The Secret World of Arrietty

directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi (2010)
screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki

Japanese anime can be so very good at the sentimental.  This one was kinda melancholy too.

Girls will really dig this.  The animation is straight up gorgeous, just what you'd expect from a Studio Ghibli production and it's drawn from good source materials since it's based on The Borrowers - a best selling series of children's books by Mary Norton.  I loved the books when I was a girl, and seeing this movie I can see why.  You've got a plucky girl going on adventures, and she's meeting up with a handsome boy who wants to save her. So you've got appropriate amounts of action and romance pitched to a preteen level. It's a very engaging story for kids, but it's especially gonna hit home and be empowering for the YA girls who are bound to identify with Arrietty.  Her secret world is secret not simply because the heart of a young girl is mysterious, yeah to that but more because she's really for real living a secret life.  She's a teeny tiny miniature person living with her family inside the walls of a regular person's house.  She's just like people though, just small and she's at the age where she's eager to get out from under her parent's thumb and meet up with the big wide world - a little corner of it anyhow.   It's fun, and there's magical little people, well they aren't really magical except that they exist, plus there's helpful animals and what all boycrazy girls will appreciate - in spite of obvious complications, sparks still fly between the boy and the girl.  Who cares that they come from different worlds and aren't even close to the same size?  They speak the language of love.  Aw... I ate this up when I was 11, and I still found it sweet as an grown up.

I have a greater appreciation for reality and tragedy now though.  I think if I'd watched this when I was a kid I'd have felt really disappointed at the ending.

There are 2 different English language dubs, one for American audiences and one for the UK.  The books were written by an English woman, so maybe that's why that happened.  Or maybe it's because the producers wanted the broadest possible audience and figured American people wouldn't want to listen to "foreign accents."  I heard the American version, and it was pleasant, but I can't help but wonder if the movie would have sounded better in the other dub.

Also, I liked hearing Carol Burnett in a small role as a housekeeper.  I could easily picture her animated character as the cleaning lady she did at the close of her variety TV show.

The cat was pretty great too.

A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie)

directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (2010)

Set in Chad, this flick follows a rather Shakespearean path.  There's a father and a son, both working at the same hotel.  The father was a champion swimmer who parleyed that skill into a job running the hotel pool.  It's a good job and it's his whole world.  His son is following in his footsteps, working alongside him, until the hotel changes owners and that upsets the pool man's kingdom.

There was a lot going on in this film I wasn't quite getting, like the fact that the father was paying a war tax of some sort to the government? The army?  I dunno, I guess Chad is at war with itself, a civil war of some sort, but that wasn't made clear.  There's some news footage in the beginning showing dead soldiers and talking about the "rebels", but I didn't understand who the rebels were or what that meant.    

SPOILERS!!!

I didn't much like this one, even though the lead did a very good job.  It was too sad. I hate when parents are selfish and disappointing. Seeing a man jealous of his son succeeding him is a bit understandable, but then the way he betrayed him was just yuck. I'm not sure if he could have stopped his son getting drafted, but it seemed like he could have.  At least he could have told his son, if we don't scrape together the cash, you're going soldiering.  I bet the son would have paid attention.  Sure it's a story, but I hate how it was written as an illustration of human weakness.  Maybe it resonates better with folk in Chad.  Probably it's got an anti-war message for them. I guess it's fucking reprehensible that fathers are the ones who believe the sons should be sacrificed going to war.

It's distributed by The Film Movement DVD club.  They send you a different arty flick every month, $11/month if you subscribe for a year.  Inneresting way to get the flicks out.

A Fathead American In A Better Parisian World

 Fat Head directed by Tom Naughton (2009)

In A Better World directed by Susanne Bier (2010)

I watched both of these on Netflix. Fat Head actually prompted me midway though, to drop watching and go get my free birthday burger at Red Robin, and I'm grateful for that, because if I hadn't seen the guy about to chow down on a massive Wendy's double cheeseburger, I wouldn't have tasted the Red Robin's beautiful Blue Ribbon burger. So good.

The documentary itself is a little harder to swallow. The guy is a pompous jerk. He was offended by the suspect methodology of Morgan Spurlock attacking McDonald's in his documentary Super Size Me, so what does he do? He uses a same kinda load the deck process so it will deal out the answers he wants - that you can lose weight eating fast food. Sure you can, so what? Yeah you showed that bastard Spurlock.

Petty and silly and dishonest. He did share some food wisdom, but most of it was garbage, and especially his libertarian stance was annoying.

A more thought out and better criticism on this blog here.

Then I watched A Better Tomorrow? No, In A Better World. Damn, it works much better and is more memorable in the original Danish title Haeven - which translates as Revenge.

This is what won the 2010 Best Foreign Language Oscar. I've finally seen all of them; Biutiful, Dogtooth, Incendies, and.... ooops I actually haven't seen them all - Outside The Law is the outlier. Still I totally wouldn't have picked this if I'd been on the jury and watched all 5. It's kinda trite and melodramatic. The acting is good. The fact that one family is Swedish, living in Denmark and were victims of xenophobic bigotry, was lost on me until it was literally happening on the screen. But the plot was meh.

I'm slamming on this after the fact, and disliking flaws in the plot, but that really was the weakest part. It resolved very cleanly and all happy like. Joe made a point of saying Denmark has such an equitable, cooperative and pleasant society that it's hard for them to make a movie with conflict. They had to go to Africa to create a real bad guy and he was over the top evil. I didn't like the symmetry of the Big Man sociopath in the unnamed African country and his brutal murderous violence contrasting with that of the schoolyard bully in Denmark. The one vigilante kid reminded me of a nascent Batman. I wonder if that was intentional, a little joke maybe, naming his character Christian because the vengeful boy looked like Christian Bale. Probably it was more to do with the judgemental, rigid, and punitive beliefs held by most Christians.

I guess even in the "better world" there is nasty inhumanity. I dunno. It was pretty good. I just think Biutiful or Incendies was better.

I started watching An American In Paris. I like musicals. But the plot kinda squicked me the way it has dancer man Gene Kelly, aggressively pursuing the girl. It's merely a sign of the times, and demonstrates how openly sexist things you used to be. I guess they still are. I'll hold back my judgement until I watch the whole thing.