...I know, it's hard to believe, but I am not the first to use this pun.
I watched Napoleon Dynamite. I'd not watched it before because I was scared it was just clever-clever and had no heart. What previews I had seen had left me feeling like that, the enduring memory being that of I Napoleon drawing a "liger," half lion half tiger, and that being it, kind of.
Then various trusted friends' endorsements meant I finally got around to seeing it, and pretty soon I started worrying that, rather than having no heart, this was going to be a film almost too unbearably sad to watch.
I just can't deal with watching lonely people, it's absolutely the most heartbreaking thing. My top two one-timers (films I never ever want to watch again, I'd rather eat a frothy mixture of natto, yamakake, okra and little fishies) are Requiem for a Dream, not because of the druggies but because of old TV woman, and The Death of Mr Lazarescu, which, poster notwithstanding, is NOT a comedy. It is exactly what the title indicates, and it's fucking unrelenting and unbearable, although not quite as unbearable as the clueless socialite who decided it was appropriate and not at all offensively ignorant to inform the director at the London premiere that the state of Romania's post-Communist health-care is "just like the NHS." Hey, they still have gulags? I am sure they are "just like prison."
Napoleon comes across as so sad, lonely and clueless in the beginning I almost stopped watching. But just as I was debating whether to risk the trauma, the scope expanded and in the end, it's a positive and heartfelt film. It isn't shy to portray Napoleon as a possibly socially disabled, definitely socially awkward, boy; and while it doesn't really aim for realism per se, how it deals with the problems that arise from this is not altogether fanciful either. There is a point to the quirkiness, and a big, big heart at the middle of it all.
Spoilers will follow from hereon in so, you know, on your ass be it.
Sooo this is where I finally get to do a proper anthropology/cultural studies/GENDER post. Just watched Takeshi Beat/Kitano's 2002 film Dolls. It is really good. Beautiful storylines that do not so much interweave as compliment each other. A slow pace and minimal dialogue that nonetheless feel like not a second or frame is wasted or accidental. Lots of JAPAN! in there, and subtle JAPAN! It is JAPAN! that will make the uninitiated foreigner scream JAPAN! in a delighted manner, yet the initiated or native will find themselves guided gently down subtly different roads. Tropes such as the changes of seasons, honne (real feelings) versus tatemae (face) and filial piety are used, but rather than rely on them to move the plot forward, actions are given explanations that are more than merely cultural.
The cinematography is breathtaking and genuine. Bunraku, the traditional doll theater which frames the film, also provides the film's stunning colour scheme. More importantly, the colours here are true to the Japan I know: no matter how bright the maple leaves, there is always a sense of drab greyness abound:
This could be because of the overcastness that characterises Japan's skies so much of the time. Or it could be because of the huge slabs of concrete that show up all over Japan's beautiful countryside.
No matter how beautiful the scenery...
... Takeshi keeps our gaze focused on the ugly slabs placed two steps away.
He also gets props for using an actor who is actually disabled, rather than just sticking someone in a wheelchair. And for giving said actor the funniest line of the film: He somewhat negates this, however, by having a storyline in which a man obviously perfectly capable of seeing plays a blind guy. OK, this guy has to play the person both before and after he became blind, but really, wouldn't an actually blind person have been capable of doing this?
And this?
I accept that it would be a challenge for a blind person to play someone who can see. But I really resent the fact that it is not acknowledged that it is most likely just as hard to play someone who has a disability you don't have. I know, actors are actors, it's what they do, but having some physical impairment is different from having emotions, history or a personality different to yours. It is a profoundly different reality and life.
And it is straight up inexcusable when, as in Yama no Anata - Tokuichi no Koi (You of the Mountains - Love in Tokuichi Town), a remake of a 1930s film that premiered Saturday and stars a SMAPper (in this case, Kusanagi-kun), not only does a seeing person play someone who is blind, but does so in the totally over-the-top, ridiculous and frankly offensive way of the original, in order to "stay true" in a profoundly pointless frame-by-frame recreation to what was, by all indications, a throwaway flick even in its day:
I mean, people did plenty of things in films in the thirties, blacking up, for example. It's not cute or acceptable to recreate this shit. Although as Sarah pointed out recently, Japanese people seem to enjoy indulging in BOTH:
I was going to talk about the dubious gender roles in the film, too, but I somehow seem to have lost the will. Doesn't matter. Go read that post of Sarah's that I linked to, it says it better than I could anyway.
