Babylon (2022)

Saw Babylon, a film about showbiz in the wake of the talkies.  More broadly, it's about progress and how it impacts people.

The film follows four characters most closely: an up-and-coming Ingénue who has raw talent, a hard-working Servant who has hustle, and a suave Leading Man who has vision.  The film watches how they are impacted by arrival of the talkies: some are able to ride the wave, but not all.

The film is meant to be a comedy. It opens on a huge, swinging party which is a metaphor for the before-times.  The party really is great though: there's nude people cavorting about, midgets, costumes, and barnyard animals.  This is all shot in a continuous take, overwhelming the senses with an eternal swooping glide over the festivities.  I enjoyed all the glut and excess.  The gag I liked best was when the leading man is talking to someone and, unfocused and in the background, a cow shambles by.  Outrageous!

The film is frequently funny in an ironic kind of way, however (typical of me) I enjoyed it more when it was giving me pathos.  There's a late-film monologue where one character lectures another on the inevitability of irrelevance, of having outlived your usefulness, but there's another undercurrent that's never really spelled out: that this is a business.  Yes, there's talk of artistry and talent, but it's all marketing in the end.  It reminded me The Social Network, another film about vision being transmuted into cash.  This is all sort of metaphorically given to us in a sinister closing party that shows what was hiding beneath everything the whole time (also: phenomenal cameo from Tobey Maguire!)

Ossessione (1943)

Saw Ossessione, an Italian film based on a noir book.  Being a noir plot, you know there's gonna be murder most foul and femmes most fatale.  In addition to all of this, I thought the main character guy was pretty attractive, so that was nice.

The plot is that a drifter (the main character) comes to a small bar/gas station rest stop in rural Italy run by a husband/wife team.  The husband in much older and fatter than his wife, but he seems to love her. She is hard-working and stern.  The drifter immediately starts making eyes at the wife of the house who makes starts making eyes right back and quickly engineers a way to keep the drifter at her bar.  We now have a classic love triangle: the oblivious husband, the scheming wife, and the hot third party.

The film is pretty good.  It's shot in a naturalistic style with enough Hitchcockian heightened drama to keep it interesting.  There's another drifter character who urges the main character to move on, away from the wife's messy designs and to join the navy.  I read these scenes as being homoerotic because it amused me to do so.  The film is really most interested in watching this attractive drifter brood and be tormented.  He's pretty good at that though, so it's time well spent.

The film is more slow-paced and natural than most noirs, but its noir roots are where its heart is.  There's not a lot of fedoras or detectives, but dames get slapped and schemers scheme.  It surprised me a bit with the slower pacing, but it was interesting.  Sort of Maltese Falcon meets Call Me By Your Name.  It didn't shock me or blow me away (what does?) but it's a solid film.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

Saw Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, a fun little film that follows Wallace and Gromit as they once again match wits with the villainous Feathers McGraw.  Also adding to the madness: Wallace has created a robot which is comically irritating.  The film is fairly fun, but contains a lot of in-jokes and references to older shorts and movies.  It's not important to know all the lore, but you'll understand the joke of having Wallace run into the farmer from Shaun the Sheep, for example.

Anyhow, the antagonist, Feathers McGraw comes from The Wrong Trousers which is my favorite Wallace and Gromit short.  It doesn't quite match that one's climactic chase sequence, but it delivers on the homey, goofy feel of the franchise.  It didn't quite meet my expectations, but in fairness my expectations were sky-high.

If you've seen the other Wallace & Gromit movies, you know what to expect.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)

Saw Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.  It was a Sam Peckinpah movie about the death of Billy the Kid at the hands of Pat Garrett.  I didn't like it.  Filmed in the 70s, this is one of those movies that celebrates the daring individual against the encroaching forces of civilization and capitalism.  This is a fine theme and, unlike many other films of the time, it doesn't come at the expense of broader society or some hapless girlfriend.  The folks that Billy kills in order to be free, man, are usually maniacs or evil in their own right.  No, the thing that sets me off about this film is how tediously violent it is, how plodding and grim, how torturous and lame.

The plot is this: Pat Garrett is a retired outlaw become sheriff.  He's been hired or assigned or whatever to bring his old friend Billy the Kid to justice.  Pat has the outlaw chops but is clearly a sell-out.  He cavorts with prostitutes, commands hired men, and generally carries out his duties in a grim self-loathing way, hating what he's being forced to become in order to capture Billy.  Billy meanwhile smiles and smirks and dandles children on his knee, beloved by all, he kills only when he has to, being free and cool and all.  All the other characters are filthy, ugly, fat old men who lumber ponderously around the desert, murdering each other.  (Oddly Bob Dylan is given a prominent but minor role.)

In fairness to the film, I think I didn't really Get It.  It's not really for me, I think.  The violence is distasteful, but it's sort of Peckinpah's whole thing, and the theme of living free vs bowing to societal pressures is a theme I've seen before and have been irritated by before (most notably by Five Easy Pieces which I hated.)  I think I recognize the universe that this film takes place in as one that has no use for me; one in which I, personally, would be killed by.  If life were all just a cynical kill-or-be-killed, I think I'd just lay down and die.

Beauty and the Beast (1978)

Saw Beauty and the Beast, a Czech version of the famous story.  This one stays mostly true to the original story, lingering on the redemptive power of the love of a woman for a monster.  A little off-topic, but in its own way, the Beauty and the Beast story may be the first example of the Magical Pixie Dream Girl trope.  Anyway, this film is shot as a horror film, so it's fairly grim and strange.  The magical castle that Beauty stays in is dark and shadowy, overgrown with moss and  dirt everywhere.  It is inhabited by magical servants who are not singing teacups, but dark, gargoylish monsters.  The Beast himself is made up to look like a bird, his head covered in some unpleasant mixture of dirt and feathers.

The film succeeds in being creepy, but creepy in a sort of dark fantasy way.  You never really feel fear, but it would creep out a child, I feel.  There are strong elements of fairy-tale whimsy and simplicity in it however.  Beauty has two sisters who are nakedly greedy, literally stealing the dress of of Beauty at one point, always laughing and blatantly evil in a broad, fairy-tale kind of way.  Juxtaposed with this is Beauty's father, a struggling merchant trying to provide for his family.  His sincerely acted exhaustion grounds the story in some real-world anxiety and despair.

The film is a strange mix of cartoonish and realistic.  It's very gothic and sinister, particularly when Beauty is in the Beast's castle.  It's not scary, but it's very self-indulgent in this teenage, self-serious kind of way, almost campily so, as if Hellraiser had been a fantasy film.  It's an interesting take on the story.

Mildred Pierce (1945)

Saw Mildred Pierce, a noir film that opens on a murder and then flashes back to tell the story of how we got here.  Mostly, the film is a fairly progressive film about Mildred, a working mother building a life for her children.  The film was shot in the war years, and the business that the mother builds up is a restaurant, but it's still a nice thing to see this woman make a successful career for herself.  Alas, she is forced into ever-more financial risk by her heinous daughter Veda.  Veda is the wanna-be aristocrat who has the misfortune of being born to a prole and whose disdain for her mother's work is the engine of most of the film.  Hilariously, she was almost played by Shirley Temple.

The film was alright.  There's a strong proto-feminist (perhaps even crypto-saphic!) undercurrent to the film which makes it feel fresher than other contemporaneous films.  The character of Mildred is studied closely.  It's an interesting meditation on who this character is, how she's driven to greatness, and what that greatness means to her.  It unfortunately also involves Butterfly McQueen (famous for not knowing about birthin' babies in Gone With the Wind) doing her maid role which is the stuff of racial caricature.  So this film delivers on strong women, but only strong white women (a trait shared by Gone With the Wind.)  We can't have everything.

Joan Crawford does a nice job of portraying Mildred.  She does her signature clench-jawed declaiming  of her lines and every one sounds great, but she feels strangely wimpy here.  I found myself thinking how she could have done it better, such is my vice.  Similarly, the other characters are stuck in the mannered style of 40s acting: they say their lines in a service-like way, then scuttle off, leaving the stage clear for the next scene.  It's a very formal way of acting.  Everyone is playing their role in a way that makes sure the background characters never protrude into the foreground, but it leaves some lines feeling strangely flat, like they're just lines being recited.

Anyway, this was an alright film.  Worth seeing for Crawford's scene-chewing and surprisingly progressive in parts.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Saw Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.  It was a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road.  That film I absolutely adored.  It was full of crazy, delightful, shocking excess.  This film is similar in that it's more of the same fun-house ride, but it's the same fun-house ride as before, so it feels a little less ground-breaking.  Don't get me wrong: this is not a bad film by any means, but it doesn't leave me with the same go-out-and-tell-everyone feeling the first film did.

The plot follows the story of Imperitor Furiosa before she joins Immortan Joe's gang.  Because this is a prequel, some of the conclusions are a little fore-gone.  Eg: we know she will wind up working for Immortan Joe.  The film keeps the action exciting enough that it sort of helps you to forget this, but we know always how the film will sort of wind up.  On that note: not to give spoilers, but the ending is pretty satisfying, a clever symbol of hope for tomorrow winning out over anger over the past.

I liked this film okay.  It wasn't as face-melting as the first film, but it's a solid showing.

The Blood of a Poet (1932)

Saw The Blood of a Poet, a surrealist film directed by Jean Cocteau.  Being a surrealist film, it's kind of hard to describe the plot or to determine what counts as a spoiler, but the premise anyway is that an artist wipes off the mouth of a charcoal sketch only to find that the mouth has somehow transferred to the palm of his hand.  Later on I think he turns into a statue.

The film completely lost me.  It has the creative process and artistry on its mind, but I was too tired and confused to guess at the meanings.  There's many moments where the artist becomes the art or the art comes to malevolent life, and I feel these are straightforward metaphors about creation and about "finishing" a piece (at which point it gains its own sort of "life".)  As I say however, the film contains a lot of stuff and I for sure did not understand it all.  It was fairly brief however, so I didn't have to baffled for too long.

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

Saw Bill & Ted Face the Music, a sequel to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey which I unabashedly loved.  This film is similarly goofy and shaggy-dog, but I gotta admit I didn't like it quite so much as the Bogus Journey.

It's a very fun kind of film, jumping wildly from gag to gag in a way that never gets cloying or tedious but always seems somehow energetic and fresh in an 80s film kind of way.  There's a series of sequences where they visit versions of themselves in the future which are delightfully dumb.  Similarly, this film introduces Bill and Ted's daughters who are (of course) winningly doofy clones of their fathers.  The film is slightly precious but exudes so much good dude energy that I can't bring myself to be critical.

Here are some small gripes: they assemble a musical super-troupe by going backwards in time and recruiting Jimi Hendrix and Mozart and such.  This rang a little false to me because, like, Jimi Hendrix's music was a reaction to and a partial subversion of Mozart's work.  I don't think Mozart would have been delighted and impressed by hearing a subversive remix of his music, he would probably have just felt insulted, or distracted by the electric guitar.  Another thing: the introduction of the daughters (and their large roles in the film) suggests an open door for more sequels which makes the movie seem a tad  artificial, perhaps even corporate.  These are all pet peeves of mine however which I trot out just to have something to say.  Really this was a fun and sweet film.

So, this was a fun film.  I don't know that I'll be recommending it to folks full-throated-ly, but it was a nice capstone on the series.

There's Always Tomorrow (1956)

Saw There's Always Tomorrow, a domestic drama about a man who works at a toy factory.  The film opens on his plans for a romantic birthday dinner with his wife falling through as all of his kids take priority over his life.  He happens to meet an old acquaintance who is played by Barbara Stanwyck so, y'know, this is not just any random lady.  They dine and laugh and the woman showers the man with the attention his family denies him.

This is an interesting film because it was made in the 50s.  Societal expectations of the time cannot be flouted but also patriarchal figures cannot be mocked, so how are we going to deal with this burgeoning scandal?  I won't give the ending away, but it's handled decently.  There's a great showdown in the finale which, although it may not be super believable, is a great source of shouting and women crying and so forth (all of which feeds me.)

The characters all come off more-or-less okay.  The wife of the main character is necessarily very dismissive of any attempt at communication.  I get that this was necessary for the film's plot, but damn that lady is dumb.  When her husband talks about losing a sense of adventure together the wife primly says "Well, a life of adventure sounds very exhausting." and then she reminds him  to come inside and close the balcony door, dear.  Ugh, this lady.

Anyway, the film is fun but somewhat mild.  It has some nice Hitchcockian scenes, where the man and his old coworker laugh and talk, always being overheard at just the wrong moment.  There's some tension there but not a lot.  Similarly, a lot of the film is pretty twee, so we never get into really dark territory.  Similarly, since the film was made in the 50s, there's little chance of getting anything really transgressive (yo but what if they formed a throuple?)  This film is sort of the best of a series of compromises, a middling film that's pleasant but is sort of stopped from being really surprising or exciting.  Ah well.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Saw Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a fairly stirring film set in the Planet of the Apes universe.  In case you're somehow unaware, the franchise was kicked off by a Twilight Zone-esque film showing a group of astronauts crash land on a planet ruled by apes where humans are unintelligent livestock animals.  The big twist of the original film was that this is earth after all and that some calamity has occurred which wound us up in this upside-down world.  The prequels (which this film is one of) then work to fill in that gap: how did we get from here to there?

The prequel films have been attempted twice: once in the 70s and now in the 2010s.  They have a tricky central problem to solve: the apes are going up against long odds as they overcome humanity but we know, from the original, that they do it.  How can we start the apes off as an underclass without making their eventual transition to the over-class very troubling?  The original 70s films could not square this circle: they idiotically made the intelligent apes into analogues for black people (being shipped from Africa and employed as maids and all) implying that some kind of race war was coming where the "apes" would rise up and subjugate all us "humans".  Unsurprisingly, the films struggled to cohere.  The modern films have no such trouble.  They draw from the Fallout series of games and from other post-apocalyptic stories. How will a sympathetic and well-meaning pluralistic society wind up subjugating one of its sub-sets?  Why by arrogance, laziness, and greed - the same as today.

The film mostly follows ape society as it begins to crystallize into a feudal state.  It evokes Apocalypto in parts, showing tribal communities being subjugated by a more complex, but also more stratified culture.  It's interesting to see these historical dramas play out, but the film is more interested in how to negotiate sympathy between humans and apes.  Humans are still around and apes are not certain about how to deal with them.  They are capable of great and useful things, but they are also hungry for power themselves.  Can we create a pluralistic society?  The question looms large over our real lives as well.  There's no red/blue analogues, but we are divided, and the players in the different camps regard each other with wary suspicion.

So okay, but did I like it?  Well, the film is solidly alright.  It has the gaudy, CGI-soaked feel of one James Cameron's Avatar films or of the Marvel franchise.  There's pages and pages of IMDB trivia devoted to the novel use of AI in the film's special effects.  You're not going to be very challenged by the film, even as it deals with some interesting topics.  It's an entertaining and pretty film and the emphasis is on those two items: prettiness and entertainment.  It's not bad, but it didn't blow me away.  It's a sort of by-the-numbers big box-office epic.  A sequel is planned, naturally, as there is always more of this story to tell: it has no firm point, so it can go on forever.

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Saw I Walked with a Zombie, a sort of quaint film about a nurse who comes to work at a small island in Haiti or somewhere where they follow voodoo.  The nurse is supposed to care for the wife of one of the guys who runs the sugar cane plantation on the island.  This wife was once normal but is now shambling and vacant, almost (dare I say) zombie-like.  I didn't realize it, but the film is basically Wuthering Heights.  One of the characters even calls the Heathcliff character Byronic.

Anyway, the setting of the film gives it strong racial/colonial overtones.  I was convinced half-way through that the wife was meant to stand in for the decaying western values transplanted and enforced by the colonial settlers.  Like the wife, a once vivacious force is reduced to sleepwalking along, vacant and useless but venerated by the local rulers.  There's a late-film revelation that implies a more murky interplay with the locals.

Alas, the film doesn't really go in that direction, at least not explicitly.  Instead it's a somewhat more conventional horror film, with stalking black men menacing the main characters.  It's fairly lurid and is pretty entertaining, but also somewhat racist in what I feel is a strident and indifferent way.  In one early exchange a black man is driving the nurse to the manor house.  He speaks of his family being brought to this island in slave galleys. "Well it's certainly a beautiful place they were brought to!" the nurse smilingly says.  "As you say ma'am." the driver responds. "As you say." because what else can you really say to that?

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Saw I Saw the TV Glow, a film about a boy becoming obsessed with a young-adult TV show called The Pink Opaque.  The film is a sort of psychodrama/horror film, about losing oneself, but not in the way you'd think.

The film is most focused on the harmful and helpful parts of fandom.  On the one hand, the TV show gives this boy an escape from his difficult home life, friends, a sense of purpose and belonging, but the film also suggests that this all-consuming obsession may lead to increasingly insular beliefs and ideas about the world, ultimately even sucking the joy out of real life.

The plot of the film makes it seem like Beware the Slenderman, a story about a teenager who falls too deeply into a fictional world, but the fictional TV show within the film is clearly based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other such supernatural-themed teen shows, which have large real-life followings.  Not everyone who watched Buffy became unhealthily obsessed, many found role models that gave them a voice and a way of carrying themselves, a way to command respect when they felt least respected.  Particularly for folks who didn't perfectly fit it: gay men and women, struggling with their place in the world.

The director of this film is queer and I cannot help feeling that their life journey is a strong inspiration of this film.  It helps explain why the central TV show is given such a fair shake: yes this is an all-consuming fantasy, but sometimes you need to start with fantasy to get to reality.  I don't want to be reductive though: the film is not only about gender expression, but about the central struggle of going along and fitting in with the world vs going your own direction, following a lesser-traveled path, even at the cost of your own safety, comfort, and even life.

The film is a slow creep.  It feels more like a coming-of-age film than a horror film.  There's no jump scares, but there is the creeping realization that something deeper and stranger is going on.  The film plays with our expectations and also gives us lots of glorious, creepy imagery.  Special mention: that scene where the main character's father pushes him under the shower.  The main character screams, the soundtrack distorts, and the water is suddenly animated with ugly colored pencils before a smash cut to black.  Splendid!

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Saw L.A. Confidential (1997), a modern noir film with three major protagonists.  The main protagonist is this self-righteous boy-scout of a cop who is determined to do everything by the book.  He opens the film being denied a position in the homicide squad because of his unwillingness to bend the law to get results.  This conflict of justice vs vigilantism becomes the central preoccupation of the film.  As I said: it's a noir film.

The film was alright.  I was able to follow the plot okay which is always nice in a noir.  Sometimes they get so knotty that I completely lose track of who the characters are talking about.  Not so here - it was usually easy to keep track of what the characters know.  I did have a sneaking suspicion that I'd seen this movie before though, so that may be why.

Anyway, the film also spends a lot of time creating and exploding cover stories as different characters try to clear their names.  It made me think of post-modernism, where the narrative is considered to be more important than the reality of a situation.  In these modern times when objective truth is becoming more and more murky, perhaps we're due for a resurgence in noirs?

Anyway, I'm not that interested in the central theme of the film (playing by the rules vs taking the law into one's own hands) and this film did not succeed in hooking me on it either.  It did a good job of keeping me entertained and guessing as the film unfolded however.  It was a decent film.

Until the End of the World (1991)

Saw Until the End of the World, an extremely long film by Wim Wenders.  Clocking in at 4 hours and 45 minutes, the film is sort of three small films put together.  The three films are these:

1. A woman falls in love with a man by chance encounter.  He is on the run and she follows him across the globe, country to country, trying to understand him and to save him.

2. A nuclear powered satellite loses control and is hurtling somewhere towards earth.  Society reacts with terror and panic at this calamity.

2. A scientist develops a way to record and transmit dreams from one person to another.

Each of these films are interesting in their own right.  Apparently the first one is a sort of inverted Odyssey, where Penelope becomes tired of waiting for Odysseus and goes out to find him herself.  It's an interesting feminist twist on the Odyssey story and worth digging into.  There's that theme of obsession and desire that films are so good at exploring.

The second film could be made into a compelling action film.  There are interesting thoughts to be had about mankind's relationship to its own continued survival and mankind's relationship with its own weapons of war.  I don't want to spoil this film too much, but there's potential for ruminations on the end of the world and the sort of legacy humans will leave too.

The third film I found the most interesting.  There's some thoughts there about how technology both empowers and hobbles us, enabling us to things we could do before, but also limiting us in some ways.  (eg: we now have cameras to do what oil paints used to, but now we need photoshop or smoothing filters to hide our flaws.) That's a whole topic unto itself.

Alas, this is not three small films but one big one.  The same characters are improbably involved in all three acts and, to be fair, there is some foreshadowing and theming to tie these things all together.  Apparently there was going to be a fourth act that also tied in to the frequent references to aboriginal ceremonies.

To add to this, it's directed by Wim Wenders whose films have never really been about the destination.  Instead, his films amble along, enjoying the car ride and listening to some laid-back tunes.  I feel like Wenders's work would really work best in a period piece.  The slow contemplation would be more palatable to me if it were set in the 40s, where life was lived more slowly.  Perversely however, this film is set in the future (ie: 1999).  This is a slightly retro future however.  There are public pay phones, but they are now video pay phones.  Cars no longer play CDs, but they do use some kind of plastic card to play music instead.  It's a strange choice that I think was only made for plot-fudging reasons.

So this film was not the greatest.  It tackles many things.  It does not feel rushed thankfully, but that is due to its length which is oppressive.  The film feels like a long book or a heady dinner conversation that discursively stretches on, wandering through many themes.  It's relatively interesting and intelligent, but oof I wish there were an intermission.  Usually, I want to watch a quick movie before bed, not start a marathon!  That is why this movie sat on my queue for so long.

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.