Howl's Moving Castle

This imaginative animated film from Japan’s Studio Ghibli is the latest to be directed by legendary graphic artist Hayao Miyazaki, who gave us “Spirited Away” and “Nausicca of the Valley of Wind”, among many others.   It’s Miyazaki’s take on the English author Diana Wynne Jones’ fantasy novel for young people.   On the eve of war between young Sophie’s village and another, she is transformed into an old lady by a witch’s curse.   The elderly Sophie sallies forth from her village on foot in search of a way to lift the curse.   On her journey she encounters the titular magic castle, which shakes the surrounding hillside as it stomps about on stilt-like legs, and in which resides Howl, a dashing young wizard who once was apprentice to the King’s sorceress until his hubris and his unwillingness to be a tool of war forced him into exile.  

I saw the English-language version of the film.   As a proper film snob, I usually chafe volubly at dubbed versions of foreign films, but “Howl” is animation after all, and besides, its characters are meant to be English-speaking.   I liked the British actresses Emily Mortimer (as the young Sophie) and the venerable Jean Simmons (as the elderly Sophie), but some of the other performances smacked too much of Disney-type cliché for my taste (Disney distributes Studio Ghibli’s films in the U.S. and many other countries).

The film has a complexity of character.   Our heroes’ nemeses are not uncomplicatedly evil and though Howl is the putative good guy, he is feared by the villagers for “stealing young girls’ hearts”.   Further, his hatred of war increasingly threatens to consume him, transforming him into a monstrous raven as he flies by night over the war zone, and he is less and less able to return to human form.   You won’t see these particular animated characters licensed to Burger King ads anytime soon.  

A storehouse of mystery and painstakingly hand-crafted images, the work of Studio Ghibli stands in marked contrast to the paucity of imagination of much contemporary CGI animation.

- Jun 25, 2005  

Layer Cake

A slice of the “Layer Cake” reveals a cross-section of the strata of England’s illicit drug trade.   Occupying a layer somewhere in the middle is the protagonist of the movie: a businessman, smart and professional, who runs a sort of drug brokerage.   Though he’s careful that we never get his name (in the credits he’s listed as “xxxx”), as played by Daniel Craig he’s got leading-man looks and a cool, smooth demeanor which allows him to finesse transactions between the producers, wholesalers, and retailers of the drug economy.  

However, as good as things are going, he tells us that he’s eager to get out of the business after the proverbial “one last job”.   He’s never had a taste for crime; he can’t stand guns and has always done his best to keep “the street” at arm’s length.   Besides, he reckons that it’s only a matter of time before illicit drugs are legalized: he figures that people will always enjoy changing their consciousness and there’re just too many billions at stake for “legit” capitalists to pass it up forever (in an amusing, inventive shot, he visualizes supermarket shelves stocked with name-brand cocaine and ecstasy).   However, when his boss orders him to find another boss’ missing daughter, whilst at the same time he finds himself mixed up in a robbery of a group of particularly ruthless dealers, “xxxx” is hurled into the criminal side of the business where he’s way out of his depth.

While it’s not formulaic, “Layer Cake”’s flavor is fairly familiar; its pleasures consist mostly in watching good British character actors work variations on familiar themes, including Michael Gambon as a top crime lord (in a nice twist on the film’s theme of rank in the strata of the drug economy, Gambon’s character makes “xxxx”’s boss, whom we’ve been intimidated by for most of the picture, look fairly ridiculous).   We’re familiar with the use of the drug milieu as metaphor for capitalism in extremis; we know what becomes of the criminal who just wants to get out of “the life” after “one more job”; we’ve laughed before at the comically transgressive ruthlessness and the absurdly violent situations.  

It’s quite a well-crafted piece, recommended to those who enjoy violent British crime films.   Directed by Matthew Vaughn, who produced “Lock, Stock” as well as “Snatch”.

- Jun 10, 2005  

Kings and Queen

This very interesting French film fluctuates from comedy to drama as it follows the relationships of headstrong Nora (Emmanuelle Devos) with the four most important males in her life: her father, her young son, her son’s late father, and with Ismael (Mathieu Amalric), her now-estranged boyfriend whom she became involved with after her son’s father died nearly a decade earlier in a mysterious accident.   As the film begins Nora has learned that her father is in the end stages of terminal cancer; elsewhere Ismael has been committed to a nuthouse by a third party, putatively to keep him from offing himself.  

Mathieu Amalric’s work as Ismael imparts to the film its ironic humor that just skirts the gallows.   When we first meet Ismael he appears to be a suicidal nutter: he’s got a noose hanging from the ceiling of his apartment.   However, he insists that it’s just there because it comforts him to know that he’s got that option if he wants it.   Though a bit broken, Ismael is irrepressible: as played by Amalric he’s by turns mad, obstinate, warm, essentially goodhearted.   Of the years Ismael spent helping to raise Nora’s child, we are shown only one sequence, of Ismael helping the boy to climb a tree and play in its branches, but it’s enough to establish what sort of person he is.   In fact, though her relationship with Ismael is over, it is Nora who insists on the important part he played in the boy’s formative years.  

The film’s title, “Kings and Queen”, can I believe be explained by Nora’s gift to her father, a scholar of ancient Greece, of a painting of “Leda and the Swan”.   Leda, of course, was queen of Sparta and out of her union with the swan (Zeus) was “hatched” Helen, thereby making Leda indirectly responsible for the Trojan War and the kings who sailed to retrieve Helen from Troy.   King Agamenon’s murder at the hands of Helen’s sister Clytemnestra perhaps ties into the themes of family strife and murder which emerge in the film’s second half, which serves to upend nearly all of the assumptions we made during the first.   “Leda and the Swan” is also a poem by Yeats, which ties into a therapy session in which Ismael recounts a bizarre dream which amusingly turns out to be based upon Yeats’ poem “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”.  

This is one of the more interesting films I’ve seen this year.   Directed and co-written by Arnaud Desplechin with an interesting mix of techniques including documentary-like sequences in which Nora directly addresses the camera.   And if all that’s not enough, we’re also treated to a cameo from the great Catherine Deneuve as a psychiatric nurse who remains unflappable in the face of Ismael’s provocations.

- Jun 3, 2005  

Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

For us 30-somethings, “Star Wars” iconography looms large in our collective consciousness.   Lucas’ characters roamed our mental space; they were the roles we played in our childhood games.   This was thanks not only to the film’s massive marketing campaign (“Star Wars” ushered in the era of film as merchandising tool for toys and sundry tie-ins), but also because the characters and story captured our imaginations.   That said, I’ve got to ask: what are the critics smoking who consider “Revenge of the Sith” to be a return to form?   This shabby film completes the prequel trilogy which tells the story of Anakin Skywalker’s seduction by the dark side of the force and metamorphosis into Darth Vader, and Lucas clearly hopes that he’s created a tragedy to place alongside those of Shakespeare and the Greeks.   However, there’s a slight problem with his attempt to impart a bit of gravitas to his once-fun mélange of Joseph Campbell, Kurosawa, and every classic Hollywood genre in the book: his dialogue is rubbish.   We’re talking eyes-averting, makes-you-wince kind of bad.   You or me or anybody in the theatre could have come up with better dialogue than Lucas does here.   As for the frenetic action that bursts all over the frames, it is curiously non-rousing.   I suppose the special effects are pretty good, but good special effects do not a good movie make in my judgment. I suppose Lucas should be given some credit for making “Revenge of the Sith” into an allegory on American empire and Darth Bush.   He’s fascinated by the ways in which democracies have historically become dictatorships.   It is here that the film achieves some resonance and comes up with some good lines.   As Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) listens to the Senate cheer for Chancellor Palpatine’s bid to consolidate his power, which he justifies by pointing to the war, she comments, “So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause”.   I also like this exchange between Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen, a non-entity) and Obi Wan-Kenobi (Ewan McGregor, doing what he can with the material): Anakin: “If you're not with me then you're my enemy.” Obi Wan: “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes.”   I’d be interested in what others thought, but for me this was pretty much all downhill after the trumpeting of that great opening theme.

- May 27, 2005  

Palindromes

A palindrome is a word or sentence that reads the same way backwards and forwards, and this concept is the controlling metaphor for “Palindromes”, the latest provocation from writer/director Todd Solondz.   It’s a comedy about all the usual stuff: born-again Christianity, abortion, suicide, and pedophilia.   But then, it’s always been Solondz’s M.O. to make comedy from stuff that would make any reasonable person squeamish.  

The film tells the story of young, dumb Aviva (notice anything about that name?), whom we first meet having a heart-to-heart with her mother (Ellen Barkin).   Aviva’s cousin Dawn has committed suicide and Aviva exuberantly expresses her wish to not turn out like Dawn and to have many, many babies one day.   In her early teens she becomes pregnant and though she’s fiercely determined to keep the baby, her parents force her to have an abortion.   She runs away from home, eventually falling in with a fundamentalist Christian household of disabled young people and their foster parents, Mama Sunshine and her husband Bo.   To say more would be to say too much, but it certainly sounds like a laugh riot so far, no?

But hold!   The intriguing device here is that Aviva is played by eight different actresses!   Solondz has said that his inspiration for this idea was TV shows in which a role is taken over by a new actor and yet nobody on the show notices that the character looks different.   Similarly, no one in this movie sees Aviva’s changes even though from sequence to sequence she is embodied variously by an obese black woman, a scrawny pre-teen, a middle-aged woman, etc.   It occurs to me that this is a purely cinematic device: there’s no way this film could be done as a novel.  
 
Who is the “real” Aviva?   We find that we cannot say.   Or rather, we cannot say what the “real” Aviva looks like: is she fat or thin, black or white?   The only thing we know for sure is her age: she’s in her early teens.   It’s remarkable how each actress playing Aviva stays in character, down to speaking with the same tone and speech patterns.    

‘Palindromes’ mocks its characters, and none come in for fiercer mocking than the born-again Christians.   Now there’s no doubt that fundamentalism is a scourge upon the land and represents human beings at their worst.   But really, born-agains are easy targets and have been amply skewered before.   On the other hand, ‘Palindromes’ recognizes that a fundie often has dark periods in his or her past that account for the fervor, revealing that Mama Sunshine was molested as a child.   More troubling is that the film seems to want us to laugh at the disabled youth as they mouth ridiculous banalities at the dinner table or sing their saccharine Christian rock songs.   It appears that Solondz has used disabled actors for these roles, but are we laughing with them or at them?

Was I completely engrossed by the film?   Yes.   Can I in good conscience recommend it here?   No.   It is my kind of flick in that it leaves an itch in your head that can’t quite be satisfied regardless of how much you scratch.   For example, how would the film be different if only one actress played the main character?   It certainly wouldn’t be as funny, since much of the humor comes from the discrepancy between the Aviva that we see and the way she’s perceived by the other characters.   What are we to make of the myriad twisted forms of love for children on display here?   And on and on the questions come.

- May 21, 2005