Japan Today Opens With Savage Satire

The Japan Foundation’s annual Japan Today film festival begins Friday at the Monica 4-Plex, and this year it is part of an ongoing series of performances, exhibitions and forums taking place in Santa Monica.

Among the films in the festival are a pair of major productions from the venerable but ever-vital Shochiku Co., “Nowhere Man” (at 7 p.m.) and “We Are Not Alone” (at 9:30 p.m.). The latter will be repeated several times through Oct. 5, as will be the case with most of the other pictures in the series, which includes a documentary on renowned screen composer Toru Takemitsu and concludes with 2 and 7 p.m. screenings of a new 35-millimeter print of Akira Kurosawa’s own cut of his classic 1954 “Seven Samurai,” starring Toshiro Mifune.

The confounding, beautiful and utterly distinctive “Nowhere Man” marked the 1991 directorial debut of the popular actor Naoto Takenaka, who also stars as a once-popular cartoonist out of work for two years.

It is based on a well-known semi-autobiographical comic series by the celebrated cartoonist Yoshiharu Tsuge.

Living with his long-suffering wife and small son in a house by a river on the outskirts of a city, the cartoonist--having tried his hand at various unsuccessful endeavors--decides to erect a shack nearby and sell rocks he finds in the riverbed, a not-exactly-promising venture.

The cartoonist’s predicament, which unfolds in strikingly composed, jarring vignettes, deals with the eternal conflicts between art and commerce, the whole question of what is art and the tug of war between the artist’s responsibility to himself and to his family.

“Nowhere Man” unfolds with a highly developed sense of the absurd, bleak humor and considerable anguish. Yohjiro Takita, who made a splash with “The Yen Family,” a hilarious satire on the limitless greed of a suburban family, returns with the entertaining and even more audacious “We Are Not Alone” (1993), a savage yet balanced satire on a fictional Southeast Asian dictatorship ripe for exploitation as a “developing country” by Japan (and by extension, any superpower).

A young engineer (Henry Sanada) is sent there by his company with a proposal for the construction of a vast and costly bridge. He becomes caught up, with three other fellow countrymen, including his company’s disenchanted local representative (the veteran Tsutomu Yamazaki), in a revolution.

Working from a story and screenplay by Nobuyuki Isshiki, Takita is evenhanded: sharply skewering the corruption of the dictatorship and the ruthlessness of Japanese business practices.

Beyond this, Takita nevertheless discovers heroism not only in the local rebels but in the much-maligned typical Japanese businessman.

Information: (310) 394-9741.

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Docu Duo: The Sunset 5 is opening two worthy documentaries this Friday, Rosanne Ehrlich’s deeply moving “Dear Babe” and Barbara Leibovitz’s “Salvaged Lives.”

In the first, Ehrlich keys her father’s wartime letters to her mother to an astute assemblage of archival footage that give us an idea of what it was like to be a corporal in the U.S. Army as World War II drew to a close in Europe.

Surely, few wives and mothers received letters as descriptive and perceptive as those of Meyer (Mike) Siegalbaum, who was also equally capable of expressing his deep love for his wife Hazel and children.

In “Salvaged Lives,” Leibovitz--sister of famed photographer Annie Leibovitz--is on to something important in calling attention to the California Institute for Men at Chino’s unique and highly regarded course in deep-sea diving.

It’s an awesomely rugged test of endurance but one that promises a virtual guarantee of employment for its graduates: While 63% of parolees are back behind bars within five years, only 5% of the Chino program’s inmates return.

While she certainly has us rooting for the six men she follows throughout the course and beyond, “Salvaged Lives” could have benefited from sharper editing.

Even so, she surely gets her message across, showing that convicts can turn their lives around when opportunity, motivation, dedication and imagination--a tall order--exist within both inmates and penal institutions.

Information: (213) 848-3500.