September 27, 2002

Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away is a dazzling animated film from Japan. I’d go so far as to call a masterpiece for its surreal and moving transposition of The Wizard of Oz to a Japanese otherworld, where each and every object in nature could potentially contain its own god. Or is that “Alice in Miyazaki-land”? Cochiro, a spunky, scrawny 10-year-old girl, must save her parents from a cruel fate—they’ve been transformed into braying hogs—through a series of tests in a strange and comic bathhouse populated by dozens of spirits. She finds love; so did I.

The English-language version, directed by Kirk Wise (Beauty and the Beast) and supervised by John Lasseter (Toy Story) retains the original cut while attempting to make the jokes and the sweet dream logic play for a U.S. audience. It seemed to work with the packed audience I saw it with: the gorgeous, fantastic animation speaks a universal language, even if the characters include The Radish God, an immense walrus-like Daikon, the Stink-God, and Mr. No-Face. I’ve admired movies like Princess Mononoke from a remove; this one got me. Then there are the hilarious little sootballs, familiar from My Neighbor Totoro, blots of feathery black with large comic eyes and a pronounced sneaker fetish. Roger Ebert’s review, drawing from a conversation with Miyazaki, is one of the best pieces I’ve read on the master animator’s latest.

A number of movies are opening with women-centered stories. The biggest, if not brassiest, is Sweet Home Alabama. Predictable cornpone, it’s the kind of star vehicle that makes a charmer like Reese Witherspoon shine even brighter. Trafficking in stereotypes about big cities and small towns, Andy Tennant’s fourth feature is equally clueless about the true nature of either. Yet the story charms. Um, Reese charms, a gem surrounded by a dimestore tiara.

Alabama-bred but Manhattan-made Melanie Carmichael seems to live in a windstorm of glossy magazine pages, her all-about-the-love colleagues, variously gay, black and British, at her side as she makes her name with a fashion collection debut. She’s whisked away from her moment, however, by Andrew, her (uncomfortably) JFK, Jr.-like beau (Patrick Dempsey) who proposes to her in the jewelry section of Tiffany’s. All well and good, even the hackneyed complications with Andrew’s mom, the Mayor of New York (Candice Bergen). Bergen plays her role with the sort of crude finesse (as in her turn in Miss Congeniality) that makes you wonder when she’ll get shoved into a pile of pig manure. (A punch in the face will have to do.) Mel has unfinished business in Alabama, however, with childhood sweetheart Jake (Josh Lucas), whom she’s neglected to stay in touch with… or divorce. Tennant’s good, as in Ever After, at maneuvering around the potential pitfalls of sap, and audiences won’t be there for his skills anyway: it’s the spunky, sweet charisma of Witherspoon that keeps even the oddest moments from turning obnoxious.

I’ve been fascinated by reviews for Steven Shainberg’s second feature, after the indigestible Hit Me, notably Stephen Holden’s in the New York Times. Still, I can’t see artistic virtue in the inexplicably awful Secretary beyond the brave, invested performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal as a submissive secretary to masturbation-given boss James Spader. (Spader, who needs a strong director, is as awful as he’s ever been.) This over-designed dog also distorts short-story writer Mary Gaitskill’s work into a farrago of incoherent psychology and overwrought, cheap-looking production design. A voice-over in the last five minutes seems like the conclusion to a much different, much better movie, and while it sounds like Gaitskill, it’s Gyllenhaal who’s left smelling like a rose. Graham Robinson also has an interesting take in LA Weekly.

Smart, smirking French wunderkind Francois Ozon, whose hour-long See the Sea is one of the most disturbing thrillers I’ve ever seen (it’s about a child abduction, so it might not be the best time to rent it), directed 8 Women, which Focus Features is opening slowly. It’s a wicked, weird murder-mystery-musical, as if George Cukor’s The Women were remade by Douglas Sirk.

The blinding-bright art direction and costume design are candy-box precious but always an eyeful. It’s Divas on Parade, with performances both delightful and deranged. The occasional pop songs the characters break out in have all been hits in France. If the cheapness is to your liking, they’re a delight; otherwise, they’re just damn peculiar. With Catherine Deneuve’s regal bearing; Isabelle Huppert’s brass; Virginie Ledoyen’s ponytail and straightedge bangs; Fanny Ardant’s twisted smile; Danielle Darrieux’s swoon, Emmanuelle Beart’s freckles, and young Ludivine Sagnier, a dreamy-faced little-known with a chopped-off haircut, the liveliest surly teen on screen in an age. (My date said she’d kill for Sagnier’s incredibly flattering lime green pants.)

Another internet columnist has weighed in on Roger Avary’s striking, gorgeously sad Bret Easton Ellis adaptation, Rules of Attraction, and I hope to write about it when it opens in October. I won’t provide a link; most of its showy pleasures are given away in the piece. It’s also been trashed by Premiere's Glenn Kenny says it "nails its spot as the worst movie of 2002 before the opening credits have even concluded." I’ll write more when it opens in October, since I’ve only since a version with a temp sound mix that’s only a dozen cuts or so into the MPAA’s collaboration on the final cut.

DVD: A small-budgeted Midwestern feature—small as in "don't even ask"—comes out on video this week from Water Bearer Films.  While it had a theatrical release on 16mm in Canada, the rough-hewn, sometimes indelicately shot Straightman, from-the-heart story about male friendship, and it's the most heartfelt Chicago-made independent film in memory.

Why? Working in a style derived from backgrounds in acting and improvisation, director/co-producer/co-writer/co-star Ben Berkowitz, and co-producer/co-writer/star Ben Redgrave, both in their late twenties, play roommates with cluttered lives. David (Berkowitz) overweight, bearded and furry, manages a comedy club with comics from an off-brand hell, and pursues, with clumsy aplomb, a succession of flings with women who pass through the club. Jack (Redgrave) works construction jobs, scowling at the world and his live-in girlfriend from behind a heavy handlebar mustache. A few small tremors in their lives, and the pair become roommates. David is manic; Jack is unhappy: while David thinks Jack is straight, he is, in fact, pursuing sex with strangers in stairwells and men's rooms across Chicago. Eventually, Jack confronts the reality of his life, and the performances--searching, seething--and the writing of the scenes--never judgmental, only descriptive--make for a modestly scaled film that has remarkable nuance and texture.

Straightman could be described as being somewhat like a Cassavetes film, but the more intriguing reference point would be the work of Mike Leigh. After the filmmakers held extended workshops, a series of improvisations and conversations, many videotaped, with each other and other actors, they discovered that their process paralleled Leigh's. (Similarly, Redgrave discovered Charles Burnett's intense, equally taciturn Killer of Sheep during editing; not an influence, but a confirmation of their instincts.) For more on the making of the film, link here.  Berkowitz and Redgrave’s unassuming commentary demonstrates both pride and no-budget cleverness, and the easy japery between the pair is reminiscent of commentaries by John Carpenter and his cronies, or of the toe-to-toe performance of Steven Soderbergh and Lem Dobbs on The Limey DVD.

E-me: What’s the most slanderous thing you’ve ever heard claimed on a DVD commentary?