Web MasterThrough the looking glass into the land of spirits
Spirited Away
Directed by: Hayao Miyazaki
Featuring the voices of: Daveigh Chase, Suzanne Pleshette and Jason Marsden
Playing at: The Chase Park Plaza
by Dan Carlin
Call Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away a children’s movie if you like, but a film with such a mesmerizing sense of the magical, such dazzling visual imagination and thematic richness should hardly be kept to a limited audience. Besides, there is enough blood, psychedelia, and general creepiness for the film to be altogether too weird for most little children.
The first ten minutes are probably the only segment of the film that can be properly described without employing Miyazaki’s own fantastical language of witches, dragons, and spirits. While visiting an abandoned amusement park with her careless parents, little Chihiro feels ill at ease and suspicious of the odd sculptures and vacant buildings looming around her. When her parents discover, to their delight, an overflowing buffet lying on a stand in the middle of an empty marketplace, Chihiro begs them not to touch any of it. And indeed, soon after they ignore her and begin greedily devouring the food, her mother and father are transformed into a pair of giant snorting pigs. Suddenly, a forbidding night falls swiftly around the terrified Chihiro, and a magical, hidden world comes to life around her.
With the help of a young boy, Haku, Chihiro avoids the initial dangers of her new world and is ushered into the fantastic center of the bizarre metropolis she has fallen into. That center is the bath house of the “Spirit World,” where spirits come to cleanse themselves and take a break from the real world. The spirits and the employees of the bath house, for lack of a better word, are a trip. Some of them look like overgrown rubber duckies wearing lilypads on their heads, others like quadruped carp, and the boss and bad-woman of the entire operation, Yubaba, looks like a big-headed, platinum-blonde version of the Wicked Witch of the West.
Indeed, the story of Spirited Away begins vaguely as a cross between The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, but Miyazaki takes hallucinogenic flights of fancy even farther than those masterpieces of the bizarre. The initial set-up is that in order to save her parents from being turned into a meal, and to have them restored to human form, Chihiro must become a worker in the bath house and pass a series of tests. But the plot is of little consequence through most of the film. Miyazaki’s plot developments grow less out of a linear and logical progression of events than of dream-like free-associations. The essence of Spirited Away seems less its traditional elements-hero sympathy or the twists and turns of a traditional three-act plot-then a complete sensual and intellectual engagement with each moment on screen, Miyazaki wants above all for the viewer to be transported wholesale into the bizarre sights and sounds of his fantasy world.
In one astonishing scene, the bath house is in a panic because a “Stink Spirit”-essentially a giant, lurching, only vaguely humanoid pile of poo-has arrived looking for a bath. As the unlucky new girl, Chihiro is assigned to take care of this revolting guest. After inundating him with a cascade of water, Chihiro discovers what she think is a thorn in the spirit’s side. She enlists the help of a dozen men who attach a rope, pull, and out comes a bicycle, then a fishing rod, a trash can, and so on, until it seems an entire landfill has been extracted from the belly of the now-deflated spirit. It’s a weird moment, no doubt, but Miyazaki stages it to convey a moment of purification and salvation.
Miyazaki’s visual style is just as unconventional as his narrative method. Many of the film’s most indelible images-a glistening train running partially submerged through a seemingly endless, topaz sea; a silver dragon snaking through the sky in evasion of an attacking swarm of paper birds-have as much to do with the classic paintings of Edo-era Japan as with any other animation film. Indeed, throughout Spirited Away, Miyazaki draws on an amazing mix of imagery and thematic material from Eastern mythology, Hollywood cinema, and Western literature, and when it sticks, his synthesis has an amazing visual and thematic density. And even when the screen becomes jumbled with too much information, Spirited Away still comes off, at the very least, as stunning visual candy.
Bottom Line: “…draws on an amazing mix of imagery and thematic material from Eastern mythology, Hollywood cinema, and Western literature.”
Grade: A-
The longest lap dance you’ve ever experienced
Femme Fatale
Directed by: Brian de Palma
Starring: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas
Playing at: The Galleria
by Matt McCluskey
In film scholar-talk Femme Fatale is a film about looking, seeing, and witnessing. Photographs and photographers are central aspects of the narrative and the major plot twist hinges on a character’s inner vision of events to come. In practical why-you’re-going-to-see-this-flick talk Femme Fatale is a film about looking, seeing, and witnessing Rebecca Romijn-Stamos make out with a beautiful woman and strip to all levels of partial and full nudity. There is also an average dose of intrigue and a heaping helping of De Palma’s unique style – long takes, gorgeous Steadicam usage, and split screen – but most spectators will leave the film with newfound respect for John “Uncle Jesse” Stamos, one of the luckiest men on earth.
The film opens in a hotel room in Cannes, France, where blonde bombshell Laure (Romijn-Stamos) lies half-naked on her bed watching Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) on television. The term “femme fatale” refers to the brand of female character played by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and throughout the film noir genre: a sexy deceitful woman with dark secrets who is as beautiful as she is dangerous. Laure is part of this tradition of dangerous women who use their bodies as deadly weapons. She first uses this asset to rob a model (Rie Rasmussen) attending the Cannes Film Festival of an out-of-this-world sexy diamond-studded garment. As the two women engage in some serious heavy petting in the restroom, her male partners in crime provide support behind the scenes. But these men, like all men in Laure’s path, are left behind and Laure escapes to Paris.
In Paris, while meeting with a new financial partner, Laure is accidentally photographed by Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), a part-time paparazzo obsessed with the town square outside his apartment. Not wanting to be identified, Laure flees the scene, ending up in a church where she is misidentified as the grieving daughter of a pair of distraught parents. The parents mistakenly bring Laure to their home and she ponders assuming the identity of their daughter (also played by Romijn-Stamos). After a few major twists, very few of which have anything to do with Nicolas, the photographer and his accidental subject are reunited. Nicolas wants to protect her and is easily seduced by her charms in more than one venue. Nicolas has to wise up to Laure’s games if he wants to stay alive, especially when her former partners and cuckolded husband come looking for her.
This is by far the largest role Rebecca Romijn-Stamos has ever played and I am not sure that she can handle the weight of it. Laure is in almost every scene in the film and her decisions and lifestyle move the plot along. Romijn-Stamos is too plain-spoken when she exposes her evil side and this makes her mind much less compelling than her physical wiles. Her motivation stems from being a deep down bad person who likes to steal, but her unsinister, dispassionate tone forces her character into being a foul-mouthed stripper rather than a methodical criminal.
Antonio Banderas does an average job as Laure’s newest plaything, but his facial expressions and line delivery do very little to show the inner conflict his character should have.
If you are a fan of De Palma’s style or like intrigue without clich‚ action sequences and explosions, then you would probably go see Femme Fatale even if it wasn’t full of Romijn-Stamos. For those of you looking for a 110-minute visual lap dance, check this one out.
Bottom Line: “A film about looking, seeing, and witnessing Rebecca Romijn-Stamos make out with a beautiful woman and strip to all levels of partial and full nudity.”
Grade: C+