Colin Marshall

A Story of Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1934) and Floating Weeds (Ozu, 1959)

A ragtag kabuki troupe steams into a seaside town ready to settle in for what's assumed to be a good year or so of performances. It so happens that this town is home to one of the leader's ex-lovers and her son, who's also his son. The son doesn't know that, though; wanting him to grow into a higher class than that of a traveling actor, his father pretends to be his uncle when visiting. When she discovers that the leader has been surreptitiously hanging out with his son and the mother, the leader's prostitute-cum-actress girlfriend gets jealous and seeks her revenge by bribing the troupe's other girl to go seduce the kid, dragging him down from a life of promise to the dreaded desultory, loose-moral'd existence of the actors.

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The Criterion Collection put out a handsome box set, as is their wont, containing both A Story of Floating Weeds, Ozu's 1934 silent film, and Floating Weeds, his 1959 color remake, the former with a commentary track from noted Japan scholar Donald Richie, the latter with one from Roger Ebert. As someone whose Ozu enthusiasm (Ozuthusiasm?) grows by the day, this is as the crack cocaine to me.

The two movies share a plot and even, apparently, some locations — Ozu was highly, highly particular about building a mise-en-scène — but they're otherwise distinct experiences. As much of a film geek as I can be, I haven't yet entered a silent phase, so watching dialogue cards was, in a way, something of a novelty. Then again, I watch a lot of — mostly? — pictures with dialogue spoken in languages I don't (yet) know, so it's not much of a novelty at all as I'd be reading the subtitles anyway. What was striking was the 1934 version's solidly beautiful photography. The films I've seen from that area and before — hell, even in decades after — have been pretty sketchy, visually speaking, but this one nears perfection. It even outdoes many black-and-whites from the late 1950s and 1960s. I'm almost ready to make the bold declaration that the remake doesn't look as good, though the color and 25-year distance make for tricky comparison.

Richie and Ebert's commentaries, the former of which I'm still in the middle, added tremendous value. My respect for Ebert's writing skill is well-documented, but his commentary skill? Wow. It's a damned tragedy that cancer surgery has robbed him of his voice, at least until he's ready (if ever he will be) to go under the knife again. His Dark City track was nice, but this one is finer still, because, though he may not be a die-hard Alex Proyas fan — does such a creature walk this Earth? — he is a die-hard Ozu fan. So he's all up in there with the trivia Ozu-lovers will relish: that teapot he tends to drop into the corner of his frames, for instance.

A few of Ebert's observations were especially helpful in shining a light on why I like Ozu. To paraphrase, he says that Floating Weeds comes late enough in Ozu's career &href; he died in '63 — that, by the time of its release, the director had pretty much unshackled himself from the chains of overbearing plots. As the critic puts it, Ozu felt that too much plot just "jerks the characters around" in unnatural (and thus uninteresting) ways. I couldn't agree more. If I had to articulate my chief beef with current mainstream cinema (other than its aesthetically bankrupt herky-jerky editing), I'd say that it's the dumb, lumbering plots that grab the characters and clumsily push them around like toy soldiers on the sofa. Ozu is nearly the antithesis of that; not quite to the degree of, say, Kiarostami, but then again, Ozu doesn't make nearly as many casual viewers uncomfortable as does the Iranian. (Ironic that Kiarostami's Five Dedicated to Ozu, which comprises essentially five human-free long shots, discomfits most audiences than the rest of his stuff put together.)

Ozu's films — and really, I tend to think of his filmography as one big movie — may well be the apotheosis of what, through intensive viewing, I have some to identify as my preferred cinematic configuration. (Or quite possibly my preferred configuration of any sort of narrative.) It's this: maximum realism of subject matter, delivered with maximum aestheticization. Ozu's ultra-realistic scripts certainly provide this — practically every person is an everyperson, every setting an everysetting — and so does his meticulous attention to visual composition. He was so concerned with making all his shots suitable for framing that he'd re-arrange the rooms' objects and just eat the continuity errors in the name of beauty. A filmmaker after my own heart. (I learned that tidbit from Ebert, by the by.)

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18. Plot should be lightly applied. Characters are interesting. The various machinations of overzealous screenwriters meant to yank them to and fro are, generally speaking, not.

Tokyo-Ga (Wim Wenders, 1985)

Wanting to see if the locations where Yasujiro Ozu shot his 54 films during the first half of the 20th century would retain their magic in person and at least two decades on, German filmmaker Wim Wenders traveled to Tokyo in 1983. There, he found Ozu's grave, teenage fetishists of the American 1950s, pachinko parlors, Ozu's favorite actor, a workshop that produces fake food, a multi-tiered driving range, Ozu's cameraman and Werner Herzog.

* * *

Rapidly sinking into the depths of Ozu fandom as I am, I couldn't really watch Tokyo-Ga as much of an Ozu-centric film. Wenders' conversations with actor Chishu Ryu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta (legend has it that he also very nearly got to chat with the reclusive Setsuko Hara, but it fell through) play like some of the most visually wonderful DVD extras ever shot, but the movie that surrounds them is more the simple experience of a German filmmaker plopping himself into unfamiliar territory. That the territory is also unfamiliar to me makes it even better; it's not just Tokyo, it's 1983 Tokyo, captured cooly, vividly, almost hypnotically.

While I'm not one of those Americans drawn inexorably to Japan (the way a previous generation might have felt about, say, France), it does rank at least among my top twenty destinations of intrigue. But while I could theoretically take off for Japan whenever I want, I can never go the Japan of a quarter-century ago. That's a shame, because Tokyo₁₉₈₃ had some damn cool-looking technology. Things are much more advanced now, sure, but images of Tokyo₂₀₀₈ seem more muddled, somehow, more anything-goes; the place seems to have lost its retro-futuristic edge. Sure, the retro-futurism label applies now, you might say, but I think Tokyo₁₉₈₃ even looked a little retro-futuristic in 1983; there's a midcentury aesthetic there mixed in with the sharp-angled Sony (and Sony-angled Sharp) cassette recorders and whatnot. Combine this with saturated-color photography of cherry blossom viewing, the rain in Ryu's garden and whatnot and you've got yourself an aesthetic winner.

Lucky, then, that Wenders created this filmic time capsule for me. Half the fun is just seeing a man-on-the-street-view of Tokyo₁₉₈₃ — the film is bascially all shot with a camera in Wenders' own hands — and the other half is finding out what sorts of stuff a genuine Intense German Filmmaker of Both Fiction and Documentary^TM, a category also including — and maybe only also including — Wenders' pal Herzog, whom he meets in Tokyo Tower, fixates on when in Japan. Wenders can't get enough of floor after floor of stacked salarymen driving golf balls into the distance, for instance; he's so captivated that he returns for a second day of staring. One of his obsessions happens to align with a question I've asked for a while: how does that model food you see in teryiaki joints get made? Wenders hangs around a faux food plant long enough to document the whole delicious-looking process.

Tokyo-Ga isn't the most illuminating meditation on Ozu's life and work out there, but hey, it's not like we're wanting for secondary material on the man. The film is something even more valuable, experientially fascinating and aesthetically stunning. (Not that I don't wish Wenders would've gone with subtitles for his interviewees rather than paraphrasing them in voiceover, but then again, that kind of fits in with the whole project's feel, so I'll give the choice a pass.)

The Fall (Tarsem, 2008)

Paralyzed after a jump gone awry, Roy, a silent-era stuntman convalescing in a Los Angeles hospital, befriends Alexandria, a little Romanian girl who broke her arm picking fruit. Trying to work up the goodwill to have her swipe a suicide-grade dosage of morphine from the pill room, Roy begins telling Alexandria a fantastical improvised story about the adventures of a masked bandit, an superhero-physiqued ex-slave, a tough Indian, an explosive-wielding Italian and Charles Darwin, who carries around a monkey. The quintet's quest to find and kill a malevolent governor who has badly wronged each of them at one time or another plays out onscreen as interpred through Alexandria's imagination: the locations are vast, boldly colorful and nearly empty, the characters are flamboyantly costumed versions of people she sees around, and the references she doesn't fully understand are rendered only semi-accurately.

* * *

Ebert called this "a movie that you might want to see for no other reason than because it exists. There will never be another like it." That seems about right. One of the elements that pushes the film into really rarefied territory, at least for 2008, is that it's packed with all manner of visual wonders but not one — not one — instance of CGI. That alone merits the cost of admission, whatever you're payin'. I don't mean to come off like Pops Marshall here — not that I couldn't use a pipe and slippers right about now — but CGI's lameness is only surpassed by its near-ubiquity; I'd even go so far as to say I prefer slightly shabby optical or practical effects to flawlessly-executed CGI.

But why? CGI's very popular, and it's come a long way since its invention. Why, you can make whatever you want with CGI! And yet that's the problem. Given enough dollars, manpower and CPU cycles, CGI can do pretty damn much anything. (Leaving aside the task of creating from whole cloth human-looking characters who don't get marooned in the uncanny valley, which, as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and The Polar Express took pains to remind us, remains a bridge too far. Not for long, I suspect.) Thus, nothing created with CGI is particularly impressive. To go to Ebert again, he wrote in his review of Tsui Hark's visually choice and CGI-light Time and Tide:

I denounced "The Mummy Returns" for abandoning its characters and using its plot "only as a clothesline for special effects and action sequences." Now I recommend "Time and Tide," which does exactly the same thing. But there is a difference. While both films rely on nonstop, wall-to-wall action, "Time and Tide" does a better job, and plugs its action and stunt sequences into the real world with everyday props, instead of relying on computers to generate vast and meaningless armies of special effects creatures.

It's one thing to create an Egyptian canine sand warrior on your computer, multiply it by 1,000, and send the results into battle. It's another thing to show a man rappelling down the sides of the interior courtyard of a high-rise apartment building, with the camera following him in a vertiginous descent. In "The Mummy Returns," you're thinking of the effects. In "Time and Tide," you're thinking you've never seen anything like that before.

Huh. So Roger Ebert's outdone my own descriptive abilities twice, in my own post. Fancy that. "Vast and meaningless" describes perfectly most CGI trickery I see, when I miscalculate badly enough to watch a movie incorporating it. If a technology's capable of anything, nothing it does is particularly impressive, but if a technology's got certain limitations and you work creatively and surprisingly within them, that's gold. By sticking to filling his visual awesomeness quota without CGI — and hell, very nearly without effects — Tarsem wins me over right there.

(And no, I still haven't seen The Fountain yet, but I'm now fired up to do so. Just gimme like three months; I'm mostly watching Ozu right now.)

But is The Fall enjoyable as narrative? My answer is yes, but with the qualifier that it's really more about the concept and the aesthetics. If we're breaking it down, the movie comprises two parallel stories. The first is about a desperate, bedridden man who befriends a little girl, if only to get suicide assistance at first. The second is a highly theatrical, almost dreamlike quest for revenge, a tale woven by an unreliable teller. What's really cool about this is what I think Tarsem meant to be really cool about this: the points of congruence between the two lines of action. Hey, isn't that escaped slave also the man who delivers the hospital's ice? And that foul governor has to be the slickster who stole Roy's woman! That the imagery is meant to be the function of a little girl's incompletely-informed imagination is quite neat as well: when Roy describes an "Indian" with a "wigwam" and a "squaw", for instance, Alexandria pictures a turbaned subcontinental guarding his spire-topped palace.

My one regret is not that the picture goes too far with this conceit, but that it goes not far enough. The "real-life" equivalents of a bunch of the faces starring in Alexandria's imagination aren't shoehorned in until nearly the end, and a tad too much remains unexplored by the credits. (It's implied that Alexandria's house was burned down by a roving band of Romanian fruit picker-hating rabble, but unless there are huge gaps in my knowedlge of American history — not an unlikely proposition — I'm not sure how many of those there were.) But it's still freakin' incredible to watch. To make it an Ebert hat trick, "'The Fall' is so audacious that when Variety calls it a "vanity project," you can only admire the man vain enough to make it." I certainly do, but then again, I've always admired vanity.

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17. CGI sucks. When a technology can theoretically do anything, nothing it does is impressive, because never does it call for much ingenuity or creativity. Effects are better — by which I mean "much more entertainingly" — accomplished with standard optical or practical techniques, or even just with artful implication.

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2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire
2. Tarsem's The Fall
3. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
4. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Feeling societal pressure to marry off Noriko, his 27-year-old live-in daughter, aging, widowed professor Shukichi lies and says he's found a potential spouse of his own so that Noriko won't feel bad about leaving him to care for himself. A local busybody sets her up with some dude whose mouth allegedly looks like Gary Cooper's and the wheels turn just as the town expects, but neither Noriko nor Shukichi's hearts are in it. 

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inertiacrept wrote this a couple years back:

Books are alone in their power to make me feel inadequate. If I read, say, "Pride and Prejudice", and come away flummoxed and unaffected, I feel like I failed to grasp the point - that there was a deep meaning, something about subtlety, and for me to let my lack of interest in the Old World obsession with marriageability color my perception of the book as a classic was crass and superficial. I'm a bad guy, or a dumby, because I didn't/couldn't get it. And this isn't just me beating up on myself... if you walk up to someone who knows books and tell them that Jane Austen sucks, they'll usually tell you that you just didn't get it.

Late Spring isn't a book, granted, but marriageability is a big deal in its world. That would be the world of early postwar Japan, where there were evidently two kinds of people: the old-school types with robes and stilty sandals and everything, or the youngsters, equally costumed, in full wholesome-Western-kid mufti, cardigans and side-parts on the men, long skirts and those restrictedly poofy hairstyles on the ladies. Nobody looks like they aren't wearing period outfits. And boy, do they care who's marrying who. 

This, I think, would be a pain-in-the-ass social environment to live in. Noriko's plight shows how tough it is for the ladies, especially those not in the mood for holy matrimony, but it's clearly no picnic for the dudes either. At one point, Shukichi's young assistant goes on a few jaunts with Noriko, riding bikes and such, only to reveal that he's already been set up — and not exactly of his own free will, the movie implies. Nevertheless, he invites her to the theater, and she, knowing that he's promised to another woman, chastely declines. But what do we see sitting in the seat next to him when he attents the show anyway? His betrothed? His hat. 

Nor is Shukichi himself perfectly pleased with the groupthink about marriage. Recalling his relationship with his own late wife in order to reassure Noriko that it's not all bad, he has the opposite effect. Sure, he admits, I'd come home and find her crying in the kitchen a lot, but after years and years things became pretty okay. I'm thinking that might not count as a ringing endorsement. And, odd as it sounds, the film starts out depicting the life Shukichi and Noriko have as a pretty happy one, an unconventional "marriage" of sorts. But the force of tradition, obligation, etc. gang up and force the latter into what we can only assume is a few years of weeping quietly in Cooper-mouth's kitchen and the former into sitting, alone, peeling an apple in silence. (That silent apple-peeling just kills me.) 

I'm more or less ambivalent toward the institution of marriage in this day and age — I'm not entirely comfortable actively inviting John Law into my relationships, though Sammo Law is welcome — and, if Late Spring is to be believed, it was positively terrifying in 1949 Japan. I breathe a sigh relief to live an a society that expects almost nothing of me. Marriage, children, hard work, widgets, supporting the elderly outside of a doomed creaky bureaucracy, producing social good of any kind: if I don't want to do it, I don't have to. That's the essence of freedom, I suppose.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami, 1985)

In a futuristic, Johnny Mnemonic-y Tokyo, a young guy works as a Calcutec, a sort of human encryption key paid to process and transport data securely within his own subconscious mind. He takes an off-the-books assignment from a cranky old engineer of Calcutec technology who lives and works in a dank underground labyrinth guarded by his pudgy granddaughter. Upon completing his work, the narrator finds himself on the business end of threats from the Semiotecs, arch-enemies of the Calcutecs bent on stealing data to use it for presumably unsavory purposes. As time passes, his mind plays more and more tricks on him, perceiving reality in unpredictable ways and repeatedly hammering him with the image of a unicorn skull, one of which the prof mailed him as an extra reward for a job well done. Researching unicorn skulls leads him to an attractive librarian who may know how to figure out why his mind's going haywire.

Simultaneously, another unnamed protagonist arrives in a walled city referred to as "the end of the world". After having his shadow removed, he's introduced to his job: reading the dreams of a bunch of unicorn skulls stored in the town's library. Chafing against his limited, routinized existence, he plans an escape from the city along with his shadow, which has been relegated to slow death by manual labor.

* * *

This is an early example of the two-narratives-converging form that Murakami would later use, to kinda-sorta-success, in Kafka on the Shore. Rather than having the main characters' paths cross, though, he sets up parallels between them — you may have noticed the unicorn skulls, for one — that hint at a more complex arrangement. Though I am not particularly respectful of the great internet spoiler code, I'm not sure how much to reveal about the extent to which the two stories, "Hard Boiled Wonderland" and "The End of the World", are intertwined. Hell, I'm not even sure how much they are intertwined. Murakami imbues his works with many qualities; easiness isn't one of them.

Occasional Murakami translator Jay Rubin wrote a book called Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, a really informative couple hundred pages about the man and his work in both Japanese and American contexts. In it, Rubin recalls his initial encounter with Murakami's peculiar aesthetic being none other than Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. He was just blown away by how different it was than the thousands of Japanese narratives he'd previously read, absolutely unencumbered by tradition or custom and audaciously non-autobiographical. "A breath of fresh air" would be the appropriate cliché. I believe the book remains Rubin's favorite Murakami, including the ones he himself translated.

I'm kind of with him and I'm kind of not. Sure, the novel is full of imaginative ideas that have stayed with me: the dreaded, only indirectly invisible "INKlings" that swarm through the sewer leading to the old professor's lair; the nature of Calcutec training and the work itself; the process of dream-reading; the (common in Murakami) permeable membrane between one reality and the other. But as studded with neat things as it is, the whole Murakami-meets-Gibson hybridization — the Johnny Mnemonic comparison runs deeper than you may assume — gets problematic. The biggest issue is that it's simply too distanced from normal human experience. Or at least from my normal human experience. The "Hard-Boiled Wonderland" half is set in a conceivable future and thus theoretically grounded in the actual present, vague as Murakami is about certain elements of it. The "End of the World" setting is pretty much cut from whole cloth. If the former is Murakami's take on sci-fi, the latter is Murakami's take on fantasy. I like Murakami. I kinda like sci-fi. But boy howdy, I do not cotton to fantasy.

This passage, from "Hard-Boiled Wonderland", made up for a lot, though:

The woman was on the chubby side. Young and beautiful and all that went with it, but chubby. Now a young, beautiful woman who is, shall we say, plump, seems a bit off. Walking behind her, I fixated on her body.

Around young, beautiful, fat women, I am generally thrown into confusion. I don't know why. Maybe it's because an image of their dietary habits naturally congeals in my mind. When I see a goodly sized woman, I have visions of her mopping up that last drop of cream sauce with bread, wolfing down that final sprig of watercress garnish from her plate. And once that hapens, it's like acid corroding metal: scenes of her eating spread through my head and I lose control.

Your plain fat woman is fine. Fat women are like clouds in the sky. They're just floating there, nothing to do with me. Bur your young, beautiful, fat woman is another story. I am demanded to assume a posture toward her. I could end up sleeping with her. That is probably where all the confusion comes in.

Which is not to say that I have anything against fat women. Confusion and replusion are two different things. I've slept with fat women before and on the whole the experience wasn't bad. If your confusion leads you in the right direction, the results can be uncommonly rewarding. But of course, things don't always take the right course. Sex is an extremely subtle undertaking, unlike going to the department store on Sunday to buy a thermos. Even among young, beautiful, fat women, there are distinctions to be made. Fleshed out one way, they'll lead you in the right direction; fleshed out another way, they'll leave you lost, trivial, confused.

In this sense, sleeping with fat women can be a challenge. There must be as many paths of human fat as there are ways of human death.

Dance Dance Dance (Haruki Murakami, 1988)

The nameless protagonist of A Wild Sheep Chase returns, several years later, to the Dolphin Hotel in Sapporo, looking for his lost ear-model love. The place has been completely rebuilt from a shabby former sheep research hall into a tower of gleaming luxury in which our hero finds an alluring bespectacled front desk attendant and an adolescent girl with a flighty photographer mom. Though he becomes fixated on Yumiyoshi, the clerk, he winds up escorting Yuki, the tween, back to her Tokyo home after her mother jets in a fit of artistic inspiration.

Back on Honshu, the narrator re-encounters Gotanda, a junior high classmate who's since become a B-grade movie star. His current release, Unrequited Love, actually features the stunningly-eared missing girlfriend — whose name, or at least whose assumed name, turns out to be Kiki — in a bit part. Sick of fame and its trappings, Gotanda enthusiastically hangs out with and pours out his heart to our hero, a representative of his simpler past. Since both the narrator and Yuki are at loose ends, he joins her on an extended trip to Hawaii, where they find Yuki's world-famous sometimes-adult-guardian shacked up with a one-armed Vietnam vet. But the people he knows start dying, and it falls to the protagonist to figure out what's going on.

* * *

Nobody likes this book except Haruki Murakami and me. Okay, that's an exaggeration, but Dance Dance Dance is roundly considered one of Murakami's inferior — or at least less superior — works. He says writing it was an enjoyable catharsis after getting blindsided by the staggering popularity of his previous novel, Norwegian Wood. He fled the public eye, decided to write not another wistful story of 1960s teen romance but a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase containing whatever he damn well pleased. Out came this book. Detractors call it muddled and disorganized, but I prefer it to its (critically acclaimed) predecessor because it spends more time in real situations, or at least ones partially recognizable as real. And in any case, there's a lot less dialogue between the narrator andthatshortguyinthesheepcostumewhosewordsallruntogetherlikethis, which comes as a relief.

Even by Murakami's standards, this novel's plot is tough to lay out. Like most of his protagonists, Dance Dance Dance's just sort of lets fate take him where it may. When he needs money, he earns it by "shoveling cultural snow," i.e. writing restaurant reviews for a women's magazine, so he's more or less free to do what he pleases, when he pleases. Which turns out to be encountering a series of eccentrics, including but not limited to those named in the plot summary. Amusingly, Yuki's father is a mediocre but decent-selling novelist named Hiraku Makmura. Ponder that name for a sec. To commit the literary crime of going outside the text, I can't help but think him a reflection of what the newly-popular Murakami thought he might, with complacency, become. Dance Dance Dance isn't just a Confederacy of Dunces-style walkthrough of colorfully-peopled settings, though: there's a story, not to say a particularly good one, about a supernaturally affected (haunted?) floor of the rebuilt Dolphin Hotel. When the protagonist and Yumiyoshi visit it, it turns out to be one of those portals to a parallel world that Murakami so enjoys employing. It also seems to predict, by way of a couch full of skeletons, the deaths of everyone the narrator knows, so he's got that to intervene in. Fortunately, the magic part of this particular instance of magic realism is easy to ignore. To summarize, lamely: I can't call this a prime piece of craftsmanship and it doesn't quite add up to anything, but I had a fine time anyway. Your mileage may vary.

Aberdeen (Hans Petter Moland, 2000)

Having arranged for his admission into a last-ditch rehab program, a terminally cancer-stricken mother demands that her skanky, coke-snorting daughter Kaisa ferry her estranged alcoholic husband (and the daughter's estranged alcoholic father) Tomas from his home in Oslo to her deathbed in Aberdeen. They forge ahead about as well as could be expected, and end up taking a ride from Clive, a lonely young soccer-hooliganesque trucker who's got more of his act together than both of them combined.

* * *
Ah, the romance of drunkenness. Oh, wait — I'm thinking of every other movie about alcoholism. In Aberdeen, Tomas' condition couldn't be less romantic: he's always stumbling around half-coherent at best, urinating in flower beds, puking on Kaisa while she drives or getting showered in beer by a pack of wandering, suited young toughs. You know that theory about the behavior of congressmen that claims their actions can pretty much all be explained as a function of pursuing reelection? Nearly every single one of Tomas' actions can be explained as a function of pursuing booze. Maybe that's because there's — as the Brits say — fuck-all to do but drink when you're a retired Norwegian oil rig worker, but man, staying soused is all he cares about. He doesn't even have the burning self-destructive drive that most movie drunks do; he just needs to maintain inebriation. (And he doesn't like to be reminded of it; when he asks Kaisa and Clive if they're hungry, Kaisa responds, "You mean thirsty? No!" and his face justfalls.) 

That's not to say that Kaisa's much better; ultimately, I could summon even less sympathy for her, but I've never claimed not to prefer middle-aged Scandinavian drunkards to twentysomething paper-pushing libertines. The two make their way through that classic form, the road movie, a genre which affords lesser filmmakers a chance to stuff in every cliché of cinema's last fifty years. Aside from a bit of capital-S Symbolism, Moland resists that, a choice for which I'm grateful, opting instead for a realism that punctuated either by lapses into the slightly surreal or just lapses into Scottish stuff I don't understand, such as the aforementioned pack of relatively well-dressed thugs. Are there really so few attractions in Scotland that it's a viable choice for a bored young man to don a blazer, shake up a can of beer and then go around with the lads spraying pathetic drunks with it?

Giving the issue a bit more thought, though, I'm not entirely sure how confidently I can call the film realistic. I mean, the hassles Tomas and Kaisa endure are drawn from life for sure, but I have no basis on which to declare that their substance abuse is bravely approached with badly-needed realism or anything. That's because I don't know any alcoholics; I don't know them very well, at least. That, and I keep my distance from the skanks — boy howdy, do I keep my distance. Coke is something of an anachronism these days too, so I don't exactly see it in action. But none of this stuff is romanticized in Aberdeen, so even if it's not a gritty, all-too-real portrait of the drinks and the drugs, it's successfully convinced me that it is, and really, isn't that all a movie has to do?

A Wild Sheep Chase (Haruki Murakami, 1982)

The easygoing co-proprietor of a small advertising firm finds himself called into the office of an ultra-wealthy right-wing activist. The activist himself is at death's door, but his right-hand man wants answers regarding a pamphlet produced by the ad man's company. Where, he asks, is that sheep with a brown star on its back that happens to appear, among a crowd of other, more normal sheep, in the cover photo? The ad man has no idea, but the secretary strongarms him into going on a monthlong journey to find the sheep anyway. And if he doesn't make with the ruminant in question, it's curtains for him.

Enlisting his part-time ear model, part-time call girl, part-time translator girlfriend, the ad man travels from Tokyo to Sapporo in search of the wanted sheep. At first it seems hopeless, but the girlfriend's intuition leads them to a shabby hotel that, it turns out, contains the very clues they need. And the ad man's long-lost friend, "The Rat", the one who snapped the photo that sparked the trouble; he's been sending letters. Could he have anything to do with all this?

* * *

This was the first Murakami novel to find wide release in the United States, and critics basically made sweet love to it. And if you put that in the context of the times, that's understandable; there was simply nothing like it around, especially not from Japanese authors. The review desks probably expected another tome chock full of kimonos, rice paper walls, tea ceremonies and cherry blossoms, and they got a surrealistic detective story jam-packed with slang, Western cultural artifacts, modern consumer products and a man in a sheep suit. It's like when you expect the taste of water, but get the taste of Sprite: startling, slightly sweeter than expected and in a vague way unpleasant, but kind of pleasantly unpleasant, if you get me.

That said, this isn't my favorite Murakami, which puts me in the awkward position of parting with critical consensus. That's not to say that it's bad — I've yet to encounter a bad Murakami novel — but it doesn't deliver quite the same brand of captivating page-turnery to be found in later titles. The thing is, I would call it essential; you wouldn't want to read its superior (in my humble opinion) sequel Dance Dance Dance without having read this one, and it's also a reasonably revealing portrait of the artist as a young man. But I can't endorse it as a fully functioning self-contained novel, not just because it's essentially the prologue to its sequel but because it's actually part three of the "Rat" trilogy, which comprises Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, his second, the nigh-unavailable-in-English Pinball '73, and, finally, A Wild Sheep Chase. So there's an arriving-late-to-the-party feeling to the experience that I couldn't shake.

But I'm making the book sound bad, which it isn't; it's better than most novels I read, but at this point I've come to hold Murakami to a higher standard. Though something of a mess compared to Murakami's more recent work, A Wild Sheep Chase nonetheless contains undeniable nuggets of phrasing brilliance, such as (a) "the elevators shook like a large dog with lung disease" and (b) "occasionally, someone coughed with a dry rasp that sounded like a mummy tapped on the head with a pair of tongs." Read lines like that and you know you're in good authorial — or at least translatorial — hands.

Michael Palin's New Europe (Michael Palin et al., 2007)

In his seventh world travel series for BBC Television, Monty Python alum Michael Palin and his time- and inadequate lavatory-tested crew visit the newest members of the European Union and their immediate neighbors. Along his curved way from Slovenia to Turkey to Kaliningrad to Germany with a load of stops in between, Palin has leeches applied to his chest, wears an unwieldy head wreath, pronounces words on Polish television, witnesses hairy men slathered in olive oil wrestle one another, checks out hideous Communist architecture, makes a sausage, not-quite-successfully attempts that wrist-intensive frying pan trick chefs do and hits a public bath.

* * *

Michael Palin came by my former neck of the woods in 2000 to promote the Hemingway Adventure, and seeing the lecture was, to that point in my life, one of the neat-o-est things ever. During the Q&A, he mentioned that, after completing each series, he vows to himself that he'll take no more of "these long trips," and of course he'd done the same post-Hemingway. Which was followed, two years later, by Sahara. Then Himalaya. And now New Europe. So, in other words, he'll be doing these shows all the way to the grave, though in his condition I imagine he'll live forever. That's fine by me, since Palin's Travels have long since been my favorite television of any kind; I have many memories of watching rapt at age seven as he made his way from, say, Pole to Pole, thinking, "This guy has the best job in the world!" (I didn't was unaware of Palin's beloved-comedy-troupe origins at the time — to me, he was the main guy from Ripping Yarns — though since I've never quite gotten with their material, his Python credentials are still essentially meaningless to me.)

The new series differs from its predecessors most noticeably in that Palin sticks chiefly to places more or less safely categorizable as part of the "developed world"; he never eats a can of "stewed chicken with bone" in a colonial-era dining car stalled on its tracks somewhere in the desert, for instance. He drinks from zero bowls of chewed leaves with tribeswoman saliva. He stays off dhows. Compared to where he's been, many of the New European places he visits are positively slick. This is fine by me — if I go journeying myself, it'll be to countries with U.S.-quality toilets or better — but perhaps certain hardcore fans of the Travels need to see more inconvenience.

But it's not all fun, games and a lack of Delhi Belly. From the very first, the program makes it clear that most of the states covered have only put a salami slice of temporal distance between themselves and living nightmares, whether those nightmares involve the Bosnian War, the caprice of any number of eccentric dictators, or, of course, The Big C. Communism's legacy casts an unsurprising shadow over a bunch of these nations, and its effects show up not just in their stringy economies but in the memories of everyone over the age of about forty. There's a lot of "Man, that sucked" sentiment, which I expected, since, y'know, the rise of communism was pretty much the worst thing. Not the worst ideology, not even the worst event — the worst thing. Forgive me if I come off like a cornfed, red-faced midcentury legistlator sputtering incoherently against the human wave of godless pinkos, but try to argue that I'm wrong. Know that if you pull one of those "the Soviet Union wasn't hell, it was just really dull" rationales, I will lump you with those who argue that "well, the Soviet Union wasn't real communism anyway." Not a group to be taken seriously.

Anyhow, what was kind of surprising was how young eastern Europeans would tell Palin about their parents' few fond memories of the Soviet era. "In the GDR, not everything was wrong," says one German of his parents' life, which couldn't have promised much more than a 800 square feet in a cement tower, a place on the Trabant waiting list and a jar of Spreewald pickles. They quickly clarify that they don't mean that they miss the government, but that they just miss the times they had under than government. And if you think about it, that stands to reason: alongside irony, nostalgia is one of the universe's most powerful forces. Even if you grew up under the thousand heels of a bureaucratic totalitarian monstrosity that itself was dominated by several other, even more grotesque, violent strata, you'll still be a kid, you'll still play hide-and-seek, you'll still come of age, you'll still meet those special somebodies, and thus you'll retain fond memories of those things, occur under brutal communist misrule though they may have. And you probably weren't even aware of that until later in life. So I guess it's only natural for older generations to have "fond memories of the Soviet era," unless their lives sucked for non-state-inflicted reasons too.

But what really did surprise me is what oldsters said — not guys and girls my age relaying their parents' stories, and not even those parents themselves, but actual old people around their 80s — when reflecting on their lives, the large majority of whose years were spent on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. One in particular articulated the core of what I hadn't expected: he believed that given just a few more years the Soviets could have pulled it together and, at long last, established real Communism, freedom, equality, people's democracy, dialectical materialism, grander monuments, etc. It slowly emerged over the course of the next several episodes that a lot of people, marooned in the vast wasteland of cabbage lines and stunted grayness, apparently thought Communism on its way. Did they assume all the Solzhenitsynesque nonesnse crushing them on a daily basis was just the due they had to pay to one day attain the socialist ideal? Alas, they were already living the socialist ideal, or at least the fullest possible instantiation of the socialist ideal in the material world. Hope springs eternal, I guess.

Palin's Travels have always been beautifully photographed — and the books of stills by Basil Pao are on a whole other, higher plane altogether — but New Europe looks and feels like the most polished of the bunch on several scales. It even moves more smoothly than its predecessors. If you've seen a single episode of any of Palin's Travels you know the format: Palin gets to a country, meets up with a local and gets led into some amusing and/or culturally revealing situation. Pause to think about production, and it's obvious that Palin isn't just disembarking from the boat or train or whatver, running across random fascinating, unusual people all on his lonesone and getting invited into their lives; sure, maybe some were found on the fly, but the vast, vast majority of the meetings were surely prearranged in fine-grained detail by the BBC.

And to be fair, Palin and co. aren't trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes. What the viewer sees is one middle-aged Englishman trotting from place to foreign place, mingling with the natives and participating in all manner of conversation, commerce and ritual. What the viewer does not see, but what couldn't very well be absent, are all the guys with the cameras, the microphones, the extra digital video cassettes or discs or drives or whatever, the director or directors, the assistant director or directors, the itinerary guy, the financial guy, the logistics guy, the grunts, the interns, the ghost of John Reith and, of course, the bond company stooge. (Let's not even go into how much luggage they all must have.) And of course, they're not just standing around shooting what Palin says and does, either: they're getting angles, coverage, multiple takes. They're on their own paddle boat while Palin's on his. They're individually micing everyone he speaks to. It sounds like a whole lot of... work.

I'm making it sound as if I've finally become fed up with the artifice of it all and am maybe about to kick Palin's Travel's to the curb, but no; I like the shows as much as ever. Maybe more. Some viewers might have a kneejerk negative reaction to slickness and orchestration, but c'mon — this is the best damn slickness and orchestration around. It's not slickness and orchestration in the name of banality; it's slickness and orchestration in the name of aesthetically awesome, information-packed entertainment. And who more appropriate than Palin to host it? The formula has been and remains near-perfect, so you won't hear me calling for a shake-up.

Insomnia (Erik Skjoldbjærg, 1997)

Exiled in Norway, disgraced (and quite randy, which is what led to his disgrace) Swedish detective Jonas Engström gets on the trail of the murderer of a girl whose body turned up tidly garbage-bagged in a landfill. Staking out the shed where he thinks the killing went down, Engström accidentally plugs his partner, mistaking him for the suspect behind a thick wall of fog. This would normally be a (literal) fog-of-war mistake, except that cops in Norway aren't allowed to carry without a special warrant, and he didn't have one. Thus Engström must simultaneously cover his tracks and attempt to solve the case, two goals which ultimately come into direct conflict. Also, he can't sleep because this is the Norwegian Arctic, where the sun never don't shine.

* * *

In a few ways, this film is very much an embossed-cover mass-market thriller. It has, for instance:

• a dead teenage girl
• a cop on the edge
• creeping guilt
• a menacing novelist

But then again, we must take into account that:

• it takes place in Norway and not, like, Chicago
• its protagonist isn't a hero, nor a reluctant hero with some ragged edges, but just this guy, who's guilty of a crime himself
• it's always bright outside, even — especially — at midnight
• it's a movie that, when other movies wouldn't go there, it goes there

With these and other qualities, Skjoldbjærg makes Insomnia into something other than your standard police procedural, which is a genre I've just never latched onto. (I've never seen an episode of Law & Order, for instance, or any of the CSI shows; I've lumped the lifestyles where one comes home and watches programs like that on a daily basis into a fairly undesirable mental box.) I even fail to grasp what all those other people see in the form; how many times can one watch detectives go through the motions and remain engaged? Someone dies. The cops show up and grimace at the body. There's some morgue stuff. Detectives set out to find the killer. False crisis. False dawn. Reversal. Real crisis. Real dawn. The end... ? I can barely stand typing out the formula, let alone viewing it.

Insomnia begins as a police procedural, sort of, but the wonkiness of the ingredients diverts it from the standard track pretty quickly. It's possible that a viewer living in the Norwegian Arctic, accustomed to exotic-to-me stuff like the sun not going down and Swedish interlopers whose language is just about intelligible enough, would find it just slightly more engaging that the average cop movie. But they'd prefer the foreign streets of, say, Hoboken, where they'd be able to spot all sorts of fascinating cultural and climatic differences.

It's worth noting that Christopher Nolan remade the movie in 2002, but U.S.'d it up and in the process — I assume, since I haven't seen the newer version but have read quite a bit about it — smoothed it down. The location moves from Norway to another equally sunlight- and lowlife-filled territory, Alaska. Stellan Skarsgård's role is played by one Mr. Al Pacino, and the character is made into more of a conventional "hero" who stands by his moral convictions, shoots dead dogs instead of live ones and doesn't have sex with witnesses. Needless to say, I'm sure it's thus not as good. (Also, the remake has infinity percent more Robin Williams.)