After Life

After Life is unlike any movie I’d ever seen before.  Watching it suffused me with happiness, and I’m taking a lesson from it.

The film, by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda, is set in a way station between this life and the next.  The souls of the newly-dead file in to a reception area, give their names, and take seats in a waiting room.  When called, a friendly and efficient counselor tells them they’ll be staying at the way station (which looks an awful lot like a college dormitory the production company rented) for five days.  They’ll have three days to review their lives and choose one memory they’d like to carry into the next world.  On the fourth day, the staff will recreate that memory and film it.  On the fifth, the souls will see their films and depart, off to spend the rest of eternity in moments of their choosing.  The staff, it seems, gets one day off and one day to prep for the next batch.

The counsellors are kind and patient.  One helps a teenager dig more deeply after the latter goes with a trip to Disneyland, presumably the first thing that popped into her mind.  Another helps a man who argues that life is pain and best forgotten.  This is a narrative film, so there is a plot, but the plot seems beside the point.

The point, I think, is to inspire viewers to browse their own memories as they ask themselves which one they’d take with them.  The effect: roughly ninety minutes of reviewing one’s personal highlight reel.  While watching this film, I found myself beginning at my earliest memories and reliving those moments in which I felt the most loved, or in love, or triumphant, or elated, or joyous, or content.  Whenever I thought I’d settled on an answer, another memory would crowd in to take its place.

This was a powerful experience. 

I tend not to dwell on the past.  When I see old friends, I steer the conversation away from reminiscence.  When people refer to some shared experience from long ago, I often smile and nod, having forgotten the moment to which they’re referring.  I didn’t have a particularly traumatic childhood.  I’m just more interested in what’s happening right now.

This film, however, taught me that my past is a rich trove of memories, one worthy of attention and reflection.  It reminded me how very fortunate I am to love and be loved, to be an adventurer, to have achieved some modicum of professional success and fulfillment.

This film taught me to look back and choose what matters.  And if the end came right now, the choice would be clear.  My most cherished memory may seem mundane, but it’s precious to me: hanging out on the couch with my wife and children, doing nothing in particular, living in love.

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.

King Kong Escapes

Oh, King Kong Escapes is absolutely horrible.  It features gratingly bad American actors in critical roles, ugly monster design and story that feels like it was designed to put its audience to bed as quickly as possible.

Here’s the story: a “research submarine” commanded by a hunky American guy and crewed with a capable Japanese dude and a comely American woman with indeterminate responsibilities, goes to an island in the South Pacific.  Of course, it’s that island, and some pretty standard Kong-type stuff happens, including a fun little Kong-on-dino battle for the ship’s bimbo.  Kong gets captured, eventually, and there’s a battle with a Mecha-Kong that exists for no other reason than to give its inventor the rather amusing name of Doctor Hu.  The film winds up on the Empire State Building, for reasons I don’t entirely recall, the ship’s bimbo screams a lot.

But I didn’t care about Kong, or the bimbo, or He-Captain, or much of anything here.  King Kong Escapes conjures no sense of wonder, danger, or delight.  It gives us no characters of interest and does nothing to compel us to watch it all the way through.  It’s just bad.  Bad bad bad.  I wouldn’t even see it to mock it.  Neither should you. 

House

You have never seen a movie like House.  Director Nobuhiko Obayashi made sure of it.

It was the early ‘70s and Jaws had just hit.  Toho studios, looking to capitalize on the horror market, asked commercial director Obayashi for a script.  Obayashi thought, ‘If Jaws is a success, what’s next?  Movies about bear attacks and bee attacks and ant attacks.  How boring.’  He talked over the project with his ten year old daughter, talked about what scared her.  He wrote down her ideas as scenarios including mummies, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, hungry pianos, murderous reflections, demonic cats ,and much more.  He gave the scenarios to his writing partner and told him to have at it.  The result?  A film that processes a little girl’s night terrors through the sensibilities of the men who made the classic Charles Bronson “Mandom” commercials.

The result is a bold, creepy, and funny horror fantasy.  It gathers seven young women whom the camera will love, fetishisize, and terrorize in combinations that’ll alternately make you smile, squirm, recoil, and guffaw.  It sends them to a spooky house on a hill.  It introduces them to a friendly old woman who may not be friendly at all.  Before long, the flying head of a decapitated Japanese girl will take a bite out of the rear end of one of her former classmates.  And away we go.

Ok, so far so good.  But you’ve seen Sam Raimi pictures and you’ve seen early Peter Jackson flicks.  What makes House so very different?  Execution.  This horror fantasy luxuriates in the fantastic.  It uses every imaginable camera trick to focus the eye, to leap from image to image, and even to play within an image to give the impression of a story told by someone whose mind is racing through and among characters and events faster than she can get the words out.  House’s sets, including deliriously colorful matte paintings and generous helpings of cobwebs, heighten the sense of unreality.  Its use of color, music, and editing make it feel like it has so much story to tell, that it wants to pile on so many ideas, that it can’t squeeze them all into 90ish minutes of classical narrative film.

In other words, House stands as a delirious exercise in excessive, feverish, joyfully weird and innovative filmmaking.  It’s the most fun I’ve had at the movies since Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and I can’t wait to see it again.

And the second time through, I’ll still have never seen anything like it.