Tag Archives: International Film

Miroirs No. 3

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Christian Petzold is one of my favorite directors working today, and part of this might come from hearing his interviews. Because he’s such a charismatic, hilarious person to listen to. It might be surprising to those familiar with more than a few of his films. Still, his knowledge and love of movies are just so infectious.

Like many of us, he is plagued by the condition of always seeing movies through other movies. And this applies to his own films, too. Except he also has an aptitude for literature and music, while layering in ideas buried deep within the German cultural consciousness.

There is so much to like about his work. How he’s built out his own stock company, including long-term collaborators like Nina Hoss and Paula Beer. He’s distinctly reliable; his movies are always economical and still pregnant with so many worthwhile themes.

As best as I can describe it, they are grounded in the real world with real people, and still, somehow, we witness the kind of mysteries on screen only movies can provide. In the same way, you know, watching his movies, images have meaning, and they are there for a reason. We have mirrors, we have refractions, even dreams.

This movie’s inciting incident comes when a woman (Barbara Auer) overhears a nearby car accident and races to the scene. The young man (Philip Froissant) driving the car was killed instantly. His girlfriend, thrown from the car, lies nearby in shock, but almost without a scratch. It’s one of many uncanny events in the story.

The middle-aged woman, Barbara, comes to her aid. She’s going to fetch an ambulance, but this young music student, Laura (Paula Beer), asks her not to leave. From then on, they form a bit of a symbiotic relationship out of the wreckage.

A red sports car is meant to evoke the car crash in Contempt as much as the iconography of The Graduate. Why are those there exactly? It’s in conversation with film history. Jean-Luc Godard, Brigitte Bardot, Mike Nichols, and Dustin Hoffman. The music does the same, be it Ravel or Frankie Valli.

Miroirs No. 3 is a film that betrays so many elements of disrepair. A fence needing painting, a la Tom Sawyer. A dripping faucet gone kaput. A bicycle with a busted seat and an out-of-tune piano.

There is so much existing on the fringes, unexplained, even inscrutable, with the screen logic of a Hitchcock thriller in the countryside. We have very little background for Laura or Barbara, for that matter. Instead, we are offered the opportunity to watch, learn, and respond in kind.

Barbara brings Laura into her home and allows her to recuperate, doting over her with quiet compassion. At the same time, there is a felt absence around an unseen girl named Yelena and a noticeable dissolution of a family.

Why do the father (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs) no longer live with the woman of the house? Instead, they come over and have dinner after a day of work at their nearby garage. It’s awkward and stunted, and then Laura comes in with a special meal, and they don’t quite know what to do or say.

So they eat together in silence before doing odd jobs around the home, like fixing the dishwasher. This is what they’re comfortable with, and it is another expression of care. Certainly, external injury and broken appliances need repairing, but there is simultaneous work needing to be done on the interior of these lives, Laura’s included.

I know Petzold stuck “The Night” by Frankie Valli in his film because he likes The Deer Hunter, and that film features “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.” It’s a sprawling working-class movie. The context feels so far away from what he is crafting, and yet there is a shared understanding of how this music can develop these incubated moments of joy amid trauma.

But Petzold also enjoys the act of people listening to music. There are no bits of business or shrouds of performance they can put up. At their very best, the actors are laid bare. It’s small, seemingly inconsequential, but it is a kind of visual exposition for us as understanding builds in an interlude between Laura and Max. Then, the darkness breaks in again, and the light is momentarily extinguished.

Despite this tension, I kept on thinking about what a different perspective Petzold gives to the modern domestic movie. With the likes of fellow auteur Bong Joon Ho, it’s easy to look at the landscape and distrust strangers as the parasites move in. Petzold upends this and makes us think maybe strangers can actually give something to us. Or there might be something deeper in need of excavation and then refurbishment.

At the same time, there are the reverberations of Vertigo and themes related to the remaking of people. One image in the place of another image, in this case, Laura for the unseen daughter. Except Laura has so much to offer on her own, and in many ways, down to the very last frame, this is her movie, thanks to the hypnotic presence of Beer.

It’s easy to call a movie like this minor, but it uses its space sagaciously, and it has bounties in the intermittent passages that a lot of larger spectacles never quite discover. Ironically, they don’t have time.

It feels like Petzold at his very best precisely because it fits in concert with all his work, and in feeling small, it suggests what it needs to in such a perplexing, even exciting way.

Watching Miroirs No. 3 is another stirring reminder of why I continue coming back to movies and why Petzold remains one of my modern-day favorites. If you are new to his filmography, please give his earlier work with Nina Hoss a watch, and if you have the opportunity, watch his interviews.

In the hands of some people, films can come off pretentious, but I appreciate the care and creativity the writer-director puts into every story he writes. There’s a personal spark to them, fully alive and made in the tradition of all his favorite films that came before. Because he is a fan just like us, and he lets this shine through everything he does.

4/5 Stars

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

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Before the movie played, there was a short featurette following famed animator Hayao Miyazaki leading up to his Oscar win for Boy and The Heron in 2024. He sits with one of his fanciful drawings and mumbles something to the effect that it’s a pain going back to the real world. 

You only say that if you have an extraordinary imagination. But like many of us, Miyazaki seems to yearn for a better if not a different world altogether. When he wins the award, the man’s nowhere to be found.

Because that’s not why he made his film. It was the process and the exhilaration of reaching back into his imagination and exploring a different world. In documentaries, the director always strikes me as a somewhat cagey if unassuming individual, but what a joy it is to be privy to his creations. 

It’s little different with Howl’s Moving Castle, which now sees its 20th anniversary come to pass. It’s a striking opening image following this mechanical Baba Yaga-like castle (from Russian folklore), almost anthropomorphic in its movements. Howl’s abode is not only a visual marvel, but it is also the seat of this entire story. 

The eponymous man is a charismatic wizard, benevolent if somewhat vain and periodically selfish. But he is not the film’s only hero. Its true core begins with Sophie, a young girl who works as a hat maker. She has the humble beginnings that fit right at home in a fairy tale, and true to convention, her fearlessness means she has a spell cast on her by the menacing Witch of the Waste. 

Instantly, her youth is snatched away from her, and she’s stricken with the wrinkles and arthritic posture of old age. But Sophie is a driven, ever stalwart heroine, and she resolves to find a resolution for her fate. She must venture to Howl’s Castle in search of answers. Upon seeing how dank and grungy the wizard’s abode is, she hires herself on as a cleaning woman, determined to cultivate it.

Once again, I’m struck by how Miyazaki conjures up a world of the grotesque, from creepy crawlies to ghoulish, otherworldly adversaries, and dark forces. But the fairy tale almost demands these elements; they feel like a prerequisite because they give us a threshold for great beauty and even serenity in the lap of nature. One would not be as potent without the other. 

Like some of the great adventure stories, Sophie and her newfound acquaintances form a disparate family unit reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz, Star Wars, or even Pixar’s UP.

There’s Markl, a precocious little boy with a bearded cloak who earnestly tries to hold down the fort while the master of the house is indisposed. Calcifer is the obstinate fire demon who begrudgingly powers Howl’s mobile fortress even as he dreams of being freed from his fate. Later additions include a scarecrow christened “Turnip Head” by Sophie, and then a sad-eyed, wheezing canine Heen and, eventually, a wilting Grandma.

In a subsequent scene, Markl looks up to his surrogate maternal figure and asks her if they are family, and she quietly affirms him with added conviction. What he asks is right and good. Not only that, it is true. They look after one another. 

Joe Hisaishi’s score, including the jaunty waltz-inflected “Merry Go Round Life,” augments the entire panoply of Miyazaki’s world as the composer always seems to do. In this case, it’s an added European flavor to go with the opulent architecture. I could not help thinking of the French phrase, “La Ronde.” It no doubt has many meanings, but it suggests to me that stories, like life, often come full circle. We’re all interconnected. 

In another sense, I was struck by the way Howl seems timeless, even as a film that turned 20 years old in 2024. It stands outside of that moment to mean something more to us that’s universal.

The story is gripped in the throes of war and the destructive chaos it engenders. It’s difficult not to see the film living in the literal shadow of The Bomb, as many Japanese films have post-WWII. Because while Howl is not about a literal time and place, that’s not to say history cannot bleed into the storyline. Especially because Miyazaki is a personal filmmaker laying himself bare and sharing his thoughts and emotions through his creative offerings.

The glory of a Miyazaki movie is how deep his imagination takes him as he pushes to the limits in the most glorious of ways. I come out of his most epic films overwhelmed. If you asked me to give a rundown of plot points, I could not without feeling discombobulated, because watching his films is not about plot points but an overarching experience. It’s so easy to remember crystallized interactions, character moments, and these grand, almost innate themes.

In the deepest sense, perhaps Howl’s Moving Castle is a love story. Transcendent, yes, but also a tale about opening up your heart. I’ve often heard the words in a spiritual context, but it fits here too: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. The metaphor is clear. 

It feels as if Howl is transformed and regains a heart and a desire for love he never had before. As the Narnia author C.S. Lewis wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.”

Howl is injured, and our heroes are taken to the brink of death on multiple occasions, and yet the risk seems worth it. Because there is hope and then elation before the final curtain when those who are meant to be together are reunited. 

Of course, this is all a world Miyazaki has conceived with the aid of Diana Wynne Jones’s novel, but just as his real life seems to bleed into the fantasy, I feel like we would like to believe that the fairy tale permeates the real world, too. Love, sacrifice, beauty, camaraderie, these are profound things to strive for in life. They can hardly put us to shame.

They give meaning in ways worldly accolades like an Oscar could never satiate. Miyazaki seems to know deep within his bones that this is true. Look no further than his films for proof. 

4/5 Stars

Note: This review was originally written in 2024 around the 20th anniversary of Howl’s Moving Castle.

Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989)

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For the two years I lived in Japan, one of my immediate joys was discovering music that was new to me: It included the likes of Happy End and Mr. Children. And that’s before you broach the subject of City Pop. But about the same time, I was smitten by some of the tunes of Yumi Arai.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned two of her most famous classic tracks gained a second life in Kiki’s Delivery Service, and a third was used in The Wind Rises. For this, I must thank Studio Ghibli because the songs evoke instant nostalgia even if you’ve never heard them before. They pair so wonderfully with the opening and end credits, setting the mood with such a peppy rush of gleefulness as embodied by our titular heroine.

It’s always a consummate joy watching Hayao Miyazaki’s films for the very reason that they rarely follow the most well-traveled road. Closer still, his films pursue what we want in our heart of hearts.  There’s a vigor of youth, an idealism, and space for big dreams and aspirations that reach high into the atmosphere.

What you come to admire about him as a maker of animated films is how magic is nothing to be skeptical about. In his stories, it feels integrated like a crucial part of everyday life. Something that he probably acknowledges when he’s walking around his neighborhood.

Who else would think about taking the story of a young witch coming of age and spin such a delightfully winsome yarn? In truth, he adapted Eiko Kadono’s 1985 novel, but there is a sense that Miyazaki has an outsized influence on where the story occupies itself.

Kiki leaves her parents behind at the ripe young age of 13, armed with her broom and transistor radio, and her black cat companion Jiji, to find a new town to settle in. It could be such a lonely tale with the slant of Oliver Twist, and yet it’s rarely this kind of story.

She finds a place to stay in the attic of a bakery called Gutiokipanja, thanks to the maternal warmth of the proprietor, Osono, who becomes like a surrogate mother to Kiki. Her husband is hard-working and taciturn, proving himself to be covertly kind. They provide a framework of warmth to build the rest of the movie around.

We are still in Miyazaki’s early period. As best as I can describe it, the hand-drawn images look older, but the vintage quality is part of their charm, helping us venture back into a bygone era right alongside Arai’s pop songs. They fit well together.

And yet Miyazaki has made a career out of layering all these influences that have endured throughout his work. Joe Hisaishi’s scoring is the height of elegance, while the animation itself is replete with architecture, street corners, and automobiles, accentuating a European sensibility fractured through a romanticized Japanese lens. Regardless, it’s a beautiful, ever-magical world to be privy to.

With her lodging and provisions in place, Kiki sets out to make a life for herself using her talent for broomstick travel into a local delivery service. In the days before Lyft and Uber Eats, she feels cutting edge, delivering all sorts of things across the countryside.

Her first booking is a present for a young boy’s birthday, and the stuffed toy looks strikingly like Jiji. However, en route, she runs into a spot of bother, and so her faithful companion takes one of the team so Kiki can save face and try to recover the original.

This vignette introduces the family’s elderly dog, who languishes lazily by the hearth with nary a sound. In a Disney movie or Warner Bros. cartoon, he would be the obvious villain of the scenario, and yet Miyazaki, with his bewitching kinship toward animals, makes him into a wonderful ally. In fact, Kiki meets many such people across her journey.

Try as one might to manufacture conflict, most of these interactions feel refreshing and honest. Surely this is not how you make a movie traditionally, and still, by some alchemy, Miyazaki pulls it off. Kiki spends most of her time with a zest for life and in the service of others, with the trusty Jiji by her side.

Her biggest crisis comes near the end. It’s hardly a spoiler to say she loses her powers as well as her ability to talk with Jiji. Even here, she gains a ready-made mentor in Ursula, an independent artist who paints and lives in the nearby forest.

The final act evokes Miyazaki’s constant preoccupation with the skies, building off Kiki’s broom-riding, the young boy Tombo’s propeller bike, and finally, a giant zeppelin that evokes a bit of the Hindenburg. He gives the finale of his picture a slam-bang bit of spectacle as the aircraft loses control and Kiki must summon her talents to save her young crush. To say any more would rob the audience the pleasure of experiencing the culmination of the film for themselves.

Because eventually, the world does settle back into its rhythms and the prevailing good-nature that runs through the entire story. The only curious change is how, now that Jiji has a lady friend, even after Kiki’s triumph, she doesn’t seem able to speak with him. Perhaps it’s part of her coming-of-age journey. Giving up childish things in a sense, while never totally relinquishing her wonder.

One imagines this is how you grow up to be the ripe old age of someone like Miyazaki. Still being able to call on your imagination vividly, and believe in forces that seemingly break into the mundane moments of everyday life. In the waning moments, it’s apropos that Yumi Arai’s final song sends us off just as we began. Kiki’s Delivery Service goes from strength to strength, never allowing us to falter in having a good time.

4.5/5 Stars

Tokyo Pop (1988)

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Since my time living in Tokyo, I’ve continued to be fascinated with how Japanese culture will create these hyper-specific niches of popular fandom. Japanese people take their hobbies very seriously and they go all in. You often meet teenagers or straight-laced salarymen who can barely string together sentences in English, only to discover they have some unique knowledge about American culture, especially in the realm of music.

There was a businessman who loved Olivia Newton-John; his go-to English-language Karaoke song was “Physical.” There was a student who jammed out to Korn, or one of my fellow teachers who shared a love of Sam Cooke and taught me about jazz musicians like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker.

Japanese popular culture was arguably at its height during the 1980s. You had the economic miracle or the “bubble,” which led to unprecedented prosperity in the country and with it greater disposable income and thriving youth subcultures.

Tokyo Pop feels like a perfect time capsule for this precise moment. There are evocations of pop culture that blend Japanese tradition with Western influence. Front and center are a Mickey Mouse ryokan in Iidabashi, then iconic brands like KFC, McDonalds, and Dunkin Donuts.

There were even a couple of times I sat up in my seat because I felt like I knew where a storefront or restaurant might be below the neon lights of the city. However, some of the most famous landmarks are unmistakable. We get views of Shibuya near the Hachiko statue or greasers and punks hanging out in Harajuku near Yoyogi Park.

I don’t need much plot to enjoy the movie, but here it is. Wendy Reed (Carrie Hamilton) isn’t having much luck on the music circuit in America. When she receives a postcard from a friend, plastered with Mount Fuji on the front, she makes the impetuous decision to make the trip. However, she arrives only to realize her girlfriend has already moved on.

So she’s left high and dry bumming around Tokyo like a helpless baby who doesn’t know the culture, can’t speak the language, and is quickly running out of money. Hiro Yamaguchi (Diamond Yukai) spies her at a street vendor where he’s eating late at night with his buddies, and they bet him that he can’t get lucky with her. He takes them on. It’s a trifle, a cliché-filled scenario, but it’s easy to excuse the film based on what it excels at.

Carrie Hamilton and Yutaka “Diamond” Yukai try and go through the paces of antagonism, however, it’s their genuine camaraderie and shared appreciation of music that really shines through. In one sequence he serenades his American flame with an acoustic rendition of “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman.”

Meanwhile, his band spends their time trying to get to a prominent Tokyo tastemaker named Doda who can make or break their careers. When all their ploys fail, Wendy finally takes the very direct approach waltzing into his office and commanding the room.

Eventually they make it big playing poppy covers of “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Do You Believe in Magic.” We see their rapid ascension as media personalities and global sensations, but at what cost? The couple’s able to get their own apartment and they should be happy, but their art suffers. They’ve pigeonholed themselves doing something that isn’t life-giving. They want to rock out.

Tokyo Pop‘s alive with so much youthful energy and, I would argue it has an even more perceptive viewpoint than later works like Lost in Translation. Although it has an entry point for American audiences, so much of it feels attuned to aspects of Japanese culture; they’re the type of moments I see and totally recognize, not as foreign and other, but authentic.

Japanese lavishing effusive praise on their fellow countrymen for any nominal use of English. Shoes taken off at the entryway. Every taxi driver’s fear of foreigners. Karaoke and alcohol as one of the most beloved forms of socialization, and the kindness of elderly men and women who will walk you where you need to go in spite of any language barrier.

In its day, Fran Rubel Kuzui’s movie was quite a success at Cannes only to fall away thanks to a distributor that went defunct. For a film that’s so perfectly in my wheelhouse, it’s a joy to see it resurrected from obscurity in a fancy new print that does wonders in making the images of the 1980s explode off the screen. There’s a tactile sense that we are there in the moment.

During an interview, the director acknowledged, only years later when friends told her, that she and her Japanese husband Kaz Kuzui were basically Wendy and Hiro. If not in actuality, then certainly it mirrors how their relationship crossed cultural bounds.

It’s also easy to draw parallels between Tokyo Pop and Lost in Translation for how they capture a moment in time (and coincidentally they both feature Diamond Yukai). Although the former film is more upbeat, and lacks much of the alienation of Coppola’s work, you do still see the darker, lonelier edges of Tokyo on the fringes.

From passionless love hotels to getting lost in the masses of humanity, and the crippling societal expectations of Japan, it’s still present. Because while Lost in Translation is always about the western perspective incubated in Tokyo’s fast-paced modernity, it seems like Kuzui’s international marriage gives her a more perceptive and localized understanding of Japan.

I’ve long been a fan of John Carney and there’s some of that energy here where music is so integral in constructing the story. No matter how humble the means, the production of the music functions as a platform and a showcase for the performers in such an authentic way. By the end, we appreciate the music and by extension the characters as well. But they both work in tandem to supersede the plot.

Some of the songs feel like absolute knockouts like “Hiro’s Song,” which can stand on its own two feet. They leave the film on a feel-good high that extends beyond the credits. With the latest reissue of the film for its 25th anniversary in 2023, it seems ripe for rediscovery by a new audience.

3.5/5 Stars

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

Linda, Linda, Linda (2005)

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“Like a rat, I want to be beautiful. Because you have a beauty that can’t be reflected in pictures” -sung by Linda, Linda, Linda

During the grainy opening scene of Linda, Linda, Linda there’s some time spent figuring out how these characters relate to our story as two AV nerds look to video a high school girl who is introducing a school’s forthcoming cultural festival.

It’s not so important to get to know who they are as to realize they will become the bookend for the movie and the parameters of its world. Because when you are a Japanese student, “Bunkasai” really is your chance to shine in front of your peers.

Linda, Linda, Linda captures this environment better than any other film I’ve seen thus far, and it’s because there’s really an ecosystem built out. Each class has their own task, game, or food vendor that they’re preparing for. Sports teams will have exhibitions. Clubs will have booths. Bands put on performances on the big stage for everyone.

However, this canvas wouldn’t work without the human drama we come to expect with high school. One girl hurts her hand and petty disagreements lead to the dissolution of an all-girl rock band. Three of its members, Kei, Kyoko, and Nozomi, decide to form a new quartet without their lead singer. Son (Bae Doona), the unblinking Korean exchange student is quickly found as her replacement.

Some western audiences might not recognize what an odd choice Son is to be their lead singer. Japanese is not her first language. They often have trouble communicating with her (A stunted bus stop interaction brought back all sorts of personal memories from my time overseas). She has to learn all the lyrics to their setlist and she’s a bit kooky. Still, it fosters a beautiful kind of relationship.

There’s something leisurely and unhurried about the pacing of the movie. Characters are put in front of us, and yet we don’t feel like there’s some objective to be obtained. It’s about getting to know them and observing their situations.

My primary avenue to consider this film is through the filter of my own experience. I went to a cultural festival like this. There was giant Jenga and classrooms turned into rollercoasters and carnival games. We had boba, sweet potatoes, and frankfurters (while supplies last). But the best part was the music. I saw many of my students come into their own, witnessing sides of them you never see in the classroom. Raging fuzz-filled guitar solos, singers coming out of their shells, and girl guitar gods rocking out.

In fact, I was up on that stage too. Rather like Son I was an outsider. I got asked to sing a song in English and so without any musical training or a voice to speak of I agreed spending several weeks learning a One Direction tune. It’s not quite The Blue Hearts, but I’m not much of a singer. Son spends her time training at a karaoke drink bar.

If that experience was hardly a highlight of my life, I fall back on the experiences I got to witness. Linda Linda Linda has that same raucous joie de vivre we rarely attribute to Japanese culture. That’s what made it so joyous watching my students rock out to One OK Rock and Green Day.

It’s the same energy making Linda, Linda, Linda buzz with a pervasive joy. The audience imbibes the energy, cheers it on, and the musicians feed off of it. Nerves die away. They give themselves over to the music and enjoy themselves. If it’s like my school, these kids will probably never be professional musicians, but that’s hardly the point. Music has joys going beyond fame and monetary gain.

I was once taken by the idea of James Carse with his infinite games. Finite games have winners and losers. In infinite games, the players seem to be cooperative feeding into something bigger than themselves and utilizing a different, intrinsic rubric for success.

Although Linda…deviates mostly from the similar-sounding Swing Girls, what they share beyond a frantic slap-dash finale, is this performative exhilaration found most often in music. Soon enough, the festival is over and that’s the end of it.

But for a couple shining moments in the middle of the setlist, they were at the center of something spectacular. It’s easy to be a sucker for these kinds of stories when they feel so closely tied to my own fond memories. Long live Linda, Linda, Linda.

4/5 Stars

Swing Girls (2004)

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“There are two kind of people in the world. Those who swing and those who don’t.”

I’ve already talked about this phenomenon ad nauseam, but having lived abroad in Japan, worked at a school, and interacted with many Japanese people, it fascinates me to learn about their cultural proclivities.

I hesitate to call much of what the Japanese do musically cultural appropriation because they seem to totally recontextualize the artifacts we know. One prime example is “Take Me Home Country Roads” by John Denver being featured so whimsically in Ghibli’s Whisper of The Heart. They somehow take cultural touchstones we know and pluck them out of a moment in a kind of reverent homage (One peculiar counterexample might be the animatronic JFK featured in Sans Soleil).

Writer-Director Shinobu Yaguchi’s Swing Girls is a film positively swimming in teen culture. Like a School of Rock, it feels like a movie looking for a wide audience, and it will easily repay those desiring a crowd-pleaser.

It introduces its world by gladly playing into high school tropes and stereotypes. Tomoko is our primary conduit in a clique of girls who seem generally bored with school and crazy about cute boys, fashion, and the like. They’ll do anything to get out of a summer make-up class and reclaim their adolescent freedom.

When the school’s band regrettably forgets their order of bentos for their gig miles away, the girls volunteer to hand-deliver them by train. It begins the madcap craziness as they miss stops, take to walking on foot, and unintentionally bake the food into oblivion. When all the band comes down with deadly food poisoning, their failed charade is up.

It’s a bit ridiculous. Where can a movie like this go? There’s only one answer and Yaguchi does his best work leaning into the big-hearted absurdity of it all. Having single-handedly wiped out the band, Tomoko and her compatriots consider joining the one male member not sidelined. It’s yet another convenient way to get out of summer school.

As an audience, we are able to laugh at the incongruity as all these girls who have never handled a musical instrument in their lives try their hand at forming a Big Band. They’re of the assumption that Jazz is for fuddy-duddies and intellectual types swirling brandy snifters. I can’t fault them because I was of a similar persuasion until I saw the light.

Takuo (Yuta Hiraoka) sets them up with a training regimen conditioning like athletes and introducing them to the likes of “Take The A Train” by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, a song that was integral to my own jazz appreciation. It feels like this mixture of oil and water, but then that’s the entire novelty of the premise. Whether or not it’s realistic, they do get better and more ambitious.

The girls take up part-time jobs to try and cobble together some second-hand instruments. They take part in all manner of good-natured fun and games like fleeing a wild boar and engaging in a euphoric snowball fight. Still, they still have a goal to realize, preparing their audition tape for the big high school competition.

Swing Girls is a film that keeps on building on itself until the height and width of its sizable heart overwhelms us with warmth and laughter. It grows to a crescendo as they frantically try to make it to their big day, first serenading their tour bus, and then performing the real thing.

They pad their performance with renditions of Glenn Miller and then Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” This second song is noteworthy to me because the band at the high school I worked at performed this same song. I have no inclination if this choice was inspired by the film or the fact Goodman was one of the swing era’s heavyweights. The particulars don’t really matter.

Swing Girls is best in its goofiness, giving us a story easily transferable into the Hollywood arena with feel-good moments and cheering acts of redemption. There’s actually not too much romance which is actually a nice surprise. However, in it, a closeted jazz enthusiast can come out of the woodwork to fulfill his dreams, and a classroom full of dead-end girls can come together to create something quite spectacular.

It provides a new context for Japan’s long-lasting love affair with jazz music, and I was pleasantly taken with it. Wonders never cease. All I can say is I want to be one of those people that swings. I can see it bringing the utmost joy into my life.

4/5 Stars

His Motorbike, Her Island (1986) and The Rocking Horsemen (1992)

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His Motorbike, Her Island (1986)

There’s an immediate aesthetic artifice to His Motorbike, Her Island. Our hero is cool and simultaneously cruel representing a husky-voiced, brusque masculinity that feels no doubt appealing and equally toxic. He recounts his life’s observations through voiceover — the monochrome dreams making up his memories — and as such the movie slaloms easily between black & white and color.

It feels perfectly at home in its moment as part ’80s biker movie full of style. Some of this no doubt comes from director Nobuhiko Obayashi who always seems to have a propensity for commercial pop culture imagery. I would hesitate to call him a technician, and yet since he both edited and directed many of his films, maybe I don’t want to use the label because it sounds too austere.

His films are suffused with a vibrant energy and although the comparison misses the mark, the only reference I could think of was Richard Lester. I’d be interested in hearing who others bring up.

The movie’s premise is quite simple. Koh Hashimoto (Riki Takeuchi) runs errands on his motorcycle part time. His idle hours are taken up with a docile beauty name Fuyumi. He even gets in a duel with the girl’s older brother, who’s worried for her honor. Whether the outcome impacts his view of her or not, Koh, breaks it off. By his estimation, she’s boring (all she knows is crying and cooking).

Koh is looking for the Japanese version of the aloof dream girl, and he finds it in Miiyo. She captivates him with her confident vivacity, taking pictures of him, chatting in the onsen, and ultimately taking up his first love of motorcycles.

Their relationship blossoms when he visits her hometown out in the country during Obon, and we witness how the summer holiday is rooted in both a veneration and a celebration of dead loved ones. Koh’s captivated watching Miiyo dance during the festival proceedings. It’s something about her spirit he finds so attractive.

It also signals the film’s dangerous edges. Because if I wanted to distill His Motorbike, Her Island, down to its essence, we would need to talk about the intoxicating and reckless abandon of youth. It’s mesmerizing when it’s projected up on the screen in all its glory existing without worldly consequence of any kind.

Miiyo follows Koh and becomes infatuated by his singular passion: a 750cc Kawasaki. But it’s not just a supercharged motorcycle, and it’s not so much about an object made of chrome and an engine. It’s the adrenaline hit and emotional high of riding a motorcycle and riding it fast. It’s almost a dare for life to come at you head-on. For them, living life on on the edge like this is an obvious antidote to the malaise.

It’s both what attracts them to one another and threatens their ultimate undoing. Live fast, die young, has a poetic inevitably to it. I feel like I will need to watch the movie again down the road sometime, but there’s a pervasive sense that this motorbike, this island, this young man and this young woman take on a kind of mythic proportion.

Just like I never caught onto a perceptible rhythm of the monochrome and color, what we witness is not always an objective, tangible world. It exists in the hinterlands of memory, love, passion, and emotions just out of reach. The irony is obvious.

Sometimes, to feel alive, people need to get as close to death as possible. I’m not sure if this star-crossed, high-octane hedonism is still en vogue, but it’s easy to understand how it could seem attractive albeit misguided. There’s a hubris to it.

3.5/5 Stars

The Rocking Horseman (1992)

When I lived in Japan, I was flabbergasted to learn that there was a group that was bigger in Japan during the ’60s than the Beatles. It was The Ventures! This instrumental act kicked off the “Eleki Boom” as their iconic onomatopoeic glissandos (deke-deke-deke) captivated a generation of youth. These teenagers subsequently rushed out to buy their electric guitars and start their own bands during the “Group Sounds” explosion.

Although I didn’t think about it at the time, I’m a sucker for a good musical coming-of-age movie, and this landscape was ripe for such a story. Recently, when I came upon The Rocking Horsemen, I realized a void in the cinematic landscape had been filled thanks to Nobuhiko Obayashi

Fujiwara (Yasufumi Hayashi) feels like the most innocent and congenial of Obayashi’s boy heroes, a Ferris Bueller-type who instantly takes us into his confidence by not only providing voiceover but speaking directly to us.

OB’s films are easily placed in this provincial milieu outside the hustle and bustle of the big city. This gives them a kind of comfortable intimacy, and it’s only a small jump to place them in the past. In this case, Japan during the 1960s. I already mentioned that the movie covers a subgenre I have a private preoccupation with: form-a-band origin stories. That includes That Thing You Do! and Sing Street to The Commitments, Nowhere Boy, and School of Rock. What sets this one apart is the unique context and cultural moment.

Now I’ve been inculcated from an early age that the Beatles had the greatest music, but Fujiwara is coming of age with an ear raised to the admonitions of his elders. Pop music is puerile entertainment, cultural dregs compared to the sophistication of classical music. The Beatles included.

Then, his radio played “Pipeline” and he is changed forever. Any kind of snobbery quickly dissipates. The new sound assaults him as he reclines in his bedroom. There’s no escaping its force, and he converted for good, caught up in the same boom I read about. It was electric liberation.

Since a rock musician can’t look like a Buddhist acolyte, the first course of action was to grow out his hair. It occurs to me that one of the reasons I find these movies compelling is it involves some kind of youthful industry. When you’re young you don’t need to be told the odds. If you want to start a band, and that’s you’re impetus, you can go ahead and do it. No permission is necessary (parents notwithstanding).

In this way, Fujiwara meets his future bandmates. The first shares his interest in rock and turns his back on the more traditional setlist the school club follows. The rest of the members include a priest’s son, who’s the band’s source of worldly wisdom, and then a gawky dork who gets coerced into playing the drums for them.

If initially they fall together organically enough, they also premeditate how to best go about their business. In the end, they resolve to get summer jobs at a local manufacturing plant to save up to buy their instruments. These scenes are mostly transitory — only an end to the means — but as “Woolly Bully” plays over their assembly line, there’s a sense of optimism. They’re getting closer to their goal.

Ittoku Kishibe shows up again after Lonely Heart as a good-natured teacher who supplies American lyrics and ultimately offers to become their club advisor. It’s a small addition, but his tacit affirmation of their endeavors speaks volumes.

I’m fascinated by how pop culture can infiltrate and suffuse through the cracks of a society, especially in an international context. I met Japanese folks with very specified knowledge about Korn or Olivia Newton-John, Sam Cooke, Jazz or Punk music. Or think of the two teens in Mystery Train who go on a pilgrimage to Memphis in search of The King. Where does this come from?

While I wouldn’t call the general Japanese populous particularly aware of world culture, you do find these hyperspecialized niches of expertise. These boys glean their inspirations thanks to radio and import records, even older siblings who pass down a love of Nat King Cole.

A perfect example is Jan and Dean’s “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” played as our hero rides his bike through his neighborhood. It’s a totally different context from the California surf culture I was born and bred in. But it still reaches them on the other side of the world. The same might be said of The Animals, “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”

It doesn’t feel like a mistake that the first time the new band convenes and brandishes their new name — The Rocking Horsemen — they start playing, and it’s a flawless rendition of “Pipeline” (exactly like the Ventures recording). They make their debut at a show during Christmas with mixed results, but they disregard the critics and play their hearts out. What’s more, they gel and become galvanized as a group. How can you not under the circumstances?

But as school comes to a close, their journey together winds down too. Their first and last big show comes at the annual school cultural festival and with a set list including “I Feel Fine” and “Johnny B. Goode,” they can’t miss. We’ve seen this moment before in many a movie so it’s a kind of expected wish-fulfillment watching them go out.

When you’re an adolescent these are the kind of memories that stay with you. And in a final act of solidarity, Fujiwara now listless and despondent over the future, has his newfound brotherhood to come around him. They christen him their “Bandleader for Life.” So even as their journey as a band might have met its logical conclusion more than an impasse (not many make it like The Beatles), The Rocking Horsemen do have some amount of closure. The music and those relationships will never leave them.

4/5 Stars

Lonely Heart (1985)

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Lonely Heart is a film bathed in the golden hues of nostalgia (“natsukashii” in Japanese). It also boasts a rural landscape with a topography that’s the utter antithesis of Tokyo’s urban skyline. This in itself already evokes a certain quaintness, regardless of the story being told almost 40 years ago.

Hiroki (Toshinori Omi) envisions his world through the shutter of his camera — though he rarely has actual film to use — and so he imagines what he might capture. After school, he can be found scampering through the village streets in his school uniform with his two best friends doing backflips and cracking all manner of jokes. They have a youthful ingenuity that’s clever when it’s not getting them in trouble.

For instance, their use of Bunsen burners, forceps, and various pieces of lab equipment to cook up a delectable meal is inspired. Then, Hiroki’s friends razz him about following his father’s footsteps to be a Buddhist monk — he must give up meat lest he goes to hell for cutting corners on the road to enlightenment — and they’ll gladly eat his portion.

The next moment, they’re ushered off to the principal’s office to clean as a minor punishment. Instead, they teach vulgarities to the principal’s prized parrot and their mothers have the ignominy of coming into school to atone for their indiscretions. Hiroki’s mother is your typical portrait of a Japanese parent, at the very least because she’s always on her son to study more and pick up his grades. Their underlining failure to communicate is a universal adolescent struggle.

But his life stage is also about love, something that still feels naïve and untarnished by regrets and ample experience. He often looks through his camera viewfinder at the mystery girl, “Lonely Heart,” as she plays the piano, rides her bike, and takes the ferry home. If this was all it was, Lonely Heart might be a fairly rudimentary exploration of youth — another boyish awakening where the girl is cast as an object rather than a human being with a unique inner life.

Some of this happens in the movie with the ethereal Yasuko Tomita, but there’s also a parallel tale leaning into these themes in a more profound way. In fact, it takes them a step further. Hiroki receives a visitation from an impish ghost of a girl who materializes on numerous occasions even going so far as berating his mother and toying with her.

This seems like a curious development, but then Japanese culture has a greater tolerance for ghosts. If you’ve seen some of Miyazaki’s movies (arguably Japan’s most beloved cinematic export), you already know there’s a kind of acceptance of these things. They aren’t so much supernatural and if she’s labeled as “weird,” she’s also more or less accepted as fact.  Just as magical realism and surrealism can often permeate Japanese cinema.

This is easier to accept as I often have trouble with Japanese humor because it feels broad (whatever that means). The film is full of juvenile shenanigans and adult caricatures who overwhelm the screen from time to time blindsiding us with absurdity.

However, in juxtaposition, there are these instances of sensitivity playing out in Lonely Heart’s more pensive parts, personifying what Hiroki grapples with all throughout the film. It’s this long-lost love — the deep longing within all of us — resigning us to be these lonely creatures.

In Japanese culture, there’s also something innately beautiful about this sacrificial melancholy for the sake of some greater good or greater call. If I didn’t get my cultural signals crossed, it ties into the essence of “mono no aware” — an impermanence or transience of things. I’m not sure if Japanese culture would speak about love with these same terms, but please allow me to, even if only momentarily.

I’ve gotten to a juncture in my film-viewing life where, if I haven’t quite matured, I’m willing to take things on their own terms. Lonely Heart does not function within our western logic. If you asked me to explain everything away I’d be hard-pressed to say all the whys and wherefores. And yet something about this movie, mixed in with all its various forms and flights of fancies, left me with an indelible sense or feeling that will remain with me.

Somehow it reminded me of the more recent gem Petite Mamman. It has to do with honing in on a magical and poignant connection between parents and children. It developed differently than what I was expecting — the fantasy has a unique kind of functionality — and so by the time the movie’s over it has done work on us.

It’s offered up a quiet epiphany that we might tuck away for later enjoyment. Hopefully, if you get the chance to watch the film you’ll understand exactly what I mean. However, I wouldn’t dream of divulging that here.

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