Ozu's Ohayo (Good Morning) (1959)

I have been totally digging Ozu's films lately. I found Early Spring to be a masterpiece and even slight misses (Equinox Flower)are very good.

Taken together, the films that Ozu made in the postwar period examine the changes in Japanese society through the lenses of industrial and postindustrial work, gender roles and marriage, lifestyles including houses and clothing, parent-child relations, food and the rise of the urban (and less urban) middle class.

Good Morning fits well into this tradition, most carefully examining an emerging middle class that buys appliances and spoils their increasingly assertive children even as stay-at-home mothers still dress in kimonos, fathers continue to be dictatorial and stern and parents resist the televisions that their children so crave. In this film, there is no question of miai or resistance to marriage for love; Ozu's Japan has evolved enough that it is assumed that the generation born in the 1930s will marry for love. It is also a world where English has become a an educational commodity that middle class parents acquire for their children.

Good morning is also helped by one of the world's cutest children. While this can be really annoying in many films, this particular little boy provides comic relief while emphasizing that the naughty behavior of the children is not just adolescent rebellion but a true change in how children respected (and disrespected) parents, grandparents and teachers. This is something that would have seen very familiar to parents in the 1959 audiences while it may have outraged Ozu's generation (the director was born in 1903).

Still, I never have the sense that Ozu is opposing change. Sometimes he just points it out; sometimes there is simultaneous nostalgia for the past and criticism of traditions. He seems to have been ambivalent in regards to his subjects. This film, for instance, is sympathetic and tender toward the misbehaving children even as it is not decisive on the subject of the television. Those who oppose the television are clearly seen as old-fashioned as they resist the inevitable, but they are also seen as kind of right in their fears of creating a generation of zombies.

I highly recommend this and all of Ozu's films.

Equinox Flower

Ozu is one of the more interesting directors to address the issues of urbanization and modernization. This film looks at young women in postwar Japan who want to break the cycle of miai and the traditions that try to call them back to it.

Ozu has an amazing sense of the urban landscape and the contrast between the modern and the traditional. This film has the added bonus of color, a feature which Ozu uses effectively in the 1950s Japanese home and as well as at the office. His obsession with the ways in which modern people work and the buildings that facilitate this work leads to shots that set the scenes for his films in ways that other directors neglect. In other words, Ozu understands that a simple shot of men washing windows on a skyscraper, a row of green chairs framed in suits, or a home decorated with a printed cotton table cloth and a Bakelite radio provide us with an understanding of the setting that is difficult to achieve through simple dialogue.

I often see Ozu's films as remarkably feminist in their critiques of a paternalistic society where married women are servants to their husbands, but I wonder if this is my interpretation from a half of a century down the road. At any rate, they clearly examine gender in a critical and insightful way.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is the feel-good film of late 2008 that is sweeping the awards season. The triumphant story of an uneducated man who manages through luck to win the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire?” in his quest to win a girl, it is bland, apolitical, and uncontroversial. There is very little that would challenge our comfort levels or open our hearts to any cause short of nodding at the poverty of Mumbai’s slums. In other words, it is everything that Milk and Wall-E are not: a happy story that can be taken at face value and makes almost no comment on the current state of the world. In a dark time for the economy and global warming and in the wake of a major setback for gay liberation in last year’s elections, the film allows is sublimely neutral.

That said, there is not much else going for Slumdog Millionaire. It is a fairly routine rags-to-riches story of tragedy and struggle. Director Danny Boyle is careful to show the audience pieces of violence and tragedy without the gruesome details that one would find in the Coen brothers version or the sex that almost any other director would include. There is also precious little intensity or character development. There is nothing artful or interesting about the cinematography and the yellow lighting in the torture scene is sickening not for its mood but for its triteness.

Still, Slumdog Millionaire is better than almost anything out there and a fun albeit mild bit of entertainment for a Saturday night.

Persepolis

Persepolis is yet another film that drags the audience through 13+ years of someone's life. That said, it is done in funny and interesting ways to the tune of some of the most interesting animation that I have seen.

The animation really is central to this film. The artwork depends on black to create the imagery and it is often amazingly creative or disturbing such as when it portrays people being blown to bits. This is not your mother's disney cartoon; be prepared to see things expressed that you thought impossible in a feature that happens to be animated.

O céu de Suely

After seeing O céu de Suely, a friend of mine declared, "This is Brazil." Another friend says the same thing about Bye Bye Brasil and I myself have gone so far as to say the same thing about O ano em que meus pais saíram de férias. In all three cases, I think we see films that don't exotify or objectify. Instead, they try to tell about life as it is and was, about changing societies and places where that change is truncated.

The friend who loved this film is, predictably, from a rural city, a place where the prostitutes do actually cost US$10 per trick and where there is almost no work and no way to get ahead if you do not start out with privilege. This friend's city is bigger than Suely's and thus has more opportunities, but the problems are the same, particularly for women. Tellingly, the same problems plague small towns in desolate areas throughout the world.

The story of Suely--the woman lured to the big city by love and ambition who returns to her home town only to discover that she cannot support herself and her child there--is not one of victimization so much as one of hope. From the outside, we feel bad for her and know that her future in the city where she still has no education and no job history on her work card is only slightly more hopeful than in the small town. Perhaps this is why Suely's belief in her ability to better herself is so touching and heartbreaking.

Milk

Milk is Sean Penn's film. In his role as the title character, Penn's performance is truly great; he is one of the few straight actors to "play gay" without going over the top or straying into stereotype. It is a careful and seamless performance that will be well-rewarded in the awards season.

That said, the film is not as great as Penn's performance. A typical biopic, it drags the audience around in Milk's life. Unfortunately, the presence of the writer's decisions is too present and the narrative decisions (both inclusions and exclusions) distract. There are also some points where the pace should be faster, particularly at the end when the film tries to build a dramatic tension for a finale that everyone expects. Perhaps the problem is that the writing in these parts seemed gratuitous and did not add to the events (as opposed to the King assassination in Talk to Me that was both heartbreaking and original even though this is one of the most storied events in recent history). Another problem was the writing of the supporting characters--both Diego Luna and Alison Pill suffer from parts that were terribly neglected and undeveloped. This is painfully obvious in the case of Luna's character who is hard to understand and perhaps should have been excluded if he wasn't going to be developed or understood. Furthermore, there is a curious dearth of drag queens in the Castro; although Milk's social circle did not include this population, the crowds should. I understand the desire not to cave to stereotypes, but the absence is unnerving.

Overall, totally worth seeing but not Van Sant's best.

Waitress

The best thing about Waitress is that it is essentially a movie about pie. Sometimes (particularly at the end) the pies were a little too florescent and it takes a non-cook to think that her chocolate would be cooked directly over the stove's flames instead of on a double boiler. Still, pie held an otherwise mediocre film together.

This is one of a string of 2007 films about unwanted pregnancies where the protagonists never consider abortions; in this one, the protagonist is lukewarm about the situation until the moment the baby is born, at which point she is delighted. The film is consistently too easy like this--wouldn't people have been concerned about her reaction (more than just giving her a baby book)? After the birth, wouldn't an asshole husband tried to control her via a custody battle? Is it too convenient that the prize for a pie contest is $25,000?

It is not that Waitress didn't provide some harmless entertainment; it did. Still, the plot was filled with holes and problematic elements that were too distracting to ignore.

Soshun (Early Spring)

This is one of the more ambivalent films that I have seen on modern life. Ozu's story of the "salary man" in postwar Tokyo addresses urbanization and gender without ever fully condemning modernity or older traditions such as miai or relations between men and women.

It is also a great film. The ambivalence works to keep the audience rapt in thoughtful interest as we question the demands that a husband makes on his wife and muse at his traditional (albeit chosen) home life and modern work and social life. Ozu also treats us to some breathtaking shots that could only be improved by a full-screen version of the DVD or a screening in a movie theater. Ozu proves that a character-driven urban drama can still feature excellent cinematography; perhaps modern filmmakers could learn from this.

I did not love the musical score and the timing of Sugiyama's transfer seems a bit unlikely, but this is generally on par with the very best films of the 1950s.

City of Men

Don't see it.

This film is a failed sequel to a miniseries that was rather captivating. In the film, however, the magic is gone as the writer stretches for a plot and the television style fails to convert to the big screen.

This was a total disappointment to anyone who didn't want the miniseries to end. Ultimately, they should have left well enough alone.