A Fantastic Event at an Abnormal Time

A high school girl's affections are torn between a fellow student and her homeroom teacher in 2017's Daytime Shooting Star (ひるなかの流星). It's a pretty lightweight romantic comedy that very gently flirts with the idea of a high school girl dating one of her teachers, a bit more conservatively than After the Rain. The film is filled with safely cliche beats but the leads are genuinely cute and charming, particularly Mei Nagano as Suzume.

Suzume's a girl from the country who goes to live with her uncle (Ryuta Sato) in Tokyo. She's overwhelmed by the city and faints when she spots a shooting star in the daytime. A scruffy young man catches her who turns out to be a friend of her uncle's--as well as her new homeroom teacher, Shishio (Shohei Miura).

On her first day at school, the nervous but earnest Suzume finds she's also sitting next to a handsome boy named Mamura (Alan Shirahama) who gallantly offers to share his text book with her. But he recoils when she accidentally brushes his hand and cgi gives him a fierce blush. It turns out he's deathly afraid of girls.

Suzume also makes a female frenemy, Yuyuka (Maika Yamamoto), who has a crush on Mamura. In a pretty standard scene, Yuyuka tries to pull a prank on Suzume but, when it looks like she'll be caught in the act, Suzume covers for her, and the two are friends after that. It's amazing how cliches can cross cultural boundaries.

For most of the film, it feels like Suzume's going to end up with Shishio and Yuyuka's going to end up with Mamura. That would be a pretty radical outcome, though, in a country where I just read about the latest four teachers to be arrested for sleeping with students (and I hear about a lot more that don't get caught). It's a sad problem. Girls should be free to innocently fantasise about this stuff without adults who take advantage of their innocence.

I watched this movie because many students recommended it to me in the letters they wrote to me. Now I know why they kept asking me if I like Mei Nagano. She's cute. With her big nose, she kind of looks like Setsuko Hara. For some reason, the kids aren't thrilled when I recommend Mikio Naruse movies from the '50s.

Daytime Shooting Star is available on Netflix in Japan.

Clothes Make the Size

How's a working class girl supposed to get ahead in the cutthroat world of business? In 1988's Working Girl, the answer is elaborate deception, which is also apparently pretty standard anyway. It's an entertaining romantic comedy, too, and Melanie Griffith is very sweet as the star.

She plays Tess, an office worker who got a BA at night school. Her best friend is played by Joan Cusack and I'd swear their wardrobe was inspired by Jean Marais in La Belle et la Bete.

I don't remember people dressing so big in the '80s whose names weren't David Byrne. But maybe it was a working class New York thing.

She gets a job working for Sigourney Weaver who turns out to be the film's villain. A lesser actress would've suited the film just fine but I love how Weaver makes Katharine subtle. When she tells Tess she honours her ideas and wants to help her get ahead, the viewer is as unsure as Tess is whether or not Katharine is being genuine or patronising. Then, of course, Tess discovers Katharine was planning to steal Tess' idea about acquiring a radio station for a big company.

After Katharine breaks her leg skiing and asks Tess to manage things for her, Tess decides to pretend she's at Katharine's level in the company. This leads to her partnering professionally and romantically with Harrison Ford.

He has an interesting line when he picks her up at a bar--"You're the first woman I've seen at one of these damned things that dresses like a woman, not like a woman thinks a man would dress if he was a woman." That's a lot of thought put into her simple little black dress, even if that dress was revealed to have cost six thousand dollars in an earlier, amusing scene where she and Joan Cusack pilfered it from Katharine's wardrobe ("And it's not even leather!" says Cusack). But what does it mean? He's a man, so how would he know what a woman would choose? Though, since the film's costume designer is a woman, a woman presumably did choose it. I think it's a long way of saying it doesn't look slutty, the presumption being that if a man were suddenly in a woman's body, he'd dress to be seen by himself. This all sounds like a Male Gaze discussion and incurs many of the logical problems inevitable if anyone thinks too deeply about it. Though it becomes more interesting when Tess meets Ford's character again at a board room meeting.

And I thought, my God, she's the spitting image of Kim Novak in Vertigo.

And I thought further--she's a working class girl dressing as an upper class woman and attracts a man in the process. And there's even a scene where he carries her home unconscious, undresses her, and puts her in his bed and treats the event like it was totally innocent. It makes me wonder if there was a stage in which this movie was meant to go in another direction.

The second half of the film isn't as intriguingly weird as the first. There's a big boardroom showdown that's a bit silly but also pretty satisfying.

Working Girl is available on Disney+ in most countries (not the U.S. or Japan).

A Pratfall to Save the World

Conflict and negotiation have failed to unite North and South Korea but a screwball romantic comedy has never been tried--until now. Crash Landing on You (사랑의 불시착 "Love's Emergency Landing") is a South Korean Netflix series from 2019/20 about a successful South Korean business woman who's hit by a tornado while paragliding. When she wakes up, she meets the man of her dreams--in the demilitarised zone. I watched the first episode last night. It's a bit silly but not bad.

Son Ye-jin plays Yoon Se-ri whom we meet getting photographed by paparazzi in the midst of her latest affair. In fact, she's a brilliant entrepreneur with her own successful company. She comes from a wealthy family who mostly despise her but, despite this, her ailing father offers her the inheritance of the family financial empire. I started to like her when, upon being offered this, she immediately proclaimed she would fire most of her father's top people--some of whom happened to be her spoiled siblings.

Everything's cued up for success until she takes that fateful paragliding trip. She's brilliant but the show can't seem to stop from making her a bit daft to go for broader jokes, as when she only thinks its funny at first when a tractor flies past her while she's paragliding.

Her love interest is a stoic North Korean soldier who finds her hanging from a tree. Hyun Bin as Ri Jeong-hyeok is handsome but not very lively. But that's part of the role, I think it'll take a few episodes before I get a real sense of him. There's already some hint that he's conflicted about his loyalty to North Korea--somehow I doubt this series is going to end with the two sides realising they both have valid and wonderful forms of government. Son Ye-jin is good but I wish she wasn't so dopey sometimes--though that, too, is in the writing.

Crash Landing on You is available on Netflix.

Twitter Sonnet #1441

The thought of dragons keeps the reader late.
The pages rustle, telling drafts intrude.
Behind the lacquered panel, shadows wait.
A stealthy chatter round the dark ensued.
A garish green disturbed the sleeper's peace.
Commanding winds, the wizard stopped a cloud.
Behind the stone, the droning voices cease.
Between the trees appeared a stripey shroud.
A fire traces skinny stones to read.
About the moon, the frigid clouds collect.
Remembered words foretell the painted seed.
A second step away from land direct.
In dark or light, the words she'll never find.
Between the clutching roots the soil's blind.

Typical Shenanigans in Atypical Environs

The house detective sees her wearing only a tiny towel, fleeing the hotel room of an influential millionaire who turns out to be dead but who would suspect plucky little Shirley MacLaine of blackmail? But that is the misunderstanding that fuels the comedy in 1961's All in a Night's Work. Not a particularly funny movie--every joke lands with a thud--or an interesting story but MacLaine and Dean Martin have terrific chemistry and the sets, costumes, and cinematography are just divine.

It's all sets, too, for some reason this crew never wanted to go outside. Hitchcock hated shooting outdoors because of how little control it afforded him but even he would step outside now and then when a shot required. Not even for a brief shot on the street or a beach do we leave sound stages here. This is not a Hitchcock movie but you might be forgiven for thinking it is from screenshots because director Joseph Anthony brought on board Hitchcock's costume designer, Edith Head, his art director, Hal Pereira, and two of his set decorators, Sam Comer and Arthur Krams.

The boardroom sets where Martin's Tony Ryder presides over the company he recently inherited from that influential millionaire have this lovely textured, burnished look, the art direction brought to life by the great cinematographer Joseph LaShelle (Laura, River of No Return, The Apartment).

Dino's face also has a textured, burnished quality and together with the fact that he was clearly slightly buzzed for the whole film I couldn't resist having a bourbon while I watched. MacLaine gives a much better performance--the visible layers of emotion in her reactions are credible as the transparent reactions of an innocent young woman. Martin's performance isn't bad exactly but it's mainly charming in how relaxed he is. It reminded me of how Tyrone Power made George Sanders look like he could use a sword in their sword fights through his own skill on his end--MacLaine's performance enhances Martin's.

She also sells the dialogue in three ways--she makes me believe that she honestly doesn't realise anyone suspects her of sleeping with the dead boss for his money but she delivers her lines in a way that we credibly believe other people think that. And she builds her rapport with Martin all at the same time.

I can't recommend the direction, the plot, or the dialogue but this is a damn fine thing to rest your eyeballs on.

Education in Pearls and Watches

Ginger Rogers escapes from a reform school and finds herself accepted into a secret boarding school for pickpockets in the first part of 1946's Heartbeat. This entertaining first act of the film also stars Basil Rathbone as the headmaster of the school who guides his clutch of thieves with a firm but elegant hand. The second and third acts of the film are an entertaining enough romantic comedy, though.

Rogers plays Arlette whose first target when she's out on the streets turns out to be another famously elegant actor, Adolphe Menjou, whose pearl stick pin she nabs somehow by rolling into him on the crowded trolley. I like to think she caught it with her mouth--at any rate, it's the only way I can think of.

But he catches up with her in an amusing scene in a movie theatre where he allows the dialogue from the film currently playing, about a thief being sentenced at court, to do the talking for him. But instead of turning Arlette in to the cops, he enlists her as a pickpocket for his own purposes, to steal a watch from the handsome young Pierre de Roche (Jean-Pierre Aumont).

She poses as the niece of Menjou's colleague and, of course, Arlette winds up stealing more than Pierre's watch. Rogers is sweet and charming as ever, amusingly off-balance yet canny for most of the film, and Jean-Pierre Aumont is handsome with fetchingly quick mannerisms, a worthy romantic lead. But the conflict the writers were obliged to contrive for the two in the middle of the film manifests abruptly and never with any satisfactory explanation, vaguely being put down to Pierre's class consciousness by a supporting character, but Pierre himself never says anything to support this.

Melville Cooper, the Sheriff of Nottingham from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood, also has an amusing supporting role as Pierre's freeloading friend who briefly desires to marry Arlette. I honestly would like to have seen that though, even more, I'd have liked a full movie about Arlette at Basil Rathbone's school for thieves. Heartbeat is available on Amazon Prime.

The End of Débuts

In 1958, Queen Elizabeth II decided to discontinue the long tradition of débutante balls presided over by English royalty. That same year, a Vincent Minnelli movie called The Reluctant Débutante was released, in which Sandra Dee became one of the last young women to "come out" in the ceremony. The film isn't wistful regarding the impending demise of the tradition neither does it relish its death. Instead it's a simple, delightful comedy with clever dialogue served very well by Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall.

Dee plays Jane Broadbent, daughter of Jimmy Broadbent (Harrison) from his first marriage, to an American. Her stepmother, Sheila (Kendall), abruptly decides Jane shall be a débutante in the middle of a catty discussion with her snooty friend, Mabel (Angela Lansbury).

Sheila forces Jimmy to improvise knowledge of the plan when he enters the room, the first of several brilliant scenes where one or the other of the couple is rapidly making do based on limited or false information. In one of my favourite scenes, Sheila decides to invite a particular boy to have dinner with the family in the hopes of bringing him closer to Jane. But instead of the desired but boring and sexually abusive David Fenner (Peter Myers) she invites the black sheep and social outcast David Parkson (John Saxon) whose number Mabel gives her, deliberately misrepresenting it as belonging to the other boy. Sheila never realises her mistake, even when Fenner happens to call next, and her apologising for wishing his mother well although she's dead is taken as an eccentricity by Fenner.

SHEILA: David, this is Sheila. About your mother, Darling . . .

FENNER: Well, I'm afraid she's dead, actually.

SHEILA: Yes, I know, Darling, that's why I'm so sorry about asking you to give her my love.

FENNER: Ah--I'm afraid I can't because she's dead.

SHEILA: I know, Darling, that's why I'm so sorry, it was such a silly mistake to make!

FENNER: Well, she couldn't help it, actually.

Fenner is the eligible bachelor girls are forced to dance with even though his conversation is limited to droning on and on about the state of roads and traffic in the London area and bragging about his route choices. This is hilarious until it turns out his other fault is getting too aggressive with young women when they're alone together, a crime which the other David, the one played by John Saxon, is widely considered guilty of after a girl was found passed out drunk in his bed.

This is all a misunderstanding, which we know well before it's explained, but to be fair, John Saxon never stops seeming creepy in this movie. It's a wonder his career of playing villains in genre films and television was still years ahead. There's an embarrassing conversation where he sincerely tells the Broadbents about studying drums "in Africa" and describes how "the tribe" have a wedding dance with a "shuddering climax". No-one thinks to ask, "Where in Africa?" or "What tribe?" Hadn't anyone seen King Solomon's Mines?

Rex Harrison has most of the funny lines, though, as the last act involves his delicate attempts to make the truth known despite Sheila's unshakeable impression of Parkson. The costumes are beautiful and while it might not be among Minnelli's best films his able had at the wheel nicely showcases the talents of the actors.

Twitter Sonnet #1184

Detectives follow cars to moons of coats.
The movie candy sticks to glass to-night.
The slinking hoods are all but passing boats.
A bridge's shadow plucks a hat from sight.
A dollar marker held the pages off.
A hundred watches marked the foolish road.
Between the warping wood the air would cough.
Bereft of players tables may implode.
The knives were hid in cans along the lanes.
The finished reel was soaked in tea and beer.
A wooden heel destroyed reflected stains.
A boiled mug ascends the fatal tier.
An axe reforged of lead collected rust.
The joint awaits a slow eternal bust.

Houses of Sex and Love

There are many ways to frame culture wars; liberal versus conservative, change versus stability, innovation versus tradition. Partisans have trouble admitting that generally we need some compromise between the two so maybe that's where the Romantic Comedy can help. 1962's Love on a Pillow (Le repos du guerrier) uses the familiar pairing of a lower class guy and a upper class gal to comment on the cultural conflicts of the 50s and 60s. It's no masterpiece but it is an entertaining and thoughtful film directed by Roger Vadim and based on a novel by feminist author Christiane Rochefort.

A wealthy heiress, Genevieve (Brigitte Bardot), checks into a hotel in Dijon and accidentally enters the wrong room where she discovers a man named Renaud (Robert Hossein) unconscious in bed from an intentional overdose of sleeping pills. She calls for help and his life is saved by her fortuitous accident.

She has a fiance back in Paris but the Florence Nightingale syndrome kicks in when she has lunch with Renaud after he's released from the hospital. So she takes him home to her recently inherited sumptuous manor. Like many Brigitte Bardot movies, a lot of the plot revolves around her being naked and she and Renaud first make love after he walks in on her nude, gazing into her massive fireplace.

"Make love" might not be the right expression because the film's central conflict is over the difference between love and sexual attraction and whether the former even truly exists. Genevieve is shocked by Renaud's bohemian lifestyle yet can't help following his advice when it comes to blowing off her commitments. She also breaks up with her fiance because she insists she loves Renaud but Renaud insists the two of them have an open relationship because he thinks love as a concept is just part of the bourgeois tyranny that stifles natural human sexual urges.

Because the first half of the movie is apparently about him opening her eyes to life's realities, and her feelings of liberation as a result, she doesn't seem to have a leg to stand on to argue in favour of anything so stodgy as monogamy. He's something of a beatnik and takes her to meet his friends, the typical movie beatnik assemblage of hazy poets, scattered jazz musicians, and girls with slightly dishevelled hair. Both Renaud and Genevieve flirt with other people but they also keep watching each other.

There are problems that become apparent in Renaud's philosophy, if the fact that he was trying to commit suicide wasn't already an indication. He can't commit creatively, for one thing, and Genevieve discovers the book he's been working on is just the same first sentence over and over, like the writer in Camus' The Plague. As Renaud's outlook on life is gradually revealed to be less and less adequate to suit his emotional needs, Genevieve tells his father that she feels a strange peace, commenting, "It's like giving birth. Like I now have the strength to live for myself . . . " At the same time, she also says, "I feel like I understand him now."

What had been presented as a conflicted between the Beat and the Old Money is really a conflict about power and freedom. When he was rocking her world, he had the power and freedom, and then when she has the upper hand, the power and freedom is hers, and now she can look back and understand how he felt when he had her at a disadvantage. Naturally, this calls into question the wisdom of subscribing to either philosophy wholesale and she seems to know it.

It's a nice looking movie and the performances are good though Bardot has a tantrum at one point that seems a bit forced, as though she told Vadim she wanted to do the scene in Citizen Kane where Kane smashes up Susan's room but the story here doesn't quite justify it. Of course, she looks terrific.

Twitter Sonnet #1149

The winking waves report in frothy lids.
A crowded grin replete with eyes appeared.
In razor slats the apple fell to bids.
The table took the chips for something weird.
The pair repaired beneath an absent roof.
A weakened pull divests a world of moons.
At craggy hill the place entraps a hoof.
For flocking dreams the tired walker swoons.
Collected chairs established last the screen.
Contained between the leather arms they sat.
In lavender and coffee friends've made the scene.
The books returned the fertile brain of Cat.
A cast assembles parties off the sheet.
Instead of cake they sliced neglected peat.