Movie Enthusiast Issue 30: A good horror movie audience is hard to find, Japanese antiwar movies, and more
Earlier this month I saw Get Out, Jordan Peele’s fantastic horror-comedy (emphasis on the horror) about a black guy who goes to meet his white girlfriend’s respectable liberal family only to discover that they’re…out for him. I saw this movie to a sold out crowd on a Saturday night in DC’s Chinatown and it was WILD. Horror isn’t normally my genre, so I don’t have too many anecdotes to compare this one with, but I’ve never been in an audience that responded to a movie the way that one did to this one. We’re talking: uproarious laughter at all the funny moments, sudden loss in cabin air pressure in all the suspenseful moments, sassy vocal feedback to every plot twist (“mmmmm girl’s got like seventeen of ’em in that box”), and thunderous applause at the finale. The movie itself is great and lands all the right beats (except for one: you can’t show us something catching fire in the basement of the house and then not show the house burning down several scenes later. I'm choosing to believe they just ran out of money to get that shot), but seen with the right audience it turns into that rare instance of a barrier-demolishing act of cinema. Your personal experience of watching the movie suddenly, somehow becomes inseparable from the collective audience’s experience, and all the shared wisdom, anxiety, and dread each audience member brings with them into the theater.
This weekend I saw Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (you know, the one where Kristen Stewart’s a medium who can communicate with the dead by text message, nbd) and the difference in this audience’s response was stark. Granted, there were only 20 or so of us intrepid souls in the theater compared with the 200–300 who came for Get Out, but…still. Guys. This movie is PREPOSTEROUS. At one point K-Stew is talking to her boss’s ex in the living room of some swanky new-money Parisian apartment and explaining, with a total sincerity and dead seriousness that’s reflected everywhere in the filmmaking itself, how she and her twin brother (recently deceased of heart complications) can communicate with the dead. No eyelashes batted. Some bougie French couple hires her out to spend the night in a mansion on a hill to determine for them if it’s haunted so they know whether it would be a good investment or not and she watches a ghost vomit ectoplasm. And then subsequently she describes the ectoplasm-vomiting to someone and everyone is totally chill with it, like, “Ah, yes, it is perfectly logical that a ghost would vomit ectoplasm” GUUUUUUUUUYS.
I wish this movie were as good as its premise might have allowed to be, but, as I quipped on social media, having a lot of big ideas—and this one’s full of them, many related to technology’s role in changing person-to-person communication and creating suspense—doesn’t necessarily distinguish you from an undergraduate research paper written two hours before it’s due. Nevertheless, what is there in this movie is ripe for audience interaction—maybe not quite as uproarious a response as Get Out got, but at least a few vocal “Oh COME ON”s. Instead: nothing. Nada. Zippo. It’s as though the discerning clientele of coastal urban foreign-film-distributing movie theaters are under the impression that any movie that comes to these shores from Europe bearing the Cannes Film Festival palm fronds before the title credits is a de facto work of serious cinema™; check your emotions at the door and observe the Art in silence, s’il vous plaît. I think I’ll stick to the Get Outs of cinema from now on, thanks.
Unintentionally I’ve found myself watching a lot of Japanese antiwar movies this month.
Akira Kurosawa’s No Regrets for Our Youth dates from 1946, before his samurai-epic phase, and stars Yasujiro Ozu regular Setsuko Hara in one of her only coquettish performances. (She is famously known as “Japan’s Eternal Virgin” for the dependability with which she played chaste, patient daughters throughout her career.) I’ve seen a few people call this movie a propaganda film, as it charts the change in Hara’s character from the flighty daughter of a bourgeois university professor to the class-conscience co-laborer with the peasant parents of her leftist lover. I found it an extremely pleasant movie and didn’t mind whatever corners it cut to make its socialist points, though I am curious now to investigate propaganda filmmaking in more detail to see how our definitions of the genre have changed over time.
Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp, from 1956, takes more of a John Ford-ian approach to its antiwar story. It’s about a harp-playing Japanese soldier in Burma at the close of World War II who fails to convince a fellow regiment to surrender and then becomes a Buddhist monk as penitence for his actions in wartime and his failure to save the lives of his fellow countrymen. It’s a stirring film with many beautiful music cues (including one show-stopper an unfortunate 15 minutes into the film when the soldier’s harp playing induces the British soldiers surrounding the defeated Japanese regiment to lay down their weapons and join the vanquished enemy in song) and poetic tableaux (one shot in particular is reminiscent of a grotesque Hieronymus Bosch panel). Ichikawa isn’t nearly the director Kurosawa is, in the sense that his camera movements aren’t themselves anything to write home about, but darn it if he doesn’t know how to make a riveting testament to pacifistic sentiment—without recourse to leftist politics, at that.
Jumping some sixty years forward, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises is a beautiful swan song for the beloved Ghibli director, brimming with painterly canvases and the best looking clouds I’ve ever seen in an animated movie. Yet…there’s something a touch weird about the romanticizing going on with its protagonist, Jiro Horikoshi, the aeronautical engineer who designed the war planes Japan used in World War II. The point of the movie isn’t to condone Jiro’s contribution to the war effort (nor to excuse the passivity that led him to continue his life’s work to the point of enabling the destruction of others). And there are enough harrowing depictions of suffering and cautionary words about war in this film for the casual viewer to get its pacifistic gist. But it does seem to be lacking some necessary acknowledgement that Actually Jiro Did a Bad Thing, even if his pursuit of artistic perfection and beauty is a resonant theme that nicely ties together Miyazaki’s entire œuvre.
An interesting portrait of Japan in wartime emerges from these three very different pictures. Kind of like how the market for American World War II movies continues to produce new stories about as-yet unsung heroes of wartime year after year, Japan has its own inexhaustible fount of accounts of the war and how it changed Japanese society.
Articles, News, and Interviews
There’s a new Terrence Malick movie out this week! (I know, right? Who would have thought this would become a regular thing we catch ourselves saying in our lifetime?) In light of that, here’s the most comprehensive biographical account of his life I’ve yet encountered. The reclusive director is, suitably, full of surprises: “[Malick’s friend Jim Lynch] remembers that after seeing Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, Malick—a fluent French speaker, with conversational German and Spanish—mentioned that he understood the film’s spoken Aramaic, because he’d grown up hearing it from his paternal grandparents.”
That’s a wrap: on Alfonso Cuarón’s forthcoming, Roma, a long-gestating passion project about the Corpus Christi Massacre. It was shot on 70mm film and Emmanuel Lubezki was not DP this go-round. Is it heretical if I admit that’s a bit of a relief? After The Revenant I need a bit of a Lubezki break.
My complicated relationship with Alex Ross Perry gets…thornier, on the tails of this thoughtful encomium on moviegoing for the sake of enjoying movies. “If a twenty film series of an unknown entity makes you happy and is your idea of a nice time, please go see that. Just make sure that the movies are entertaining and fun first and foremost, whatever your idea of that is.”
I did not see the new live-action Beauty and the Beast; it doesn’t have a scenery-chewing, fabulous-hat-wearing Cate Blanchett so I probably won’t. My friends, however have some questions: “Do we really need a canonical myth about making it a woman’s job to put up with and eventually transform an abusive man? How much damage is it going to do to have the first official queer representation in Disney canon be a snivelling villain’s henchman? Do the villagers not resent it at all when their anarchic utopia is made to serve an excessive monarchy again? What happens when the actual historical French Revolution happens about 20 years later?”