Category: Movies

Shaviro at The Pinocchio Theory has posted an entry about the movie Swallowtail Butterfly directed by Iwai Shunji. The movie is one of my favorites for a number of reasons. It is, as Shaviro notes, a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic movie set in Japan (Yen town) and it is full of ambiguous identities. Shaviro concludes with, “The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.”

I am a big fan of this rather odd movie but not everyone finds this movie to be a celebration of multi-ethnicity and a condemnation of Japanese society…
Continue reading Swallowtail Butterfly

While I was back in the US, I went to see the “Last Samurai” and have been promising my family that I would share some of my thoughts on the movie here. There has been a flurry of mails going back and forth on the H-Japan discussion list about the movie so I had read quite a lot about the Tom Cruise Hollywood production before I went to see it…
Continue reading Last Samurai

I rented some movies to watch while staying warm under a blanket and recovering from a nasty cold. None were any good so I cut them all off soon after they started but by chance I saw that Japanese TV was showing a US movie without dubbing it (for once). It was “The Way of the Gun” and initially looked like a pretty mindless way to drift in and out of sleep. However, after watching it I have to say it is probably the best kidnapping/action movie I have ever seen.

I was impressed by the complexity of its characters, their interaction, and the fact that the audience isn’t treated like an idiot. I never thought a movie with a name and plot like this could have subtlety. The action, for what it is worth, was also impressive, with everyone behaving like they actually had training in tactics rather than growing up on too many cheesy police shows. The bad guy bodyguards are even given a little more than the usual, with them hatching their own plots and affairs and also behaving half way intelligently.

Sayaka and I went to see Terminator 3 on the recommendation of two of our friends. It was pretty much what I expected. After the movie Sayaka had an interesting idea for a Terminator 4 (which the movie sets up nicely) which amounts to a rather unusual twist on the cult success Left Behind which is a series of Christian books and movies that spawned a whole genre of biblically inspired science fiction.

The “Left Behind” series, which I was able to get a taste of through the B-Movie of that name, tells the story of unbelievers who are “left behind” after faithful Christians are suddenly removed from the world. A perceptive group among the survivors realize that they have erred in their lack of faith, become reborn Christians and try to spread word that the world has plunged into the heart of the Bible’s Revelations. They uncover the identity of the Anti-Christ (who is none other than the secretary-general of the UN) and battle against his evil blue-helmeted UN troops. In addition, they discover a range of diabolical plans for things like a unified world currency, world government, an end to starvation, and, God forbid, peace among religions.

Sayaka’s interesting twist to this idea, which I think would make for a great Terminator 4 came initially from her question of who John Conner (future leader of the “free” post-apocalyptic world in the movie’s prophecies) is suddenly in radio contact with when the world has been largely destroyed by the nuclear cataclysm launched by the “cybernetic organism” Skynet…
Continue reading Left Behind, with a little help from the Terminator