I’m in a Japan moment.

Maybe it’s the influence of the cherry blossoms of New York’s parks and botanical gardens in April, but Perfect Days, “Shōgun,” and a recent replay to the Platinum trophy in From Software’s ronin epic, Sekiro, have me visiting Japan daily. The latest voyage happened this weekend when Lauren and I watched Hikari’s Rental Family.

Phillip (Brendan Fraser) is a struggling working actor in Tokyo who was once an iconic commercial character (effectively, Toothpaste-Man).

But the good times have faded, and now he’s hustling subways and shinkansen for his daily bread ramen. After some light exposition, he’s invited to join an agency that sends out rental familial roles: a missing father, a contrite mistress, a reporter, a claque for a child’s recital, etc.

The premise of a rental family agency could be another moment of “Japan so crazy” à la penis festivals, take-out everything, or Lost in Translation’s wince-worthy beats like “Lip [sic] my stocking.” Director Hikari’s experience living abroad among westerners gives her a directorial edge. Her direction shows perplexing foreignness (love hotels, a corporate apology culture that looks like sadomasochism, etc.), but not at the expense of showing shared humanity. The film never gawks and thus creates a study in character. It is a movie that hinges on characterization with the beauty of both urban and rural Japan as sumptuous set. Says Shinji Tada, the agency owner: “You can live here a hundred years and still be left with more questions than answers.”

As a young man I wanted to know what happened to people; now, I want to know who they are. This is the goal of Rental Family as well.

During the opening bumper to the film, director Wenders asked the audience to take a moment to enjoy stepping into the world of a modest life, lived in harmony with the seasons and with nature while within a metropolis. Having made that journey, it was profoundly beautiful and nutritive for the soul.

Based on a recent post thinking about AI, I was thinking deeply about Dead Ringers. I started to think that David Cronenberg’s film could be read as an introduction to the challenges of dealing with fundamentally foreign minds like general AI. To be clear, Cronenberg does not introduce us to a strange robot or computer à la HAL 9000, but rather gives us two humans, Drs. Elliot and Beverly Mantle who exhibit alien intelligence despite behaving eccentrically by “standard human” estimation.¹ Cronenberg imagines for us, in this film, what our interactions with the uncanny intelligence of AI might be like.

Where I come from, a far-off land called the 80s, there was one movie that really was the one that everyone knew it was OK to be afraid of: Poltergeist, written by Steven Spielberg et al. and directed by Tobe Hooper. Somewhere between unlocking aliens twice: E.T. and “Close Encounters” and bringing us derring-do incarnate with Indiana Jones, Spielberg found time to plumb another genre — horror — and scare the hell out of us.

So, in the last weekend before our child arrived, we thought we’d celebrate a bit of Halloween and a bit of 80s comfort entertainment by seeing whether this reputedly scary movie held up. I had seen it once somewhere near 1987 and Lauren had never seen it.

My friends, I’m glad to say, it’s still wonderfully, delightfully, disturbingly scary. Even the poster hints at the spooky. From the bare-bones Helvetica title that announces some strange German word to the light-flooding empty television (ulp) communicating with adorable moppet Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), “Poltergeist’s” images, still and moving, and direction encourage our imaginations to go to horrible, horrible places.

Having seen the film, the nouns: “swimming pool,” “tree,” “clown,” “closet,” “bathtub,” “the light,” “maggot,” and others will all gain a permanent and horrific tint.

And while the scary story was good, watching it this time, I couldn’t help but notice how the movie was also acting as a mirror to the Boomer audience/culture it was portraying.

Read on for more explorations of “Poltergeist.”

Nostalgia is a funny thing, and it gives our memories vivid colors that reality never had. I think Paul Simon, who has said many things well, may have said it best:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

A few lines later the narrator lets this fact seep through:

I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

During the final days of Lauren’s pregnancy, we were watching some “comfort movies,” and we decided to watch 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While I’d seen it three or four times before, it was only in this viewing that a profound truth became glaringly obvious: Richard Dreyfus’ iconic everyman encountering the ineffable, Roy Neary, is terrible.

In my Kodachrome® recollection, Neary has a Jamesian mystical experience that he can only render in sculpture (potato medium and purloined property), hunted by shadowy government officials and scientists he reaches Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, and is chosen by the extraterrestrials before he joins them to jaunt happily beyond Earth to frolic among the stars. It has the glitter and sheen of Spielberg of the early 80s: childlike wonder, lens flare, and the messy reality of family.

In black and white consideration though, the modern audience (myself included) asks: “Yeah, but what about his wife, his kids, the house he totaled?” The last they saw Dad he was in the midst of his Jamesian crisis and then he’s…gone.

As I asked myself this question, I had to ask, “why had I never thought to ask that before?” Only with some huge planetoids of socially-indoctrinated privilege could it be swallowed that Neary was a “hero” entitled to be a Terran ambassador of humankind’s best. But in the Kodachrome® memories of this film — he was. Privilege is a hell of a drug.

With the aid of critical theory (of the gender and economic kind), I’d like to unpack this movie a bit more.

Oh, and let’s just say what doesn’t need much saying: Teri Garr was criminally underused in this role.

Amongst film fans, the story goes that “The Cotton Club” was undone by the studio and its meddlesome editing. It’s been circulated that the original cut was “too Black” and not “The Godfather” enough. Rumors aside, the fact stands that “The Cotton Club” released to theatres in December 1984 was a financial failure: after world-wide box office was totaled, the movie was still $10 million in the red.

Fast-forward 30 years, director Coppola has been re-cutting his movies so as to leave for posterity the versions he wants left e.g. the recent edits to “The Godfather.” “The Cotton Club” has been the latest beneficiary of Coppola’s time and wealth (he reportedly sank a half-million into this edit) and “Encore” was the result.

The new cut is still a damn mess. But scenes and passages of brilliance and beauty – some entirely new – have been restored or are more clearly showcased through the edit. The result doesn’t transcend confused direction, leaden acting, pointless arcs, and a dearth of romantic chemistry between Lane and Gere to be a masterpiece. Nevertheless…there is greatness in it, despite it not being great.

It’s a recommend, with some caveats.

This might well be a perfect scifi-horror film. Drawn from the book The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham (author of Chocky, progenitor of biophilic horror), an entire town passes out. An outsider comes to delimit the zone in which all consciousness fades (à la the Southern Reach) when suddenly the blackout ends, with seemingly no ill effect. Over the coming days, fertile women find themselves inexplicably pregnant. Months later, simultaneously they beget “arresting-eyed,” blonde children of exceptional intellect and rapid maturation.

While the presentation in this film is superficial (no women have speaking roles or volition; no women talk to each other about the fact that they’re pregnant, etc.) due to the constraints of its time, the thought-provoking barbs laid by Wyndham give flashes of insight, complexity, and terror. The movie holds up for its time and for of its era, but it also suggests deep questions about society, arms races, and the need for idiotic savage populism within the general population. It’s an iconic work with deep and wide impact beyond its reference value in Simpsons episodes.

Seeing the trailer for this movie, and as a survivor of Southern Baptist culture, I thought I knew what it was going to be. But I was wrong, the “mockumentary” style of filming (à la Best in Show or Spinal Tap) gives an infinite canvas to master thespians Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown such that they turn an expected commedia dell’arte of awkwardness with Big Church’s stock characters into Greek tragedy.

It all started with this tweet from my former colleague, movie blogger/podcaster, and writer, Jen:

Data lost to Twitter/X Drama

Between not wanting to earn the opprobrium of Jen, and the fact that our friends had recently watched the film on a Watch Party that we’d missed, I really wanted to see this. All the better that it was being screened in a 70mm print. Additionally, as Lauren has reached her third trimester, going to do things where one sits/has access to food/has access to bathroom is a key. With some planning and some patience, yours truly, and his very pregnant wife, made the two-train tango to Astoria. We built in plenty of buffer time and were able to grab dinner at sports bar, outside, off of Steinway Drive before heading to the Museum of the Moving Image.¹

It was entirely worth it. We loved this movie.

To be clear, the five-star rating is not for the film Mommie Dearest. That movie I’d give two-stars, and then I’d bump up another star for the sheer spectacle of Faye Dunaway swinging for the fences in her performance. Instead, this rating is for the:

• Great joy of watching anything in Village East’s primary screening room: a sumptuous throwback to movie palaces of yesteryear that is comparable, say, to the Castro in SF
• Great joy of watching drag queen Hedda Lettuce use a laser pointer to point out continuity errors, questionable fish ceramic decor, costuming excellence, and unmotivated plot. It’s Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with chicken cutlets
• Great joy for the Village East’s awesome popcorn

“The Automat” is a joyous film that recalls the arrival and departure of the automatic restaurant, the automat, Horn and Hardart in Philadelphia and New York. Guided by and framed with interviews with H&H aficionado Mel Brooks, the story of a scrappy restaurant that believed in good food for the people, all people, in a beautiful environment was nostalgic, tender, and sad. As Brooks recounts: you could never make it today, it makes no sense to accounting that something so naive and good and cheap could ever be conjured again.

As we shuffled out my seat neighbor leaned over and confided: “They didn’t mention it, but the mashed potatoes were pretty darn good, too.”

What’s left to say about “The Godfather?”

When ranking all of my favorite movies across time, it always winds up in the top slot. This restoration is a revelation and seeing it again gave me some pause to reflect on why it’s my favorite movie.

Anniversary Restoration

Let me talk about the film as a collection of images. The 50^th anniversary release, has had hundreds of painstaking hours of color and light correction put into it by the director, Francis Ford Coppola. Because Paramount hadn’t expected the film to be a success, they had only a few prints. When the success began, they keep originals in reserve and screened all the films they had. As such the originals had had their color palette flattened: the blacks leeched away and the director’s vision was lost.

Deep in to his 80’s, Coppola sought to ensure his legacy would be preserved as he saw it. For the last several years his team of editors and restorers created a restored version that honored the original color and lighting. Thusly restored, we see just how deeply Coppola was affected by Renaissance lighting. His scenes feel profoundly deep and dark, wrapped in small, dramatic light sources. The scenes look like Caravaggio oils in their simplicity, focus, and careful use of light.

Experiencing this restoration in our local Dolby format deepened the experience of the restoration both visually and aurally.