The Secret World of Arrietty

My daughter came home a month ago and gave me that amazed look of hers. “Why didn’t you tell me Miyazaki had a movie coming out?” She’d seen the poster for The Secret World of Arrietty displayed in the lobby of the Grand Theater. She was so excited she almost sent the stack of Miyazaki DVDs that live on our end table tumbling.

She had me. Hayao Miyazaki snuck this one in on me, the household movie know-it-all. My excuse, it wasn’t officially directed by the master. His protégé Hiromasa Yonebayashi did the honors. But, it has Miyazaki’s fingerprints all over it. From the very first image of too blue sky and white, billowy clouds; I knew I was in good hands.

As a young man passes through a tunnel of trees to arrive at an old house born as if from fairytales, I settled back into my seat with a sigh. Memories of My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Ponyo – my three favorite Miyazaki movies – danced through my thoughts.

My daughter and I talked about the movie afterwards:

Me: I knew I was going to love that movie from the very first shot. Miyazaki has such a passion for nature. I’ve never seen an animated movie so filled from corner to corner of the frame with life, trees and plants and flowers.

Her: I just love all the moments when he holds on images of nature and how that nature always seems to be opening up before us. There’s something so delightfully, I dunno, random about his view of nature.

Me: He is probably the cinema’s most passionate environmental activist. He should be a spokesperson for Greenpeace or something. Just think about the great spirit of the river in Spirited Away, nauseated to overflowing with the river’s pollution. And, of course, saving the environment is everything in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Her: And nobody does sunsets better. I forget I’m watching an animated movie sometimes because nobody else makes them the way he does.

Me: This movie seemed a first in a way. He has always loved to include magic in his movies. Parents who make pigs of themselves and then literally turn into pigs, a little fish that turns into a little girl so she can befriend a little boy, and a young witch flying around on a broomstick in Kiki’s Delivery Service are all Miyazaki favorites. But, here, he makes tiny people living beneath the floor of a house seem completely natural.

Her: I agree, totally. He is so good at making all of his characters, no matter how fantastic, seem real. It’s like mom reading the Pern stories and wanting to have her own pet dragon. This movie made me want to have my own dollhouse filled with little people. Remember how I wanted my own pet dust creatures after watching Totoro? That’s what his stories and his imagination do for me. And the stories are so touching they make me cry.

I highly recommend that parents share Arrietty with their kids. A mother sat in front of us with her two small children, so small they were dwarfed by their boxes of popcorn. And those kids were totally enraptured. They had chattered nonstop before the lights went down. But once the tale of tiny borrowers journeying through an enormous kitchen to steal a sugar cube got underway, they sat perfectly still, not another peep.

Their mom looked pleased. She sat back, laughed, and had a great time as well. Miyazaki is very healthy food for young kids of all ages.

Meek's Cutoff

My wife watches bemused as I drive about town – or wander about a department store – with an elusive destination evading me, always giggling just around the next corner. She doesn’t even bother suggesting that I ask for directions. What’s the point? I’m a man. I should be able to find things on my own – or die trying.

The new and terrific western Meek’s Cutoff toys tantalizingly with this sexual conundrum. It’s as if God instilled in the sexes the wrong occupations. Women are in charge of the hearth and home while their men venture out, often to their doom. Reverse the roles and women would simply ask for directions, get the food, and be home for supper, returning to their men who have a roaring fire waiting. And who have had little opportunity for self-destruction other than, I suppose, burning down the house.

The story of the movie is simple enough. Three families, their covered wagons pulled by cattle creaking and shuddering over ruts in the rough prairie and sloshing through rivers and streams, are lost. Actually, as one of the men carves into a fallen tree, they are all capital letters LOST. Their burly leader, Meek, has led them on a shortcut, through a cutoff. He should have let his wife draw the maps in the dirt and stuck to building fires.

And that’s almost all there is for a plot. Three families moving from an abundance of water – the opening scenes have the wet stuff flowing and dripping and splashing everywhere – to gradual, inevitable collapse from thirst. Along the way, director Kelly Reichardt treats us to some of the most poetic images I’ve yet encountered in this most poetic of genres. My favorite is an elegant dissolve (where one image replaces another by slowly superimposing over the first). Wagons exit the frame to leave an expanse of wilderness with a river running through it. Then a man on horseback followed by wagons appears like a mirage travelling through the clouds.

Midway through the movie, first appearing and then disappearing, ghostlike to Emily (Michelle Williams) and then gradually taking concrete form is a lone, aged Native American man. He doesn’t speak English, but he speaks a universal language that Emily intuitively understands. He’s a guide, their map just waiting to be opened. Meek just sees him as a threat, someone to shoot.

Emily, the movie, and Reichardt think of women and men using two simple equations: women are at home with chaos, men with destruction. Women realize that the world is beyond their control and humbly seek help toward understanding. Men draw rifles from their saddlebags and blow their problems away.

Emily, often photographed peering out through the folds of her bonnet, wants to take this strange, potential savior into their fold, feed him, and follow him, trusting blindly that he’ll lead them to water. Meek is introduced emerging from a tent as a wild animal of a man. Before turning toward us, all we see is a tangle and snarl of unkempt hair. He often takes just the men aside and plots their next move like a general orchestrating a skirmish.

Of course, Emily and Meek are at odds, leading to two confrontations. One is a tense standoff, him with a pistol, her with a rifle, their potential guide in the middle. The other another great poetic moment by a lone tree, proof that there is water to be found if he meekly surrenders to Emily’s better instincts.

Teen Writes: The Group that Opened the Box

“We want parents to understand. We don’t want to talk to them. It’s not like I don’t want to talk to them. I have this looming fear of disappointing them. When they were growing up, [what we are trying to do] was unheard of.”

Those words — spoken searchingly by a teenage girl in the new documentary “Teen Writes: The Group that Opened the Box” — occur during a relaxed dinner break. The girls in the group are wondering what their families think about their edgy project. They well capture the mixture of wisdom and honesty these girls are attempting to coax out into the open.

But, I’m getting ahead of myself. So, what’s this Group that Opened the Box anyway?

Clinical psychologist Kathy Blohm, Ph.D., faced challenges with getting her young patients, especially often angry teenage girls, to open up. She and writer Karen Van Fossan decided to try an experiment. Get a group of girls together and encourage them to write about their concerns. And, just as crucially, get them to further open up by performing their words on stage.

They began by placing assorted objects — a book of matches, a guitar pick, a wrapped condom, etc. — in a yellow box adorned with flowers. The girls would then open the box, select an item, and write a free-associative poem or bit of prose. No rules, just honest feelings. And, before they knew it, the girls’ creativity and openness was proving boundless. They were expressing concerns ranging from sexuality and desire to harassment, the environment, war, cutting, and eating disorders.

And beyond the founders’ wildest dreams, the girls really blossomed in performance. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing two of their live shows, once with my older daughter and once with both my teenage daughters. (They both loved the shows.) The girls find such a beautiful way of approaching touchy subjects with humor and a wink.

“Teen Writes” does a fine job telling this story. It’s a breezy and engaging 56 minutes. Local area teens Michaela, Rachel, Megan, Alexis, Caitlyn, Ray (Rachel), and Breeanna — a diverse, creative, and charismatic bunch — are introduced and we get a feel for each personality. My only criticism of the movie is that I wish it was longer. I could’ve spent hours with this cast.

The movie also, necessarily, includes the group’s most controversial episode. Accused by some of promoting homosexuality and of brainwashing, the group was told by a Fargo radio station that they could only join a program on woman’s issues if a hostile counter-voice shared their air time. This violated Blohm’s and Van Fossan’s core principle, always make the girls feel safe to express themselves. The radio appearance was cancelled.

One thing I don’t hear mentioned enough is the crucial role the girls’ parents have played. It’s their open-mindedness and trust in their daughters that has made this whole experiment possible. I’m grateful that these girls and these parents are talking and setting such an example. And seeing how much the girls have grown and accomplished fills me with optimism. Everything is possible if parents and teens open their boxes together.

Hugo

Hugo is a joy from start to finish. It’s a colorful, delightful evocation of 1930s Paris as playground for two fanciful, imaginative kids – both orphans, one living by his own resources in a train station, the other living with her grandmother and grumpy, peculiar grandfather. It’s full of slapstick chases and funny moments involving dogs. Most kids of all ages should enjoy it.

Definitely see it. Grab the DVD right away and curl up with the whole family. It should be available shortly. The crowd was pretty sparse both times I saw it. But, this isn’t really the type of review I wish to write. I’d rather tell you why it so grabbed me and won’t let go.

I’ve long had a love affair with the work of Georges Méliès – the first wizard of the movies – and that grumpy and mysterious grandfather turns out to be one and the same. By way of the clever “children’s” book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, director Martin Scorsese – here eschewing his usual gangster mayhem and finding a gentler expression – has crafted Hugo as a loving vision of the legendary rise, fall, and redemption of the man who invented movies as a place where dreams come true.

The story of Méliès is all here, mildly fictionalized. Beginning his career as a magician, he one day stumbled into a sideshow screening of a train pulling into a station, causing the startled audience to scurry to safety. As if already seeing King Kong and Star Wars in his crystal ball, he immediately approached the creators of this new magic, the Brothers Lumière, and offered to buy one of their cameras. Offer spurned, and being the genius he was, he simply built one his own.

Within 17 years, the infinitely creative Méliès had made over 500 movies, even wowing crowds with the seemingly impossible feat of A Trip to the Moon. Then, sadly, people lost interest in his type of movies and he became a forgotten man, many of his movies melted down to be reformed into heels for women’s shoes (in real life it was heels for boots). He burned his sets and props in despair.

Hugo is more than mere history lesson though. Its fabric is woven out of images and ideas from the many works of Méliès. He built the first movie studio, a glass building allowing in sunlight, and staged his movies in depth, perhaps shooting through a fish tank toward a stage where actors frolicked in front of layers of backdrops. In Scorsese’s hands, this becomes the most dazzling use of 3D I’ve seen.

Méliès loved dreams and trains and used models to depict an elaborate train station crash in his movie The Impossible Voyage. In Hugo, these become the inspiration for a deliriously impossible dream sequence.

Méliès adored flowers and this infatuation assumes life in the character of a lovely train station florist. Méliès spent his post-moviemaking years running a toy stand. After his death, the same space became poetically re-occupied by a flower stand. Hugo’s combining of this love with this fortuitous bit of history is one of its loveliest touches.

Having once flirted with entering the priesthood, Scorsese has forever sought ways of exploring religious themes, his favorite being redemption. His pet project for decades has been the tireless championing of movie preservation. These two concerns come together in Hugo. After years of sadness, early movie historians began to discover lost prints and rekindled interest in Méliès’ movies.

He ended his life seeing his work treasured anew. His fans have only blossomed ever since.

Dazed and Confused

“The older you get, the more rules they are going to try and get you to follow. You just gotta keep on livin', man. L-I-V-I-N.” – Wooderson in Dazed and Confused.

Critic Robin Wood, while discussing the history and meaning of teen movies, once let slip the following nugget: “...when I described [Dazed and Confused] in an article as a 'horror' movie, I received a message from its director Richard Linklater congratulating me on being the first to notice his intention!” What the heck might they have meant?

Wood praised The Texas Chainsaw Massacre while discussing the meaning of horror movies (he discussed meaning of movies a lot, my kind of guy). Shot in and around Austin, Texas (same as Dazed) in 1974 (two years before the setting of Dazed); I'll begin with it.

Chainsaw pits its wide-eyed protagonists – five young adults straight out of Scooby Doo – against a terrible family of three generations. Grandpa, Pa, and Sons have always worked at the slaughterhouse, but now the meat packing company has found a more efficient way to kill cattle. Rendered obsolete and out of work, they find new ways to apply their skills.

The protagonists' hopes for the future are killed one by one by a sledgehammer, a meat hook, and the titular chainsaw and the only survivor will forever be a basket case. Chainsaw is about one generation obstinately following the next even though the future once enjoyed by its parents and grandparents is no longer out there. Dazed is also about generation following generation with steadily diminishing promises.

Every character in Dazed is part of a generation – incoming high school freshmen, the new senior class, and adults. The action involves freshmen boys being mercilessly beaten with wood paddles and freshmen girls being humiliated by having food smeared on their bodies, led about on leashes, and ordered to propose to senior boys. The seniors gleefully have at it, the memory of their freshman year still fresh. The adults go along, vaguely remembering their own glory days, even selling concessions.

Many of the seniors look toward their futures with feigned optimism. One doesn't want to go to college, he just wants to dance. Another believes that, since the seventies obviously suck, “maybe the eighties will be like radical or something.” And a stoner simply sees the whole adult world as a huge conspiracy with spooky stuff happening on the dollar bill.

Two characters, Wooderson and O'Bannion refuse to graduate to adulthood altogether. Wooderson lives in some pre-adulthood purgatory saying, “That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age.” O'Bannion flunked his senior year and gets to continue paddling freshman (for eternity?).

Star quarterback Randall 'Pink' Floyd is the wide-eyed protagonist of Dazed. He opts out of a paddling simply giving a sympathetic tap and despises his coaches that he recognizes as pathetic future versions of his teammates. The coaches demand he sign a form promising he will stay drug and alcohol free all summer. A running gag is that no matter how many times he wads it up and tosses it away someone picks it up and puts it back in his pocket.

I think the root of Wood's horror was the sense that Pink – conflicted about what to do (at one point he says he'll probably sign, at another he declares he never will) – will give in, sign, and continue the tradition, maybe even end up coaching the team one day.

“You just gotta keep on livin', man. L-I-V-I-N.”

(As a footnote, that line by Wooderson would've made a terrifically sardonic tagline for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, describing the terrified young woman caught in its vortex.)

The Tree of Life

We humans have difficulty seeing beyond our current condition. Events only days ago become fuzzy and we can hardly see past that check to a creditor we agonized over ten minutes ago. The future becomes a question: Will I be able to write that check again next month?

Geographically, we’re fixated on our home town, patriotism, and property boundary lines. We live in our own little worlds and see everything and everyone beyond our white picket fences as ‘other.’ On a global scale, this leads to endless wars.

Turn the telescope around and gaze inward and life can become unbearable. Seeming unsolvable problems turn the picket fence into an insurmountable wall and all hope is lost. As unforgettably documented in an album by Nine Inch Nails, the downward spiral can lead to suicide.

The extraordinary new movie The Tree of Life from director Terrence Malick encompasses all of these ideas, and some. It is a monumental achievement of beauty, intelligence, and mystery. It is Malick’s gift to the world born out of personal pain and loss.

The movie tells two stories of Jack. In the present, he’s a businessman living and working in a sterile, glass-encased world. Played by Sean Penn, he’s drained of life and deeply troubled. He is, as he alludes in the movie’s opening narration, knocking on God’s door. The bulk of the movie consists of his memories growing up in Waco, Texas in the 1950s. He’s played as a child, quite irresistibly by Hunter McCracken.

His childhood is centered on the family home, his parents played by Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain (so good recently in The Help). Or maybe ‘confined by’ is more appropriate. Neighborhood streets surround the home like a moat and his father’s first lesson to him forbids his crossing the property line into the neighbor’s yard.

The world beyond the home is portrayed as offering adventure tainted with peril. A trip to a swimming pool is to watch a boy drown. A trip to town is to witness the handicapped, the destitute, and the criminal, all those ‘others’ that fill a sheltered child’s dreams with fear. His mother points beyond the trees surrounding their home saying, “That’s where God lives.” And his adult mind desperately searches these memories for meaning.

He tries to situate his life within a larger frame. He imagines a history of the world from the Big Bang, to the origins of life on Earth, to the dinosaurs, to the Ice Age, and finally to his own birth. After his family is forced to leave their home, he imagines the inevitable death of life on Earth. These remarkable scenes reminded me of Carl Sagan’s Cosmic Calendar where man occupies only the last hour and a half of December 31.

Jack has long struggled with his younger brother’s death (we aren’t told the nature of his passing and first assume he was a soldier in Viet Nam – Malick’s own younger brother committed suicide at the same age) and his reverie is his attempt to climb above the walls surrounding him. An image of trees reflected in the glass of his office building assured me that his climb was successful – though this is wonderfully debatable.

Many have compared this amazing movie to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The mesmerizing creation sequence is certainly reminiscent of the famed star gate sequence. But one thing sets it apart. While I’ve always found Kubrick’s movie cold, distant, and abstract; the evocation of growing up in the 1950s in The Tree of Life is warm, immediate, and overflowing with life.

Can you tell? I really love this movie.

Eat the Rich!

With all the Occupy Wall Street rallies going on, I’ve found it pleasing that some have taken the extra step and walked the streets dressed as zombies and holding signs asserting, “Eat the rich!” I wonder though. How many people get the joke?

George Romero has been making zombie movies since he revolutionized the genre in 1968 with “Night of the Living Dead.” And he’s been a man on a mission. You see, for him the zombies aren’t walking blobs of decaying flesh. They are us. Or more specifically they are those of us that have fallen on hard times and tumbled from the middle class into poverty. And from one film in the series to the next, their numbers have steadily, dramatically grown.

In “Dawn of the Dead” (1978), a scientist assesses the political situation saying, “This isn't the Republicans versus the Democrats, where we're in a hole economically or... or we're in another war. This is more crucial than that. This is down to the line. There can be no more divisions among the living!” Another character realizes the zombies – those struggling – kill for one reason: “They kill for food.” They are the hungry.

With “Day of the Dead” (1985), hopes of working with the government had faded. In a throwaway line of dialog discussing the failing phone systems, a character says, “We used to talk to Washington all the time. They could hear us then.” And the beginnings of revolution were forming: “It takes more energy to keep quiet than it does to speak the mind.”

This culminated in “Land of the Dead” (2005). The zombies have overrun the earth and the last CEO (played by Dennis Hopper who notoriously went from “Easy Rider” to one of Ronald Reagan’s biggest supporters) is barricaded in his high tower as countless zombies converge on the city. Beginning their march in a funny scene set in Main Street, USA, these zombies are different than their predecessors. They’ve learned to work together. And the last vestiges of the old way are memorably devoured.

In “Dawn of the Dead,” it was proclaimed “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” I think the true subtext of that quote has become all too familiar: “When there’s no more room in the unemployment lines, the unemployed will walk the earth.” And they’ll be plenty eager to “Eat the rich!”