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Episode 107 - The Watch

Conversation

Christian: What’cha doing there kiddo?
Jack: Just throwing rocks.
Christian: Good, good. Get all that rock throwing out before you get married.
Jack: It was either this, or being inside with Sarah and the Wedding Planner figuring out where all the flowers should go.
Christian: Wise choice. Listen, before tonight, before, before things get crazy, I wanted to give you something. This was my dad’s and I jus… I thought it would only be fitting.
Jack: I’ve never seen you wear it before.
Christian: Well that’s because I never did. Your grandfather didn’t really like your mother, and you know, he thought marrying her was a mistake. He told me, to my face, that the day that I got married, an then he gave me this watch. So I never wore it.
Jack: Dad… are you trying to tell me something?
Christian: Unlike me, you have made..the absolute right choice.
Jack: Thank you,
Christian: Oh here, that’s yours.
Jack: I guess this is really happening, huh?
Christian: oh, a soon as they arrange those flowers, and you run out of rocks…
Jack: There’s a lot of rocks out here.
[Pause]
Christian: Would you do me a favor? If you and Sarah ever have a kid, try to treat him a little better than I treated you.
Jack: No pressure, right?
Christian: I’ll see you inside, kiddo.
Jack: Yeah, yeah

Dexter 2×11 Left Turn Ahead Promo

For a ticking-bomb actioner, Japanese import Midnight Eagle is surprisingly profound, going far beyond the conventions of typical thrillers to embrace everything from father-son relationships and East Asian geopolitics to the role of journalists in a dangerous world.

Award-winning photojournalist Yuji Nishizaki (Takao Osawa) has finally seen enough war and has retreated to the Japanese Alps to shoot nature instead. Recently widowed and feeling guilty about his inattention to his dying wife, he’s also abandoned his young son Yu (Hiroki Sahara) to the care of his sister-in-law Keiko (Yuko Takeuchi), a muckraking journalist herself.

While camping, Yuji has the bad luck to witness — and photograph — the crash of a plane that turns out to be a nuclear-armed American Stealth bomber that had no business being in the air over Japan, especially Western Japan, which is dangerously close to North Korea. The Japanese military snow patrol rushes into the mountains to get the nuke, but the “foreign agents” who sabotaged the plane to bring it down are also in the hunt. (It’s funny how no one in the movie ever utters the words “North Korea.”)

Sensing the story of his life, Yuji’s journalist friend Oaichi (Hiroshi Tamaki) also heads for the hills after convincing the reluctant Yuji to accompany him. Eventually, after dodging dozens of white-suited Japanese troops and “foreign agents,” they find the plane, and naturally the classic red digital timer is counting down from 150 minutes. Can they save Japan?

Back in Tokyo, the very worried Prime Minister Watarase (Tatsuya Fuji) is slowly forced to reveal that he’s been giving the Americans a bit too much leeway in their Asian operations, leading to this crisis. As bullets fly on the mountain top, Yuji asks, “Can this be happening in Japan?” He then adds, “We shouldn’t have wars or armies.” The gallant Major Akihiko (A-Saku Yoshida), who is helping them fight off the bad guys, says, “We’re not an army. We’re the self-defense force.”

While the subtleties of philosophical debates about Japanese self-defense and foreign policy are likely to be lost on Western audiences, there’s plenty to keep us engaged throughout. The movie shifts quickly among the Tokyo war room, the snowy mountain, and the streets of Tokyo, where reporter Keiko is trying to make contact with foreign agents to find out what’s going on and to get the password to deactivate the nuke. At the same time, Yuji is tormented by the meaninglessness of his life, wondering what good taking pictures ever did until the Major points out it was seeing Yuji’s war photos that inspired him to work for peace in his military career.

Gunfire, avalanches, explosions, even napalm… Midnight Eagle has it all. There’s even time for endings on top of endings, each one more gut-wrenching than the one that came before. It’s quite a ride. All the boom boom of a Bruce Willis project but with lots of intriguing Asian angles. As they say in Japan: sugoi! Cool!

Aka Middonaito Îguru.

Midnight away from the oasis.

We first meet the real Bob Dylan, lit by a spotlight and blowing into a harmonica with his eyes turned ever-downward, at the very end of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. (The footage comes from a concert filmed in the 1960s.) Though there are six evocations of our hero’s persona and dozens of references to his words and images, his actual visage is kept under lock and key until the solemn credits. To Haynes, the mystery of who the man is behind closed doors should stay that way: Behind closed doors tends to be pretty tedious if not downright boring. It’s more fun to extrapolate: In the open valleys of cultural myth, a celebrity can become any number of things.

At first, he’s a young, train-hopping wanderer who has taken the name Woody (Marcus Carl Franklin), from his hero Woody Guthrie. He also plays a guitar with “This Machine Kills Fascism” painted on it. Later, the man appears as an aged Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) who can’t understand why the locals are being bullied out of their land by a decrepit Pat Garrett (Bruce Greenwood). Fitfully, the sequences are shot in the dusty browns of Peckinpah and the hippie westerns of the late 1960s and 1970s. Both stories, along with the others, are consistently interrupted by a press conference with poet Arthur Rimbaud (Ben Whishaw), who speaks in a particularly American sarcasm while scrutinizing everyone who questions him, half-mumbling with cigarette in hand.

In a scratched and uneasy documentary style a la Harlan County USA, we are introduced to Jack (Christian Bale) who goes from being a mythical folk singer in the New York Bowery and Lower East Side to a born-again Christian preacher in the south. Aged and ragged, Bale does a terrifyingly acute rendition of “Pressin’ On,” a cut from the much-bemoaned Saved album, with a gospel choir backing. Jack’s early folk ramblings are consequently the subject of a film starring Robbie (Heath Ledger) who no sooner becomes haunted by the songwriter than he falls for an artist named Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Slowly, Robbie succumbs to the habits and beliefs of the rebellious musician, tearing his family apart. Gainsbourg appropriates a concluding speech from Godard’s Masculine Feminine as she ends her marriage to the actor.

And then there’s Jude (Cate Blanchett), the androgynous approximation of Dylan-going-electric. The tonal residue of 8 1/2 and a Richard Lester marathon, Haynes style becomes wholly ambidextrous in the black-and-white milieu of Jude’s confrontations with television journalist Mr. Jones (Greenwood again). The set pieces play like metaphorical jungle-gyms: a Warhol apartment screening a projection of Lyndon B. Johnson with “Tombstone Blues” subtitles, a fluid trip from fooling around with the Beatles to chasing Coco (Michelle Williams), a former lover, through the forest. All the performances are brilliant but Blanchett’s is an act of wonderment; she plays Jude like a marionette ambivalent to its puppeteer, contorting and shifting to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” body unencumbered by formal ways of movement.

Densely interwoven, I’m Not There fills in the gaps of Haynes’ similarly-minded Velvet Goldmine by disregarding the idea of the outsider. In Goldmine, Bale played a man obsessed with the glam identity but not embroiled in it; an agent of free will outside the provocateurs of glam. His closest approximation here, Ledger’s character, refuses to be excluded from the melee and becomes part of the landscape along with all the other personas. In fact, the film most closely resembles Far From Heaven in daring to take an accepted and popular style and imbuing it with modern themes.

In the same realm as Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, I’m Not There engulfs and nearly drowns the viewer in the widespread apparitions, intimations, and projections of the artist rather than attempting to possess him. What ultimately devalues films like Ray and Walk the Line is an attempt to assign these legends to the realm of humanity; a nagging dream that we could be like them since we’ve been through similar human experiences. But I’m Not There is wholly uninterested in the pitfalls of sex, drugs, marriage, affairs, and children. Haynes’ film, certainly his masterpiece to date and one of the year’s best, elusively evokes everything Dylan has reflected while keeping him, as always, ostensibly unknowable. In the words of Bobby Zimmerman, the very ones Haynes ends his film on: “It’s like the past, present, and future sitting in the same room together.”
I’m right here.