Producers in Focus: Jacob Chapman (formerly JesuOtaku)

            This entry in Producers in Focus will be a bit different than normal, since it concerns someone who no longer produces video content and whose past work is no longer available (at least not in any format I’ve yet found). 

            Jacob Chapman would most likely be familiar to former Channel Awesome aficionados under his original moniker, “JesuOtaku” (which he no longer goes by, though he’s still fine with being called “JO”).  Specializing in anime, he premiered on the site in the summer of 2010, appeared a year later in the now-infamous To Boldly Flee, and left the site in October of 2014 so as to pursue a different career path.  He also revealed over the course of the #ChangetheChannel movement that his personal circumstances behind the scenes at CA had been really, really bad for some time (To Boldly Flee production being just one of many issues). 

            Despite his departure, the old JesuOtaku website still functioned and most of his work could be found on Youtube, until January 30^th, 2016, when Jacob formally came out on Twitter as transgender.  I had the good fortune and honor of being able to message directly with him right after his coming-out video went live.  After congratulating him, I asked if he had any plans to re-host his old JO content; he responded that, while he had no problem if others had downloaded and saved his past videos, he did not plan to ever rerelease anything he did under his dead name. 

            This is, of course, his decision entirely, and given the degree of shit he experienced while at Channel Awesome on top of the challenges of coming out as transgender, he has every reason to not want or have to revisit that time; more, perhaps, than most of the other former CA producers. 

            However, I do wish to take a brief moment now, at the very least, to show my particular gratitude for what, for me, was one of the most influential and informative works ever published on Channel Awesome; JO’s “Month of Miyazaki” series. 

            In response to Miyazaki’s (since rescinded) retirement announcement, JO decided to go back and review each and every Miyazaki/Ghibli film ever made up to that point.  These videos were a treasure trove of rich detail for anyone who loves the work the Ghibli team has done over the years.  Jacob went deep with each review, analyzing linguistic and even sound design differences between the Japanese and American versions, provided background stories on the inspirations for some of the characters out of traditional Japanese culture, and in some cases examinations of when and how the movie was released in the States and what sort of success each one had. 

            Ultimately, Jacob never finished the series- due to a mix of production delays, his personal struggles at the time, and his eventual departure from CA, the last one he completed was Howl’s Moving Castle- but, amazingly, that in no way diminished the immenseness of what Jacob achieved with the series while it was running.  Neither before nor since have I seen anything like this series go so far and be so thoroughly detailed in its study of the Ghibli canon, arguably one of the greatest sets of studio films in the history of film.  Nothing I have since watched or read comes even close to it.  These videos left an incredible impression on me at a time when I was still in the early stages of developing my sense as a film critic, and these videos were as big as anything by MovieBob, Lindsay Ellis, or Roger Ebert in shaping my approach to film. 

            Because of this, I will always feel a certain sadness when I think of the fact that these videos are no longer available, even though Jacob is completely within the right with his decision.  I hope that is not presumptuous or arrogant or dismissive of me to say that.  It is certainly not meant so.  If anything this is meant as an appreciative farewell to what I consider one of the first great lost works of the Internet Age, one that never had the chance to receive its proper due. 

            Thank you so much, Jacob, for what you did before and for what you do now.  You are a shining light in world in desperate need of them, and I am so grateful the world has you. 

-Noah Franc

Wasting Time: Scarlett Johansson, Nanette, and Representation in Media

            It is the first and greatest Law of the Celebrity Jungle; every big star, no matter how universally regarded, will have at least one utter bomb attached to their name.  One terrible, self-afflicted wound that can be neither excused nor forgotten, merely endured (think George Clooney’s brief tenure as Batman).  For Scarlett Johansson, one of the most beloved actresses in the business today, that moment should have come and gone with the whitewashing misfire that was Rupert Sanders’ 2017 live-action remake of Ghost In The Shell.  Usually, an error that grave only needs to happen once for a person to learn a hard-won lesson and never do it again.  Rarely is anyone dense enough to return to the poisoned well for seconds. 

            Yet somehow, here we are.  For the briefest of moments, Scarlett Johansson did just that, announcing last month that she would once again partner with Sanders, (so, BIG flag right away) except this time, instead of pilfering the pantheon of Japanese classics, it would be for a biopic of a real-world trans-person, Dante “Tex” Gill.  To be fair, as I was in the process of writing this piece, Johansson did come to her senses and withdraw from the project, but not before experiencing seriously sharp backlash from all corners of the internet. 

            This was very much not helped by Johansson being stupendously callous in her initial response to the outrage, using a rep to send out a nonsense defense of her accepting the role in the vein of, “But the other kids do it too!”  Yes, she took it back fairly quickly, but the fact that she allowed this to happen at all is still troubling.  Like Meryl Streep pulling the tired “We’re ALL Africans!” card to duck around answering why her 2016 Berlin Film Festival jury was all-white, it is another saddening example of how those who’ve benefited from our current cultural power structure cannot, in most cases, be relied on to do things that could affect actual change within said power structure, like, say, agreeing to turn down a handful of the hundreds of roles one is offered in a given year in favor of more disenfranchised artists without being caddy about it.  

            As it happens, this shitshow was hitting the fans right around the time Nanette was released on Netflix, the one-woman show by Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby.  Nanette is a brilliant, cutting, furious deconstruction of the current nature of stand-up, especially how much it demands from disenfranchised people- in Gadsby’s case, from queer women- in order to be “successful,” “accepted,” or “normalized.”  More often than not, breaking out into any boys club or position of power or prominence (like, say, headlining major Hollywood tentpole films) is ultimately not possible for women or minorities of any stripe without, at some level, subjecting oneself to ritual self-humiliation, to making light of the hurts of being on the bottom.  Gadsby focuses on comedy in her special, yes, but the parallels to everything in our world are so obvious she knows she doesn’t have to waste time drawing attention to them. 

            That would have been enough to make her special required viewing, but somehow she was able to take it even further.  She remains gut-punchingly funny even as she is denigrating comedy as an agent of healing, but is able to break down in painfully clear ways how this process of self-humiliation, no matter what end is intended, can only further hurt and hinder its subject as both a person and an artist; it allows the cordoning off of the ills of oppression and fails to encourage active confrontation of the ugly sides of human existence. 

            In one of her special’s most powerful moments- which is saying something, because it is PACKED with them- she openly admits that she is directly challenging those on top of the food chain, specifically white, straight, cisgender men.  She refuses to lessen the tension in the room, thereby breaking what she admits is usually the bargain a comedian makes with their audience; I explain something painful and uncomfortable, something that you may well be directly involved in, but before you squirm too much, I bring in the punchline, end the story, and you can all feel better again. 

            In the end, she concludes, we can only make things better by all hitching up our socks, facing the uncomfortable, and being honest about it.  And a big part of that involves representation, about opening up our notions of what “normal” and “acceptable” and “typical” are. And it is exactly this nature of the problems we face that Johansson’s self-created controversy touches on, and why I couldn’t help but repeatedly come back to it in my mind while watching Nanette.  The base need for any studio is to make at least some money with a given film.  Star power remains a big draw in terms of getting butts in seats to see your movie, whatever it’s about.  And there is a fairly limited and set list of who the “big stars” in the movie world are who are guaranteed draws, nearly all of which are white and/or straight, and ALL of which are cisgender, full stop.  So of COURSE, even if your movie is about a trans-person, fictional or no, your first instinct as a studio and a director is to get the biggest, most well-known name you can to fill the role.  And so disenfranchisement and a lack of proper representation and influence within a given industry or medium is perpetuated and entrenched, ad nauseum, over years and decades and even generations.  It is the worst of capitalism meeting the worst (read; all) of systemic discrimination. 

            It almost feels like the most Sisyphean of tasks to try and change all this.  It feels overwhelming.  It IS overwhelming.  And exhausting.  So when Gadsby “comes out” to announce that she identifies as Tired, she speaks for so many people around the world who are tired of the same Johansson-esque stumbles happening in a never-ending cycle, requiring the same points and same arguments to be made, and the same ground being gained and then re-gained time and time and time again.  It’s enough to make any sane person want to go for a nap and never get up again. 

            But we can’t.  We can’t afford to.  Jokes aside, Gadsby will not stop fighting, because she knows in every fiber of her being what the cost is of giving up, and she knows that it is a price far too high to pay.  And if she won’t give up, what right do we have to?  It is tiresome to have to do what should be the wholly unnecessary work of reaching the Scarlett Johanssons of the world and getting them to change their ways, but it must be done, because that is the only way we can ever affect real change in our world.  Anything else is just a waste of time, and God help the person who wastes the time of someone like Hannah Gadsby. 

-Noah Franc

Nippon Review: Sandome No Satsujin (The Third Murder)

The Third Murder (2017): Written and directed by Hirokazu Koreeda.  Starring: Masaharu Fukuyama, Koji Yakusho, Suzu Hirose, Isao Hashizume, and Mikako Ichikawa.  Running Time: 124 minutes. 

Rating: 3/4

            Hirokazu Koreeda has an established reputation of using his films to examine complicated and troubled father/son relationships, most notably (and most explicitly) in his 2013 masterpiece, Like Father, Like Son.  Although the relationship of the main character to his second to the film’s main plot, The Third Murder very much follows this trend, where the inheritance of the past is a shadow over the present that one can never fully abandon, however much one might wish to. 

            Shigemori is a lawyer proud of his cold practicality in approaching his professional life.  He insists, repeatedly, that his own thoughts and views on a case don’t matter.  All that counts is that there is a truth about each case, and this can be presented or manipulated as needed to convince a jury of the desired outcome; all else is of lesser importance.  This worldview, an inheritance of his distant and often dismissive father (who had previously worked as a judge), runs straight into a brick wall when he is handed responsibility for the murder trial of Misumi, whose constant altering of his story befuddles him and his partner, forcing them to constantly shift their strategy on the fly. 

            Shigemori digs and digs, even traveling to the man’s hometown and paying visits to the wife and daughter of his alleged murder victim, but everything he “learns” (or rather, is told) only muddies the waters further.  A series of twists regarding the man’s past and his possible (but never confirmed) connection to the victim’s daughter forces Shigemori to confront the boundaries of what he thought was real, and what he assumed the nature of good and evil to be. 

            This is the sort of character procedural that especially depends on its acting, and the cast of this film delivers.  Masaharu Fukuyama mirrors much of the emotional distance he used to such great effect in Like Father, Like Son, and his opposite in Koji Yakusho as the alleged murderer is fascinating to watch as someone who keeps contradicting what he said before, but somehow still manages to sound firmly convincing each time he says something entirely different.   

           

            The film is also heavily marked by starkly Christian imagery.  Characters refer to themselves or others as “vessels” for either good or evil, and question the nature of free will and how morality in a person can be judged, subjects that are especially central to Christian theology.  Crosses appear in one form or another throughout the film as well, ranging from a traffic intersection to the leftover outline from where the murdered man was burned.  Thought it may not have quite the deep power of his last movie, but Koreeda’s latest nonetheless an excellent work that leaves much room for thought and debate by the end. 

-Noah Franc

Nippon Review: Of Love and Law

Of Love and Law (2017): Directed by Hikaru Toda.  Running Time: 94 minutes. 

Rating: 4/4

            These are trying times for humanity.  Faced with societal regression and environmental catastrophe, it is all too easy for those with heart and compassion to fall into despair at the state of things.  This makes examples like Kazu and Fumi all the more necessary for those of us facing this quandary, so that we don't forget that we who yearn for a better tomorrow are not few, but legion. 

            A gay couple who also happen to be lawyers, these two have dedicated their professional lives to combating discrimination against minorities and disenfranchised groups of all stripes.  This film by the remarkable Hiraku Toda uses a selection of cases the pair are engaged with as a window into their lives and worldviews, on what sorts of successes they are able to celebrate and the failures they have no choice but to endure. 

            The sampling of issues they are involved in include, but are by no means limited to, juveniles charged with crimes, a provocative female artist being suied over her "dangerous" vagina art, ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, and the cases of "unregistered" Japanese.  That last one refers to a small but not-insignificant number of people who, due to a very specific bureaucratic loophole regarding marriage law, the Japanese government literally can't recognize as people. 

            A film just focusing on the biographies and personalities of these two individuals would no doubt have been fascinating and moving enough, but the movie is smart enough to go the extra mile, looking beyond them to create a cross-section representation of disenfranchisement that leads the viewer to consider how both written law and broader culture in Japan (and, by extension, everywhere else) restricts and punishes those who, in any number of ways, stick in of the crowd. 

            As it goes on, you realize the film is less about putting these two on a saintly pedestial than about holding up their silent courage in the face of all the obstacles they have to endure.  For all their love and tenderness, they bear plenty of emotional scars from the myriad setbacks and tragedies they've experienced, and in the movie's most heart-wrenching moments it looks this squarely in the eye and doesn't blink. 

            It is eminently heartening and always necessary to be reminded of all those, everywhere in the world, fighting the good fight and refusing to cow to the darkness.  Few films strike me like this one did.  This is the definition of an essential, must-see work of cinema. 

-Noah Franc

Nippon Review: Oyogisugita Yoru (The Night I Swam)

The Night I Swam (2017): Written and directed by Damien Manivel and Kohei Igarashi.  Starring: Takara Kogawa.  Running Time: 78 minutes. 

Rating: 3/4

            This is one of those particularly challenging films that demands full and undivided attention for the viewer to make any sense of it; anything less and you’ll be bored to tears.  I can’t help but feel that this movie’s premise would have been better served by being a short film, but it is nonetheless a brave effort, and I applaud its vision.  

            Told with no dialogue at all, and very nearly zero music, the movie opens with a shot of a man sitting in his darkened kitchen before heading out for work in the pre-sunrise darkness of an early winter morning.  A thick, fresh snow covers the entire town, suffusing every shot of the film with blankets of pure white.  The child wakes up a bit later, prepares for school, then heads out for the day, armed with lunch, warm clothes, a camera, and a crayon drawing of his pa.  After school- or maybe during school, it’s never particularly clear what time it is- he seems to be struck by a thought, gets up, and sets out through the snow. 

            The images and scenes that follow, of a boy wandering through the snowscape wanting to see his father, make for a strange and contemplative experience, one most viewers may very well find off-putting.  It takes a bit to piece together why, exactly, this boy suddenly wants or needs to see his father, but it is a touching moment indeed when the answer is finally hinted at.  We can guess at a life where the father is out working at all possible hours, and therefore he and his son barely ever see each other awake.  Children notice these things, even when we think they don’t, and perhaps the boy finally thought, “Enough is enough.  I want my Dad.” 

            What to make of this film, silent, sparse, depicted wholly from the perspective of a somewhat-lost child?  It’s not an easy one to parse out, but maybe that’s the point.  To be a child is to be surrounded by big things, most of which you can’t really grasp.  It is to lose track of time as a matter of course, to have it stretch and bend like a rubber band, to have moments where it seems as if the world is at a perfect standstill.  Such memories of what that feels like fade as we inevitably age, so it’s perhaps good to have films like this to remind us of what we once were. 

-Noah Franc

Nippon Reviews: Yoru Wa Mijikashi Arukeyo Otome (The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl)

The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017): Written by Makoto Ueda, directed by Masaaki Yuasa.  Starring: Gen Hoshino, Kana Hanazawa, Hiroshi Kamiya, Ryuji Akiyama, and Mugihito.  Running Time: 93 minutes.  Based on a novel of the same name by Tomihiko Morimi. 

Rating: 3.5/4

            If Yuasa's other recent release, Lu Over The Wall, went a bit too wild for its own good, The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is the opposite end of the spectrum, where Yuasa manages a perfect balance of his wild instincts and creates a sublime and wholly satisfying experience.  It is zany, packed to the gills, and an absolute visual feast, but also manages to create space for rather profound reflections on the nature of time, innocence and growing up, and the connectedness of all things.  All that, and it's also funny as hell.  

            Our protagonist, known to us only as The Girl with Black Hair, is a blissfully innocent young woman on the cusp of adulthood, and determined to celebrate with a night out on the town, drinking, partying, dancing, and enjoying the company of a massive cast of colorful, memorable characters.  Throughout it all, she is pursued by a shy young man (The Student), sure of his love for her, but utterly at a loss as to how to get her attention other than to manufacture scenarios where they bump into each other "by coincidence," or as he calls it, "Operation Run Into Her Often." 

            We start at a wedding, where both of them are in attendance, and then wander throughout the entire town.  We are treated to settings that include a series of bars, a drinking ship on the river, a book fair, and a student festival, and meet a remarkable variety of people, all in various stages of despair or cynicism of one form or another; despairing groups of student bachelors, despairing old businessmen, despairing perverted collectors of erotic woodprints, the cold and calculating head of an NSA-esque Student Affairs spy network, a selfish and greedy hoarder of rare used books, and, my personal favorite, a veritable army of actors and directors calling themselves the "Guerilla Theater," determined to put on their show all over campus even though Student Affairs keeps chasing them down and arresting their cast and crew members. 

            This wild run-around that supposedly takes up only a single night of this strange city, but this magical night of wonder feels like it stretches out for years on end, a fact commented on by several of the characters, many of whom pine for a "happy ending" to everything.  A dozen different plot points and characters arcs are all tied together in one way or another, and the fact that this film doesn't fly apart at the seams like Lu Over The Wall did is something of a miracle. 

            This elastic nature of time is a repeated theme of the film, with both its visuals and the bizarro rules of physics that govern this world emphasizing the very objective nature of time and its passing.  In one scene, several characters compare watches; that of the girl, the youngest in the group, moves at a snail's pace and her somewhat older drinking buddy's has a more regular tempo, while those of the elderly businessmen spin forward at breakneck speed.  Time, so fickle and so strange, always feels slower for those with more life and so quickly dissipated for those with less. 

            The Student ends up not being the focus of most of the movie, which is for the better, since the real star are the antics surrounding The Girl.  The concept of her character does run the risk of being a bit of a blank slate, or a rather bland Jesus-esque figure (much of the third act involves her administering to the sick throughout town, their ailments practically healed by her touch), or perhaps simply being too innocently naive for her own good.  However, I found this to be the right fit alongside the more pessimistic nature of the world around her.  She literally brightens places up when she appears, and has an instinctive sense of when someone needs help.  This may be a subtle commentary on the film's part that people of all stripes, when they are down, could use a brief return to the boundless optimism of youth to regain their footing in a strange world. 

            The film's sense of humor and anything-goes attitude makes the film a riot, especially an extended sequence where the conflict between the Guerilla Theater and the Student Affairs committee reaches its climax, one of the most consistently funny bits I've seen in a movie this year.  There is also a particular running gag that suggests Yuasa has it in for Sophism, a sentiment for which I have nothing but the deepest sympathy. 

            I was particularly tickled that the movie even manages to find time for a subplot surrounding a hoarder ruining a book fair (complete with the presence of a God of Used Books) that is, effectively, a love letter to the printed word and to the power of books and stories to carry memories and experience through time and connect all those who hold a book over the course of its existence.  It's almost as if this movie was determined to target every one of my particular sweet spots to get to love it. 

            Not that that was ever necessary, because I would have loved this movie even without my Inner Reader being pandered to.  This is a remarkable, adventurous, out-there movie that takes full advantages of the inherent advantages of animation and lets the mind and imagination expand to previously unexplored places of magic and wonder.  This is one of the best films I've yet seen this year.

-Noah Franc

Nippon Review: Boku No Kaeru Basho (Passage of Life)

Passage of Life (2017): Written and directed by Akio Fujimoto.  Starring: Kaung Myat Thu, Khin Myat Thu, Issace, Htet Myat Naing, and Yuki Kitagawa.  Running Time: 98 minutes. 

Rating: 4/4

            As justified as much of the attention has been in recent years on the plight of refugees in, entering, or trying/hoping to enter Europe, it has often overshadowed or crowded out attention to other, equally important refugee and migrant situations in other parts of the world.  A prime example of this is those fleeing the military government of Burma, especially members of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.  Although the characters of this particular story are Buddhist and not Rohingya, Passage of Life is nonetheless essential in how it uses the experience of a Burmese family struggling to build a new life in Japan to remind us that the suffering of the lost and destitute is a truly global crisis of the human heart. 

            The film starts off being about the parents, and their struggles to come to grips with their precarious legal status in Japan, which, despite their longtime residence and their kids’ presence in the school system, could be uprooted at any time.  By the end, it shifts focus to being a story about the children and how, in certain ways, they suffer even more deeply than the parents do, despite the fact that they are too young to fully understand what is happening around them.  They only know that something is wrong- they sense it, instinctively- and they are troubled by this.  They carry most of the family’s pathos in their very bearing, containing both the hope of a better tomorrow and the desperate worry that only the same old struggle awaits them. 

            The film utilizes simple, stark, camerawork that gives the story a quasi-documentary feel.  Indeed, the story is told with such minimalistic nuance, and the interactions between the family members (some of whom are actually related to each other) are so effortlessly natural, that I had to repeatedly remind myself that this was NOT, in fact, real found footage.  The primary question that occupies the mind of the parents is if it is worth them staying together in Japan.  The mother misses her country terribly and never seems at ease when not with her relatives.  The father doesn’t even consider this a possibility.  Eventually, either the unstoppable force or the immovable object must yield, and they do decide to part.  Whether or not they ever will, can, or even want to find their way back together is left open by the end.  One of the best shots in the movie is of the father, at the moment where the full weight of his plight comes down on his shoulders; he tries to keep the brave face he’s managed to hold all these years, and, finally, finds that he can’t. 

            That sounds like it should be the film’s climax, but it’s not even at the halfway part.  It is when we are in Burma that the film moves its focus to the children, as their confusion and anger over the loss of the only home they remember starts to eat at them. 

            How is it that we continuously find ways to inflict this pain on children?  We are born innocent and without bias or prejudice, but the world inevitably hammers it into us until it sets, and we are hardened.  With each new generation, we glimpse a vision of this chain being broken, but it has still never happened.  And the worst part is that none of the pain or separation the family feels is in any way justified or necessary.  It never needed to happen. 

            Above all else, the movie struggles with the question of what home really is.  Can a “home” be movable?  Flexible?  Should it be flexible?  Its real power, in the end, comes from understanding that even when a home or concept of it has been chosen, by choosing and, in part, closing off others there are still painful compromises and sacrifices that this ultimately requires, and it never is, never will be, easy. 

            This is masterfully encapsulated in the movie’s final scene, a wrenching moment, the audio of which continues to play for some time over the scrolling of the end credits.  Debut films don’t get much better than this.  Akio Fujimoto has given the world one of the year’s best, and most essential films, in a time where the cries of humanity need to be heard more than ever. 

-Noah Franc