“I think we should let our children watch animation only once or twice a year,” director Hiyao Miyazaki told an interviewer in 2001, the year “Spirited Away,” one of the most wonderful films of the decade, was first released in Japan. “There are too many things around us to relieve our unsatisfied hearts and boredom. This is the fault of adults; it’s adults who are in the wrong shape. Children are just mirrors, so no wonder they are in the wrong shape.”
Chihiro, the heroine of “Spirited Away,” is in the wrong shape. Grumpy and sour, 10-year-old Chihiro whines at her parents about their move to a new town; timid and apprehensive, she clings so that her mother, irritated, shakes her off. Trapped in the spirit world in which the film takes place, Chihiro is belittled by the staff of the bathhouse where she gets a job. “What a dope!” one character says. “You’re the most pathetic little girl I’ve ever seen,” another says, laughing, “a stinking, useless weakling.”
It’s a lot of abuse for a 10-year-old girl to take, but the wonder of “Spirited Away” is that Chihiro believably transforms from “a lazy spoiled crybaby” to a tough, resilient little girl whose determination suggests the strong woman she will one day become. It’s easy to praise Miyazaki’s movie for its visual delights — the radish spirits and river gods, the ancient bathhouse floating on the sea, the scenes of flight (as in most every Miyazaki film) so thrillingly realized — but it’s also easy to forget how touching a portrait it is of a modern child learning to live within herself, learning to be the right shape. Chihiro faces her fears and overcomes them, and finds within herself a strength she’d previously been unaware she had. And she does it so subtly that only afterward do you realize how profound that transition has been.
Late in the film, Chihiro takes a ride on a train through the cities and neighborhoods of this spirit world, the cars gliding swiftly across the endless sea, Joe Hisaishi’s lovely score a counterpoint as day turns to dusk outside. Shadowy riders disembark, and the train slips past another little girl, waiting patiently on a platform in the pale evening. Chihiro’s going to return something her friend Haku stole, and to apologize on his behalf, but she’s also headed out of childhood and into adolescence. It’s not a trip to be embarked upon lightly, and that’s what makes the sequence so moving, not only for children but also for adults. For I remember a time in my life when I yearned to be grown-up even as I reveled in childhood, never realizing what would be lost when I moved on. “The train used to run in both directions,” Kamaji the boilerman warns Chihiro as he hands her the delicate paper tickets. “But these days, it’s a one-way ride.”
Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.
Why did LOTR drop off the critical radar at decade’s end? Methinks it’s due to that perennial, fundamental disrespect of the fantasy and science fiction genre, the same reason “sci-fi” literature was/is ghettoized and consigned to the bring-your-own-blacklight section of your local bookstore. See Ellison, Harlan, or King, Stephen. Or better, Dick, Philip, K. (while he was alive). “Fantasy” is just not as critic- or award-friendly as, say, our annual dose of Clint Eastwood directed melodramatic “relevant” Oscar fodder.
Or, as the great Firesign Theatre pinpointed, “honest stories of working people as told by rich Hollywood stars.”
Let’s be clear. Peter Jackson finally got his Oscar for “Lord of the Rings” by simple attrition. After three consecutive films of excellence, and frankly, some palooka-like competition in 2004 (“Seabiscuit,” anyone? “Master and Commander”?), the Academy just got worn down.
The smug critical consensus seems to be: If Cameron could have only jettisoned that stupid fantastic story, the amazing fantastic world he created might have really been cool. Uh, but, um, did not one begat the other? Is not the simple, elegant, uncluttered fantasy the beating heart of the thing? This smugness pervades how Cameron has been regarded his entire career. He’s just that Canuck Fanboy Truck Driver who somehow managed to crash the Oscars with “Titanic.” And when Cameron consecrated that moment by quoting a line delivered by his doomed, hubristic, foolishly optimistic lead character, in a wry foreshadowing of his own post-”Titanic” future, well, let’s just say the irony was lost, and has been lost in approximately 10,237 (wait, 10,332 as of last Monday) subsequent lazy “journalistic” references to that boorish egomaniac who thought he was the “King of the World.”
But I digress.
There are a lot of “fantasy” films that fully deserve critical scorn, and audience disdain. As the great fantasist Theodore Sturgeon opined, “90% of everything is crap.”
But that 10 percent that isn’t should be allowed to keep winning the race against “Seabiscuit.”
Last week we received a fascinating letter here at Film Salon Towers (OK, it’s more like a deep purple grotto) from Matt Burr, a reader in Austin, Texas. In between bites of excellent Tex-Mex and BBQ, Matt raised a question about Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and all the recent decade-end lists, including our own Films of the Decade series. I realized it was a question that’s been hovering, half-formed, in the back of my brain without quite expressing itself clearly.
I just want to ask [Matt writes] if one of the Salon movie contributors would explain why the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy has been so disrespected by critics. Not just at Salon but also at Slate and in every list I have seen. This suggests that a negative critical consensus has formed about LOTR and I have to admit that that really surprises me. I consider LOTR one of the singular cinematic achievements in film history. But if not that, at least of the decade. And I think there was a time where some critics would have agreed with me. It seems that some sort of gestalt has changed while I wasn’t looking.
He goes on to discuss David Edelstein’s NPR review of Peter Jackson’s new movie, “The Lovely Bones,” which he felt was dripping with unearned distaste for Jackson and his work. Granted, lots of people who liked or loved “Lord of the Rings” (including our own Stephanie Zacharek) haven’t exactly been brimming over with affection for “The Lovely Bones.” But Mr. Burr is onto something here, and we’ve got a gift certificate for the Outback Steakhouse in Guam with his name on it. I received perhaps 65 or 70 suggestions for our Films of the Decade series, and exactly zero pertained to the LOTR trilogy.
As a point of information, nobody suggested decade box-office champ “The Dark Knight,” either, but that’s much less surprising. Despite its vast popularity, Christopher Nolan’s Gotham City pseudo-noir met with a more evidently divided response, while the LOTR trilogy had massive box-office numbers, was acclaimed by populist and highbrow critics alike and brought home multiple Oscars and other hardware. In the first half of the decade, Jackson’s trilogy seemed like the dominant moviegoing experience, and suggested that a new era of big-budget fantasy, aimed at a tween-to-adult audience, was upon us.
What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks happened? As our Texan friend suggests, the zeitgeist, or at least its critical-cinephile-pointyhead component, seems to have shifted somehow. (“The world has changed,” to quote the icy-elegant female voice-over — isn’t it Cate Blanchett? — from the opening of “Fellowship of the Ring.”) What’s more, I feel this shift within myself, although I can’t exactly quantify it. As a lifelong Tolkien fan, I loved Jackson’s trilogy when I saw it, but after a second viewing I haven’t been back. When I made an initial list of 40 or 50 favorites to consider for my decade-end list, I included “Fellowship of the Ring” (the story is inescapably better-told and more exciting in its first third, both in print and on screen). But when I asked myself whether I had any overwhelming visual or emotional memory of that film, I lopped it off in the first cut and never looked back.
I could speculate. And, hey, I will! Maybe the immense hype surrounding the trilogy’s release and all the attendant marketing burned itself out. Maybe the slow-burning backlash among a certain segment of Tolkien purists has gradually taken its toll. Maybe the context in which the films were launched — the early Bush era, just after 9/11, when the “War on Terror” hadn’t yet become a dreary mixture of Orwellian gag-line and grinding reality — is now so deep in the cultural past that the movies have lost the invisible penumbra of meaning that seemed so strong at the time.
I’ve asked a few Film Salon contributors whether they’ll rise to this particular bait, and we’ll see what rolls in. In the meantime, I’m just guessing that some of you have thoughts to offer on this question.
Despite what many think of either the encroaching annihilation of the form or its social or economic irrelevance, film criticism remains a noble and deeply necessary vocation. A number of films and filmmakers excited, disturbed or enthralled me over the course of the past 10 years (I have about 126 titles on a preliminary list of my personal favorites). It’s hard if not impossible to pick just one, but the movie that exemplifies what the art form is capable of — the sensual intoxication of camera movement, color, editing and the framing of bodies punctuated by an emotional and narrative roundelay of desire, longing and memory — is Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love.” I’ll never forget the first time I saw it, in the balcony of the Théâtre Lumière on the final Saturday at Cannes in May 2000.
I reviewed it for indieWIRE at Cannes. That piece remains one of my favorites because I had very little time, maybe an hour, to gather my thoughts and put it together. In retrospect, the lack of time was the best thing because I just had to put down a volley of words that I hoped captured the intoxicating, though devastating, emotional piece I had just seen. The story of a man (Tony Leung) and woman (Maggie Cheung) who discover the tragic, peculiar way their lives are interconnected, Wong’s movie is a great many things, a fugue, constructed as a series of dances where the two eye each other, tenderly, warily, unable to say how they really feel about each other.
Wong is the most Proustian of directors, whose dominant theme is the irretrievability of a lost Eden. Like Jim Jarmusch, Wong is a romantic pessimist whose movies circle around ideas of solitude, loneliness and cultural dislocation. It’s a great theme, but also a potentially off-putting one because it is all predicated on silences, body movements and facial inflections. The reaction to the movie, then and today, has been quite polarized. A lot of people were frustrated by the fact that Wong was so severe in what he withheld. I’ve watched the movie countless times, and I’m still not sure what the coda means. The fact that it hovers and dances around the unknowable, that the movie and its characters remain outside our grasp, is one of the reasons I love it so much. I ended my original review by saying, “In the past Wong Kar-wai created movies so stylized and abstract they formed his own particular reality, a dreamscape that flowed with possibility. With ‘In the Mood for Love’ Wong breaks our hearts with images, songs and Maggie Cheung’s face.”
Just thinking about it now, my body shivers. That’s what great art does.
This concludes Film Salon’s series of posts by special guests writing about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.
The past decade of movies included several cosmic explorations of lunacy, from “Punch-Drunk Love” to “Grizzly Man,” but none impacted me quite as much as Don Hertzfeldt’s mesmerizing animated short film, “Rejected,” made in 2000. (You can see it embedded below.) The premise is incredibly simple: An animator continually fails to create consumer-friendly TV commercials as he quickly loses his mind. But there’s brilliance coursing through this fundamental strangeness. Hertzfeldt crams riotous absurdity and profound epistemological inquiry into a trippy shot of comedic inspiration. In less than 10 minutes, he hurls through a series of endlessly quotable non sequitur vignettes (“Mah spoon is too big!”) as his rudimentary characters grapple with their absurdly untenable existence. It’s sheer madness in bite-size chunks of hilarity (with a keen anti-consumerist message to boot), delivered entirely by way of stick figures less complicated than the earliest cave paintings.
That simplicity — which Hertzfeldt has replicated in subsequent shorts while gradually advancing his style — makes the rapid progression of oddities in “Rejected” feel more like classic slapstick comedy than anything produced in contemporary animation. Pixar continues to lead the charge on that front (I would be remiss not to single out “Ratatouille” as one of the best American movies since 2000), but Hertzfeldt’s one-man-band approach in “Rejected” anticipated a new era of grassroots creative expression (see: YouTube, among others) and delivered a sharp reprimand to anyone finding success in the commercial world. That’s a level of insight that no corporate product can possibly reach. I saw (and continue to see) genuine artistic freedom in Hertzfeldt’s nutty portrayal of art and commerce coming to blows. The world would be a much better place if we all heeded his warning.
Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.
It feels pretty strange to nominate a James Bond movie as one of the decade’s best examples of filmmaking craft — the series had been photocopying the same formula over and over for decades ever since the glory days of Sean Connery, and even longtime fans like myself had given up hope that the franchise would ever feel exciting or vital again. Imagine my surprise when Martin Campbell’s 2006 “Casino Royale” turned out to be a fantastic, full-service entertainment in an era when the standards for big-budget cinema have plummeted: It’s a thriller with action scenes that further the character development (and how rare is that?), a romance between two leads who have movie star charisma to burn, and finally, a heartbreaking tragedy.
On one end of the spectrum, I love the deliriously fun chase sequence in which Bond pursues an acrobatic would-be terrorist through a construction site. Notable for its lack of shaky camerawork or ADD editing, the scene gradually evolves into a game of “Can you top this?” as Bond realizes he’s met an opponent he’ll have to outthink rather than outfight. It’s his first lesson that if he’s going to survive, he’ll need to become something more than just a glorified hit man.
Yet while “Casino Royale” isn’t ashamed to revel in the kinetic freedom of a good action scene, it’s also thoughtful enough to consider the consequences. After Bond (Daniel Craig) and love interest Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) barely survive a brutal, claustrophobic fight (which ends not with a one-liner but the gruesome sight of Bond strangling a man to death), he returns to his hotel room to wash off the blood and calm his nerves with a stiff drink. His expression as he stares in the mirror is eerie and ambiguous: Is he scared or impressed with his capacity for violence? Vesper doesn’t fare as well, and Bond finds her in a near-catatonic state, curled up in the shower still in her evening wear. As they embrace under the running water, both of them shaken by their close brush with death and holding on to each for comfort, the Bond series manages to make up for years of cheesy pick-up lines and one-night stands with one of the most deeply romantic images of the decade.
Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.
Living in the In-Between Place 
Made for each other: India & flash mobs 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
Whip-it 
My debate with Charles Murray 
More tips for literary lovers 
U.S., China need a green peace, not a trade war 
Santorum mangles the Founding Fathers 
Chris Christie’s gay marriage headache 
