Hiroshima Tagged Articles at Cinematical

This will no doubt be an illegal movie forever. After seeing it at the UC Theater in the summer of '82, I recently found a copy on a bootleg VHS for $1 at a Friends of the Library sale, still burned with the Sundance Channel bug. In today's cinema, much is made of the nostalgia value of the 1980s soundtrack: a famous example being Tears for Fears' "Head Over Heels" during Donnie Darko's opening. You can have your MTV, though, since URGH! A Music War was the soundtrack to my 1980s. Hey, what a surprise, no Duran Duran, no INXS, no Soft Cell covering a Gloria Jones soul classic and convincing a history-impaired generation that they wrote it. And yet it's clear why this film failed.

As a business scheme URGH seems, in 2008 hindsight, a uniquely quick way to burn a fortune. The film documents second-wave punk and New Wave bands playing from LA to London, editing them together without any particular zeitgeisty event like a music festival. So: play it a little under a real kiss-of-death title, and then wait to be deafened by the wails of bands, managers and lawyers zooming in to fight over the non-existant money. The Police were the headliners, opening and closing the film. They wrap up the film, too; you can see drummer Miles Copeland wearing an URGH! T-shirt. Is this perhaps all he was paid for this film? There are mostly cinematic performances here, and we see how much was lost by the fact that the Industry couldn't figure out a way to use their talents in the movies. Here's a key to the best of the show, omitting slurs of forgotten bands who perished long years ago.

If foreign-language feature films can serve as windows into the lives and cultures of people we may never meet, and tell us about places we may never travel, how much more so a good documentary? In July I wrote about Campaign, a doc about the Japanese political process as seen through the eyes of an unlikely candidate. Since I haven't seen too many documentaries from or about Japan, that's made my ears perk up every time I hear about another.

Recently I watched White Light, Black Rain, which started showing on HBO after premiering at Sundance earlier this year. Steven Okazaki is a gifted, Academy Award-winning filmmaker, and one of his gifts is an ability to take a subject that might initially sound uninviting -- in this case, survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- and present the material in a straightforward yet artful manner that is very persuasive. I found myself caught up in the stories and very striking images and, before I realized it, the points had been made. The film will continue showing on HBO in August and September; it's also available on DVD.

The Village That Became Water (pictured) was released in Japan this month and Mark Schilling of The Japan Times had high praise for it. Filmmaker Nobuo Onishi spent 15 years documenting the impact of a long-planned dam on the people who would be displaced by the construction. The villagers raised and prepared their own food, "made medicines from local plants," and lived contentedly without any taste of modern civilization. The dam was first proposed in 1957; "after decades of living with the threat of the dam, they have become resigned to it and determined to enjoy their remaining time in the best place they know." The documentary, which Schilling says is permeated by Onishi's "commitment and passion," sounds well worth seeking out; I hope some enterprising festival programmers will give us a chance to see it.