Category: Film & TV

Yesterday I met up with Kate, Hannah, and a friend to see Howl’s Moving Castle at the Landmark in Kendall Square in Cambridge. It was delightful: another wonderful creation by Miyazaki. Normally I prefer to watch foreign animated films in the original language with subtitles*, but this was the English language version, and it worked very well. The element of the film that really grabbed me was the way in which Miyazaki plays with the age of the heroine Sophie, after she’s been turned into a 90 year old woman; he shows us the girl in the woman and the woman in the girl, and how the way she sees herself affects the way others see her.

—
* I don’t like animated films in which the actors providing the voices are so distinctive that you see them rather than the animated character. The exception here was Billy Crystal, who provided the voice of Calcifer, an irrepressible fire demon. Instantly recognizable, but not intrusively so.

Not a lot to blog about this week…. I’m in Broomfield, Colorado, doing a ton of interesting but completely unblogworthy work; when I get a chance, I’m reading… work-related books; even the evenings have been working sessions….

However, while waiting for some colleagues to join me for dinner, I dived into a video store and picked up a delightful anime DVD, Makoto Shinkai’s “The Place Promised in Our Early Days”. I’d seen the trailer for it on the Anime Network a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the luminous colour – somewhere between “Spirited Away” and “Haibane Renmei”. Some critics are calling the director “the new Miyazaki”. I wouldn’t go that far – he loses the pacing a bit in the final third of the film – but it’s visually stunning and really draws you into his strange alternate history. Recommended. (See also this glowing review.)

slacktivist went to see Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, and was intrigued to find that many conservative pundits are interpreting it as an anti-American diatribe. But as he points out, H. G. Wells wrote the original novel as a commentary on the colonialism of his day. He was trying to get his readers to understand what it might have been like for aboriginal peoples to be confronted by the overwhelming and inexorable fire-power of Britain and the other European powers.

“These conservative film critic wannabes want a story to follow the moral outline of the old comics code or of Job’s foolish friend Bildad. They want the good guys to be rewarded for their virtue and the bad guys to be punished for their vice. But Wells’ story isn’t about morality, it’s about power. His Martian invaders have bigger, better weapons so they win and we lose. Period.

This, I think, is what the rightwing critics find most threatening in Wells’ story and Spielberg’s film. It vividly illustrates that might and right are not the same thing, that military superiority is not evidence of superior virtue. If the illustration of such a basic truth can now be interpreted as an ‘anti-American’ political statement, that is neither Wells’ nor Spielberg’s fault.”

Saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy this evening. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. You know it’s bad when the high point is spotting the old Marvin robot (from the BBC TV series) queuing in the Vogon office. And to those who say that it’s what Douglas would have wanted – yes, I agree, it’s full of things that exemplify his weakest tendencies. Douglas’s strength was satirical dialog, skewering pompous bureaucratic gobbledygook and content-free marketing pablum with equal energy. However, he was also a geek, always fascinated with shiny toys – even if he didn’t know how to use them properly. Giving Douglas a large SFX budget was like giving a bipolar wine-taster the keys to the cellar. He was (admirably) obsessed with the environment, and endangered species; his book Last Chance To See is wonderful. But that doesn’t mean turning HHGTTG into a “green” manifesto. It’s a comedy, dammit! (But I noticed that hardly anyone in the cinema was laughing – including me.)
And whoever wrote that stupid theme song should be forcibly re-educated and compelled to take up a new line of work.

Among the Things that aren’t in the film:

• The second part of the Guide entry on Babel fish, about proving the non-existence of God
• Most of the Vogon poetry scene, including most of the poem itself
• Talking doors (they sigh, but they don’t talk)
• Eddie singing ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’

I shall go and see the film, of course. But I’m prepared for the possibility that I won’t enjoy it.

(Via Chris, who sounds almost as depressed as Marvin.)

UPDATE: Reading all of those HHGTTG quotations got me all fired up, so when I came home this evening I hunted around in the basement, found the old (1992) VHS tape of the television version of HHGTTG, and watched it straight through – all 192 minutes. I sipped a gin and tonic while I watched it, but decided to skip the rubber ducky. I feel much better now. 🙂

For reasons that I won’t go into, I found myself watching the DVD of What the Bleep Do We Know? this evening. After nearly an hour of increasingly nonsensical stuff, my blood pressure and I could stand it no longer. I skipped to the last DVD chapter to watch the credits, to find out which reputable scientists and philosophers had given their support to such hokum. Fortunately, the answer seemed to be “None”.
The writers weren’t even that creative in the way the fabricated the bleeping stuff. They mostly relied on two tricks:

• Take a term such as “observer”, “consciousness”, “unity”, etc. and then use it interchangably in metaphorical and literal senses.
• Consistently use the term “possibility” in place of “probability”, conveying a subtle suggestion of unboundedness and unpredictability.

So, if you want to get really drunk really quickly, get a bottle, a glass, and this film and take a shot every time someone recycles a metaphor as literal truth, or opens vistas of boundless possibility wherever a probability distribution belongs. Otherwise, stay away. (I thought we got all that New Age stuff out of our system last century, but I guess not….)

Amazon.com is showing the trailer for the forthcoming film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. As is usual with such things, the trailer has a manic feel and seems to focus on special effects, but there are quite a few elements which I can’t place at all in the story. I’ll reserve judgment. (What the hell; I know I’ll go to see it, but I have an anticipatory pain in the diodes all down my left side.)
Speaking of HHGTTG, I see they’ve just published a Deluxe 25th Anniversary Edition of the book. Now I think that this is a wasted opportunity. Some maker of PDAs should have taken the cue from Apple’s U2 Edition iPod, and produced a HHGTTG PDA, with preloaded multimedia Guide and Encyclopedia Galactica applications, e-books of Douglas Adams works, MP3s of the radio show, etc., etc. Naturally there would be a flip-down (peril-sensitive?) screen protector with the immortal words “Don’t Panic”. Maybe PalmOne could produce an SD card for their PDAs….

Over at Boing-Boing, Xeni Jardin is waxing lyrical about James Cameron’s 3D iMax film: Aliens of the Deep. Quote: “I still can’t get one of these deep, deep, deep-sea creatures out of my head — shown here. Looked like a giant diaphanous curtain of glass, rippling through the water. Amazing. And amazing because it is real, and alive, and not a product of CGI.” I can’t wait to see it, even if I will have to wear dorky cardboard 3D glasses.

On a whim, the “Fellowship” gathered this evening in Burlington to eat Korean food and see Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. The food was good (after a certain sharp-eyed person spotted shrimp in a supposedly vegetarian appetizer, thereby saving two allergic people from a horrible experience), and the film was sheer magic. From the spoof introduction to the mind-bending credits, the whole thing was delightful. Excellent performances from Liam Aiken and Emily Browning as Klaus and Violet, Billy Connolly as Uncle Monty, and Jim Carrey as Count Olaf; the best, however, was Meryl Streep’s tour de force as Aunt Josephine. I had not read the books; I had no idea what to expect; I haven’t laughed so hard in many, many films.

I’ve been laid low for the last 48 hours with flu, but curiously that hasn’t meant that I’ve been stuck in bed. In fact I’ve found myself sleeping for 4 hours getting up for 2 or 3, and so on. I’ve tried reading, but that doesn’t work, so I’ve mostly been watching the bonus features on the The Return of the King (Extended Edition) DVD. I’d watched the film itself on Thursday, with some friends, and now I find that dipping into the various documentaries is exactly the right speed for my fevered brain at 4 in the morning. Among the high points:

• Home of the Horse Lords, about the horses in the film – their selection and training, and the extraordinary actor-horse relationships that developed. The dedication of the equestrian extras. The breathtaking work of the stunt rider who doubled for Gandalf on Shadowfax. Stunning.
• In the sequence about the world-wide premieres of RotK (towards the end of The End of All Things), the Norwegian event was unexpectedly special. It was held in a sports arena, with a huge screen, and before the film was shown 200 volunteers reenacted the key scenes from the first two films.
• The Abandoned concept material about a version of the battle at the Black Gate in which Aragorn would battle Sauron. WHAT?! How could they even think of betraying such a key element of Tolkien’s vision by rendering immaterial evil as concrete? Fortunately, sanity was restored.
• The documentary material on Cameron Duncan, a teenage New Zealand film-maker who succumbed to cancer while LotR was being filmed. Peter Jackson introduces a tenuous connection with the film (to do with the closing song), but he didn’t need to do that. After pulling off such a stupendous achievement, he’s entitled to put anything he wants in the DVD extras.
• Odd things, like the fact that the scene with Sam and Frodo on the stairs (when Frodo sends Sam away) was shot in two sessions a full year apart.

So that’s how I’m spending my time. Well, that and watching Tottenham’s 5-2 win over Everton.