Swing Girls (2004)

aka Suwingu gâruzu

After accidentally poisoning their school’s brass band through the power of raw fish, heat and tardiness, a group of girls decide it’s best to roll with the punches and use this opportunity to get out of their summer school maths class by replacing the original band members.

The problem: apart from the still standing cymbal player of the original band Takuo (Yuta Hiraoka) who is actually a pretty decent piano player, most of the girls do not play an instrument or are actually motivated to learn music – at least at first. There aren’t enough members for a proper brass band anyway, but a swing big band seems somewhat doable to Takuo.

Despite keeping up appearances for teenage disengagement, some of the girls really do take to the whole band thing, and even when the return of the real brass players should put a stop to their band ambitions, a hard core around Tomoko (Juri Ueno, doing some of the choicest cute camera hogging known to humanity) and Takuo decide to continue turning into a band that might even manage to keep time.

Swing Girls’ director Shinobu Yaguchi is something of a specialist in the very specifically Japanese kind of feelgood movie where a group of people of dubious talent and motivation come to learn to work together to achieve something quite special.

At its worst, this sort of thing can feel disingenuous and downright unpleasant and unkind towards the many, many people who fail at things and never manage to play an awesome version of “Take the A-Train” without any fault of their own.

At its best – and Swing Girls certainly is this sub-genre at its best – these films can feel like a shot in the arm of a condensed mix of hope, actual good cheer and appreciation of people in all their difference. As Yaguchi does it here, avoiding the pitfalls of kitsch and bad faith storytelling looks easy – a quality of genuine humanity runs through scenes of broad and not so broad comedy, plain silliness and quiet contemplation, touching coming of age tropes without wagging a finger and teaching us all a valuable lesson.

The film does occasionally allow us to laugh at its characters, but it does so in a way that suggests we do so recognizing our own foibles in them; the film’s kindness is of a type that even allows us to be kind to our own failings.

Yaguchi’s main trick for avoiding the horrors of making this feel either treacly or unpleasant lies in this ability to look at his characters with kindness yet also show their failures and strengths and the connections and fissures in their relationships with great precision. There’s a lot of slapstick here, and a lot of very movie-like good cheer, but also a clear appreciation of emotional truths. It’s quite the thing, really, additionally delivered with perfect comedic timing.

Three Films Make A Post: Elvis Has Left the Building

Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015): It wouldn’t have been difficult to tell this specific tale as an utter freakshow. It is, after all, the of story a horse breeder with musical ambition and a voice naturally a lot like that of Elvis Presley who got roped into the role of “Orion” – a masked singer heavily insinuated to be Elvis returned shortly after his death, somewhat bigger, buffer, and younger, and built to make Sun Records (the Nashville version, so no bad thoughts about Sam Phillips necessary) a whole lot of money, at least for a time.

Director Jeanie Finlay doesn’t at all, but instead creates a sympathetic portrayal of a guy who had a dream he finds fulfilled in a way that’s making him painfully unhappy, and the curious cultural impact of Elvis on the more peculiar parts of American culture. It’s a lovely thing, and that most pleasant of surprises – a documentary about a curiosity that turns out to be a film about people.

Bored Hatamoto: Island of No Return (1960): In this outing of the jidai geki pulp detective series, the Bored Hatamoto (as always embodied quite wonderfully by Utaemon Ichikawa) makes his way to the shadowed streets and the foreigners’ quarter of Nagasaki, where he finds a lot of moody filmmaking by Yasushi Sasaki, who makes much of the sets, those exotic foreigners (like the same two red-headed Western guys wandering through the background of many a scene, or the Japanese guys in blackface wearing turbans), yet another plan to dispose of the shogun (this time via the drug trade), musical numbers, running sword battles and my very favourite trope in this sort of movie – the Japanese actors very badly pretending to be dastardly (sigh) Chinese who turn out to indeed be meant to be Japanese villains pretending to be Japanese.

This is particularly rollicking good fun, with everyone involved in top form. There’s really something to be said for industrialized studio filmmaking, at least when it comes to Toei films from this era (and the next two).

Crimson Bat, the Blind Swordswoman (1969): Apparently, every studio in Japan wanted a slice of the blind swordsperson cake after the success of the Zatoichi films. Shochiku gave us this comparatively short-lived – four entries are next to nothing for a Japanese movie series – entry in the canon, following the adventures of blind swordswoman Oichi (Yoko Matsuyama), in this first film directed by veteran director Sadatsugu Matsuda.

The film’s pacing suffers a bit from too much flashback backstory, but whenever the pretty delightful Yoko Matsuyama stops crying (about her run-away mum, having been blinded by lightning, and years later a murdered gramps) and goes to business with her red sword cane, Matsuda does direct like a young man instead of one right at the end of his career, with some pretty fancy choreography, excellent bad guys (among them eternal villain Bin Amatsu as a gent named “Devil” Denzo), and frame compositions to die (be killed by blind swordswoman?) for.

Flora and Son (2023)

Flora (Eve Hewson), a mostly single Mom in Dublin – the father Kev (Paul Reid) is around but is clearly useless in most regards – can’t really connect with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). She’s not quite grown-up as fully as you’d expect of a proper movie mom, after all, and is rather more abrasive than Hollywood rules allow for being a good mother.

On a wine-driven lark, Flora signs up for online guitar lessons from Los Angeles never-quite-made-it musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Not unexpectedly, they do fall in long-distance love, but, this being a John Carney movie, the romantic aspect isn’t everything, so Flora discovers certain aspects about herself through the power of music and their connection that will in turn help her connect with Max.

So yes, this is pretty much a typical John Carney film in its use of romance movie tropes it doesn’t quite subvert but also clearly isn’t feeling slavishly beholden to, where the lovers not getting together in a romantic embrace isn’t actually a sad ending, and where re-connecting a family isn’t part of some kind of conservative impulse to put things back in order, but an example of human connection.

Human connection that in Carney’s films is typically enabled and enhanced through the power of music, or really, the power of songs – in a way where genre and approach matter less than the nearly spiritual way making music together as an act of creativity can connect people in unexpected ways.

This nearly never glides off into the realms of kitsch because Carney also knows that songs do not magically solve every problem, that problems may indeed not be solvable, and isn’t afraid to leave room for characters to grow or screw up after the movie is finished. His sometimes a little abrasive but never cruel sense of humour certainly helps keep things honest as well.

Which makes Flora and Son, like all of Carney’s musically minded movies, the kind of film to watch when you want to feel all little better about humanity without feeling like you’re being lied to - a perfect thing, really.

Crazy Heart (2009)

Outlaw country musician Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) is going nowhere. An aging alcoholic, he’s stopped writing songs and is mostly working the nostalgia and bowling alley circuit with his old hits, pick-up bands, whiskey and an air of bitterness. Bad’s former, much younger and sexier, sidekick Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell) has hit the big time of country music stardom, but his intermittent attempts at helping out feel more like dominance plays and the kind of hand-outs that do not sit well with the rest of dignity Bad still possesses somewhere.

Bad comes to a crossroads when he meets younger journalist and single mom Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and falls for her – or perhaps the idea of falling for her and the different kind of life she stands for.

Sometimes, it’s okay for a director to step back and let their leads, their script and – particularly in this case – their musical experts do most of the work. There’s an admirable ability to shut off one’s director’s ego for a bit needed to do that properly, and Scott Cooper apparently possesses it, and can use it without making a film that looks and feels bland. Rather, this one’s simply focussed on performance and tone, centring Bridges and to a degree Gyllenhaal (whose story this isn’t it, but who always shows she possesses one outside of Bad’s life).

Bridges is in finest form, presenting a character as a relatable human being who might have become either a caricature or just unpleasant in the wrong hands, without attempting to make Bad better than he actually is. He’s also a really great old man outlaw country singer when provided with the right material.

There is a deep sense of compassion running through the film and its treatment of Bad that doesn’t make excuses, either. Yet Crazy Heart carries with it a not uncomplicated hopefulness that feels grown-up and deserved instead of perfunctory and calculated for its market.

It is also a joy to see a film that treats country music with an actual eye from the inside, with many small telling details about this particular intersection of showbiz and working class art that demonstrate how much the filmmakers get it. The involvement of T-Bone Burnett, Stephen Bruton and Ryan Bingham on the musical side will certainly have provided some of the stuff of reality for the film – in any case, these guys do provide Crazy Heart with a tonally and sonically perfect soundtrack.

Three Films Make A Post: Beneath the city streets lie government secrets. File #7 is missing… Pray they don't find it.

The Most Terrible Time in My Life (1993) aka Waga jinsei saiaku no toki: This first movie in Kaizo Hayashi’s Maiku Hama trilogy is a very film school film nerd type of project. It is full of allusions to and plays with tropes and approaches from other movies – mostly from noir, the hard-boiled school and the nouvelle vague.

As it often happens with this approach, the film appears stuffed full of things, or really, overstuffed, leaving little room for a personality that isn’t made exclusively made from other movies. As it also often happens, many of the scenes here are fantastic when looked at on their own, they just don’t add up to much of a whole.

Where You’re Meant to Be (2016): Paul Fegan’s documentary concerns the attempt of Arab Strap’s voice Aidan Moffat of doing a small town tour with his versions of traditional Scottish ballad and folk material. An early encounter with very traditional Scottish ballad singer Sheila Stewart – her rules of folk singing are so purist, most other folk singers wouldn’t cut it – sees her criticizing the project rather vigorously. Her criticism clearly hurts and rankles Moffat in ways he never quite expresses on camera. An off-camera monologue ruminates about Moffat’s doubts, while the film follows him through backrooms, rehearsals and meetings with various somewhat ballad connected people.

This is more an interesting documentary than a successful one, mostly because it seems to be quite able to find out what it actually is about. It attempts to use the Stewart/Moffat divide as a narrative frame, but there’s really not enough substance to it to carry the whole film. Other encounters feel rather random and not always terribly interesting, something that isn’t helped by Moffat’s tendency to throw himself into the pose of a smirking ironicist, which in my experience only is a way to get people to talk when they’re drunk and don’t notice their interlocutor thinks he’s above them. In any case, it’s not a pose I find terribly interesting to watch.

Hidden City (1987): A young woman (Cassie Stuart) drags an at first unwilling statistician (Charles Dance) into the search for a classified film that leads into the lower echelons of espionage, bad commercial art, and all the interesting things barely buried under London’s surface, secrets the people meant to keep them secret have mostly forgotten themselves.

In mood and style Stephen Poliakoff’s movie fluctuates between comedy, a light and very British 80s version of the 70s US conspiracy thriller, and a psychogeographical essay turned movie. This is very much a film about a boring life getting in touch with the weird undercurrents that have always run just a tiny bit below the surface and starting to get in tune with them, shifting his view of the world; the thriller elements are really only there to hang this shift in personal perspective on.

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In short: Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

Julien Temple’s documentary about the late, great Shane MacGowan uses a kind of collage method to not speak about the man and his work but let him speak for himself. So the film uses archival footage and often appropriately bizarre animation to illustrate the life and times of MacGowan as he tells them through various interviews from different stages of his life, some of which conducted by and with friends with an physically barely there man. The only outside perspective given is from some interviews with members of his family, editorializing doesn’t really happen. Given MacGowan’s tendency to extreme drunken debauchery, I wouldn’t exactly believe anything he’s saying, which doesn’t mean the film isn’t a true portrayal of his life and mind – it’s simply not one I’d believe as a portrayal of all the facts of his life and mind. But the facts aren’t really the point when you’re trying the portrait the core of a human being.

Given the nature of the man and his music, the film is a mix of nostalgia, aggression and sudden outbursts of poetry. It’s also clearly not on board with romanticizing hard living as a necessity for art – there’s an unflinching aspect to its look at MacGowan’s increasing physical and mental decline that leaves no room for that. Pleasantly, this unflinching view is paired with a complete lack of hypocritical moral superiority – talent wasting away and life fading is not treated with judgment here, but sadness for what’s gone and love for what’s still there. Which does turn this into a bit of a heartbreaker for those of us to whom MacGowan’s music means a lot, but that’s only right and proper.

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While Google is trying to make the free version of YouTube impossibly annoying to watch I recommend using FreeTube or comparable software and apps to access videos like this.

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