KEITH UHLICH
Perfect Days
film roundup
Perfect Days (Dir. Wim Wenders). Starring: Koji Yakusho, Tokio Emoto, Arisa Nakano. As a director of fiction features, Wim Wenders has long been in the wilderness, far from the heights of Kings of the Road or Paris, Texas. His latest doesn’t break the losing streak, though it has an easygoing gentility about it that seduces at first. Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is a Tokyo-based toilet cleaner with a pre-set daily routine that we watch unfold, unhurriedly, for much of the film’s first third. He cleans, drives, and listens to ‘60s-era Western rock music on cassette tapes. He’s a patient, sorta-analog guy winding his way through an increasingly hasty world. Where he is in life hasn’t come without sacrifice, and as figures from his past re-emerge, a portrait of a deeply unhappy man, one prone to smiling through his tears, comes to the fore. Perfect Days is a tragedy played as a gentle comedy, done in the style of Wenders’ favorite Yasujiro Ozu. And it’s not for a moment convincing, every would-be-devastating emotional beat coming Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, and ICON. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com. 14
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off increasingly contrived. Wenders is faking greatness here, which is very unfortunate considering all the times he has been at a master’s level. [PG] HH American Fiction (Dir. Cord Jefferson). Starring: Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae. Writer-director Cord Jefferson’s very ofthe-moment debut feature takes on a lot. Jeffrey Wright plays college professor and elitist author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, whose books are nicher than niche and whose blood is boiling at the stereotypical hollows that black artists are expected to contort themselves to fit. Inspired, in a negative way, by the example of the bestselling writer Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), whose novel is penned in a hilarious ghetto patois far from her own experience, Monk, under a pseudonym, tosses off a (gang)banger of a melodramatic tragedy about violence-prone African American hoodlums…and it becomes an unexpected success! Jefferson parodies everything from well-meaning white liberals to an entertainment industry that consistently prefers cliches to hard truths. The film is often funny, but mostly middle-of-the-road for C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 2 7