Watched in passing

For the past month I have been deeply involved with a manuscript that is now on its way to the publisher, so finally I can catch up with what I’ve been watching in passing. Certainly the most significant was another fine Japanese film resurrected by the Criterion Collection, Keisuke Kinoshita’s Twenty Four Eyes (1954). I watched it because I was looking for more of Hideko Takamine. Here she plays a beloved teacher in a village on the Inland Sea, the 24 eyes belonging to 12 students whose lives we follow from 1928 to 1946. Understandably this makes for a long and grim film, comparable to a Western “women’s weepie” and as such very popular in Japan. It’s sad and beautiful, but also slow going, and sometimes frustrating in its reliance on long shots. I mean, if you had Ingrid Bergman in your movie, you wouldn’t want to shoot her as a small figure in the landscape all the time. So just give me more of Hideko Takamine!

Inadvertently on a Japanese theme, I also watched The Cats of Mirikitani (2007, MC-73), a modest but moving personal documentary, about a homeless old Japanese painter that the filmmaker, Linda Hattendorf, discovers living on the streets of Manhattan. After 9/11 she takes him into her small apartment and in a self-effacing manner helps him put his life back together. He had been born in Sacramento but went back to Hiroshima with his mother, to return to the US to avoid being drafted before the war, only to wind up in an internment camp for three years. These are the obsessive subjects of his art, the remnants of his identity, lost along the way. Ms. Hattendorf helps him regain his citizenship and finds him a home, in an impressive act of human resurrection. There is not a false or excess moment in a film that could have been cloying and self-congratulatory.

Then there was the latest from two appealing British comics, both of which were funny enough in parts to be enjoyable, but neither close to being a good film. Steve Coogan plays a hapless high school drama teacher in Tucson in Hamlet 2 (2008, MC-54), which is in effect an understudy to the classic Waiting for Guffman. He has his moments, as does the film, and also supporting players like Catherine Keener, but as a whole it is no better than mildly amusing. (As is frequently the case, Stephanie Zacharek nails it in a way that leaves me with nothing else to say.) The same goes for Simon Pegg in Run, Fat Boy, Run (2008, MC-48), a loser who unaccountably leaves a lovely and pregnant Thandie Newton at the altar, only to try to woo her back years later by entering a London marathon to best her new stockbroker boyfriend (Hank Azaria). Both these films display an effortful wackiness but contain not the slightest surprise, basically just sitcoms on film.

As for TV itself, there’s some good stuff going these days. As a DirecTV subscriber, I’ve already watched the entire third season of Friday Night Lights (MC-84), which is now running on NBC. Recovering from some eye-rolling fumbles in Season 2, this reestablishes the show as a marvelous group portrait of a small rural Texas community where high school football is the only game in town. But it is certainly not the only game in the series, which has multiple soap opera pleasures as well as a delicious portrait of the marriage between Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. He’s Coach Taylor and she’s now the school principal. All their interaction is a delight to watch. And then of course, there are all the high school hunks and honeys. Though better to watch on dvd, this is the rare broadcast network series worth committing to. DirecTV has used the platform to launch another series created by Peter Berg, and it’s looking pretty good after three episodes. Wonderland explores the world of a NYC mental hospital based on Bellevue, and seems involvingly interwoven and slambang in impact.

Now in progress are the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactic (MC-85) on the SciFi Channel and the third season of Big Love (MC-79) on HBO. While each has its ludicrous moments, each ultimately is worth the time it takes to get into them. BG modulates its action with thought-provoking parallels to current international issues, and BL takes the premise of modern Mormon polygamy and delves into all sorts of amusing and touching areas of family life. The acting of the latter is more consistently up to snuff than the former, but both offer significant pleasures and provocations of continuity.