Ponyo

I can’t claim to be any expert on the work of Hayao Miyazaki, but I’m certainly an expert on at least one subject: my own tastes.  I don’t know art, but I know what I like, in other words; and so far, I haven’t failed to love a single one of the Miyazaki films I’ve seen.

Ponyo does nothing to break that streak.  Pure magic through and through, this is the tale of a fish out of water, quite literally.  Ponyo is a goldfish who yearns to break out of her isolated conditions and explore the world around her; this leads to her taking the form of a young girl and befriending a young human boy.

The animation might look somewhat rough to eyes accustomed to American toons, but those eyes adjust pretty rapidly to Miyazaki’s style, which is packed full of inventive detail.

I do have one complaint about the film: the climax is a bit of a letdown, coming too abruptly and carrying too little weight for my tastes.  And the song over the end credits is quite possibly one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard.

Otherwise, Ponyo is an instant classic.

District 9

Speaking of instant classics, here’s another one.

Director Neill Blomkamp’s first feature film, District 9, is a cinematic pearl, and it’s one that comes as an especially welcome breath of fresh air when you stop to consider how genuinely rare it is becoming for Hollywood’s hype machine to get rolling over a movie that isn’t a sequel, a remake, or an adaptation of a novel, comic book, or action figure line.

District 9 is, like Ponyo, perhaps not a perfect film — it feels as if some of the plot developments are maybe not quite as rational as they might have been — but in a lot of ways, it gets close.  The most impressive aspect, to me, was that I simply had no idea where the movie was going.  The subtlety of the marketing campaign (especially the trailers) is probably responsible for that as much as the movie itself is … but whoever gets the credit, I thank them for it.  It’s always fun to be surprised by a movie, and usually when that happens, the movie builds up a rabid fanbase.  I expect that to be the case here, as well.

The plot, acting, and filmmaking in general are all great, but the most significant aspect of the film may well be its visual effects.  The CGI character work is simply terrific, and seems even more so when you consider that most of the effects scenes take place in broad daylight.  It’s tempting to say that you can feel the guiding hand of director Peter Jackson here, but Blomkamp’s short films also feature pretty great CGI effects, so it’s clear that he is no slouch in this department.  Either way, the aliens in this movie set a new standard for believability of CGI-realized characters.  They also represent some of the most alien of aliens to ever be depicted on film, but Blomkamp manages that trick and simultaneously manages to make them seem like genuine individuals; it’s a trick that feels inspired more by sci-fi literature than by sci-fi movies.

There’s a lot more that could be said about this fine film, but for now, I’ll leave it there.

(500) Days of Summer

At my local theatre, this movie came out on the same day as both Ponyo and District 9, and I saw all three on the same day.  That was one of the better moviegoing days I’ve ever had, and certainly the best since the triple feature consisting of No Country for Old Men, The Mist, and Enchanted.

(500) Days of Summer has been billed as being not a love story, but a story about love.  That’s both a great tagline and an accurate description of the movie, which — thanks to a droll, no-nonsense voiceover — lets you know right at the outset that if you’re looking for a happy ending, well, you might be in for a letdown.

However, the film is far from being a bummer.  Instead, it establishes early on that one character is an incurable romantic and the other is an incurable realist, and it does so convincingly enough that when things start to go sour, you have empathy for the romantic but also realize that this is the only way the realist knows how to be; therefore, you’ve got sympathy for both sides.

The film is ingeniously structured so that it bounces back and forth chronologically, going from (as an example) day 350 of the relationship to day 7 to day 48 to day 320 and so forth.  This might be confusing and unwieldy in the hands of, say, Michael Bay, but director Marc Webb does a great job of keeping the audience well aware of when, emotionally speakingeach scene is taking place.

A lot of the credit for the film’s success has to rest with its stars, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zoey Deschanel.  Deschanel, of course, seems to have been (successfully) engineered by some sort of supercool mad scientist to be the most adorable person on the face of the planet; she’s great here.  Gordon-Levitt is also excellent.  Both actors have to play their characters so that we like them but also see their (many) flaws; we have to intensely like them from a slight remove, in other words, and that is subtle stuff that would not have worked at all without two fine actors such as these in the roles.

Inglourious Basterds

I’ve been a devoted Quentin Tarantino fan since about sixty seconds into the first time I saw Pulp Fiction some fifteen years ago.  He’s at it again with this World War II fantasy, which has been frustrating some critics and viewers.

I can’t say that I don’t sympathize, because I do: the first time I saw this movie, it frustrated me, too.  I’d been expecting to see one type of movie, and instead of that, I saw something almost completely different.

The second time I saw it, I knew what to expect, and armed with that foreknowledge, I not only enjoyed it more, but enjoyed it a LOT more.

The third time I saw it, I became convinced that it was the best movie of 2009 to date.

As with District 9, there is a lot to be said about this movie, and I’m going to say virtually none of it for the time being.  However, I’d definitely like to talk briefly about certain aspects, key amongst them being the performances.

The two that most people will talk about are the ones by Christoph Waltz, the Austrain television actor whom Tarantino has probably just made on Oscar nominee, and Brad Pitt, the American superstar who cotinues his hot streak here with a wonderful comedic performance.

Waltz plays Colonel Hans Landa, the “Jew Hunter,” who seemingly speaks every language except for Klingon, and does so flawlessly.  Landa is immediately one of the best villains in recent film memory, and one of Tarantino’s best characters ever.

Pitt plays Aldo Raine, “Aldo the Apache,” the American Lieutenant who heads a secret band of killers whose singular mission is to kill as many Nazis as they can get their hands (and feet, and knives, and baseball bats) on in France.  Landa is a model of eloquence, and so is Raine, in his own blunt, uneducated way.  Pitt plays him with considerable comedic flair, but with enough weight that he isn’t just a caricature: you kinda get why people who follow him on a secret mission likely to end in despair, agony, and death.

Tarantino proved himself to be a genius at directing actors long ago, and he certainly re-emphasizes it with this movie.  It’s one thing to get a great performance out of someone speaking your own language, but it’s another thing entirely to do so with a character speaking a language you don’t speak.  Waltz is merely one example; it seems as if about two-thirds of the movie is in either German or French, and there is not a single one of these performances that feels anything less than 100% genuine.  (I can’t quite say the same for Mike Myers, who is okay playing a British officer, but seems a bit too much like Austin Powers playing a British officer; it was an ill-advised move, but not a particularly harmful one.)

There are also two fine female performances from Melanie Laurent, who plays a cinema owner, and Diane Kruger, who does a very credible job of playing a ’40s film star.  Laurent elicits a tremendous amount of sympathy in her role, and ends up being as crucial to the film’s success as either Pitt or Waltz; I hope to see her in more American movies.  Kruger’s role is smaller, but she performs it flawlessly.

The final thing I want to say in this review is to mention that I think it’s time we start re-evaluating Tarantino.  For too long, he’s been seen as a writer first, and as a director second.  That has meant that his visual style has been too neglected; Inglourious Basterds is good enough visually that continuing to neglect it is simply no longer an option.  He’s always been strong visually, of course; going all the way back to Reservoir Dogs, it is clear that Tarantino can do exactly what he wants with a camera.

Inglourious Basterds, however, is his best-looking movie to date, and I think it’s about time more critics started acknowledging his tremendous skill with the camera.

Halloween II

Lest you think I’ve enjoyed every movie I’ve seen lately, allow me to review the new Rob Zombie flick.

I’ve been a Zombie fan since House of 1000 Corpses; and in many ways, I thought his remake of Halloween was his best effort to date.

Unfortunately, the sequel is a giant backwards step for the budding auteur.  It isn’t a complete misfire; there are a few good sequences, and the last couple of minutes are quite good.  Then there’s the rest of the movie, which is poorly lit, upleasant, and nonsensical.

The story involves Laurie Strode’s attempts to come to terms with the events of the first movie, and Michael Myers’ attempts to kill as many people as possible while tracking her down.  At least one scene is downright head-scratchingly confusing; it involves a man who’s been in a car accident sitting in shock, saying “fuck” over and over again and trying to figure out how badly he is hurt.  I’m confused, not as to what is going on, but as to why any director or editor would allow the scene to play for as long as it plays.

Zombie feels almost totally disengaged from the film, almost as if he didn’t actually want to make it in the first place.  And I would guess that that is exactly the case.  I’m still a fan, and I think Zombie — who frequently shows a nice, realistic touch at directing actors — has more good movies within him.

This is not one.

Overall, though, between the other movies I reviewed and Julie & Julia, this has been an exceptional August.  Hopefully, that’s a trend that will continue next year.