more TIFF

[rwdavisjr@ca.rr.com]

Greetings from Tokyo!

Alice Massa wrote

> I met Mr Wakamatsu some weeks ago and he told me the initial score Jim 
O'Rourke composed was almost totally reworked to set the kind of music 
Wakamatsu himself wanted for his film. He said: Jim hasn't heard the final 
score yet, but I bet he won't like it at all...!!!!!!!

That makes a lot of sense, as it seemed to me there were, at least in the second half of the film, few cues used over and over again.

This is my first TIFF, btw. I used my guest lecture at Waseda U on Monday as an excuse to stay in Tokyo 10 days and attend the fest. TIFF seems well organized - the small army of volunteers seems to outnumber the press (I got a credential because I sometimes write for American Cinematographer magazine) by about three to one, but the selection, especially of Japanese films, seems surprisingly weak.

Unlike the Wakamatsu film we've been discussing, "Beauty" and "Tears of Kitty" seem to have zero artistic aspirations. And the most exciting thing about "Peeping Tom" was that Kurosawa Kiyoshi was sitting (sleeping?) in the row in front of me. The movie I most anticipated, Kobayashi Masahiro's "Ai no yokan", was the incredibly rigorously executed "story" of the father and mother of a 14-year-old murder victim and her 14-year-old assailant, respectively. And though the premise sounds promising, the film consists of a dozen or more scenes of said father (Kobayashi himself) eating dinner and said mother doing the dishes, and little else. Today I saw Miike's "Crows Zero", apparently a kind of prequel to the manga. Miike spoke briefly before the film. One of my former students, now back at Waseda, a Miike fan, sensed from the talk that the director wasn't that enthusiastic about the film and indeed the TBS sponsored film (the figure 400,000,000 Y was mentioned re the budget) was non-stop fighting but uninspired, not particularly Miike-esque in any one of Miike's many incarnations. My student thought it was a "Blue Spring" rehash on steroids, which seems a reasonable capsule assessment.

For my money, the most interesting film I've seen in Tokyo this week was Aoyama's "Sad Vacation" which was still playing at Shinjuku's Musashinokan. The movie seemed to have a real voice, a much more mature and distinctive rhythm than any of Aoyama's previous work (though I should perhaps say that I'm certainly not as big a fan of his "Eureka" as many probably are, so ...)..

Others who're attending the fest may have more detailed comments, which I look forward to hearing. Ja mata.

Bob Davis