Play democracy for me

Kono yo no Soto E

Rating: * * * (out of 5)
Director: Junji Sakamoto
Running time: 123 minutes
Language: Japanese
Opens Feb. 7

Movies, producer Naoya Narita once told me, are news. The problem is, real world news moves fast -- and films often have a hard time keeping up. One notorious example is the 1988 "Rambo III," which sent Sylvester Stallone to battle the Ruskies in Afghanistan -- just as the real Russians were clearing out of the place.

Sometimes, though, a movie hits the news wave just right. A few years ago, when the world was a slightly more peaceful place, Junji Sakamoto's "Kono Yo no Soto E (Out of This World)," a film about Occupation-era Japanese jazzmen, might have looked like another exercise in postwar nostalgia. Today, though, with another war-torn country making a halting transition from dictatorship to democracy under the watchful eye of the U.S. military, it looks prescient and timely.

But for all the commonalties between the present occupation of Iraq and that of Japan half a century ago, the differences, Sakamoto shows us, are stark. Instead of plotting violent resistance against American troops, Sakamoto's heroes entertain them with that most American of music -- jazz -- while eating their hamburgers and drinking their Coca-Cola. Meanwhile, certain of their female acquaintances are getting to know the Americans in more intimate and immediately profitable ways.