4.00 | A young girl has to navigate a magical spa to rescue her parents. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki Starring Rumi Hiragi, Miyu Irino, and Mari Natsuki Review by Jon Kissel |
In Spirited Away, the most critically acclaimed film in Hiyao Miyazaki’s extensive and oft-praised career, the most powerful and memorable image isn’t of wonders like a multi-armed spiderman operating a bellows or a dragon fleeing from a swarm of paper birds. These, and many others, fill Spirited Away, but an early shot wins out. It’s simply a broad-shouldered man, shot from a low angle, walking confidently forward. Through the eyes of pre-teen protagonist Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragai), daughter to the man, the whole world is captured in her gaze as she watches her father lead her into an unknown future. Her parents can lead her to the enchanted spa she finds herself stuck in, but she has to be the one to get out of it. That shot is so self-evidently loving, that it is enough to want Chihiro to escape a truly incredible place, one of cinema’s great fantasy locations. It’s the fulcrum on which the film is balanced, and it powers Miyazaki’s masterpiece as surely as that aforementioned spiderman powers the spa.
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The sixth film by animator and filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki provides the master Japanese director with a vehicle to explore one of the things he seems to love the most. For Miyazaki, flight is a repeated motif, from the gliders in Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to the air force in Howl’s Moving Castle. His most mature, non-fantasy films, Porco Rosso and The Wind Rises, are about pilots and aeronautical engineers,, though at this stage of his career, some fantasy is still required. Porco Rosso turns the old idiom on its head, putting a pig in a plane and making it seem like the most natural thing in the world. As his titular pilot flits around the Adriatic in Depression-era fascist Italy, the meticulous hand-drawn animation that Studio Ghibli is renowned for boosts a story that, disappointingly, is the thinnest of Miyazaki’s career. In using his medium to make a stock mid-century romance/adventure, he only succeeds in gussying up a boring genre.
Enacted in WWI nationalistic fervor, the Espionage Act is a blunt tool that the government can break out whenever it wants to bring the hammer down on leakers, including those who expose crimes by the US government at home and abroad. In the War on Terror era, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are only the most well-known conscientious leakers. Amongst many others, Daniel Hale, descendant of Revolutionary icon Nathan Hale, released documents about the drone program, John Kiriakou disclosed information about torture, and Terry Albury exposed the surveillance and infiltration of American Muslim communities. These men weren’t trying to sell out the government to foreign adversaries, but inform the American public of crimes done in their names and felt there was no alternative way to do so that precluded them serving jail time. Reality Winner is an interesting addition to this clan of whistleblowers, as what she gave to the press was malfeasance from a foreign government towards the same government that tapped Angela Merkel’s personal phone. It’s harder to feel righteously indignant about her actions, understandable as they might be. Who wouldn’t find it difficult to be in a position to shut up Sean Hannity and do nothing? Tina Satter’s Reality, adapted from a play that is itself adapted from the FBI transcript of Winner’s initial interrogation, doesn’t portray Winner in the way Oliver Stone portrayed Snowden. She’s not wracked by guilt over what her bosses are doing, but is a little too trusting and a little naïve and tired of hearing bloviating conservative voices. Reality is a character study and a smaller film befitting Winner’s more impulsive actions, but the insignificance of her actions doesn’t stop her from looking like a nail to the government’s hammer.
After eight movies, a franchise synonymous with Sylvester Stallone is fully taken over by Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed. Creed 3 puts Jordan in the director’s chair and jettisons Stallone’s Great White Hope Rocky for a film that has one white speaking role. Thoroughly Black and completely Jordan’s, Creed 3 has minimal connection to anything that came before it, rooting the film’s conflict within the past of a protagonist who no longer has to share any narrative momentum with Rocky. The result is one of the best films in the franchise and another major achievement on Jordan’s remarkable resume. Creed 3 demonstrates how rich this world can continue to be without the Italian Stallion, providing Jordan with a blockbuster outlet that should sustain him for as long as Rocky sustained Stallone.
Of all the movies to get a trilogy, Magic Mike seems an unlikely choice. Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper workplace drama/recession aftermath story/Matthew McConaughey revival ends with Channing Tatum’s dancer extraordinaire leaving the stripper life. Magic Mike doesn’t exactly take a negative view of his chosen profession, but it doesn’t imagine it as one with much longevity either. In both the first and second sequels to Magic Mike, Tatum’s Mike Lane fails off-screen and returns to the only thing the universe wants him to do. The tsk-ing tone of the original gives way to male strippers as vessels of female empowerment, rejuvenators for women who have ignored the part of themselves that’s confident and attractive. Middle entry Magic Mike XXL most embodies this idea in a plotless road trip, and Soderbergh returns to direct the final chapter in Magic Mike’s Last Dance, a film that dissolves the stripper gang and sends Mike to stuffy London, where he is enlisted to liven up the frosty blue-bloods with athletic dance moves and simulated sex. In a rare miss for Soderbergh, the trilogy limps to a conclusion, drained of most of the jovial energy that earned Magic Mike two follow-ups. |
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