p.s. Hey. Today the very talent-enriched poet and d.l. in excellent standing aka Ferdinand has devised a pretty and nagging guest-post for all of you lucky readers out there. Please enjoy, and, as always with guest hosts, do find related words within you to share with the guy in charge to show him you care. Thank you, and thank you totally, Ferdinand! ** Liquoredgoat, Big D, top of the morning to you. When the difficult tag is placed on Ashbery it is a manifestation of the taggers’ laziness and conservatism, point blank. Oh, how cool, you’ll be in the new SCAB! How awesome both for you and for the great SCAB-maestro Dora! I have to second Burroughs and you on that thought. I am well enough, thank you, and I hope you are utterly well. ** David Ehrenstein, I did! And it cost a decent portion of my soul, but it was worth it! No models planned in ‘Genesis’, wow. The mind boggles and explodes. Fuck. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. ‘Black Beauty’ is very good, but I haven’t found it to have the depth/staying power of Lee’s earlier, best work. Well, I don’t think there’s any problem whatsoever on addressing psychedelics in the post without having done them. I write about things I’ve never personally done and will never do all the time. Go for it without hesitation, I say. It’s pretty unusual in my experience to have a full-fledged freak out on mushrooms, although all psychedelics are 80% about the mind involved so anything is possible. I think the rule of thumb with psychedelics is if you’re afraid to take them don’t because psychedelics will exaggerate whatever you’re feeling. As I’ve said, I had two very, very bad mental breakdowns on LSD, but it took having a second one to get me to give them up. Very cool news that you’ll be writing about music. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I don’t believe in evil. I think all ‘evil’ can be deconstructed into understandable causes. I just think the word evil is a convenient, colorful term to use when describing something or someone who’s especially horrible. When people accuse someone of being evil, it’s almost always an emotional reaction, I think. What can be done to get LPS to go to his classes regularly, anything? ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! How cool that Liquoredgoat aka Douglas has a piece in the new SCAB! My astral-projected angel is still there on your shoulder and will remain there, lightly as a feather, until you have no more use for him. Sucks about your stubborn cold. Colds are such weird and mysterious illnesses. Fight it with everything you’ve got. Okay, understood, about the job not feeling right for you. Always trust your instincts, for sure. I’m going to California to do the conference and the reading but, while I’m there, I want to hang out in California for a while and do Halloween. I’ll probably be over there until the end of the month. I’ll probably be able to do the p.s. for at least part of that time. I’m trying to figure that out now, and I’ll know better in a day or so. But I won’t have any time to make new posts, so I’m having to line up a whole bunch of restored posts to cover that period. Yesterday, I mostly worked on the new film script and started getting ready for the trip. No word from Sundance yet. Last night Zac and our friend Bene and I went to see the great documentarian Frederick Wiseman show clips from a lot of his films and talk at Theater Odeon. That was fantastic. He’s in his 90s and totally sharp and lively and still making films, and, man, being like him in your 90s is something to strive for. How and what was your Tuesday? ** Sypha, Ha ha. I only put her GIF in there because I knew it would please you. Seriously. Yeah, a deserted landscape might be the way to go, brevity-wise. Or maybe it could about someone locked in a prison cell or, uh, in a bathroom? Ha ha. ** Lynne Tillman, Lynne! Maestro! Dear, dear friend! I’m honored to have you here in my odd home away from home. On the non-invitation, I suspect it’s because they have little money/funding. I’m only going because I was traveling to California around that time for Halloween anyway, and I’m stopping through there on essentially my own dime. I wish you could be there! Yes, I can’t wait to see you here in Paris! I’ll email you my phone number in a sec. Plans are that I’ll be back in Paris as of the morning of November 1st. Lunch with Aaron Peck would be excellent! Thank you, Lynne, and a huge amount of love to you! ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Yeah, poor Britney, although that wild, downward spiral phase is kind of what gave her some kind of weird cred, I think? Nice about the fine visit with your mom. Another reason that I guess I will see ‘BR2049’. Sorry about Scotland. The Netherlands, who I always root for due to having gotten into soccer when I lived in Amsterdam, knocked themselves out too, sadly. ** H, Hi. Thank you. I’m very happy to hear you’re making very good progress with your work. My shoulder thing is improving very, very slowly. It’s strange, but good. Yes, I’m going to San Francisco on Thursday for a conference about New Narrative and then staying in California for Halloween. Take care. ** Bill, Hi. I get to SF on Thursday evening. The conference starts the next morning. I’m being put up at some place called The Women’s Faculty Club on the UC Berkeley campus. Haven’t seen ‘Super Dark Times’, only heard of it and of the ‘River’s Edge’ comparison. I doubt it’ll open here. Maybe I can catch it while I’m in Cali. ** Okay. Please continue to enjoy Ferdinand’s post and make your feelings known, thanks. See you tomorrow.
‘Death looms over the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda. His first fiction feature, Maborosi (1995), is a quiet study of bereavement, about a young woman struggling to move on after her husband’s inexplicable suicide. In After Life (1998), a supernatural fable about the materiality of memory (and of film), the newly deceased find themselves in an ethereal limbo where they pick a single worldly recollection to be turned into an eternal celluloid keepsake. Distance (2001) observes the conflicting emotions—the sorrow, shame, and incomprehension—of the relatives of cult members who participated in a fatal terrorist attack and a ritualistic mass suicide.
‘Both the novelistic touches and the documentary details in Kore-eda’s work reflect his formative years—he studied literature at Tokyo’s Waseda University and began his career making nonfiction films for Japanese television. The themes of loss and memory, not to mention his signature empathy for traumatized figures, are present in most of his early documentaries. However . . . (1991) links the life stories of two suicides: a bureaucrat in charge of Japan’s social welfare system and a woman who was a casualty of its failures. August Without Him (1994) centers on the first Japanese man to publicly admit contracting HIV through gay sexual contact; Without Memory (1996), likewise structured around direct encounters with the subject, is about a man who, due to a botched surgical procedure, suffers from a rare form of amnesia that prevents his brain from creating new memories.
‘Many of Kore-eda’s documentaries have informed his fiction films. He adapted Maborosi from a novel but, in shaping his heroine, also drew from the government official’s widow in However . . . . The fascination with mnemonic process in After Life stems from the stranger-than-fiction case of Without Memory. Beyond his own nonfiction work, Kore-eda has also borrowed from real-life events. The cult in Distance is modeled on the notorious Aum Shinrikyo group, which launched sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995. Nobody Knows—which has affinities with Kore-eda’s first documentary, Lessons from a Calf (1991), about elementary school kids learning to care for a calf (and in the process to cope with loss)—is loosely based on a child-abandonment news story that scandalized Japan in the eighties.
‘Still Walking, Kore-eda’s most personal work, has strong elements of autobiography. He has said that he made it in response to the death of his mother, whom he nursed toward the end of her life, and the film is full of personalizing details, the sense memories of childhood. It lingers in the kitchen as daikons are peeled, carrots chopped, edamame washed and salted. The humble corn tempura fritter is the equivalent here of Proust’s madeleine, and Kore-eda captures the vivid details of its preparation, from the snapping of the kernels off the cob to the crackle of the batter as it hits the hot oil. The film’s title comes from the lyrics of a 1960s hit, “Blue Light Yokohama,” a favorite of Kore-eda’s mother, and of Toshiko in the movie, for whom this wistfully romantic song has a perverse significance (we learn that it is a reminder of her husband’s betrayal).
‘Kore-eda has always seemed to stand apart from most of his generational cohort—many of his best-known contemporaries, like Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Miike, are given to genre-minded experimentation, and in their own ways extend the radicalizing projects of such Japanese New Wave figures as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura. Often tagged as an old-school humanist, Kore-eda appears more directly descended from the age of classical cinema, and in tackling the “home drama,” that most quintessentially Japanese of genres, he invites comparisons to the most revered of his nation’s filmmakers, Yasujiro Ozu.
‘At first glance, Still Walking does not lack for Ozu-esque themes and tropes. It concerns the relationship between parents and children. Much of it is confined to shoji-screen and tatami-mat interiors. The camera is usually fixed, and there’s even some pillow-shot punctuation; when we are outdoors, an occasional train stretches across the screen. It would not be inaccurate to call Still Walking a film that “grew under the shade” of Ozu, as Claire Denis has described 35 Shots of Rum, her 2008 tribute to the Japanese master’s Late Spring. But it is important to point out that Still Walking lacks the insistent discretion and circumscribed austerity of an Ozu film. Like another Ozu update, Café Lumière, by Hou Hsiao-hsien (the subject of one of Kore-eda’s documentaries), Still Walking takes care to reflect the sociocultural realities of present-day Japan (“These days, we’re not so abnormal,” Ryota tells his mother when she makes a jab about his unconventional family). And if Ozu’s ordinary folk are paragons of calm acceptance, Kore-eda’s are less reconciled to life’s cruelties and disappointments; if anything, as Kore-eda has pointed out, they are closer to the stubborn, openly anguished characters of Mikio Naruse, a director with a bleaker worldview than Ozu.
‘There are no sentimental breakthroughs in Kore-eda’s day in the life—and the flash-forward epilogue implies that they don’t exist in life, period. In this family, people and relationships don’t change in any fundamental sense; avoidance prevails over confrontation. Some might simply chalk this up to Japanese decorum, but it has at least as much to do with Kore-eda’s gimlet-eyed appraisal of how hurts and grievances play out in most families, whatever the culture: silently and subcutaneously, in coded words and actions. But while Kore-eda grants his characters no epiphanies, he allows them pangs of regret and moments of dawning awareness. Resentments go unaired, and problems remain unsolved, but they are, however dimly or privately, recognized, even understood—which is, at least, one definition of family love.’ — Dennis Lim
Q&A; with the LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON Director/Writer Hirokazu Korea
Tribute to Hirokazu Koreeda
Hirokazu Koreeda – After Life – Q&A; – 2011
______ Interview from The Rumpus
The Rumpus: You studied at Waseda University in Tokyo — famous for its literature department — in order to become a novelist. How did you end up becoming a filmmaker?
Hirokazu Koreeda: I did want to become a novelist, but the program at Waseda was pretty intense in terms of language requirements — two hours of English and four hours of Chinese. I thought, what do I need this for? So I stopped going to class. In the neighborhood around Waseda, there were all these movie theaters, so every morning I left the house and watched movies instead of going to class. The experience of encountering films then is one of my greatest memories. Before that I’d never paid any attention to directors, but there I was taking a crash course in Ozu, Kurosawa, Naruse, Truffaut, Renoir, Fellini. Because I’ve always been naturally a more introspective person, I was more interested in becoming a screenwriter than a director.
Rumpus: But then you made documentaries before you made feature films.
Koreeda: First I wrote the screenplay for Nobody Knows and showed it to people at the studios without luck. But around that time I was making a documentary about an official in the ministry of the environment who committed suicide. This man oversaw cases surrounding the victims of Minamata disease, which was a huge controversy at the time — a corporation had been found illegally dumping mercury into a river, causing thousands of deaths, horrifying disfigurement, blindness, paralysis, for which they denied culpability. This man was a morally upright person, and he was in a bind. The government didn’t want to pay out any money or admit that there was a problem, but the victims he met were clearly suffering terribly, and he sympathized with them. He was caught in the middle and ended up committing suicide.
I interviewed his wife for a television documentary and afterward wrote a book of nonfiction about it. I was deeply moved by her reaction to her husband’s suicide — how she was able to make sense of it and how and if she would be able to get on with her life. I worked on this book for two years. A producer who read it told me about a novel, Maborosi, by the writer Teru Miyamoto, that had a similar theme, and suggested I direct an adaptation of it. I’d actually read the novel as a student, but then when I looked at it again it really struck me — the core of the story was the same, about a woman trying to grapple with her husband’s suicide. I mulled over this project for five years and then finally filmed it. So my first feature took this long path from documentary to nonfiction to screen adaptation of a fictional work.
Rumpus: Your newest film, Still Walking, has more personal origins than your other films. How did this affect the making of it?
Koreeda: It’s not totally autobiographical, but I based the characters on people close to me, and a lot of the dialogue actually came from things said in my family. But whereas the challenge of, say, Nobody Knows was to take events from a real incident and then try to try to get as close as possible to the characters so I could understand them, in Still Walking it was quite the opposite: in order to avoid sentimentality and to be able to write the screenplay with the kind of humor and irony necessary to keep the story moving, I needed to distance myself as much as I could from the characters, to try to get to a point where I could view them objectively.
Rumpus: Maborosi drew comparisons to the films of Yasujiro Ozu when it came out. Still Walking seems reminiscent of Ozu’s work as well — perhaps more so.
Koreeda: When I made Maborosi, I was aware of drawing from Ozu’s style in framing certain scenes — unsuccessfully, to be honest. But Still Walking was so personal that I really set aside any consideration of technique or style or influence and just worked intuitively. The motif of family in Still Walking is similar to Maborosi, so perhaps that’s where the Ozu comparison comes from. Actually, seeing the movie now in completed form, I’d say it has more in common with Naruse’s work than with Ozu’s.
Rumpus: What about camera angles? You stick mostly to medium shots, with a minimum of close-ups, and the framing of them is similar to Ozu’s famed “tatami-eyed view.”
Koreeda: The biggest considerations I had were practical: how do you move such a large number of actors around a small space? So, for example, if I have to have the mother bring a pot of tea from the kitchen to the living room and serve it to the others, how do I, on a practical level, get everyone into the frame? Any decisions I made about the camera angles or movement came out of necessity, versus any sort of stylistic choice.
Rumpus: You’re able to get some of the most natural acting from children I’ve ever seen. Was there any particular method to this?
Koreeda: Well, the movie is pretty tightly scripted. But with the actors playing the children, I didn’t give them a script. All I told them was that this was a movie about going to their grandparents’ house during summer vacation, and that they should just run around and do whatever came naturally. The adult actors had to act around this; they had to deliver some very specific lines without knowing what the children around them would do or say. This collision of a predetermined and more random elements is something I’ve always been drawn to, and that I was pretty satisfied with in the final result.
Rumpus: Has the foreign reaction to your films ever taken you by surprise?
Koreeda: Yes. For one, I never thought Still Walking would be of any interest to Westerners or picked up overseas.
Rumpus: Why?
Koreeda: I didn’t think Westerners would get it at all. I figured, for example, that they would sit and think, why don’t these people ever just say what they’re thinking? And then the characters themselves don’t experience much growth, if any, from beginning to end.
I don’t believe in making movies to cater to a foreign audience. You never know what the reaction is going to be anyhow. At the time I made Maborosi, the Japanese movies getting any foreign attention were all period dramas and seemed to be about some representative element of Japanese life, and my movie was contemporary movie about one specific woman trying to understand her husband’s suicide. But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan — which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn’t find it interesting at all. But then again to my surprise it was also well received. Perhaps there was a stylistic element they were responding to — I was aware of Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, that forties documentary style, while I was making it — so maybe that was it. At any rate, I don’t concern myself with what the critics will say; you really have no idea anyway. That’s part of the fun of making movies, seeing what the reaction will be.
Rumpus: To what extent is a film’s reception in Japan dependent on its reception overseas?
Koreeda: If a movie is nominated for, say, an Academy award, that movie will instantly become popular in Japan. There’s always been a bit of a complex the Japanese have about being taken seriously in the West. At the same time, the contemporary Japanese directors who are well-known in the West — say, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Takeshi Kitano, Naomi Kawase — are mostly unknown to Japanese, particularly of the younger generation. One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They’re either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.
Rumpus: To go back to our first question, do you ever think about writing novels? What about doing more documentaries?
Koreeda: Actually, after Still Walking was made, I was asked to write a novel version. I accepted eagerly, but then about a month into it I realized how difficult writing a novel can be. I finished it and it was published, but it was difficult. As far as documentaries go, I believe unreservedly that they serve an important function in our culture. I’d love to be able to make both documentaries and feature films simultaneously, but so far that hasn’t happened.
______________ 14 of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 22 films
_____________ August Without Him (1994) ‘Hirata Yukata became the first man in Japan to publicly acknowledge that he had contracted HIV through homosexual sex. Koreeda’s film is designed as a lament for Yukata, who had a profound impact on the filmmaker. His dying years are not presented as a time of physical deterioration, but rather an evolution of a relationship between two men, one of whom emerged from the process with a markedly changed perspective on the goal of objectivity in nonfiction film.’— Harvard Film Archive
the entire film
____________ Maborosi (1995) ‘This is the first film by Hirokazu Koreeda, a young Japanese director whose love for the work of the great Yasujiro Ozu (1903-63) is evident. Ozu is one of the four or five greatest directors of all time, and some of his visual touches are visible here. The camera, for example, is often placed at the eye level of someone kneeling on a tatami mat. Shots begin or end on empty rooms. Characters speak while seated side by side, not looking at one another. There are many long shots and few closeups; the camera does not move, but regards. In more obvious homage, Koreeda uses a technique that Ozu himself borrowed from Japanese poetry: the “pillow shot,” inspired by “pillow words,” which are words that do not lead out of or into the rest of the poem but provide a resting place — a pause or punctuation. Koreeda frequently cuts away from the action to simply look for a moment at something: a street, a doorway, a shop front, a view. And there are two small touches in which the young director subtly acknowledges the master: a characteristic teakettle in the foreground of a shot, and a scene in which the engine of a canal boat makes a sound so uncannily similar to the boat at the beginning of Ozu’s Floating Weeds (1959) that it might have been lifted from the soundtrack.’— Roger Ebert
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_____________ Without Memory (1996) ‘A father loses his short-term memory as the result of a botched medical procedure which causes him to develop Wernicke’s Encephalopathy. Koreeda chronicles his family’s fight to receive proper treatment and benefits from this devastating malpractice. Without Memory is an unabashed protest against the government and its disregard for health care. However, the film is also rich with thematic concerns, namely memory and loss, which infuse his later fiction films.’— Harvard Film Archive
the entire film
______________ After Life (1998) ‘Limbo becomes a place of psychological breakthrough in After Life, the film that introduced Koreeda to art-house audiences worldwide. As people die and journey to this other world, they are stopped at a sort of postmodern rest area, where they are greeted by counselors. The counselors ask the deceased to select one memory from life to take with them to the great beyond. Memories, which range from moments of first love to a trip to Disneyland, are recreated by the counselors and filmed so the departed may have a permanent record of their former lives. Despite his focus on the supernatural, Koreeda reveals a humanist sentiment on par with his fellow countryman, Yasujiro Ozu.’— Harvard Film Archive
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_____________ Distance (2001) ‘Distance, nominated for the Golden Palm award at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, focuses on the aftermath of a massacre by an apocalyptic religious cult. On the 3rd anniversary of the tragedy, four friends convene at a lake where the ashes of their loved ones are scattered. It is here where they encounter the sole survivor of the cult, who absconded just before the massacre. He gives them a tour round the religious sect’s headquarters and the characters are forced to confront their overwhelming feeling of loss as well as shame. Distance is interspersed with recollections, flashbacks and long, unbroken shots instilling a meditative tone to the proceedings. Ultimately, the film poses the question: can the characters put a distance between themselves and their loved one’s incomprehensible act of violence?’— The Culture Trip
the entire film (w/o subtitles)
______________ Nobody Knows (2004) ‘Like his previous film Distance (2001), which involved an Aum-like cult, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Nobody Knows was inspired by a real case of child abandonment in Tokyo, 1988. As with Distance, the headline event being referenced serves as purely the catalyst for a much more personal tale. With Nobody Knows, Kore-eda took the real case, mulled it over in his head for fifteen years and used it as only the skeleton around which he built this piece of fiction, filmed with a documentary eye. The plot is simple: scatty single mum Keiko (television talento You) and 12-year-old son Akira (Yagira in the performance that made him the youngest ever Best Actor winner at Cannes) move into a nice new apartment in Tokyo. What the landlord doesn’t know is that Keiko has three other children hidden in her flat, reserved Kyoko (Kitaura), rambunctious Shigeru (Kimura) and the youngest sister, Yuki (Shimizu). When Keiko takes off with a new boyfriend, Akira is left with the responsibility of managing the household and looking after his younger siblings. The documentary style that Koreeda is known for is more prominent here than in After Life (1998), and more successful than in Distance. While the camera is often static, it doesn’t come across so much like a business training video as Distance sometimes could. However much that aesthetic may have suited the subject of that film, the camera work in Nobody Knows is easier to appreciate, catching beautiful moments of realism – childish realism, rather than stark or flat realism. One of Koreeda’s great successes is to put the audience on a level with the children, not by hackneyed devices such as dropping the camera to kid height, but through focusing on their interests, habits and practices. Several shots in the film focus on their hands touching things, the kids fidgeting. For instance, Akira’s dirty hands feeling the grooves on the suitcase, right at the start of the picture. The children of Nobody Knows are depicted as tactile beings who learn and explore through touch, taste, smell. The only words to come out of their mouths are exactly what they are feeling. The director has managed one of those rare feats, putting actual children on screen.’— Midnight Eye
_______________ Hana Yori Mo Naho (2006) ‘Set in 1702, Hana yori mo naho looks back a full three centuries to a time when samurai clans offered monetary rewards to the samurais who succeeded in taking on a revenge act. The central character is a young samurai, Sozaemon Aoki, who has come to Edo (now Tokyo) to avenge his late father. Although he searches the city for his father’s enemy, he is hopeless with swordplay and reluctant to pursue his mission. Living in an Edo tenement, poverty-stricken but rich in human relationships, Sozaemon starts to cherish life and question the meaning of taking revenge.’— Film Affinity
Trailer
_______________ Still Walking (2008) ‘The lyrical, profoundly moving Still Walking (Aruitemo aruitemo) is contemporary Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-eda’s most personal work to date. Created as a tribute to his late mother, the film depicts one day in the life of the Yokoyamas, gathered together for a commemorative ritual whose nature only gradually becomes clear. Rather than focus on big dramatic moments, Kore-eda relies on simple gestures and domestic routines (especially cooking) to evoke a family’s entire life, its deep regrets and its daily joys. Featuring vivid, heartrending performances and a gentle naturalism that harks back to the director’s earlier, documentary work, Still Walking is an extraordinary portrayal of the ties that bind us.’— The Criterion Collection
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_______________ Air Doll (2009) ‘Koreeda’s latest effort Air Doll is both his most commercial film and one of his most accomplished. Beginning life as a work-for-hire adapted from a short manga by Yoshiie Gouda, Air Doll is the story of an inflatable sex doll that gains life and goes in search of what it means to be human. Straying from the cramped, rickety house of her owner, lonely mama’s boy Hideo (Itao), the doll goes out on daily treks around the neighbourhood, befriending a variety of individuals, taking a job at a video store and even starting a relationship with her mild-mannered co-worker (Arata). Though the most immediate reference for Air Doll’s search for the true meaning of humanity would be Pinocchio, the central theme is one recurrent in Japanese literature, Frankensteinian though it may be. Ian Buruma devoted an entire chapter of his best-known collection of essays, A Japanese Mirror (a.k.a. Behind the Mask), to “The Human Work of Art”, in which he makes ample reference to the work of literary great Junichiro Tanizaki. Tanizaki’s first published work The Tattooist (Shisei, 1910) deals with the transformation of an innocent maiden into a man-eating femme fatale through the manipulation of her body – in this case a tattoo of a spider that covers her entire back. Air Doll more closely resembles another such story of Tanizaki’s, the novel Naomi (Chijin no Ai, 1924), in which a shy, unmarried engineer’s attempts to groom a teenage girl into an ideal Western-style lady see her transforming instead into a loosely moraled, manipulative wench with a string of boyfriends.’— Midnight Eye
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______________ I Wish (2011) ‘Hirokazu Koreeda’s I Wish has taken two years to come to the UK. It has been more than worth the wait. Like his earlier movie Still Walking, this is a deeply considered Japanese family drama in the tradition of Ozu, with echoes of Edward Yang and Tsai Ming-liang – moving, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, often mysterious. The film is about the powerful imperative of family unity, but also about the inevitability, and even desirability, of families finally disintegrating and allowing everyone involved a painful kind of freedom. The original title is Kiseki, or “Miracle”, and a miracle is being longed for by two brothers, around nine or 10 years old: they are Koichi and Ryu, played by real-life brothers Koki and Ohshirô Maeda, from whom the director gets terrifically natural and relaxed performances. Their mum and dad have broken up; Nozomi (Nene Ohtsuka) has returned to live with her parents and taken a demeaning supermarket job in her hometown of Kagoshima, within sight of the Sakura-jima volcano, which, with eerie calm, like a figure in a painting, is in a state of silent eruption on the distant skyline. It deposits a fine film of ash over everything, which the city-dwellers must continually clean away. Koreeda does not belabour the metaphorical quality of this volcano, or the Pompei-snapshot of ordinariness he himself records. Meanwhile the father, Kenji, (Jô Odagiri) stays in Osaka, where he pursues the laid-back slacker lifestyle that so infuriated Nozomi, failing to hold down day jobs while in the evenings trying to be a guitarist in a band.’— The Guardian
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______________ Like Father, Like Son (2013) ‘Kore-eda’s latest film, Like Father, Like Son, concerns a switched-at-birth scenario wherein two couples, the upright Ryota and Midori Nonoyima (Masaharu Fukuyama and Machiko Ono) and the laid-back Yudai and Yukari Saiki (Lily Franky and Yoko Maki), discover they’ve been raising each other’s six-year-old sons, the reserved Keita (Keita Ninomiya) and the aloof Ryusei (Hwang Sho-gen). Nature versus nurture is explored through tender melodrama, and, true to form, Kore-eda presents a wellspring of eye-catching frames and locales, each of them inviting their own thematic readings.’— Filmmaker Magazine
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_____________ Our Little Sister (2015) ‘Koreeda’s sensitive yet lucid helming keeps the performances precise yet natural, and the presence of character actors in supporting roles — like Kirin Kiki, Lily Franky, Jun Fubuki and Shinobu Otake — adds flavor to the cast, even if they aren’t given much centrality in the story. Although they’re excellent actors in their own right, Shinichi Tsutsumi, Ryo Kase and Takashi Ikeda are short-changed as the Koda sisters’ love interests, to minimal emotional effect. The four distaff leads hold the screen by dint of their sheer beauty, but theirs are not career-breakthrough performances. Still, Ayase, who exudes a vivacious personality in most of the films she’s starred in, successfully conveys Sachi’s tightly wound mental state with her imposing posture and strong sense of self-discipline. This makes it hard for viewers to get under her skin most of the time, but she is radiant in scenes with Hirose’s Suzu, revealing another side of empathy and gentleness to the person she sees as her younger mirror image. Craft contributions, as expected of a Kore-eda film, is superb in an entirely unostentatious way. Especially worth noting is Yoko Kanno’s music, whose dulcet melodies and classical edge has a softening effect on the helmer’s usually austere tone. Lenser Mikiya Takimoto (“Like Father, Like Son”) captures the genteel charm of Kamakura while filtering out its more touristy spots; his pristine visuals, enhanced by an elegant color palette of blue, gray and olive, has none of the artificial glossiness suggested by his long career in commercials. However, some of the framing, notably the sisters’ upright poses and profile shots, strain to reference Ozu’s compositions. Kore-eda’s professed homage to the master of family drama (a longtime Kamakura resident) feels a little superficial compared with Still Walking which captures Ozu’s spirit rather than rigidly adhering to his technique.’— Variety
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______________ After the Storm (2016) ‘Hirokazu Kore-eda first established himself as a major filmmaker with a string of audacious dramas that included a harrowing portrait of modern poverty (“Nobody Knows”) and a transcendent vision of the great beyond (“After Life”). In recent years, however — at least since 2009’s “Air Doll,” a contemporary fairy tale in which Bae Doo-na plays an inflatable sex doll who comes to life — the great Japanese humanist has downshifted towards more openly sentimental slice-of-life stories, churning out low-key masterpieces with such regularity and deceptive effortlessness that it can be easy to take them for granted. So when Kore-eda unloads another gently brilliant film full of characters so real and full of life that it feels as though could fly to Japan and visit them, it may not seem like much cause for celebration. But when one of those films is just the tiniest bit above his batting average, it’s enough to clarify and crystallize what makes them all so special. Hirokazu Kore-eda may only make good movies, but “After the Storm” is one of his best.’— David Ehrlich, Indiewire
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_______________ The Third Murder (2017) ‘“The Third Murder” poses a battery of intriguing rhetorical questions, which the characters often ask aloud and allow to hang in the air for a half-second too long. Why does the law consider it worse if you kill for money than if you kill for revenge? Is ignoring a crime a crime unto itself? Is it at all relevant that Misumi killed two people in Hokkaido in 1986 (this is the third murder, after all), or did Kore-eda just want an excuse to interject a lyrical, snowbound interlude into a musty murder mystery? It would be against Kore-eda’s nature to answer any of these questions — a certain degree of moral ambiguity is fundamental to the warmth of his work — but he’s never made anything so cold. That’s not a problem in and of itself, but it becomes one because the filmmaker is uncharacteristically incurious about parsing the story’s major themes. As the movie stumbles from the certainty with which it started and leads Shigemori toward a very literal crossroads, it grows more frustrating (and more ironic) that this should be the first Kore-eda feature not to thoroughly investigate itself.’— David Ehrlich, Indiewire
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AFTER THE STORM – Sujet – EV – Cannes 2016
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Yes, yes, RIP Anne Wiazemsky. So great in the Bresson and really in everything. Wait, what is that a book of Bill’s? Is he ‘David Arlen’ or is he the publisher or … what? I don’t see his name, is what I mean. It sounds very interesting. I’ll get it. ** Dóra Grőber, Hi! The meet and greet was, you know, awkward, ha ha. He’s here to watch the 12 French film submissions, including our film, and the event was set up so any filmmakers with submitted films who are in Paris could say hi. So it was basically him standing there and getting continually cornered by filmmakers giving him a hard sell on their films. Zac and I are completely incapable of that kind of behavior, so our producer, who was there, basically talked up our film while we smiled and tried to seem like pleasant guys. He seemed nice. He’ll decide which if any of the French films are worth sending to the next level whereupon the full selection committee will watch the films and decide. Apparently we will get word as soon as Monday whether we’re in the running or an immediate no. Fingers very crossed. Oh, how great that the apartment might be a go! Shoot, about all the dog walks that would be ahead of you, but it sounds good otherwise. When will you know if you get it? I hope your sickness was a phantom or an extreme quickie. How are you feeling today? My day was that meeting and the other meeting with the producer of this other big project the I should be able to identify in a couple of weeks, I think. It was okay. Productive day, I guess. Did you feel good enough to have a good enough day today? ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Great, fantastic, about putting the Day together! There’s time. Thank you a lot. What you’re thinking and planning sounds fascinating. That’s very exciting! I did not know about that Danny Brown video. How strange. I don’t … think I heard the Gravediggaz back then, but I’ll need to rehear it to make sure. That review you shared is just moronic and embarrassingly lame. ** Bill, Hi, B. I’m curious about Stephen’s new book. Fiction Collective put it out, and they generally publish very good books. And Johnny Ray Huston, wow. I haven’t seen or heard about him since the Queer Zine days. He has a book? ** Sypha, Hi, James. Ha ha, okay, 700 pages, I think it’s virtually assured that I’m not going to even attempt to read a cycle whose single books sport page numbers like that. It does sound very interesting, however. Huh. Thanks, pal. ** Matthew Doyle, Hi, Matthew! Yeah, I never check the comments on past days. I should, but I never think to. Cool, thanks for your understanding. Maybe another time? Then I’ll see you at the conference. Um, if I go to LA, and it looks like I will, I’m still not sure how long I’ll be there, hopefully for a bit. I have these things going on over here that want me to be here, and I’m trying to evade them. Was ‘Dark Harbour’ good? I always liked it ‘cos it had this sort of trashy feel relative to Knotts Scary Farm, which is kind of the god re: the big production spooky house circuit in my option, or the high budget Universal one. If/when I go to LA, it will be largely to go to haunted houses, so sure. Mostly home haunts, or they’re the priority. So, yeah, def. Wow: the helicopter filming! What’s your job? Excuse me if you told me and I’m spacing. Like … the camera guy on films or the DP or … ? I still haven’t seen ‘Good Time’. I’ve been intending to for weeks. Yeah, I’m super curious about it. A guy/film critic at the Sundance meet and greet thing yesterday was raving about it. Interesting about the ‘mini Gyro’ inventor guy. All of that is so cool. Good morning! ** Jamie, Hi, Jamie! Oh, fuck, you were sick again? That shit is taking way, way advantage of your good nature. So sorry, man, hugs. I’m good. Yep, ‘PGL’ is ‘in the can’! I mean, we have one more day of technical shit to do, outputting the various versions of the film (theater version, online version — which we had to make because two scenes in the film are so dark that, to be visible on computers, they had to be lightened a little — and the dreaded short version) and boring blah blah, but it’s finis(!), and it has now been viewed by the very first non-Zac/me human being, a programmer for Sundance Film Festival. Birth by fire. Well, I’m vegetarian since I was 16, and I eat nothing but non-meat staples, but the ‘fake meat’ thing is just a tag to make them seem comfortable or something. Like a veggie burger is just burger-like because it’s a convenient form to eat. I do eat veggie-dogs. I guess those look like meat. Dialogue-free sounds cool. For our next film, we’re going to try to bring the amount of dialogue way down if we can. ‘PGL’ has a lot of dialogue. Cool. How’s that working? May your Friday turn the Atlantic Ocean into a gigantic trampoline. Brilliantine love, Dennis. ** Corey Heiferman, Well, hello there, Corey! Ah, yes, very bittersweet sounding. I think you have the right idea even though I’ve never been able to adhere to it. How are you making the keep/discard selection, criteria-wise? Thanks about Sundance. It’s a very long shot, I think, but, yes, any least with him watching it projected, we’ll know the film had every chance. Bon day. ** Misanthrope, G-man. Fake everything, why not? Although I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the appeal of sex dolls. Yeah, it will be very interesting to get the teachers’ feedback. One always hopes that teachers can recognize kids’ qualities that don’t fit into the school requirements and appreciate a kid’s non-traditional specialness. You sound like a good adult, man. Shit, it happens sometimes. Nothing we overgrown teens can do it about that, I guess. ** Chris dankland, Hi, Chris! Thanks a whole lot, man. We’re very excited and hopeful. It’s funny how I’ve slipped into wanting to make films. It’s kind of the main thing I want to do now. Never would have predicted that. And, yeah, I personally think that, as happy as I am with ‘LCTG’, that ‘PGL’ is at a whole other level, but we’ll see. I’ve always had a burning, impractical desire to collect fake food, fill the walls and shelves of where I live with them, but I will never do it for realistic reasons. Cool, yeah, Richard Dawson’s awesome. When I first heard about him, I hoped he was the same Richard Dawson who used to host game shows on American TV and that he’d transitioned into being an experimental musician, but alas. You take care too! How’s everything? I keep utterly adoring your Facebook-posted works big time. ** Okay. I decided to restore and slightly expand the old, dead Hirokazu Kore-eda post because he and his work are really great. Have at it. See you tomorrow.
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