Tokyo

[imomus]

I'm in Tokyo for the rest of this week, staying in Ogikubo with Florian Perret, a friend from Paris who designed the sleeves for Folktronic, Oskar Tennis Champion and the Super Madrigal Brothers album.



Florian now has a very high-powered job with a Tokyo animation company... and a new baby! It took a while to find his company's HQ last night though: we had to go into the lobby of the Hyatt Century to ask directions, which felt like walking onto the set of one of my least favourite films, set in one of my least favourite parts of this city. Right after leaving the Hyatt lobby with its fuck-off chandeliers, arrogant gaijin and Saudi marble we walked through Chuo Koen, a park inhabited by homeless Japanese living under blue tarpaulin. Big city, big Gini spread.

Over dinner at my favourite Nishi-Ogi restaurant last night (a tiny place with room for just ten people, hidden in a backstreet... God, the crispy tatsutaage mackerel was delicious!) Florian told us that rents in Tokyo are now cheaper per square metre than those in New York, London or Paris. He pays around €800 a month for 50 square metres, which, while not quite Berlin-cheap, is pretty reasonable. And the area's nice.

Comments

[akabe.livejournal.com]

i'm in sapporo at the moment ane it reminds me of berlin. (i guess the absence of an edo infrasctructure has spawned an alltogether different beast)

[jimyojimbo.livejournal.com]

christ yes, lost in T is a terribly overrated film, isn't it? I have this thing for re-titling films in a literal manner. Lost in Translation is something like: Two Wingeing People Go to Tokyo; Fail to See Tokyo

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I can sort of see the Berlin thing in Sapporo... certainly the red brick building containing Cafe Soso / Shift (http://www.shift.jp.org/) is an older, post-industrial space of the kind you don't often see in Japan (the Tokyo equivalent would have been the Shokuryo Building (http://metropolis.japantoday.com/tokyo/451/art.asp) which used to house Koyama and other notable Tokyo galleries, but got demolished).

Yum!

[(Anonymous)]

Nice choice of cereal.

[blastoisemaster.livejournal.com]

Yes, god forbid a movie is anything but a cultural documentary. I hate it when characterization and the central plot get in the way of long explanations about societal values and traditions.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But Two Wingeing People Go to Tokyo; Fail to See Tokyo IS characterization and plot, just not very compelling ones. Sofia's next movie "Marie Antoinette" promises to focus on someone even more spoiled and whingeing ("Let them eat cake!"), but at least we'll get to see her head chopped off at the end. Unless it just ends on a shot of Marie in her bedroom in her panties.

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

weird, your review of LIT.
I generally thought that bill murray was more self-effacing than insulting to anyone in the film. Your take on the film hits on what I thought was one of the thrusts of the film: That their medieval values and the artifice of the western bubble through which they see tokyo is severely limiting. The world is teeming, and neither of the principles are free to take part, or even have the means to understand anymore thanks to their self-imposed lifestyles/alienations.
And yeah, tokyo's a red herring. It's just a safer backdrop than the closest analogues for that sort of incomprehensible frenzy... developing nations.

cheap

[(Anonymous)]

800 $ for 50 square meters?! where does your friend live???

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Loved the review of Lost in Translation. I completely agree with your assessment, but unlike you, I loved the film. I was rather shocked when my friends talked about how much they liked the main characters after the film was over. "They were assholes," I said, "and we saw the world from their perspective: everyone else was stupid and cheesy, and utterly false and insincere."

You hit the nail on the head, but I think that Coppolla knew what she was doing, and showed us the ultimate "horrible American tourist" who never leaves their Western hotel, and who stays above the culture they're in, and betray everyone and everything around them (while falling in love). They were horrible people: distrustful of the people they should trust, dismissive, superficial, selfish, but I still couldn't take my eyes off of them. I thought Coppolla walked that line between repulsion and identification perfectly, but maybe I was wrong - maybe she did think the main characters were awesome (which, like I said, I don't want to believe).

BTW, I wish I could read the article on Kill Bill.

[peripherus-max.livejournal.com]

I can't say this enough... your hatred of Sofia Coppola's boho trustafarian aesthetic feels like something close to heaven. Thank you. I had no idea about M. Antoinette being her next subject. BTW, I just saw a miraculous film by Miranda July called "Me and You and Everyone We Know" that Sofia could learn more than a few things from.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

It's amazing to me that you write so much about the delight of unresolved ambiguities but can still insist on being so literal-minded about what different things represent in the world and in the arts. I sort of took Lost In Translation the same way as the last couple of commenters above, who suggest that perhaps the main characters of the film weren't meant to be entirely sympathetic. I swear sometimes it's like you're incapable of appreciating a piece of art (or a piece of architecture) that doesn't have a strong, positive protagonist as its main focus.

But you call everyone else old fashioned...

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

To be fair, you're undoubtedly much more acquainted with the actual personalities behind this film, so perhaps your reaction is at least partially based on firsthand knowledge of what the creators' attitudes really are. Still, it's probably not fair to hold this against the vast majority of the film's admirers who couldn't have possilby shared that perspective, and instead 'got it wrong in an interesting way.'

Re: cheap

[(Anonymous)]

pounds, not dollars

[cheapsurrealist.livejournal.com]

The Miranda July movie was wonderful. I agree.

I haven't seen Lost in Translation. Which is odd because I usually watch anything with Bill Murray in it.

I almost rented "Broken Flowers" the other night but then I remembered that it was made by Jim Jarmusch.

It's time for Ghostbusters III

Re: cheap

[(Anonymous)]

euros, not pounds

[dzima.livejournal.com]

The problem is, after one lives in Tokyo as a foreigner and sees the arts/creative scene there it is hard to find anything interesting about those two characters at all. An ironic thing about the setting of the film is that literally one block away from the Hyatt is the Opera City building, where the NTT Centre and Opera City Gallery are, and there are plenty of things to do there to keep you from getting bored.

If those characters were a bit younger, uncooler and not as rich, they'd be partying hard at Gaspanic in Roppongi.

[markii187.livejournal.com]

Cheaper per metre than London and NYC?!

*starts packing*

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Of course, but this is the kind of literal-mindedness I'm talking about here. As Momus observed, the movie largely ignores the set and setting and concentrates on the narcissism and myopia of the two lead characters. Arguably it's not a film about Japan at all; the very way it trivializes and marginalizes Japanese culture can be seen as part of the film's depiction of precisely what these characters are missing out on. Probably Momus is right that it could have been set in a completely different environment and have its major thematic elements emerge mostly intact. While he seems to find that immensely distasteful, I'm not sure it makes Lost In Translation a bad film per se. Certainly, he seems to have a problem with the sort of people who loudly proclaim to identify with and love the movie. Hopefully the two constructs (movie, people who love the movie) can be parsed here.

I didn't see any of the characters in the film as potential role models and it didn't seem to me that they were intended as such. I could well be wrong. I do wonder though how Momus' own work would hold up under such a literal interpretation, especially if we're to take into account those who claim to enjoy it. This approach is probably why Pitchfork, etc. find it difficult to cut our old friend a break.

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

Let me write the other side of this dialogue for a second, too: 'Oh you silly American!'

[stanleylieber.livejournal.com]

:)

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

they weren't bored, they were lonely.

[dzima.livejournal.com]

Talking about films featuring narcissistic and myopic characters, give Buffalo 66 and The Brown Bunny over Lost in Translation every day of the year. Vinnie Gallo is big in Japan, Lost in Translation was not.

probably why Pitchfork, etc. find it difficult to cut our old friend a break.

They take Jim O'Rourke too literally as well so he's not in bad company! Maybe it's time for them to form CurrO'Berg...

[dzima.livejournal.com]

They were "control freaks with a victim's complex".

[nato-dakke.livejournal.com]

yes... it's made clear that they're americans at the beginning of the film.

[tassellrealm.livejournal.com]

London. You'd have to be rich to live here.

And if you were that rich - you'd live somewhere else.

£1.50 for a short-hop bus ride.

£3.00 on the tube.

£5.50 for a packet of cigarettes.

£1.80 for a sit-down piss-weak coffee.

Rents, polltax and mortgages completely unaffordable.

In a place where proper brains, beauty, glamour, newness and excitement were made Virtual Illegal a long time ago.