Movies

Nobuhiko Obayashi, an idiosyncratic Japanese filmmaker whose wide-ranging résumé included a horror movie about a house full of furniture that eats schoolgirls, a fantasy about a boy who befriends a six-inch-tall samurai and an antiwar trilogy that he completed while being treated for cancer, died on April 10 in Tokyo. He was 82.The cause was lung cancer, which was first diagnosed in 2016, The Associated Press said, citing an announcement on the website of his latest film, “Labyrinth of Cinema.”Mr. Obayashi’s startling feature debut, in 1977, was “House,” a demented horror movie that is more comic than scary. The Los Angeles Times called it “one of the most enduringly — and endearingly — weird cult movies of the last few decades.”Reviewing it in The New York Times in 2010, when it had a theatrical run at the IFC Center in Manhattan in advance of a DVD release, Manohla Dargis described the goings-on.“This might be about a haunted house,” she wrote, “but it’s the film that is more truly possessed: In one scene a piano bites off the fingers of a musician tickling its keys; in another a severed head tries to take a bite out of a girl’s rear, snapping at the derrière as if it were an apple. Later a roomful of futons goes on the attack.”Mr. Obayashi followed “House” with several other films about young people. Some had supernatural powers, as in “The Little Girl Who Conquered Time” (1983), about a time traveler. “The Rocking Horsemen” (1992) was a comedy about Japanese youngsters in the 1960s who discover the American rock group the Ventures’ recording of “Pipeline” and are inspired to form their own band.In the special-effects-filled fantasy adventure “Samurai Kids” (1993), an 8-year-old boy encounters an ancient samurai warrior who is just six inches tall, allowing Mr. Obayashi to have some fun by making a cat look gigantic and a crow loom like a jetliner.“Nobuhiko Obayashi is a real fantasist,” Donald Richie wrote in a brief review of that film in The International Herald Tribune. “Through fast cutting, witty detail and extraordinary care, he effortlessly tosses off his prodigious events and turns a kid movie into emotion-packed magic.”Late in Mr. Obayashi’s career came his antiwar trilogy, “Casting Blossoms to the Sky” (2012), “Seven Weeks” (2014) and “Hanagatami” (2017). The third of those, based on a 1937 novella by Kazuo Dan, was a film he had wanted to make 40 years earlier, at the beginning of his career.“But it was an economic boom time in Japan, driven by consumerism,” he told Asia Times in 2017. “Everyone had forgotten the war, and I realized it wasn’t the right time.”Whatever the subject, Mr. Obayashi’s films were inventive both visually and in their storytelling.“Obayashi unnerved audiences through a strange and uncanny admixture of absurdist humor, sexual innuendo, violence and melancholy,” Josh Siegel, a film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, said by email.Japan Society, when it mounted an Obayashi retrospective in New York in 2015, called him simply an “endlessly innovative, singular film artist.”Mr. Obayashi was born on Jan. 9, 1938, in Onomichi, in the prefecture whose capital in Hiroshima.He said he first became enthralled with film when, at age 3, he found a projector in his home and, thinking it was some sort of toy train, began cranking the handle. The image it was projecting began to move.“That really appealed to me,” he said through a translator in a talk at the Japan Society retrospective, “this idea of something that’s completely still starting to take on life and moving. That was really my first encounter with film.”Mr. Siegel said the atomic bombing of Hiroshima always haunted Mr. Obayashi and might have led him to the postwar collective of artists, writers, performers and filmmakers known as the Art Theatre Guild, who, Mr. Siegel said, “rebelled in politically and aesthetically extremist ways against the jingoist demands of self-sacrifice and unquestioning obedience to authority that had led to Japan’s engagement in the war.”Mr. Obayashi moved to Tokyo in the late 1950s and began experimenting with eight-millimeter films, and by the 1960s some of his work was being shown in screenings of art films. A producer from an advertising concern was at one such screening and offered Mr. Obayashi the chance to make short commercials. The result was a series of trippy ads, some featuring Western movie stars.One in particular has become the stuff of legend. Two minutes long and invoking soft-core pornography, it features Charles Bronson, who was popular in Japan after his film “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) caught on there, ripping his shirt off and dousing himself in a fragrance called Mandom.Mr. Obayashi’s wife, Kyoko, started out as an actress and had a small role in “House” but later became his producer. Their daughter, Chigumi, came up with the story that was turned into “House” (“Hausu” in Japan). Steven Spielberg also had something to do with that film, though inadvertently — Mr. Obayashi said that Toho studios, which hired him to make a feature on the strength of his popular TV commercials, had noted that Mr. Spielberg’s “Jaws” (1975) was a huge hit.“They asked, ‘Do you have a film that’s similar to sharks attacking humans?’” he told the online magazine The Notebook in 2019. “And so I consulted my daughter Chigumi, and ‘Hausu’ was born.”Mr. Obayashi made more than 40 films in all. His wife and daughter survive him.His movies were often greeted with mixed reviews. For instance, Mr. Richie was less taken with “Sada” (1998), a sendup on the life of Sada Abe, the protagonist of Nagisa Oshima’s 1976 film, “In the Realm of the Senses.”“Obayashi’s strong point is usually his insouciance,” Mr. Richie wrote in a review, “but here nonchalant unconcern becomes small-mindedness. Sada deserves a lot better.”Mr. Obayashi, though, was all about challenging viewers. In a 2014 interview with Tokyo Weekender, he admitted that he did not follow the usual practice of starting with a script and following its structure.“The shooting is very random,” he said. “It’s almost like making a sculpture and taking out little pieces and then putting them back in. That’s the editing process. But what I do is take that little piece out and put it somewhere else and see what happens, maybe create a little dent and then put it back.”“I call it a ‘charming chaos,’” he continued. “I want to communicate with the audience, I want them to find their own way and get them lost first and have them find their own way back.” More

Ballyard shenanigans, eccentric visionaries and dark doings in the world of oenophiles and ticklers are among the subjects of these wildly entertaining documentaries.‘Screwball’ (2018)It’s a sign of how little respect the director Billy Corben has for the men involved in a Major League Baseball doping scandal that the re-enactments in “Screwball” are performed entirely by children. Wearing wigs, crudely pasted facial hair, spray tans and bulging fake muscles when necessary, the kids lip-sync testimony from various South Floridians involved in the Biogenesis scandal, which ensnared several MLB stars in 2013, including Alex Rodriguez. The gambit isn’t entirely necessary, if only because a story this stupefying doesn’t need artificial enhancement. But when one witness talks about Rodriguez pulling silly faces to throw him off at a deposition, Corben finds some justification for his schoolyard conceit.Stream it on Netflix.‘Shirkers’ (2018)There was no independent film scene in Singapore when Sandi Tan was a culture-crazy teenager there in the early ’90s, so she and her best friend, along with a mysterious mentor twice their ages, decided to created one themselves. Tan set out to make her own answer to Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless,” a personal and playfully experimental road movie set on an island nation it takes only 40 minutes to drive across. But then that older mentor, a blue-eyed American film director named Georges Cordona, absconded with 70 16-millimeter film canisters, dashing Tan’s moviemaking dreams. Finally having recovered the footage after Cordona’s death, Tan assembled it into “Shirkers,” an inspired and delirious memoir about her youth and the film that might have sparked a career.Stream it on Netflix.‘The Battered Bastards of Baseball’ (2014)After a ball to the head ended Bing Russell’s minor league career, he set aside his baseball dreams for a career in Hollywood, where he had a long-running role on “Bonanza” and took bullets dozens of times in various film and TV westerns. His son Kurt would become a much more famous actor, but the elder Russell returned to the game in 1973 by founding the Class-A Portland Mavericks, the only minor league team not affiliated with a professional franchise. With an outlaw spirit and a keen eye for talent, Russell, as the owner of the team, assembled a rogue’s gallery of players — including “Ball Four” author Jim Bouton — and his success galvanized a city that had previously given up on the game. In celebrating the team’s independent spirit, “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” suggests what’s missing from the corporate game. More

On the flat, otherworldly, shingle expanse of Dungeness, a headland in southern England, stands a wooden cottage with a small garden. The tar-black cabin with its canary-yellow trim is surrounded by rambling flowers and driftwood totems bedecked with sun-bleached crab claws and snail shells: a quaint scene thrown off-kilter by a nuclear power plant that looms in the background.The house, called Prospect Cottage, was home to the British filmmaker, artist and activist Derek Jarman, a prominent figure in avant-garde London circles from the 1970s to the ’90s. His first feature, “Sebastiane” (1976), a film all in Latin about the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, garnered attention for its unabashed homoeroticism. Jarman went on to direct many films based on gay and bisexual historical figures, like the arty biopics “Caravaggio” (1986) and “Wittgenstein” (1993). He also made music videos for the Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, and Bryan Ferry.In 1986, after testing positive for H.I.V. and at the height of the panic over the virus, Jarman spoke publicly about his diagnosis and became a leading voice of AIDS activism. The same year, he bought Prospect Cottage for 32,000 pounds, or about $48,000 at the time, with a modest inheritance from his father, and soon began his garden there.In his diaries, Jarman wrote of the salve the garden provided him amid the AIDS crisis. He saw his “pharmacopoeia” of medicinal plants, lavender, daffodils, sea kale and wild bees as therapy, and, in an interview for British television a year before his death, said: “I should’ve been a gardener.”Jarman died of an AIDS-related illness in 1994, and he left the cottage to his partner, Keith Collins, who tended the garden until he, too, passed away in 2018. Before he died, Collins set up a trust to preserve the property. A fund-raising campaign, led by the Art Fund, a British charity, raised about $4 million, and Creative Folkstone, a local arts organization, will offer residencies in the house for artists, thinkers, writers and others — including gardeners.The campaign was supported by some of Jarman’s friends and collaborators, including the actress Tilda Swinton. In a speech at an introductory event in London in March, Swinton said that some places were worth preserving not simply to remember an artist’s life, but “because of the influence they had on that life, the working practice they made possible,” and “the liminal energy they afforded.”The campaign raised the funds in just 10 weeks, with more than 8,000 crowdfunding donations, and substantial contributions from trusts and foundations, and from the artist David Hockney. Sandy Powell, a costume designer who worked with Jarman, contributed by collecting celebrity signatures on a suit she wore to the Oscars, the Critics Choice Awards, and the BAFTAs, which she auctioned for about $20,000.During this coronavirus pandemic, it is perhaps worth exploring what can be learned from Jarman’s act of nurturing plants during his own health emergency. Can the simple, tactile pleasure of pottering in the dirt or watching seedlings sprout comfort us at a time of loss and bewilderment?Speaking by phone from her home in London, Powell, whose first film job was on “Caravaggio,” said that getting lost in gardening had given Jarman the solace and energy to continue working — even after AIDS robbed him of his sight.As he went blind, Jarman saw a blue light, which he recreated in the film “Blue,” released in 1993, a feature-length meditation on impending death, narrated over a single shot of saturated ultramarine, with a soundtrack by Simon Fisher Turner.Creating “made him happy and kept him sane,” Powell said. “His enthusiasm and lust for life was infectious. He was extremely generous with his time and knowledge, always saying, ‘You have to go to work every day as if it were a party.’”As well as developing his films at Prospect Cottage, Jarman also made paintings and sculptures and wrote books and poetry there. And he used flotsam from the beach to make art from found objects.Howard Sooley, a photographer who knew Jarman, said, “He got through every illness known to humankind, remarkably, because he was always busy.” The two met in 1991 when Sooley went to photograph the garden for the magazine The Face. Later, after they became friends, Sooley helped Jarman gather flotsam for the garden on the beach, and drove the filmmaker to and from hospital many times.“Gardening carries you to a fundamental place of living, rather than doing,” Sooley said. “When he was quite ill, he’d just grow the second we got onto Dungeness, gardening all day like he was breathing air.”Christopher Woodward, director of the Garden Museum in London, said in a telephone interview that gardens were “more than pretty ornamental things.” A coming show at the museum about Prospect Cottage, which will feature photographs by Sooley, has been postponed to an unspecified later date because of the coronavirus.Gardens offer respite from the pressures of modern life, Woodward said. “You’re staring at the screen and it doesn’t make sense. Then you go out to the garden and 10 minutes later it just kind of resolves itself,” he added. “That’s the mystery of gardens.”Stephen Deuchar, who ran the Art Fund campaign and is a trustee of Creative Folkestone, said by phone that Jarman’s garden was a response to the unusual landscape at Dungeness, which includes not just the brutal-looking nuclear power plant, but also a miniature steam train that chugs across the headland. “It’s as if there’s a contest between the optimism and audacity of plants, and the relentlessness of the shingle,” Deuchar said.“There’s something moving about a small plant that springs up, forging its way to the surface through the stones,” he said. “It’s what makes his garden — his last great work of art — so mesmerizing.”With no fences or soil, and gales of leaf-singeing salt, the challenge to grow life in such an inhospitable environment reflected Jarman’s tenacity to continue creating despite the virus that ravaged him; each blossom is a marvel.“A garden locates you in eternity, Derek often said,” noted the author Olivia Laing, whose latest book “Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency,” includes an essay on the garden at Dungeness.“It also connects you to the future,” she said in an email. “When you don’t know how much time you have left, that sense of planting something that will flower next summer is immensely sustaining.” More

Here are a few of the best events happening Friday through Sunday and how to tune in (all times are Eastern Standard). Movie Night With Jamie Lee CurtisFriday at 9 p.m. on YouTubeBeginning this Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis will host “Lionsgate Live! A Night at the Movies,” a free four-week series featuring some of Lionsgate’s most popular titles. This week, watch “The Hunger Games.” (“Dirty Dancing” is next week’s offering, followed by “La La Land” on May 1 and “John Wick” on May 8.) Curtis will share memories from her own acting career as she is joined by special guest stars. Each event will include interactive opportunities for fans like real-time chats via YouTube Live, movie trivia and movie-themed challenges.When: 9 p.m.Where: Lionsgate’s YouTube and Fandango’s Movieclips YouTube.Robyn D.J.s LiveFriday at 3 p.m. on FacebookDancing on your own doesn’t get better than this. The Grammy-nominated Swedish pop powerhouse Robyn will be performing a live D.J. set from her virtual venue, Konichiwa TV: Club Domo, on Friday. “I want to play some music for you,” she captioned the announcement on social media. “Let’s make a dance floor.”When: 3 p.m.Where: Robyn’s Facebook, YouTube and Twitch accounts‘The Phantom of the Opera’ at the Royal Albert HallFriday at 2 p.m. on YouTubeIf isolating at home has you wanting to swing from the light fixtures, how about this instead? On Friday, you can stream Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “The Phantom of the Opera” for free. The special production was filmed in 2011, for the show’s 25th anniversary, at the Royal Albert Hall in London. This lavish, fully-staged production from Cameron Mackintosh features a cast and orchestra of over 200, plus special guest appearances.When: Friday at 2 p.m. It will be available for 48 hours.Where: The Shows Must Go On! YouTube More