We are two flowers in the same pot

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19 November

A rating and review for Cutie and The Boxer (2013)

96 = N : 15 / M : 16 / C1 : 17 / C2 : 16 / E : 16 / F : 16

N = narration / script

M = material / use of material

C1 = cinematography

C2 = cohesiveness

E = effects / music

F = feel


9 = mid-point of scale (all scores out of 17, 17 x 6 = 102)



The best documentary-makers know that audiences can be trusted to wait for whatever information / explanation comes (or for things to be left uncertain), and that they do not need all things spelt out : the art must be to stand back from one’s film, see it with another’s eyes, and imagine what would be understood by saying this, mentioning this here…

Early on, it just comes out of what Ushio and Noriko Shinohara are doing domestically that it is his birthday and he is 80, with individual cakes and candles. They are clearly Japanese, largely not talking in English except for emphasis, a good word, wit (but the subtitling is simply maintained as a constant), but we may not be aware (or may have read) that they are in New York.

That never needs to be conveyed as a statement (nor whether they have ever tried or wanted to live elsewhere in the States), although some excerpts from a documentary talk about Noriko arriving from Japan with support from her parents, and the early part of Ushio’s career. From where we see them, we come to conclude that it is their home, and many a feature film would benefit from allowing provisional beliefs to be made by their viewers.

Cases of artists – in the widest sense – married to other artists give us Mahler not letting Alma compose, Schumann cramping Clara’s career, and, in a friend’s life, a husband (they are now divorced) who thought himself a genius (as Ushio does), and that certain things did not merit him spending his time on them.

Here, we see the lives together of Noriko and Ushio, and their traumatized son Alex, with whom she became pregnant six months after arriving in New York from Tokyo – it seemed that, unlike the cat whom we see compliantly being washed, he just visited (or, if not, he must have been hiding, or dead drunk, earlier on). When she met Ushio, she was 19, he 41.

Now, the nature of female ageing typically being what it is, the age difference initially seems less apparent – also because he boxes paint onto canvas, with pads attached to gloves, and so seems very fit and energetic. Nothing is made of it as an explanation, but there is a beautifully tranquil, intense and bubble-laden scene where we see him swimming, and elsewhere we see his physique.

The film shows us two recent shows of Ushio’s, the first solo (we never hear whether anything sells, though the opening of the documentary has Noriko estimating that they need $1,000 and the money for the rent to keep afloat), the second jointly with Noriko, which is near the end. In between, there is questioning about (from Ushio) whether he should have an assistant, and (from Noriko) any assumption that she is his assistant, and that she helps him other than because she wants to. Then, in Noriko’s painted-in drawings, we see the emergence of the characters Bullie and Cutie.

To begin with, they tell Cutie Noriko’s own story, soon pregnant and having an alcoholic to contend with, and financial support stopping from her parents when they learn of the drug- and alcohol-informed parties. She works out, in the drawings, her feelings, one of which is that of having been delayed being able to be creative again in her own right for so long, because of the cares and concerns of motherhood. However, in the mural for the joint show, she turns them into less identifiable polar characters with more general desires and impulses.

None of this sums up this neatly put-together film (which, one has to trust, does explain the poster) : the integration of the earlier documentary, the closeness to the subjects, the doubt about whether Ushio’s work is strong or just gimmick (which seems displaced for a while by a visitor from The Guggenheim, and the possibility of buying one of his boxing-paintings, but he then only tells Noriko when she asks that they had decided to buy a work from another artist this year).

What cannot be denied is that, despite the frictions, it is Noriko who knows better than Ushio where a suitable painting is to show to the Guggenheim visitor, and who can also intervene to say that a work that seems of interest had actually been given by Ushio to someone else with a promise not to sell it. Seeing her reasserting herself (for she complains, largely unheard, not only that she is a chef to Ushio, but that he then crudely gobbles something down on which she has laboured) may be a by-product of this film, but, at any rate, it is good to see her valuing her artistic creation – and having others value it.


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

Self-parking garages at Writer's Rest

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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27 January

There's a discussion going on about cars that drive themselves (that age-old dream - of some, anyway!).

I have just posted this comment in a 'spin-off thread'* to the original posting:


Hmm. I'm not sure that this concept is a new one - if I am not raving, it originated in Japan (probably Tokyo), where, clearly, efficient use of the available space is of paramount importance. (It may be now in West Hollywood.)

In essence, I think that it is little more than a giant car-transporter (those huge things on the roads that look so dangerous on so many counts:

* What if the cars touch (in varying degrees of touching from a knock to a squash)?;

* What if the whole thing falls over?;

* What if a car - as in the films - tumbles off the back and into one's path, and would one's reactions be good enough?.


Self-parking garages are a mechanization of using storage space, as I recall, a bit like the capsule hotel - you get a bed for the night, but it's cheap and basic, as you're occupying a space not much larger than a coffin!

I believe that, with the self-parking concept, you leave the garage with fitting your car into the space available, rather than driving around and around a car-park, where a large surface-area is, of course, wasted in this search by providing the route for the cars to get around, and from floor to floor.

I think that it's computer-controlled mechanization, in fact, with hydraulics, sensors, etc. If I'm right, it's little different from the technology that we have already taken for granted with robots building vehicles for us in car-plants:

There's a very atmospheric scene in such a plant in The Hunter (2010) (write-up on my blog**, and the Cambridge Film Festival web-site), where Ali (writer / director / actor Rafi Pitts), who is a security guard on night duties, makes a patrol. There is no one around, but the robots are busy welding and the like.


Full blog at http://writersrest.com/2012/01/24/let-the-robot-drive/#comment-1108


End-notes

* Some such...

** Postings at: The Hunter re-emerges and Back to The Hunter.


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In and out of insults

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22 December

Fashion was when an abruptly raised solo middle finger (probably of either hand - forgive me for not being bothered with the etiquette!), together with the curt utterance ‘Swivel!’, was deeply insulting*. Probably, then, it became less insulting, until it became too tame to do at all, because I cannot think when I last saw it done.

(If not on t.v., although it usually lags behind in the provocation stakes, it probably originated on celluloid, that great promoter of catch-phrases such as the dire ‘I’ll be back…!’ – with its sickeningly inappropriate overtones of Captain Oates.)

In their time, insults and insulting gestures have the currency (pun intended!) of being known to be both the latest and also stylish: by saying it and doing the (action and) utterance properly, you are showing that you are an informed person, and so worthwhile. (By mimicking something else, whether it is passé or just not credited as being the thing to do, you are showing the converse, your worthlessness: and we all know how the dictionary almost invairably defines various coarse words as meaning (amongst those referring to the sexual organs in which they have their home) 'a worthless [or offensive] person'.

But we know that all, of course: we're modern, we're in the post-Manwatching period. What we don’t know is that the same gesture, performed more slowly, and with the utterance softer and more questioning would have been a pick-up line in Tokyo’s infamous district of the love-hotels. After all, would the person using the more combative combination either expect or want to be taken up on the offered service?

Fine, the insult depends on proposing a penetration that is assumed to be unwelcome, but it only works if there isn’t a retort that takes it at face value and says ‘Yes, please! – Your place or mine?’, intending to induce the revulsion in the other person that he or she sought to provoke. Other responses, of a more cloacal nature, could equally have been devised, but I doubt that they were.

Which shows? The mere copying of a gesture or insult is just that, whereas it takes genuine wit to parry it, as stand-ups do with put-downs, and make the person who uttered it (feel) defenceless and stupid. Doing it on the hoof takes sharper wits, of course, and most people who expect to be heckled have their armoury of both passive and offensive attack – which can, in turn, be copied…

Homo sapiens? I don’t think so! More like Homo mimicus, and even the primates, mammals and birds do that to pass on tricks that have been discovered even in the domain of accessing, processing or eating food. (Quite apart from bees and the honey-dances, and ants’ - or termites’ - ways of passing on important information about threat or prey.)

But do any of these creatures copy something that, looked at, makes no rational sense? – why would the person raising the finger actually want it where he or she suggests the other person accepting it, and, if he or she actually stopped to consider the indecent proposal, wouldn’t he or she be the loser in the transaction?!

Negative view it may be, but human-beings are not always very selective, and the part of the body that this sort of copying behaviour resembles most is not the brain, but the appendix, for its redundancy (and also the scope for grievously poisoning the body with its hoard of toxins). Not the evolutionary future at all, not even a tributary, but a silted-up backwater, stagnating and no longer flowing!


* And these things can be misheard, of course, to the great delight of those who realize that someone else has got it wrong: imagine someone going through the whole routine perfectly, but under the impression that the word is 'Snivel'...

(Actually, a friend revealed, by writing down the phrase 'can't be asked', that there is evidence of genetic miscopying (sc. transcriptional error) in meanings changing and phrasal words becoming confused - when it is the thing to say 'feisty', no one troubles to think what the word actually means, because, hey, we're talking about The Spice Girls, and we know what they're like, so we know what feisty signifies?

Johnson got it all wrong with his dictionary, then, and Carroll's Humpty-Dumpty was right - should have said that the awesome five were 'very helicopter' and seen if that caught on, if you can excuse me being a bit traffic-cone about it!)


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