Documentaries Galore / 嘘つかない

Apparently I am holding my own private documentary film festival, seeing as how the last three movies I've watched (in about as many days) are all documentaries. The reason, though, isn't because I like documentaries (even though I do); it's because I mainly watch movies that run 90 minutes or less, and with that criterion, most feature films on my Netflix Instant Queue can't cut it. (Bachelorette (2012), of course, is an exception—it's next on my list.)

I remember back when I was working (and so had "free time" after I left the office) I had 30 days each of free Netflix and Blockbuster trials thanks to my sister. That basically meant a movie every other night for those months, making a small dent in my "Movies to Watch" list. I could stay up late into the night with a movie on in my apartment, and even if I fell asleep watching it, I could wake up at 3 AM and finish the last 20 minutes.

Of course that was over six years ago, when I was still young. Now I fall asleep a lot earlier, and once I fall asleep I don't wake up until morning. Old age... But the point is, I want to be selective about what I watch, and I am developing my own taste for the kinds of documentaries I enjoy. It's by watching things I don't like, that I can get excited about the things I do.

Take, for example, Roger Sherman's The Restaurateur (2010), a documentary that follows Danny Meyer and his team as they work to open two new restaurants in New York City. But...that was all it did. It followed the people over the years, captured the challenges they had to overcome, and documented the progress of these restaurants from conception to realization. But once it was over, all I could say was, "Well then."

I'd been wanting to see Bess Kargman's First Position (2011) for a while now, and it didn't disappoint. The young ballet dancers that the film follows as they prepare for the Youth America Grand Prix are phenomenal—they are mature, disciplined, passionate, and critical of themselves to the nth degree. I cried when they won; I cried when they lost. (I also cried when one of the mothers cried...because I felt so sad that she felt so sad that her son quit ballet. Oh, parents.) But after the film ended, I didn't have anything to take away with me. I watched beautiful dancing for 90 minutes; but afterwards, what was I to learn from it?

But then I saw Neil Diamond's Reel Injun (2009), a documentary tracing the representation of Native Americans in American film, and it hit me—ah, this is the kind of dissertation I want to write. (No, I don't mean that I want to make a film tracing the representation of women in Japanese imperialist literature...) In tracing that film history, Diamond manages to tie together so many different complex issues: racial hierarchy in North America over the century; internalization and resistance of stereotypes among minority communities; poverty and issues of abuse and alcoholism in Native American (or is it "American Indian"?) societies today; homogenization and appropriation of the richly diverse cultures among the various tribes by American capitalist culture; and so much more. Yes, tell me about all the important films, actors, and directors of Native American cinema—but I want to learn more about why this stuff matters, why we have to keep talking about it today. That's what Reel Injun did for me. (It even included a kickass analysis of Disney's Pocahontas (1995) by Ethnic Studies scholar Melinda Micco, which just about made my day.)

I admit that watching a movie while doing the dishes isn't as easy as listening to music—but with all the sorting through junk mail, hanging up the laundry, and stretching my muscles that I have to do every day, a documentary a day (or every other day) doesn't seem all that impossible.

The Cats of Mirikitani / ミリキタニの猫

A couple of nights ago I watched The Cats of Mirikitani (2006), a documentary by Linda Hattendorf about Japanese/American painter "Jimmy" Tsutomu Mirikitani. My old boss at the store in San Francisco had told me about it when it first came out, but I never had the chance to watch it until now. And at the risk of sounding trite, I must say: Boy do I wish I had seen this film earlier.

Watching the film is a process of getting to know "Jimmy"—an artist who lives on the street in New York and has fierce pride for his art and himself as an artist. And getting to know "Jimmy" becomes an exercise in getting to know one man's experience as a Japanese/American during World War II. Yet as we follow the story, the obvious but unexpected happens: 9/11. And then it's a whole 'nother story from there.

The film doesn't necessary present Jimmy as a victim, nor does it try to sugarcoat his person. (He can be a sweet, but sometimes difficult, person—and the camera doesn't hesitate to show both sides.) But we see Jimmy's fierceness in pointing out what he sees as an injustice: the internment of the Japanese and Japanese-Americans during World War II, and the subsequent treatment of "enemy aliens" by the United States—which continues through, and is resurrected after, 9/11.

In documenting one man's life—born in Sacramento, raised in Hiroshima, taken to Tule Lake, lost among the records of American social security—the film presents a gentle critique of U.S. racial, social, and foreign policies. At what point does it become justified to racially profile a whole group of "dangerous" people? How can a city, as thriving as New York, in a country as powerful as the United States, be unable to help its homeless? And how do we justify waging a "War on/of Terror", without addressing the criticisms lodged against U.S. policies toward other nations?

More than any other film about internment I've seen, this film deftly weaves a story that is at once complicated and deeply human: losing a home (more than once) and then finding family again, where one least expects it. Yes, the comparisons among 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and Hiroshima are there; but the striking images of Jimmy's paintings endure far more in my mind than any shot of smoke and destruction can.

こまねこ / Friendships

Getting on my 10 PM–5 AM sleep schedule isn't easy. As in, I can't do it. But I've only just started trying, and it's too soon to give up....

それより兎角、今日は『こまねこ』を見たぞ。ダーリンから DVD を借りたんだが、これがまた可愛い。表情といい、仕草といい。う〜む、こんなのが周りにいたら、たまらないだろうな。

Actually, Koma Neko may be a bit too mature and sad in its subtleties for me to show it to the Little One. So many things are left unanswered, which conflicts with the lightheartedness of the images. What's not said, what's not shown is what makes the stories both meaningful and troubling at the same time.

Regardless, today was a day of writing some syllabi, doing some laundry, ironing some handkerchiefs, and eating some pasta. Tomorrow will be...well, tomorrow will just have to be another day.

つーか、「こまねこ」って女の子だったのかよ。全然分からんかった・・・

A Matter of Taste / 味覚

I was so hungry today that I bit into my own fork. It was a good thing I didn't swallow the broken pieces.

Watching Sally Rowe's A Matter of Taste (2011), a documentary about chef Paul Liebrandt, left a funny taste in my mouth, too. The food in the film was beautiful—a medley of spectacular colors and shapes. But there wasn't a story that made me want to follow it, nor a character I could care about. It may have been a pretty dish, but I'm afraid it didn't give me much to chew on.

The Great Happiness Space / 大阪恋泥棒

Despite the fact that I'd only managed to revise my abstract today, I went ahead and rewarded myself with a screening of Jake Clennell's The Great Happiness Space (2006). I can say this: At least now my abstract is pretty darn good, even if it is abstracting a nonexistent dissertation.

I'll be honest: I liked this movie, even though I felt guilty about liking it. I'm glad that I watched it, even though I wished I hadn't. It's not the kind of subject I like seeing picked up and fussed over, glorified, exoticized, or sanitized for consumption by the overseas market. And yet...and yet.

There was something in the development of the story that, I felt, did justice to the conflict presented by the people being interviewed—their emotions and needs as human beings, versus their desires and obligations as people working at host clubs and in sex work. Even though it shouldn't have, I felt more comfortable hearing about the guys working as hosts than I did hearing about the girls working as hostesses or at soap lands. There shouldn't be a difference between the two. And yet...and yet.

These topics are messy, I admit. Money, love, consumption, happiness. Sex, body, solace, comfort. And I guess I appreciated that the film left everything in that complicated heap, didn't try to draw a nice, neat conclusion. It made certain decisions about how to present the interviewers as they talked about their lives and work, different moods and lighting, spliced with giddy girls or with drab salarymen. I suspect there was a bit of moralizing on the part of the creators, but it just so happened that I leaned somewhat close to their way of thinking. If only I were allowed to leave my dissertation as messy and inconclusive...

The Reader / 愛を読む人

In the last two days I read Bernhard Schlink's The Reader. It was a quick read—just 218 ages, with wide margins, large font, and big line spacing. Ironic, given how long it was sitting on my shelf.

Truth be told, I read it to rid myself of a memory. And as I was reading it, I realized that that was what the book is about, too—not just about coming to terms with the past, but about how to deal with the desire to forget and let go, and the simultaneous inability (and maybe deep down, the defiance not) to do so.

The past is past, I know. It's behind us, it's gone, it's not coming back. But it's always...happened. The fact that the past "was" (and will always continue to "was") is undeniable. We can't change it, we can't wish it away. We may not think the way we did then, we may not love the people we did then. But the fact that we did remains. Maybe the question, then, is how to live our present and future...