#53 -- "The Tree of Life" Reviewed | * * * ½

". . .a science, fiction film."

Life, identifiable life, is a difficult thing to face.

Fragile and grand in its insignificance, life is soft in a deafening universe. It comes in short moments and it's remembered in even fewer of them. We cannot meditate on its expansiveness without dividing ourselves from it, distancing ourselves from the only thing that makes us tangible, pondering theory and meaning, pondering our own biology and our own ego.

The human spirit is boundless, should we desire it to be, capable of comprehending our place and our size in ways that would be heresy in centuries past. The question now isn't "Who, or where, do we come from?" but "What do we come from?" We most certainly go to death, if that even is a thing worth mentioning. James Cameron once said that nobody every really dies in science-fiction.

The Tree of Life isn't a science-fiction film. It's a science, fiction film.

Addressing science and addressing fiction as vital entities that will create life, human life, in particular, it is devoid of superficial meaning, just as human life is, particularly when framed against the universe's very creation. Even from mankind's limitations, physical or otherwise, the film presents us humans as symmetrical with The Big Bang itself. Small in some ways, but so large in more, because we make ourselves thusly. It's filmed with the hopes that some day a poet from another planet will find it in a time-capsule and learn from humanity's intimacy with life itself. Optimistic and childish and fascinated, the story is formless and it scatters time as if it were a handful of salt. It endures because we viewers demand that it endure. We will make story and find story if we can.

It's story is questions:

"Why good?"

"Why bad?"

"Why hurt, and why happiness, and why anger, and why are we blessed with such potential, and why do we come across disparity?"

"Why is clarity withheld?"

Because life is an implausible, wide thing. Run these questions alongside any family and you will find limitless stories -- basic, but all unique. It's startling and realistic, like one hundred brief stories about the same person in a small-town newspaper. Stories about nature and nurture in equal measure. They combine to make the titular Tree of Life.

And yet, there are the laws erected around us, and then there's assumed fiction that goes defied, again circling back to questions that we aren't really looking for answers to, but are looking more for affirmation and identification from things capable of doing harm. They fear the ones they love and their humanity, so the family in the movie, the boys in particular, search for questions that will turn authorities into fiction and expose them as liars -- innocent logic applied, hoping to extract meaning. That desperation works its way up the chain with the parents asking equally desperate questions of God, and then the film suggests that God has to go ahead and ask these things of all of Creation, whether He invented it or not. Authority is never too far away, lurking and judgmental in the background, hanging overhead like an angry parent, a god, or a blinding sun, the last of which being present in innumerable shots throughout the film. 

That presence is terrifying and the movie is oftentimes terrifying, placing the death of the middle brother early in the movie and then flashing back to let the rest of the story build towards that event. This, like the movie's frequent, whispering narration from various characters, is cruel. There is no shelter in these internal monologues, just confusion, regret, and dread. The boys don't initially have the ability to actually harm each other -- time goes by though. Rough-housing inside becomes recklessness climbing trees becomes firecrackers becomes brotherly dares and BB guns. Eventually, it happens, and there's the death. It's never shown on-screen, we only see the emotional aftermath.

A decent metaphor for mankind as a species.

In the future, where the oldest son is grown, his life is a lucid nightmare. The world is a gray city full of deaf-mutes. He's constantly rising in an elevator that blinks mechanically like a death-bed heart-monitor. The events in his adult life are cold, fragmented, meaningless, and difficult to place -- a result of his grief. Without warning, he's wandering a desert until he finds his family; father, mother, brothers, exactly as they should be, happy, on a beach, wandering together until all of the light fades at the end of the day.

And that's all there is to it.

* * * ½

(out of 4)

Recommended related reading:

[The Prestige | * * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Shakespeare In Love | * * ½] by Ghost Little

[Jane Eyre | * * *] by Ghost Little

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF

#40 -- "The Prestige" Reviewed | * * * ½

"This is a movie about being fooled because we want to be fooled and it doesn't stop there -- we want to be fooled by something complicated and we won't take simple for an answer. . . Don't look closely. Stand at a distance. You aren't being fooled."

This movie is a Monet. It's impressionism. It's clearest when you stop squinting and you back away and you stop trying to examine it because as you examine it, The Prestige is giving you your answers over and over. Let it. In fact, while you're worming your way around the question, trying to match it up with an answer that must, by necessity, be as equally taut and coiled, you have all the answers you need. It is both question and codex, describing itself, and you, at the same time.

Christopher Nolan is cruel and he doesn't care who knows it. The guy is fairly humorless in his movies and that's one of his flaws. As a director, his grasp on the audience's reactions goes beyond the movie itself and he bats around expectations like an arrogant racquetball player. His characters in The Prestige, Borden and Angier, are cold and obsessive, assuredly like Nolan is, mystifying people because they know how to, not because it cheers them up. They have the ability to distract the gawking masses, and out of pity, these two magicians suffer for their art, probably more than they would have liked to. It's sort of a self-pitying sacrifice but the outcome is a warm amazement at the power our own minds have over us when we go looking for something and ignore all other possibilities in search of something complex. The search for a complex answer sends feedback into the simple question we asked in the first place, layering and warping it until its nigh-unrecognizable.

The Prestige is fairly self-referential, something we normally don't like because it places an invisible dunce cap on the audience, and yet The Prestige goes even further -- that dunce cap isn't its last trick, it's just more sleight-of-hand. In fact, the movie thinks very highly of you, proven by the fact that it bothered to challenge you at all. It has deeper meaning than Inception, Nolan's later movie, but lacks Inception's urgency, focusing instead on keeping every shot air-tight instead of making it exciting. Inception is better the first time you view it while The Prestige is sharper the fifth or sixth time you see it and they're both equally good. Push. We're not talking about Inception though.

No, instead, we have The Prestige today. This is a movie about being fooled because we want to be fooled and it doesn't stop there -- we want to be fooled by something complicated and we won't take simple for an answer. We need to let that go. Maybe enjoy ourselves. Maybe try smiling at a neat li'l trick.

In London around the start of the 20th century, two stage magicians become rivals and through some non-linear storytelling, one of them is wrongfully accused of drowning the other after a trick involving some sort of lightning machine. But that doesn't happen until later, apparently. Flashback to years earlier when they were just starting up, dissecting what it means to be a capable stage performer. It appears total commitment is the answer to that question and we are slowly told that answers might not be as clear as they seem. People are always acting, always leaving misdirection.

Angier, the man who drowns in the introductory flash-forward, is a better performer, favoring flashiness. Borden, the accused now on trial, is blunter but sneakier -- he starts as the "antagonist." The two of them constantly trade the upper hand and the roles of antagonist and protagonist. The audience doesn't know which one to keep an eye on and credit to Nolan for these switches is highly-deserved. We're asked from the very beginning if we're "watching closely," but this is even more misdirection.

Don't look closely. Stand at a distance. You aren't being fooled.

The whole time, while the two of them are swapping mistresses and puzzling each other with new tricks that bring them to anger, assuring others that it's a puzzle within a riddle within a masquerade. It isn't though. Angier visits Nikolai Tesla / David Bowie in America to make him a high-science machine that will zap him from one place to another, a magic trick that Borden has mastered without the use of a body-double, which is the traditional way to accomplish The Transported Man illusion. Little by little we learn just how extensive their contention is. Eventually, Angier discovers the machine can clone anything or anybody.

It doesn't really matter what the solution is because the point the movie is making is that actual answers can never be guessed if we go in with an obsessed eye. This rubs some people the wrong way and those people must think very highly of themselves. The answer is: you're a dummy, stop pretending, stop thinking you know everything. Even when the answer is right in front of your face, waving at you, which The Prestige does with zero apologies on repeated viewings, you won't see the answer until you're cool with being fooled and that's not a bad thing. If you can't stick with the movie after the twist with Angier cloning and killing himself over and over, all to serve a magic trick, You're Doing It Wrong. 

It's a stupid twist and it knows it. It teaches a lesson about suspending disbelief, which is why you're there, watching a movie. Movies are all about people dying over and over and people swapping characters every other second, which is how Borden does his version of The Transported Man, and yet Angier refuses to believe it is so simple. Angier is the all assholes at the movies demanding complexity, considering themselves to be very smart and feeling quite entitled to a story as equally-gnarled. At the movies, we believe the misdirection because we want to believe in the mystery.

Like your dad trolling you for trying to act like an adult before you're ready, The Prestige gives you all the tools you need to fix a roof that doesn't need fixing, and yet you search it for the flaws he assured you were there and he is kicking back somewhere with an iced tea, waiting for you to come find him after two hours of trying.

Your reaction should not be: "you asshole."

It should be: "good one."

* * * ½

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#38 -- "Shakespeare In Love" Reviewed | * * ½

". . .honestly, Shakespeare In Love is not meta enough. . . it is like throwing a bratwurst down a hallway."

An interesting conversation happened at the bar last week when we mentioned to somebody that we would never see that movie Contagion because it would only increase our hypochondria and that it was weird that they give away Gwyneth Paltrow's death in the trailers and that she had been an overrated actress ever since Shakespeare In Love, a movie which we had never seen.

"Oh, you need to watch Shakespeare In Love. It's amazing. It's my go-to feel-good movie to watch when I'm feeling down."

"Really. That's a pretty big statement. Is it better than Love, Actually?"

"I'm getting kinda sick of Love, Actually."

"Okay. Is it better than Saving Private Ryan?"

"I haven't seen Saving Private Ryan. Why do you ask?"

"Because Shakespeare In Love won the best picture Oscar over Saving Private Ryan in 1998, which I'm pretty sure was the biggest acts of grand larceny since Prometheus."

That dim-light conversation was how we found ourselves watching Shakespeare In Love and yeah, we did go into this movie on a sour note, a bad way to go into any experience, expecting one thing and instead getting another. Expecting local venison steaks and instead getting a shrink-wrapped mid-sized bratwurst -- not terrible, just disturbing because you're worried about how it was made. Co-written by Tom Stoppard, a genius, it's a very meta-story about William Shakespeare getting writer's block while working on "Romeo and Juliet" and then overcoming the aforementioned writer's block by inadvertently living the play's story himself, and, umm, writing it as he goes. Shakespeare is the Romeo in that sentence. Today, Shakespeare's stories are veritable narrative-engines that you can tweak and tune to run in any environment -- lighten it by setting it as a CG cartoon (Gnomio & Juliet, featuring the voice of Jason Statham as Tybalt), tighten the gear ratio to make it work in modern California (Romeo + Juliet, directed by the mad-Australian Baz Luhrmann), add werewolves and vampires (Underworld, directed by nobody) because werewolves and vampires have blood like soda-fountain syrup and it is joyous to watch it squib everywhere. Those are all just the takes on "Romeo and Juliet," let's not forget those riffs on "Hamlet" (The Lion King), and "The Tempest" (Forbidden Planet). These plays are sort of like wide, straight-line hallways that you can decorate to your liking, highly-adaptable templates tailor-made for being self-referential and tongue-in-cheek meta-narratives, but honestly, Shakespeare In Love is not meta enough.

For all of its borrowing of classical Shakespearean elements like class-warfare and simple misunderstandings leading to big troubles and big troubles leading to fencing-duels and fencing-duels leading to Accidental Poison, this is a movie that's self-satisfied. Stoppard's approach to, ya know, "spinning the whole Shakespeare play-writing story so it's sly and aware, man" is the equivalent of a college student coming into a sophomore creative writing class and saying, "My paper is about my roommate writing a poem about his doomed relationship with a girl whose family has a house in the Hamptons."

Saying that Shakespeare didn't just write "Romeo and Juliet," bro, he lived it, isn't clever. It's child's play. Know what Stoppard should've done? He should've gone further. He should've set it in on a far-flung future space-station where a barely-human playwright repeats history and inadvertently re-write Shakespeare by living that timeless starcrossed-lovers story -- a "million monkeys at a million typewriters" meets "power of love" kinda thing (in space!). Stoppard squeezes references to so many other plays that this could have been a huge mash-up of all the Shakespearean mythos rather than just an opaque retelling with a deus ex machina that doesn't do her job. And there are references, there are Easter eggs, there is fan-service, and there are no bigger fanboys than English literature fanboys, that's for damn sure, but it isn't enough to point to a human skull in the background and assume you've just split the stage-drama atom. C'mon, that's what Family Guy does, sniggering at Optimus Prime copy-pasted into the background during a conversation about robots. Those objects in the background in Shakespeare In Love like Yorick's skull have meaning in the plays come from -- why did they make the plot run parallel to "Romeo and Juliet" if it's supposed to be a Shakespeare origin-story? Is it Shakespeare Begins or is it Batman and Juliet? Well, it's something in between and as a result, we're stuck with an imbalance. The whole message feels misdirected or unsure of what it wants to be, hence the well-documented re-shoots on the movie's ending. The sad part is that Stoppard fucking knows how to write a good, goofy spoof like he did with Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and it's tragic that his ideas seem to be a delicious apple-blueberry crumb pie that somebody decided to drop a upside-down German bundt cake on top of, hoping to hide the sugary fruit filling dripping out of the sides and maybe win some Oscars.

Shakespeare wrote comedies and tragedies and romances and sonnets -- most of the sonnets are rumored to have actually been written for one of his male friends, by the way -- so there was obviously more to his talent and legend than one girl that he couldn't forget. He invented words! He borrowed and stole ideas! He wrote fucking "MacBeth" and "King Lear!" The fact that Shakespeare cheated on his wife with no remorse is the least interesting thing he did. Instead of being just "Romeo and Juliet" -- and yes, there were disguises, and deceptions, and cross-dressing, and a third-act turn, and those are all Shakespeare tropes -- this should have been an assembly of the major themes from many plays woven together into a story that's genuinely new. That would have been impressive. Retelling "Romeo and Juliet" has been done better, most notably by the above-mentioned Baz Luhrmann; in Moulin Rouge! The whole back-half of that movie is about them inadvertently performing an Indian version of "Romeo and Juliet" but they don't wink and nod at each other, they just added Bollywood-psychosis by way of French Absinthe-madness and actually had the balls to kill the female lead.

Shakespeare In Love is not a bad movie. It isn't as smart as it thinks it is. It isn't poorly-acted. It isn't poorly-written dialog. It isn't disrespectful of its medium. It isn't as good as Saving Private Ryan. It isn't undeserving of praise but it is given too much credit. It is award-bait. It is wasted potential. It is sugar-neutral. It is Splenda. It is a case of been-there done-that. It is a re-tread. It is like throwing a bratwurst down a hallway.

* * ½

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#16 -- "Sucker Punch" Reviewed | * *

"It's like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this."

The titular sucker punch refers to the fact that you, moviegoer, are what powers shallow, exploitative, CGI-soaked power-fantasies that dominate modern Hollywood. And that's why this movie is hard to enjoy, even when its German/orc/robot bodycount is in the hundreds. 

A girl's mom dies, she is taken to an insane asylum named after the lead singer of The Eurthymics so that her wicked Stepdad can have her declared insane, lobotomized, and then collect her inheritance. The asylum is a grimy toilet filled with sad girls and corrupt orderlies that consider themselves kings. They keep saying when the girls are lobotomized, they see paradise. Twenty minutes into the movie, the girl called Babydoll is lobotomized for seemingly no reason by Don Draper. 

What follows is a lengthy flashback told through a weird framing narrative. Without warning, the events of the previous 5 days before the lobotomy are related, but now, Babydoll is introduced as a "new girl," not at an insane asylum, but at a brothel, of all things. So what's going on? It's a badly-handled shift. Look, the workers at the asylum -- ostensibly the "real" world -- are re-drawn as 60's swingers and scummy club-goers. The girls working the brothel are mesmerizing dancers, we're told, and the dances they perform represent who they truly are when given the chance to create art. They lose themselves when dancing, falling into their roles as entertainers, all for the enjoyment of the club's audience. 

When Babydoll dances, she assures herself -- as all diluted entertainers throughout history have -- that this, distracting the trollish, all-male audience, is power, and she is then sent to a world where, at least in her mind, she's a hero. She fights samurai in an absurd costume, using katana and pistol like it's time to Devil May Cry, and it's so over-the-top that you, the actual movie-goer, should make the realization: 

This is satire. 

A poorly executed satire, sure, but it's satire nonetheless. Between the art direction, which eerily echoes Unreal Tournament III, and the "How The Fuck?!" action, particularly during the robots-on-a-train sequence, we give it 2 stars. We can't in good faith recommend it though. To anybody. It's basically all for naught. Let's drill down just a little bit further into the satire, because it's the only thing saving the story. It sure as shit isn't the characters, but a story can be carried a decent distance on the bent ankles of "concept" and "industry commentary." Yes, it's a metaphor for the stupidity of Hollywood, but so were Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and Three Amigos! and those movies wasn't self-important and were very funny. 

This movie isn't good, but it isn't good for the reasons you'd initially think. Breaking this busted, poorly-acted metaphor down:

• Girl in insane asylum. The innocent goes to Hollywood, realizes it's an icky, insane, corrupt place that lobotomizes people if they cause trouble or stop being profitable.
• The subconscious brothel fantasy. What the higher-ups in Hollywood try to glam up to keep the audiences coming back and "the talent" dreaming their dreams and dancing their dances. There's a jarring sequence when the worm-man villain says he won't kill the girls just yet because they're going to make him so much 'effing money. But at this point, are we still talking about actresses or a certain writer/director/producer auteur, hmmm?
• The steampunk power-fantasy sequences. The movies "the talent" are told they are making, when in reality, they are actually making smut for the leering masses back in the brothel. Can the girls use this power to get what they want? Maybe. Is it empowering? Well, it's a mocking empowerment. Was it actually empowering to see Angelia Jolie punch dudes in Salt? No. And this is the same.

So it's no coincidence that the battles are bloodless, without consequence, and highly-stylized (/wink). It's no coincidence that these girls jump from battle to battle like highly-disposable working actors over the course of the movie. One day they're shooting an empty-suited, steampunk, (deliberately) historically-inaccurate World War I set-piece, the next, they're slaying inhuman orcs and murdering CGI dragons. Setting dragon-slaying to a cover of an Iggy Pop song is so blatant that it has to be mocking Kill Bill or any movie that thinks using obscure music for action sequences is hip. Then, it's worth repeating, comes the above-mentioned robots-on-a-train. And seriously, this scene is the "entering the Copacabana" of tracking-shot action sequences. We dare any living director from Michael Bay to Timur Bekmambetov to shoot a more jaw-dropping piece of ass-kickery. This movie treats action sequences like musicals treat elaborate dance-numbers. We just drop into them like pocket-dimension murder-soliloquies. They're the only moments when the movie speaks to the audience and goddamn they're good. Snappy, crunchy, hyper-accelerated and beautifully choreographed, like good bullet-riddled dance hip-hoperas should be. Give that one girl, Sweet Pea, her own movie, because she rocks the hoodie, assault rifle, and zweihander like it's her IRS-documented occupation.

She is self-employed and will have many itemized business expenses.

This film movie is a commentary on how we've allowed talented artists to become corrupted by the movie-making machine. Problem is, it has to become a monster to kill a monster. It's not a fun topic to tackle with a straight face. Somehow, Sucker Punch is a fairly humorless dry-heave, when we want physical comedy to be funny, but it's just gross to watch our friend wretch over a shit-stained toilet. For example, movies like Hot Fuzz manage to be comedic homages to the stupidity of Bad Boys II while sufficiently matching the action one-to-one. But this -- this isn't a celebration of thrilling cinema -- it's a dirge. We want to talk about Sucker Punch, the steaming-hot afterbirth of the 2000's.

We also want to talk about movies being compared to video games as a negative. Did you notice we compared it to a video game earlier? We did. But we didn't mention that we mentioned it (until now). Go back up and try to find the reference, it's in passing, but kinda funny, now that we think about it. 

Go do it, scroll back up. We'll wait. Do it. Did you find it? Good. 

Now, want to know why movies like Sucker Punch borrow concept and style from modern video games? Because modern Hollywood movies are artistic graveyards and aren't worth borrowing from. That's why this very film is throwing itself on its sword in defiant mockery. Today, imagination lives in interactive media, so to say it looks like a video game is a compliment. How is it that Quentin Tarantino borrows from shitty 70's exploitation grindhouse B-movies and he's called an visionary auteur? We're assuming nobody lives and dies by the artistic integrity of I'm Gonna Git You, Suckah! So how is the rambling, patchwork plot of Inglourious Basterds (sic (the rod up that man's ass has a rod up its ass)) worth any praise? His characters are matchsticks. His plots are vignettes. He knows nothing about story structure. Nothing he shoots could be called "beautiful."

Except the car chase scene in Death Proof. That's beautiful. 

And yet, Tarantino's best moments are when he steals, so we take that back about Death Proof. He steals the spiky dialogue from snarky French films by way of blaxploitation. He steals the Yakuza gangster attitude from Japanese anime. Want to know a secret? Video games stole from Japanese anime. American movies stole from video games. Anime stole from American movies. Oh, shit! Inspirational ouroboros! See, the thing is, these Tarantino eccentricities aren't part of conscious American culture -- we give it some grace. Sucker Punch's school-girl, robot enslicing, Call of Duty fetishism is very much a part of conscious American culture. It gets no grace. It gets no grace because it's Apple Jacks, and kids love that not everybody understand why they like it, in spite of it not tasting like apples, man.

But Sucker Punch. Oh, Sucker Punch. You are, at first glance, everything that parents hate in their children. Sucker Punch is basically a problem child -- it's other peoples' kids. Parents love making snap judgments about other peoples' kids. Maybe the movie critics of Sucker Punch are meant to represent the parents that actually allow and enable these movies to succeed, or something? We're just stunned that nobody has made this comparison of the film-making industrial-complex -- it took us a while to see Inception as a metaphor for constructing a movie and planting a story inside an audience, and not many critics made that link right away. These people should go back to, uh, like, creative critique, college, for the film-watcher? Put it on a dog. 

We've said before that Avatar is passable because of its audacious bird-flipping to accusations of being generic (it's a monomyth, assholes, just like Dances With Wolves, just like Star Wars, and just like The Bible). Avatar also lifts from 90's video games of all things. Those floating mountains are straight out of Chrono Trigger, which probably lifted them from a 70's prog-rock album cover by Roger Dean. You might call Sucker Punch a kid's wet dream. You'd be right. It's also a film exec's worst nightmare coke-fueled rampage ever. A bad movie about how they allow bad movies to be made, hurting talented people to make half a metric fuck-ton of money? With elaborate -- and unsurprisingly removed from this cut of the movie -- dance sequences? With too much CGI and no discernible script? Man, the dialogue in this bad. It's video game bad. But the action is video game good, which is better than movie great action. Eh, we'll call it a wash. 

Sucker Punch didn't need to exist. The only justification for its existence is so we could all have the black mirror held up to us and have it scream, "You're an enabler! Look what the machine does to cinema, to art, to critique, to talent!" It's like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this. It's like staring into a backed-up toilet and the only way for you to come to grips with a clog this bad is for somebody to smash the porcelain. And what a goddamn mess it makes. For all it does "right," it still doesn't "win." A casualty of war, this thing is exactly $7 worth of terrible. Here's hoping we've gotten all of this self-loathing out of our systems.

* *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#11 -- "Princess Mononoke" Reviewed | * * * *

"...body of a reindeer, feet of a chicken, antlers like tree roots, chest plumage of an eagle, tail of a fox, face like a painted semi-humanoid African lion mask (yup!)..."

The moral of Princess Mononoke flies in the face of established western religion. Well-sketched human ambiguity flies in the face of established western religion. Taking place in a land that sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japan (further research suggests it's technically around the 1300s, but a fantastical version of the 1300s, so it might as well be in Asia-Narnia), the earth is being contaminated. Humans have been driving the soil too hard, subjugating the animals too harshly, and mining too deeply for iron to build their fortresses of sand and mud. There is societal and technological progress as a result. Humans are safer from the wild beasts. We have crude guns. The mountains are being tamed. The future is drawing closer. And somewhere in the wilderness, a princess raised by a thirty-foot wolf is plotting revenge against the fortress' governess. 

This is cinema's animated, foreign, ancient, Gaia-theory-infused, epic saga. It's better than The Godfather Part II, but maybe not quite as good as The Godfather.

The leaves are green but the rivers have begun to run brown in this place. Under the shadowy forest canopy, demons are beginning to possess the strongest animals. They leak blackened, cursed blood that writhe like lecherous worms when cut. The demons' skin is comprised of half-dissected land-bound octopi. These demons are manifestations of the earth's anger at the growing imbalance -- an imbalance that the greedy, desperate humans have brought. The very ground we walk on fighting back against the people fighting to survive? The animals have every right to the planet that we do, don't they? With both sides fighting for justifiable survival, what side doe we take?

In short: neither side. In the most un-western way possible, good and bad are not binary in this movie. Supreme benevolence and total evil don't exist in this sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japanese land. There is no God, there is no Satan. There are, however, forces of greater sentience that humans can't quite comprehend. And isn't that what a god really is? There are wicked demons that can be killed and there are kinder spirits that can also be killed. And there are people, but there is no carved set of rules. There is no infallible source of unquestionable truth. There's nothing to default to in this story. 

Goodness is not openly declared. Its concept must be explored and discovered by all of the characters, be they man, woman, or wolf-god.

The prince, one of our two main characters, capable with the bow and with the sword, rides a straight-up lovable red elk across the countryside. That red elk might be my favorite animal in any movie ever. He's mildly fantastic, but could certainly exist somewhere in the world. Throughout the movie, the elk will: get scared, face certain death, get the prince out of danger, carry him when he's injured, disobey and follows when it's told not to, and get shot with an arrow. We want one. We'd ride it to the bar. 

Traveling closer to town, the prince passes out familiar greetings to villagers. They're clearly fans of his red elk and they adore the shit out of the prince. Five minutes later though, the prince has killed a rampaging boar god and in doing so, learns he's cursed with the creature's anger -- that anger will soon kill him. Natch. So in defense of his home, the infinitely noble (and I mean that, he's honorable to a fault), the prince will die, eaten from the inside-out by worming feelings of rage. The demon, which lives in his arm, occasionally rises up, feeding on the fury around the prince, its half-dissected land-bound octopi skin showing through in the ickiest, most believable way imaginable. 

How can we root for this guy? He's damned. He's tainted and his fate is written. He can't fight back against evil, because that just speeds up the curse's consumption of his soul. But you do root for him. Because his character is not binary. He doesn't turn the other cheek, he doesn't wait for the world, he isn't complacent, he isn't self-pitying. He gears up. He gets shit done. He doesn't do this stuff to survive, he knows he's already dead. He doesn't do this stuff because he's commanded to or sent on a quest. He doesn't do it out of thoughtless devotion to something he doesn't understand (at least not at first, but then the princess shows up (but she's a total sweetie (at least not at first, again))). No, the prince does this because he looks at the problems, assesses his own shit situation, and then goes totally Flash Gordon on the rapidly eroding landscape of sort-of-isn't-ancient-Japan. 

Traveling some distance across the countryside, he eventually learns from the governess of the fortress that it was she that killed the boar god, who in turn cursed the prince. The boar god was enraged by an iron bullet she'd shot, that hatred allowed the demon to enter and corrupt the boar god (who by the way, is, like, a boar the size of an orca). The governess was defending her people from the forest beasts, she shot the boar god in defense. And then what does she do? She apologizes to the prince for being an accessory to his being cursed. Oh, also, the governess cares for lepers and rescues women from brothels in the city and gives them shelter. 

Oh, come on, man! Give us a bad guy! We have the prince, we have the governess, we demons possessing giant animals, and we have... well, we have the princess. 

The princess. We love the princess. She's a fantastic foil to the prince. She's a total spitting-cobra that meshes flawlessly with the prince's cool, focused self-confidence. Their arguments are so one-sided. She threatens to kill him the way normal people would inhale or use punctuation. And he just goes about his business -- listening to her, but focusing on the bigger issues, like the impending eco-pocalypse. He doesn't snap at her, isn't mean to her, and doesn't sass back at her. He knows she's worried, but fighting her won't improve his situation. He's just got liquid nitrogen running through his veins. Pretty soon, she realizes what he's all about. They save one another from death on multiple occasions. They're both determined, headstrong, thoughtful, sometimes vulnerable, and always capable. They rock our socks off every time. They're better than the husband and wife from The Fountain. They're so much better than Harry and Sally. They're one of the best couples you'll find in any story. 

See, the prince is basically half-hatred by the end of the first hour, so him just handling his shit is exciting to watch. You pray he won't become a self-loathing blob of a human and he doesn't! When he goes demonic, the noise fades out, he goes sort of expressionless, and moves through his troubles like a determined white dandelion. He bends swords slowly like they grass. He gets shot (bloodily too, there's a hole in his chest that's the circumference of an mature ferret at one point) and keeps walking. He saves the princess from the governess and they retreat to the woods. 

What follows is a chase across the wilderness. The governess wants to secure her power by killing the peaceful forest spirit that gives life to all the nice spirits. If it dies, then the beasts like the wolves and the boars and the apes will become docile. This keeps up with the running themes of survivalism and prickishness, in that everybody, man, woman, or wolf-god, are capable of being emotionally small. 

Eventually, we gather that the best thing we all can do is: moderation. The animals need to stop being pissed off. The humans need to be less greedy when they dig for iron or gather resources. The demons need to go and fuck right off, because they're just being tricky dickholes that want to ruin people's good times. The governess gets her arm bitten off at one point by a disembodied wolf head, which is so sudden and so un-graphic that you sort of forget it happens. 

The scariest moment occurs when the great forest spirit (body of a reindeer, feet of a chicken, antlers like tree roots, chest plumage of an eagle, tail of a fox, face like a painted semi-humanoid African lion mask (yup!)) is just chilling out, making flowers grow wherever it walks, and it gets its head shot off. It then mutates over the course of a few hard-to-watch minutes into a toxic single-celled organism. It walks like a headless emaciated gorilla. Growing a hundred feet tall, sort of amorphous, but with transparent, spidery limbs and too many fingers. It's so faceless, yet familiar and human(ish)-shaped, that you can't help but be terrified of this good thing being desecrated by violence. 

Rewind for a sec. Earlier on, when it had a head, the great forest spirit has the opportunity to cure the prince of his demonic curse when it heals the ferret-sized wound in his chest. But it doesn't. The prince wonders this aloud. Well, because that wouldn't solve anything. The prince has to go on wondering, growing, fighting, riding giant wolves, learning to appreciate the princess' passionate desire to protect her forest, and eventually realize on his own that he needs and wants to restore the balance of nature in the world. Nobody tells him to do this. Nobody tells him when he's done it. It's beautiful when he restores the great forest spirit to its rightful form with the princess' help. The gigantic spirit collapses into a lake and the water purifies the decaying forest the way a good deus ex machina should. The hatred subsides, the demons are defeated.  

And the princess has to go back into the forest. It's an optimistic but very sad ending. It isn't "boo-hoo" sad. It's more of "goddamn, we suck" sad.  

We'd knock it down a peg for being a movie for tree-hugging dipshit hippies, but we'd be missing the point if we did, and then the hippies would win. It isn't entirely about that. The truth behind Princess Mononoke is that there is no one true force of white goodness and there is no source of endless evil blackness. We aren't here on earth to please the righteous, or even attack the wicked. Ambiguity can be a tough conclusion to grasp. It's a vital lesson in life though. We're all just trying to make it in a world filled with forces bigger and stronger than ourselves. If you can't handle that, that unfairness, then you'll succumb. You'll default to an extreme -- complacent, weak goodness or rage-blinded wickedness, whichever is the path of least resistance. The prince and the princess are dangerously close to these ends of the spectrum until they meet each other. Through mutual, personal identification, they gradually discover a better truth (and it's a long-ass movie, let me remind you, clocking in at about 2.5 hours) than these simpler default settings of "this" or "that." 

They are fluctuating shades. In the end, they get it. They are much greater than the sum of their more obvious parts. 

* * * *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little and Doberman
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#10 -- "The Fountain" Reviewed | * * *

"Then the musical score, which has been boggarting about in the background of every shot, hits its mark, and all you want to do is eat cookies and hug a cat to displace the charcoal-flavored I.E.D. that detonated in your guts."

The Fountain, the saddest movie of the 21st century, is one that we've seen a dozen or so times. It's also not that great of a movie the first dozen or so times you watch it. It begins with a badly-lit scene (on purpose? maybe?) featuring a Spaniard in Central America, fighting some natives at the foot of a Mayan pyramid. His buddies get stabbed to shit, but the natives spare the Spaniard himself, instead forcing him up the impossibly vertical stairs. Convenient. This is what the conquistador wants, and is also the last convenient thing to occur in the entire movie, him scrambling haggard towards whatever is at the top. He has an ornate, important dagger, and the audience has no other details. Inside the pyramid, there's a silhouette of a disgusting motherfucker with a flaming sword. There's something gigantic and beautiful growing behind him far off in the background that we won't see clearly until the very end of the movie.

The disgusting motherfucker stabs the conquistador with a small hidden blade, there's a yell of pain and a flash, and that Spaniard is somehow the Spaniard no longer. The screen smash-cuts to that same conquistador's face yelling -- the acoustics are dampened now though, like those of an enclosed space now, not an airy pyramid's stone corridor -- his pale head is shaved, a vein on his forehead pulses, and he is sitting, floating in a full-lotus position, drifting above an ancient, dead(ish) tree. He calms. He drifts back down into the tree's base. This tree and its roots visibly maintain an opaque sphere that isn't made of glass; perhaps very thick air? It's not explained and it needn't be. We can deduce that the sphere is traveling relatively fast through outer space where the stars are gold and weep tears of godly dust.

This is not good linear story-structure. And we love it. Over the course of the film, we learn to understand that elsewhere, our main characters are a modern couple that are very much in love, living in a house where everything is richly-stained mahogany and expensive ivory and free-standing bathtubs, but the world itself is tinged with that same dreadful, aching, gold-dust aura. Something is irreversibly up. The couple go to very few locations in the movie, yet each bears that same visible scent: their house, a lab, a museum, and eventually, a hospital. The wife is dying of a brain tumor, the husband is a brain surgeon, and as much as he loathes it, he has to neglect the final days of her life to attempt to find a cure, which he is very close to discovering.

Again, though, we flick absent-mindedly between modern times, back to conquistador in 1500s Spain prior to his fight at the pyramid, and also to the far-flung-future, where the space-sphere is found. Now, the couple appear in each of the three stories, playing different characters. The man is the conquistador, the doctor, and the space-man. The woman is the Queen of Spain, the patient, and... wait, what is she in the future? Well, she's the tree.

About that.

In the future, she is the vessel for the man, traveling through dead, sad infinite. He keeps telling the tree that they're "going to make it," despite her bark crumbling off, which he does occasionally eat to sustain himself. That's an important and weird detail right there. The tree-sphere is traveling towards a nebula, a dead star -- endless death that the space-man insists he wants to reach with her. As we said before though, these details are presented entirely out of order in the movie itself. There's a lot of him talking to the tree (in space), practicing Tai Chi (in space), and tattooing rings (also in space) around his arm with an eerily-opulent fountain pen, marking how long he's been traveling for. It is clear he's been dicking around on the sphere-ship for a long time, because there's an entire written tattoo language that the man has developed at this point -- big rings, smaller rings, patterns, waving and straight lines, tapped into his inky-skin like an alien code. It's not only painful, he's emotionally hurt that he has to track the passing of time. 

We admire a story that gives you a plot twist that doesn't wave at you as it passes by. Here's how it works. As the wife is dying, she's been hand-writing (so sexy) the story of a familiar-seeming conquistador (yes, him) traveling under the queen's orders to Central America to find the Biblical Tree of Life, which contains sap that will grant immortality. This was a big hook -- Genesis stories fascinate the hell out of me. The conquistador in her book is cagey about his obvious love of the queen, yet the two of them identify what must be done in order for him to prove her what he feels. He feels obligated to nut up, she knows she can't stop him, and knows that he'll do this thing, and then he'll stop being so emo, because he'll feel he's earned his keep.

This is the story the wife is writing, but we are left to ourselves to figure out that it's the same story from a different point of view and with cooler costumes. This is the story of what is happening to the dying wife in modern times from her perspective. She knows her husband loves her, and she knows he would die trying to demonstrate that there is nothing he would not do to save her. Near the end, the wife asks her husband to finish the story she's writing. She gives him her nearly-done manuscript and an eerily-opulent fountain pen. He says he doesn't know how it ends, and that he can't be trusted to finish it.

We'll come back to that.

In the future, the darkened space is gradually filling with dying golden light as the sphere moves closer to the nebula. The space-man starts seeing visions of his actual wife from the modern storyline. I mean, did he actually find a way to seal her soul in a tree and travel into space, or something, and now he's hallucinating? No, of course not, because that would be fucking retarded. The space-man story is how the husband is interpreting these last few days of his wife's life as he struggles to find a cure. It's how he's feeling, a contrast to the wife's version with the queen and the conquistador. In space, in the sphere with the tree, the space-man is alone. He can't go to her for support in this, as a loving husband does. As he sees it, she's all but left him to mark down the seconds to her passing moment. He's been left to literally write the end of his wife's life -- the woman that he loves, that pulls him through all the black shit we go through in the world. And that's how it has to be. There's brilliant dust streaming down the side of his sphere-tree-ship, his wife, that carries him. The craft is inching ever-closer to the dead star, and he doesn't want to go there without her.

To him, the cure for death is her. It's kind of a selfish thought from the husband, like listening to the actual lyrics in a pop music piece. Her being alive keeps him alive, and without her, the ship will collapse. There's a brutal scene where the tree quite visibly tightens, withers, and dies, changing from rich and living to gray and petrified. Then the musical score, which has been boggarting about in the background of every shot, hits its mark, and all you want to do is eat cookies and hug a cat to displace the charcoal-flavored I.E.D. that detonated in your guts. It is the saddest movie of the 21st century, after all.

In the husband's mind, there's nothing left. The tree is dead, the universe will swallow him. But the book. He can finish the book. (He's sort of out of options at that point, now that I think about it -- but maybe he does have a bit of a revelation. The modern husband is the least self-pitying of the three Hims, so in reality, it's logical he'd be the one to power the actions of his other selves.) The wife trusted him to finish the book. In the past, present, and future, hope comes roaring back. His character in all three eras declares that he trusts her. She knows she's going to die, and he finally believes her.

He breaks free from the miasma -- he starts to imagine and he starts to write. He leaves the safety of the tree-sphere in his own meditation bubble (it's in a stunning shot where he ascends the tree, jumps, folds into a cross-legged position, and glides upward and outwards). Elsewhere, the husband changes the book's ending, bringing the conquistador back to life after being stabbed by the disgusting motherfucker with the flaming sword. He passes through the corridor to find the Tree of Life at the back of the pyramid -- we won't spoil what occurs next. In all three instances though, he "dies," is revived, faces and accepts death, and then dies again (eventually, we assume, because we all will). In the greatest moment in the movie, the space-man is absorbed into the singularity at the center of the nebula, the soundtrack erupts, the tree inside the sphere burst into bloom, and we have the epiphany. Or, we did on my twelfth viewing of the damn thing because the first half-dozen times, it's still a mess.

Shortly after that, in the closing moments, we flash back to the first scene where we met the modern couple, having originally been introduced to the other two eras first near the beginning of the movie before encountering the husband and wife.

Something is different. For whatever reason, the scene is altered, the husband chases his wife through the snow instead of going to the lab to try to find a cure, and then the movie ends. There is minimal dialogue, (and we'd check IMDB for the quote, but it doesn't matter and the words are flowing pretty well from memory right now) but in this version, both the man and the woman are spared from their fears of wondering what the other is thinking in those last few days of the wife's life. They trust what will happen, and they trust each other.

The first time watching this movie, we dozed off in the part at the museum where the wife is trying to explain to the husband how the Mayans thought the nebula was their soul-purifying underworld, far off in the heavens. It was the first Blu-Ray movie we'd bought because it was cheap at Best Buy, and we were determined to get my money's worth, so we declared we'd watch the entire thing again. In the second viewing, it made slightly more sense, like the second time you read a draft of a research paper. Scratch that. It was more like reading a book, reading the Cliff Notes, and then re-reading the same book again. There's no more weird new-story odor and the characters are drawn with a heavier ink in your mind's eye. The third time, the order of the scenes was less confusing, but many of them still felt purposeless. We realized later we had it entirely backwards. Every scene has a purpose, it's just that every scene points to another random scene somewhere else in the movie.

If The Fountain was a pasta, it'd be heavy Alfredo with flecks of crushed red pepper, bitter parsley garnish, and chicken so tender that you're not at all surprised when you're told it's not chicken, but some other bizarre fowl that comes from the secluded cliffs of Cyprus or some shit. Either way, you want to know more, just not right now. The plate is deep, weighty, rich, overwhelming, tangled, and probably containing more thought than you realize. It makes you want to sleep, and maybe it's the Chilean wine you've been quaffing with the meal, because it's terribly satisfying to deconstruct its contents. You want to eat it again.

* * * 

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF