Something about the cherry blossoms, something about the neon luminosity of a
midnight alley as subway trains soar overhead, something about tales of honor
lost and regained, and kimonos, and pop music, and pachinko parlors, and the
yakuza. And ninja. Lots and lots of ninja.

World cinema fads come and go in the States. Yesterday’s French New Wave gives
way to today’s Korean horror flicks, to tomorrow’s Bollywood spectacles. And yet
our fascination, our uneasiness, with Japan continues. We stare Japan down as
it has always stared us down – as a carnival, a monolith of quirks and culture,
something to be regarded quizzically, and referenced liberally. They sell high
school girls’ panties in vending machines, we sell automatic weapons for one and
all. They rule with bullet trains that arrive exactly on schedule, we rule in
the deployment of CGI to lovingly portray a body as it smashes to the pavement
after a 40-story fall. And so we must co-opt Japan, just as it co-opted us after
World War II, for we both steal in order to understand. Thus Rudy Guiliani’s Times
Square resembles Shibuya in all its garish illuminated glory, and before we catch
Sex Machine Guns in concert, we enjoy “the Legend of Whopper” at a Burger King
in the Ikebukuro district.

The fall of 2003 was a watershed of sorts for our cinematic obsession with japonaiserie:
three films, critical darlings at that, with Japan on their minds. One in the
present (Lost in Translation), one in Fantasyland (Kill Bill, Vol. 1), and one
in the past (The Last Samurai). In all of them, we find abiding affection, disillusion,
and confusion about the American condition vis-à-vis Nippon.

***

“Just when I had spent time in Tokyo, I thought, ‘Oh, I really want to film
this, and I love the way the neon at night looks.’ That was really the starting
point of the story though. I never thought about setting it somewhere else.”

— Sofia Coppola, Screenwriter’s
Monthly interview

If nothing else,
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a valentine to the way Tokyo neon
looks at night to American eyes. Playful, evasive, and punch-drunk, it says little
about its characters, and even less about Japan, but is also canny enough to emphasize
its own slightness. Coppola’s script is a framework of situational tics and ellipses,
just enough skeleton to support the film’s vaporous atmosphere. In the space of
a week, two souls converge, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) and Bob (Bill Murray).
Prematurely disillusioned, aimless, she undergoes her twenty-something crisis
as her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) gallivants with rock stars and old
flames. Bob is aging movie icon reduced to shilling for Suntory whiskey, jet-lagged
and rumpled within his Armani suit, suffering non-conversations with his unctuous
wife back in the US of A. The two meet, they talk, they meet some more, they sing
karaoke, they sleep together without sleeping together, and they part.

Rather desultory, that plot, and the same goes for the characterization. Charlotte’s
J.D. Salinger-style ennui comes off more like a course in Vague Dissatisfaction
101, and Bob can be summed up in quotations: “middle-aged, lonely standup comic.”
And forget about penetrating looks at Japanese society. Lost offers up
clichés as if they are newly minted wonders: middle-aged hookers who purr, “Lip
my stockings,” arcade games based on dance steps (so 1998), bonsai tree trimming
classes, sex club harlots bursting with leather and breasts, American bar singers
contributing strident covers of “Scarborough Fair.” The Japanese characters, faceless
and unnamed, are totems, lingering on the edges like set decoration, serving as
a locus of cultural misunderstanding here, a bit of low comedy there.

But this is all secondary. What counts are those gorgeous
alien shots of Tokyo landscape, the way skyscrapers and the rainbow splashes of
neon reflect off car windows in time with my Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and
Mary Chain, or how Murray’s monotone karaoke reading of Roxy Music’s “More Than
This” fails to conceal reservoirs of longing. The story may be merely an excuse
to film the Japanese night life, but there is nothing indulgent about Coppola’s
camerawork. Hotel corridors swallow Bob and Charlotte in antiseptic black, yet
they find refuge in the fizz of a habachi eatery, or the thickets of crowds coverging
across electrified intersections. It is as if we are being reassured: Yes,
we outsiders, we happy few. More than any film in a while, Lost in Translation
successfully evokes the oxymoron of feeling lost, hip and hypnotized by a strange
land. In its fits and starts, the movie is a ready analogue to life in urban Japan
2003 – all uncertain smiles and subterranean romance.

It’s to Johansson’s
credit that Charlotte emerges as something resembling a flesh-and-blood creature,
but the film belongs to Murray. Puncturing the hoary cross-cultural jokes with
a sadness that suggests that he’s too exhausted to even have fun about not having
fun, Murray is the still – dare we say Zen-like? – center of the film. His interactions
with the peripheral Japanese characters (all of them obviously improvised) are
marvels of offhand comic timing, and a scene in which he and an elfin Japanese
hospital patient attain a loopy rapport despite being unable to comprehend what
the other is saying communicates all that needs to be said about the universality
of connection amid unbridgeable gaps.

Despite its Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land perspective, there is something about Coppola’s
film – its reticence, its refusal to push matters, and finally, its glorious candy-pop
conclusion in which Bob whispers something to Charlotte that reduces her to tears
– that recalls the delicacy of Japanese pop art. One thinks of the effervescent
innocence of a Japanese soap opera in which a chaste kiss is something to be thirsted
for, or director Yasujiro Ozu’s momentous tales in which nothing and everything
happens. Coppola doesn’t yet have Ozu’s deep reserves of humanity or his expansive
vision, but she has the rhythm and the eye. One suggestion: Sign up Bill Murray
for your next film, pronto.

***

Bang bang, I shot you down
Bang bang, you hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang, I used to shoot you down.

If Lost
in Translation is a triumph of mood over the terrible weight of story, Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is the victory of pastiche over personality.
Lost rolls over us like a fog, but Kill Bill is a Cusinart of Asian
grindhouse cinema mashing away at 90 miles per hour, Action Set Piece A to Action
Set Piece B. In short, the Bride (Uma Thurman) has been shot and left for dead
by her traitorous associates, and “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” as the
Klingon proverb that opens the film proclaims. The Bride’s hit list includes O-ren
Ishii (Lucy Liu), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox),
not to mention the titular Bill, played offscreen in Vol. 1 by a bone-dry David
Carradine. All of this is packaged as the Asian midnight flick of our wet dreams,
flush with cheesy 70s funk (thank you, RZA), dialogue that reads like samurai
pronouncements translated by a stoner, screen wipes, and whacked-out monikers
like Sophie Fatale, Go Go Yubari, and the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or,
ahem, DiVAS).

Unlike
the overly reverential Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill
makes no bones about stealing the tropes that have nourished many a chop-socky
revenge flick – and throws in a few dozen other cinematic tips of the hat. In
Tarantino’s populist nirvana, audiences as well as critics are encouraged to play
the game of spot-the-reference: a little Brian DePalma split-screen action for
Daryl Hannah, a little Stanley Kubrick in Go Go Yubari’s eye shadow, a little
Bruce Lee in Uma’s orange jumpsuit. Slate’s David
Edelstein may claim that the movie’s penultimate moment – the Bride hacking
at her enemies in silhouette against an electric blue background – harkens to
An American in Paris, but any Joe on the street can tell you that Tarantino
is ripping off Chuck Norris’ The Octagon. Still, give Tarantino credit:
rather than xerox his influences, he heads straight for the source. Japan’s Production
I.G., the animation studio behind the cyberpunk classic Ghost in the Shell,
contributes a bloody vignette for a flashback scene, and those in the know will
recognize Chiaki Kuriyama, star of the similarly deranged Japanese classic Battle
Royale, playing the same role: homicidal schoolgirl with maces on numchucks.

So is there a point to all this glorious cross-genre pollination, to a Japanese
tea house that was actually filmed in Beijing, to a climactic fight scored with
samples from nearly every kung fu masterpiece ever made, to Lucy Liu’s Japanese
mob boss (who in the script is singled out as one-half “Chinese-American”)? Sadly,
yes. Tarantino wants to imbue this high-powered slaughter machine with emotional
depth, and thereby drag it above genre, but in attempting to do so he torpedoes
the film’s energy. A scene of a grieving Thurman drags on for at least a minute,
and we are meant to think, Yes, we must take this all seriously. Contrasted
with the blithe slaughter that occupies two-thirds of the running time, it seems
excessive, incredibly enough. And yet, those central scenes of bloodletting seem
unlived-in, like an empty coloring book. Pulp Fiction may now seem dated
thanks to the army of imitators in its wake, but Tarantino’s sniggering yet brutal
approach to murder from that film is missed – instead one finds the hardest working
man in the kung fu business, aided and abetted by fight choreographer par excellence
Yuen Woo Ping. Technically proficient to be sure, respectful of the source material
certainly, but devoid of personality.

Nevertheless, Kill Bill reassures us that in the
hierarchy of Tarantino’s fevered, B-movie imagination, Japan is clearly king.
The point is underscored by a cameo by “Street Fighter” Sonny Chiba as Hanzo,
Swordmaker Extraordinaire, who all but walks away with the show. Avuncular and
joking in accented English, he slices up fish in an Okinawa hut when he’s not
busy sharpening the blade to end all blades and dispensing fortune-cookie philosophy
that serves as the film’s lynchpin (“Revenge is like a forest”). His character
is the only one that we can believe carries on an autonomous existence outside
the dictates of plot. Likewise, the climax in the tea house between Thurman and
Liu evolves from all-out Hong Kong martial arts extravagance to a classical one-on-one
duel, pregnant with pauses and elegant slashes of sword – an orgasm borrowed and
blue from Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune classics like Yojimbo (you
see how difficult it is to escape those references). Sure it’s nothing new, but
through the fever of Tarantino’s American eyes, the film as a whole can be seen
as the ultimate refresher course in the history of Japanese cinema, from old-style
honor to modern-day splatter. It remains to be seen if Kill Bill Vol. 2
reveals any further method behind the madness, but if Vol. 1 is any indication,
we can take comfort in the fact that as much as Japan may change, it still stirs
the souls of cinephiliacs everywhere.

***

I know why you don’t talk. You don’t talk because you’re angry. You’re angry
because they make you wear a dress.

Not surprisingly,
the “prestige” picture in this trio of Japan-obsessed flicks, the one starring
Tom Cruise (only the universe’s biggest box office star), the one with the ornate
19th century setting and panoramas of army combat, the one generating the most
Oscar buzz, is the one that is complete and irredeemable hooey. While Kill
Bill is sincere in its aping of Asian influences, The Last Samurai
uses them as one uses costumes at a fancy dress ball, all of it honoring the coronation
of Tom Cruise as Serious Actor.

Play this Mad Lib game: Take Dances with Wolves. Replace “Native American”
with “samurai,” and “the West” with “Japan.” The film’s reading of 19th century
Japan is at a similar Cliffs’ Notes level. Slick, lean, pleased with its exoticism,
Last Samurai isn’t as sanctimonious as Kevin Costner’s magnum opus, but
it also lacks the latter film’s cumulative power and attention to detail. With
all the kimonos and lush landscape on display, the movie has no use for vision,
or a point to make – particularly distressing given the context. How could one
not find contradiction and drama in the convulsions of the post-Tokugawa Era,
where the traditions and cruelties of the feudal system came face to face with
the machinelike efficiency of New Japan? How could the filmmakers squander the
story of Americans and Japanese in uneasy collision for the first time in history?
Against all odds, The Last Samurai finds a way.

The script (written by John Logan of Gladiator
and Star Trek: Nemesis fame) follows a familiar template: spiritually tormented
hero comes into contact with enlightened culture, and rediscovers his soul. Of
course, “rediscovery” is the key word here, and “enlightened culture” might as
well be written in invisible ink. To our mounting horror, we realize that Tom
Cruise’s shellshocked Civil War veteran, Nathan Algren, is a fierce fighter, a
drunkard, and – gasp! – an honorable man. We also learn that the key to understanding
samurai culture is to be taken captive, continuously pummeled (no Christ complex
here) and finally learning that having “no mind” is everything.

To be fair, Cruise does yeoman’s work as Algren, but
the role refuses to allow for his usual preening fratboy quirks; there’s little
left to his persona besides Solemnity Lite. Director Edward Zwick isn’t known
for a light touch, although he does have one masterpiece to his credit: Glory.
In that Civil War drama, he also came down hard on the easy beats (racism is bad),
but he also had a protagonist in Matthew Broderick who wasn’t afraid to cede the
spotlight to supporting players, and searing performances by Denzel Washington
and Morgan Freeman to balance out the whole. In Samurai, Ken Watanabe is
a witty, ferocious presence as Katsumoto, Algren’s opponent, mentor, and brother
in arms, but the rest of the cast plays stick figures (tough, hard-to-please warrior,
beautiful Japanese maiden ripe for the plucking, charming brats who want to be
fighters). And just so we won’t fall asleep, we also have ninjas. Dozens of ninjas.
Ninjas versus samurai – one reels at the thought of what Tarantino could have
done with it.

It’s
all choreographed for maximum middlebrow impact, down to a final tragic charge
by our outmoded samurai, the noble savages (do we hear Sioux caterwauls in the
distance?) versus a modern army of Gatling guns. If one looks hard – very hard
– at the film’s conclusion, one can catch a whiff of liberal self-hatred, as the
Americans arm Japan with the very weapons which will lead to Japanese imperialism
in the next century. But that is all mere sideshow to the intricate production
design, a few blatherings on duty and honor and loyalty, the utter lack of understanding
about Japan outside props and body armor. No, what is most important is the closing
shot of Cruise’s blubbering face as he gains redemption and shows the Japanese
emperor a thing or two about honor. And then it dawns on us – Tom Cruise is
the last samurai! It’s nice to know that Hollywood is alive and well.

Curiously enough, The Last Samurai has been a critical and popular success
in Cruise’s adopted Japan – or perhaps it’s not so surprising after all. Both
Nippon and the U.S. share the same elemental taste for hype, for dreams of historic
heroes and Fantasyland, even if it means twisting and distorting those selfsame
dreams all out of proportion and sense. Bosom buddies indeed.