Wednesday, April 2, 2025
The Lost World: PRINCESS MONONOKE
Here is a complicated fantasy vision, effortlessly involving world-building and vividly imagined creatures and places, that unfurls with folkloric earnestness, spiritually engaged and classically structured. It feels like it’s a story that’s always existed. And its every frame reminds us it’s been crafted with human touch. Its hand-drawn spectacle, full of the deep breaths and luxurious pauses, the extra attention to details of wind and ripples and sighs and flinches that bring such richness to Miyazaki’s animation, is an illusion of movement and life given shape and form through the dedicated focus and attention of skilled artists with pen and brush. The characters are memorable, complicated, and lovable. The action is quick and exciting. The tension is gripping, and the detail of the environments are enveloping. And it’s all done in the patient, lovingly drafted images of Miyazaki and his team. This re-release is a good excuse to sit in the dark in front of an enormous screen, surrounded by booming sound, and be reminded of the primal magic of moving drawings. More than even the best CG animation, and certainly more than the pernicious anti-art prompted by technologists who think algorithmic computer programs can entirely replace the minds and efforts of artists, hand-drawn animation is a direct access to our shared humanity, and the wonders of which the human mind is capable. A film like Princess Mononoke will last; dishonest images spat out by a server copying its style won’t.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
Princess Protection Program: SNOW WHITE
Under the anonymously proficient direction of Marc Webb, it’s at least not a thoughtless photocopy of the original—in which case, why’d you even see it, a la the 2019 The Lion King. Nor is it a pointless shedding of the original’s iconic charms—in which case, why take out the only reasons to remake it, like the 2020 Mulan. These usually fall in between those two extremes, and White’s just on the right side of the balance. Here she’s given a few new songs from The Greatest Showman’s Pasek and Paul and performed with fresh star power from Rachel Zegler. Her ballad “Waiting on a Wish” is a better “I Want” song than any in recent flop original Disney princess musical Wish. Here her White is a fine blend of sweet naivety and dawning G-rated political consciousness. She’s one of the only performers of her generation who could pull off such sweetly guileless innocence. (The movie also gives her another of what’s becoming a standard Zegler hero shot, like in her Hunger Games, with her leaning into a closeup so her big eyes look bigger and the determination behind her crooked smile gives off a sense of impending catharsis.) The plot gives her more of a confrontation with the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot, whose frictionless shallow villainy is put to smooth use). And there’s some nice ideas about cross-class solidarity against fascism, even if its hashtag-Girl-Boss logic leads to a tacit royalism. Isn’t it always thus with princess problems? Here’s a passable matinee diversion. Disney’s done way worse.
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Stylish Substance: PRESENCE and BLACK BAG
Soderbergh is a rare modern Hollywood craftsman whose prolific and consistent sense of play with style only adds to the fine-tuned pleasures of his films. He clearly loves moviemaking, and it enlivens the genres to which he brings his touch. Whether a cheap experiment like Presence or his bigger studio productions, his movies reliably have slick surfaces and crisp editing, an intelligent precision to where he looks and what he sees, expertly calibrated with forward momentum and clever thoughtfulness. They are sensational entertainments serious about class and process and the ways our relationships get tangled up in ambitions and betrayals and systems. So of course Black Bag proves the spy movie works well for his style. He does it with an approach reminiscent of his Ocean’s trilogy. This is similarly a story that’s a nesting doll of intricate, intersecting secret plots done with warm colorful cinematography, a jazzy David Holmes score, clever multi-layered dialogue, and sexy stars outwitting one another. The movie, another scripted by Koepp, has a familiar cat-and-mouse game—a digital-age Le Carré mole hunt—enlivened by a cool, clinical, procedural logic. Husband and wife spies (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) that’s a cover for rooting out a suspicious character. Turns out each of them could be a suspect, too. Much sneaking and spying and setting traps ensues. Their boss (Pierce Brosnan) swoops in for a handful of scenes that keep the plates spinning, too. It has that pleasing confusion of the best spy stories, and the psychological gamesmanship you’d expect from wrapping it around a marriage. Soderbergh keeps this one short and sweet, too, playing out the setup to a crisp conclusion with a propulsive editing and clinical eye that suitably straightens out the complications with a satisfying snap.
Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Wild Child: NE ZHA 2
So here’s Ne Zha 2, a delight from beginning to end despite its 144-minute run time. It continues the story of the first picture, which introduced audiences to little Ne Zha, a scamp who looks like the British Dennis the Menace and acts like an anime hero filtered through Moana’s rounded sentimentality and Dreamworks' spiky silliness. He’s fighting his fate, trying desperately to battle the bad and uplift the good. It’s a story settled firmly in a loosely retold cinematic universe of Chinese mythology, and to a typical Western audience it’ll be occasionally baffling. (Try imagining getting dropped into a dense Hercules riff with no prior knowledge of Greek myth.) But writer-director Yang Yu has crafted a movie that moves like Hollywood blockbuster, even as it is so deeply informed by its cultural perspective. There are wars between immortal gods and trickster figures, jade palaces in the clouds, villages endangered by supernatural forces, gurus training students, martial arts, dragons, comic relief, and massive armies preparing for showdowns. It has the peaks and valleys, and twists and catharsis, a movie on this scale should deliver to its popcorn matinee audiences.
It’s satisfying, and easy to want more from its mythology unfurling as a backdrop to a lovable character just trying his best to be his best. The world is imagined well, with colorful complications and elaborate staging. The characters are vividly drawn and immediately appealing—from little Ne Zha to his roly-poly master, his noble parents, his ice-blue dragon-brother, and a big babyfaced deity. The writing is heart-felt and well-crafted to a sturdy family adventure formula, from escalating tension to kiddie humor asides. The action is well-choreographed, and takes advantage of the careening velocity and precision in framing that only a computer-animated sequence can pull off. Watching it, I got the feeling of being a foreigner looking in on something huge on which I’m almost missing out. This must be what international audiences feel watching blockbusters from us. It’s no more a work of Chinese propaganda than Hollywood blockbusters are visions of American hegemony. If you can believe only New York’s superheroes can stop international supervillains, or only a United States-led coalition can stop an alien invasion, you can hang with some Eastern mythology as it's rendered in vivid colors, appealing characters, and agreeable spectacle.
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
The Voracious Filmgoer's Top Ten Films of 2024
Other Bests of 2024
Monday, February 24, 2025
Toying with Death: THE MONKEY
The Monkey is a funny, nasty little thing: a cockeyed horror movie with explosive gore served up as punchlines. Those are real gags in both senses of the word. Its horror is both archly told and earnestly felt. The blend of random violence and cornball sentimentality signals it as authentically Stephen King. It’s based on one of his short stories, after all. But it also makes it a satisfying, wild-eyed B-side to its writer-director Osgood Perkins’ previous feature, Longlegs. That surprise hit of last summer was a droning, portentous demonic serial killer movie. This one is about twin boys who discover a cursed wind-up monkey. Both pictures are about a legacy of family trauma, the capriciousness of fragile life and random death, and a possibly quixotic attempt by children to atone for the sins of their parents. Longlegs did so with a sly sense of silliness percolating under its grim straight-faced sense of doom that feels a little empty by the end. I liked The Monkey’s approach more, for its oddball turns and jabs, and its sense of accumulating absurdity. The twins don’t know the toy monkey’s deadly curse—but we know immediately it’s up to no good since the movie starts with their father (Adam Scott) trying to sell it in a pawn shop, an effort thwarted by a sudden accident taking the shopkeeper’s life. He’s abandoned his boys years ago, though, and their mother (Tatiana Maslany) isn’t talking about him. Snooping for information, the boys find the cursed thing in the back of a closet. Let the random deaths begin.
The movie wastes no time quickly and impactfully killing off a few characters, then jumps ahead 25 years to find the meeker of the boys (grown in Theo James) having deliberately isolated himself from others to avoid the pain of losing them. Too bad, then, that the monkey will make a comeback and leave a bloody trail in its mechanically-drumming wake. In true King fashion, the grown-up kids feel they're the only ones who can stop It. By rooting the movie in a very real sense of dawning childhood awareness of death, it makes even the most outrageous moments—an explosive electrocution, a bowling ball smushing a face, a trampled sleeping bag that might as well be filled with cherry pie filling—a sense of absurd dread. (It's like Sam Raimi doing Creepshow.) Here’s a pitch black horror comedy—laced with a sense of ironic impending doom—about existential grief that stems from fluke accidental death, and how deranged we can get in our denials, and our attempts to explain it away. How fragile the human body. How fragile our efforts to forget that. After one early, poignantly shattering death, one of the boys tells us the chances of such an event were one in 44 million. Cold comfort, since he says it means to him that it has to happen to somebody. The movie sits in that cold pessimism, and the preposterously frightening ways it comes to pass.