Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
These three reviews got steamrolled by the SUPERMAN script review, so Harry's asked me to move them over here so they might actually get read. In particular, I want to make sure you keep your eyes open for BELOW, which is about to get severely shafted by Miramax, even though it doesn't deserve it...
BLOWN AWAY ON A GHIBLI WIND
On my very, very short list of the best working filmmakers, those amazing artists whose work never fails to offer me something of value, I would rank Hayao Miyazaki very near the top. His body of work is so significant, so rewarding, and he continues to offer his audiences something new and genuine each time he makes a film. When I hear people refer to him as “Japan’s Walt Disney,” it annoys me, because I think as a filmmaker, Miyazaki is a thousand times more accomplished and brilliant than Walt was, and his works speak to me in a way that few films do. They work on the level of dreams, feeling as I watch them like they are already familiar, already part of that deep pool of mythology that we all carry around. He just taps into those images in a way that speaks almost primally to an audience. I think that’s why people call his work “children’s films.” They’re not, of course, but maybe children are more open to the experience. They are able to simply follow the film instinctually and understand the direct and emotional journey that Miyazaki has charted for us. There’s things here that we can all benefit from though, ideas rather than morals, offered instead of force-fed, and the resultant mix of all the ideas here is something incredibly satisfying that should reward repeat viewers enormously.
I just spent a few weeks wading through Miyazaki’s past work, not only so that I could rediscover them, but also so I could introduce them to my girlfriend before she went with me to see Miyazaki speak at the special El Capitan event. I wanted to give her a chance to see what she thought of his worlds and his characters, and the first one I showed her was MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO, a film I think gets better the more you watch it. Basically, two small girls, Satsuki and Mei, move with their father to a small home in the country as they try to deal with their mother being hospitalized and constantly sick. They meet Totoro, a nature spirit, and adjust to their new home. And that’s pretty much it. The joy of the film is the details, the way Totoro enjoys learning about an umbrella or the way Mei giggles as she climbs up Totoro’s massive furred chest or the way the door to the Catbus opens or the way the dustballs swarm and scatter. KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE was next for us, and I’m a total sucker for the design of this film and the sense of flight. It was the first Miyazaki film I ever saw, and I have a real fondness for it as a result. NAUSICAA IN THE VALLEY OF WINDS left her cold, but it remains my favorite Miyazaki film overall. I think it’s an amazing epic end of the world fantasy, and I’ve been told that the manga version is even more sweeping. All I know is that I get caught up in the film every time I put it on, and I lose track of time. It’s one of the most beautiful movies I’ve ever seen, even in its depiction of the wasteland. PORCO ROSSO was the last one we watched together, and it was the only Miyazaki film I’d never seen before. Glad I finally corrected that, too. It’s a charming, odd little movie about The Crimson Pig, a notorious pilot in post-War Italy, once human but now quite content to live as a pig named Marco. There’s a great scene early on with a whole herd of little girls running roughshod over the pirates who have “kidnapped” them that’s laugh out loud funny, and Miyazaki’s flight fetish has never been more evident than it is here.
By the time we went to the Egyptian on September 10th to see the new English dub of SPIRITED AWAY and to see Miyazaki speak afterwards, I think she was almost as excited as I was. She understood who people were dressed as (there was a Totoro and a Lupin in attendance and seated near us), and when Miyazaki came out onstage afterwards, she seemed just as impressed by him as I was. It’s hard not to be, especially just after SPIRITED AWAY has finished playing.
Miyazaki said he made this film to give ten year old girls a main character they could relate to, and to tell a story they could see themselves in. Chihiro is a fascinating lead character because it doesn’t seem like Miyazaki likes her much at the start of the story. She’s got gangly legs, and she’s sullen, even spoiled. He’s said that he drew her to show a whole class of girls who have grown up without having to work, without ever experiencing any hardship at all. Chihiro and her parents are moving, on their way to the new house, and her father tries a shortcut that gets them lost. They end up at the mouth of a small tunnel, and when they walk through, they find something that her father is sure is an abandoned theme park. “They build a lot of them in the early ‘90s,” he says, “and then they all went bankrupt.” They walk further in, and they find a stall where a huge meal has been set out. Chihiro’s parents begin to dig into the food, but Chihiro refuses, uneasy about the place. She goes exploring, and as she stands on a bridge, the sun low in the sky, she comes face to face with a boy, Haku, who seems startled to see her. He tells her to leave before night falls, but it’s too late. Even as Chihiro runs back the way she came, it’s as if the evening’s long shadows race to get ahead of her. She finds her parents, but they’ve been transformed now into giant pigs, and when she tries to leave, she finds that the quiet field they crossed when they came in is now a river, huge and impassable.
Even worse, she learns that it’s no theme park she’s stumbled into. Instead, it’s a spa, a resort for gods on vacation, a place where they can escape from mankind. Humans, if they’re allowed at all, are relegated to the position of worker, and Chihiro’s survival depends on her coming face to face with Yubaba, the witch who runs the place, and somehow getting Yubaba to agree to give her a job, something she’ll only do in exchange for Chihiro’s name. Much of the middle of the film has to do with Chihiro’s attempts to settle into the routine of life at the spa, and to figure out the many mysteries that seem to make up the place. If Chihiro has a great strength, it appears to be her ability to adapt, to figure out the world around her and make some space for herself in it. Gradually, a real strength of character begins to assert itself, and she becomes a hero, although not the kind we’re used to in typical Western fiction. Instead, hers is the heroism of quiet determination.
The remarkable sights and characters that we are exposed to along the way would be criminal for me to reveal, since that’s what the film is... the journey. Like the best of Miyazaki’s work, SPIRITED AWAY is about the details, the small moments. Miyazaki, like many Japanese directors, makes full use of ma, or emptiness. It’s like the film is so dizzy from its own sense of invention that, from time to time, it simply has to take a moment and catch its breath. Director Kirk Wise (BEAUTY & THE BEAST and THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME) has risen to the unenviable task of directing the American voice actors, and he’s done a great job with Daveigh Chase, who was also Lilo in LILO & STITCH this year, and who has also been memorable as Donnie Darko’s little sister and as the main figure of fear in Gore Verbinki’s THE RING. She gives Chihiro a very real sense of life, and the rest of the cast (Susan Egan, Suzanne Pleshette, Jason Marsden) all do very strong work. This is one of the rare cases where I would recommend seeing the dubbed version first. The American script by Don and Cindy Hewitt (who I should point out share an agent with me, in the interest of full disclosure) manages to introduce some Western phrases and explain things with crystal clarity without disrupting the rhythms of Miyazaki’s work, no simple task. John Lasseter executive produced the American version, and I think it’s safe to say no more care or attention could have been lavished on it. I know it’s popular to beat Disney up about how they’ve handled Miyazaki’s films in America, and I’ll confess... I’m stumped as to why I can’t buy KIKI or CASTLE IN THE SKY on DVD yet... but poor business decisions aren’t the same thing as open disrespect. SPIRITED AWAY is obviously a labor of love for all the American artists involved in bringing it to a Western audience, and it’s my sincerest hope that the audience embraces this special gift as Disney rolls it out in limited release in the weeks ahead.
BELOW IS A CUT ABOVE... SO WHY IS MIRAMAX SCUTTLING THE BOAT?!
Y’know, this mystifies me. BELOW is supposed to be opening in a couple of weeks. Obviously, Miramax would like critics to talk about it when it opens, since they’re screening it now. So why is it that when I talk to people about this film, no one has seen a poster or a trailer or a single commercial of any kind?
I’ve heard rumblings about discontent between director David Twohy and Bob Weinstein, but I don’t know any specifics, and even if that’s true... even if they don’t see eye to eye... what would make a studio completely abandon a film? Even IMPOSTOR got better treatment than this during its obligatory dumping in the marketplace last Christmas. Is BELOW some sort of disaster that Dimension is trying to simply forget so they can move on?
In a word... no.
BELOW is an enjoyable, well-directed ghost story set on a submarine during WWII. Matt Davis, Bruce Greenwood, Olivia Williams, Holt McCallany, Scott Foley, Jason Flemyng, and Dexter Fletcher all do good solid work in the film as the crew that finds itself under extreme and unexpected pressure after picking up a few survivors off a hospital boat that was sunk by Germans. The script, by Lucas Sussman & Darren Aronofsky, with rewrites by Twohy, is smart and manages to offer up real visceral scares without ever once becoming just another dumb horror film. Instead, stakes are set high right at the start, and we’re gradually drawn into the mystery that seems to make all the men of the U.S.S. TIGER SHARK so increasingly frightened as events play out in a space that’s tight both physically and psychologically.
What I liked most about the film was the way it’s written so you can argue at the end about what really happened. Is this a supernatural story? Or is it a story of guilt and what happens when men do what they think is right, only to be eaten alive by the gradual realization that it’s wrong? All of the more bizarre occurences could be written off to the mental effects of a lack of oxygen as they stay submerged too long and hydrogen begins to fill the boat. The script only reveals the backstory of things in small bits and pieces, and it works as a result. The film opens with survivors floating on the ocean and the TIGER SHARK being ordered to go pick them up. There’s no setup where we meet the crew under manufactured circumstances. We just get directly into the film, something that is rapidly becoming a trademark of Twohy’s. There’s nothing as immediately eye-popping as the spaceship crash that opened PITCH BLACK with a bang, but visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang has made sure that when Twohy needs to come up with something memorable, he does.
In fact, I’d say one of Twohy’s trademarks is the elegance and sheer taste in composition that he brings to his material. I’m not the biggest fan of THE ARRIVAL (mainly because I don’t picture many radio technicians snorting blow off the crack of a hooker’s ass, meaning Charlie Sheen seemed a wee bit miscast to me), but that opening scene is a stunner. And if you asked me to make a list of the ten things I’m proudest of from my time here at AICN, the theatrical release of PITCH BLACK would be very near the top of that list. When Harry and I first saw the film, Interscope hated it and USA wasn’t sure what to do with it, and we only saw it because a publicist on another unrelated film felt passionately that the movie was getting boned. He set up that screening for us, and after it cleaned our clocks, we started making arrangements for it to play at Butt-Numb-A-Thon’s inaugural outing. Eventually, USA committed to a full theatrical release for the film, and it went on to become their highest-grossing theatrical release. This was a film that was sitting on a shelf when we saw it, before we started getting excited about it, and it’s only because USA actually listened and got wise that they were eventually rewarded.
I wish I could offer BELOW the same sort of support, but it appears to be too late. As a result, all I can do is tell you, the potential audience, that you’re being screwed out of a good time in the theater here. As Warner Bros. pumps money into GHOST SHIP and DreamWorks does their deep-pocketed best to saturate the world with RING ads, do yourself the favor. Search for BELOW. Keep your eyes peeled. And if it plays near you, give it a shot. You’ll be rewarded with a smart, knowing genre film that was made with real wit and respect.
Oh, if only it were being released the same way...
THE FOUR FEATHERS MAY BE ONE VERSION TOO MANY
I’ve been dreading this review for the whole past week.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that the film is terrible. Far from it. The problem is that the film is soft, average, entirely okay. It’s the kind of film that inspires no passion in me as a critic either one way or another, and I hardly know where to start.
What did I like? Well, Djimon Hounsou continues to impress me with his sheer magnetism onscreen, even if he is playing a very slight variation on his GLADIATOR character here. And the photography by Robert Richardson is sharp, vivid, and at times, overwhelming. The direction by Shekhar Kapur is at times involving and at other times disinterested, but I think he did about as good a job as anyone could have with this particular script. There’s one breathtaking sequence, involving a trap that’s been set for the British soldiers, that builds to an incredibly intense place. Unfortunately, it fizzles out after that amazing overhead shot you’ve seen in most of the recent ads.
What didn’t I like? Pretty much the rest of the film. Wes Bentley and Heath Ledger both give it their best shot, but the screenplay strands them. Any notion that this is about the definitions of friendship or courage or honor are chucked out the window as the film boils down to a pissing match over the incredibly dull Ethne (Kate Hudson), who demonstrates no charm or talent or character traits that would make her worth fighting over. There’s a ridiculous image that opens the film that was lifted directly from MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE that set the wrong tone for me right off the bat, and in some ways, the film never recovered.
It’s weird, too, because I really like this story. The 1939 version by Zoltan Korda is, in my opinion, one of the many reasons that year is seen as the height of Hollywood’s golden age. It’s sweeping, yet personal, and it’s packed with adventure and drama. This version covers many of the same basic events, but we live in different times, and screenwriters Michael Schiffer and Hossein Amini have utterly failed to acknowledge that in their script. There’s one moment early on where the film almost becomes a Sudanese version of BLACK HAWK DOWN that gets at the idea that heroism isn’t blindly killing someone else just because your government tells you to, but the notion is ast aside as quickly as it’s raised, and for the most part, the enemy in this film is simply a faceless, impersonal mass of black people. Colonialism has proven to be as tricky a foundation for a society as communism, but this film doesn’t seem even slightly concerned with such thoughts.
In the end, FOUR FEATHERS fails to satisfy as a drama, as an adventure, or as a serious film about courage. It wants to be all those things, but manages to be none of them. Here’s hoping that all involved are able to redeem themselves their next time in battle.
"Moriarty" out.
