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. 

Fall 2014 #1: Kill Bill Volume 1 - Quentin Tarantino

Alright so I think it’s safe to say I failed miserably at my Summer 2014 Movie Bucketlist reviews. While I saw all 16 movies, I reviewed the first 3 and never made time to review the rest.

Now I have a new rule for my Fall 2014 Movie Bucketlist, and it’s that I can’t watch the next movie on the list until I review the previous one. So my first film on the list was Kill Bill Volume 1. 

This is my fourth Tarantino film, since I saw Django Unchained two winters ago, Pulp Fiction for my first Movie Bucketlist from January 2014, and Inglorious Basterds somewhere in between. After Pulp Fiction, I would say this is probably the one that comes up most in conversation. I always knew it as “That movie with Uma Thurman in the yellow suit where whenever she sees an enemy a really high pitched tone plays and the screen turns red.” I can probably thank Date Movie (2006) for that. 

But in all honesty, the movie really impressed me. I loved how it revived old spaghetti western motifs, and fused them with Japanese samurai movies to create this imaginative tale about kick ass women. I think anyone who has something bad to say about this movie, especially women, should probably be paying less attention to the violence and more attention to how a white male director has portrayed women as totally in control of their own lives and as complete badasses who don’t take shit from anyone. I mean… Deadly Viper Assassin Squad? DVAS? DIVAS!?

The film follows the Bride (Uma Thurman) after she wakes up from a four year coma caused by her team of elite female assassins betraying her at her wedding and killing all of her guests as well as her unborn child. She swears revenge on the women (and their leader, Bill), who wronged her and who were dumb enough not to kill her.

What the film does that makes it so impressive is that it juggles tons of fourth-wall breaking illusions, such as physically impossible amounts of blood and gravity-defying fight scenes, with the simplicity of a revenge story. Not to mention slightly off-chronological storytelling, which reiterates the idea that this is a movie and not real life.

Not to mention, the film includes a five minute short animated film to explain a specific character’s (played by Lucy Liu) backstory.

For a film that features more violence than almost any film I’ve ever seen, it’s also an incredibly well-written, well-acted piece of feminist cinema that should be looked at as pretty damn awesome. I said it. The F-word.

The film is split into two volumes because Tarantino filmed for 155 days and cut the film down to 4 hours before deciding it had to be released as two separate films. I will be watching the Volume 2 shortly (even though it’s not on my Fall Bucketlist). Currently Kill Bill Volume 1 is #166 on the IMDb Top 250.

Day 10: January 12th, 2014: Pulp Fiction (1994) - Quentin Tarantino

I just realized that I watched the two films from 1994 back to back, which was unintentional but shows just how massively different two critically acclaimed movies from the same year can be.

Okay I guess I’ll get to the point. Every time in my life where I have heard Pulp Fiction come up in conversation, my immediate thought afterwards is always “Okay, I guess this is a movie I really need to watch.” That is because, 20 years later (yes, 1994 was 20 years ago), Pulp Fiction still has a lasting impression on pop culture. And now that I’ve seen it, I can finally understand why.

There’s no point in trying to explain the plot, so I won’t. Pulp Fiction is the product of decades of film history, all compiled by Quentin Tarantino and revealed to us in a colorful and violent display of humor and wit.

Okay very violent. But there’s an interesting quote I found on the Wikipedia page that I think is one of the best ways of explaining Pulp Fiction. Ken Dancyger says that Pulp Fiction represents “a new phenomenon, the movie whose style is created from the context of movie life rather than real life. The consequence is twofold—the presumption of deep knowledge on the part of the audience of those forms such as the gangster films or Westerns, horror films or adventure films. And that the parody or alteration of that film creates a new form, a different experience for the audience.”

Pulp Fiction is one of the most critically acclaimed postmodern films of all time. It is self-referential in that it looks and acts like a highly stylized reference to the gangster films of the past, but it still manages to make fun of those tropes in the process.

Here Tarantino plays a random man, a friend of Samuel L. Jackson’s character, and he is calling his own two main characters, Jackson and John Travolta, dorks. That’s about as self-referential as it gets.

The film also includes a random cameo from Christopher Walken, as well as a supporting role played by Bruce Willis. This storyline hardly relates to the main storyline that the film begins and ends with, and yet its characters intersect with the other world only in that Willis plays a boxer who is paid by Travolta and Jackson’s boss to lose a fight.

This seemingly random storyline told right in the middle of an almost completely unrelated tale (following Jackson and Travolta, two gangsters) is what makes Pulp Fiction so enthralling to watch. Not to mention the absurdity of Uma Thurman’s character, the wife of Travolta and Jackson’s boss.

Everything that happens is so flashy and stylized, and yet all of the characters get their own quiet moment where they reveal their view on how the world works. It’s a twisted world of gang members, petty thieves, rapists, and a crackhead wife, but they all have a perspective to offer the audience about this messed up world. And the film kind of just laughs at itself, stares at the audience, and says

Pulp Fiction is the first independent film to ever gross over $100 million. It won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and also the Oscar for Best Screenplay. It ranks #4 on the IMDb Top 250, but #94 on the AFI Top 100.