This entry is an ambitious attempt to transmit the essence of the 1983 film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, as well as communicate its cultural significance, in such a way that hopefully you, as the reader, will feel as if you've seen the actual movie (if you've never seen it, which is most likely the case)! I am doing this because MCML is not an easy movie to sit through; it is a bizarre film that is both repulsive and beautiful in equal measures...But I feel it deserves to be recognized for director Nagisa Oshima's daring and radical contribution to the Japanese post World War II conscience and consciousness, as well as for its own unique cinematic intensity. Later in the blog, there are video clips of two selected key scenes, as well as the original theatrical trailer.

MCML takes place in a Japanese POW camp in Java during World War II. The story's dramatic tension centers around a pitched battle of wills and spirit between the Japanese soldiers and a massive group of European soldiers they are holding captive. Leading the Japanese army is the repressed, aristocratic Captain Yoni (played by Japanese mega pop star turned internationally acclaimed film composer Ryuchi Sakamoto) and the sadistic Sergeant Hara (TV media personality and film auteur Takeshi "Beat" Kitano). Amongst the British prisoners, Jack Ceiliers (another mega pop star, David Bowie) becomes an unrelenting force of defiance against the Japanese, while John Lawrence (Tom Conti) is the single unifying bridge between the two armies, as he can speak Japanese and to some extent can sympathize with their culture.

One of the unique aspects of MCML is the film's unflattering and stark portrayal of the Japanese soldiers. The movie opens with Sergeant Hara standing over two soldiers crouched on the ground, a Dutch prisoner and a Korean guard. The Korean guard has been accused of having raped the Dutch man, and Hara taunts the guard and demands that he commit suicide in order to atone for his depravity. In an excruciating sequence, the terrified Korean guard tries a half-hearted attempt to drive a knife into his stomach, while being verbally humiliated by Hara. British prisoner, John Lawrence, can no longer bear it, and attempts to intervene and appeal to Hara in Japanese to stop the suicide. Lawrence is subsequently beaten.

As the film makes clear, the Japanese consider the prisoners less than human because they surrendered instead of fighting to the death or committing suicide. And for the prisoners, the Japanese are seen as pathological brutal robots. As Lawrence says later in the film, "They are a nation of anxious people. And because none of them could do anything individually, they decided to go insane en masse."

This is significant, given that to this day, controversy still reigns over how the Japanese depict the events of World War II in their school textbooks.  The recently ousted Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe provoked international fury by publicly stating that the 200,000 "comfort women" mostly seized from China and Korea during World War II to be forced into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers were not actually coerced. Widely accepted accounts of Japanese soldiers frequently torturing before murdering Asian civilians are still openly disputed at the upper echelons of Japanese society (perhaps the most well known case being the Nanking Massacre of 1938, which was brought out into the Western world's popular media by Iris Chang through her bestselling book The Rape of Nanking in 1998). 

What I find both tragic and fascinating is that the Japanese people themselves are the victims of their nation's collective ambiguity on how to interpret the past. Clint Eastwood's recent masterpiece Letters from Iwo Jima, that depicted the events of the battle on the island of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective sent shockwaves through the Japanese public - not only because many of them were not aware of the event itself, but apparently, they are taught very little about World War II at all. Clint Eastwood was quoted about the Japanese response to his film:

"A lot of Japanese that have seen it seem to enjoy it and seem to be interested in it. After the war, Japanese history was left very still. There wasn't much talk about the war. It's not taught in schools. None of the actors in Letters from Iwo Jima knew anything about the battle of Iwo Jima, these Japanese fellows that came over. They were very curious about it. The current generation doesn't know very much about that."

It's in this context that makes Oshima's unflinching portrayal of the Japanese in MCML such a bold statement. At the same time though, Oshima uses his perspective to set up some of the most moving and human scenes I've ever seen in cinema. And I'm obviously not alone in this, as one of the magical scenes I'm thinking of was already posted on YouTube by someone else in the world...

In this scene, Ceiliers (David Bowie) and Lawrence (Tom Conti) have both been sentenced to death by Captain Yoni (Ryuchi Sakamoto), and they have spent a night imprisoned in adjacent cells separated by a wall, before their execution. Since the beginning of the movie, Ceiliers and Lawrence have been agitating the moral leadership of Japanese soldiers Captain Yoni and Sergeant Hara.

Ceiliers, despite continous beatings and even close executions, refuses to lose his sense of measured and cool defiance, which results in an air of confidence and charisma that gives strength to the prisoners, and many of the Japanese can't help but find attractive...Especially Captain Yoni, who clearly is being forced to repress his sexual longing for Ceiliers. Lawrence, on the other hand, with his fluent Japanese, is able to break through the bullheaded and violent Sergeant Hara for brief instances, and connect on a human level. Moments of transcendent intimacy are often followed by explosions of violence, as if the possibility of connecting with "the enemy" is so unacceptable that devastating force is required to preserve their own sense of order and worldview.

So, we are back to the adjacent cells, where Ceiliers and Lawrence have spent a night looking death in the eye. They share stories of the most singular events of their lives that crystallize their karmic burdens - they reveal the cross they bear in life. Finally, beaten and starven, they are called from their cages and brought into a room with Sergeant Hara.

Instantly, Lawrence recognizes by the look on Hara's face and the tone in the room, that

Hara has had a change of heart, and that for whatever reason, they are not going to be executed. Perhaps Lawrence realizes that the brief human moments the two of them have shared together actually did make an impact on his conscience.

Sergeant Hara, Ceiliers, and Lawrence

 

However, once Yoni learns of Hara's leniency, he is enraged and demands that the entire prisoner compound somehow be punished in order to save face for not having killed Ceiliers and Lawrence. He calls forth every prisoner, even the wounded ones, to the central courtyard. In a state of conflicted madness, Yoni is ready to behead one of the prisoners who has been acting as a kind of liason for the Japanese to serve as an example.

Suddenly, Ceiliers steps from the crowd and in an unbelievable act, topples the hierarchy and havoc ensues...Watch the awesome climax of this classic film, and keep in mind that Ceiliers and Lawrence have both been aware of Yoni's repressed sexual longing for Ceiliers.

Captain Yoni and Ceiliers: MCML's climax

 

Of course, Ceiliers pays with his life for what he did, and the next time we see him, he is buried to his neck in sand and left to die.

The movie concludes in another prisoner of war camp - this time on the side of the Allies, as we see the tables turned. The war is over, and Sergeant Hara is now in prison, to be executed at dawn, and Lawrence comes to wish him farewell. There is warmth and sadness between them, a kind of rapport and respect that happens between soldiers. Hara, obviously softened by events that have happened, genuinely cannot understand why he is sentenced to die, when he feels that what he was doing was no different than many other Japanese officers who are now also imprisoned. He says that he was just trying to make the prisoners better men by correcting their "wrong-headedness".  Lawrence answers back that he is now the victim of men who think they are right just as people thought against him when he had been imprisoned in the Java camp. Hara understands, bows, and ends the film with a "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Merry Christmas!"

See this final statement and other elements of the film I've mentioned in the film's original theatrical trailer:

I think there are moments or scenes in a movie, when everything falls into place and there's a creative explosion - the camera's composition, the energy from the actor(s), the trajectory of the plot, the editing, the music, the sound effects(!), - all comes together and you've got movie magic. There is something alive that comes from the synthesis of all of the elements and it unifies them with a kind of transcendental energy.

One of the qualities of these magical moments is that they seem to end too soon, you have the feeling that you wish it would have gone on for at least twice as long; it seems over before it even started.

I was thinking about certain scenes that hit that quality, and I thought of the very brief training montage from Jim Jarmusch's genre-bending Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai, released in 1999, starring Forrest Whitaker who does a beautiful performance. I don't even think that it's that great of a movie, but that's irrelevant in the context of this one particular moment.

Thanks to the power of YouTube, I obviously am not the only person in the world who loves this scene, as it has already been posted for all of us to enjoy.

Just to set some context: Forrest Whitaker's character "Ghost Dog" is a soft spoken mysterious urban assassin who lives by the ancient samurai code of ethics, who also happens to be a big black man that rocks out to a soundtrack by the Wu Tang's RZA (who makes a cameo appearance in the film). Ghost Dog single handedly battles a clan of buffoonish Italian Mafia types, who look comparatively silly for not being grounded in the timeless codes of conduct as our hero.

In this scene, Ghost Dog trains on the rooftop of an unnamed city in the North East. It's important to note that this scene serves no function to the plot except to establish Ghost Dog's credibility as an authentically devoted disciple to his martial arts tradition!

Beautiful!

No Country for Old Men opened two weeks ago, marking the 12^th feature film from the esteemed dynamic directing duo of Joel and Ethan Coen, "The Coen Brothers". I found it interesting that despite their long list of objectively talented and inspired filmmaking, I hardly have any interest when they put something new out - and I'm sure I'm not the only who has that experience. I love Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Raising Arizona...And I respect Barton Fink and Millers Crossing on their own merits...But then there's this long list of films that make critical acclaim that just vanish into the void as if they've never happened...Tom Hanks in The Ladykillers (2004)? George Clooney in Intolerable Cruelty (2003)?...Tim Robbins in The Hudsucker Proxy?...Have you seen (or heard) of any of them?

To be fair, O Brother Where Art Thou (which I haven't seen) did make a lot of noise.

What caught my interest about No Country for Old Men, was its noticeably scale breaking score it received on one of my favorite websites, Metacritic. For those of you who don't rely on this simple but brilliant website, Metacritic tallies and collects all of the reviews on movies, music, video games, and books from the major media sources (Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Time, Newsweek), so you can have as close to an objective view as possible on the perspective of any given production, at least from the point of view of the arts/entertainment critics industry.

NCFOM received a 91, which is pretty damn good. Across the board, critics are gushing about this film...Film Threat Magazine: "it will be looked back upon as one of the truly great movies of the first part of this new decade." (it's 2007...What the hell does that mean?). New York Post: "The first movie I've seen in a very long while that deserves to be called a masterpiece. It's such a stunning achievement in storytelling."

And from Rolling Stone - slightly toned down, but still unequivocal in its praise: "Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is an indisputably great movie, at this point the year's very best."

And after I saw the trailer, I was definitely hooked, and I do plan on seeing this...

But my point is that these are always interesting junctures where we can take an inside look into the perspective of the culture at large. My first experience of this was when the recent revamp of the Superman series came out last year, directed by Bryan Singer, who did a fantastic job bringing the X-Men comic series to live action (not to mention, cult classic The Usual Suspects). Superman Returns received a 72 on the Metacritic scale, which is nowhere in the ballpark of NCFOM's 92, but it's pretty damn high for what I consider one of the most repulsive movies I've ever seen!

Newsweek: "This Superman, which infuses its action with poetry, soars as a love story filled with epic yearnings, thwarted desires and breathtaking imagery."

LA Weekly: "Superman Returns is a lush and enthralling piece of adventure storytelling that's both revisionist AND reverential, putting a timely spin on a timeless character without violating his primal appeal."

Rolling Stone: "Superman returns with a bang. Singer tarnishes his hero's halo with just enough sexual longing and self-doubt to make him riveting and relatable. That "S" on his suit has a whole new meaning: He's a Soul man."

It's one thing for two people to disagree on a movie - but it's something else to have a slew of media critics herald a film that doesn't resemble anything close to the two hours of agonizing torture one just went through!

Without going into a whole essay of why I hated Superman Returns, maybe I can encapsulate it with a single image...In one scene, you have Superman, a man powerful enough to fly around the world at such velocity that he can literally turn back time (see Superman I), wistfully floating over Lois Lane's apartment, quietly wracked with unrequited love, using his X-Ray vision to watch her at night, while unbeknownst to him, [SPOILER] her young son is actually their child which they conceived together in some earlier unseen episode. She knows all of this, is re-engaged to some guy, and has proudly written a Pulitzer Prize winning anti-Superman article. CREEPY! It's one of the few times I would have appreciated a few healthy wallops of irony in a movie.

Nutshell analysis: We like our superheroes emasculated.

Anyways, when all is said and done, I am psyched to go see NCFOM simply because it promises to be a visceral, all-out intense cinematic experience. But I am also curious to see what it will reveal about where our collective opinions come from. Perhaps a clue may come from the only slightly negative review from Metacritic:

Chicago Reader: "A very well-made genre exercise, but I can't understand why it's been accorded so much importance, unless it's because it strokes some ideological impulse."

Fascinating!