The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)

Saw The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, a film by Werner Herzog about a feral man who appears in a village one day with no sign of where he came from or who had been taking care of him.  As a film about a feral person, it cannot help but also be about people living on the fringes of society.  Kaspar cannot navigate this world, needs people, but also lacks people.  He must rely on the largesse of the state and on charity.  It is kind of comforting to see that even with so many disadvantages (or perhaps due to them) he is still able to find some kind of place in this world.

The appeal of the story to Herzog, I think, comes from the fact that Kaspar does not seem to really want to be saved.  He spent the beginning of his life in a cellar and, after being freed, expressed a longing to return to the cellar.  He says that he is most happy in bed, and his various forays into the wider public are always hassle-filled, humiliating trials.  Perhaps he has too much isolation within him already, perhaps this society is not suitable for him anymore.

The film follows Kaspar very closely.  We are not really told what's happening to him, we just see that now he seems to be living in this place, now that place.  The film moves along nicely and has some fairly funny scenes where policemen and doctors officially react to Kaspar.  It didn't fully grab me, but that's probably my fault.  I dunno.

Summer Wars (2009)

Saw Summer Wars, an exciting anime about a boy caught up in events beyond his control.  He is recruited by his high-school crush to pretend to be her fiancé when she visits her wealthy grandmother.  Simultaneously, he solves what he believes to be a brain teaser and becomes accidentally involved in the destruction of OZ, a futuristic metaverse-style pseudo-internet which is deeply integrated into the real world.

The film is fairly straightforward.  The boy is a fish out of water among the sprawling and loud family he's been dumped into.  A fair amount of the movie is just him reacting to the rambunctious kids or the brash men or whatever.  The OZ stuff is not super realistic, but it's more cinema-friendly depictions of avatars punching each other or struggling to open doors etc.  It's nonsense, but it's relatable nonsense.  Also, having actually been part of fairly serious tech outages in the past, I can tell you that that's how it feels, even if we're just watching little scripts run.

This film depicts tech and the internet generally as being another universe where other rules apply.  It was made in 2009, but even by that point I think it was becoming clear that the internet is just people.  There are no new rules, just mobs of people and companies.  This film recognizes this and centers most of the action around real people in the real world.  There is a theme, for example, of misbehaving bastard offspring.

The film is cute and silly however.  It's somewhat over-cute (the ending bits especially made me squirm with sugar overload) but the action is thrilling and it does a good job of topping itself, always coming up with some yet-more stunt for the family to get involved in.  The emotions are big and bold and the art is beautiful (the sun coming up over the mountains!  Muah!)  It's a fun movie.

Poor Things (2023)

Saw Poor Things, a fable-like reimagination of the story of Frankenstein.  It follows Bella, a woman brought back from the dead with the mind of a child.  From there, she is adopted by various men who try to make her in their image: a doctor who makes her into a biological experiment, a lothario who tries to make her into a lover, a cynic who tries to give her a cynical view.  All of these men's actions are  deliciously subverted and frustrated by her simple certainty and ghastly nonconformity.  It's great fun to watch.

The film is extremely gaudy, venturing into George Miller-ish excesses and Wes Anderson-ian artificiality.  At one point they're in a ship and Bella looks at the sky which has the northern lights, a ton of stars, a bank of storm clouds, and a sunset going on all at once.  Similarly, the doctor's house is occupied by strange semi-erotic statues and half-goat/half-duck hybrids.  Even outside of the doctor's house we see carriages which are both horse-drawn and also steam powered.  It's very silly, but it's not really supposed to be comical.  In the style of fairytales and fantasy it's fabulous but not frivolous.  The story is held together by the motivations of Bella which are always childishly clear.  She frankly states what she wants throughout the movie.

Watching her navigate all of these men who seek to control her is very satisfying.  I particularly liked her takedown of the cynic (who, to be fair, takes it with good grace.)  The film has a lot of great moments and, as Bella learns to navigate the world, becomes more hopeful over time.  She has a lot going against her, but her confidence is magnetic.  After all she has already died once.  What more can happen to her?

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

Saw Spring in a Small Town, a quiet but intense melodrama about a woman who is married to a sickly man.  You can see trouble brewing as soon as a visitor comes to their small household: a good friend of the husband and the childhood sweetheart of the wife.  The wife and the visitor care for the sickly husband and begin the long slow process of circling around each other, unwilling to hurt each other, but both still longing for the other.  It's forbidden love, 1940s style!

The film is somewhat mannered.  No more than contemporary American films, but differently.  There's scenes where the characters dramatically pose before launching into some dramatic act.  Curiously, there's not a lot of monologues.  The central woman does a lot of acting by way of little pauses, her downturned gaze bespeaking an intense inner struggle.  There's a lot of pregnant pauses and unspoken feelings.  The result is that the feelings can be as intense as we understand them to be.  Well done.

The film is somewhat pokey however.  I admit I wasn't in the mood for a family melodrama, so this film didn't really hit the spot, but I could tell even so that this is a well-made film.  It seems to celebrate self-sacrifice which feels troublesome and uncomfortable.  You shouldn't be too self-centered of course, but staying in what seems to be a loveless marriage, just out of a sense of duty?  It feels like it's asking too much.  The past was a different time.

The film is good.  It's a little old, but brief for all that.  It's an interesting, small, quietly big film.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Saw The Boy and the Heron, a typically masterful film from Studio Ghibli.  This one reminded me a lot of Howl's Moving Castle, another film that hearkens back to arcadian idylls, full of vast monuments, intricate passages, and malevolent danger. The film doesn't directly steal from anything, but echoes MC Escher, the grotesques of Felix Colgrave and Jan Švankmajer.  The film is so touching and grand.

The opening of the film gives Pixar's Up a run for the fastest a film can break your heart: we open on the main character's memories of his mother dying in a fire.  This haunts him and he becomes a stern, serious little boy who is always ready to do the right thing, ready to pull the next victim from a fire.  The film is set against the backdrop of a burgeoning WW2, when the whole world was bracing itself, steeling itself; preparing itself to make the great self-sacrifice.  This rigidity is the boy's strength and his weakness.  He is ready to do battle with magical forces, but he cannot bring himself to face his classmates.

The film is packed with wonderful whimsey.  There's a gang of seven old women who look like wrinkled little frogs and who gleefully cackle over potted meat.  In addition to the titular heron, there are lots of birds, some sinister, some pathetic.  There are many set-pieces with the gorgeous intricacy of the bathhouse from Spirited Away or the club house from From Up on Poppy Hill. This is a world I would love to live in, even as the characters shout cryptic warnings about waking the dead.

I loved this film.  It opened with an almost palpable sense of doom: the little boy, newly traumatized by the death of his mother seems to be thrust in a new situation and engaged in self-destruction.  Indeed, about a fourth of the way through, I thought I was going to write that this is the closest Miyazaki has come to a horror movie.  But soon after that, the film deepens, and opens, and lifts, and it gets slowly better.  Just a lovely film.

Winter Light (1963)

Saw Winter Light, an Ingmar Bergman film about a priest who is having a crisis of faith.  We open on a celebration of the mass in front of a nearly empty church.  The organist yawns as he starts the music.  The priest has no emotion in his voice and has the flu.  The film is subtle and ambiguous.  Famously, Ingmar's wife said of this film "Yes, Ingmar, it's a masterpiece. But it's a dreary masterpiece."

The nature of the priest's crisis of faith is the central point of the film.  I felt that the only way to satisfyingly end the film was for the priest to recover his faith (happy ending!) or to reject it in some way (stupid ending!) The film leaves it nicely ambiguous right up to the end though.  The priest's plight is likened to Jesus in the garden of gethsemane, praying while his apostles slept and ignored him.  As opposed to that image, this priest is merely letting himself down: he has a faithful woman who loves him, his advice is sought by the congregation, he does not seem to be being abandoned.

Despite this lack of abandonment however, the priest finds it hard to have faith in his God, his mission, and himself.  This doubt leads to guilt leads to self-loathing which prevents him from being of use and prevents him from receiving help.  We sort of leave him there - still acting out the lingering fumes of an exhausted faith.  The ending is deliciously ambiguous though: is this the dying gasp or the reclamation I hoped for (the happy ending?) It's a nice little study of a film, a stark yet ambiguous look at a man in crisis.

Consuming Spirits (2012)

Saw Consuming Spirits, a somewhat grim animated film about three people living in some dreary Appalachian town.  It features the usual elements of a cramped, small-town drama: addiction, mental health issues, divorce and infidelity.  Everyone in the film is ugly and advertisements play on the radio for "institution-grade" meat products.  Yes, this is one of those universes where things kind of comically suck.  Despite the grim and confusion start however, the film coheres into a touching, almost comforting story.

The film is very sad.  The characters are hopeless, stuck in this town in jobs which they are failing at and in romances that are continuing more out of inertia and faith than out of any affection.  The title of the film does a lot of nice work laying the thematic background: "Consuming Spirits" can be read as either ghosts which devour or just plain old drinking beer.  These two interpretations are tied together by the legacy of alcoholism that haunts the characters.

The film has the rough, unfinished look of a work print.  Some scenes are animated in Southpark-style paper puppets, some are stop-motion miniatures, some are traditional drawings.  Adding to this loose, raw feeling is the narration which is provided by the host of a radio gardening show who waxes poetical about vegetables and pests, weeds and deer.  At one point he says of deer "A rutting deer may lose the fear of man altogether when unsated.  Beware these cloven messengers of the hybrid knowledge.  They are the keepers of my crypt!"  Believe it or not, this statement makes more sense after you know the full story.  It's not just wild set-dressing (I mean it is that, but not just that.)

The film is interesting.  It's fairly dismal, reminding me of Phil Mulloy's Cowboys shorts.  The animation is off-putting and the subject matter is challenging.  The film feels long and it drags a bit here and there, but it wraps together nicely and is much more coherent and cohesive than you'd expect.