Fall 2014 #12: Manhattan (1979) - Woody Allen

Final stretch! Down to the last five movies on the list. I know this is my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist but it’s never too late to immerse yourself in classic cinema!

So I’m starting to learn what makes a good well-rounded Moviecation List. Each one needs a Hitchcock film, a Studio Ghibli film, maybe a Coen brothers or a Tarantino, a silent film, a horror movie, a Best Picture winner. And of course a Woody Allen film. I chose Manhattan because it was on Netflix when I made the list but as fate would have it, it got deleted before I got to it.

Also it has 19 Academy Award Nominee Meryl Fucking Streep!

I actually assumed this movie would be an Annie Hall-style love story with Woody Allen and Meryl Streep. Turns out Meryl plays his bisexual (or possibly lesbian) ex-wife and Manhattan is a love story between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton… or so we think.

Of course it starts with him dating a 17-year-old high schooler so the whole film is shrouded in a kind of uncomfortable feeling, similar to the one you get when you see Woody Allen promoting monogamy.

Anyway so the film has that sort of “Here’s real, complicated people living their real, complicated lives, so screw conventional storytelling” that I actually love and think very few writers are able to pull off. It’s bordering on satire while also portraying authentic situations. The only person I think who is pulling that off today is Lena Dunham.

Feel like a line from Girls? It’s because we’re the protagonists of our own stories! A lot of people hate that “Here are some deeply flawed characters who are aimlessly navigating their sometimes boring lives.” I don’t care, I love it.

So the film is objectively no Annie Hall. It doesn’t have the complicated timeline that makes for one of the coolest love stories in cinema. But Manhattan is full of messed-up people trying to figure out what they want.

One major difference I did notice from Annie Hall is Manhattan’s reliance on music, as well as sequences of driving. I want to say the music made the film a little more sappy, with the repetition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue elevating the story to capture the majesty of New York City. Even the black and white sort of seemed to be a reference to a period of higher culture, acknowledging a city in decline.

The driving I took to be an understanding of the characters constantly being in motion, sometimes stuck, but always navigating the complicated network of roads in the largest city in America.

The film had its boring moments as well as its poignant moments, about love and growing old, and I definitely enjoyed watching it.

Fall 2014 #8: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - Hayao Miyazaki

My sixth Studio Ghibli film! What a wonderful time it’s been, getting to enjoy this amazing collection of unique movies. Always so full of heart, with great themes and incredible depth of storylines, I can’t get enough of Miyazaki’s films. 

Now normally I would say that any film that uses “of the” twice in the title is not worth my time (looking at you Lord of the Rings movies and Planet of the Apes prequels). But imagine if M. Night Shyamalan films had the depth to actually gracefully present their pro-nature sentiments, with strong feminist characters and incredible visual imagery, and that’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Actually, scratch that weird comparison altogether, I’m sorry. So the reason for all of the “of the”s is because Nausicaä is a princess living a post-apocalyptic world, where her small settlement is called “The Valley of the Wind” because of its strong offshore winds. The story takes place one thousand years after a devastating war that wiped out human civilization as well as nature, giving birth to the Toxic Forest. Humans cannot breathe the poisoned air near the forest, but hoards of vicious, giant bugs live there and threaten the human settlements that survived the war.

Nausicaä, who is a badass with a glider, soon becomes entangled in a war between two of the settlements, Tolmekia and Pejite. The Tolmekians have captured an embryo of a Giant Warrior, one of the warriors from the war that destroyed everything, and are planning to use it to wipe out the Toxic Forest and their enemies. They are led by Princess Kushana.

Nausicaaä befriends the Pejite prince, Asbel, and the two must figure out how to stop the war and save the forest (despite it’s toxicity). It’s a real battle of human industrial expansion versus nature’s will to survive and adapt. It’s kind of reminiscent of the Avatar The Last Airbender series, even though that came 20 years after this movie came out.

And the movie certainly has powerful themes with great emotional storylines. It recalls the devastation of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the environmental damage of human expansion. Not to mention the way it situates female characters as being strong while also being feminine and uncompromisingly themselves, something that feels crazy for an animated film from the 80s (couch cough The Little Mermaid). 

The English cast for the unedited 2005 version (Miyazaki was furious after an English-dubbed Warriors of the Wind from 1985 cut about 21 minutes of the film) includes Shia LaBeouf as Asbel, Uma Thurman as Princess Kushana, and even Jodi Benson (Ariel from The Little Mermaid) as Asbel’s mother.

So it’s safe to say Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is an awesome film, tying together beautiful animation with thought-provoking themes and striking fantasy elements. It currently sits at #199 on the IMDb Top 250. 

Summer 2014 #1: Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) - Hayao Miyazaki

I can’t believe that I’ve managed to get my almost 250 film Watchlist down to just 196 films in a little over a year. But I think I can do better! That means it’s time for another Moviecation. This time, I won’t be doing 15 films in 15 days like I did over winter break. I’m doing 15 films over the course of the summer. So

and let’s go!

My fifth Miyazaki film! In just sixth months. I can’t believe it was only January when I saw Spirited Away, and since then I have seen My Neighbor Totoro, The Wind Rises, and Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki has totally altered the way I think about animation, since, as I’ve said before, the only animation companies I respect are Disney and Pixar. 

I think Miyazaki has transcended the American idea that animated films have to be geared towards kids. And even though the fantastical worlds created in Studio Ghibli’s films are definitely, on the surface, childlike and wonderful, these films are always much deeper. Miyazaki’s hard childhood experiences with WWII bleed into all of his films, and you can feel the animator struggling to understand those troubling times in mid-twentieth century Japan.

Howl’s Moving Castle follows a strong female protagonist like many of his other films. This one’s name is Sophie, and within two minutes of meeting her as the bland hat shop girl who works herself too hard, a witch comes and transforms her into an old woman.

The film doesn’t care to take the time to characterize Sophie in her normal world, but we do hear a little about the strange wizard named Howl, who eats women’s hearts and must be watched out for. That is, until Sophie encounters him and he protects her from some evil spirits that are following her.

Old lady Sophie is a hilarious lens for the story, because she is strong-willed and curious and learns quickly that with old age comes a bizarre amount of courage. Her witty self-banter is probably the strongest comedic source in the film, and she quickly asserts herself into Howl’s magical world in hopes of having her curse lifted.

Howl’s connection to the crown makes him a target for the king’s system of drafting military men, since he trained with a witch that seems to have all the power in Japan. A violent and unjust war permeates the entire film, and Howl’s plight to stop it leaves him less and less human with each battle. It’s very interesting to see the negative characteristics in Howl, namely his cowardice, because it humanized someone who at the beginning of the film seems so inaccessible. 

Like the other Miyazaki films I’ve seen, feminist and anti-war themes ground the film, while the imaginative world it inhabits lifts it off of the screen and into a sort of escapist adventure. Between the witches and wizards, the spells, and Howl’s literal moving castle, the film has enough heart to rival even the best Pixar films. Not to mention a great love story.

And as always, Studio Ghibli’s ties with Disney made for some amazing English voice actors. Howl is voiced by Christian Bale, Josh Hutcherson plays his young assistant, and the amazing Lauren Bacall (The Big Sleep) gets to be the antagonist turned comedic side character, the Witch of the Waste. 

There she is in her “normal” state. Here she is the next scene.

Also the fire she is referring to is a tiny fire voiced by Billy Crystal.

I loved the film overall. It has drama, heart, and comedy. Roger Ebert, one of the only critics to not love it, called it one of Miyazaki’s weakest films. I think I’d be hard-pressed to pick a “weak” Miyazaki film, but out of the five I’ve seen, I can see where this one seems to be missing in that last bit of extra spark that his films usually emit. Maybe it’s the nonchalance with which Sophie falls in love with the deluded, cowardly Howl, I’m not sure. Not that the film isn’t great, because it is. It’s beautiful in so many ways, and definitely worth viewing.

Howl’s Moving Castle lost the Best Animated Film at the 2005 Oscars to “Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” But it ranks as #152 on the IMDb Top 250, only behind #36 Spirited Away and #130 My Neighbor Totoro.