Rehash

Alien: Romulus (2024) - Alvarez Quick thoughts after viewing:

-Rehash of the first from the set design to plotpoints. But not as good or as effective. It gets grimyness right but nothing really memorable.

-The cast is too young. It feels like kids playing dressup.

-Facehuggers are rubbery. The first Alien came out 47 years ago and it has more realistic looking practical effects? How?

-Xenomorphs not menacing or scary enough.

-What they did to Ian Holm is a travesty

-Thoroughly PG-13

-I never thought I'd say this but I miss Ridley Scott. However trashy and incomprehensible Prometheus and Covenant were, they were superb entertainment.

Luminations

Afterglows (2023) - Kimura A Tokyo cap driver, Morishima (Kentez Asaka) lost his wife Sayuri (Megumi), an accomplished pop singer, to suicide. It's his obsessive spying that pushed her to end her life. Afterglows is about him processing his guilt while driving around Tokyo, mostly at night shot in contrasty black and white with glowing soft lit Tokyo skyline. The film is beautiful to look at, even inappropriately so. Things take a turn when he picks up a passenger who looks exactly like Sayuri. His obsession, believing his wife is still not dead, starts again as he stalks the woman. Morishima is confronted with his wrongdoing by a sly journalist who befriends him at a small late night eatery.

First time director Taichi Kimura creates a dreamy landscape where you don't exactly know if it's afterlife/purgatory or the protagonist's imaginings. Don't matter - empty Tokyo at night has never been more beautiful.

Hong Kong Mon Amour

2046 (2005) - Wong There is a train that goes to a place called 2046, a place trapped in memory, at least for characters in Wong Kar-Wai's filmography. Also the year 2046 is the eve of Hong Kong's supposed return to the control of mainland China. The end of an era marking the 50 years of self-governing after British Handover in 1997. Memories are nothing but trails of tears, the title card says. Once you get to 2046, you can't escape from it. So starts WKW's a sort of sequel to Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love.

Mr. Chow (Tony Leung), the same man who had a platonic relationship in In the Mood for Love and cultivated his gigolo status at the end of Days of Being Wild, is a hack writer for a newspaper in 60s Hong Kong. The film, in nonlinear fashion, traces his many encounters with various female characters who tread his pad, room 2047, in Hotel Oriental. The film is an observation of a gigolo from his room the goings on in the room next door 2046. Su Li-Zhen from in the mood for love, played by Maggie Cheung, is now played by Gong Li and Zhang Ziyi, with Cheung making a brief appearance as a memory/dream. Faye Wong of Chunking Express also makes an appearance as the hotel manager's daughter who is in love with a Japanese man (Takuya Kimura).

2046, like most of Wong's films, is about unrequited love and yearning. Chow, who is incapable of emotional attachment, is the only one who can observe the love's fickle nature objectively. He even creates science fiction to exemplify the unanswerable nature of love - the train to 2046 is attended by fembots that passengers shouldn't fall in love with. In 2046, everyone is a reminder of lost love or what would have been. Time and timing are the enemies.

In true WKW fashion, 2046 took 4 years to make, with three different DP attached. But it's stunning. Gorgeous costumes and beautiful actors unhurriedly go in and out of tightly held frames. Chow gets to consummate with Su Li-Zhen, who is now a high-priced call girl. Zhang Ziyi is at the height of her youth and beauty and thrives in Wong's astute melodrama. But again, I'm Chunking Express/Fallen Angels/Happy Together Wong fan, not In the Mood for Love fan. I find this revisit to the film since its initial release, overlong and tedious. If 2046 is a lamentation of a bygone era and a specific place, Wong has a funny way of (not) showing the place except for some heavily CGI shot of the neon landscape.

I rewatched Fallen Angels just before 2046 and the contrast can't be more obvious. It was his humor, light touch and Chris Doyle's handheld, intimate photography that made his 90s films so iconic. 2046 is more of an idea of the lamentation of a place that gave Wong much freedom to capture the place's spontaneity and vibrance. And the film marks the end of WKW supremacy.

Live Life Truthfully

A Traveler's Needs (2024) - Hong It is hard to quantify Hong's films, and I am not talking about him making two or three films of the year as he has been for the last decade or so. It's not that what Hong does need to be measured by the likes of me, but as someone who watched vast swaths of his films, with my ADHD triggered rating system toward a director's filmography going, I can't help myself ranking which of his films are better, more impactful than others in my head. and I am happy to say that A Traveler's Needs, his new film starring indomitable Isabelle Huppert, is one of his best films.

A Traveler's Needs concerns Iris (Huppert), a French woman living in Korea. She started giving French lessons to two Korean women recently. Her method seems interesting: she writes down a custom-made phrase on wads of index cards she carries in her bag for each person she is tutoring. Eager to please the foreign woman, Korean women play musical instruments in front of her. She asks each of them how they feel when they play. And they both in turn give generic answers which turn out to be identical. Iris pushes harder - but how do you really feel? Then she writes down her French phrases for them.

All the Hong signatures are present - a subtle comedy based on repetition, copious amounts of alcohol consumption - in this film, the choice is Makguli, a milky Korean rice wine.

The third act concerns a young man, Seong-guk who shares his flat with Iris. It turns out that he met her in a park, sitting there alone, playing a flute badly without a care in the world. It is revealed that she didn't have any means for living, so he suggested tutoring French which she has no prior experience in. Seong-guk's estranged mom stops by unexpectedly and chastises her son for living with some foreign woman. He explains that Iris lives her life truthfully. Mom wants him to ask her about her background. She doesn't want this mysterious foreign woman taking her naive son for a ride.

A Traveler's Needs have much in common with Wim Wenders's Perfect Days. These protagonists are people of very limited means and ambitions. They just float around living life as truthfully as they can. Never looking backwards but always forward. There's some sort of universality here - Wenders directing in Japan seeing the world through the eyes of Koji Yakusho and Hong directing and seeing the world through Huppert's eyes. Gentle, living by the moment, enjoying the surroundings - nature, sleeping, drinking, small human interactions.

I see that Iris can be the continuation of a character Huppert played in Mia Hansen-Løve's L'avenir/Things to Come (2016), a professor losing her job and marriage, trying to find the footing in the world for the first time in a long time as an aging woman. It is not difficult to imagine her character taking off to some foreign land and keep on living like that.

Huppert is marvelous as Iris. The best scene is perhaps her flirting with Kwon Hye-ho's character: obviously there's an attraction between them. She touches him on the shoulder and winks at him, then giggles like a schoolgirl. He is spellbound obviously.

A Traveler's Needs is up there in Hong canon and one of my favorite films of the year for sure. Here is my review for Things to Come

A Case Against Capital Punishment and Institutional Racism

Death by Hanging (1968) - Oshima Nagisa Oshima's resolute condemnation of capital punishment and institutional racism is laid out in Death by Hanging, based on a real life case of Ri Chin'u, an ethnic Korean who murdered 2 Japanese school girls in 1958. The film concerns the botched execution of a young ethnic Korean man, known only as R (Yung-do Yoon) where he doesn't die from hanging and losing his memories and Japanese state officials' attempt to make him realize his crimes again, as they can't execute a man who doesn't recognize his guilt. In the process of proving R his guilt, the film exposes the state violence and Japanese colonialist past and asks pointed questions where executioners themselves are guilty and whether they have the authority to kill the accused.

After the hanging and R survives, the officials, consisting of a military general, a catholic priest, an education officer, a hangman, a prosecutor, debate the legality of attempting another execution. To their displeasure, R became conscious but doesn't remember who he is or what he has done. In order to execute him again, they have to make R conscious of his guilt. In a series of bizarre and darkly comical reenactments by themselves, the film becomes a Brechtian experimental theater, first within the confines of a staged death chamber where hanging takes place which Oshima narrates in detail in the beginning like a documentarian. After several failed attempts to get R recognize his crimes and him being Korean living in Japan as ethnic minority, the officials have to delve into his ethnicity and background, thus digging up the dreadful conditions of the lives of ethnic minorities living under the institutionalized racism day in and day out. Their grotesque caricatures of Koreans are carried out in reenactment and their superiority complex as colonizers is pronounced.

R's sister (played by Oshima's wife, Akiko Koyama) manifests in front of the officials, who one by one sees her, as she tries to convince R as a nationalistic communist of North Korea, but fails to convince him. She ends up being hanged by the officials. R finally accepts being himself but refuses to acknowledge his crimes because the murderous imperial Japanese power has no legitimacy to impose capital punishment on anyone. The prosecutor finally tells him that if he doesn't feel guilty of his crime, he can leave. Upon opening the door, the bright light from outside overtakes R and he realizes he has no prospects in Japanese society as an ethnic Korean and chooses to be hanged the second time.

Death by Hanging is a complex film, questioning the legitimacy of capital punishment, especially by Japanese government considering all the atrocities committed during the war and occupation of much of the South East Asia, Osmhima, a long time advocate of rights of ethnic Koreans living in Japan, is unafraid of exposing the hypocrisy of the state.

Yakuza vs Teens

P.P. Rider (1983) - Somai Considered to be Shinji Somai's first masterpiece, the freewheelin, madcap coming-of-age tale by way of combating authorities - teachers, cops, yakuza is an unruly, wild ride, taking place in sweltering summer heat when the school's out. Three high schoolers - Jojo, Bruce and Jisho witness the kidnapping of a fat, bully schoolmate in the school yard and even though they don't like him, they decide to track down the kidnappers. It's the summer vacation and anything is possible. It's that manic energy of youth Somai is tapping on and P.P. Rider is nothing if not that forward momentum from the beginning, long tracking shot (supposedly used 3 cranes to manage) to the very end. On the trio's journey (one girl named Bruce, and two boys), they meet many characters - cops, a druggy yakuza named Nobody (Gombei), played by Tatsuya Fuji (In the Realm of the Senses), and their school teacher who decides to help them out, perhaps infected by her student's youthful exuberance and more.

Getting the fatso back is not really the main point of P.P. Rider. The chaos is. The world outside school is truly a dangerous place - they get beat up, get shot at constantly, offered drugs left and right, and have to face a lot of physical hurdles on the way. Nothing really fazes them. They sing, dance, exchange their clothes and appearances and shoot their way through the obstacles.

The physicality of the film is astounding. The trio constantly climbs up and down grimy concrete walls and barbed wires: the prolonged chase scene at the lumber yard near the harbor where they jump from a floating log to log and constantly falling into water. I really do not know how Somai and team achieved that. It's much less coherent and compact than his later masterpieces like Typhoon Club and Moving. But it's P.P. Rider's unkempt, daring attempt at capturing the manic exuberance of youth that is commendable.

The Lost Generation

Sway (2006) - Nishikawa Miwa Nishikawa (Dear Doctor, Under the Open Sky), a pupil of the great Hirokazu Kore-eda, proves herself to be a fine writer and director in her debut feature with Sway. One could make a comparison between Sway and Rysuke Hamaguchi's recent Evil Does Not Exist. But while I find the city/country dichotomy a little unsubtle and naive in Hamaguchi's latest, Sway examines it with much more nuance.

Takeru Hayakawa (Joe Odagiri), a hip photographer in Tokyo, goes back to a small rural town to attend his mom's funeral. He confronts his gas station owning father and his older brother Minoru (great character actor Teruyuki Kagawa). It seems Takeru was the one who got away from drabby small town living and Minoru, always a mediator, remained and has been taking care of things, like working at the gas station. There is Chieko (Yoko Maki), a childhood sweetheart, who now works for the gas station too - after the economic downturn cost her her job, a couple of years prior. It is also clear that Minoru has feelings for her. After the funeral and all the blame game and awkward exchanges, Takeru and Chieko spend the night together. There are a lot of unsaid yearnings in her looks toward Takeru which he is oblivious to or doesn't care enough about. He just wants to get back to his life in Tokyo. Next day, by the urging of Minoru, the three of them go to the picturesque gorge with a swaying drawbridge across. It's the Hayakawa family picnic spot which their father often took the brothers to when they were young. After a confrontation on the draw bridge between Minoru and Chieko, she falls to the water and drowns. The rest of the movie is mostly a courtroom drama where the family dynamics were examined.

The film presents the deep chasm that can't be bridged between the generations in Japanese society amid the crippling economic downturn. Minoru's confession to the cops, originates from the mixture of envy, humiliation and resignation for meaningless life in the boring rural life as a gas station attendant, still living under the old school patriarchy. But Nishikawa shows that his envy of Takeru's success in the city is also misplaced, since Takeru's life is just as meaningless in superficial surroundings - a cool vintage car, a leather jacket, lots of one night stands. Nishikawa makes a subtle point to have Takeru's car break down near the end of the movie.

Nishikawa presents a snapshot of a Japanese society in mid-2000: one escapes the old school patriarchy to a meaningless life in superficiality. The other, full of envy and resentment, still trying to appease the old generation and living in a self-imposed prison. Odagiri and Kagawa are both terrific in their roles.