Random transmission from my life: if I were accurately representing my media-watching activities here, I would have to include like half a dozen watches of Bambi and The Lion King, which my son insists on watching daily. I'm actually finding Bambi to go down a lot easier than The Lion King on extreme repeat, which is something I never would have thought I'd say (Bambi has always mildly bored me). It's low-key slow-cinema/ambient impulses make it much easier just to vibe to than The Lion King's constant LOUD, IMPORTANT DRAMA.
Movies
Céline Sciamma writes/directs a remarkably cutting screenplay about the ways in which teen girls have to reconcile the politics of their bodies with the politics of their peers. As with all of Sciamma's work, it's laser-focused on its theme while also finding ways to be consistently generous and unpredictable in its stance toward its characters; for example, Adèle Haenel more or less becomes a kind of villain in the second half of the movie, but rather than make her a thinly sketched Mean Girl, Sciamma (and Haenel herself) make her development into that antagonist role a kind of tragedy born from social pressures and psychological anxieties that are really deftly laid out by the movie's opening half, and as a result, nothing here feels so simple as the straightforward protagonist/antagonist binary that another movie might have been tempted to make it. Water Lilies is Sciamma's feature debut, though, and it's clear that, unlike in, say, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma is still working out her style here, and it's a little more home-grown in terms of camerawork and lighting than I'm used to seeing from her films. That said, there are some pretty strong images that crop up here from time to time, and if the only thing that changes as you go back to the early stages of Sciamma's career is that it just feels a little more low-budget and indie-ish, then I think she's got to be one of the great directors working today, right? Grade: B+
I'm never coming to Makoto Shinkai movies for the plots, which is good because this one is irritating. Even laying aside some of the niggling inconsistencies in the plot mechanics and characters themselves, it's pretty dumb that this movie presents its plot as a symbolic analogue to climate change—not just for the way that it shyly celebrates the protagonist's choice to destroy Tokyo with climate change just so he can get with his girlfriend (it's a long story), but also for the fact that the movie sets up this trolley-problem-type scenario in the first place (as if climate change really hinged on individual [ir]responsibility in choosing one lifestyle over another instead of multi-national corporations and nation states exploiting half the global population). But like I said, I'm not really here for the plot; I'm looking for that shimmering, detailed, achingly colorful animation that forms the backbone of everything I like about Shinkai movies. And Weathering with You delivers that and more. It's probably the best-looking Shinkai movie to date; the setting's constant rain pierced by only intermittent rays of sunshine is the perfect conduit for some of the most breathtaking animated flourishes in Shinkai's career: the flashes of deep green as a beam of sunlight plays over raindrop-bejeweled grass, the swirling azure depths of the towering clouds, the stark gloss of a waterlogged Tokyo—it's all just so beautiful and striking. I'm really having a hard time figuring out what to do with a movie whose plot I dislike so strongly but whose aesthetic I love so much, sooo... Grade: B-
I've seen a lot of reviews complaining about this movie's didacticism and its focus on bad, second-wave feminist folk music, but I feel like those criticisms are kind of missing the forest for the trees. Admittedly, most of the songs are pretty bad (though I gotta stan "Papa Engels Was Right"), but I really don't think they're a vehicle for tidy lessons about feminism; from where I'm sitting, they're clearly an extension of the character of Apple's arc as a woman finding a meaningful framework for her gender through explicit political action, and while the songs' ideas about female liberation and bodily autonomy aren't exactly antithetical to this film's worldview, I also don't think they really represent the film laying bare every stitch of thematic ambition it has. Specifically, the presence of the entire other half of the film that focuses instead on Suzanne, who ends up living a much more domestic life in which she also finds meaning, does a lot to, if not problematize, then definitely enrich the absolutism of the folk songs, and whatever holistic thesis the movie has on the female experience, it emerges from the juxtaposition of these two stories, not simply the overt political slogans we hear. And what emerges is complex and beautiful and poignant. So says I, a man who definitely understands everything that there is to know about femininity. Anyway, I do think the screenplay is a little shoddy at times, particularly in its use of overlapping voiceovers (the "narrator" sections always felt extremely artificial and jarring to me), and it feels a tad too long, too. But this movie's core relationship between Apple and Suzanne is so strong that none of that ever becomes too big of a problem for the movie's overall impact. Anyway, after all this rambling, I guess my take is that the best thing about this movie is that core friendship, which is so good. Grade: B+
Outside of the special effects, there's not a lot to recommend about this movie. The cast is alternatingly bad and bland (and in the case of Sinbad himself, badly bland), the script is leaden, the aesthetics are hardcore orientalist (and very reliant on brownface). But the effects, by legendary stop-motion effects maestro Ray Harryhausen, are great, if (in retrospect) a little too obviously doing a beta for the much more technically impressive Jason and the Argonauts—there's even a skeleton sword fight. If I'd seen this movie first, I'd probably be a little bit more positive toward it, but I made the mistake of watching Jason before this, so this can only pale in comparison. Dragon vs. Cyclops was very cool, though. Grade: B-
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