For once, most of these are films I actually went to go see in a theater. Ponyo was a rewatch, but the last time I saw that movie, I was only 13. I was excited to see that one, because I didn't love it when I first saw it. So far, whenever I haven't been totally won over by one of Miyazaki's films, I've been blown away when I went to see it in a theater. Ponyo was no exception. I've often found people's insistence the importance of the theater experience a little overstated or confusing, but these films have convinced me.
Asteroid City (2023)
Wes Anderson often has actors perform with low expression, and out of all his films this one may exemplify that the most. I don't really perceive them as expressionless, but empty, portraying people drained of energy and expectation. Many suggest Asteroid City is a film about grief, but if so, it's a late stage of grief, or the aftermath. One has no more tears, but senses some emptiness behind things they may have taken for granted before.
There are two stories in this film. One is a frame story in which a playwright writes and produces a play called "Asteroid City." The other is an embedded story, the story of the play. Notably, this story is not depicted to us as if it were a play being performed, but as if it were its own movie. Some people respond to this negatively, feeling that it prevents them from caring about the events of the play.
But like the end of Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, I don't think the framing of the embedded story robs it of its power. The reminder that what we see is artificial doesn't somehow cheapen it. It reminds us that there was some need or interest a person was hoping to meet in building it. Asteroid City understands how much existential importance the concept of extraterrestrial life has for some people, especially in this film's postnuclear US setting. So, it tells us about someone building an artifice around it.
If anything, the frame narrative makes it more poignant. There's no escapism, just longing, and a failure to find what one was looking for when they set out trying to build something from their imagination. Poignant, but still always funny more than upsetting; it's emptied out, past the point of being sad about it. It evokes a mood of waiting around to see what happens because you can't convince yourself there's anything better to do.
Beau is Afraid (2023)
This film can be divided up into four sections, the first being Beau living alone in his apartment, assailed on one side by his anxiety about having to go visit his mother and on the other side by the exaggerated smorgasbord of street crime constantly taking place outside his building. The second is Beau's stay with a family whose members seem kind at first but increasingly show themselves to be unstable. The third is a partly animated sequence in which Beau imagines a play based on his life. The last is Beau's visit to his mother's house. These are all occasionally interrupted by flashbacks to Beau's life with his mother when he was a child.
Beau is Afraid kept losing me then reeling me back in. The first and second parts were genuinely funny, and I was optimistic. The third part reminded me of Michel Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle. It's visually striking, but devoted to hokey, arguably reactionary ideas that almost any film fan will have already seen done to death. This is where it first started to lose me, but it ended with a decent jab at itself. The final section contains the film's best scene, but the dialogue becomes extremely repetitive and wordy, saying the same thing over and over again.
It reminds me of Charlie Kaufman's films Synecdoche, New York and, to a lesser extent, Anomalisa, except that I appreciated this film's sense of humor a lot more. I don't doubt that the ideas this film constantly elaborates on are personal to Ari Aster, but again, films about men's fear and confusion about women and/or familial responsibility are ubiquitous. I do like this movie though, because in the end it comes across more as an experiment and an extended joke rather than, as some critics have derisively called it, a "therapy session."
First Cow (2019)
In this film, Toby Jones plays an English aristocrat called the "Chief Factor" who owns the first cow to have been brought to a trading outpost in Oregon. In the middle of the film, he has a discussion with a sea captain about how to properly punish a disobedient sailor. The captain says he limited the punishment to twenty lashes so as to keep the sailor in good enough condition for labor for the rest of the voyage. The Chief Factor argues that a harsher punishment, though it would have rendered the sailor unable to work, might have impressed the other sailors to work even harder. He suggests that in some cases, it might even be wise to kill someone as a publicly visible punishment.
The Chief Factor here sounds a lot like his countrymen who wrote to justify and theorize the enclosures and the poorhouses. Nothing about a person, not even their right to live, is sacred when the propertied classes are trying to figure out how to maximize their revenue. But the Chief Factor's commentary is only a brief part of this film.
In other places, this is a film about people who are passionate about their work, who relish the things they do for their own sake. It's also about people having visions for the future, not only believing that things could improve for them but working out what they can change and how. And it's a film about the friendship between people who embody these mindsets, born of gratitude. But these people can only do these things by stealing, and in the end all they leave to history are their skeletons.
The meaning of the film's opening scene isn't clear until the end, nor is the meaning of the ending clear without that opening scene. The end is so sudden and the opener is so brief that their connection probably won't be the first thing that comes to your mind. Chronologically, the first scene comes after the last scene. But separating them like this means that in the moment, you experience the ending as open and ambiguous, and only then remember what the film told us about it earlier. It lets us draw two contrary feelings from the way it ends, on one hand of the characters' holding onto a vision and having at least a chance of getting there by the skin of their teeth, and on the other of history burying what they stand for.
The Flash (2023)
Several times now, I've seen people describe films they dislike as "ChatGPT cinema." But we need to be clear about this. The Flash is not ChatGPT cinema: ChatGPT is designed to produce responses that an average user would consider "normal." I've seen it described as a machine that produces responses that "look like answers" to whatever questions you ask it. (Though I still haven't gotten it to tell me what exactly is happening to the Bear River delta as the Great Salt Lake dries up.)
The Flash isn't like this. It seems to me more like a film where various parties involved in its making couldn't reconcile their different opinions of how they wanted it to go or how they wanted it to feel. I don't know if this was the case, but it would hardly be surprising. The friend I saw it with could even tell that the last scene must have been reshot more than once just by looking at it. I wonder if this has anything to do with how bad the effects look. Some people behind the film have explained that they're supposed to look bad to simulate how things naturally would look to the Flash, a fictional character, when he enters the "Chronobowl," a fictional location. There was no explanation of why, even if there were some reason for these fictional things to look like anything in particular, we the audience should care to see it.
This is also a "multiverse" movie, and while I know DC Comics has a multiverse, it's obvious that making a movie about it now is hopping a bandwagon. I don't know why these are so popular now, though one of my friends believes it is to encourage a type of thinking in people that dwells on hypotheticals about their personal lives, rather than what they can do in the real world. I think it may be because it lets studios make a theoretically infinite amount of content about the same material, which is easier than trying to do something original. Or there may be no specific intent behind it, maybe it's just a trend that snowballed out of Marvel beginning to delve into the multiverse concept from the source comics.
The person who asked me to go see this movie said they thought it would be good because the audience score on RottenTomatoes was high. The lesson here is that neither the audience score nor the critics' score should sway you. You are able to easily decide for yourself if a movie interests you, or to consult the opinions of people you actually know. If one is more interested in critics, it should be because they write out their opinions and you can therefore get to know whether or not you care what they think. And even then, you don't care about the critics' score; you care about individual critics' opinions. The audience score is a trap.
Ponyo (2008)
A very funny film, and one of the most detailed, inventive, and kinetic. Also one of the films that most exposes that Miyazaki auteurism is, in large part, a narrative peddled by Studio Ghibli for marketing purposes. Hiromasa Yonebayashi and Makiko Futaki are the heroes here, in my view. (Nice $300 million tech demo dipshit, now check this out.) But it has something like the off-putting quality Jonathan Rosenbaum recognized in Jacques Demy's The Young Girls of Rochefort, a vexation underneath the comic, colorful surface. The sea near Lisa and Sosuke's house is severely polluted, and Ponyo's magical journey to find Sosuke creates waves powerful enough to submerge a whole town. This film is obviously concerned with humans' relationships to the other animals, and to the biomes where they don't live.
The film's actual premise is that the
moon is going to crash into the Earth because of the out-of-control
magic of a sorcerer who wanted to end the age of humanity so he could
stop the pollution of the Earth and create a surge of new life rivaling
the Cambrian Explosion. It falls to children to stop this from
happening, and perhaps the biggest vexation is them having to answer for
the grudges and mistakes of earlier generations at such a young age. But it doesn't feel as heavy as all that while you're watching it.
This is probably because, unlike those films, its story is driven entirely by the whims of 5-year-old children, and its art style isn't verisimilar. I normally hesitate to compare films to dreams, but Ponyo really is like an especially unhinged dream. The characters notice all the bizarre phenomena but are only mildly surprised by them. The ambiguous emotions it provokes coexist without irony. Dreams aren't just unreality, but also scattered elements of real life, acceptance of the weird as normal, and confusing mixtures of feelings. And the parts of real life that shine through in this film don't just include the depictions of school, work, and home life, but the careful, weighty character animation, especially when Ponyo is running all over Lisa's house with no understanding of how furniture is used.
Shanghai Express (1932)
Andrew Sarris eloquently said Josef von Sternberg was "a lyricist of light and shadow rather than a master of montage." I still have many of his films left to see, but of the ones I have, the parts I most remember are single shots of people in silhouette, of light illuminating a single important spot in the darkness, or of delicately captured cigarette smoke.
Sternberg made a number of films about displaced people who encounter each other in underground places, or in transit. There's a lot of intrigue in these settings. This is partly because anyone in such a situation probably has an interesting story. Then there's the way many of these displaced people put on a front of being shallow and morally disengaged. In Shanghai Express, the performances suggest great history and emotional intensity beneath the characters' insouciance. But even as the characters try to keep it buried, the film, like so many of Sternberg's other films, brings the intensity to the fore with its beautiful shadows and its lovingly realized settings. There's a tension between the open expressiveness of the imagery and the characters' struggles with respectability and hesitation toward their own feelings of attraction.
Showing Up (2022)
Like First Cow, this is a film where necessity and passion run into each other. The main character Lizzy is a sculptor, but also works at an art school. She lives next to Jo, another artist who is also her friend and landlord. Her immediate family members are also artists, and her mother works at the art school. While she works on her sculpting, Lizzy also supervises a pigeon that was injured by her cat.
Many of Lizzy's relationships could give rise to problems, but for the most part, they don't. What matters to this film is that those relationships are facts of her life. The problems that might arise from them would give rise to stories with beginnings, middles, and ends, but this is a film about how life goes on before and after all that.
What punctuates this film, then, are not problems being solved, but moments of aesthetic contemplation. This is a film that understands art as something people spend hours of their lives on, straining their hands, eyes, ears, noses, and budgets to get something the way they want it or to discover something. But not in an "art is suffering" kind of way. On the contrary, putting all this into it lets you lose yourself in it and can give you a meditative reprieve from work, inconvenience, and anxiety.
Suzume (2023)
There are two major threads in Suzume which don't cohere very well and are rather different in effectiveness. One is the romance: the two leads, Suzume and Souta, not only don't have much chemistry, but don't have much interaction period. Also, Souta spends most of the film having been magically transformed into a chair. Nevertheless, it still ends up with the same treatment we find in Shinkai's other films, where their romance is the most important thing in the world.
The second thread is the road trip. Suzume and Souta travel haphazardly throughout Japan, and along the way they meet random people who offer them rides, shelter, food, and so on. Suzume's mother died during the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake, when Suzume was four years old. At the end of the film, having met all these people who were willing to help her over the course of her travels, she's able to look back on her younger self and find that despite what she experienced back then, she's still able to believe things will turn out OK. Something about the way this was all put together doesn't entirely sit right with me. I agree with Hayao Miyazaki when he says "one must not speak too facilely of hope." Still, this part of the film works so well that I'd probably say this was Shinkai's best film if that's all there was to it. I might say that anyway.
Shinkai revealed in an interview that he originally wanted this second thread to be the focus of the film, and for it to take place with Suzume traveling with another girl, possibly even in a queer romance. He also said he made Souta a chair to deemphasize the romance between him and Suzume after being pressured by his producer to make this film more like his others. Apparently it worked, because the same people that loved Your Name seem to be loving this. But now I look forward to the day Shinkai stops trying to hook them.
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