Big Dreams Little Tokyo: A Half Japanese Comedy

For Screening Purposes Only

Big Dreams Little Tokyo (IMDb entry) is one of those movies that seek to explore the meaning of culture in today’s globalizing world that serves as a melting pot of ethnic identities. It has been making its way around various independent film festivals and has received many positive reviews. Two weeks ago, Mr. Dave Boyle, the director and also the lead actor, presented me with an opportunity to review the movie before its DVD and theatrical release in America next year. Of course I was not the only blogger offered to do this, but I did feel a tingle of joy to receive such a request.

Two weeks later, I’m sitting in my room with the screener DVD (digitally watermarked to prevent piracy) in hand and a movie review to write. So here we go.

“The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.”

The story is about Boyd, an American who speaks fluent Japanese, and his dream of success as a businessman. He wrote a book which teaches English to Japanese speakers and he runs his own one-person company (his apartment) where he conducts English lessons. He spends his days going from house to house to promote his book and he frequently gets chased out of the book store’s owner for trying to peddle his goods in the store. He lives with a 200-pound Japanese American guy called Jerome who spends his time putting on weight and learning Japanese because he wants to be a professional sumo wrestler.

“Just…another…20…pounds.”

In a way, this film reminds me of Lost in Translation, except it doesn’t really deal with Japanese culture. It has a lot of “Japan” element in it and indeed Japanese plays an important role in the story, but it’s not a movie that deals with Japan and its culture the way Translation did. It’s really a movie about ethnic identity in today’s generation, with Japanese being used as a device to tell that story. Or at least that’s what I think anyway.

Besides the main character and his room mate, we get to meet a Mexican who works as a sushi chef, a Japanese corporate boss who likes to shake hands instead of bow and various other characters who seem somewhat out of place in their roles. It is through the (often humorous) interactions between this cast of cultural misfits that we, the viewers, get to enjoy an interesting commentary on the way we think about our own racial identities in today’s world.

“I should be saving the world in New York right now.”

Interesting side note: James Kyson Lee, who plays Ando in the hit TV series Heroes, is an angry shopkeeper in the movie. He doesn’t really do much, but it’s kind of cool considering how I just started watching Heroes recently. LOL. Actually the shopkeeper is also quite fascinating because he’s clearly Japanese but he always speaks English and he hates it when Boyd speaks Japanese to him. In a way, he seems to have rejected part of him, perhaps in his attempt to integrate himself into American society.

“Good day, would you like to learn English?”

While nominally a comedy, it’s not the kind of “Jim Carrey” humour that’s commonplace in cinemas today. It’s subtle in execution, perhaps too subtle sometimes. Much of the dialogue is in Japanese, and some of the jokes make use of it. For example, in the opening scene of the movie, Boyd is trying (but failing) to convince three drunken Japanese businessmen to buy his book. They are more amused by his command of Japanese and one of them asks him to say “this morning, every morning” in Japanese. If you don’t speak Japanese, it’s a little hard to get this joke. Basically, it’s “kesa maiasa” (今朝毎朝), which sounds like “kiss my ass” when you say it out loud. There’s also a tako/taco joke in a later part of the story.

Two Mexican chefs preparing udon.

As Boyd and Jerome try to achieve their dreams, they face the challenge of overcoming social prejudices due to their unique circumstances. Boyd has trouble making people take him seriously because they are too busy getting excited over his fluent Japanese. Jerome feels like he’s too American to be a sumo wrestler and at the same time too Japanese to really be American. In one scene, two guys from Okinawa refuse to take English lessons from Jerome because he’s not white, despite the fact that he speaks perfectly accented English.

Along the way, Boyd meets a Japanese nurse, Mai, who wants to improve her English and ends up taking lessons from him. Hilarity and some light drama ensue. With her help, difficulties are resolved and eventually Boyd and Jerome learn to come to terms with both sides of their identities and everyone lives happily ever after. Or something like that.

“She’s hot!”

One of my favourite scenes happens near the end, when Boyd and the Mexican Japanese chef ends up as interpretors for a takeover negotiation between a Mexican factory owner (who bears an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush) and representatives of a Japanese corporation. Unhappy differences are resolved thanks to some creative interpreting by them. This reminded me of a scene in Lost in Translation where the director passionately gives out instructions to Bob, the main character, in Japanese and his interpretor condenses everything into brief translations that lose their original meanings.

The Mexican factory owner and the Japanese salarymen eventually hit it off despite the cultural and language barriers, with a little help from the universal male language: alcohol. It’s a pretty entertaining scene.

It’s like one of those yakuza movies…except with some Mexicans.

It’s also very interesting to note that throughout the movie, there’s no direct mention of where it is set in. Indeed, from the first few scenes it seemed like the movie was set in Japan. I was somewhat confused when Boyd said that his book cost eighteen dollars because it’s kind of weird for people to use dollars in Japan. It is only later in the film where you see signs that say “Japantown” and even then we never get to find out which Japantown it is. I think this is a very clever set-up because it really makes you realize just how we perceive the world through stereotypes that can turn out to be very wrong in this age of rampant cultural cross-pollination. Or perhaps it was completely unintentional and I’m just reading too much into it. LOL.

My girlfriend thinks that the girl in the middle is cute.

In conclusion, it’s a great movie! Having studied Japanese for the past five years, I find that the film really resonated with the way I feel. I’ve always been a supporter of cultural globalization and I think that the movie did an excellent job of telling that story in a light-hearted and digestible manner. I especially loved the final scene which I find to be the perfect cumulation of the film’s messages, but I shall refrain from describing it. You’ll just have to watch it for yourself when the movie is released in early 2008! Meanwhile, I have to mail the DVD back.

P.S. I wish more movie directors would send me their works for pre-release reviews. Steven Spielberg, I’m looking your way! ;)