Totoro

My friend Michael and I both decided to watch My Neighbor Totoro last night for the first time. Michael is on a Japanese animation kick, and I'm going to see the stage production of My Neighbour Totoro in London in June and wanted to be prepared. Then we texted about it the next day. Here's what we said.

Michael: Just finished. I thought it was delightful.

Aaron: Yes, it was!! I love that cat bus. There was a little too much screaming little girls.

Michael: Oh I thought the whole time the screaming was going to be a fight for you.

Aaron: Little girls really do not need to scream that much. Hush up.

Michael: I was so immediately taken with Totoro, his little sprites, and their bus cat.

Aaron: Love that Totoro. And love his little leaf hat.

Michael: I didn't expect the plot to go in the direction it did. I expected more fantastical adventure and this was pastoral life interrupted by childhood fear. I also assumed Totoro would be a very different character. I can't remember the word for it, but his actions didn't seem to make normal sense. He was following his own whims and if he wanted to fly around on a top then baby, he was gonna. On a personal viewing level, it mattered a lot to me that the dad especially didn't scoff at the kids when they were insistent they saw Totoro. He honored it and said ok we better go show some respect!

Aaron: Your analysis here is wonderful. You're very right and I hadn't thought of all of this.

Michael: Tell me how it landed for you.

Aaron: In my viewing of kids movies recently I've been very preoccupied with the attitude the film takes. Most kids movies are not about the experience of being a child at all; they're about parenting. Totoro splits the difference by having two kids of different ages. 

Michael: This felt almost completely about the childhood experience. You're so right in the way the parental experience is so commonly the background reasoning behind plotting. 

Aaron: And Totoro himself is not the focus of this movie. The first supernatural figure we meet is the soot-mites, actually. And if we consider things that way, then the movie is much more about finding pleasure in the haunted house, learning to love ghosts, staying open to wonder and terror. Totoro appears at the bus stop when they're scared and lonely. He is a kind of embodiment of the scary figure in the dark or in the forest. But as it turns out, he's cuddly and helpful and magically gifted. (Contrast with the way Americans think about Jesus when they're kids.)

Michael: Oh that's such a good way to frame him. That lines up better with my surprise about him. He's unknowable, but it turns out to at least be in a fun way.

Aaron: What I love about Totoro (and maybe Miyazaki more generally) is its approach to the mysterious and unknown. He asks the child to head toward what scares her. In this case her mother's illness and a new house and her sister's absence.

Michael: I see that in a lot of his other work too. And the films don't demand the characters face those fears without flinching. The characters are allowed their breakdowns and acknowledgment of how overwhelming it all is. 

War Requiem (1989)

After adoring Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, I was disappointed to find myself less patient with his War Requiem, a feature-length film without dialogue set to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Honestly, in theory this is a cool idea. I've loved similar concepts on occasion, including an incredible version of The Passion of Joan of Arc set to Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light which I was grateful to be able to hear performed live by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park back when I lived in Orlando. But anyway... Jarman's film is hyper theatrical in ways I didn't totally understand, and because there's no dialogue it often felt indulgent and distant. There is a very smart interpretation of the sacrifice of Abraham – but it's in the original Britten text, so it was a kind of literalization of the music. I don't know. This is cool in parts, but it left me rather cold.

The Salt Mines (1990)

Whoa. The Salt Mines is a powerful documentary (and only 45 minutes) about transvestite crack users in New York City in the late 1980s. This is a really important film, especially for the way the subjects describe the Mariel boat lift, life on the streets in New York City, their understandings of their sexualities (and genders), crack use, religion, and their own disposability because of capitalism. Their living conditions are horrific – the salt mines are a storage facility for salt used on the roads when it snows – but these women are fascinating.

The Garden (1990)

The Garden is a psychedelic dream-trip of a film that uses the mythology of the life of Jesus Christ to talk about homophobia and to mourn for the loss of life caused by the HIV/AIDS crisis and the criminally lethargic response from the US and UK governments to the health crisis. I'm not into Christian imagery, so much of this felt heavy handed to me, but this has some very good moments, and every time the central couple appeared onscreen, I felt great. To be honest, though, they're not in it very much...

One image that will really stick with me from The Garden, though, is a small boy on a table spinning a globe, appearing to teach a group of very old male students, none of whom is listening. The old men–students are all banging these wooden rods on the table in unison, making stupid noises. It's a great image of role-reversal: old male hysteria masquerading as reasonable adult behavior. This is, of course, exactly what does happen in the world, although our newsmedia and governments pretend that their hysteria is normal and that other people are the crazies.

I watched The Garden as part of a series of queer films on the Criterion Channel.

Privilege

Privilege, Yvonne Rainer's meditation on white feminism, menopause, sexual violence, and racism is... a lot of stuff. It's at its best when it's making its documentary aspects weird, and there are some excellent visual moments, but overall this feels quite jumbled, and I was bored for lots of its running time.

Privilege isn't a documentary, but it's doing something like the work of Isaac Julien, although I think this is much more meta and complex... and less successful overall.

Jacob's Ladder

The script for Jacob's Ladder is kind of great, and of course Adrian Lyne's filmmaking is scary and strange and enjoyable. It's unfortunate that this movie stars the inexpressive Tim Robbins, whose breakdown just never materializes onscreen. He's so deer-in-the-headlights at all times, that one seems to see no change at all.

Tavernier Triple Feature

I watched three Bertrand Tavernier films at the end of June. Tavernier died recently (in March) and the Criterion Channel put a bunch of his films up for us. 

A Sunday in the Country (Un Dimanche à la Compagne) (1984) is understated and lovely.

Daddy Nostalgie (1990) is smart and slow and sad. It's Dirk Bogarde's last performance, and I love that man so much, so this is a pleasure in many ways. It's also a very interesting character study. Jane Birkin's character is constantly getting angry for no reason, or rather, there's something in her character that prompts her to quick rages. It's a very, very interesting film.

And then there is La Vie et Rien d'Autre (Life and Nothing But) (1989), which is plainly Bertrand Tavernier's masterpiece. This is an incredible, moving antiwar film set in the year following WWI. Tavernier's focus on the dead, on the absolute and total loss of life is extraordinary, humane, and almost unbearable. I loved this film. Philippe Noiret and Sabine Azéma are wonderful.

The Juniper Tree (1990)

The Juniper Tree is a nice companion piece to The White Reindeer, also a film about witchcraft in the frozen north. The Juniper Tree's main draw, though, is that it stars a very young Björk as a medium who is able to communicate with the dead. It's an odd little film that I thought I understood until it took a gruesome turn in act three. 

I watched it as part of my unseen movie club, and it was someone else's pick, so I'm not actually sure how to access it, but it's sort of a fun little curiosity.