Robert Barber and Mary Pearson battle mankind at Shea Stadium on April 8
Shea Stadium
20 Meadow St. between Bogart & Waterbury
Thursday, April 8, 8:00
www.myspace.com/hellohighplaces
www.myspace.com/sheastadiumbk
High Places set some lofty goals for themselves on their new album, HIGH PLACES VS. MANKIND (Thrill Jockey, April 2010), but the cops almost thwarted their vaunted return to Brooklyn when they closed down Market Hotel a few days ago. Fortunately, the duo of Mary Pearson and Robert Barber, now based in Los Angeles, have found another venue for their New York album release show, heading to Bushwick’s rather makeshift Shea Stadium on April 8, on a bill with Soft Circle and Bow Ribbons. High Places’ sophomore full-length, the follow-up to its eponymously titled September 2008 debut, features ten songs built around creative percussion, mystical electronic loops, and simple but infectious keyboards, with Barber adding guitars and Pearson contributing dreamy vocals. After the Brooklyn show, High Places has two gigs in Massachusetts before heading to Europe and Scandinavia, where they’ll be playing such locales as Madrid, Milan, Zagreb, Antwerp, and Lisbon through May. In the meantime, we’re gonna head back into the new album and put “On a Hill in a Bed on a Road in a House” on repeat play.
After the orchestra in which he plays cello is dissolved, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki) and his wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) leave Tokyo and head back to his hometown in Yamagata. Seeing a classified ad in the local paper listing a job in “departures,” Daigo schedules an interview, thinking it is a travel agent position. But as it turns out, the boss, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), claims it was a typo — it should have read “the departed” — and immediately hires Daigo as his assistant encoffinor. Daigo quickly learns that he and Sasaki attend to the newly dead, picking them up for funeral directors and then preparing the bodies, in front of grieving friends and family, for the coffins and cremation through an elaborate, detailed ceremony. Daigo takes the job out of financial desperation — Sasaki throws money at him to come on board — but doesn’t tell anyone, including Mika, what he is doing, since people who work in businesses involving corpses are shunned in Japan, considered dirty. But as Daigo grows to appreciate the importance of what Sasaki does, everything he has built threatens to fall apart when his secret starts getting out. Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (As well as ten Japan Academy Prizes), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of life and death, told beautifully by director Yojiro Takita (WHENT THE LAST SWORD IS DRAWN, ONMYOJI) and screenwriter Kundo Koyama. Motoki, who had the original idea for the film, gives a wonderfully subtle performance as a Daigo, while Yamazaki is a riot as the stern boss with a sly sense of humor. Despite an embarrassingly unnecessary montage scene and sappy music by Joe Hisaishi (who’s never met an emotion he couldn’t overexploit), DEPARTURES is a moving portrait of a man searching for his place in the world — and meeting personal and professional obstacles when he thinks he might have found it.