Category Archives: 2023

Perfect Days

Perfect Days                       5 stars

What would you think if I said one of the best movies I have seen this year is about a man who cleans toilets for a living? You might not believe it but that was what I found when I saw Perfect Days, the new movie by German filmmaker, Wim Wenders, starring Japanese movie star Koji Yakusho. This 68-year-old actor has been a steady performer in Japanese cinema for decades and is known to western audiences from Shall We Dance? And Tampopo. He is able to display his emotions and the contentment of his character by his facial expressions while hardly saying a word. His plays Hirayama, an older man who lives in a small apartment, gets up at dawn every day and sets out to travel the city of Tokyo and clean the many public toilets as an employee of The Tokyo Toilet. We follow him as he goes about his routine, preparing for the day and meticulously cleaning each toilet in the bustling city. Along the way we find out his varied interests of raising Bansai trees, photographing trees in the park using an old film camera, listening to 60’s and 70’s popular music on cassette and reading essays and novels, like William Faulkner. Through his work routine he is respectful of those he meets at the restrooms and seems completely content. As the film goes on, he has some encounters with regulars at a bar and the restaurants and public bath that he frequents. There is a rather flaky young co-worker he shares a shift with who is more interested in impressing a girl than with the job. Koji handles him with ease and only has to say a few words to deal with the co-worker’s begging for money. Eventually, we do learn a bit more about his past when a long absent niece and his sister come to pay him an unexpected visit. We know that something must have happened in his family years ago, but he found his own way of dealing with the issues of life. Through his meetings with those he knows well and his encounters with strangers, he puts them at ease and gives them the feeling that he can be trusted. And he does it all while remaining satisfied with his situation in life and listening to the likes of The Rolling Stones, Otis Reading, Lou Reed and Nina Simone. The writer-director, Wenders came up with the idea of this story while visiting Tokyo and doing a documentary on the modern public toilets that Japan offers. They really are quite a technological marvel compared to what we are used to. Wenders has successfully given us a positive picture of those public service workers who quietly go about their business of making life easier for the rest of us and doing it with a smile. Perfect Days is nominated for the Best International Film Academy Award.

The Zone of Interest

The Zone of Interest                       4 ½ stars

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is such an unconventional movie it’s hard to compare it to anything we have seen coming out of Hollywood. The subject is of course the Holocaust set in Auschwitz, the concentration camp in Poland during World War II. Holocaust movies have been a staple of Hollywood going back at least to Schindler’s List in 1993, but Glazer has done something with these horrors that we haven’t seen before. The focus is entirely on the day to day lives of the Commandant of the camp, Rudolph Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller of Anatomy of a Fall) and their family who live in their house and garden right outside the walls of the infamous camp. We watch as the family goes on outings to a lake or host get-togethers with their neighbors and Rudolph’s colleagues or attends to their children. Throughout the movie we never see any of the victims of the atrocities, but there are constant reminders as we see the walls of the camp in the background, see the smoke belching from the tall smokestacks and hear the sounds of gunshots and dogs barking in the distance. The cameras are set up in fixed positions inside the house making it seem like we are watching a reality show, spying on the inhabitants instead of watching a dramatic movie. There are few dramatic moments and that is the point that Glazer is making. He is showing us just how normal and mundane are the lives of those perpetrating one of history’s greatest crimes. There are scenes designed to make it clear that the family is completely aware of what is going on such as the wives distributing baby clothes and women’s dresses taken from the camp inmates, or when Hedwig threatens her young prisoner servant with execution if she doesn’t perform her tasks better. One son collects teeth with gold fillings. Later on, we see a scene with Nazi officials in a meeting in Berlin calmly discussing plans to send more Jews to the death camps with corporate like efficiency. This all serves to remind us of what is termed the banality of evil, how those involved can become blind to the evil of what is being perpetrated, though it is obvious to the rest of us. As I alluded to before, there is no normally constructed story here, but rather a portrayal of the rationalization of the characters’ actions. Jonathan Glazer has demonstrated how unconventional he can be before. One just has to go back to his previous movie, 2013’s Under the Skin, the “alien invasion” movie in which the alien predator portrayed by Scarlett Johansson lured Scottish boys to its feeding tar-pits. That’s one I will never forget. The same can be said about The Zone of Interest. The movie is nominated for Academy Awards in Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best International Film.

Rustin

Rustin                   3 ½ stars

I have seen news clips of the March on Washington of August 28, 1963 and read references to it dozens of times for decades. Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech of that day is legendary, but I had never heard of the organizer behind that event until seeing the movie Rustin by director George C. Wolfe (Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom). The movie focuses on Bayard Rustin (played by Colman Domingo of Zola, Selma and If Beale Street Could Talk), a civil rights leader of the era who was the person regarded as most responsible for pulling off this historic event. This movie has the distinction of having Barack and Michelle Obama among its executive directors, so it has some pretty high expectations. Since I had not heard this story before I read some more about it to see how accurate the movie is. It appears that Hollywood’s enthusiasm to create a moving story of a civil rights icon may have led to shading a few facts. A. Philip Randolph (portrayed by Glynn Turman in the movie) should have credit for proposing the march, but this seems to have been missed in the movie by giving Rustin the credit. The movie also doesn’t give much credit to the labor movement even though the UAW played a large part in this and other events of the period. From the movie, it would seem that Rustin almost alone was responsible for making the march happen. The movie ends with the conclusion of the march showing Rustin helping to clean up the Washington Mall instead of meeting with elected officials, leaving that to King and the other civil rights leaders. Therefore, it leaves out his later contributions to the movement in the mid-sixties. Colman Domingo, who has typically played supporting roles before, is quite effective in showing the determination and resilience of Rustin when faced with major hurdles. He deserves the role and rightly received an Academy Award nomination for the performance. There are several other notable appearances of actors in historical roles including Chris Rock as Roy Wilkins, leader of the NAACP, Audra McDonald as Ella Baker, CCH Pounder as Anna Hedgeman, Aml Ameen as Dr. King and of course, Jeffrey Wright as Representative Adam Clayton Powell. The writing probably doesn’t measure up to Oscar winning status though. The movie does not shy away from Rustin’s homosexuality, including his affairs and indiscretions that nearly got him removed from his organizing position. Domingo really owns the line “On the day that I was born Black, I was also born homosexual. They either believe in freedom and justice for all, or they do not.” In this respect it brings the struggle for gay rights into present terms. The movie deserves to be seen as long as one is aware of some shading of the truth.

Nyad

Nyad                     4 stars

It is Oscar season which is certainly clear from the number of A list actors that
have put in some notable performances in recent months. Certainly among them
are the two women appearing side by side in the true story of endurance swimmer
Diane Nyad simply called Nyad. Four-time Oscar nominee Annette Bening has the
title role of the woman who failed in her first attempt to swim from Cuba to
Florida, a distance of 103 miles in the open ocean in 1978, but then had the
vision to take up the challenge again at the age of 60. Jodie Foster has the
role of Bonnie Stoll, Nyad’s lifelong friend and coach who volunteers to be
with her to realize her dream to be the first to accomplish this seemingly
impossible feat. What stands out the most in this “biopic” is the close
personal bond this pair has, especially when they go toe to toe at each other
in highly emotional scenes. Add to this, a third character, their navigator,
John Bartlett (Rhys Ifans) who adds to the drama during the film’s many
harrowing moments. The film is the work of the pair Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi
and Jimmy Chin who have worked primarily on documentaries like Free Solo in the
past. Over the film’s two hours we get a steady dose of the challenges this
small group faced that include storms, a swift moving current, cold
temperatures, hallucinations and attacks from sharks and box jellyfish. We also
get a lesson in some of the science involved in such a feat of human endurance
such as the nutrition needed, the equipment used to defend from sea creature attacks
(Nyad did not use a shark cage) and the navigation methods employed. An
important element is the encouragement from Bonnie she gives to Nyad during
moments of disorientation and confusion. The scenes have a very real sense to
them. Interspersed throughout the movie are actual footage of Nyad’s first
attempt at the swim when she was 28 and flashbacks to her childhood and time
with her father. The movie may seem predictable at times, but it is made
memorable by the performances of Bening and Foster, both of whom are well above
the age of most women having major roles in movies today. It’s rare to have two
in the same film and rarer still to have two with Academy Award Acting
nominations at the same time which is true for Nyad.