Archive for the Live Action Category


Live-Action: Colette

February 24th, 2019

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known as Colette, was a noted French author of the first half of the 20th century, who went on to gain fame as an actor and journalist. Her most well-known works are the Claudine stories, and novella Gigi, upon which the movie and musical are based. She was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Her life and career were larger than life – as so many of the talents that inhabited pre-war Paris seem to have been. 

The movie Colette, starring Keira Knightley and Dominic West was a surprisingly excellent retelling of her early career. Beginning with her marriage to Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as “Willy” and her writing under his name, it follows her through their turbulent years together, the popularity of the Claudine stories, their mutual affair with a visiting American woman, the break up of their marriage and ends with Colette touring Europe as an actress with her lover Mathilde de Morny, known as Missy, who was scandalous for wearing men’s clothes, portrayed by Denise Gough.

As you may know, I do not sleep on the plane very well so, with almost 30 hours to kill on the roundtrip to and from Japan, I take some time to watch movies, which I otherwise would not sit through. I watched 5 movies all the way through and 2 I started but did not finish. (The remainder of the movies mini-reviews will be in the postscript.)

Because I really don’t like movies, I’m predisposed to being disappointed when I watch them. Colette did not suck. Her bisexuality was neither erased nor fetishized, her passion for writing and creating centered. Paris was not portrayed as all-white, for which I am grateful.  The writing was a bit predictable, but at this point, movies just are. Her life is well-known, this movie makes no pretense to insight. It’s just a retelling of the woman’s young life as highlights.  IMHO, Knightley does a fine job of plucky young author, Dominic West did a fine job as Kenneth Brannagh as Willy, and while the beginning had a slow start, by the end, I found I had enjoyed it.

Ratings:

Cinematography – 7 Honestly, a bit conservative
Acting – 8 As one would expect
Story – 7 
Queerness – 7

Overall-8

For a reasonably accurate and very pretty movie about one of the Belle Époque‘s most famous women of letters, Colette was a decent watch.

Here are mini reviews of the other movies I watched this time around:

Ant-Man and the Wasp: What a shocker to me that I enjoyed it. I cannot stand Paul Rudd or the type of character he plays, so I was amazed that I didn’t hate the movie, but I actually enjoyed it. I can’t remember any of it now. I thought they did a decent job of showing Hank as a narcissistic asshole, which is how I think of him.

Crazy Rich Asians: Not a fan of rom-coms, (this is a minimalist statement, they make me want to claw my eyes out) but the acting was *superb.* 

The Four Heavenly Kings: The acting for this was the opposite of superb. But Detective Dee and Tsui Hark, so I forgave a lot. Like, really, the whole movie really needs to be forgiven.

Ocean’s 8: Thoroughly enjoyable nonsense. Between this and CRA, Awkafina may be my new favorite actress ever.

I started but did not finish Along with the Gods a Korean action flick and The Great Battle, a Korean historical action movie. Along with the Gods I just couldn’t follow, but turns out (thanks, Richmond!) that this is the second part of a two-parter. The Great Battle was fun, but we landed before the climactic scene. So, I looked it up to find out what happened historically and boy was I surprised to learn the ending. ^_^ I’d recommend this one.





Live Action: Rose of Versailles Digital Remaster Blu-ray (ベルサイユのばら デジタルリマスター版)

December 24th, 2018

What better way is there to celebrate a holiday, than to watch Lady Oscar, the French live action movie with English cast and audio, Japanese subtitles, based on a Japanese manga about the French Revolution that is being translated into English?

Rose of Versailles Digital Remaster (ベルサイユのばら デジタルリマスター版) is Schrodinger’s movie – not bad, not good, not inaccurate, not accurate. I think I like it but I cannot be sure. ^_^

On second thought, I think I like it.

As a live-action version of the manga classic, it’s really not bad. It follows the key pieces of the story in a condensed fashion. The Affair of the Necklace has a chunk of the story and the end rush to tragedy plays out at increasing speed. 

The major changes are in the characterizations. 

Andre is a freedom fighter and tends to chide Oscar, demanding she be one, too. He’s not lovelorn, he’s vexed that his woman is so gosh-darn delusional. He’s kind of a mix of Bernard and Andre.

Girodel is another changed character, but at least he is in purple, which I thought was funny. Instead of being a self-proclaimed rival, Girodel is a jerk, but his marriage offer provides us with a scene in which Oscar strides into Versailles in white and silver and cape and dances with one of the court ladies, then kisses her, so I am not complaining. ^_^

General de Jarjayes is not nice to either Oscar nor Andre, which is a shame. I much preferred the General of the anime.

Jeanne and Rosalie are exactly as we remember them, although we don’t get to spend too much time with them. (I also feel that the actresses were too old for the roles by about 25 years, but that might be me.)

Marie Antoinette is overblown and likewise delusional right to the very end. They do a fine job of making her unrepentant through the final moments. 

And finally, there’s Oscar. Catriona MacColl plays the role exactly as it is written and does a fine job of it. 

I also want to shout out Granny, who is the only sane character in the movie. When Fersen is praising Oscar as a fine young man, Granny looks at him like he’s an idiot and says, “How could anyone see Oscar and not realize she’s a woman?” Thank you Granny. Oscar could not have passed for a man if she were trying.  In fact, the issue of her sex and gender presentation is a running thread throughout the story and is one of the reasons General de Jarjayes comes off as such an asshole. For a man who called Oscar his son for two decades, he marries his daughter off pretty quickly. It was a vexing moment.

The movie ends with a nice little scene of Oscar and Andre shouting each other’s names, but fades on Oscar unable to find Andre, who has been killed. She does not die at the storming as she did in the manga and anime. It kills some of the epic feel of the story.

Ratings:

Overall – Not bad

I wouldn’t probably recommend this movie to someone who isn’t already a fan of the story, but if you are, how could you pass up this chance to see this classic manga as a live-action movie?

 





Live-Action: Shoujo Kakumei Utena ~Shirokibara no Tsubomi Musical (少女革命ウテナ ～白き薔薇のつぼみ～)

October 10th, 2018

In Spring 2018, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Shoujo Kakumei Utena franchise, a stage play musical was performed in Tokyo. Now the Shoujo Kakumei Utena ~Shirokibara no Tsubomi Musical (少女革命ウテナ ～白き薔薇のつぼみ～) is available  on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming on Amazon for folks in JP.

Now, if you have been a Utena fan for a long time, you may remember that in the early 2000s, there had been a Utena Musical stage play. And, should you remember that musical, you will remember that it was, in a word, excruciating. The word “unwatchable” also comes to mind. ^_^;

We set the memory of that earlier musical aside to watch the new musical and found that we generally enjoyed it. 

There were a few glaring weaknesses, primarily that the boys couldn’t sing. This is a pretty major problem in a musical. And, in comparison to all the female leads, especially Anthy and Utena’s actresses, Yamauchi Yuka and Nouji Ami, it was a pretty stark failing. 

But that aside, there were a number of elements that made the play move along well. In Utena”s first duel with Saionji at the climactic moment, they switch swords. It was a low-tech way to communicate a moment of intense magic. Instead of focusing on drawing the sword from Anthy’s chest, which was handled with little subtlety, the focus of this musical is the actual relationships of the characters. Time is given to everyone’s back stories. In the first act we clearly see the delusions that make up Miki’s and Juri’s pasts. And Tatemichi Riona as Juri did a convincing flinch away from B-ko when she got too close.

The second act was much tighter than the first, with a number of highlights. Yokoi Shojiro, who plays Saionji, has a brilliant moment when, defeated by Utena a second time, he creates his own Shadowgirl scenario and enters it himself. It was both a funny and profound moment. It was, my wife points out, very self-aware of the play. As one of the few wholly original moments, it worked beautifully.

The final scenes are extraordinary and moving, as Nouji does an excellent job of communicating Utena’s despair at having been defeated by Touga. Takeuchi Yume is brilliant as Wakaba, motivating Utena to take control of herself.  Nouji notches up the acting with a very emotional climax, where her need to get through to Anthy is pretty darn convincing. (My wife had stepped out of the room and returned as the play wrapped up. She noted immediately that it looked like Nouji had been crying. And she had been, fairly realistically.)

For staging, dueling concepts and acting, it was worth watching. For fans of the Utena story, this was a pretty decent re-telling of the first 13 episodes of the anime.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

 If the boys had been able to carry a tune, it would have definitely been a 9.





LGBTQ Live-Action: Otouto no Otto Television Drama (弟の夫)

August 19th, 2018

Last spring NHK Premium launched a 4-part live-action television drama based on Tagame Gengoroh-sensei’s manga Otouto no Otto (published in English by Pantheon as My Brother’s Husband.) This drama starred Sato Ryuuya as Yaichi, the protagonist and Baruto (Kaido Höövelson) a Sumo wrestler from Estonia, as Mike Flanagan, the man who married Yaichi’s brother and who bring chaos into his quiet life. 

The Otouto no Otto TV Drama (弟の夫) follows the books fairly closely. Canadian Mike Flanagan arrives at Yaichi’s door on a trip to visit his late husband’s hometown. Yaichi’s daughter, Kana, is ecstatic to find she has an uncle and a foreign one at that, and insists Mike stay at their home. With Mike’s presence a palpable reminder of his failure to stay connected to his brother, Yaichi finds his values challenged and is made very aware of his own, albeit passive, homophobia. The harder he is pushed by other’s people more overt homophobia, the more his own implicit homophobia is uncovered. In the mean time, Mike is able to provide a role model and advice to a young man in the town who knows he’s gay, and meets a former classmate of his husband Ryouji’s, a deeply closeted man who own internal fear makes Mike uncomfortable. 

By the end of Mike’s stay, we can see that Yaichi has grown in his understanding and acceptance of his brother and, although it’s too late for Ryouji, it might not be too late for the next kid in town. 

The dialogue cleaves closely to the original, with one notable omission. In the beginning when she meets Mike, Kana says that it’s weird that Japan won’t allow same-sex marriage (not in those words, the line was closer to “it’s weird that they can’t here.”) This line was scrubbed from the drama, presumably as it was too close to a criticism of the Japanese government’s policies and NHK is Japan’s national public broadcasting organization funded by public fees. It is pretty amazing that NHK aired this, but….let’s also remember it aired on a pay cable channel, not one of the main network channels. I had written NHK to ask if they planned on airing this on the USA-based NHK cable network TV Japan, but they said flat out they had no intention of doing so. So I’d count this a half step, rather than a full step forward for representation on Japanese TV. 

The DVD comes with a director interview as an extra. There are no subtitles for the audio track, but if you’ve read the books, you can follow the dialogue without problem.

The cinematography is very small and claustrophic, without being intrusive. It gives a feeling of being in the room with the characters, without being up into their faces. Sato Ryuuya was excellent as Yaichi (and as Ryouji for a few scenes) and really communicated all the many layers of discomfort he was feeling.  Nemoto Maharu was a fantastic Kana. It’s a pretty pivotal role, as she has to say what the audience is thinking most of the time. And Baruto did a pretty good job, considering he’s a sumo wrestler, not an actor and not Canadian. His English is heavily accented, but you know what? Who cares. ^_^

A friend of mine who is deeply embedded in the Japanese LGBTQ community said that they had heard this drama wasn’t that good, but we discussed that this drama wasn’t targeted to the LGBTQ community, as such. It was about them, as so many LGBTQ-themed works are. It was targeted to a straight, mainstream audience of nice people, family people, good people who just happen to have a lot of deeply held opinions about why being gay is bad and will make you live a short, unhappy life (in part, from decades of late-night TV specials about being gay in Japan.) On the other side of this, a Japanese acquaintance – who is admittedly rather more worldly than many other people – commented that they liked the drama quite a bit. They represented the presumed audience much more closely, I believe, than anyone in the LGBTQ community. Nonetheless one cannot draw conclusion from an n of 2 and your mileage may vary considerably, depending on what you expect from this drama.

Ratings:

Overall – 8

From my perspective, as an adaptation of what is a fairy tale about the gap between tolerance and acceptance and how much unpleasant shit lives in that gap, this was a very well done television drama. 





Live-Action: Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie Adèle)

August 5th, 2018

In 2013, the Palme d’Or, the highest award at Cannes, went to a movie adaptation of Julie Maroh’s comic, Le Bleu est une couleur chaude. That year I was able to review the English-language edition of the graphic novel, Blue is the Warmest Color. It was an uncomfortable read, but for all the right reasons.

This summer, as part of my unusually high consumption of LGBTQ non-print media, I’ve watched several gay movies, including Call Me By Your Name and Love, Simon and the live-action television adaptation of Tagame-sensei’s Otouto no Otto (My Brother’s Husband) , I thought it only fair that I finally make some time to watch the movie Blue is the Warmest Color.

I rented this movie on Amazon Prime Video, but it is also available on DVD, if you prefer a hard copy.

The movie is just under three hours long. The best thing about it is the acting. Both Adèle Exarchopoulos (Adèle) and Léa Seydoux (Emma) do a fine job of making stone soup out of a mostly empty plot. 

Where the comic was nuanced look at Clementine’s spiral into drugs and death, the movie is a very conventional “girl realizes she’s gay” story. Adèle is a typical high school student. Her friends are obsessed with boys and sex and she isn’t. She tries to care about the attractive classmate who wants her, but realizes she’s faking it. When she sees Emma, she finds herself interested and when she meets her, even more so. Emma and Adèle become involved, they move in together and, ultimately after some years, they break up.  As the movie ends, Adèle has become a school teacher and she seeks Emma out once more to talk, hoping, somewhat pointlessly, to get back together. 

All of this would be satisfactory to me but for the director’s specific foibles.  Abdellatif Kechiche, the director, has some serious issues about mouths. Clearly this director wants to be *in* the mucus cavities as things go on. There are many extended, close-up eating scenes, including 3 scenes of eating spaghetti in red sauce. The first one was weird, the second one was gross, by the third one, I just felt like I was being forced to deal with the director’s fetish. All kissing and sex scenes were likewise extended and focused on oral activity.  

What was a fraught tale of dysfunction and emotional pain becomes a nice, slightly bourgeois, weepy romance, with some lesbian pulp moments.

IF you are looking for a lesbian romance with explicit sex, with good acting filling in the many spaces between the dialogue, this is a good movie. If you were looking for an adaptation with any reference to the source comic, this is not it. Adèle is not the comic’s Clem, this Emma is not Maroh’s manipulative Emma.

Ratings:

Acting – 10
Characters – 8 They were all too likable
Story – 7
Cinematography – 1 This movie is a brutal waste of the medium of film. It could have been filmed on a cell phone for all these closeups. No need to take up a movie screen.
Lesbian – 10

Overall – 7 I was hoping for more drug despair, not breakup despair.

Where the comic is about two people who were extremely bad together, this movie is about a woman who met the love of her life and lost her for no particular reason, just because that’s how it goes sometimes.