The image is from Princess Mononoke, and if you didn't recognize it, I recommend you watch it at your earliest convenience. This year is its 25th Anniversary, and I wrote this right after going to see a screening of it at a local theater. I was pleasantly surprised by how many people showed up. There are a couple scenes theater audiences always react to when they see Princess Mononoke: they snicker at the scene where San pre-chews food for an unconscious Ashitaka, and they get excited when Ashitaka grabs an arrow that was fired at him and fires it right back at his assailant.
It's been a very long three months for me. I spent half of January and all of February writing a 56-page draft of a paper about groundwater and environmental justice. A psychiatrist prescribed me a bunch of medications without actually telling me what diagnosis they were for, but I later found that they were all for bipolar disorder so I assume that was it. (Update: That psychiatrist was a quack and none of those medications did anything but caused adverse side effects. But a different psychiatrist said I have "agitated depression.")
The most aggravating thing was dealing with a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy trying to get the state bar to approve my "Moral Character Application," an invasive survey that's supposed to prove that I'm a good/normal enough person to practice law. I don't think anyone should have to do this, considering measures to ensure that lawyers are ethical obviously don't work. It's hard for me to believe it prevents more harm than it causes.
The movies I watched were still good.
Don't Go Breaking My Heart (2011)
This is like an inversion of Tati's Playtime. Playtime shows first how architecture directs people's movements and then how people spontaneously find ways of diverging from that direction. This film starts with people repurposing architecture in small ways, and it escalates from there. It becomes a fight between the central characters for control of their surroundings, with the intent of using them as a medium of emotional expression.
This is perfect for Johnnie To and Wai Ka-Fai, the co-directors of Fat Choi Spirit, a film about people who love to play Mahjong for its own sake. Some of To's other films are about the same thing for other practices. Throw Down is about how good judo feels. Sparrow, maybe his masterpiece, features a fat-cat crime boss conceding to the heroes not for any practical reason, but simply out of honor for his craft. These are utopian films, not because everything goes perfectly for everyone but because the things that enrapture the characters really are the things that matter most in the world.
The films sell this simply through the strength and inventiveness of their visual expression. In Don't Go Breaking My Heart, it's in the things the characters do to charm and excite each other. The romantic leads work in office buildings across the street from each other and turn their corporate offices into performance stages. They watch each other through the window and their performances only get more elaborate as the film proceeds.
The Harder They Come (1972)
This is a dense film that moves quickly from one subject matter to the next. This is because it explains the world from the perspective of a character, Ivanhoe Martin, trying to escape stigma and exploitation, but finds new forms of each at every turn. Through all this, music and dance are the only sources of sympathy and release from the cartelization of his society and the indignities that plague him—even though they're controlled by his enemies.
The name "Ivanhoe Martin" is a reference to a Jamaican outlaw who became a folk hero of the working class. The character in this film is inspired Ivanhoe Martin's story, but is also a musician. He's played by the reggae legend Jimmy Cliff, whose music is used often in the movie. By blending these two figures, the film creates a hero who speaks to two sides of what its audience longs for.
Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)
In some ways, this doesn't feel like it should be one of the best movies I've ever seen. On paper, everything in it looks like a blunt, schematic statement of theme. The characters even speak such statements out loud. They mention how they hesitate to approach the things they imagine for fear of the ideal being ruined by reality. At a distance, it seems like it should be too awkward to work. But it's just too convincing. Joan Fontaine's performance is a big part of it.
Like in Ophüls's other films, the camera's presence is conspicuous because of how it moves, unbound in long takes. It has a mind of its own which is omniscient but still invested in the characters' lives. The way it restlessly tracks and anticipates their movements gives the impression that they're being pulled forward through time. It works especially well with this film's narrative structure: most of the film takes place in a flashback that portrays the contents of Lisa's letter. It lets us grasp the value she found in the moments she recalls, but it also contributes to our frustration with the knowledge that tragedy is inevitable.
But a great deal happens before the tragedy. The world this film depicts is multilayered, with unpredictable events, good and bad, changing the course of Lisa's life. While the omniscient camera mostly follows the events described in Lisa's letter, it sometimes glances aside at the activities of people who affect her life, but which she doesn't perceive. What started as a story about the gap between Lisa's reality and her imagination becomes a story about how much slips beneath our notice, and the devastation that slippage wreaks on our own and others' lives.
L’opéra-mouffe (1958)
This is one of Agnès Varda's most experimental films, and one of her own favorites. It's also called Diary of a Pregnant Woman. It's a highly subjective exploration of the Rue Mouffetard, an old and busy neighborhood in Paris. Scenes in the Rue Mouffetard are paired with abstract scenes of Varda's creation. It
comes from the perspective of someone who is clearly familiar with the
neighborhood, but who is experiencing a change in perception.
The film has a fascination with human anatomy and food, and by a combination of paying close attention to these things and free association, you gain a sense of how a familiar place can come to look new. The sensations this gives you are simultaneously disturbed and ecstatic. And despite how subjective the film is, the independent life of the Rue Mouffetard comes through. The people filmed on the street look back into the camera, responding to its curiosity.
Man of Tai Chi (2013)
If you love martial arts movies, you owe it to yourself to see this. (Use caution, though, as the film contains more than one scene with strobe effects.) The
sound effects of bones cracking and air whistling are almost too much,
but they help with important moments where the violence is supposed to
feel like it crosses a line. More importantly, it's some of Yuen-Woo Ping's best work. It's by no means realistic, but different types of martial arts actually look different across fights. The Karateka moves differently from the Sanda fighter, and they both move differently from the masters of Tai Chi. The only comparable films I can think of are the Ip Man movies and the legendary Lau Kar-Leung's Heroes of the East. You can see the back-and-forth between fighters, and the logical buildup of impacts that ultimately settles the outcome.
Pale Flower (1964)
The film begins just after the gangster Muraki gets out of prison. He went in willingly, having taken responsibility for a revenge killing on the yakuza's behalf. Near the beginning of the film, a younger gangster tries and fails to kill Muraki, and is forced to cut off a finger as punishment. He spends the rest of the film tagging along with Muraki, who keeps the finger in a small box in his pocket.
Muraki starts helping a young woman named Saeko get into gambling. The game rooms they visit come with ever higher stakes and more dangerous people. The games themselves, with the rhythmic clatter of wooden pieces and the dealer's voice, are tense yet hypnotic. At night, they drive through a haze of short-focus, getting into impromptu races with other cars on the road.
In the end, Muraki railroads himself back into prison with another revenge killing. The killing is rendered poetically, with no sound except for a Henry Purcell aria, shot like a dance between Muraki and his victim in the presence of statues and stained-glass windows. The film overall is beautiful, depicting a city that glows at night and how its light bounces off puddles of rainwater.
It dwells on self-consciously self-destructive behavior. The characters know their games are bad for them, but they don't care, don't even see that as a problem. Shinoda picked the yakuza as his subject because it was one of the few places he felt ceremony persisted in Japanese society. For Muraki, it's something worth throwing away his life for. After Saeko witnesses the final killing, the film lingers on she and Muraki gazing at each other. Earlier in the film, he tried to get Saeko to avoid drugs, but in the end, it's
obvious he isn't coming from some straight-edge high ground. They both have their vices. You're going to die someday, so you may as well do it in style. Muraki was just searching a little harder for the perfect style.
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