An occasional feature whereby we make it through slow-paced movies by deftly employing the FF button.
PERFECT DAYS (C+) - Wim Wenders ("Wings of Desire") takes a great idea and turns it into a Boomer wank, as he celebrates a simple Everyman who cleans public toilets in Tokyo while savoring the beauty of the every day. It's about as sappy as movies come these days.
Koji Yakusho is perfectly charming as Hirayama, a middle-aged regular Joe who refuses to let his lowly job define him. Rather, he studies photography, embraces nature, and reads highbrow books before nodding off to sleep each night on a simple mat in a humble home. He always has an amused look on his face, and he is a man of few words. Ah, let us celebrate the noble working man! (One who never gets his uniform dirty and who absent-mindedly scrubs away at porcelain that's already in cinematic ship-shape, as if the Japanese don't leave a mark on their public potties.)
Of course, Wenders imbues Hirayama with the exact musical taste you would expect Wenders to have. He pops a cassette (old school, but of course) into his car stereo on his daily commute and blares one overplayed classic pop song after another. (The world just never needs to hear "Brown-Eyed Girl" in a movie ever again. And "(Sittin' on) the Dock of the Bay" is a close second.) And wouldn't you know it, young people -- especially young women -- go gaga over his taste in music and analog ways. One even crushes on him and gives him a peck on the cheek. Happens to us geezers all the time!
The plot, you ask? There really isn't one, and that's supposed to be the cloying point, I suppose. Hirayama's younger colleague Takashi (Tokio Emoto) makes a play for one of the women, a stereotypical manic-pixie dream girl, but the two men often toil in silence -- convenient for fast-forwarding through the toilet-scrubbing and the leaf-gazing. Hirayama's niece Niko (Arisa Nakano) comes to visit, and of course she is completely smitten with his zen bachelor-pad aesthetic -- not to mention his taste in literature, because what teen wouldn't want to live like a 60-year-old man.
If Hirayama were believable as a real working slug instead of an idealized slumming intellectual, this might have more than Hallmark appeal. But with so little action, the weaknesses and wish-fulfillment are glaring.
BONUS TRACK
ONLY IN THEATERS (C) - It's hard to describe how misleading and annoying this documentary -- about Los Angeles' elite art-house cinema chain, curated for decades by the Laemmle family -- is. You settle into your seat and hope to celebrate the dying communal experience of watching quality films in a quaint theater, only to be stuck with a dreary, drawn-out hagiography of the clan that has exhibited movies for nearly as long as Hollywood has been making them.
No one has an unkind word for four generations of Laemmles, and the filmmakers hang their narrative on friendly Greg Laemmle, the middle-aged grandson of the founder, who finds himself seriously considering unloading the chain when we meet him in the late 2010s. We hear praise from a wide range of eminent talking heads -- Ava Duvernay, Cameron Crowe, James Ivory, Nicole Holofcener and even old Leonard Maltin. The filmmakers are grateful for this type of theater chain that reached its heights during the '90s heyday of boutique indies.
But things here bog down about halfway through when Covid hits. Director Raphael Sbarge thinks he's got grand drama on his hands, but instead his documentary drops like a lead balloon. There is little narrative spark to be derived from rehashing the pandemic's closures and panic. (A nice touch is a running visual accounting of the clever marquee movie references the shuttered theaters feature during the shutdown.) Greg Laemmle and his fawning wife move to Seattle, and it's just hard to care how this all turns out. (You'll likely be as disappointed as Sbarge probably was at the outcome.) For some reason, Greg's kids, who have nothing interesting to offer, get a lot of face time, including during bland family gatherings.
Meantime, interview after interview waxes poetic over how precious these theaters are and how crucial it is that we watch prestige films in these hallowed group settings. No one finds an original or interesting way to articulate that. And when the narrative here stalls, you'll be grateful that you are watching this on home video so that you can fast-forward through this indulgent family album.
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