“Aggretsuko”: Netflix’s Brilliant Anime Series

Retsuko and Aggretsuko

This post contains plot spoilers

Netflix has aired a number of excellent Japanese TV series, including “Sparks,” “Midnight Diner” and “Terrace House,” but the animated series “Aggretsuko” surpasses all of them in its writing, acting and insight. A show about anthropomorphic characters developed by Sanrio, the inventor of “Hello Kitty”, sounds like a gimmick; instead, “Aggretsuko” is very funny, occasionally sad, and always compelling. And its depiction of Japan’s corporate hamster wheel and the plight of office workers, especially women, is profound.

Retsuko, an adorable red panda, is a junior accountant for a big corporation, which means she not only gets extra work at the end of the day but is expected to fetch tea and tidy the office of her boss, Director Ton. An obnoxious pig (literally) who spends his days practicing his golf swing and complaining about how overworked he is, Ton insults Retsuko, screams for tea and labels her a “short-timer,” destined for a career-ending exit. Retsuko maintains a docile and cheerful exterior, but inside she roils with resentment. Her anger finds an outlet in karaoke, in which she becomes Aggretsuko, a death metal head who adapts her favorite song, “Rage” to fit the day’s indignities. In a private booth, she howls:

Neanderthal knuckle-dragging chauvinist pig/ Looking at your face just makes me sick/ How can any person be such a dick?!/ Shitty Boss!

It’s not only Director Ton who earns Retsuko’s wrath. In Season 2, Retsuko’s overbearing mother mounts a maddening campaign to get Retsuko to grow up and find a suitable mate. After sending Retsuko an absurdly childish pink, bow-covered dress—“It’s practically cosplay”, remarks one of her co-workers—her mother tricks her into trying it on for a photo, ostensibly for her grandparents but in reality for a matchmaker. This leads Retsuko to reject the attractive, likable man she meets, not only because she doesn’t want to be fixed up but because marriage, usually a zero sum game in Japan, is too daunting. At this point I realized that Retsuko is more complex than most human characters in movies, plays and TV, and not only because of her karaoke alter ego. Under her cute red panda exterior, Retsuko is deeply stubborn, confused about her desires and unwilling to admit fault. 

But she’s also capable of change, and by Season 3 Retsuko is living on her own terms. No longer bottled up and insecure, she has broken up with a fabulously wealthy slacker/tech entrepreneur because he didn’t want marriage and wanted her to quit her job. Happy at work, she achieves success both as an accountant and, through a series of twists, as a death metal “idol” in a girl band. Her friends and co-workers grow too, and even Director Ton proves to be more than he seemed: an accounting whiz (though he still uses an abacus) and a source of insightful advice for Retsuko.

Three seasons weren’t enough for me, but Japanese programs are designed to end before they get old. A bonus for Japanese speakers is the treasure trove of contemporary language. For those who don’t speak Japanese, the dialog is brilliantly subtitled by John Haguewood. Kudos to Rarecho, who not only wrote and directed every episode but supplied Retsuko’s death metal voice. And Kaolip, who happens to be Rarecho’s wife, is pitch perfect as Retsuko. Forget the dubbed version; even if you don’t know a word of Japanese, the voices speak volumes.

The Return of Netflix’s “Midnight Diner”: Food, Memory and Geography

Kaoru Kobayashi in “Midnight Diner”

This post contains plot spoilers

Readers of this blog might recall my previous piece about “Midnight Diner,” Netflix Japan’s show about a tiny backstreet eatery, its mysterious chef/proprietor and the colorful night owls who make up its clientele. https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2017/02/03/midnight-diner-and-sparks-two-compelling-netflix-shows-from-japan/ Over the past three years, the series has found a devoted fanbase of not only cooks and Japanophiles, but afficionados of the moving and universal tales of love, loss and missed connections, bound by the dish highlighted in each episode. the latest installments of “Midnight Diner” are labeled Seasons 1-3, it’s the same show as before, plus or minus some characters. The earlier two seasons, called “Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories”, are still on Netflix and provide a good introduction to the major characters. This time around, the proprietor, “Master” (Kaoru Kobayashi) offers his customers less advice but sticks to his old policy: a single unchanging menu item (pork noodle soup), plus whatever he is asked to make from ingredients at hand or ones that his customers bring him. As in earlier seasons, these dishes, like Proust’s madeleine, evoke the lost world of the characters’ past. They also provide tantilizing clues to the geographic origins of the customers who order them.

In Episode 5, a portly restaurant critic and food snob orders butter rice, a dish that immediately identifies him as a native of Hokkaido, Japan’s dairy belt. As it happens, the diner has another affixiando of this unusual (and, to most Japanese, off-putting) dish: an impoverished busking guitarist who sings of his lost love in Hakodate, Hokkaido’s second-largest city. Improbably, the two men are acquainted: the busker was the high school boyfriend of the restaurant critic’s sister, and the critic sets out to reunite the long lost lovers.

Another geographic clue pops up in Episode 8, with the appearance of Rinko (played by You, baby-voiced, one-named actress best known for her role in Kore-eda’s “Nobody Knows”) a former teen idol who always orders her favorite childhood dish: yakisoba (fried noodles) topped with a fried egg. When a homeless man returns Master’s lost wallet and refuses a reward, Master offers him a free meal instead. The man sees Rinko interviewed on the diner’s TV. When Master tells him she’s a regular who always orders yakisoba with egg, the man tells him to sprinkle green nori from the Shimanto River on it. “You won’t believe it’s the same dish,” he says. Master obliges and buys the nori, then adds it to Rinko’s yakisoba the next time she comes in. At that point, the mystery unravels: the homeless man is Rinko’s long-lost father, who abandoned her as a child. But before he left, he was a devoted father who cooked his daughter’s favorite dish, always making sure to sprinkle Shimanto nori on top.

Although there’s no happy reunion between Rinko and her father, Master is able to convey the homeless man’s love for his daughter through a regional food. Intrigued, I did some research on the green nori that elevated Rinko’s yakisoba. Although I grew up in Tokyo, I had never heard of the Shimanto River, which is located in southern Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s main islands. Nor did I know that nori, usually translated as seaweed, is also found in fresh water. I was fascinated to learn that the Shimanto is not only Shikoku’s largest river but the last pristine river in Japan. Unspoilt by channels or dams, it is famous both for its natural beauty and its 22 footbridges that, lacking sides, allow flood waters to pass over them.

Regional details such these illustrate Tokyo’s role as Japan’s great melting pot, a megacity of dreamers and strivers who sometimes succeed and sometimes fail. As several of the new episodes illustrate, both the successes and failures of “Midnight Diner” find themselves unable or unwilling to return to their hometowns and families. Adrift in the nighttime world of Shinjuku’s entertainment district, they are pulled back in time through food: the childhood dishes that Master, a fine cook in a humble establishment, recreates for them.

related post: https://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/lost-in-translation-american-movie-critics-on-japanese-films/

Next time: Mizushobai: The Origins of Tokyo’s Vibrant Nightlife

Revisiting Peg Entwistle’s Life and Death: Myth vs. Reality in Netflix’s “Hollywood”

Peg Entwistle in 1932/Courtesy Bruce Torrence

Filming “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk

Jeremy Pope, Darren Criss and Laura Harrier in “Hollywood”

Soon after Netflix released the new Ryan Murphy-Ian Brennan miniseries “Hollywood,” I heard from Chris Yogerst, a University of Wisconsin film professor who has corresponded with me off and on since 2010, that Peg Entwistle’s story was a major theme. Naturally, I got right on it.

Since releasing my short film “Peg Entwistle’s Last Walk,” my documentary “Under the Hollywood Sign” in 2009 and my book of essays (Peg Entwistle and The Hollywood Sign) in 2013, a number of Peg-related projects have been announced, such as this one ://underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com/2014/10/05/the-newly-announced-peg-entwistle-biopic/ , but “Hollywood” is the first major one to be completed. It’s also the most imaginative, using Peg’s story not as a grim cautionary tale but the departure point for a wildly revisionist Hollywood history.

At the outset of “Hollywood,” a script about Peg is greenlit by the Paramount-like Ace Studios. The screenwriter, Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope) is predictably male but also black, and his struggle to make it in Hollywood gives him empathy for Peg’s tragic story. Fortunately for Archie, his champions at Ace Studios are self-professed outsiders: the director Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss), though passing for white, is half-Filipino, and the acting head of production Avis Amberg (Patti Lupone) is a former silent film star whose acting career was cut short by her apparent Jewishness.

Though the Peg Entwistle project begins as a straightforward biopic featuring a blonde, white starlet, Avis agrees to cast Claire Wood (Samira Weaving), a Dorothy Dandridge-like actress whose screen test blows away the competition, in the lead. Thus Peg becomes Meg, and the film changes from a tragedy to a triumph of interracial romance and career redemption. If that weren’t enough, a major subplot involves Archie’s romance with the young Rock Hudson, and the couple soon smash racial and sexual barriers by walking the red carpet hand-in-hand at the Oscars. When Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec) becomes the first Asian to win an Academy Award, every studio-era wrong is righted, and it’s only 1948.

In short,”Hollywood” is a fantasia of racial and sexual justice. Though it’s based in fact–Rock Hudson, his manager Henry Willson (Jim Parsons) and the gas station/prostitution ring all existed–the series becomes increasingly fantastical as it careens toward a universal happy ending. This revisionism actually works for Peg Entwistle’s story, which–stripped of her Depression Era suicide–becomes a tale of  movie stardom and true love.

Unfortunately, Ryan and Brennan can’t let go of the biggest myth about Peg: that the Hollywood Sign symbolized Hollywood The Industry. In fact, it didn’t even symbolize Hollywood The Place. As I’ve said many times, the Hollywoodland Sign (which is how it appeared even when “Hollywood,” is set) was a billboard for the neighborhood where it stood. What it symbolized was real estate, nothing more. If Peg Entwistle hadn’t been living in Beachwood Canyon in 1932, she would have chosen another spot from which to jump–or might not have jumped at all.

As for Peg’s drinking beforehand, it didn’t happen, not only because there were no legal alcohol or bars during the Depression but because no inebriate could have climbed Mt. Lee, let alone the ladder to the top of the H. In “Meg” this fiction does, however, give Rock Hudson something to do: in the role of bartender, he not only serves Meg a drink but tells her how to get to the Sign. The directions, it should be noted, are accurate.

For Peg Entwistle’s actual story, as well as photos and artifacts, here are links to my film, documentaries and book:

DVDs

eBooks

“The Other Side of the Wind”: Orson Welles’s Last Film, Seen on a Big Screen

“The Other Side of the Wind” at Netflix/Hope Anderson Productions

Recently I was invited to see “The Other Side of the Wind,” the long-awaited final film from Orson Welles. Though it’s streaming on Netflix, I was eager to see it as Welles had intended, and where better than at Netflix’s beautiful headquarters in Hollywood?

Netflix’s pride in “The Other Side of the Wind,” was clear from the moment I set foot in the lobby, which is dominated by a giant lighted screen of its poster (as well as a wall dedicated to the season’s other prestige project, “Roma”). If someone had told me a year ago that two of the most anticipated movies of 2018 would be black-and-white art films, I wouldn’t have believed it, but it’s true.

Those who bemoan Netflix’s growing clout in movie production should try to imagine any of the old-line Hollywood studios backing a largely unedited forty-year-old experimental film shot on different film stocks in both black-and-white and color. Oh, and with faulty and at times nonexistent sound. None of them would have touched the hundred hours of raw footage with a barge pole, let alone sunk millions of dollars into fashioning it into a film. That project–which took a comparatively fast two years–is detailed in a companion documentary, “A Final Cut for Orson: 40 Years in the Making.” I found as fascinating as the movie itself, and recommend seeing it beforehand.

Editor Bob Murawski discussing the film with Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter/Hope Anderson Productions

“The Other Side of the Wind” was described by Welles as a painting with a frame around it. The painting is the film directed by the central character, Jake Hannaford (John Huston), while the frame is Hannaford’s 70th birthday party, attended by his cast, crew and a group of journalists who attempt to interview Hannaford while filming the goings-on. The cast includes many filmmakers. Some, like Claud Chabrol and Paul Mazursky, play themselves; others, like John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich, have leading roles. The film-within-a-film is silent and plotless but beautifully shot in 35mm Technicolor by Gary Graver, Welles’s DP during the 1970’s, who didn’t live to see his best work on the screen. Jake’s story  is shot in black-and-white, and the juxtaposition makes “The Other Side of the Wind” seem as if it’s set in different eras. While Jake’s project is an Antonioni-like art film, Jake’s party is vintage Welles: conversations about mortality and sexuality, crowded rooms, shots fired, and–at the end–a death.

Welles was fifty-five when he started filming “The Other Side of the Wind,” but it’s a young man’s movie: messy, brash and uneven. For every gorgeous moment there’s one that doesn’t work, but this inconsistency gives the film a certain charm. I was thrilled to see John Huston on the screen again; I’d forgotten what a great actor he was. But the film’s biggest revelation is  Welles himself,  a director so ahead of his time that he needed technology that didn’t exist to finish his film. If he were alive today, Orson Welles would find Netflix the perfect home for his imagination and ambitions.

“Midnight Diner” and “Sparks;” Two Compelling Netflix Shows from Japan

Kaoru Kobayashi in “Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories”

Kazuki Namioka and Kento Hayashi in “Sparks”

One of the bright spots of the past couple of months has been my discovery of two new Japanese series on Netflix, both excellent. Both shows are based on books: “Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories” (“Shinya Shukudou“) on a manga (graphic novel) series, and “Sparks” (“Hibana“) on a novel. Season One for both series is available on Netflix, and both will continue.

“Midnight Diner,” takes place in one of the countless small, owner-operated restaurants located on side streets throughout Tokyo. What distinguishes this one is its hours–midnight to 7am–and its owner, a handsome, stoic man known as Master (Kaoru Kobayashi). Master’s facial scar and bearing suggest a mysterious past as a sword fighter, though it is never discussed. In his current life, Master is a talented cook who runs a tight ship: only one item on the menu but endless possibilities, based on ingredients he is given or has at hand. And though diverse viewpoints are welcome in the diner, there’s no fighting allowed.

Each episode is named for a different dish, most of which evoke strong feelings of nostalgia for those who order them. In “Corn Dog,” an old, washed- up comedian continues to treat his former protégé, now a successful TV actor, as his lackey. In “Tan-Men” (a kind of ramen), an actress-turned-chauffeur meets a late night D.J., who later recognizes her as the superhero idol of his youth. “Ham Cutlet” follows a soon-to-be-retired lawyer and his long-lost stepbrother who is fighting eviction from a city-owned apartment building.

Though each episode features different people, a core group of regulars provide both color and continuity. They include bar hostesses, two men who dress as women and a group of ladies who are either insomniacs or office workers on the night shift. Though separated by gender, sexual orientation and income, all are loyal to Master, who observes the action and offers sage counsel.

There’s a beautiful melancholy to the series that is at once universal and very Japanese. Watching it, I felt as if Yasujiro Ozu, Edward Hopper and the writers of “Cheers” had gotten together to make “Midnight Diner;” it’s that good.

Less accessible but no less fascinating is “Sparks,” which follows a two sets of Manzai stand-up comedians as their careers rise and fall. Manzai, which originated during the Heian Period (8th-12th centuries) but is strongly identified with Osaka during the Meji Era, involves rapid-fire bantering between a straight man (tsukkomi) and a fool (boke).

When the series opens, the young boke protagonist, Tokunaga (Kento Hayashi), and his partner arrive in Atami, a seaside resort city, to perform at its summer festival. Though they bomb, Tokunaga strikes up a fateful friendship with Kamiya (Kazuki Namioka), the boke of an older, more skillful duo, and quickly becomes his protégé. As the series progresses, Tokunaga’s star rises while Kamiya’s falls, changing but not destroying their friendship, which (like those in “Midnight Diner”) is cemented over restaurant meals.

For Japanese speakers, “Sparks” offers a bonus: it’s a crash course in slang-laden, Kansai dialect, male Japanese. For everyone else, it’s a bromance that sheds light on an ancient but still vital Japanese comedy tradition. Although it took me a few episodes to get hooked on it, I’m looking forward to Season Two.