Jiro Dreams of Sushi

[NOTE: In this entry, I’m going to make some generalizations about Japanese culture.  I spend a fair amount of time in Japan and believe that I’ve learned enough to get away with this.  I am, however, an outsider and always will be.  I could very well be dead wrong.]

Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a documentary by David Gelb, is about a man who may be the world’s greatest sushi chef.  More, it’s an examination of what makes Japanese so culture so wonderful and so constricting.

In Western culture, we revere the concept of the Renaissance Man, the well-rounded individual.  In Japanese culture, they revere the expert, the man who devotes his life to one thing and, with a Zen-like focus, does that thing as well as it can be done.  Jiro Ono is such a man.  82 years old, he first apprenticed in a sushi restaurant at the age of 9.  He works nearly every day, literally dreams of fabulous new sushi at night, and owns a restaurant that serves $300 meals and boasts a 3-star Michelin rating (the highest possible).  His elder son is his #2 and will, one day, take over the restaurant.  His younger son owns a branch in a different part of town.  They are gifted sushi chefs in their own right.

That focus, that lifelong drive for perfection in one thing, has made relatively tiny Japan a world leader in science, culture, and industry.  It has also led to an incredibly restrictive, hierarchical Japanese culture in which Jiro’s sons, regardless of their ability and effort, will never be regarded as the equals of their father.  The best that they can hope for is to achieve the rank of “not-disappointments,” and one of Jiro Dreams of Sushi’s triumphs is its ability to share with us their pride in their own achievements and their knowledge that, no matter what, they’ll never quite measure up to the Old Man.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi gives us all this, taking us inside these people’s world from a culinary, technical, and personal perspective.  It does so with an empathetic, engaged touch and a respect for its subjects.  While I lack the palate to justify a $300 sushi dinner, I came away from this film with a profound respect for those who do and for those who can prepare food that’s worth the price.  Jiro Dreams of Sushi succeeds as a personal and professional exploration of perfection, and I found it entrancing.  This is one of the best films I saw in 2012.

Bill Cunningham New York

Brilliant writer and great guy Les Phillips turned me on to Bill Cunningham New York, a film I otherwise wouldn't have seen, with this review.  I loved it, and I think you deserve a chance to have him talk you into seeing, it too.  With Les's permission, here's his review.

BILL CUNNINGHAM NEW YORK (2011, directed by Richard Press).  The legendary photographer and dancer Editta Sherman, well into her nineties but quite frisky and saucy, looks straight at the camera:  "You want me to say something about Bill?"  There are many things to say about Bill, who is one of the most celebrated fashion photographers in the world.  Bill Cunningham goes to all the New York fashion shows and takes pictures; he goes to all the most important charity events in New York and takes pictures; but, very especially, he takes pictures of random women on the street.  I should not say "random" women; Bill prowls Manhattan looking for well dressed women, fashionable women in all modes of fashion, sometimes leaping off his bicycle and into a broken run, through Fifth Avenue traffic, to capture that perfect woman in her perfect clothes. 

Bill Cunningham is 82 years old, and his photographs have appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES forever and ever.  He is trim and energetic, and he has the face of a slightly mischievous 12-year-old -- full of joy verging on ecstasy, pure delight at his work, which he does all day and all evening. all the time.  For years he has traveled to Paris to photograph the new collections.  He says that he goes to Paris "to re-educate the eye." Bill is a Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres!  He was the only member of the working press invited to Brooke Astor's 100th birthday party.  We see Anna Wintour, the real one, describing him as one of the most important people in the entire fashion industry.  Certainly he must be the least pretentious person in the fashion industry.  Until recently, he lived in a one-room studio over Carnegie Hall, no kitchen, no room to turn around, bathroom in the hallway.  ("What would I do with a bathroom or a kitchen?  I've never eaten in in my whole life!  More rooms to clean!").  His residence is crammed with filing cabinets and more filing cabinets; they contain the negatives of every photograph he has ever taken.  Cunningham has no wardrobe of his own to speak of, and no time for restaurant meals, in New York or Paris either; that would be time not spent working.  He loves stylish and beautiful people because they are stylish and beautiful, but is entirely unimpressed with celebrity itself; he passed up opportunities to photograph Marilyn Monroe and Joan Crawford because "they were not stylish."  He loves the philanthropist Mercedes Bass because he thinks she's kind, and because "in that dress, she looks like a John Singer Sargent portrait."  So Bill photographs her, and, indeed, when he's done, she sure does look like a John Singer Sargent portrait. 

Back to Editta Sherman, who lived down the hall from Cunningham for 40 years, in her own Carnegie Hall studio.  "Some people say I'm a legend," says Sherman.  "Other people say I'm a fixture.  I'm both!"  She talks about Warhol and Leonard Bernstein and the many other famous people she's photographed and worked with.  She worries about Bill.  What does she know about Bill Cunningham's personal life?  "Nothing!"   Bill himself reveals only that he's had no romantic relationships because he's been busy working, and casually brushes away questions about his sexuality.  When asked about his religious beliefs, he becomes uncommonly silent and closed, looks at the table, and mutters something about how Catholicism has always been of deep importance. Bill Cunningham goes to Mass every Sunday morning. 

Bill Cunningham's bicycle is a Schwinn Classic.  It's his 29th Schwinn Classic bicycle; the other 28 were stolen.  He dropped out of Harvard.  He used to design shoes.  He runs through city traffic like a war photographer.  Bill may have met more fabulously rich people than anyone living; he says that "money is the cheapest thing, the least important thing; freedom is what's expensive."  Go see this marvelous film.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work

“White.  All this white.  This is what Hell looks like.”   Joan Rivers pages through an empty appointment book.  Comics’ careers run hot and cold, and Joan’s been on a cold streak for some time.  Yes, she still lives in high style.  Yes, she can still fill a casino theater in South Dakota.  And yes, she’s still wickedly funny.  But, says Joan, “A career in the entertainment industry is a career in the rejection industry.”  Joan soldiers on, but the rejections are piling up.

And so goes Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, a sojourn in the life of a performer who loves her craft and is so good at it that she can’t stop just because bookings are low.  Yes, she needs to earn enough to maintain her lifestyle.  However, there appears to be no Joan Rivers other than the Joan Rivers who’s either writing jokes or reviewing jokes or producing or performing or doing something to keep her in the public eye, to tell her that she’s loved.  She knows she went to far with the surgery and she knows that some consider her a relic.  Yet, George Burns performed well into his nineties.  Joan would consider that a pretty nice life.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work pulls us into Joan’s world and gets us to see past the surgery into the heart of a workhorse.  Laugh-out-loud funny, it records failures and successes both, while giving us a retrospective of Rivers’s career as a groundbreaking comic who walked away from her anointed position as Johnny Carson’s successor and who, in some ways, never recovered from that decision.  It’s engaging and fascinating.  It makes me want to see her perform in concert.  It turned me into a fan of Joan Rivers.

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

There is such a thing as competitive vintage video gaming. There are adults, people with businesses and families, who spend enormous amounts of time pursuing world records in games like Frogger, Q*Bert, Joust, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong. These people have their own subculture, and their subculture has an evil king. THE KING OF KONG: A FISTFUL OF QUARTERS is a documentary about a hapless schmuck who decides that there's gotta be something he can succeed in, makes becoming the Donkey Kong champion that one thing, blunders into this subculture, and takes on the king.

It's phenomenal.

THE KING OF KONG has everything one could want in a movie: heroes, villains, partisans on both sides, romantic tension, and a structure so perfect one wonders if parts of it were scripted. As Steve Wiebe pursues his quest to finally win at something, we get wrapped up in it with him even as we see the toll it takes on his family. As Billy Mitchell and his minions try one ploy after another to protect his title, we boo and hiss even as we marvel at the fact that such an obvious slimeball can actually succeed in the wider world. Who knew that watching a pixellated plumber climb up a ladder could generate so much drama?

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

I didn't follow the Enron disaster too closely. It was a busy time in my life, and I was concentrating on keeping my family afloat. I did, however, have a general understanding of the magnitude of the crimes committed by the top echelon of Enron's leadership and a general feeling that they were getting off a lot lighter than the poor schlub who steals $20 from the local 7-11. I never really bothered to go back and look into the story until a trusted cousin of mine (an executive, himself)) strongly recommended that I give this movie a look.

Wow. What a shocking, well-made movie. As it turns out, the criminals at Enron weren't just the top three or four guys. There was widespread criminality throughout the company's trading floor, an entire corporate culture of "me first and screw the country" at work there. _Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room_ takes inside the company through interviews and archival footage, and it raises real questions about how to balance the freedoms necessary for capitalism to work while ensuring that those involved in the actual workings of capitalism stay on the straight and narrow.

Sure, the movie spends some unnecessary time on the salacious. Did I really need to know about one exec's stripper fetish, complete with gratuitous nudie footage? I mean, c'mon - I was watching this movie in an airport lounge! Nevertheless, _Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room_ entertains and compels. It is one fine documentary.

The Corporation

THE CORPORATION is, indeed, a film by true believers for true believers. The problem is, I'm not entirely sure what these true believers believe in.

THE CORPORATION asks the question, "If a corporation is a legal person, what kind of person would it be?" The answer: "A psychopath." And, y'know, that's fine. State your thesis, make your argument, and have at you. But the movie's all over the place. One moment it's on about corporations in particular, then capitalism in general, then American consumer culture, then environmentalism, et cetera ad infitum. For authorities, the film gives us people like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky, which sends a very clear message to the observer: if you don't trust these guys, this film isn't even trying to talk to you.

As a film, THE CORPORATION is basically a power point presentation with moving slides. The problem is, these visuals add nothing to the presentation, instead merely giving us something to look at while people read to us. If the purpose of this documentary is to inform or persuade, it succeeds only in boring the skeptical audience and leaving that audiencee unmoved. While watching THE CORPORATION, I felt like turning it off and just finding the bulletized summary somewhere on the Internet. It would have served the same purpose and saved me some time (But hey, I saw it on the Metro, and it's not like I had anything else to do.).

Had I done so, however, I'm still not sure I would have reaped a clear picture of where THE CORPORATION is coming from. What does it want? A global economy run by the same people who run the DMV? A transition to the pastoral existence of urban fantasy? Just to hit all the right talking points so maybe it can score with that cute hippie chick?

I don't know and, frankly, I don't care. THE CORPORATION fails as an invective, it fails as an entertainment, it fails as a film. This one is for punch-drinkers only.

The Aristocrats

Here's something you probably don't know about me: I have an incredibly vulgar sense of humor. When I'm hanging out in a ready room, I'll go lower faster than anyone there. The "Oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-he-just-said-that" laugh is a cheap laugh, but I'll take it any time.

In other words, THE ARISTOCRATS was right up my alley. For its first hour or so, the movie had me going from chuckling to guffawing to weeping to back again with hardly a letup. Then the movie made a fatal mistake: it gave us Kevin Pollack telling the joke as Christopher Walken, a performance so brilliant that no one - no one - could possibly follow it. By climaxing too early, the movie left me rather disinterested for the remainder.

But I was ready to watch it again five minutes after that.

PS One major disappointment: THE ARISTOCRATS gives us Shelley Berman (my favorite comedian) talking about the joke, but never actually telling the joke. I would've loved to have seen his take!

PPS My wife left the room after twenty minutes, so YMMV. I don't tell her ready room jokes, either.

PPPS Sarah Silverman: I don't get it. Who's Joe Franklin?

Grizzly Man

I'm trying to decide whether GRIZZLY MAN is a very good movie or a downright brilliant one.

The photography alone is very good; Herzog's calling our attention to the photography is brilliant. The insights into Timothy Treadwell are very good; Herzog's editing of Treadwell's soliloquoys is brilliant. The film's balancing on the thin line between fascination and morbid voyeurism is very good; Herzog's occasional steps across the line are brilliant.

GRIZZLY MAN is a collaboration between Herzog and a dead man, a dead man who left hundreds of hours of (mostly self-shot) footage behind. Timothy Treadwell, Herzog's collaborator and the titular Grizzly Man, is disturbed, sympathetic, angry, profoundly innocent, and absolutely in love with Nature. Treadwell's the kind of guy who would've loved MARCH OF THE PENGUINS. He anthropomorphizes bears, foxes, even Alaska, seeming to believe that if he just loves them enough, they'll love him back. But bears are bears and nature doesn't love him back. It's a lesson Herzog understands but Treadwell may never have learned.

GRIZZLY MAN'S power comes from the juxtaposition of Treadwell's innocence, Herzog's wisdom, and the stupendous beauty of Alaska and the grizzlies Treadwell was foolish enough to try to befriend. Because Treadwell was a fool, he shot footage of these bears unlike anything I've ever seen. He got right up next to them. He talked to them, scolded them, even swam with them. He seemed to make something of a pet of a local fox. He lived his dream, right up until he (and his apprehensive girlfriend) died in a grizzly's hungry maw. Amazingly, Treadwell's camera was running (lens cap on) at the time of his death, and Herzog shot some oblique footage of himself listening to the couple's final minutes. In the end, Herzog doesn't share those minutes with us. Instead, he advises the keeper of the tape to destroy it, as it's simply to horrible to own. It's better to remember Treadwell as he was: innocent, foolish, and enveloped in beauty.

And it's that beauty I'll remember long after I've forgotten Treadwell's name. Thank you for a brilliant movie, gentlemen.

An Inconvenient Truth

If you like watching people preach to the converted, you'll love AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH. Al Gore, at his pedantic, self-satisfied best, delivers his well-honed global warming presentation to an audience that hangs on his every word. Gore's presentation combines data, images, and even a Matt Groening video in its efforts to convince -well, by the looks of things, people who need no convincing. He uses straw man arguments to dismiss "critics" (You can practically see the quotation marks he puts around the word.), he milks the current administration for easy laughs (not that that's hard to do), and he generally plays to his base.

This is fine, particularly if you're his base, but then the movie can't help but get us into Gore's personal life, or at least whichever aspects of his personal life he chooses to exploit for the purposes of the film. There are plenty of shots of Apple board member Gore working with determination at his Apple computer, looking pensively into his Apple computer, and just generally promoting the Apple brand. There's Gore sitting down with "cutting edge," as he describes them, (fully vetted) representatives of the PRC, home of some of the world's most polluted cities, talking about their solutions. There's Gore navigating the backstage labyrinth, causing me to hope, for just a moment, that he'd stop and ask someone for directions. Oh, it was horrible.

If I had to boil AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH down to just one word, that word would be "Insufferable." I went into this movie feeling neutral about Gore and generally sympathetic toward his cause. I came out of it actively disliking the man and neutral toward his cause. This film's success is a mystery to me.

Seven Up / 7 Plus Seven

With the highly lauded release of the latest iteration in Michael Apted's "Up" series, 49 UP, generating attention around the world, I figured it was time that I invested some hours into this remarkable project.

SEVEN UP and 7 PLUS SEVEN represent the first two editions in the documentary series that revisits a group of British kids at regular intervals and monitors their progress. These first two documentary films were not, sadly, particularly interesting. (This just in: bright-eyed children often turn into sullen adolescents.) While watching them, I felt like I was laying the groundwork for the good things that are heralded to come: kind of like plowing through the first several chapters of a Victorian novel in the knowledge that things will speed up and come together as the story goes on.

So ... not an auspicious beginning to the series, but I have high hopes. We'll see what 21 UP has to tell us.

Red Trousers

You may remember Robin Shou from MORTAL KOMBAT, a fun-filled cheesefest from the mid-'90s. He played Liu Kang, the hero, and his skill at stuntwork was eclipsed only by his consistently great hair.

Well, Shou still has great hair, and he's still deeply involved in the stuntman's craft. With RED TROUSERS, he has directed a documentary about the lives of Hong Kong stuntmen, their roots in Chinese Opera, and the challenges they face as they ply their craft. It's an interesting film with the requisite number of talking heads and archival clips, but what makes it really fun is its use of a terrible movie-within-the-movie to illustrate how the sweat and pain of stuntwork delivers delivers those sequences that make the audience go, "Ooof! That's gotta hurt!" Will the general viewer find RED TROUSERS particularly engaging? Probably not, but fans of Hong Kong action pictures might want to give it a spin.

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

It's virtually impossible to get my child to sit still for a documentary, but he sat still for THE WILD PARROTS OF TELEGRAPH HILL. There's something fascinating about a guy whose entire life revolves around these little, displaced creatures.

PARROTS is about a flock of birds that somehow got loose in San Francisco and have managed to create a self-sustaining, er, flock in an environment that many folks think is too inhospitable for them. It's also about the guy who cares for them, sort've an SF version of The Dude who, almost by accident, has turned himself into one of the world's authorities on parrot behavior. You see, explains an ornithologist at the San Francisco Zoo, it's virtually impossible to observe parrots in the jungle, so The SF Dude is in a unique position to add to the world's body of knowledge on this particular subject.

It's interesting stuff, and it doesn't fall prey to the temptation to anthropomorphize the birds. They are what they are, and the SF Dude appreciates them for that. Through him, we come to do the same. It worked for my boy, and it worked for me.