​Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, my favorite book, doesn’t introduce its protagonist or any of its main characters for its first sixty pages.  As is typical of sprawling 19th century novels, the lengthy prologue is given over to historical scene-setting through the eyes of a minor character, the bishop who will set Jean Valjean on his path to redemption.  One of these early chapters is given over to the bishop’s encounter with a dying revolutionary who was present at the major events of the French Revolution some decades earlier.  The bishop starts off indignant about all the crimes of the Reign of Terror, especially against Queen Marie Antoinette and her children, but the revolutionary grants him sympathy for them if he’ll extend the same sympathy to the millions who suffered under absolute monarchy.  Focusing on well-known sufferers is a choice that lacks scope and imagination, memorably described by Hugo as taking in the thunderbolt and ignoring the storm clouds that made it possible.  Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is all thunderbolt, a fatally flawed film whose considerable style and technical mastery cannot overshadow how perverse it is to frame Madame Deficit as any kind of victim of the patriarchy.  History or feminism owes this person nothing, and no small amount of pleasure is taken from knowing that many of the people onscreen , including her, are going to get theirs.  However, if a film is going to be this unnecessary, it may as well be as fun as this one is.

​Hayao Miyazaki released his ultimate homage to the wonder of childhood in 1988 with My Neighbor Totoro, but he wasn’t finished dissecting the first phases of life.  A year later, his follow-up Kiki’s Delivery Service provides a melancholic look at adolescence, smuggled in amongst an adventure story about a witch establishing herself in a new city.  It’s not surprising that Miyazaki and his fellow artists at Studio Ghibli would add depth to their films, but it is surprising in this particular package, an underappreciated gem compared to the recognition of Totoro, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke.  Kiki’s Delivery Service is another of Miyazaki’s low-stakes stories without an antagonist, but when a studio makes some of the best hang-out movies in cinematic history, who needs major conflicts?