1. Last week I watched Juzo Itami's brilliant movie, Tampopo, and today I watched his first feature film, released in 1984, The Funeral.
I am ecstatic that I have discovered the director Juzo Itami and his wife, Nobuko Miyamoto, a brilliant actor who plays a leading role in both movies. Several years ago, I devoted a lot of time to watching movies made in the Middle East. Several of them featured Hiam Abbass, a fierce and deeply moving actor. She also plays in US made productions. She moved me as the mother of her detained Syrian son in Tom McCarthy's superb movie, The Visitor, and I loved her in every international movie I saw her in.
Nobuko Miyamoto brought Hiam Abbass to mind as I watched her play two very different roles in Tampopo and The Funeral. Their acting styles are very different and the two movies I just watched Miyamoto play in are very different from the movies I've loved Hiam Abbass in.
But both actors inhabit the characters they play with complete freedom, with intelligence and passion, with great dignity. Having only seen Nobuko Miyamoto in two movies and having seen clips from her performance in A Taxing Woman (which I will watch in its entirety asap), it's clear to me that she has great range. At times, Itami's movies require her to play light and comic moments and Itami's complex movies demand her, at other times, to portray dignity, deep strength, grief, and determination.
Juzo Itami's movies move smoothly between comedy, satire, absurdity, and seriousness. This blending of so many facets of human experience within each of movies excites me and has made for some unusual, absorbing, provocative, and most enjoyable movie watching.
2. Upon finishing watching this matinee performance of The Funeral, I wanted to watch more Japanese story telling.
I suddenly remembered that I had never watched all the episodes of the wondrous show Midnight Diner.
I figured out that I had still had four episodes of Season 3 left to watch. Until this evening, I limited myself to one 25 minute episode per viewing session.
I love this series so much that I didn't want it to end, so I just kept watching one episode every once in a while, knowing that I'd have more to see when I got around to it again.
My approach is the opposite of binge watching.
Well, this evening I was hungry for a larger helping of Midnight Diner and I watched the last four episodes of Season 3 and I loved them.
I enjoy their brevity.
They are like having haikus come to life on my television screen.
Like haikus, these short stories about characters who patronize this tiny Tokyo diner (it's open from 12 midnight until 7 a.m.) are structured around contrasts. Like haikus, they often build toward a surprise of some kind. The diner's proprietor and chief cook, who goes by Master, is the anchor of each story and his calm demeanor, carefully chosen words, superb meals, and almost casual wisdom give each story a deep sense of the humaneness of his wonderful regulars and other diners whose lives are ordinary on the surface, but extraordinary as these episodes tell their different stories.
Midnight Diner is available on Netflix.
3. Watching Midnight Diner excites my imagination when it comes to food. Each episode opens with Master combining ingredients to make a miso soup. Each episode itself focuses on on particular Japanese dish. I am not well equipped at all to cook Japanese cuisine -- oh, I have rice on hand and a container of miso paste in the icebox, and sometimes I'll buy a bottle of teriyaki sauce, but the store bought sauce is heavy and too sweet. It lacks subtlety, but it's all I've got most times and I made due ("Love the one you're with"!)
So, tonight, I cooked a pot of rice, steamed some broccoli and carrots, combined the vegetables and rice in a bowl with teriyaki sauce and pretended like I was eating Japanese cuisine. It was a far cry from the Japanese dishes I love to order in Japanese restaurants, but I kept a positive attitude, accepted that Japanese meals are unavailable in Kellogg, and enjoyed my veggie rice bowl all the same.
I did the best I could with what I had.
(Today's viewing and modest dinner brought to mind the Asian grocery store, Hung Phat, I used to shop at in Wheaton, MD. I loved popping in there. I also enjoyed the restaurant adjacent to the store called Thai Taste by Kob and enjoyed some splendid lunches there.)
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