this week in film and television

JAPAN SINGS! THE JAPANESE MUSICAL FILM: THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

A Japanese family can’t escape strange deaths in THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS

THE HAPPINESS OF THE KATAKURIS (カタクリ家の幸福) (Takashi Miike, 2001)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, April 23, 7:00
Festival runs through April 23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

“Let’s forget any accidents by singing and dancing!” is the cry of the Katakuris, a seemingly cursed family in one of the craziest dark musical comedies you’re ever likely to see. Japanese genre king Takashi Miike, who has made more than 120 films in his twenty-five-year career, outdid himself in 2001’s The Happiness of the Katakuris, an endlessly inventive tale of a disaster-ridden clan that moves to the middle of nowhere to run a country inn, lured by a rumor that a railroad will be built nearby. Masao Katakuri (Kenji Sawada) is a laid-off department-store shoe salesman who has big dreams, supported by his devoted wife and former work colleague, Terue (Keiko Matsuzaka). Their daughter, Shizue (Naomi Nishida), is a divorced single mother who falls for suspicious navy officer Richard Sagawa (Kiyoshiro Imawano), while their son, Masayuki (Shinji Takeda), is a disgraced financier. Masao’s elderly father, Jinpei (Tetsurō Tamba), likes killing birds and playing with the family dog, Pochi. The film is narrated by Terue’s young daughter, Yurie (Tamaki Miyazaki), who is sharing her memories of one very bizarre summer. Desperate for paying customers at the bed and breakfast they have dubbed White Lovers, the family is excited when a guest finally arrives, but alas, he is there only to commit suicide. Afraid that news of his death would ruin any chances of success, the Katakuris decide to cover it up by burying the man and not reporting anything to the police. And when subsequent guests end up dead as well — in bizarre, ridiculous ways — there is no turning back.

Takashi Miike has a blast with crazy musical

Miike (Ichi The Killer, Audition, Thirteen Assassins) and screenwriter Kikumi Yamagishi (Miike’s Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai and Over Your Dead Body) masterfully mix comedy, romance, Claymation, music, murder, and mayhem in this enormously entertaining and highly original movie that is filled with a never-ending bag of surprises. Loosely based on Kim Jee-woon’s The Quiet Family, the film includes an adorably vicious animated angel-winged mini-monster, a quartet of Macbeth-like witch women, and odes to Psycho, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Sound of Music. Each musical set piece, choreographed by Ryohei Kondo of the Condors, is done in a different style, going from bright and funny to dark and sinister, but always with a firm tongue in cheek. There’s lots of red blood, blue skies, and green, green grass as this oddball extended family try to make a better life for themselves, but luck is certainly not on their side. The Happiness of the Katakuris is screening April 23 at 4:00 in Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film,” which concludes at 7:00 with another delightful offbeat musical, Memories of Matsuko.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: HERE ALONE

Ann (Lucy Walters) is struggling to survive a postapocalyptic nightmare in HERE ALONE

HERE ALONE (Rod Blackhurst, 2016)
Sunday, April 24, Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea 5, 9:45
tribecafilm.com
www.herealonefilm.com

Rod Blackhurst’s tense 2013 short film, Alone Time, in which a New York City woman named Ann (Rose Hemingway) heads upstate for a few days of camping by herself, was based on a true story. Fortunately, Blackhurst’s feature debut, Here Alone, is not. The gripping postapocalyptic thriller is set in what has become our standard vision of the near future, when a virus has decimated the world’s population, turning people into cannibalistic zombies. (Are there any other kind?) Ann (Lucy Walters) is doing her best to survive in the forest by herself, raiding nearby houses for canned food while evading the hungry walking dead. The film flashes back and forth between the present and the recent past, when Ann, her husband, Jason (Shane West), and their baby left their home to seek safety in the woods. Along the way, Jason taught Ann detailed survival methods, which she uses to the best of her ability. When she finds a teenage girl, Olivia (Gina Piersanti), and her injured stepfather, Chris (Adam David Thompson), in the middle of the road, she has to decide whether to help and trust them — while also facing haunting memories, as they remind her of the family she has lost — in a future that is uncertain for all of them. Director and editor Blackhurst, screenwriter David Ebeltoft, and cinematographer Adam McDaid (Ebeltoft cowrote Alone Time with Blackhurst, and McDaid photographed the short) have crafted a nifty little horror film, mining familiar genre territory but twisting conventions just enough to keep viewers on the edge of their seat. You can’t take your eyes off Walters (Shame, Power), who gives Ann a tough yet vulnerable quality, focusing on her troubled psyche, with Thompson (A Walk among the Tombstones, Mozart in the Jungle) and Piersanti (It Felt Like Love) keeping things right on the edge of comfort and chaos. Here Alone is screening in the Midnight section of the Tribeca Film Festival on April 24 at 9:45.

JAPAN SINGS! THE JAPANESE MUSICAL FILM: MEMORIES OF MATSUKO

Tetsuya Nakashima’s MEMORIES OF MATSUKO concludes Japan Society series focusing on the history of the Japanese musical

MEMORIES OF MATSUKO (Tetsuya Nakashima, 2006)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Saturday, April 23, 7:00
Festival runs through April 23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

We called Tetsuya Nakashima’s 2004 hit, Kamikaze Girls, the “otaku version of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amelie,” referring to it as “fresh,” “frenetic,” “fast-paced,” and “very funny.” His feature-length follow-up, the stunningly gorgeous Memories of Matsuko, also recalls Amelie and all those other adjectives, albeit with much more sadness. Miki Nakatani (Ring, Silk) stars as Matsuko, a sweet woman who spent her life just looking to be loved but instead found nothing but heartbreak, deception, and physical and emotional abuse. But Memories of Matsuko, is not a depressing melodrama, even if Nakashima (Confessions, The World of Kanako) incorporates touches of Douglas Sirk every now and again. The film is drenched in glorious Technicolor, often breaking out into bright and cheerful musical numbers straight out of a 1950s fantasy world. As the movie begins, Matsuko has been found murdered, and her long-estranged brother (Akira Emoto) has sent his son, Sho (Eita), who never knew she existed, to clean out her apartment. As Sho goes through the mess she left behind, the film flashes back to critical moments in Matsuko’s life — and he also meets some crazy characters in the present. It’s difficult rooting for the endearing Matsuko knowing what becomes of her, but Nakashima’s remarkable visual style will grab you and never let go. And like Audrey Tatou in Amelie, Nakatani — who won a host of Japanese acting awards for her outstanding performance — is just a marvel to watch. Memories of Matsuko is a fine choice to conclude Japan Society’s rather eclectic 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film.” As curator Michael Raine notes, “The ubiquity of music and song in postwar Japanese cinema became an anti-naturalist resource for modernist filmmakers to characterize social groups (Twilight Saloon, A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs), or to tweak contemporary debates in avant-garde music by combining Buddhist chant and naniwabushi with West Side Story (Oh, Bomb!). We can hear echoes of that irony even in more recent musical films (The Happiness of the Katakuris, Memories of Matsuko), in which the utopian musical numbers only accentuate the bleakness of the lives they comment on. Seeing and hearing the tradition of musical films in Japanese cinema gives us a different view of Japanese popular culture that is smart as well as silly and sometimes devastating, too.”

FASSBINDER’S TOP TEN: LOLA MONTÈS

Ringmaster Peter Ustinov promises “Rumour! Scandal! Passion!” in presenting story of Lola Montès (Martine Carol)

LOLA MONTÈS (Max Ophüls, 1955)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Sunday, April 24, 5:00
Series runs April 22-30
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

“And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” announces the monocled, whip-snapping Mammoth Circus ringmaster (Peter Ustinov) as Max Ophüls’s 1955 CinemaScope masterpiece, Lola Montès, begins. “The most sensational act of the century!” he continues, the camera following him in a breathtaking tracking shot as he introduces “a creature a hundred times more wild than any beast in our menagerie! A monster of cruelty . . . with the eyes of an angel!” Then, with much fanfare, Lola Montès (Martine Carol) arrives like a queen — albeit a circus queen — as the ringmaster tells the audience that they (we) are about to witness “the whole truth of the extraordinary life of Lola Montès.” What follows is not necessarily the true tale of the famed courtesan and entertainer who gained more notoriety for her scandalous love affairs and hourglass body than for her abilities as an actress and dancer. Lola’s story is told in a series of flashbacks showing her with Franz Liszt (Will Quadflieg), Lt. Thomas James (Ivan Desny), conductor Claudio Pirotto (Claude Pinoteau), a young student (Oskar Werner), and, most critically, King Ludwig I of Bavaria (a dashing Anton Walbrook). The episodes reveal her to be both loved and reviled as she struggles to succeed in her career, which ends up taking second place to the men in her life. Ophüls barely shows the cigar-loving Lola performing, instead letting the camera slowly dance around her, often depicting her through window frames, screens, and curtains as if she is a caged animal, all leading to a dangerous grand finale.

Lola (Martine Carol) dreams of a better life in Max Ophüls’s CinemaScope masterpiece

Lola Montès is filled with visual splendor; Jean d’Eaubonne and Willy Schatz’s sets are lush and elegant, and Georges Annenkov’s and Marcel Escoffier’s costumes are beautiful and appropriately extravagant, while cinematographer Christian Matras creates an emotionally powerful palette, bathing Ophüls’s first and only color film in bold reds and blues. (The director of such previous classics as La Ronde, Le Plaisir, and Letter from an Unknown Woman died in 1957 at the age of fifty-four while making Les Amants de Montparnasse.) It’s a dazzling cinematic achievement, one that was initially met with derision, then chopped up by the producers, but finally restored to its exquisite original version. Lola Montès is screening April 24 at 5:00 as part of the Metrograph series “Fassbinder’s Top Ten,” running April 22-30 and consisting of the ten films the German director cited as his favorites in 1982, shortly before his drug-related death at the age of thirty-seven. Held in conjunction with the upcoming release of the new documentary Fassbinder: To Love without Demands, the series also includes such classics as Nicholas Ray’s Johnny Guitar, Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL AFTER THE MOVIE: STARRING AUSTIN PENDLETON

Austin Pendleton finally gets top billing in short documentary about his unique career

STARRING AUSTIN PENDLETON (Gene Gallerano & David H. Holmes, 2016)
Thursday, April 21, SVA Theater 2 Beatrice, 2:30
tribecafilm.com
www.facebook.com

Starring Austin Pendleton is a charming little tribute to director, teacher, and film, television, and theater character actor Austin Pendleton, who finally gets top billing. Directors Gene Gallerano and David H. Holmes — the latter an actor who has studied with and acted in plays directed by Pendleton — have assembled quite an all-star lineup to sing Pendleton’s praises, including Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Olympia Dukakis, Wallace Shawn, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and John Simon. “If this guy didn’t look the way he looks — he’s got a stutter, he’s five-whatever-he-is, he’s a funny-looking guy, and his hair’s all screwy — he’d be Marlon Brando,” Ethan Hawke points out. You might not know the name, but as the clips roll by, you will certainly recognize the face as Pendleton is shown in such movies and television series as The Front Page, Good Times, The Muppet Movie, The Ballad of the Sad Café, Seinfeld, Catch-22, and the film he will likely most be remembered for, My Cousin Vinny, in which he played stuttering lawyer John Gibbons, a role that showcased an affliction he has suffered from his entire life. Starring Austin Pendleton is worth seeing just for the clips of Pendleton and Hoffman in 1995’s The Fifteen Minute Hamlet, in which the former portrays the title character and the latter plays Bernardo, Horatio, and Laertes. It is supremely enjoyable watching Pendleton discuss his craft and share some very funny anecdotes; my only complaint is that the documentary is way too short at only nineteen minutes, but it is about a character actor, after all, who is used to getting limited screen time. And how could it fail to mention that Pendleton originated the role of the tailor Motel Komzoil in the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof? On April 21, the film will be shown at the Tribeca Film Festival, followed by a conversation with Pendleton, directors Holmes and Gallerano, and Olympia Dukakis, Peter Sarsgaard, Denis O’Hare, and George Morfogen, moderated by Gordon Cox. You can also catch it as part of shorts programs at Tribeca on April 19, 21, and 23.

JAPAN SINGS! THE JAPANESE MUSICAL FILM: SING A SONG OF SEX

Four high school students select a female target for their fantasies in SING A SONG OF SEX

A TREATISE ON JAPANESE BAWDY SONGS (SING A SONG OF SEX) (NIHON SHUNKAKO) (日本春歌考) (Nagisa Oshima, 1967)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Tuesday, April 19, 7:00
Festival runs through April 23
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

Japan Society’s 2016 Globus Film Series “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film” continues April 19 with a complex, hard-to-define work that is not in any way a traditional musical. But then again, it’s by Nagisa Oshima, who didn’t care much for conventions. In 1967, Oshima, who had previously made such controversial films as Pleasures of the Flesh and Violence at Noon, cowrote (with Takeshi Tamura, Mamoru Sasaki, and Toshio Tajima, although much of the film is improvised) and directed Sing a Song of Sex, the original Japanese title of which translates as A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs. The film opens with red liquid dripping on a red background, as if the Japanese flag is being stained with old and new blood. Hikaru Hayashi’s soundtrack chimes in, combining 1960s mystery and sex comedy themes. On a high school campus, many students are protesting the Vietnam War, but four virgin boys, Nakamura (pop singer Ichiro Araki), Ueda (Kôji Iwabuchi), Hiroi (Kazumi Kushida), and Maruyama (Hiroshi Satô), instead are immersed in sexual fantasies involving raping a politically active student they know only as number 469 (Kazuko Tajima). They go out drinking one night in Tokyo with their professor, Otake (Ichizô Itami), as well as three female students, Kaneda (Hideko Yoshida), Ikeda (Hiroko Masuda), and Satomi (Nobuko Miyamoto), who worship the teacher. Professor Otake gets drunk and sings a low-class shanty that demeans women, a Japanese flag behind him. Later he declares, “Bawdy songs, raunchy songs, erotic songs, songs about sex — these are the suppressed voices of the people. An oppressed people’s labor, their lives . . . and their loves. Once people became conscious of these things, they naturally turned to song to express themselves. That’s why bawdy songs represent the history of the people.” He says that he feels sorry for the youth of Japan, who don’t even know they’re being oppressed. Then another drunk man in the bar explains, “So a doomed people sing the songs of a doomed nation? What’s it matter? Japan’s full of doomed people.” That night Professor Otake dies in his hotel room, leaving the three young women to mourn for him and the four young men to continue his bawdy adventures. Meanwhile, Otake’s lover, Takako Tanigawa (Akiko Koyama), becomes involved in the controversy surrounding his death.

Politics, history, war, and sex converge in Nagisa Oshima treatise

Politics, history, war, sex and death converge in Nagisa Oshima treatise

As with so many Oshima films, Sing a Song of Sex walks a dangerously fine line between sociopolitical commentary and lurid, misogynistic exploitation. The film pits many battles, between men and women, the Japanese flag and the American flag (and ads for Coca-Cola), rich and poor, Japanese and Korean (part of the film takes place on the reinstatement of National Foundation Day, a holiday celebrating the history of Japan that had been banned since the end of WWII), educated and uneducated, bawdy Japanese songs about sex and U.S. protest songs (“We Shall Overcome,” “This Land Is Your Land”), and fantasy versus reality, as it becomes more and more difficult to tell what is really happening and what is just the boys’ teenage imaginings. And the ending is likely to enrage you, but you won’t be able to turn away. Although it uses music to tell its story, it’s hard to consider it a musical; in fact, it’s difficult to classify it at all, other than that it’s another strangely bizarre yet beguiling work from an iconoclastic auteur who always challenges the audience. Sing a Song of Sex is screening at Japan Society on April 19 at 7:00; “Japan Sings! The Japanese Musical Film” concludes April 23 with two contemporary delights, Takashi Miike’s The Happiness of the Katakuris and Tetsuya Nakashima’s Memories of Matsuko.

TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL: PARENTS

Kjeld (Søren Malling) and Vibeke (Bodil Jørgensen) see their world turned upside down in PARENTS

PARENTS (FORÆLDRE) (Christian Tafdrup, 2016)
Sunday, April 17, Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11-7, 7:15
Wednesday, April 20, Bow Tie Cinemas Chelsea 5, 9:45
Thursday, April 21, Regal Cinemas Battery Park 11-6, 6:15
tribecafilm.com
www.levelk.dk

Danish actor, writer, playwright, and director Christian Tafdrup takes the relationship between mother, father, and child to a whole new extreme in the dark, bittersweet Parents. When their son, Esben (Anton Honik), moves out to seek his own path in life, Kjeld (played by Søren Malling and Elliott Crossett Hove) and Vibeke (Bodil Jørgensen and Miri-Ann Beuschel) immediately start suffering from empty nest syndrome, especially as Esben seems to need them only to do his laundry. Kjeld returns to the apartment he shared with Vibeke when they were young lovers, hoping to rekindle the flame. But when a Twilight Zone-like twist upends the family dynamic, Esben, Kjeld, and Vibeke must redefine who they are and what they want out of life. Tafdrup, who appears as the realtor in the film, balances the real and the surreal with mixed results, as there are gaping plot holes that can be extremely frustrating, but it all comes together by the conclusion. Malling (A War, A Royal Affair) and Jørgensen (Badehotellet, The Idiots) are terrific as a husband and wife taking stock of who they are, both individually and as a couple, as Tafdrup (An Infatuation) and editors Anne Østerud and Tanya Fallenius maintain a slow but steady pace and cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff beautifully captures Jette Lehmann’s sensational production design, consisting of a wide range of interiors that mimic the characters’ evolving psyches as they deal with an impossible situation. Parents is screening in the International Narrative Competition at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 17, 20, and 21, with Tafdrup, Østerud, producer Thomas Heinesen, and actors Beuschel and Honik participating in what should be some very interesting Q&A sessions.