Yamaha

I can remember the days when Yamaha was a motor vehicle company, churning out thousands of Japanese cars per annum, in that sudden amazing splurge of industry that occurred in Japan in the fifties/sixties. 

The first Yamaha piano I came across was in Queenstown.  I was touring with the NZ Opera Company in one of their piano tours (a very much cut-down version of La Boheme, for half a dozen principals and no chorus) and came across this baby grand at the venue we were using.  It looked marvellous; it wasn't anything like it looked, and for some years afterwards I thought that Yamaha pianos were likely to be rubbish, as this one seemed to be.

However, there came a time when Yamaha got things right, and their pianos came within cooee of being as good as the famous old European names, like Steinway, even though the way the pianos were made was entirely different.

Afterwards, Yamaha turned to electronic keyboards and all sorts of other electronic musical devices, (such as the Yamaha emx5014c case for their stereo mixers). Now they're a brand name trusted in all sorts of circles, as you can see from these videos. 

Extras disks

Two of the three DVDs I borrowed from the Library last week had an extra disk with them, with 'additional features.'   I wonder how many people actually ever watch all these extras?   When we bought the DVD packs for the Lord of the Rings series I remember watching the additional material, though in fact a lot of it was excess to requirements: it added little to the movies, except for extreme film buffs (and I do enjoy background information about movies).  Some of these 'extras' are about as much good to me as Gurkha cigars.  Not that I've got anything against cigars, per se, but I've never smoked, and don't plan on doing it now, and cigars, Gurkha or otherwise, have no real appeal.  I actually quite like the smell of cigars (which for some reason my fingers insist on typing as cigards (?)) and I flatted for a while with a young man who smoked Gauloises, which have a distinctive smell of their own too, but I never fancied actually getting on and smoking them, just because I liked the smell.

Chishû Ryû on left 

Well, that was an interesting digression.  The extras disk that came with Tokyo Story included a documentary called Tokyo Ga by Wim Wenders, the German filmmaker.  It was interesting, but I got interrupted about half way through, and didn't go back to it, because while Wenders came at his visit to Tokyo in his inimitable fashion, he took his time about doing so, and there were long sections in the doco where very little actually happened.   Yes, it allowed us to just 'live' in the moment and observe, but it didn't really impact on Ozu's movie to any great extent, and sometimes seemed indulgent.  It did help in letting me know in advance what patinko is (it's a pinball game that's played obsessively in Japan) so that when it was mentioned in Still Walking,

I knew what they were talking about. And there was a scene where Chishû Ryû, who played the father in Tokyo Story (and also appeared in 52 out of the 54 films Ozu made!) went to Ozu's (anonymous) grave and poured water over the gravestone. I'm not sure what this signifies in Japanese culture, but the doing of it turned up again in Still Walking, twice.

Incidentally Ryû was only 49 when he played the old man in his late sixties in Tokyo Story. Apparently it wasn't uncommon for Ozu to use him to play men of a variety of ages. The interview with Ryû in Wenders' documentary is perhaps the most interesting thing in it; at least, it was the most interesting thing in the section I actually saw. Ryû came across as a surprisingly humble actor, a man who'd understood Ozu to be his mentor throughout his career (even though there was only a year difference in their ages), and whom he trusted implicitly. If Ozu said he wanted a scene played this way, Ryû would play it that way. He didn't ask questions about motivation or backstory, he just got on and did as he was told, and the result was always effective. Ozu seldom did many takes on a scene; he knew exactly what he wanted (he would even attend to the details of the set and the actors' clothing until they were to his satisfaction), and, somewhat like Hitchcock, he had the movie planned in his head long before filming actually began. What he 'saw' is what appeared on the screen. Nevertheless, for one scene in which Ryû appeared, he remembered that they had around twenty rehearsals, and some twenty takes. Ozu commented at the end that Ryû didn't seem to be quite on form that day, but it was said as a matter of fact rather than as a criticism. Ryû remarked in the interview that he wasn't that great an actor; he had none of Ozu's intellectual capacity.

So, yes, occasionally an 'extras' disk does have something of real value in it!  All right, I eat my words.

Still Walking

Having watched one Japanese movie (Tokyo Story) a couple of days ago, it was interesting to watch another, Still Walking, last night.  Still Walking was released in 2008, so it's nearly fifty years younger than the other movie.  Yet it has lots of connections, and seemingly the director, Hirokazu Kore-eda has used Tokyo Story as a kind of model for his movie.

Both are about families, and a visit by one part of the family to another: in the first the parents went to visit their various children; in the later movie, the children come to the parents for the anniversary of the death of the oldest son, who died saving a boy from drowning.   So there's an absent, deceased son in both the stories too.  And a daughter who speaks her mind and doesn't mince words.

In the earlier movie, the parents are a lovely couple who've grown past disputes and bitterness.  In this movie, the father is constantly bitter - pretty much at everyone (he's the sort that would never buy anniversary gifts for wife) - and his wife, until late in the movie, seems to be a lovely woman, always feeding everyone and been the hostess.  However, after a visit from the boy who was saved from drowning (he's invited every year) she nags on about how fat he's become and how untidy and how little he's made of himself as a young adult.  And then she goes on to tell her other son that she only invites the young man to vent her anger on how much she hates him for being alive when her son is dead.

The son she tells this to is a struggling artist, reduced to doing restoration work when he can find it.  He's a great disappointment to his retired doctor father, but he's the most sympathetic character in the movie, a man not only struggling with his job but with his fairly recent marriage to a young widow.  She has a young son that he's having to get to know as well.  (Interestingly, he's far more European-looking than anyone else in the movie.)

The daughter is another one of these blunt characters who's happy to move on and leave the deceased brother behind.  In fact she and her husband are planning to move in with the parents and remodel the house to suit their needs.  This doesn't seem to be being met with much favour, and we never find out whether they actually go ahead with this.  She has a bit of a dope of a husband, although he's a lot more fun than his counterpart in Tokyo Story.


It's an interesting movie, but not as engaging as its older 'brother' because there's a lot more bitterness floating around and much less warmth and humour.  I enjoyed it, but it leaves a fair amount of gloom in its wake.

Learning from a disaster

Matthew Taylor from RSA writing in relation to the Japanese disaster (and also the Scottish economy, but that doesn't get mentioned in the following extract)...

It was...fascinating this morning...to hear James Naughtie on the Today Programme describing the issues which some Japanese people hope their country will now face up to in the wake of their unfolding tragedy:
first, how could the Government and the people have a deeper and more honest conversation about the choices facing a country which already had a debt twice the size of GDP even before the crisis.
Second, how could Japan rediscover the entrepreneurial flair which led to it being the world’s economic powerhouse in the seventies and eighties.
Third, how could Japan develop a new and stronger civil society to fill the gaps between big Government, big corporations and individuals?

The idea that Japan could turn this crisis into a national conversation about a new idea of citizenship and society is inspiring. It is also fascinating how recognisable these issues are to us in the UK.

Babel

I'm going to stick my neck out and say I'm one of the few reviewers who thinks that Babel is superbly-acted tosh.
Now I have to admit that I watched it without subtitles - for some reason it didn't occur to whoever put the DVD together to include subtitles for the scenes that aren't in English (75% of the movie, roughly). It was only after the movie was finished that we discovered we could have had subtitles running; we'd thought - considering the title - that not knowing what the characters were saying most of the time was part of the director's intention.
But probably not. Consequently we spent most of the film wondering what on earth the Japanese girl's section (which is quite substantial) had to to do with the rest of the movie. In fact it has so little to do with the rest of the movie that it could have been dropped without missing a beat - also reducing the lengthy running time considerably.
Alejandro González Iñárritu has apparently made two movies with a similar structure before Babel. Good on him. My suspicion is that the only reason this one has gained some fame is that it has Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in it. Neither of them are required to do much in the way of character building, but they nevertheless invest a couple of fairly undistinguised characters with far more depth than they deserve. They're also part of the film in which chronology is most dislocated. We know Blanchett is going to be shot before it happens, and we know Pitt will have a conversation with his son - because we've already seen it from a different angle. The only thing is that this conversation makes no sense because when we saw it at the beginning of the film the nanny was part of it; yet supposedly she's been dismissed by this stage. Maybe the subtitles will help - but do I want to sit through 140 minutes of movie again just to make sense of a few subtleties?
It's interesting that we picked up most of what was happening without subtitles. That's a credit to the actors primarily - and this film is full of wonderful acting. Quite apart from Pitt and Blanchett, there are superb performances from the Moroccan and Japanese casts - I can't name names, because I never quite figured the names of the characters in these sections, but Adriana Barazza does the Mexican middle-aged nanny very well.
Quite honestly I'm not sure what point the film is trying to make. Linking the stories with the rifle says something about how we affect each other's lives, but the stories themselves don't have any great connections, most particularly the Japanese one, which seems primarily a picture of the dreadfully amoral ennui that affects a certain class of Japanese young people. The Moroccan sequence is just a tragedy, but the Americans' link to it is fairly tenuous. And the Mexican one, caused in part by the American couple's getting stuck in Morocco, is again only tenuous in its connections.
Peter Bradshaw also stuck his neck out and dismissed the film's pretentions as art. Here's part of his review
There are some films that arrive here from the international festival circuit almost incandescent with self-importance. They hover into the cinema in a kind of floating trance at how challenging and moving they are. They are films with a profound reluctance to get over themselves. One such is Babel, the exasperatingly conceited new film from Alejandro González Iñárritu. It is well acted and handsomely photographed, but still extraordinarily overpraised and overblown, a middlebrow piece of near-nonsense: the kind of self-conscious arthouse cinema that is custom-tailored and machine-tooled for the dinner-party demographic. The script is contrived, shallow, unconvincing and rendered absurd and almost meaningless by a plot naivety that is impossible to ignore once its full magnitude dawns on you.

Beware the Machine

A friend had an incident with an exercise machine tonight rather like Bill Murray did in the film Lost in Translation. There was a short scene in that movie where Murray is trying to find things to do to fill in his time in Japan, so he goes on the treadmill machine. A female Japanese voice is instructing him in a rather sergeant-major way, and gets increasingly hyper about what he’s supposed to do at the same time as the machine increases its speed. Finally Murray is thrown off in a flurry of elbows and knees while the voice burbles on for him to keep on moving!!
My friend apparently got kicked off his machine, according to his wife. He then got up and it hit him and bit him at the same time. Her suggestion was that keeping fit was too dangerous.

Lost in Translation

I probably didn’t give Lost in Translation enough of a mention, since there were quality aspects to it. The Japanese/American interplay is often quite zany: the handing over of business cards at the beginning to Bill Murray by a half dozen people who are somehow involved with his next few days; the appalling prostitute who invades his room and nearly cripples him; the insane chat show host; the director of the commercial Murray is making who can’t say something simple without a hundred words – all in Japanese and at great speed. It’s then translated into almost nothing by his offsider.
Then there are the weird people whom Murray and Johansson meet in their night wanderings, strange people who seem to pour out their heart – in Japanese. Or the man who is a rather fat John Lennon imitation; and then his lady moves into the shot, and she’s Yoko Ono. And there’s the crazy starlet who can’t stop talking long enough to let anyone else speak, or the anonymous fourth person at the table with Johansson and her husband and the starlet, who talks enthusiastically in pop music-speak for a minute, asks her if she understands, and she says no. He might as well be speaking Japanese.
The humour is quiet and subtle, and because Murray underplays his character to such an extent even the mad moments, such as when he’s trapped on an exercise treadmill with a Japanese voice exclaiming at him, aren’t over the top. These are the qualities of the movie.
But there’s no storyline; almost nothing really happens except the revealing of a man’s life on autopilot, and a girl wondering why she married a young man who doesn’t seem really interested in her. Both of them find it hard to sleep at night and they meet accidentally and on purpose in various places in the large hotel they’re staying in. Both of them have lost their way for the time being, and really don’t find it by the time the movie’s over. While this is interesting, it’s not exactly stimulating, and as I said in the earlier post, there’s a great sag in the middle of the movie where eccentric Japanese night people take over but don’t really contribute anything to what’s going on. People wandering around Tokyo, or staring out of hotel windows, or drinking whisky in the bar, or doing karaoke are interesting, but only up to a point. Unless something moves in their lives, we’re left back at square one. Which I think is the problem – for me – of the movie. For all their meetings and odd conversations, we’re no further on at the end than we were at the beginning.

Sound for the Deaf

We’re babysitting a house at the moment that has a wide-screen tv, and I mean wide-screen. Full-scale action movies appear as they would in the cinema. However, with the benefits of such a system come the negatives: the remote controls. There are two required to get the DVD working, and they have more buttons on them than the computer keyboard has keys. Not only that, many of them have more than one function. And if you don’t get things in the right sequence you don’t get the movie – or even the tv channels as we’ve just discovered.
Last night we watched Lost in Translation, the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johansson movie about a couple of insomniacs in Japan. It started off well, with a quirky sense of humour, but seemed to lose the plot (there wasn’t much of one) in the middle, and sagged for about a quarter of an hour. When we first tried to play it we got closed captioning – that system that not only tells you the dialogue but also indicates the sound effects. Mission Impossible III is on at the moment – the sound effects would be along the lines of car crash noises, glass breaking, more glass breaking, even more glass breaking, many people going Ahhhh!, villain mutters under his breath, and so on.
Lost in Translation was considerably quieter, for the most part, and only required things like: shower noise, phone rings.

Vending Machines

Vending machines. They’re just there, aren’t they? Nobody ever looks after them, or refills them, or takes the money away, do they? They just somehow fill themselves up. Don’t they?

Vending machines might look like perfect robots, endlessly doing their task without complaint, but of course there are humans behind the scenes, who keep the machines stocked, keep them happy – and, of course, who take the money.

Owning vending machines is a way many people make a living. In fact, in the United States, one company called Multivend which focuses on vending machines with candy in them has some 9,000 people working with it, people who work from home, don’t have an office, and can choose their own hours.

Think about it. How many vending machines do you come across in a day? They’re everywhere, growing like triffids! In Japan, it’s estimated that there’s one vending machine for every twenty people. This works out to some 5.6 million machines in that country alone. And a huge income for the vendors.

As a little exercise. Next time you go into town, check out how many vending machines you see. And what they sell. You may be surprised at just how many you find.