This is deviating from what's usually on here, but I don't think I've ever shared any writing of my own that isn't about film or film-making. It's sort of the purpose of this site to record all my movie reviews that I do and share them for the few who actually stick around to read them, but I thought I could post something different on here for now. Nobody panic! There's still a film review to be posted in the next two weeks (I know your heart skipped a beat there, but remained assured the bimonthly review stays intact.) Here's some writing that's short-ish, easy-to-follow-ish, and hopefully, good-ish. If not, I'll be returning to my film reviews anyway. 


Click here for my most recent short narrative (September 2019),   A Fun Thing To Do On King Street. 
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Thank you.
​Nolan  

The children live in Tokyo now, all grown with kids of their own, as they work from sunup and create the lives which their parents envisioned as better than their own. They have educated themselves properly, applied their skills, and have found modest comfort in a moderately-paid desk position. They have raised their youth to do the same, for better or for worse, to ensure the continuity of the family’s success. They have done this, just like those before them and those to come, for tradition, if nothing else. We notice, though, a trend in our children, in the distance they grow from us as they get older. No longer do they feel truly like ours, like we raised them. We give our children the sincere hopes that they grow up in a better world, that they foster a better life for themselves, that they live happily. What should we expect, then, when that wish is fulfilled, and suddenly our children, in the midst of their goals and aspirations, simply forget about us?

The questions of family, of generational connection and disconnection were often posed by the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu, and throughout his heavy, soul-shaking mid-20th century filmography, no film of his has brought itself to the forefront of the human conscience more overtime than Tokyo Story, released in 1953, which presents the dilemma described above. Two elderly parents, five grown kids, and though only hundreds of miles separate them, it feels as if the world has spun them away from each other in a permanent, immovable way. The parents have to ask themselves, do we let our children be, or stand there, yearning, trying to make ourselves seen? 

Tomi and Shukichi (two Ozu favorites, Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu) can’t decide. When they first arrive in the city, their children are already accommodating them just fine at their homes (though the inconvenience is already present via one of the grandchildren’s fits about the changes), and seem dually engaged in their responsibilities and their parents. As the days pass, though, the only person truly focused on conversing with Tomi and Shukichi is their widowed daughter-in-law Noriko (the ineffably performing Setsuko Hara). Noriko takes them sightseeing, where they are dissonant with the modernity and shapeshifting downtown Tokyo. She sits with them in discussion and truly opens up; one can reckon her loneliness from being widowed renders her able to empathize with these freshly neglected parents. It is one of the great, layered performances in cinema, and Hara delivered many throughout her life. 

Eventually, two of the couples’ children pay for and send their parents on an excursion to the Atami Hot Springs Spa, but to little avail; the two find it too noisy and claustrophobic, and the next morning, seem homesick. As they get up to leave, Tomi struggles to find her footing. She and her husband dismiss it, but we have no choice than to begin to see the roots of the third act begin to form. As they return to Tokyo, we learn that sending their parents to Atami was crucial for the daughter, Shige, who had a business meeting that we gather could not have transpired with Tomi and Shukichi present. Then, a sequence which packs the first big punch, in which Tomi implores Noriko to remarry, to forget Tomi’s son’s demise. We can feel the tremors of Tomi’s worries: she feels her own passing may be soon, and reinforces the film’s thesis, that we mold our youth, so desperately attempting to let them learn from us. It becomes the film’s most emotional component; two generations, so deeply interconnected but helplessly unfamiliar with the other. It’s as if the young can never see themselves in declining health, with fading skin and trembling muscles. 

Tomi falls ill on the train back from Tokyo to their hometown of Onomichi, and once arriving, she dies. As audience members, we may be accustomed to a standard order after a death on film: immediate mourning, crying outbursts, deep vocalized pain. The children of Tokyo Story barely weep. They rush to Onomichi to pay their respects and to see her one last time, and once she passes, they are silent. Numb. Immobile. It’s as if something has bludgeoned them, a feeling of failure -- of what they feel they could have done if they had paid more attention. In fact, one of the children is late due to a business conference, and arrives after her passing, denied a final goodbye. 

The funeral scene which follows is one of the most famed in all of Japanese cinema, but I won’t dwell on it here; instead, I find a moment shortly after more striking. Noriko, the daughter-in-law, finds the freshly widowed Shukichi on a patio outside of the funeral home, overlooking the view. He tells Noriko, “It was such a beautiful dawn.” I can’t describe this moment, only that it knocks me out every time I see it. There’s a raw, rugged truth to it. You have nothing to hide after a moment like this. It’s absolutely beautiful, and sixty-six years later, this scene’s power and impact has no expiration date. 

Ozu’s films were often composed of these moments -- the quieter conversations, the defining statements. Ozu and his writing partner Kogo Noda wrote films centered around marriages, notably Late Spring (1949) and Early Summer (1951), only to never show the wedding. His poignant Floating Weeds (1959) followed characters in a travelling acting troupe, though we scarcely see them perform. In western cinema, the opportunity for sentiment would be too high to miss these seemingly dramatic moments, but at some point early on with Ozu, no matter which film you begin with, you begin to understand it’s not about where these characters find themselves, but how they got here. Who they had to love, and had to leave, to become who they are in front of the camera. There’s irony in Ozu’s films employing the well-known Japanese actors of the time -- in his work, they never feel like actors. They feel seen, and uncomfortable, and insecure. We feel great shame for watching their failures, and sometimes we are proud of their triumphs after only ninety minutes of viewing them. In the end, they’re here like us, trying to find answers. 

Yasujiro Ozu’s work was never seen outside of the Japanese archipelago until the early seventies, when British film scholars began to discover the cinema of Asia. During his life, his contemporaries like Akira Kurosawa found international acclaim with samurai epics and Shakespeare adaptations, while Ozu himself couldn’t find distribution, as decision-makers deemed his work “too Japanese” for foreign audiences. With this label, Ozu finished his career with over fifty directing credits, without a reel of his ever seen outside of his home country. He lived with his mother in a modest house, and despite its impact on his work, marriage never found him (his likely homosexuality may have made marriage nearly impossible in his time). He died mere months after his mother, on his sixtieth birthday. Today, you won’t find a filmmaker on Earth who doesn’t owe some of their craft (and their tears) to his wonderful work, and in 2012, after never having thought his work would be seen the world over, the British magazine Sight and Sound voted Tokyo Story as the third-greatest film of all time, and the best film to ever be produced in Japan. 

A beautiful dawn, indeed.

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So cold. So empty.

There is nothing to receive from the opening images of Ridley Scott’s Alien other than these primal objectives. As the endless, desolate walls of the spaceship move at a glacial pace, we are reminded. We are barren and alone, we have convinced ourselves, and we’ve only just begun. We are disconnected from our friends and our kind, so much so that years of theirs and years of ours do not show the same way on our faces. We are stricken with an endless, undefined fear, of our oblivion and our isolation. The Nostromo, despite its mechanical sounds and sheer massive size, is relatively uninhabited, and cosmically claustrophobic. If only we weren’t all alone out here. If only there was anything else.

       This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the release of Alien, which is apt to be considered as one of the great horror movies, even though it masks itself in the science-fiction genre and its successor, Aliens, is an unapologetic action flick. And in these opening moments, the methodology which Scott employs is that of a thriller: patience, patience, strike. Sure, we meet the crew, they receive the distress call, go to discover its source, find evidence of extraterrestrial… and so on. It seems to be a basic setup, mundane for any film; and then, when an infantile alien creature bursts through the chest of Kane (John Hurt), in one of cinema’s most visceral, spine-tingling moments, we are already fifty-seven minutes in. It feels like a cheap throatpunch, but it’s all our fault, as now we are nearly halfway through the film’s runtime, and we can’t tune out now.

      Surrounding Kane while an alien emerges from his abdomen are his fellow crew members, from Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Skerritt to Veronica Cartwright and Yaphet Kotto. They bicker, ponder, challenge each other, and we attach ourselves to a piece of each of them. That’s a fraction of why screenwriter Dan O’Bannon holds off on terror for so long: no one can accuse Alien of any stock characters or one- dimensional performances, even down to the xenomorph. When mission control halts operations and makes capturing the organism its priority, Ash (Ian Holm) emerges as their delegate, professing a desire to capture the creature and study it, while Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) counters Ash with a pretty reasonable hell-no mindset. No wonder Ripley becomes our protagonist; we share her non-alien-desiring sentiment.

       The creature’s plurality of forms, designed by H.R. Giger (a legend in his own right, and who earned an Oscar for this film), is perhaps the most delectable tool at the film’s disposal. It is both upright and wormlike, mobile and stationary with intention. Its acid oozes and melts through steel of the ship. Its screams echo and deafen the atmosphere. The creature has been celebrated long beyond its origin film, and even spawned not only its own franchise, but another in Alien vs. Predator. Schlock as it may be, its cultural significance lies in the initial terrors of the sheer sight of it.

       Additionally, the creature appears to have no society, bare communicative skills, etc. Throughout the film, its role as a pure parasite only amplifies: as Ash dies after admitting his loyalty to the mission over his crew members, he cites his reasons: “I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” Out here, in the corners of the universe, conscience is only a cloud, a barrier to natural instincts, to reproduction and efficiency. To survive as the alien does, you need what Ash calls “structural perfection—matched only by hostility.”

      Maybe then it clicks. We’ve been watching one of the most distant, hostile films ever made in Hollywood, only for the film to tell us that’s the key. To survival in remote conditions. To success, when not alone out here. It’s a similar sentiment to Scott’s next film, Blade Runner, again considered a genre-hybrid and elusive masterpiece. In that film’s finale, the “Tears in the Rain” speech is eerily close to Ash’s; the purity and perfection of the Replicas are akin to that of the Xenomorphs. Survival, destruction, and reproduction. We should only hope that us humans keep our imperfections. 

“Or so the story goes,” he claims, attempting to reconstruct an image or an idea which has been lost. The man is named Brooks Otterlake, and in the opening vignettes of The Other Side of the Wind, the late Orson Welles’ notoriously unfinished film, he gives a brief voiceover, hazily recalling in the setup what has possibly happened, and what we may see in the following two hours because of it. Fitting, as the entire saga of how the film was saved, labored upon, and released through Netflix after closing production forty-two years ago is itself a towering kind of reconstruction: attempting to complete and honor the vision of one of cinema’s greatest artists in history, and the scaffolding he left behind.  After Welles’ death in 1985, the movie and its parts had a most rocky trajectory, one that included the overthrow of the Shah of Iran, sections of footage being lost, and a heap of estate-asset balderdash (or so the story goes). The conflict itself contextualizes the miracle that a streaming service in the Bay Area could hunt for a film in the way that those in the Bay Area centuries ago did for gold.

       And gold it has certainly been seen as. Upon the most recent revival efforts, headed by Welles’ close friend Peter Bogdanovich (who acts in the piece, and provides that opening narration) and producer Filip Jan Rymsza, the momentum had finally started to surface, and through crowdfunding platforms such as Indiegogo, and numerous clamors by filmmakers-turned-activists, the movie’s final parts began to take shape. Surviving cast and crew gave their notes and recollections, Academy-Award winning mixers, editors, and production specialists were assembled, and Michel Legrand, a legendary jazz composer known for his work on the French New Wave films of the 1960s, was hired, based upon a single note Welles gave way back when about the possibility of a jazz score.                                        

       The movie’s existence incites more than just mere appreciation; it’s a testament to the love of those who fought for it. As ephemeral  as the medium of film may itself seem, the methodology of how to resurrect it is becoming swifter. In Welles’ time, he needed a fortune to maintain his work and keep it alive -- now, we are seeing regular people donate a coffee-cup price to an online campaign and altogether yielding an unfinished film to reach completion. The technologies are indeed changing -- not just of how we make movies, but of how we save them. So, then, it is only natural that the question then shifts to what we choose to save, and why we may choose it. It’s the question that binds us to why we watch movies in the first place, and what strange human component it must be that implores us, urges us, to remember movies, and to want to keep them alive.

       The finished film itself, though a miracle, is read best as most expected it would be: an experimental vision, an abridged depiction of a story without any real end; a half-genius, half-frustrating collage rather than a traditional three-act bravura. It is often far from easily digestible, partly due to the inevitable incoherence of the pieces picked up over many years, but also partly to odd coincidence -- who knew a script about an unfinished film made by a dying Hollywood legend would turn into exactly that? The autobiographical pieces are certainly present, as Welles tells the story of an American expatriate director returning to Hollywood for a comeback (though I can’t imagine anyone, including Welles, considered him needing a comeback), but it’s more of the uncontrolled that sticks. Likely most notable of these oddities is the director’s death at seventy years old from a car crash in the film -- indeed, Welles was seventy himself when his own fate was decided in fall of 1985 from a heart attack.

       Are these oddities, spooky as they may be, really all that haunting? Orson Welles, as a director, lived between the smoke and mirrors. Before he even set near a film camera, he rose to national notoriety in 1938 for the War of the Worlds radio drama, said to have sparked hysteria and widespread panic from audiences who didn’t realize the recording was fictional. He continued this thematic tightrope in his film career, employing innovative technical schematics to match his cunning misdirection, a quality that would lead to his final completed film, F for Fake (1973). A film about magic and misconception, surely, but more directly aimed at raising an impending question for the growing television-avid and film-consuming world: what is real life, what is a movie, and how are they different? Why are they different?

       And after all, what is the point of completely separating the two?

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