Category: Review

Immortal Fist: The Legend of Wing Chun

  By

★★
“So, is there, like, an anime convention in town or something?”

The above quote does suggest that the makers here appreciate how ridiculous the entire thing is. And that self-awareness may be the main thing which saves this from being largely cringeworthy. Just because you can make a fantasy kung-fu film with no budget, and largely filmed in a Californian park, doesn’t mean you should make a fantasy kung-fu film, etc. etc. Kaya (Caminiti) is your normal high-school girl. Except for being adopted, parents unknown. And the recurring dreams about martial arts battles. And the four mystical guardians who follow her around. And, it turns out, that she’s the great-granddaughter of the original Wing Chun (Bennett), and her last surviving descendant. Evil forces are intent on ending the bloodline; the guardians try to stop them, while attempting to convince Kaya to… er, get her arm cut off so she can claim her mystical birth-right and resulting mad skillz.

There are some interesting ideas here, such as the notion we live in some kind of Matrix-styled VR multiverse. But there are just too many mis-steps – and ones which would have been easily avoidable, and are unrelated to the lack of resources. For instance, why the guardians take the form of young, thoroughly non-Asian Americans, could have been explained away with a quick line or two about adopting the best shape to blend in to modern society. Nope. There are way too many loose ends that go nowhere as well, such as Kaya’s school pals. This is all the more irritating, because the film ends with absolutely nothing of significance having been resolved: it’s an attempt at delivering a cliffhanger, which is staggeringly unsatisfying.  I hate that nonsense when books pull it, and it’s no better here. Especially as this runs only 73 minutes, even including all those superfluous loose ends. Tighten it up, and give us a proper, complete story. If we want a sequel, we’ll let you know: don’t tell us.

However, I actually quite liked the performances here: Caminiti is a winning heroine, with a dry reaction to the increasingly bizarre situation in which she finds herself. The guardians, led by Tai Fong (director Beyer), have an amusing mix of personalities, but it’s Bennett as Wing Chun who manages to steal the film, despite only having a few scenes – she’s taking proceedings far more seriously than they probably deserve, and elevates the whole thing as a result. Technically, it’s not bad, with some interesting use of filters and colour in the “other” realm. In the end, this is not much more than a glorified fan film, with aspirations clearly well in excess of its ability to deliver. As an apparent first feature, there’s something to build on, yet I suspect it might have been better released as a web series. This could have helped address some of the more obvious flaws, and perhaps found the cult following to which it seems to aspire.

Dir: Lon Beyer
Star: Silvana Caminiti, Lon Beyer, Josh Fesler, Elle Bennett

The Dawns Here Are Quiet

  By

★★★½
“Can’t see the forest for the Nazis”

It’s the summer of 1942, and Soviet forces are facing the invading German Army. After Sergeant Major Vaskov (Martynov) requests soldiers for his anti-aircraft battalion who won’t get drunk and molest the local women, he gets what he wants. Except, the new arrivals are an all-female squad of soldiers, with whom Vaskov is initially singularly ill-equipped to deal. However, they prove their mettle, led by the efforts of Rita Osyanina (Shevchuk), and eventually win Vaskov’s respect. While returning to the barracks one night, Rita stumbles across two Nazi paratroopers; she, along with four colleagues and Vaskov, form a search party, and head deep into the surrounding forest to capture the Germans. However, they discover the real force is significantly bigger, and must begin a guerilla warfare campaign to disrupt the enemy’s mission, harrying them through the wooded and marshy terrain.

In contrast to larger epics, it’s a very small-scale, up close and personal approach to the war, taking place well away from the front lines. Released in two parts (though at 188 minutes, it’s less then twenty longer than Saving Private Ryan), the first section takes place at the anti-aircraft emplacement. The action there is mostly far overhead, and in the early going, it is a little tough to separate the rush of similar-looking women to whom we are suddenly introduced. Though I did like the stylistic approach of having the war take place in harsh black and white, while the soldiers in more peaceful times are depicted in colour, with an almost dreamlike version of reality.

When we get to the meat of the story, the film improves significantly. It’s fairly standard “small group taking on a larger force” stuff, a topic which has been mined frequently for war movies, from Zulu and The Alamo through Ryan to 300.  Yet it’s still effective to follow Vaskov and his handful of untested soldiers, as they go into battle with far more experienced warriors. Quite deliberately, the enemy are kept almost faceless, given no humanity at all: their speech is left unsubtitled, for instance. As the losses mount inexorably, there’s a genuine impact to them, and you’re left with an up-close and personal look at war and the human cost it has. Yet at the end, a radio broadcast casually dismisses the preceding three hours of heroic sacrifice with, “During the day of June 3rd, no major engagement took place on the front. However, some minor local fighting occurred in certain sectors.”

Based on Boris Vasilyev’s 1969 short novel of the same name, there was also a 2015 mini-series for Russian television (a review of that is coming soon); a Tamil-language Indian film (Peranmai); a Chinese TV series; and more unusually, the story was turned into not one but two operas, one in Russia and the other in China. However, this version was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, where it lost out to Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. No death before dishonour there. 

Dir:  Stanislav Rostotsky
Star: Andrey Martynov, Irina Shevchuk, Yelena Drapeko, Yekaterina Markova

Terminator: Dark Fate

  By

★★½
“She’ll not be back”

If you went back in time, and told James Cameron on the set of the original Terminator, that 35 years later, it would have spawned six movies and a TV series, he probably wouldn’t have believed you. It’s not a story which screams “Franchise,” being entirely self-contained. The first sequel justified itself with a sea-change in digital effects which marked a massive shift in the way popular cinema would work thereafter. Everything beyond that? Almost entirely superfluous. And I speak as someone who liked Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines considerably more than most people.

I can certainly see why this flopped though. It comes on the heels of Salvation and Genesys, both of which were commercially dubious and critically disastrous, to the point that Cameron decreed them to have happened in alternate universes, effectively retconning them out of existence. This set Dark Fate up as a direct sequel to the franchise’s most successful installment, which also happens to be one of the greatest action films of all time (it’s likely in my top five, and not the only James Cameron film there either). Comparisons were never going to be kind to Dark Fate.

Then, Miller opens his film with footage from T2, in which an amazingly intense Sarah Connor describes her vision of Judgment Day. Rather than trying to build the movie’s own universe, the audience is immediately reminded of just how damn good its predecessor was. I turned to Chris and whispered, “We really must watch T2 again.” This is not something you should be thinking, thirty seconds into a sequel. It’s just the first in a number of missteps which end up burying the franchise once again, rather than resurrecting it.

The main problem is, we’ve seen it all before. The story is basically the same as Terminator. Or Terminator 2. Or Terminator 3. Robot gets sent back in time by future self-aware AI to kill a human it deems is a threat. Pro-mankind asset gets sent back in time to protect the target. They fight. A lot. There are a couple of wrinkles here. The protector (Davis) is actually an “augmented” human herself, albeit still short of the levels of her enemy (Luna). And Dani Ramos (Reyes) isn’t the mother of someone who’ll save humanity. But it feels less a sequel than a reboot, as we still have to watch Dani going through the whole explanatory process and “Five stages of being a Terminator target” thing.

Probably the main hook, however, is the presence of both Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger, re-united for the first time since T2. Cue another misstep: if their appearances had been unexpected twists, they would both have come as delightful surprises. And the way they are filmed, makes it feel like that may have been the original intent. For instance, when Sarah Connor makes her entrance, we see her feet getting out of the car, the mysterious saviour only eventually revealed. The same is true when the T-800 arrives. Except those bullets were already fired by marketing, with them both showing up, full face, in the trailers. And it’s never explained why a 100% artificial creature like the T-800 has aged 35 years, nor how it’s getting the information with which it helps Sarah.

The familiarity of the plot would be bearable, if the execution was up to much. After all, T2 recycled its plot to a not dissimilar degree. However, it pushed the spectacle to 11, and was superior to the original as a result. This… Did not. Indeed, I was shocked by how ropey much of the CGI and digital work was, for a $190 million budget. Not so much the new Rev-9 model Terminator, which is a slick, oily creation like an intelligent pool of tar. But the meshing with the actors is poor, especially when one or other is made to fly through the air.

Maybe this kind of thing works in superhero films like Miller’s Deadpool. Here, it falls well short of the physical impact we saw in T2, or even T3, where the bathroom brawl felt like it had a bone-crunching realism to it. The low-point here is a battle on a plummeting plane, which is so poorly shot, edited and even lit as to be entirely incoherent. You literally have no idea which was is up, and I was simply left waiting for it to be over, and figure out what happened based on who walks away from the wreckage. [Spoiler: it’s everyone]

The entry isn’t entirely without merit though. While Dani is no Sarah Connor v2.0 (and her brother is worse still, quickly triggering a Chris whisper to me, “I hope he dies soon…”), Sarah 1.0 has a tired cynicism which is endearing and understandable. Maybe if they’d made the film entirely about Connor, spending her life going from place to place, hunting and destroying Terminators? There could then have been a whole slew of styles of opponent, making it the Godzilla: Final Wars entry in the franchise. Arnie, too, possesses a charisma which is mostly notable by its absence from the rest of the cast, though Davis makes a better impression than I feared.

There’s also a brilliant sequence set thirty years ago, depicting a young Sarah and John Connor, which is so well done, I was left wondering if this was unused footage from T2. Again, I’m left to wonder if they should have embraced that wholeheartedly and had the entire film take place in that era. We might then have avoided the SJW beats e.g. Border Patrol = bad, though at least these are relatively light compared to some recent Hollywood product. Well, save the clumsy way Dani becomes the future messiah, which triggered derisive snorting from my direction.

It would be a stretch to say we were storming the box-office, demanding a refund. We don’t see many films at the cinema, and despite my criticisms, this did not feel like we wasted our time or our money. It does deliver, as a cinematic spectacle, and is certainly an improvement over Salvation and Genesys, both of which triggered actual sleep. Yet I was reminded of a definition of insanity: repeating the same actions, over and over, hoping for a different result. It appears making Terminator sequels potentially qualifies.

Dir: Tim Miller
Star: Natalia Reyes, Mackenzie Davis, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna

Handgun

  By

★★★½
“The Equalizer”

Either by intent or accidentally – and we’ll get to that in a moment – this manages to be both an indictment of and an advert for, American gun culture. That’s quite a spectacular achievement, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that the writer/director is British, so brings an outsider’s balanced eye to a topic that’s often acrimonious in the States. Kathleen Sullivan (Young) is a teacher who has just moved from Boston to a small Texas town. She falls for local attorney Larry Keeler (Day), though is only interested in friendship, not a significant relationship. The initially-charming Larry eventually won’t take no for an answer, and date-rapes Kathleen. However, the circumstances and her attacker’s local reputation mean she gets no satisfaction from the police. The meek and mild Kathleen decides to take matters into her own hands, buying a gun and taking up combat shooting – at the very same club Larry frequents – with the aim of meting out her own brand of justice.

Director Garnett is a fairly outspoken Socialist, most well-known in film circles for his work with Ken Loach, and those left-wing beliefs appear to have informed his approach here. For example, he said in regard to this film, “America is built on genocide, has a macho culture and confuses owning guns with individual freedoms.” It doesn’t exactly make him a candidate for a film pointing out the positive elements of gun ownership. But it’s absolutely no stretch to read this as a Janie’s Got a Gun-style tale of empowerment through firearms. Yes, Larry uses his gun to coerce Kathleen into sex. However, we then see her use her gun to punish him when society fails to do so. There’s no doubt that weapons and the skills to use them are part of her transformative process, and the Kathleen we see at the end is a much stronger woman than the one to whom we are introduced. Guns, it appears Garnett is saying, are just a tool which can be used for good or evil – like any other. It’s when they become fetishized to a dangerous degree, problems like Larry arise.

This does lead to the film seeming rather ambivalent, though it’s hard to tell how much of this is due to studio interference. Garnett sold the film to the mainstream Warner Bros, and says, “I had to cut elements from the film that I now regret.” While slow-paced at times, it benefits from a good performance by Young, who is pretty without being perfect (the gap in her front teeth is a seriously eighties throwback), and can also sell the transformation believably into an angel of vengeance. Yet there’s one final twist at the end, with Kathleen stopping short of becoming what she despises, and it confirms this movie’s position as easily one of the more thoughtful films in the rape-revenge genre. You may or may not necessarily agree with what Garrett has to say, yet it’s hard to say he does a poor job of making his argument.

Dir: Tony Garnett
Star: Karen Young, Clayton Day, Suzie Humphreys, Helena Humann
a.k.a. Deep in the Heart

Fear University 1-3

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

I was initially a bit concerned this was going to be a slightly-more horror oriented version of Harry Potter, based largely off the title. I needn’t have been worried. For at least the first two books, this is quite startlingly dark and on the razor’s edge. As for the third… well, we’ll get to it. The setting here is a world where Filipino shapeshifters called aswangs, which feed on the fear of their victims, are migrating across from their home country and through Alaska. Lined up to stop them, by any means necessary, are hunters; it’s a harsh and often brief occupation. To replace those lost in battle, the titular establishment exists on Kodiak Island, to train hunters – mostly members of families who have been in the bloody business for generations.

Into this comes Ollie Andrews, a waitress who kills an aswang, and is recruited (well, abducted is probably closer) into Fear University. Her survival is largely down to an unusual illness/talent: her inability to feel pain. No pain = no fear, and so nothing an aswang can use against her. However, this ability has caused her issues in the past – not least,  her abduction by a father/son pair of psychopaths. Though Ollie escaped, killing the father in the process, she has been pursued by the survivor, Max. This has forced Ollie to change her identity and keep on the move to avoid him tracking her down. FU [I’m not sure if the author chose the name for that acronym!] might offer her somewhere to belong, replacing the family she never had.

Keyword: might. For she has to overcome the prejudices of the other students, due to Ollie not being from one of those historic families. And that’s just the start, as she begins to discover the university’s quest to win the war under its head, Dean Bogrov and his shady scientific experiments. It also turns out there is a third group, operating between the aswangs and the humans, and Ollie’s past comes back into play; she was an orphan who never knew her father, and whose mother abandoned her in a closet. That’s an awful lot to unpack, and for the first two books, Collett does an admirable job. It’s a gritty approach, with Ollie a severely-damaged heroine, who has enough issues for an entire conference.

Those opening two books keep the story going forward. In the first volume, Fear University, she learns to tap into the power her talent gives her; builds a relationship with the similarly-broken young hunter Luke, who is her mentor; discovers aswang saliva can make her feel pain; finds out who her father was; and has to go through a life-or-death test involving both her, and her best friend at FU, Sunny. The second, Killing Season, is a rather drastic change in approach, with Ollie, Luke and others sent north to Barrow for the winter break, when the aswang are most active.  That was the location used for vampire action film 30 Days of Night, and serves the same kind of purpose here. However, it’s almost as much a whodunnit, with the large house which is the hunters’ base apparently home to a killer. Not helping matters: Max shows up in town.

Then there’s the third… I should probably have detected the change in approach, based entirely on the title: Monster Mine. For sadly, the series loses its edge entirely. Rather than turning into Harry Potter, it instead becomes something which combines the whiny angst of the Twilight series, with the Daddy issues from Star Wars. That’s about as appetizing as it sounds, and by the end, this was a chore to slog through. To the point, indeed, that the free novella included in this omnibus edition, was left entirely unread. Collett does, at least, tie things up reasonably well, giving the reader some closure. It’s a pity that the groundwork laid for a memorable anti-heroine over the first two volumes, evaporates so drastically in the third.

Author: Meg Collett
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Books 1-3 of 5 in the Fear University series.

Rattlesnake

  By

★★★
“A tale without enough to rattle you”

This occupies a rather odd middle-ground between a meditation on what it means to take a life, and a violent thriller. I’m not sure it manages to pull either off entirely successfully, yet some striking imagery helped sustain our interest. Katrina (Ejogo) is driving from Phoenix to Oklahoma City, with her young daughter, Clara (Pratt), to start a new life: it’s hinted that there may be an abusive partner in the rear-view mirror. The route takes her across the Texas Panhandle, and in an effort to avoid a traffic jam, she hits the back roads. This turns out to be mistake, as she first gets a flat, then Clara is bitten by a rattlesnake.

Fortunately, there’s a trailer nearby, where Katrina is able to get help; by the time mother and daughter reach the nearby hospital in Tulia, there’s no indication of any snakebite. But a stranger turns up in their room, demanding payment for the emergency assistance, and not the kind covered by their health insurance: a “soul for a soul”. If Katrina doesn’t kill someone by sundown, Clara’s life will be forfeit. After the validity of the threat is confirmed, Katrina seeks a victim, and seems to find one in another abusive man, Billy (Rossi), whom she encounters in a local bar, taking out his anger on his wife, Abbie (Greenwell). But even when her own daughter’s life is at risk, can Katrina find it in herself to go against all her morality, and take another person’s life?

It does pose an interesting question: how far would a mother (or anyone, I guess) be prepared to go in defense of their child? As we learn, Katrina is prepared to sacrifice whatever might be necessary, but it’s a bit of a process to get there. For example, she spends rather too much time hanging around the hospital, hoping for a chance to smother an already-dying patient, conveniently nearby. And Billy is similarly convenient, a character so unpleasant, the resulting moral dilemma becomes massively diluted. It would have made for greater drama if there hadn’t been an easy candidate, and Katrina was forced to choose between her child and someone decent.

Hilditch has a good eye, however, and there are some striking scenes where the heroine experiences visions, reminding her of her task, and that time is running out. A priest spontaneously combusts; a little kid engages in equally self-destructive acts. These help create an unsettling atmosphere, which keep the film’s head above water, when the plot struggles to do so. Ejogo is also decent in the central role, making it relatively easy to put yourself in her shoes. But I’d have like to have seen more of the background filled in here. Katrina does some light Googling, which suggests she is far from the first person to have found themselves in debt. Yet this angle is severely under-explored, and the net result is something which almost feels more like a series pilot.

Dir: Zak Hilditch
Star: Carmen Ejogo, Theo Rossi, Emma Greenwell, Apollonia Pratt

The Angel of Vengeance: The Female Hamlet

  By

★★★
“To be or not to be… NOT to be…”

Okay, the above is shamelessly lifted from The Last Action Hero, in which there’s a spoof trailer for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. But it applies just as much to this, which is remarkably progressive considering its origins; 1977 Turkey was not exactly in the forefront of women’s liberation. Yet here we are, with a modernized and severely truncated version of Shakespeare’s story. This runs 86 minutes, compared to 242 minutes for, say, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. But it hits the main spots, even if only in passing: for instance, Hamlet’s soliloquy shows up, though “Alas, poor Yorick” gets short shrift.

In case you’d forgotten: Hamlet (Girik) returns home from drama school in America, after the cold-blooded assassination of her father by her uncle (Yurdakul), who has married Hamlet’s mother (Ferdag). After seeing her father’s ghost, Hamlet decides to feign insanity, in order to get to the truth. When she stages a play, The Murder of Gonzago, depicting what she believes to be the true events, and her uncle’s rapid, guilty exit, it’s time for Hamlet to take her bloody revenge, and consign her uncle to the same end to which he sent her father.

It all takes place against a strange soundtrack, which includes both Shostakovich’s score to the 1964 version of Hamlet made in Russia (officially sanctioned or not), and Silver Convention’s disco hit from a couple of years earlier, Fly Robin Fly. It has its share of surreal or even avant-garde imagery too, particularly when Hamlet is playing at being mad, such as conducting an imaginary orchestra – the instruments are there, just not anyone to play them – in the middle of a field. The play, meanwhile, comes over as a bizarre cross between A Clockwork Orange, Manos, Hands of Fate and an early Kate Bush video.

The above makes it sounds rather less interesting than it is, even for someone like me, whose knowledge of Shakespeare is fairly limited. The main thing which it has working in its favor, is Girik, who was the veteran of literally hundreds of Turkish films in the sixties and seventies, before becoming the mayor of a district in Istanbul towards the end of the eighties. Even when the acting required here is nothing more than pulling faces (as quite often), she has sufficient charisma and delivers her (frequently ludicrous) lines with enough intensity to sustain the viewer’s interest.

The other tweaks resulting from the gender reversal have their moments too. For instance, Ophelia’s descent into madness takes on a rather different tone when she’s no longer a loony young girl. The same goes for Hamlet’s relationship with Rezzan and Gul, the female versions of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, which feels something akin to a Turkish version of Sex and the City. In the end, I’m probably glad Erksan – best known in the West for Seytan, his knock-off of The Exorcist – opted for a brisk adaptation of the bard. While decent at its length, I strongly suspect that 242 minutes of this approach would have seemed considerably less rather than more.

Dir: Metin Erksan
Star: Fatma Girik, Sevda Ferdag, Reha Yurdakul, Orçun Sonat
a.k.a. Intikam Melegi/Kadin Hamlet

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

  By

★★★★½
“The wind rises.”

After the enormous critical, if not commercial, success of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro, Miyazaki was commissioned to create a manga series for Animage magazine, with a potential film adaptation attached. Publication began in early 1982, but it would take a dozen years, albeit of intermittent publication, before that story was complete. When the series’s popularity among Animage readers was established, work began on the film adaptation, covering the early portion of the manga. Since this was before Miyazaki’s own Studio Ghibli was founded, an external company, Topcraft, were commissioned to create the animation. The budget was only $1 million, with a mere nine-month production schedule leading up to its release in March 1984.

It takes place on a post-apocalyptic world, a thousand years after the near-mythical “Seven Days of Fire”, pushed humanity to the edge of extinction. Since then, nature has taken over much of the planet, covering it in an expanding toxic jungle where the very air is poisonous in a few minutes. It is populated by equally lethal creatures, at the top being the “ohmu”, gigantic insectoids capable of destroying anything in its path. The human race is reduced to clinging on to the fringes, such as the small kingdom of the Valley of the Wind, in which a never-ending breeze keeps the toxins at bay. There, the king’s daughter, Nausicaä (Shimamoto), is one of the few brave enough to enter and explore the jungle, and has developed a mutually respectful relationship with its strange inhabitants.

The balance is destroyed when a plane from the kingdom of Tolmekia crashes. In its cargo is an enormous “God Warrior” – one of those which carried out the Seven Days of Fire – recently dug out from where it had been buried. Tolmekia and their rivals, Pejite, are wrestling for control of the warrior and the power it wields, and the crash drags the Valley of the Wind into their conflict. In particular, Princess Kushana of Tolmekia (Sakakibara) intends to use the warrior to destroy the jungle and restore mankind’s dominion over the planet. Nausicaä is ferociously opposed to this scheme, especially after discovering that the jungle is actually purifying the atmosphere and soil, absorbing the toxins from the apocalypse. She’ll do anything to stop Kushana, including being willing to sacrifice her own life if necessary.

There’s a lot going on here, as you can see. It’s somewhat understandable why, when initially shown in the West (one of the first examples of anime to receive a theatrical release), 22 minutes was cut out, in order to market it as a children’s film, retitled Warriors of the Wind. The problem is, like almost all of the director’s work, it is not a children’s film. This is not a uncommon mistake – presumably based on them having a child as the central characters, and because they’re animated, which still largely equates to Disney in many people’s minds. But they’re more about that age capturing an innocent and idealistic mentality. This is undeniably mature and thoughtful cinema. In just his second feature, and first original film, Nausicaä establishes several themes which would run through almost all of Miyazaki’s future work, in varying degrees: the joy of flight, concern for the environment, and a strong female presence.

Miyazaki’s father ran an airplane parts company in World War II, and even his film company, Studio Ghibli, was named after an Italian plane. Almost every one of his movies includes a flying sequence, and Nausicaä certainly has plenty of them, whether its the heroine skimming across the desert on her one-person glider, or gigantic warships looming, threateningly, in the sky. Despite the imperfect animation, a result of the limited resources, the sense of wonder and awe is undeniable. If you don’t want to take to the skies after seeing these scenes, you might want to check for a pulse. Similarly, there’s no denying Miyazaki is firmly on the side of nature, with his heroine believing all life to be sacred, and humanity deserving no special place above any other species. If mankind can’t live in harmony with the world, the movie suggests, it’s mankind which needs to change. Bending nature to our will is always going to backfire.

But it’s with the depiction of womankind that the film truly succeeds. In Nausicaä and Kushana, you have two fully-formed characters that are not just among the best in animated film, they could stand beside the protagonist and antagonist of most live-action movies. The latter, in particular, demonstrates Miyazaki’s skill at depicting those who would be flat-out villains in less nuanced films, instead being given motivation and depth. While you may not agree with Kushana resurrecting the God Warrior, you can understand what she is trying to accomplish. Her actions stem from a genuine belief that what she is doing is best for the future of mankind. She just has a military-industrial approach to that, in sharp contrast to the one emphasizing ecological science and harmony, preferred by Nausicaä. Interesting to note that, in the 2005 Disney English-language dub, Kushana was voiced by Uma Thurman.

The story here builds to a stellar climax, in which a massive herd of ohmu are lured into a stampede towards the valley, while simultaneously the God Warrior is unleashed by Kushana, to horrific effect. [The animation for the latter was done by a young Hideki Anno, who’d go on to become a master of the genre himself, best known for Neon Genesis Evangelion. In a 2006 Japanese poll, Evangelion was the only anime ranked ahead of Nausicaä as an all-time favourite] Our heroine puts herself in harm’s way in an effort to stop the carnage, and… Well, I won’t spoil it in detail; Miyazaki manages to pull off an ending which could easily have come off as contrived or ridiculous, and is instead emotionally satisfying. With even the Tolmekians forces humbled by nature, as environmental messages delivered by teenagers go, it’s certainly a great deal more effective than an angry Scandinavian shrieking “HOW DARE YOU!” at the audience.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star (voice): Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, Yoshiko Sakakibara

Princess Mononoke

  By

★★★½
“Princess Die”

To some extent, this was the film which “broke” Miyazaki in the West, being his first feature to receive an unedited theatrical release in America. It wasn’t a huge commercial success, taking only about $2.4 million in North America. But it was very well-received, Roger Ebert listing it among his top ten films of 1999. It likely opened the door for the success of Spirited Away, which would win Miyazaki the Oscar for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards. But if I’m being honest, I don’t like it as much as many of his movies. While there’s no denying the imagination and enormous technical skill here, it doesn’t resonate emotionally with me in the same way. I think it’s probably the central character, who is relatively bland and uninteresting, even compared to other characters in the movie.

Firstly though: no, there’s no-one called “Mononoke” in this. It’s not a name, but a Japanese term describing a supernatural shape-shifting creature. Though even this seems ripe to cause confusion, because there are no shape-shifting princesses to be found either. And despite the title, the protagonist is Ashitaka (Matsuda), a prince of the Emishi tribe in medieval Japan, whose arm becomes infected after an encounter with a demon-possessed wild boar. As happens… Seeking a cure before the rest of his body follows suite, despite the superhuman strength it gives him, Ashitaka heads into the Western lands, and straight into the middle of an ongoing battle.

On one side is Lady Eboshi (Tanaka), the ruler of Irontown, a progressive and industrial settlement, in need of the resources which can be found in and under the nearby forest. On the other is San (Ishida), a young woman raised by wolves, who has vowed to protect the woods and their inhabitants, including the Great Forest Spirit. It’s their conflict which is really the core of the film, with Ashitaka’s quest to get his demonic arm fixed, taking a back-seat for most of the (lengthy, at 133 minutes) running-time here. Probably for the best, since he is, as mentioned, perhaps the least charismatic or engaging protagonist in the entire Miyazaki canon. His arm is easily the most interesting thing about him – and that keeps wanting to strike out on its own. When your own limb wants to go solo, you might be the problem… To quote Lady Eboshi, “I’m getting a little bored of this curse of yours, Ashitaka. Let me just cut the damn thing off.” #ImWithTeamEboshi

But enough of him. Let’s focus on what works here, which would be San and Eboshi. The first time we see San, her face is smeared in blood which she has sucked up and spat out, from a wound in the side of a gigantic white wolf. [This is certainly the most hardcore of Miyazaki’s films, with decapitations and limbs being lost at a rate closer to an entry in the Lone Wolf & Cub franchise.] She’s relentlessly aggressive in attitude, going so far as to stage a one-woman assault on Irontown in an attempt to assassinate her enemy. She tells Ashitaka, “I’m not afraid to die. I’d do anything to get you humans out of my forest.” That said, she’s still considerably less creepy than the forest apes who want to eat him.

Eboshi, on the other hand, is a complete contrast to the near-feral San, and remarkably progressive, especially considering the era and location. Her town is a haven for the disenfranchised and those society considers “untouchables”, including both lepers and prostitutes, the latter whose contracts she bought out and who now work in her iron mill. Her citizens and their welfare are what she cares about, above all, and she’s completely fearless about who she has to go through for that purpose. “She’s not even afraid of the gods, that woman,” says one of Irontown’s residents about their ruler, admiringly. They aren’t wrong, for she subsquently tells her warriors, “I’m going to show you how to kill a god, a god of life and death. The trick is not to fear him.” It’s remarkably easy to envisage a version where the roles are reversed, and she is the heroine. The fact she’s a gun enthusiast, is just a bonus!

Ashitaka’s role is largely to act as a middleman between the two worlds: somewhat more than human, yet less than divine. That remains the case even at the end, as he agrees to spent part of his time in the forest with San, and part of it working alongside Lady Eboshi in Irontown. It’s potentially an awkward and unsatisfying compromise, storywise, yet Miyazaki makes it work better than you feel it should.  But there are a couple of perplexing missteps too. For one, when the animals of the forest are talking, there’s zero effort to make their lips synch up. It’s bizarre and distracting. And in the Japanese version, the voice of San’s wolf mother, Moro is a man. Someone known in Japan as a drag queen, admittedly – but a man none the less, a weird choice which confused the heck out of me [score one for the dub, at least, which had Gillian Anderson as the character]

The overall result is undeniably beautifully animated, and epic in its scope and invention. As ever, Miyazaki excels at creating a world which is like our own, yet simultaneously completely alien. However, it all gets rather wearing, especially at the length depicted here. My attention simply ran dry during the second half, as the multiple different factions began hacking or gnawing away on each other, with the personal and intense quality of the Eboshi/San conflict getting lost in the bigger picture. It’s in putting over the intensely personal elements of large stories, that Miyazaki is unsurpassed – never mind just in animation, among film-makers as a whole. This isn’t the best demonstration of his talents in that area.

Dir: Hayao Miyazaki
Star: Yōji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Yūko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi

The Sisterhood

  By

★★★
“Many Mad Maxines.”

This one may be the origin of the meme, “After the apocalypse, food, water and gasoline are in short supply – but hair-spray will still be plentiful.” For there’s no denying the absolute silliness of this slab of post-apocalyptic nonsense. But it’s still imaginative and energetic enough that my interest was largely sustained. We’re apparently long enough after World War III for it all to have become the stuff of almost-forgotten legend. In the aftermath, the world is now occupied by roaming bands, mostly of men. However, certain women are gifted with special powers, and they have banded together into the titular group, under their reverend mother, and are feared by most as witches.

After her settlement is attacked by Mikal (Wagner, looking like a low-rent Chuck Norris), and her brother killed, Marya (Johnson) hits the road, seeking revenge. She meets two members of the Sisterhood, Alee (Holden) and Vera (Patrick), and when they discover Marya’s gift, the ability to communicate with her pet hawk, they allow her to join them. Vera is abducted by Mikal, who then heads off to add her to the collection of Sisterhood members, being held in one of the few remaining cities. Alee and Marya follow, until a shortcut into the forbidden zone of radiation and mutants lets them stumble across a pre-apocalypse arms dump. Now armed with automatic weapons and a tank (!), they are thoroughly well-equipped, first to rescue Vera, and then storm the city and liberate the rest of their sisters.

Made in 1988, the debt this owes to the Mad Max trilogy (which had finished with Beyond Thunderdome, three years earlier) is apparent to the point of being blatant. There’s a lot of whizzing around in a quarry, with giant fireballs going off just to the side of the target. For, while it’s remarkable the heroines are able immediately to drive their tank, their talents clearly do not extend to aiming the guns accurately. This is all highly mockable, not least that it’s apparently set in the far-distant future of… er, the year 2021. Yet those involved play it all entirely straight, and eventually I found this seriousness rubbing off on me. There were occasional moments which, if not making me go “Wow!”, did extract a somewhat-impressed “Huh.”.

Director Santiago should be well-known to readers here, having also given us Angel Fist and The Muthers; he brings much the same combination of female empowerment and exploitation here. Because, for all the strong female characters, they also seem to spent a inordinate amount of time either chained up or getting their tops ripped open – and, occasionally, both. But Holden and Johnson manage to rise above the low-rent production values with their dignity intact – even if nothing remotely like the video sleeve is to be found in this one! By the admittedly low standards of the genre, this is likely well-above average. And we only have to wait two years for it all to come to pass…

Dir: Cirio H. Santiago
Star: Rebecca Holden, Chuck Wagner, Lynn-Holly Johnson, Barbara Patrick