Device Notes

The above image is from Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Eyes of the Spider .  Since it's close to the end of the year, I decided to use an image from what may be the best movie I saw this year, alongside Jia Zhangke's Platform . Belle (2021)  I had limited expectations for this movie.  I respect Mamoru Hosoda, but his greatest work remains the short movies and TV episodes he directed between 1999 and 2003, plus maybe The Girl Who Leapt Through Time .  His Studio Chizu movies have many of the same qualities that made those films great, but before Belle they generally shared some of the same basic elements: they start out with focus on the everyday life of a family, then through some encounter with the supernatural, they seek to show that the overwhelming power of idealized familial love can overcome anything.  It sometimes works. Since Belle is Hosoda's third movie about how people use the internet, I didn't expect any surprises from it.  I was wrong.  Its hopeful ...

In this film, Robert Mitchum plays Harry Powell, a preacher and a serial killer.  In prison, he meets Ben Harper, a condemned man with $10,000 hidden away somewhere.  Powell coaxes information out of Ben about his family.  After Ben is hanged, Powell travels to his hometown and begins ingratiating himself to the locals.  They're all pleased to have a new preacher in town, and they encourage Ben's widow, Willa, to marry Powell.  The young Harper children, John and Pearl, are the only ones who know where Ben hid the money.  What ensues is John's desperate effort to defend his family from Powell's onslaught against their safety. Mitchum makes sense in the sinister role of Powell.  He rarely played a nice person in a film, even when he wasn't the bad guy.  But the film also expects you to believe that people trust him and admire him as a moral role model.  It works because of his booming voice.  He doesn't earn people's trust through warmth ...