Reel Girly

A suitable, if odd, J-Horror by Takeshi Furusawa, Ghost Train walks a vague line between wholly realized and intelligent direction and slipshod decision-making. The basic plotline is classical and somewhat meaningfully predictable: Nana cares for her younger sister Noriko while her mother and only parent is in the hospital for (wait for it) heart trouble. Noriko’s classmate Takahashi has gone missing after finding a lost train pass at the station. The train pass was once owned by Yaeko Aonumo (and conduit of unspeakable evils) who comes back to haunt the Mizunashi train tunnel and take people to the underworld beneath the tunnel as she chants “I want what’s mine.” Simple, right?

Of course, a series of accidents have taken place in the tunnel but only one threatening, outcast conductor has kept any records. The transport authority is quick to penalize any employees who admit to seeing anything troublesome or ephemeral in the tunnel. At first this seems like a comment on the intolerance of elders to the openness of the young, but later it becomes clear that the authorities, including the police, knew of the dangers in full and their repeated cover-up revealed a rather profound comment upon the extent to which greed can overpower survival. Every authority dismisses the ghost sightings even as lost children notices pop up all over the city. When Noriko is seen (followed ominously by a shadow) on the tunnel station’s surveillance camera, the police and the transport authority say “this is proof she’s safe.” That one got a laugh.

The film’s strengths seem oddly paired to its shortcomings and that’s what makes this film so hard to either celebrate or dismiss. In the first few scenes of the film there’s this great moment when a train conductor and important (if secondary) character has a ghost sighting that is represented through a series of dissolves that piece together his face as surveys the scene of the sighting. The implication is quite beautiful – it was as if to say the ghost is something you couldn’t see concretely, rather, she lived between the cuts – any possible puns intended in full. Another great moment involved a long take on Nana as she searched a space we knew contained a ghost. She walked on a balcony slowly and the camera kept reframing her which left the audience searching the frame for the reveal of the ghost. That was great horror direction. Additionally it’s worth noting all the women in the film were usually threatened by their children who had been overtaken by the ghost train and came back to (presumably) take their mothers with them. The location of the tunnel developed a great formalist device to remind us of the strange connection motherhood had to the ghost train. It was eerily metaphorical. And no, there is no sex in the film.

Nana eventually finds the reason for the tragedies of the tunnel are less solve-able than she had thought and we do get to see some evidence of other-worldly powers at work. What followed, however, seemed tacked on, even laughable. The audience stayed through the credits to see if the end really was The End. I took the end to be quite political – the resolution is both easy and absurdist, and the final moral is that all terrible things, no matter how old or how powerful, can all be dissolved my a mighty, masculine explosion. Eh. I guess, if you can’t have sex, you might as well have some fire power.

They won’t all be numbered but so far I’ve faced a number of needlessly daunting limitations and the sense that I’m finally exceeding my limitations is something I want to make some kind of psychological note of. Hence “#1.”

I’ve decided to write about the films I see that haven’t been assigned to me by Boxoffice.com - my publication locale of date. I’m really looking forward to that arrangement. The people at Box Office have been great!

So, about Reprise

Reprise is a film from Norway that could have a really strong cultural draw internationally but with American distribution the deck is stacked against it. It’s a shame because the film is really clever, young and insightful, Reprise employs just the right kind of meta. The film is something of a coming of age film but the bildungsroman is happening to 23-year-olds.

About two friends who have similar fantasies of becoming successful novelists, we meet Erik and Phillip as they mail off their first manuscripts. From there we see their futures, which, like their books, are infinitely revisable. Their realities don’t vary wildly from their fantasies however the sort of glossing over that happens in their future stories carries with a romantic veneer that isn’t shared by the lives they live.

Debut feature by director Joachim Trier, the film takes from hefty influences, referencing Last Year at Marienbad (coincidentally, Resnais’ newest is playing this fest too) and hinting at other great European cultural influences in the worlds of literature, film and post-punk music. Intelligently, the protagonists are young men (almost post-kids) on the precipice of being “adults” – a condition they ridicule incessantly. When Phillip’s novel is published, he suffers a mental breakdown and is committed. Mental illness is a condition that plagues the writers in the film: they struggle with it as they struggle with their novels. Eventually the old boy’s club they’ve created, the one that’s ironically hostile to girls, can’t be held onto if the boys are to cross over to their healthier, more successful, adulthoods. And this shines a funny, messy, edgy light onto the zeitgeist that inspired their works to begin with. It’s all quite imperfect but it’s also rather glamorous. To see inspiration with nostalgia at the age of 24 somehow seems quite familiar and decidedly bittersweet.

Again, this could be HUGE internationally if America magically developed a tolerance to subtitles. In my fantasies I concoct clever websites for films like Reprise, in which I tell the cyber-world the film could be their youth-angst salvations: their new Trainspotting, their new Quadrophenia, their new (dare I write it) Breathless. But alas. All I’ve got’s this blog.

I’m not great at keeping up with Ain’t it Cool News but once in a while I get hooked to something I find there.

If I could interview just half as well as this guy, I’d be set for life. His skill and stealth and sheer prowess…I’m gripped by his every word!

Read.

Back in the first days of my interviewing and writing on film, I conducted an interview with Josh Seftel. Josh’s films Taking on the Kennedys had just been released on DVD and greencine had me chat with him for their site. Josh was pretty dreamy. At the time he’d done a bunch for TV episodes for shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and what not. I had no idea he’d go all feature narrative on us!

Well, here’s My Interview with Josh, and Here’s a link to the trailer of his new feature with both (!) Cusacks and my fav Marisa Tomei.

What’s more? He was recently mentioned on cable TV’s version of the world’s greatest radio show THIS AMERICAN LIFE! Talk of the town, that one.