English, she’s drawn to this world so different than her own. Here we have the core of all the cultural contrasts.

Without transcribing all the turn of events, Oh Lucy has a few surprises, fashioning itself into a lightweight take on the American road trip movie. It’s not quite Paris, Texas, but it does become a sort of outsider’s tale of what America represents even as our heroine comes to terms with what she wants out of life.

If you sit thinking about what this story is about, it’s easy for the pieces to fall apart, but if you just let the story happen, you can learn much about this space in-between. Disparate cultures with relatives chafing, one against the other.

In some ways, I have a great appreciation for Josh Hartnett’s character. He starts out as the most cartoonish American caricature (He might easily have his own NHK segment). I have very little context with him as a matinee idol, but since the years have passed, it feeds into his portrayal. John feels like a bit of an adult in neutral. He’s never grown up and never managed to get his life together.

As such, there are decisions he makes and aspects of him that feel wholly unsympathetic. He’s everything other people envy about Americans on the outside — on the first impression — and if you’re American, he reflects much of what we might be ashamed of in ourselves.

Still, he’s also something of a cultural mediator. Bridging the gap between Japanese folks who have the wrong perception of America and then Americans who have little patience for anyone or anything different than themselves. Helping Lucy and her nagging sister order food at a diner is only one example. Earlier they also share a genial conversation with a fellow passenger (Megan Mullaly in a cameo).

I know these moments well on both sides of the pond. The movie continually exists in these spaces I often frequented and without being too dialogue-heavy, it strives for some kind of mutual understanding since differences and barriers always crop up. Somehow there are still universal aspects that draw us to one another and cause us to reach out of our comfort zones.

One old friend who makes a welcomed appearance is Koji Yakusho as a fellow English learner. He strived for a similar kind of self-expression in Shall We Dance?, which feels a bit like a modern classic now.

Rather unfortunately, Oh Lucy makes several violent lunges at melodrama that don’t quite suit it. This is to its detriment. It functions best acknowledging quirks in opposition to the predisposed understatement of Japanese culture. So while these are my misgivings about the movie, a hug on a train platform does feel like a resounding thunderclap and a radical act.

In a culture where you can simultaneously be crammed together in a train and yet never have any meaningful physical contact of any kind, I certainly found myself starved for it at times. There are laughs and a decent amount of heartbreak and animosity strung throughout before we finally have some solace.

Lucy comes home to find a silent rebel not unlike herself, quietly revolting against the status quo, and sometimes that is a very healthy thing. It does each of us good to open up our worlds.

3/5 Stars

Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023)

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Sometimes you start a film and there’s such a specific sense of place, rhythm, and tone you perk up in anticipation. I felt that sensation from the opening credits of this new film starring Daisy Ridley.

The score is replete with a few murmuring voices and a harp, and there’s the muted color palette of a certain sleepy town in the Pacific Northwest. There’s an instant sense of where we are and what end we might be converging on. That is, besides death.

Sometimes I Think About Dying is directed by Rachel Lambert from a screenplay co-written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz, and Katy Wright-Mead. It’s easy to pigeon-hole it as a project filling the quirky indie fix and the proof of concept seems littered with a minefield of tropes.

Fran (Ridley) works in an office — the dreaded 9 to 5 desk job — and between emails and spreadsheets her mind will drift away to far off places in her subconscious. It’s also a movie with plenty of inserts of contorted posture. At times it’s uncomfortable watching her exist.

Robert (Dave Merheje) is the new guy. He’s personable and a little dorky in a charming sort of way. Make him a cinephile and you have a perfect movie character. He feels like the Yin to Fran’s Yang and somehow that bodes well.

They don’t so much have chemistry as stunted, awkward interactions. They go see a movie at the local art house theater. They have pie afterward as one does. One wouldn’t label them a couple so much as they’re two people looking for a connection; he’s just moved to town and well, she’s not the most sociable human being.

In this depicted life of dreary and at times surreal isolation, human connection is such a moving balm. They meet up again and she sees his new home, gets the tour, and learns he has his own past; he’s been divorced, not once but twice.

Ridley’s performance does feel like a performance, but the act of playing something so stunted and repressed and yet giving the sense of a charming person just trying to get out is such a meaningful focal point. Because in another movie it would vie to get bigger, but she never allows it to get into a cartoonish heightened reality of indie purgatory.

A distinction must be made. Fran doesn’t hate her life. She’s good at her job and in her own way is a part of the ecosystem in the office. Whereas Excel sheets and requisition forms are soul-crushing for someone like me, Fran seems to thrive in such a regulated environment. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t also feel the pangs of loneliness. It’s not like they are mutually exclusive; people are nuanced.

Within the context of the film, budding feelings are meager but precious. Her personal hurt and even her greatest transgression are never extended blow outs but these contained moments thoughtfully developed within time and space by the filmmakers.

Fran and Robert get invited to a get together and they both oblige. The subsequent gathering of murder in the dark is a nice evocation on the movie’s primary theme. It’s a visualization of death for a character who does consider its headiness from time to time. The best parts of these scenes is that they feel like a rambunctious good time. That is one of the movie’s strengths: balancing these emotions of warmth and affability with real melancholy.

Robert tells her later in the car, “You’re secretly good at a lot of things. You just don’t let anyone know.” It’s true. Introverted people like this do exist in the world. I feel like I know at least a few of them. On the surface, they seem so taciturn and unassuming but there interior lives or even what they do in their off hours are so vibrant. They offer so much, but they don’t need to tell everyone about it. Selfishly I wish we knew about more of them because we would do well to learn from their example.

My primary critique of the movie initially might have been its opening runway. It felt like for a fairly truncated film, it took a lot of time to get to Robert’s introduction; we even watch as they give a going away party to his predecessor who is set to retire and go on a cruise with her husband.

But even this is paid off when Fran stops by a local coffee shop to get donuts for the office. She’s going through a different kind of pain and regret because she said something regrettable that she cannot take back; she wants to acknowledge her remorse; tell Robert how she feels. But how can she do that if she can barely string two sentences together?

There Fran bumps into her retired co-worker surprised. She was supposed to be on a cruise. Except her husband had a stroke; she couldn’t bear to tell anyone and so now she drinks her coffee alone and looks out the window at the harbor wistfully. Fran could have traded pleasantries and left it at that. There is no personal utility to stick around, and yet she stops and sits down. She makes the decision to listen and her reactions feel real.

Somehow these feelings make her empathy and concern genuine. The action of getting something for her coworkers — a learned altruistic behavior is one thing — but there is also another turn. For one of the first times, we see her sympathy on display for another human being. She connects even if it’s just a little thing.

Later, she asks Robert genuinely, “Do you wish you could unknow me?” What a question, but it comes from such a place of honesty and fear. It fits hand in hand with the hypothetical question, “If you died tomorrow, would anyone care?” Could the lie be true? The voices in our own heads can be vicious.

There’s probably an HR caveat in here somewhere, but a movie is a movie. What lingers is this reverberating optimism. Human connections are worth the risk and effort. I left the film thinking, “Me too, Fran. Me too.” I resonate with this title though not because of some kind of ideation. From dust we come and from dust we will return. 

In the final embrace of the movie, it’s in a copy room. But within seconds it’s transformed into a garden-like greenhouse — a little slice of paradise. The imagery seems only fitting. We were not made to be alone.

3.5/5 Stars

Evil Does Not Exist (2024)

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From watching one of director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s interviews, it’s made clear he started Evil Does Not Exist by using the music of Eiko Ishibashi as inspiration. There’s a swelling breadth to it augmenting everything it touches. At times doleful and then evolving into a plinking intensity looking for release.

It plays against a backdrop of austere forests, trickling streams, and fresh dustings of snow outside the prying eyes of the Tokyo metropolis. The score becomes a viable metaphor for the movie itself.

The film’s relationship with its characters is also distinct. There’s something Bressonian about it. Because the famed French director famously envisioned his actors as models and often cast non-professionals. He wasn’t looking for performances in the conventional sense.

I don’t know Hamaguchi’s filmography all that well, but it doesn’t feel like he has a stock company. Rather he likes to use different actors for what they offer in each distinct context. We spend the opening minutes watching this man named Takumi (crew member Hitoshi Omika) exist and act, though not in the way we normally think of it in film.

It is slow cinema in the sense that we watch him in the paces of his life from collecting stream water to chopping wood. This tells us more about him than any amount of dialogue might, but it also signals to us what kind of movie we’re in for.

Hamaguchi is prepared to steady your heart rate, and I could use much more of this amid the daily grind. However, it is a tightrope because it’s so easy to lose your audience as they grow potentially disillusioned by the pacing and elongated editing schemes. Seeing as Drive My Car was over 3 hours and Happy Hour over 5 hours, there’s something about Evil Does Not Exist that feels, if not economical, at least more contained.

Takumi’s relationship with his quizzical daughter is rather reminiscent of Leave No Trace (2018). So much of their affection and relationship is facilitated through their shared love of nature with the father passing down his knowledge to his girl.

The movie’s dramatic conflict comes with an impending land development. A Tokyo-based talent agency has plans to install a Glamping site, which ostensibly is little more than a ploy to get a coveted tax subsidy.

Like any conscientious Japanese company, they do their due diligence by holding an open forum for the locals to voice their concerns. The subsequent extended community scene is trademark Hamaguchi with a sprawling dialogue exchange. While it’s not a Park and Rec episode, maybe it’s the Japanese alternative.

There’s something tight-knit about this small community rubbing up against the wary encroachment of the Tokyo firm. Their concerns are well-founded and measured. They see through everything with a clarity that no formal Japanese double-speak can totally obfuscate.

Their opposition, if you will, are the archetypes of a veteran salaryman and his deferential associate who hasn’t quite detached from her empathy. The audience I sat with was mostly quiet if attentive, but there was more than one occasion I found myself chuckling to myself, either from a line of Japanese dialogue or an interaction.

I found this section of the movie especially rich with behavioral humor. There’s a youthful rebel in baggy pants who tramples over the typical decorum and has to be held back. The ritualistic bowing is met with contempt and even Takumi is brusque. They want to try to recruit him as an advisor for their glamping endeavor. He has no business card to give them as is customary, nor does he want their token gifts or pleasantries.

These might be subtle, but it’s a pleasure to watch how these locals eschew what feels like traditional norms. Because so much of Japanese life feels like a tug of war between exterior and interior identity. We say don’t judge a book by its cover and here it holds true on more than one occasion. Many of these characters seem perceptive and ultimately nuanced.

One of the other surprises is how Hamaguchi turns the “enemy” into real people over an extended car ride back to the countryside. They know they’re not dealing with idiots, but their superior encourages them to return and ensure they stay on schedule. It feels like an untenable mission. Having seen both sides, we feel for them. Their hearts aren’t in it.

They trade their hopes, aspirations, and dating prospects in a way that you rarely see in Japanese work culture without alcohol as a social lubricant. Despite the modest scope, I’m not sure if others are aware of how radical this feels.

Takumi takes his guests out into the natural world and allows them to walk alongside him in his daily tasks. Later that same evening his daughter disappears and darkness is closing in. There’s something dismal and inevitable about it as the entire population mobilizes to try and find her.

Without drawing it out too much, they do discover the girl as well as a fawn and doe who feel like semiotic creatures. It’s no coincidence there was a movie called The Deer Hunter. He lives on the fringes of the frame here with his bullets flying in a game of offscreen roulette.

The willfully oblique ending is inexplicable, but I could not look away. You can take it one of two ways: either with mystified displeasure or a contentment in not understanding everything. I fit in the latter category. It was like staring at a mesmerizing spell.

Somehow it feels like a pleasure and a privilege to get these moments in time slowed down for us — sequences that are purposefully meditative. I couldn’t help thinking how much of a backward society we live in that it takes a screen in the dark projecting images in front of us to draw a person out of the hubbub and back into nature. Are we so removed that moving pictures are one of the last vestiges of the natural world in the urban jungle? Because it’s not the real thing.

I would find it instructive for the director to expound on his themes at length — that’s what I want — and yet the movie leaves the results up to us. Still, if nothing else, Hamaguchi gives us a reminder of our imperative ties to the natural world lest we forget where we originate. As much as we try, life cannot always be domesticated comfort. There’s wild beauty out there we would do well to remember.

I think we share an appreciation of the natural world. Maybe it’s semantics or a mere positive affirmation, but if evil does not exist, we could also conjecture, like The Deer Hunter, that interpersonal discord, war, and death are natural in a chaotic world. 

However, I would not say that humans nor beasts are inherently good. For the time being, we live in a broken, fallen world and this is just a reality. Our world is full of entropy, but this is not meant to be our resting state.

It’s all the more reason to do our utmost to look after our environments, be kind to our neighbors, and work toward human flourishing. Of course, that’s easier said than done, but like Thomas Aquinas posited I would like to believe that good can exist even without evil. We’re not there yet, but I’m still hopeful.

3.5/5 Stars

Mystery Train (1989)

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I hold an immediate affinity for the images at the core of Mystery Train: A Japanese couple (Youki Kudo and Masatoshi Nagase) riding a train. This is the ’80s so they’ve got a walkman with an audiocassette tape, and it’s blaring Elvis! It becomes apparent they are making a pilgrimage to Graceland so famously immortalized by Paul Simon. The song “Mystery Train” becomes an apropos and uncanny way to enter the story while paying homage to the King.

Jim Jarmusch always strikes me as such an open-minded and curious filmmaker. Modern society speaks in terms of diversity and inclusion, but the beauty of watching a Jarmusch picture, it’s the fact he’s not looking for these things in order to meet some quota. He seems generally interested by the stories and perspectives a whole host of characters can provide him, and his films benefit greatly from this enduring proclivity.

Regardless of where the funding came from, who else would consider making a film about two Japanese youth in search of Elvis Presley in the 1980s? They spend the first several minutes speaking a language that the primary audience probably does not understand. They likewise are bewildered by a upbeat yet motormouthed docent at Sun Records. Still, somehow shared passions for Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison et al., draw them together in inextricable ways.

There’s something perfectly fated about the whole thing with Screaming Jay Hawkins as a rather flamboyant hotel clerk aided by a youthful bellhop (Cinque Lee). I don’t know how to describe it but Hawkins has a command or a sway over the picture rather like Wolfman Jack in American Graffiti. His presence is felt and becomes so indelible in accentuating an aura. He comes to represent a certain era and a place in human form.

Jarmusch’s characters of choice often feel like sojourners, strangers in a strange land and Memphis is such a place. It is a film that features degradation — cracked pavements, garish neon lights, and portions of the world that are not perfectly manicured. What a concept. It’s almost like Jarmusch is giving us the real world albeit composed through his own cinematic lens. It’s no coincidence it has this kind of baked-in glow of Paris, Texas another film of geographical Americana captured so exquisitely by Robby Muller

It’s only a personal observation but my level enjoyment slightly decreased with each descending story. As someone who journeyed in Japan and went to one of the greatest concerts of my life in Yokohama, I feel this kind of kinship with these Japanese youths in their pilgrimage to Elvis and Carl Perkins. Also, on another level, this is a point of view we just don’t often see in movies of the 1980s or even today. Jarmusch is not using them as some kind of stereotypical punchline. He’s genuinely interested in their story and allowing it to play out in front of us.

Then, there’s Nicoletta Braschi in part two. She’s told a ghost story by a dubious stranger and gives him a tip to be left alone. She too seeks asylum for the night at the same hotel and gains a chatty roommate (Elizabeth Bracco) who is linked to our final vignette.

This last interlude with Steve Buscemi feels like it exists in the time capsule moment of a certain era where Tarrantino, the Coens, and others were making these stylized, often grotesque comedies. Elvis (Joe Strummer) gained his nickname inexplicably, but he’s also started to become unhinged because his girlfriend went up and left him. The cocktail of booze and firearms make his buddies Charlie (Buscemi) and Will Robinson (Rick Aviles) uneasy. Although it feels more like an absurd episode of The Twilight Zone than Lost in Space.

Regardless of my own preferences, Jarmusch still gives his world a sense of purposefulness. Again, it’s this serendipitous quality reminiscent of Jacques Demy’s fated films where lives cross paths and intersect in deeply poignant ways.

There’s something somehow elegant about the structure. It’s certainly premeditated and Jarmusch purportedly was inspired by classical literary styles in constructing his triptych, but it’s also a genuine pleasure to watch it unfurl.

The movie revolves on the axis of a few shared moments and places: A hotel, a radio DJ (Tom Waits) playing “Blue Moon,” and a gunshot. But it’s not like they’re all building to some kind of collective crescendo; it’s more so just a passing indication of how lives, whether they mean to be or not, are often interrelated.

Characters orbit each other and interact in these preordained ways that reflect the mind of the maker, in this case, Jarmusch. There’s something oddly compelling and comic about it, but there’s simultaneously a sense of comfort. We have order and a kind of narrative symmetry leading back out from whence we came.

Jarmusch is calling on the poetry of the ages and so in a movie that seems to have a free and laissez-faire attitude, there’s still a very clear order behind it, three distinct threads end-to-end and yet still interwoven into a tapestry that we can appreciate. Mystery Train represents the best in cinematic storytelling — with purposeful composition and aesthetics — but also a sense of aura and inscrutability.

It’s funny and yet when it’s over there’s also satisfaction and a hint of wistfulness. I wish there were more of its ilk today. The movie that’s come the closest is Paterson — another modern jewel from Jim Jarmusch. I see that film in a new light as a much older, wiser, and more forthcoming Masatoshi Nagase sits down on a bench with Adam Driver.

Again, it is a story about the human journey, how we are all travelers in some sense, and what a beautiful thing it is to relish the road because it can lead us to so many beguiling places if we take the time.

4/5 Stars

Beijing Watermelon (1989)

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Nobuhiko Obayashi is known to a pocket of western moviegoers for his crazy, unhinged haunted house flick Hausu (1977), but as I’ve gotten more familiar with at least some of his filmography, I’ve come to appreciate his more grounded works.

Using this phrase has the danger of giving the wrong impression about him. This doesn’t imply boring or anything of the sort. Still, some of his later works are told with such humanity through relationships, humor, and often a wistful nostalgia that comes on the tails of youthful optimism.

Beijing Watermelon hardly makes a blip on the radar. I consider myself fairly well-versed in film (albeit with many noticeable blind spots), but I had never heard of it.

Still, this film spoke to me through its simple rhythms. It’s easy enough to introduce the premise and still fail to totally articulate what makes this movie such a meaningful experience for the right person. Because it a mundane slice of life tale following a grocery store owner who comes to form a bond with a contingent of Chinese students studying and living in Japan.

It begins inauspiciously enough when a poor Chinese student tries to barter with him. He’s a bit offended by it — his prices are already reasonable — but events cause him to take an interest in the young man’s life and his well-being. He meets Li and a host of local students who are many miles away from home. It feels inexplicable at first, but as time progresses, they form an unalienable connection. I’m not sure if other’s find this cross-cultural relationship to be unbelievable or at the very least somewhat whimsical.

As someone who has lived abroad in Japan of all places and relied on other people’s good graces, there was something so resonant about this scenario. It spoke to me on a profound level, and it was not in spite of the mundane nature but rather because of it.

The comedian “Bengal” who stars as the greengrocer Haruzo Horikoshi, somehow reminds me of the Tora-san character. It’s almost like he’s an extension of the Japanese comic prototype. He’s at times a buffoon and outlandish, and yet he’s imbued with so much heart and by extension pathos. If we stretch the Tora-San metaphor, he feels a bit like the Japanese everyman who brings back nostalgic reminisces of a different era. There’s something hilarious and tragic and warm about him all at the same time.

I must admit that there’s a point where it feels like the Chinese students are taking advantage of Mr. Haruzo. Perhaps it’s just a cultural difference and a way of showing good-humor and affection, but as an outside observer and someone who has a modest appreciation for Japanese courtesy I felt bad for the man.

At the same time, he continues to grow more and more accustomed to providing them discount goods, maintaining letter correspondence with Li when he returns home, and then picking up a new arrival at the airport named Zhang.

As a side note, there are two airport sequences that feel so authentic. The callow student looks downs and realizes his bags are missing! Of course, they are nearby where a thoughtful lady has set them aside out of the way. Also, a local Japanese man brags about his English prowess. Except the moment an English-speaking tourist asks for directions, he has no help to offer and sheepishly walks away.

By this point, we must ask the question: why does Mr. Haruzo feel compelled to do all this? There’s something in his constitution that makes him different, causing him to go against the tide of Japanese convention. Because what he does transcends polite niceties and keeping up appearances. Dare I say, it’s true sacrifice.

Could it be he’s slowly falling in love with the earnest Pingping? A lesser film would have played this up for the sake of drama. But while the affection is evident, it never goes further than that.

Meanwhile, his local neighbors joke that he’s caught the “Chinese disease.” If that’s so I’d probably wish I had it too. Of course, eventually it seems to derail his life. His business isn’t profitable anymore, he’s less present with his family. His long-suffering wife (Masako Motai) is trying to pick up the slack because he feels mostly absent. His kids feel ashamed by how he’s acting. Even his shaggy-haired employee vows to go to a rival supermarket where he won’t be a laughingstock.

It feels like Mr. Haruzo’s ruined — entirely thrown away his life — and soon the tax board comes to impound his belongings while he’s also detained for a hilarious public disturbance while requesting a loan. The heightened blood pressure leads to an extended stay at the hospital. Surely this cannot be the fruit of his troubles? He’s in such a dejected space with his family unsure what to make of him.

It’s a bit on the nose, but I think of that immortal line that “no man is a failure who has friends” and of course, the friends Mr. Haruzo has in his life come to his aid when he needs it most. It’s a beautiful sentiment and something I’m sure many of us recognize if we’ve ever been enmeshed in a close-knit community.

The watermelon becomes one of the substantive cultural metaphors of the film, and as someone who lived in Japan as a westerner and has spent many years working in international spaces, this film speaks to me on a deep level.

Surely you don’t need this in order to appreciate the film, but as I watch this Japanese man build cultural bridges and become a kind of local institution with a spread in the paper and then getting treated like a king by all his grateful beneficiaries, I was fundamentally moved.

I think of the people in my life overseas who watched over me at my most vulnerable or lifelong friends my parents and siblings have made when they were abroad. If we let it, film can be one of the great universal unifiers, a language unto itself that connects us and transcends cultural origins or international borders. That’s what it’s often been for me and Beijing Watermelon is such a winsome portrait of what I aspire to in my life.

I’m not sure if anyone else has made this comparison, but Haruzo Horiko feels a bit like a Japanese Mr. Chips because with his name comes a lasting legacy and impact. It turns out to be an extraordinary life.

There is one last aspect of Beijing Watermelon that deserves some comment. I acknowledged already that this is one of Obayashi’s more formally traditional films, and yet he still breaks out of narrative convention — not for want of ostentatious showmanship — but because it serves the story he wishes to tell.

I could not track down any definitive details, but Beijing Watermelon is supposed to be based off real events that happened. However, Obayashi takes this biography and gives it a Brechtian ending, somehow working with the negative space of the film and what it does not show.

Bengal speaks to us and tells us we are back on a Japanese set in a studio. He and his movie wife journey to China and yet it’s made explicit that they are in the cabin of a plane set and not an actual plane for a reunion with all their Chinese friends.

If you’re like me, you question why have this break with the cinematic reality? The movie was humming along beautifully without the distraction. But then it slowly becomes more apparent the longer you sit with it, especially considering the cultural moment and what was happening in China — the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989 being a particular inflection point…

Because even if you are not aware of any of this, there’s something imperceptible and still intuitive about the melancholy that comes over the viewer. It’s all there in the movie both the warm feelings welling up inside of us, but also this inherent sense of sadness carried with those Chinese students as they play and sing their bittersweet song on the beach with the credits rolling against them. The postscript of the movie is what does it for me as a final rallying cry and call for greater cultural understanding:

“We dedicate this film to all our young Chinese friends.”

What an extraordinary film. I hope more people can search it out and enjoy it as much as I did.

4.5/5 Stars

Pump Up The Volume (1990): A Gen X Jeremiad

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Pump Up The Volume is a movie that tackles the existential malaise of the generation beyond After Hours and Something Wild. I’ve never been particularly good at charting the shifts in generational demographics, but the film is definitely an adolescent jeremiad for Gen Xers.

In truth, I only learned about the movie from a work colleague who is a generation older than me. The sense of upfront and personal alienation spoke to him as a high schooler and probably a whole generation of the discontented.

Although Allan Moyle’s movie doesn’t make the rounds too often, you can immediately sense its cult appeal and also a certain level of prescience in speaking to the teenager’s dilemma. I’m not sure if it’s merely a post-war phenomenon, but it’s certainly something Millennials, Gen Zers, and whoever else follows can certainly resonate with.

Harry Hardon (Christian Slater) is a local DJ who hits the airwaves at 10 pm sharp every evening cued by his theme song, Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” and backed by a steady flow of alternative music, personal commentary, and raunchy gags. He’s garnered quite a devoted following.

Within the confines of the film, he builds a cult of personality as a nighttime provocateur, and it’s so easy for him to represent the profane bombastic nature of youth. His viewership cuts across high school cliques to encompass nerds, punkers, beautiful overachievers, and everyone in between. Because everyone of a certain age can identify.

As he puts it, parents, teachers, TV, Movies, and magazines tell you what to do, but you know what you have to do — your purpose is to get accepted, get a cute girlfriend, and think of something great to do the rest of your life.

For those crying out for an alternative, less conventional existence, it can feel like a suffocating road to the American Dream. It’s easy to feel lied to or at the very least feel like school and the world haven’t fully prepared you for the brunt of angst weighing on your mind.

Christian Slater is required to do a lot of the heavy lifting throughout the film, and it relies on his charisma because in many of his scenes, he’s just speaking to an audience out in the dark somewhere (both over the radio and in the movie theater). Somehow it works though DJing is only a small aspect of his life.

By day, he’s Mark Hunter a disenchanted teen. His father is on the school board, they’re in a great district, but he’s also the new kid on the block and doesn’t have any friends. He exists on the outskirts mostly unseen as a diffident disciple of Lenny Bruce stuck in his own thoughts and unable to socialize. By night, well…he comes alive.

Samantha Mathis almost feels like a bad girl version of Molly Ringwald, dark-haired, pretty, and spunky as Nora De Niro. She, like all the rest of her peers, is captivated by Harry because of what he represents to all of them. It becomes her mission to figure out who he is as she scrounges around school and sends letters to his P.O. Box as bait. Eventually, she learns the identity of their mild-mannered Clark Kent.

It does feel like Pump Up The Volume is on the cusp of a new decade while still channeling the remnants of ‘80s film culture. There’s a War Games-like wunderkind ingenuity where a single teenager seems capable of taking on all manner of adults, government organizations, and what have you even as he muddles his way through the usual adolescent romance and alienation.

It escalates following a classmate’s suicide and a broader probe within the highly-touted school as the principal looks to bring down an iron fist on any troublemakers and keep her pristine reputation. The only problem is that the masses are getting more and more unruly and brazen as they rebel against the school’s primary enforcer, Mr. Murdock.

Then, the FCC is on Mark’s trail prepared to shut down his clandestine operation. It’s not a game anymore. We’ve gone large-scale. If you’re like me, you’re always under the assumption he’s going to be caught; they’re going to nab him, and still, he always finds a way to outsmart them.

I couldn’t help likening Harry to a prophet of the airwaves, a Howard Beale for the angsty teenage population as he exhorts them to “Do something crazy!” But what I appreciate about the movie is how he eventually kicks his version of a nihilistic spiral.  Early on he opined that “Being young is sometimes less fun than being dead.” Then, he changes his mind. Hang in there he says. It can only get better.

He and Nora take his radio show on the road for one last evening of insurrection before signing off for good as the local teenage population’s cult hero. He becomes a legend in his own time and even if his frequency dies, there’s a nation of others to rise up and take his place.

I’m not sure what the contemporary implications of Pump Up The Volume were; it could have been negligible at best, but even though this movie is not always talked about, there’s a sense it spoke into the zeitgeist of the times.

It’s not a large production, it didn’t make a ton of box office, and it hardly has the enduring reputation of John Hughes’s most prominent works. Part of this might owe to its coarser even darker subject matter, though it’s rarely bandied about with the same frequency as Heathers. But this very same punk mentality wrapped up in the anxieties of the suffocating structures of high school, middle-class meritocracy offers a foreboding portrait of the future.

It still manages to be a movie of common ground, reassurance that we are not alone, and that the days ahead can get better. It’s not a movie about stewing in death and insecurities but acknowledging them and putting them to rest. In their place, we can have romance, friendship, and camaraderie.

I’m not for glorifying delinquency per se, but it is a movie, after all, and Slater makes it quite an intoxicating thrill. Especially when we don’t have to witness the aftermath or live with any consequences. Somehow, he can ride off as the hero we always wanted, knowing deep down inside maybe we have something inside ourselves that can still be expressed — it’s waiting to be expressed. Whatever your opinion, it’s fairly optimistic, and this is in its favor all these years later.

3.5/5 Stars

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941): W.C. Fields and Gloria Jean

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“Do you think he drinks?”

“He didn’t get that nose from playing ping pong.”

Self-reflexive metanarratives have the capacity of dissecting celebrity and playing with personas. Such a context is ripe with possibility and so when we find ourselves on a studio lot with W.C. Fields eyeing the a big billboard for The Bank Dick, we know we just might be in for something. It came out the year prior, a critical darling and a commercial flop. He’s looking to pitch the follow-up to his producer.

He is under employment at Esoteric Pictures. His niece in the picture, real-life songstress Gloria Jean, plays a young ingenue out of the cut of Garland or Durbin. They are the film’s affable nucleus.

W.C. Fields is a picture of his usual self with his protruding proboscis and that straw hat of his as battered as ever. There’s the way he casually mumbles away at dialogue. It falls offhand and unrehearsed. You can almost lose it. Some of the garbled gook he gets out only makes it to your ears after he’s said it, and your mind has time enough to catch up.

Meanwhile, a typically huffy Franklin Pangborn with his stringy hair tries to command the unremittent chaos of the studio sets to get Gloria Jean to perfect her latest song, one of those high-pitched operatic numbers out of yesteryear. He’s already in a unstable mood when Fields pays him a call.

The script Fields is pitching becomes the premise for the movie itself as he darts in and out of scenes that might as well have no relation to one another aside from featuring Fields and Gloria Jean.

They start on an airplane together to some unknown destination. They might as well be waiting for Godot. He goes free-falling through space in pursuit of a bottle of spirits only to end up trampolining into the stratosphere of a pretty maiden from an oblivious world. Margaret Dumont is her imperious mother Mrs. Hemoglobin leading a great dane by the leash like some bleak Amazonian woman.

Fields, who penned the script under one of his many aliases, pushes the boundaries farther than he’s ever gone before, and it’s spectacular and surreal if this is what creative control looks like. It’s not as out and out funny as some other Fields movies, but it’s giving itself over in its totality to this absurd rhythm which is quite extraordinary to watch. He throws himself over a cliff in a basket only for Pangborn to loudly protest. The story lacks continuity! It’s an insult to human intelligence!

Is it too obvious to read it as a commentary on a career of movies and studios and such? I think not. Because W.C. Fields films were never the most tensely plotted, tightly constructed gems. He built his career out of ad-libs and performance, not so much the written word. Not that he didn’t come alive with verbal wit of his own accord and this was his gift.

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But he was never made for the strictures of the industry, and so it’s fascinating to watch him when the restraints come flying off, and he’s got his run of the candy store so to speak. In fact, he rebels against conventional plot to the point of totally pulling it apart in front of us and tossing it away as collateral damage.

There is absolutely no pretense here. It’s even less about fast and free gags and bits being assembled together. It’s given itself over fully to surrealist feats of cinematic fancy. It might leave some befuddled now as it did then, but one can gather some sense of the performer. It suggest so much about him implicitly that still needs to be parsed through.

With the real-life context, it shows the decline of W.C. Fields who was quietly ditched for other more agreeable talent, especially because Never Give a Sucker… was hardly going to woo the audiences. Not in 1941. It was of that rarefied breed we often far too easily label “Ahead of its Time.” Here it seems pertinent.

The final set piece is an eye-popping death defying car chase to the maternity hospital. It feels like a flashback to the heyday of Keaton or Lloyd. It’s the most purely comedic slapdash moment in the picture, and does it fit with the rest of the movie? Not by a long shot, but somehow it remains a capstone for something that is totally of its own form and function. It’s almost obligatory. Here the career of W.C. Fields quietly came to an end. This was his final opus to hang his reputation on for future generations.

Doing a bit of perfunctory research, Fields was game to make another such picture with Gloria Jean and some of his favorite stock players. The studio wasn’t about to have it, and his own health was at the detriment of his drinking habit, lampooned as it might have been. W.C. Fields is one of the more irascible classic comedians to be able to pin down. But his comedy at its core does seem to get at a central human longing. It was always him against the world. He took it as well as dishing it out.

gloria jean

Maybe it’s only a small reward and too little too late, but I think even Fields understood the significance of Gloria Jean being in his corner unreservedly. Yes, it’s mawkish in the kind of Hollywood tripe sort of way, but secretly it also feels like a healing balm to the Fields character.

At last he can have some kind of peace. At last there is someone who will accept him unconditionally for who he is. My hope is that Fields experienced some of that in life as he did in his final major screen role. That’s not for me to know. All I know is that we all crave love; we all crave relief.

Fields wanted the film to be titled “The Great Man.” We can read it as jest or a bit of self-congratulatory pomp. But I think this is inside all of us veiled by insecurities. For people to see past our flaws. We want kids to look up to us and see us as what we aspire to be and not as the damaged goods we actually are. Gloria Jean extends her uncle such an honor as she smiles into the camera one last time. He is known and loved. To her he is a great man.

3.5/5 Stars

The Bank Dick (1940): Egbert Sousé and Lompoc, California

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When W.C. Fields goes and names his protagonist Egbert Sousé it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to get the joke, although he does spend much of the movie explaining the correct pronunciation. The other half he spends drinking at his favorite bar: The Black Pussy Cat Cafe.

His hometown is none other than Lompoc, California. Aside from being a memorable name in its own right, the town had the illustrious title of being a dry zone with a long history of temperance. What better way for W.C. Fields to thumb his nose at them, than by setting up shop right in their fair city, albeit in his own made-up cinematic universe?

If it’s not becoming obvious already, I think the reason The Bank Dick is often touted as the finest example of his style is because it totally digs into his stereotypical persona whole hog. He’s an irreparable drunkard, a lier, and a braggart prone to any number of human vices. There’s no attempt to varnish them either. He’s a bona fide reprobate.

Nor is he particularly fond of his wife, daughter, mother-in-law, or the little kid who shows up in the bank. His daughter is bent on throwing rocks at him, and he about strangles a little boy who’s armed with a toy pistol. Does it even need to be said? He’s never a likable figure.

However, beyond mere character flaws, it is Field’s delivery that sets him apart from the crowd — the way he mumbles or draws out a line of dialogue. Again, it’s like an afterthought. He’s saying all the unfiltered comments he would say if he thought no one else is listening. Either he’s too dumb to know he’s being overheard or he plainly doesn’t care. At least that’s part of the shtick.

If he has anything close to a friend, it would probably be his bartender (Shemp Howard). He would follow the man to the end of the earth and back again, mostly because the man spells booze. It’s not all bad though since he makes another acquaintance over drinks.

After reminiscing about the good ol’ days giving a passing mention to Mack Sennett, Chaplin, Keaton, and Fatty Arbuckle — all the lads — he finds himself being pulled onto a 36-hour movie set in desperate need of a stabilizing force.

Souse’s tall tales nab him the job, and he certainly acts the part: Dishing out stage directions and convening with the script girl, between trips of being carried around like ancient royalty on a litter. His family’s far from impressed by his hamming.

What’s more, we drop this scenario almost as soon as it begins. It’s like Fields was bored with the narrative strands and decided to table it until his next go around. He has other priorities. His film, after all, is called The Bank Dick and so there has to be some scenario for this to come into being.

So, a bank robbery happens. He’s going to the saloon (where else would he go?). Alas, it’s closed, but sitting on a bench, with his nose in his paper, he ends up in the right place at the right time and gladly takes the mantle of a hero as a criminal is apprehended — no thanks to him.

As recompense, he’s bestowed a low-grade job as a bank dick that’s somehow tied to his home, which they might foreclose on if he doesn’t keep the position. It’s a dubious scenario, but also the kind of underhanded deal Fields probably more than deserves if we can say it. Tit for tat as they say. After all, it’s only a movie and this obliviousness underscores his very identity.

Next, he’s talking his future son-in-law into buying some useless mining stock, and pretty soon they’re embezzling from the bank for a dead-end deal. So of course the bank examiner, a snooty Franklin Pangborn, has to show up right on cue to throw a perilous wrench into their plans.

All Fields’ attempts at cordiality and voluntary sabotage fail, but the entertainment comes with each and every one of his ploys. I won’t try and spoil them here, but Pangborn was born to be his hapless target and Fields obliges with all sorts of shenanigans. Again, to no avail.

the bank dick

Of course, none of this matters. Not the embezzlement. Not the bank robbery. Not any of it. Because their mine is actually a bountiful lode, and they strike it rich as only W.C. Fields can. It’s an instantaneous, convenient reversal of fortune, but then again, Fields’ pictures always defy conventional logic. It’s in their very nature to shirk the normal rhythm for whatever behooves them at any given moment.

In this way, The Bank Dick synthesizes many of his prevailing themes — some of those mentioned already — capped off by an outrageously decadent happy ending. It also joins the ranks of Never Give a Sucker… in his line of raucous car chases, and it’s not a coincidence he’s working with Cline who partnered with Keaton on Sherlock Jr. Similar stunts abound here. It’s a bit of comic nostalgia even in 1940.

W.C. Fields isn’t for everyone. The Bank Dick is not always entertaining. But you come to appreciate his personal penchant for comedy as each performer of the era cultivated a very particular image. He’s little different and seeing as he wrote this number as well as starred in it, he’s giving himself over to the comedy and doing it the way he sees fit. If nothing else, it probably most closely aligns with his proclivities as an entertainer.

His films were never meant to be cohesive. They were never even really meant to be films at all. As with many comedians, it feels like the best dashes of serendipity occur in those suspended spaces in between. Where there’s a throwaway gag, an off-handed zinger, or just something resolutely out of left field.

Every person is different as are their audiences. They don’t always carry our interest every waking second. Sometimes all they have to do is bless us with little bits and pieces of time. It’s often enough for us to remember them so that they remain in the cultural consciousness. This is how I feel about Fields. He is an indelible figure for the persona he built, straw hat, big nose, flaws and all.

3.5/5 Stars

It’s a Gift (1934): “California, Here I Come!”

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It’s a Gift is built out of the framework of the domestic lifestyle. This is where it gets its comedy. Take for exhibit A an early sequence. Harold Bissonette (pronounced bis-on-ay) tries to shave with a straight edge despite the interference of his daughter. It leads him to resort to using the reflection of a can and then a mirror suspended from the ceiling dangling around the room.

He follows it around taking intermittent swipes at his gullet covered with shaving cream quite unsuccessfully. It’s a wordless sequence that’s a wonderful escalation of utter absurdity. Because it bubbles with human invention and though Fields takes it further than seems necessary, that’s part of the fun — watching him keep it going.

For any of this comedy to function, there must be a suffocating bulwark around Fields in the form of his family. He has a perfectly henpecked, windbag of a wife (Kathleen Howard) berating him incessantly. His cackling kid’s either gliding around on his roller skates or leaving them lying around so they can be tripped over. His daughter is simply boy-crazy.

Put them together and it’s a perfect combustion engine for his comedic shtick. He has dreams of leaving his corner drugstore for an orange grove in California. If his uncle keels over like he’s supposed to maybe he’ll be left some inheritance.

For the time being, he has the daily grind, which isn’t much better than his home life. A huffy man demanding kumquats. There’s a blind and deaf fellow with an ear horn who’s a walking booby trap. The stock of light bulbs never had a chance. Even his oafish shop hand is hopeless; riding his bicycle indoors, falling asleep, failing to keep a wayward baby from spreading molasses all over the shop floor. You name it. It happens to him.

W.C. Fields becomes a vehicle of antagonism and all the ires of the world seem to be directed at him. This is the source of giddy delight in the comedy strung out over the progression of loosely connected scenes. Could it be he can never catch a break or maybe he’s just enough of a doddering fool to never warrant one?

Normally the image of the comedian is sculpted as a hater of mutts and tykes. It’s true this ornery image makes him all the more human. Here in this movie, it feels strikingly different because he’s effectively accosted on all sides even as he’s just lying around minding his own business. He’s allowed no peace.

One of the ripest gags is set out on the back porch one morning. Fields is trying rather unsuccessfully to get some shuteye, thwarted by an uncooperative couch, a milkman rattling his morning stock of “sleigh bells,” and about anything else you might possibly imagine. Don’t forget a rolling coconut exuding 10 times its decibel level — it’s practically a bowling ball as it thunks down the steps. Likewise, babies are infernal creatures out to get him and wage war against his comforts, no fault of his own.

It’s also one of the most visibly cinematic scenes in which we get this stratified sense of comedy as if it’s from the old two-reeler days of the silent era.  Though, here, the sound is such a vital element. That’s what sets it apart.

Then, the needle drops on “California Here I Come” to send the move in motion again. He’s gone and put his money into his dream. He done and bought an orange grove on a whim, loading up the jalopy and taking the wife and kids out west.

With it comes camping and sprawling West coast estates with rolling greens and statues. In fact, a witty passing gag has Fields crashing into the lawn ornament while his wife exclaims, “It’s the Venus de Milo” now in mint condition having been decapitated a la real life.

They make themselves at home on the private land. Their ensuing picnic is replete with sandwiches and meats wrapped in paper, feather pillows, feisty dogs, and sprinkler systems. By the time they leave the premises, it looks a bit like a ravaged water park gone awry. It’s an example of incremental chaos all conjoining into this culminating mayhem.

In the end, Bissonette is duped with what looks to be a precursor to Green Acres‘ Haney Place. In the immortal words of Bette Davis, “What a dump.” It’s a shack falling apart at the seams. His wife is indignant, ready to walk out on him, and he’s left to sit on the front stoop. What a dismal place to be in if this is truly the end. We only have minutes left after all.

But the cinematic world of W.C. Fields is an absurd space where only moments later all his miseries are turned on their head. Soon he’s sitting on the veranda pulling Oranges straight off the tree to squeeze into his own juice. It’s an outrageous joke scenario and a lampooning of idealized California culture, but in the face of The Grapes of Wrath and other such images, it’s a welcomed relief. If only every Tom, DIck, and Harry who took his family plunking out to the west coast struck it rich like this. It really is a comedy…That is until he sees the property taxes he owes.

3.5/5 Stars

Million Dollar Legs (1932): Klopstokia and The 1932 Olympics

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“All the women here are named Angela. And all the men are named George.”
“Why?”
“Why not?” – Jack Okey and Susan Fleming

This kind of laissez-faire, anything-goes mentality is one of the obvious strengths of Million Dollar Legs‘ comic tableau. There need not be a given rationale behind what it does and with this brand of laxity, there is an empowerment to do anything it so desires.

Thus, the narrative opens in a far-off Eastern European land called Klopstokia. Their chief exports, imports, and inhabitants are goats and nuts! If it’s not evident already the movie looks like it might be an equally oddball companion piece to Duck Soup.

It’s hard not to see its shared space and that’s mostly on a perfunctory level (and because of the fact Susan Fleming married Harpo Marx). One must also note it came first to precede the L.A. Olympics, though it’s not too hard to believe the Mankiewicz brothers did conceive the movie as a vehicle for the crown princes of anarchy.

Since this is not the case, Million Dollar Legs is ripe for rediscovery propping up some other stars who are sometimes less remembered. They didn’t get them, but Herman and Joseph working with director Edward F. Cline wrangled together an absurdist universe for the likes of Jack Okey. He might be most famous to modern audiences for parodying Mussolini in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator.

Here he’s front and center, an itinerant brush salesman, who happens upon the nation on business only to fall head over heels for the country and its people — one person in particular — her name is, of course, Angela (Susan Marx). They brush each other off rather seductively as her kid brother (Dickie Moore), a begrudging and silent cupid, does his best to keep them apart.

But she also has a connection to the country’s fearless leader. Her father is the President (and also W.C. Fields) with his hat and a dictaphone perfect for bad-mouthing his subordinates on his daily carriage ride to the office. He’s the broadest, most formidable name in the movie.

He makes a daily show of his brawn arm-wrestling his sneezing cabinet including such hoodwinked bumblers as Hugh Herbert and Billy Gilbert. The President is oblivious to their conspiratorial endeavors because frankly, even with their secret cache of spies, they hardly seem likely to hurt a fly. One of their spies out in the field, no less, is a pantomiming, cross-eyed man in black portrayed by Ben Turpin.

However, despite their impotence, they agree to call upon the woman who men can’t resist — the ultimate vamp and a caricature of the Dietrich archetype — Mata Macree (Lyda Roberti). What are her plans? To seduce the entire Klopstokia Olympic team in their bid for the 1932 Olympics! It has no import aside from meeting narrative expectations.

So everyone piles onto the ocean liner, including the President, Migg, and his best girl Angela. The movie’s apex might come when W.C. Fields on one side and his cabinet on the other start yanking the wall back and forth as Okey tries to woo his girl with the gibberish national anthem. It’s delightfully absurd both in the immediate visuals and the auditory accompaniment.

The Olympics aren’t much different with the Klopstokian contingent in a shambles before Angela rallies them jumping from the high dive to have it out with the duplicitous mata hari once and for all. Then, her father shows off his feats of strength in the weightlifting competition against his rival cabinet member. All pretense of logic is gone. Just go with it. Take it for what it is.

The final baton is taken up by the speedy Major-Domo who zips past the competition as a last-second entry coming from behind on the urging of Angela on a motorbike.  Truthfully, I’m still trying to figure out who owned the pair of million-dollar legs. For my money, it’s the galloping Major-Domo

What’s not up for contention is Million Dollar Legs as an intriguing vessel of comedy functioning as a kind of cultural time capsule. Not only does it help chart the famed Mankiewicz brothers before the heights of their future successes, it’s also a contemporary commemoration of the L.A. Olympics. Marx Brothers or not, it might just be worth a look as a historical curio.

3.5/ Stars