Movies about other movies both fascinate and challenge me. The French "new wave" consisted of three types of ideas. They had notions about explicitly acknowledging the camera. That's such an ordinary notion these days that it is impossible to appreciate. And in any case, no French thinker invented the idea.
A second component was the importation of key stereotypes from American movies applied in a "real world" context in a manner of folding fiction into reality (with the irony that the reality itself was fictional). This is what the average critic associates with New Wave.
The third component was the most trenchant, but is nearly impossible to recognize today, much less appreciate. Society was undergoing change not in the radical way we all thought at the time, but in a more subtle, nuanced way: old means to accommodate damaged society were being replaced by new ones. Those new ones are immune to the old challenges and seem now like God made the world that way from the beginning (about 3500 ago?). New wave film challenged these old strictures in a direct manner as its primary task. Since we can't see the target, we miss the point all together and (in a sad irony) take the stories at face value.
Now into the long still tailwind enters Itami who makes a New New Wave film. It fits the mold in all three ways, but those three are more clearly seen by this American viewer.
We have the acknowledgment that it is a film, what with the camera whose presence creates the linkage among stories. And the copious references to past movies. In this case the references I'm talking tone and style here, not story and character include as many Asian (mostly Japanese) references as western.
We have the standard American film stereotypes. In French new wave that was the gangster, in Italian new wave, the cowboy. Here we have both. Film as food. Film as food. Perfect, nuanced, deep film as similarly sacred food. This even starts with a film-within prologue with the gangster talking directly to us about the intent.
Its a novel idea, doing a new new wave film and making the references to the nature of film being about the nature of food. To make it explicit is a scene where older Japanese thickheads are embarrassed by a younger Japanese who is extensively familiar with the French vocabulary. There's a similar scene on the Italian side, pungently misogynistic.
But it is the third element that fascinates me. That element does as much damage to all things in Japanese society as it can, those elements that are arbitrary yet solid. These are a little more accessible to this viewer than the fairly ephemeral concerns of Godard and Truffault.
Japanese in general inherit many things in their life from the Chinese giant. All these things they differentiate from their Chinese origins by extreme elaboration. Everything becomes extremely stylized, so much that the most pedestrian of Chinese things can become the basis and meaning for an entire Japanese life. Things like tea, flowers, drawing, packaging... Even a lowly bowl of soup, the soup that factory workers would eat at a diner becomes a matter of celestial obsession.
I'm not Japanese, so these stabs don't tingle. But I can recognize them, most of them.
Along the way, we have in the gangster, his moll and her idealization as oyster and oystergirl one or two of the most sensual cinema images in existence.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.
A second component was the importation of key stereotypes from American movies applied in a "real world" context in a manner of folding fiction into reality (with the irony that the reality itself was fictional). This is what the average critic associates with New Wave.
The third component was the most trenchant, but is nearly impossible to recognize today, much less appreciate. Society was undergoing change not in the radical way we all thought at the time, but in a more subtle, nuanced way: old means to accommodate damaged society were being replaced by new ones. Those new ones are immune to the old challenges and seem now like God made the world that way from the beginning (about 3500 ago?). New wave film challenged these old strictures in a direct manner as its primary task. Since we can't see the target, we miss the point all together and (in a sad irony) take the stories at face value.
Now into the long still tailwind enters Itami who makes a New New Wave film. It fits the mold in all three ways, but those three are more clearly seen by this American viewer.
We have the acknowledgment that it is a film, what with the camera whose presence creates the linkage among stories. And the copious references to past movies. In this case the references I'm talking tone and style here, not story and character include as many Asian (mostly Japanese) references as western.
We have the standard American film stereotypes. In French new wave that was the gangster, in Italian new wave, the cowboy. Here we have both. Film as food. Film as food. Perfect, nuanced, deep film as similarly sacred food. This even starts with a film-within prologue with the gangster talking directly to us about the intent.
Its a novel idea, doing a new new wave film and making the references to the nature of film being about the nature of food. To make it explicit is a scene where older Japanese thickheads are embarrassed by a younger Japanese who is extensively familiar with the French vocabulary. There's a similar scene on the Italian side, pungently misogynistic.
But it is the third element that fascinates me. That element does as much damage to all things in Japanese society as it can, those elements that are arbitrary yet solid. These are a little more accessible to this viewer than the fairly ephemeral concerns of Godard and Truffault.
Japanese in general inherit many things in their life from the Chinese giant. All these things they differentiate from their Chinese origins by extreme elaboration. Everything becomes extremely stylized, so much that the most pedestrian of Chinese things can become the basis and meaning for an entire Japanese life. Things like tea, flowers, drawing, packaging... Even a lowly bowl of soup, the soup that factory workers would eat at a diner becomes a matter of celestial obsession.
I'm not Japanese, so these stabs don't tingle. But I can recognize them, most of them.
Along the way, we have in the gangster, his moll and her idealization as oyster and oystergirl one or two of the most sensual cinema images in existence.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.