I've been a huge fan of Wong Kar-wai's brilliant work ever since I saw his landmark film, Chungking Express a few years ago. I felt as though my eyes had been peeled wide open as I stared at every frame of that amazing movie.
And while Chungking Express impressed me with it's gritty style and expressive color palette, it wasn't until I saw his film In The Mood For Love(花樣年華)that I realized what a true master the man is. This is simply the most lushly gorgeous and beautifully melancholic movie I've ever seen. Every time I re-watch it, I find myself swept away....
Maggie Cheung is always stunning in everything she does, and in this film she shines at her brightest. She has an incredible grace and poise that you simply can't turn away from.
Tony Leung Chiu-Wai has always been a major presence in Chinese cinema, and his restrained acting (intensifying the conflicted feelings of his character inside) in this movie stands among his very best work.
The sets are top-notch, with beautiful colors and details that take you to 1960's Hong Kong.
And then there's the inspring wardrobe. Maggie's amazing traditional dresses are a character in their own right, and I'd love to have a couple of Tony Leung's classic vintage ties from this film.
In The Mood For Love is easily one my very favorite movies, and rightfully stands as one of the very best films of the 21st century. I can't possibly recommend it enough.....
With each viewing of Nobuhiro Yamashita's brilliant 2005 film, Linda Linda Linda, the more I have to conclude that it's gradually become my absolute favorite film...
The movie is a breezy slice-of-life story about a hastedly assembled student rock band that finds itself only three days to perfect their set of music for their schools annual cultural festival. The camera follows around these four young ladies as they practice, deal with school, practice, experience awkward relationships, practice, overcome their shyness, and practice some more. It really is that simple a film, and the results are delightful.
The musical crux of the film is the legendary Japanese punk band The Blue Hearts. Their signature song, Linda Linda, is considered a classic and something of a karaoke staple in Japan. In the film, the band has decided to cover three songs by The Blue Hearts, but don't have a singer....
...until they meet Son. Son's a painfully shy exchange student from Korea with a limited Japanese vocabulary, but she loves the music of The Blue Hearts so much that she can't turn down the offer to sing in the band.
Son is played by Korean actress Bae Doona(Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, The Host, & Air Doll to name a few films) and she wins you over instantly. She has several great scenes in this movie where she barely even speaks, relying solely on facial expressions and body language that make Son a very real person.
As Son becomes more comfortable in her unexpected role as a singer in a punk band, she makes a subtle transition from an introverted wallflower to a young woman who's finally found where she wants to be. It's powerful and inspiring to hear her belt out rock n' roll anthems while holding on to the microphone for dear life.
Much like real life, this film moves along at it's own quiet and deliberate pace. The characters are all wonderfully likable people. You really want the best for the band as they struggle to achieve perfection in the form of a three minute punk rock song. Their journey becomes yours, and the payoff is as thunderous as it is uplifting.
As I mentioned earlier, I've watched this movie more than once. It's become a movie that I return to again and again. Sometimes I start to watch a favorite scene, and wind up watching the whole thing again anyway. I guess you could call it cinematic comfort food. With this in mind, I must declare Linda Linda Linda as my favorite movie.
An interesting aside: for the making of Linda Linda Linda, the cast learned the music themselves (Bass player Shiori Sekine is a real-life member of the terrific band Baseball Bear) and played live shows as a bonafide rock band! Here's a video for their cover of the classic Blue Hearts song...
It's a firm belief of mine that music can change your life and make you a better person, especially if the music is rock n' roll. I can remember the exact moment of my life when I first heard Elvis, Link Wray, The Stooges, The Ramones, and I can tell you where I was when Guitar Wolf nearly destroyed my stereo speakers. It was a life-changing musical moment up there with the best of them.
Guitar Wolf is the insane bastard step-child of all the names mentioned above, a band who's trademark is loud and quick bursts of "jet rock n' roll" distilled into it's most powerful package. The band's first recording line-up consisted of Toru(Drum Wolf, although there was an earlier drummer named Narita), Billy(Bass Wolf) and a bringing it all together, the ear-ringingly awesome axe-master, Seiji, a man we simply call Guitar Wolf.
Before the days of widely accessible internet, (It was around, but you usually had to go to school and deal with dial-up) we had to rely on self-published amateur zines to find out about music happenings in far away places. At the time, Guitar Wolf was this god-like rock n' roll mystery man, unattainable and fascinating. In Matt Kaufman's seminal Japanese noise/punk/garage zine, Exile Osaka, he reported the following….
"Singer Seiji special R&R ritual revealed… He has a big glass case in his apartment in which he keeps his guitar and leather jacket. The night before a performance, he enters the glass case and gets charged with Rock & Roll energy.
Also, Seiji never takes off his sunglasses. When King Joe crashed at his house, he saw him sleeping in his sunglasses. He even took a shower with his sunglasses! Believe it or not…"
And so the legend of Guitar Wolf grew. The band eventually graduated from homemade basement demos and got signed. They appeared on television, and before long, film. They played "Men in Black" in the little-seen flick The Sore Losers, and zombie fighting defenders of Earth in the drive-in classic Wild Zero, which as I've said before, just might be the the greatest film you will ever lay your eyes upon...
Here's Seiji's Oscar clip while we're at it. In a perfect world, he would've been chosen as best actor of 2000...
Guitar Wolf's rise to new rock n' roll heights continued. Seiji and his Joan Jett autographed jacket made a cameo in Puffy's Teen Titans theme-song video (he shows up at 2:07), and landed a much-deserved signature guitar from Epiphone. And oh yeah, don't forget the designer jeans...
But tragedy struck in 2005 when Billy "Bass" Wolf passed away shortly after returning from a US tour. The band went through a spell of soul-searching before choosing "U-G" as their new bassist. Shortly later, Seiji's intensely physical stage presence took it's toll when he seriously injured his hip jumping from a 6-meter high stack of amps.
Guitar Wolf would be silent for a year and a half, far too long for this world to be without them. On April 4th of 2009 they triumphantly played their comeback show, and all was right with the world again. It feels good to know that Guitar Wolf is truly here to stay.
Seiji, aka "Guitar Wolf", I salute you. Thank you for spreading the message of rock n' roll, and here's to the rock to come….
So awhile back a movie-loving friend of mine was making small talk and asked me "So have you seen those Bourne Movies, what did you think of them?"
I just shrugged and replied "Naw, I've never seen any of em', actually."
"Really?" he said with sincere surprise, "I figured you would have seen those by now, they're pretty good"
And so I explained the way watching films works in my world...
"Look man, it's like this, I can only see but so many movies in my lifetime. I have to make choices, and if I have to choose between Matt Damon jumping around rooftops and a 1970's Japanese nunspoiltation pinky-violence flick, the movie with the crazy nuns is going to win."
With only a limited amount of time in my life, it's become clear that I have no time to waste on movies that don't mean anything to me. I have to be picky and seek out films that will deliver what I want. So what movies do I want to see?
I want to see films that challenge me and the way the world looks to me. I want to see films that take me to places far away, from small towns in America, to small towns in China. I enjoy movies that take me back into a time before I was born and give me a peek into a context I've never understood, and I enjoy movies that are happening right now in the moment.
I look for movies that are overlooked and neglected, that barely saw the inside of a theater and wound up being passed around on badly dubbed videotapes.
I want to see movies that are funny, sometimes laughing at the subtleties of life, and sometimes finding humor in low-brow places. I want to see movies that were made by the seat of the pants, and movies that were works of self-indulgent love.
I want to see films that are heralded as classics. Some of these classics are wonderful examples of what the medium can do, but some are classics because they do everything wrong. I love films that are beautiful and uplifting, and yet feel drawn to pathos and sadness.
Seeing a film is somewhat like going on a trip, seeing things you've always wanted to see, and discovering things that never occurred to you. Often this takes you to far away places, and sometimes right next door. All that matters to is that I go somewhere.
As I said, I have to get a little picky about what movies I watch, I have so many to see and so little time to see them. This doesn't mean that somebody else's choices are below mine, if Transformers does that for you, that's okay. We all need to decide what's right for us.
So what you look for in a film, and what do you want it to do for you?
A strong reoccurring theme that frequently appears in Japanese film, music, and art is sadness that's wrapped in beauty. Recently as I was watching a Japanese film about a group of men following out a suicide pact, I realized that every single one of the previous Japanese films that I watched earlier in the week had ended in loss, tragedy, or an ambiguous sense of melancholy.
But yet, not a single one of these films left me depressed and cold. The thing is, despite the longing and sadness on the screen, these films were absolutely beautiful, and the beauty of those films is what resonated strongest within me, and so I fell for the strange power of Japan's most personal examples of film making.
From the early arts of the Edo-Period, and through the difficult post-war years, the Japanese mastered expressing what they call "mono no aware", a transcendental understanding of our lives being impermanent and the world ever-changing.
This zen-like acceptance greets tragic events with a bittersweet awareness that they cannot altered, much like the lazy flow of a river that occasionally floods over violently. I find this cultural philosophy fascinating and inspiring.
With this understanding, Japanese films which deal with heavy-hearted emotions often contain a positive undercurrent that helps the viewer see the ending in a affirmative way. I've found over the years that I simply adore a good sad Japanese film, and likewise I savior sitting in the dark listening to a wistful enka song.
To some people, the Japanese passion for the melancholy must seem somewhat odd. But you see, the yearning and the despair never bring me down, rather they help me embrace life and this gorgeous world we're born to, and as weird as that may seem, that makes me very happy.
And with that, I leave you with a lovely enka song performed by Fuyumi Sakamoto. Enjoy!
Tokyo. Sora is a fascinating study of loneliness in modern Toyko by minimalist filmmaker Hiroshi Ishikawa. Trailer here.
Yasujiro Ozu’sTokyo Story is considered by many to be his masterpiece, an amazing film about generational differences in post-war Japan.
Ikiru is Akira Kurosawa's highly personal film about a man reflecting on his own mortality.
5 Centimeters Per Second is a gorgeously animated film made up of 3 short stories. A beautifully sad small-scale epic with a glimmer of hope within. Music video for the film's theme song here.
If you have your favorite films that explore these themes, please share in the comments, I'd appreciate your suggestions!
Shinobu Yaguchi's terrific 2004 film スウィングガールズ, aka Swing Girls (That's the Korean poster above) instantly became one of my favorite movies before I was even quarter way through watching it. It's a simple little film that wins you over with it's upbeat tone, physical comedy, and the absolutely charming cast headed up by the delightful actress Juri Ueno.
Swing Girls is the story about a high school student named Tomoko and her summer school classmates. Tomoko lacks direction and the motivation to complete anything she begins. Her friends are pretty much the same, with minds set on materialism and karaoke.
None of them want to spend their summer trapped in math class, and through chance, (and largely due their slack efforts) the girls happen into being pressed to form a band by fellow male student Takuo. Takuo is tired of being in a marching band, and wants to play some swingin' jazz...
Along the way an epiphany comes to Tomoko and the girls. They realize they love jazz music, and when their services are no longer required, the void left behind becomes something to motivate them. And so the Swing Girls are born...
From here on it's pretty familiar movie territory. Our underdog girls struggle to polish their craft and hone their group into a tight jazz unit. An unlikely mentor tenatively approaches them, and helps instill the heart and soul that the band needs to finally break through to their potential. Naturally the girls set their eyes on a major concert event, and work hard to get on the bill...
I'm not exactly giving away anything revelatory here. Yaguchi's film doesn't have any interest in breaking new ground and you can pretty much guess how this story plays out. What you do have is a movie that is so wonderfully endearing and good-hearted that you can't help but be taken in and captivated. The cast is completely likable and has you cheering them on to succeed and come out on top.
The film is beautifully shot and the details on the screen are rich and colorful. The other thing that makes this film work so well is the comedy, mostly physical and often visually hilarious. Swing Girls is a winner all around, and it's a nice break from much of the considerably darker material that's out there in Japanese cinema.
Of course if you're going to have a movie with a band, you need music, and that's where the film really gets impressive. Director Shinobu Yaguchi is well-known for his commitment to realism and accuracy in his films. All of his movies are preceded with through research and training where needed.
Every single girl in this film actually learned to play the instruments they used in the film, and by time the movie was finished, they were a true swing band in every sense of the word. When the Swing Girls perform in this film, every note you hear came from them.
This film was a such a huge hit in Japan, that the Swing Girls (and boy) were brought together to perform a few live concerts, which they delivered with the same joy and enthusiasm you see it the film. C'mon, how cool it that?
Trailer for Swing Girls here. A news story about the film here. More concert footage here!
