Favorites//2020
Thanks to the Chinese government’s respect and reverence for its whistleblower doctors and the careful handling of the virus from other global governments, never before has there been so much access to Japanese films on the now virtual festival circuit. After Googling what a VPN is, I was able to watch films presented by Nippon Connection, Undine Far East, Japan Cuts, San Diego Asian, etc. No traveling needed (short BA, DAL, UAL). Is this the future of festival going? Hopefully, but only if an algorithm can decide what I want to watch.
Below are some films I enjoyed. Below that are some English friendly home video releases of Japanese films from this year.
In no particular order except alphabetical order:
Dancing Mary//SABU
A good Sabu movie - which most of them are - always seems to go places you don’t expect. But if we’re being honest though, by now we know what these tonal shifts will usually entail: a somber turn coming from the weight of an absurd world descending on our protagonists. Sometimes these rug-pulls seem abrupt and other times they creep up on you. And it’s always interesting to see how bleak or hopeful of a note Sabu wants to end on. All this to say that Dancing Mary is very traditional in this regard (i.e. unclassifiable). What begins as a bureaucratic sort of Ghostbusters eventually becomes what can best be described as a road movie; characters going from one place to another and back and the meandering internal journey that takes place. Each encounter with a fellow wanderer, living or dead, forces them to confront something about themselves. His works have become more and more introspective, there’s not as much running around as there used to be (2018’s throwback jam notwithstanding). However his wild card plotting is not lost, it’s just more mature.
i-Documentary of the Journalist//Tatsuya Mori
Remember when journalists wanted to challenge the establishment/ruling class and didn’t make their livings repeating talking points provided by their political party of choice? On an unrelated note, this doc-profile of reporter Isoko Mochizuki feels like a fabrication from another era: the sentimental ideal of a journalist with integrity. The catch is that she is real and it’s pure joy watching her go from one controversy to the next and get under the skin of Abe and his ilk. In the brief amount of time covered by the film (a few years at most?) there’s a greatest hits of hot button issues. She goes to Okinawa to cover the construction of a new US military base that for some reason the locals oppose, we see her working with Shiori Ito who has pretty much become synonymous with Japan’s MeToo movement, and also there’s the time Shinzo Abe and wife allegedly made a secret donation to an ultra-nationalist kindergarten which was the same school that was able to purchase state-owned land at a heavy discount. As it goes with integrity, eventually there will be attempts to squash it in the form of chickenshit tactics; during press briefings from Abe’s right-hand man Yoshihide Suga, Mochizuki is ignored and interrupted. When she’s finally able to ask a question Suga refuses to answer. What makes these scenes even better is Suga’s new gig taking over as PM. Accusations of spreading misinformation get lobbed at her. Avoid confrontation and wear the brown lipstick and you’ll do fine. Let’s celebrate those who commit to their values at the detriment of their own well-being and hope that it will rub off on us. The feel good movie of the year and that’s saying something. Also, Julian Assange was let out of solitary confinement and apparently his health is improving.
I’m Really Good//Hirobumi Watanabe
Hirobumi and his fellow Watanabes’ recurring use of an easily recognizable style brings to mind someone like Hong Sang-soo. Scenarios and character types recur but the fun comes from the variations and seeing how much those variations truly change it up. Ozu worked in a similar place. The variations in I’m Really Good are great. The film opens (in color!) with a cell phone shot performance from the young lead. The stylistic choices for the rest of the film recall works deemed “transcendental cinema” but here have been applied to schoolchildren slice-of-life and uses this film language to achieve humor.
Ju-on: Origins//Sho Miyake
As someone who had only seen the 2002 original, the American remake, the 2020 American reboot thing, and has largely avoided the series that culminated recently into a versus type of crossover with the Ringu girl (in other words largely ignorant of the series), my surprise was palpable at how good this mini-series turned out to be. Appreciative of half hour episodes and only six at that, this Netflix original I dare say reminded me of the experiential highs of Twin Peaks: The Return. In a post-Return landscape we now know that the New Golden Age of TV is a fallacy and challenging serial works are hard to come by. Origins jumps across time and characters making for a labyrinth of atrocities, it favors ambiguity over explanation (a great opportunity for the Youtubers to step in and explain things), and it feels more like a mood piece than a typical piece of television. Bold.
Kontora//Anshul Chauhan
I got some western vibes from this one. A mysterious stranger walks (backwards) into town. A young girl sets out for some hidden loot. Friction between brothers causes ripples in the family. Just as the western is the result of contemporary creators reckoning with the past, so do the characters in Kontora have to deal with their pasts, whether recent or of the legacy of the previous generation. There are weights on these characters and it can be felt. The mood is trance-like. Characters are caught in patterns, the backwards walking man the most obvious indication of this idea. It might take a mute stranger and whatever grandpa buried out in the woods to disrupt the trance. The film’s black and white looks damn good too.
Labyrinth of Cinema//Nobuhiko Ōbayashi
Obayashi’s final film is three hours worth of the energy and fun of making movies in your backyard/garage/basement. Three young men are transported through film to feudal Japan and eventually to 1945 Hiroshima. Even in his old age Obayashi’s DIY exuberance shows that big ideas and high-concept stories that sweep through history are possible with a green screen and a passion for filmmaking that is purer than what big money and polish gets you. The making of the film is chronicled in Seijo Story - 60 Years of Making Films. It’s a profile of Suzuki and his work, and gives as much credit to the role his producer wife Kyoko has played in seeing these passion projects come to fruition. The hyper digitized aesthetic of this film and its the pacing is uniquely exhausting and is an experience worth having even if this is thematic territory well tread by Obayashi.
Me and the Cult Leader: The Modern Report on the Banality of Evil//Atsushi Sakahara
It’s always going to be a little awkward when you invite your parents for lunch to meet the current leader of the cult responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack. If you were a victim of those gas attacks on top of that, then you might as well have an episode of the British Office. Director Atsushi Sakahara - whose wife he later found out was at one time involved with the Aum Shinrikyo - has had his live deeply effected by the cult and their 1995 attack. He wonders how someone could still do PR (and act as leader) of the organization responsible for those deaths and injuries. To wonder this implies a lack of cynicism. After much negotiation he is allowed access to leader Hiroshi Araki who was not involved in the plotting/carrying out of the attack but still remains devoted to the group nonetheless. They spend the day together in what can best be described as a leisurely confrontation. They travel to Kyoto, talk of their childhoods, and even find time to skip rocks. If they had discussed more art it could be a Before movie. Sakahara confronts Araki in the form of gently placed questions about the cult’s ideologies. Regarding Sakahara’s politeness, sure you could attribute it to the culture but it works in his favor not to get emotional. Araki dodges and answers questions no one else hears. anti-climax.
My Sweet Grappa Remedies//Akiko Ohku
Ohku’s twenty-something portrait played at BFFvol1 and this here is another tiny-detailed, observational work but now centered on a woman in her 40s. There’s a thirty-something focused film in between these two but it doesn’t seem well liked so it’s probably really good? Structured as diary entries, a sense of a person is formed from a collection of miniatures. Brief interactions, small observations, it’s all very hushed. Ohku has a skill portraying the battle between inner-life and social life. The main character peers over at a stranger’s phone, reading what they are texting. She’s coming from a place of genuine interest and not judgmental. The entire film in a moment.
ON-GAKU: Our Sound//Kenji Iwaisawa
In most “let’s start a band” movies the type of music being created is pretty straightforward. There’s nothing wrong with that, the fun is the societal ideal of people (hopefully misfits) coming together and creating something awesome, but it’d be nice if they got a little freaky. The bandmates in ON-GAKU are bored delinquents who take up music on a whim. Their avant-garde lineup of two bass guitars and pared down drums is because those are the things they stole. The experimental sound comes from inexperience, they have no pre-conceived notions about what a song should sound like. This mentality is sort of matched by the lo-fi rotoscope visuals of the film. Their newfound interest in music has them crossing paths with a student into folk music and prone to psych-outs when performing and they have to juggle their bullying duties with practice sessions. Extremely deadpan when there’s no jamming but it builds to noisy transcendence in its finale. Plus like a good punk song it’s short and sweet.
Red Post on Escher Street//Sion Sono
Sono already made his perfect joy of the filmmaker/plight of the artist film with Why Don’t You Play in Hell? This new one, an epic tapestry of failed actors and creatives combined with and ode to the film extra is a populist metaphor. Its structure is an egalitarian stream of consciousness, going from one character to the next seamlessly where no one seems off limits to become the focus (although to be fair even this film has unspoken for extras). Once it gets into its groove it could go on forever and get away with it as each new character makes the whole richer for their inclusion. The finale is a manic call to wake up which is just so Sono. We’re all extras or is that just a state of mind? Red Post suggests our freedoms are easier to take away if we resign ourselves to the background of the shot.
Reiwa Uprising//Kazuo Hara
Kazuo Hara promises an entertaining film within its opening. His latest film is somewhat of a rush job when compared to the time spent on his previous films. This “immediacy” matches the grass roots movement of Taro Yamamoto’s populist party Reiwa Shinsengumi, which he announced the founding of April 2019 in order to get candidates out for consideration for the July election of the House of Councillors. Their campaign is what Hara documents, giving particular focus on one of the ten candidates, the transgendered professor of economics Ayumi Yasutomi. Bringing a horse with her, Yasutomi runs a campaign on “protect the children” rhetoric. It seems naïve and incredibly simplistic but the more time spent with Yasutomi the more depth that can be seen. On the other hand maybe something as succinct and easy to understand as “protect our children” is a great way of summing up the point of policy, in other words do it for the future. Also, bring more horses into the city. The best stuff in the film is the stuff having to do with the party in general. Each candidate runs on their own platform, some focusing on rights for the disabled, workers rights, or in one case coming from the point of a view of a single mother who was previously homeless. What brings them together is the spirit of anti-establishment and a rejection of the policies of Abe and the LDP. There should be more time spent with the other candidates even if it means making this 4-hour runtime less feasible for the non-virtual festival model. Ultimately what the film does is give hope for actual opposition, anti-austerity parties to capture the attention of people. Also it’s nice to see corporate media ignore opposition figures in other countries, thankfully there’s a higher standard here in the US.
Shell and Joint//Isamu Hirabayashi
In 2003 Hirabayashi made TEXTISM, and since then has continued making interesting short form works and has now finally made a feature that continues his evolution as an artist. At 2.5 hours he is making up for lost feature filmmaking time with Shell and Joint. The constant cross-referencing of entomology and anthropology might make your eyes go cross with the persistent head hitting but the playful nature of its structure and the fairly consistent humor present in the vignettes make it worth a watch.
Tamaran Hill//Tadasuke Kotani
Sort of a laid back Saragossa Manuscript. A character gets lost in the maze of a book. Even on the level of a single word there’s a labyrinth of its many meanings. For a low budget a novel is a perfect bedfellow being the artform that requires the littles of expenses. I love it when a movie just has a character reading. Through voice over the text is heard. No need to rush to visualize what’s in the book. It seems anti-cinematic but it’s very watchable.
To the Ends of the Earth//Kiyoshi Kurosawa
In The Art Life Lynch talks about how physically small his world was when he was a child yet how expansive it was in his mind. “You could live in one place and have everything".” Yet there’s the cliché of relocation as a means for the spiritual journey. The hope is for a catalyst to self discovery by means of escape or something. Here we have the inverse of these ideas, where the unfamiliar location is just a condition of employment for Atsuko Maeda’s character who’s in Uzbekistan shooting an episode of a travel show with her small crew. It’s clear the excitement of a foreign land is only for when the camera is on. She finds more connection in a goat than any of the locals. Unsurprisingly the most interesting and human things happen outside of the scope of the travelogue. Kurosawa’s script has such rich detail and a large emotional scope it. You get a feel for each member of her crew. He’s still a master of dread. Maeda walking back to her hotel at night coming and the fright of seeing a group of men. Consecutive turns on an intense carnival ride where you think something worse will happen than just nausea. The film changes and morphs into different moods, Maybe his most “movie magic” type film so far.
Tokyo Girl//Nebiro Hashimoto
Quite a bit can be packed into 8 minutes. It’s the formal manifestation of how someone coming of age - whose opinions get brushed aside due to their age - has a lot to say. Whether there’s anything of merit being said is up for debate, sure, but it’s hard to discredit anxiety about the future coming from someone who looks ahead and doesn’t see the brightest of futures. The type of futures they will have to live through. This is a soft-spoken but hurried stream of consciousness collage piece. It’s overwhelming to watch since so much is coming at you at a rapid pace that doesn’t let up. Inner dialogue in 3-D.
True Mothers//Naomi Kawase
There’s a scene in True Mothers where the married couple come across a profile on an adoption agency on TV. They’ve considered kids but there’s issues of infertility on the husband’s side. The lack of kids doesn’t seem to bother them too much but the wife takes notice of her husband. Something changes in him while watching the stories of couples adopting kids from young mothers who are not able to care for the kids themselves. Once the segment is over they don’t really talk about it, but there’s so much unspoken. The bells in their souls are ringing. This is the moment that won me over and once the perspective shifts, its call for warmth becomes richer. True Mothers is now Japan’s 2020 Oscar submission. Other corporate-backed news outlets note that over the past decade only three of the ten films picked to represent Japan at the Academy Awards were directed by a woman. If we take a step back, that number doubles when taking into consideration films that focus on women’s issues. Thankfully, the Oscars are not relevant and neither the identity politics or Oscar buzz gave these films any of the exposure they deserved on their own merits anyway. Did Mipo O or Yang Yong-hi become household names like Kawase? Also, what kind of household is this?
Under the Open Sky//Miwa Nishikawa
The recently released prisoner and his troubles adjusting to the world that changed while he was on the inside. It’s a well-tread subject and its ubiquity might have to do with real world mistreatment of reformed inmates, but clearly the larger issue here is does it still make for a decent watch? It would be a waste of time to talk about Koji Yakusho as it’s now a given that he’s going to put his all into the role even if it means he’ll the highlight of otherwise dim works. Another directorial effort from him would be nice though. Good news is he’s not wasted here. Nishikawa gives us a character study of a man fighting to survive in a system meant to keep him down (there’s added self-destructiveness to boot). But there’s additional goodies beyond this being a showcase for Yakusho. We spend a bit of time with those around Yakusho’s character, whose kindness transcends pity. One of these “supports” is a young author/filmmaker who is hired to do a video profile of Yakusho and frame it as an inmate’s quest to find the mother who put him up for adoption all those years ago. It’s a nice package for the TV, that his upbringing will explain the path he journeyed on. Maybe there’s truth in there but it’s a distraction from the needs of the now. This man’s fight to better himself and the ones who see past the jailtime is worth getting sentimental about not the sob story.
Under Your Bed//Mari Asato
My familiarity with Asato is just from her two films released in 2014. It was nice to see a newer voice working in J-horror. Someone who had arthouse leanings but didn’t seem ashamed of making a horror picture. Under Your Bed is leaps and bounds ahead of those prior works. The supernatural stuff is dropped for a storyline of domestic dread and is actually startling. It also might be her masterpiece. Kengo Kora, someone truly chameleon-like in his embodiment of his characters, plays a man who on a whim sets out to find the woman he had coffee with once in university. He abandons his invisible existence elsewhere and sets up shop in the same town where she now lives with her husband and newborn baby. From his stalking he finds she is consistently, and brutally, beaten by her husband. Its depictions of abuse are truly hard to watch and make for a uneasy pairing with the soft-spoken narration of Kora. The scenario is thrilling; the only one who knows what this woman is going through is not necesarilly someone she’d want to spend time with. We want the stalker to be the savior. It’s uneasy moral territory and might be “problematic” but since it’s female directed makes it all the more fascinating. It’s hard not to read into the fact that this didn’t seem to get much play across the virtual film festivals, Japan focused or otherwise. It’s a bit of a tough watch and Asato doesn’t fetishize or shy away. A future Batsu film? Maybe.
Also enjoyed: Beautiful, Goodbye; Life: Untitled; Roar; Sacrifice; Sleeping Village; Wheel Music; Wolf’s Calling.
Need to watch: A Girl Missing; The Gun; Book-Paper-Scissors; Minori, on the Brink; Woman of the Photographs; Followers; Romance Doll; One Night; We Are Little Zombies; The First Supper; 37 Seconds.
Love,
Jason Suzuki
Chief Executive Communications Officer
Batsu Film Festival
In memory of Danny Graul. The man went to everything. He supported people and saw the worth in anything that brought people together even if it was a sorry excuse for a film festival held in a small campus screening room barely being run off a laptop. I saw him snoring during a screening at the silent film fest once, live accompaniment and everything. It was beautiful. On the last day of Batsu he gave me a book by Bill O’Reilly and said he thought it could be used for a joke or something. Danny was a great man.
P.S. Home Video
Black Test Car + The Black Report [Arrow Video]
Burst City [Arrow Video]
Dogra Magra (this masterpiece from Toshio Matsumoto was released w/ English subs in Japan)
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On [Second Run]
Fish Story [Third Window Films]
The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice [BFI]
Funeral Parade of Roses [BFI]
Gamera: The Complete Collection [Arrow Video]
Gemini [Mondo Macabro/Third Window Films]
Graveyards of Honor [Arrow Video]
H-Man / Battle in Outer Space [Eureka!]
Hanagatami [Third Window Films]
Hiroshima (1953) [Arrow Academy]
Inferno of Torture [Arrow Video]
Kwaidan [Eureka!]
The Legend of the Stardust Brothers [Third Window Films]
Love Hunter [Impulse Pictures]
The Mad Fox [Arrow Academy]
Melancholic [Third Window Films]
Mothra [Eureka!]
One Missed Call Trilogy [Arrow Video]
Pink Films Vol. 1 & 2; 3 & 4 [Third Window Films]
Solid Metal Nightmares – The Films of Tsukamoto [Arrow Video]
Survivor Ballads: Three Films by Shohei Imamura [Arrow Academy]
The Taste of Tea [Third Window Films]
Tokyo Olympiad [Criterion Collection]
Tora-san (the entire restored series was released w/ English subs in Japan)
Warning from Space [Arrow Video]
We Are Little Zombies [Oscilloscope Laboratories] (the Japanese release also has English subs)