Belle

Ryu to Sobakasu no Hime; animated science-fiction drama, Japan, 2021; D: Mamoru Hosoda, S: Kaho Nakamura, Takeru Satoh, Ryo Narita, Shota Sometani, Tina Tamashiro

Oh the irony: Suzu is one of the most unpopular teenage girls in high school, but at the same time, in the virtual reality platform U her avatar, the purple haired Bell, is one of the most popular characters ever, with millions of followers listening to her singing. Only her nerdy friend Hiroka knows her secret identity. When Bell encounters the Beast, an unknown profile, she recognizes his tortured soul and wants to help him, but he refuses to reveal his identity. Bell assumes it must be her ex-boyfriend Shinobu. But it turns out Beast is teenage boy Kei, who is scarred together with his brother Tomo by their abusive father who beats them. Suzu travels to Tokyo in the rain, finds Kei and Tomo and protects them from their father. Suzu returns home and reunites with her friends.  

Mamoru Hosoda’s film essay on the relationship between people and their virtual reality avatars which project their secret desires, “Belle” is an honest, well made, tender film, but it trips and falls over its own feet in the convoluted finale. This anime works the best when it focuses on small ‘slice-of-life’ moments of its protagonist, teenage girl Suzu, spinning her into a well developed character (the delicious 2-minute static shot, without a cut, in which Shinjoro finds out Ruka Has a crush on him, they both blush and don’t know what to say, he exits, but Suzu forces him to return back to the scene and talk to Ruka) or conjuring up certain cool scenes with style (Ruka playing saxophone on the school campus with others, while jumping with her legs left and right, “Blues Brothers”-style). On the other hand, the context of unpopular Suzu enjoying her popularity online as avatar Bell wasn’t explored that much. Instead, the story focuses on the relationship between two “masked” avatars, Bell and the Beast, which mirrors Disney’s animated classic “Beauty and the Beast” in an abstract way, with the highlight of her singing an enchanting song for him under a night sky, which is fabulous. And yet, when Bell finally reveals her true identity, the story also shows that such online escapism can only go so far, and that people should return to real life and have direct conversation and human contact. The finale messes everything up, though. The reveal of Beast’s identity is unexpected, but so random and arbitrary that it seems as if it was shoehorned from a different movie, a soap opera. The abusive father trope is done in such a terribly cliche way that it is embarrassing to watch, and the ending is also banal in its over-sentimentality and melodramatic excess. A better ending would have made for a better movie. 

Grade:++

Smiles of a Summer Night

Sommarnattens leende; comedy, Sweden, 1955, D: Ingmar Bergman, S: Gunnar Björnstrand, Eva Dahlbeck, Harriet Andersson, Ulla Jacobsson, Jarl Kulle, Björn Bjelfvenstam, Margit Carlqvist 

Sweden, early 1900s. Lawyer Fredrik married the 19-year old Anne after his late wife, much to the unease of his 20-year old son Henrik. Fredrik is still infatuated with the theater actress Desiree, his ex fling, but she is now the mistress of Count Malcolm, himself married to Charlotte. Anne is jealous at Desiree and senses something is up between her and Fredrik. At a castle during the Midsummer Night, they all get drunk, which causes them to release their true desires. Anne and Henrik kiss, which is seen by Fredrik who thus invites Charlotte for a fling, and thus Malcolm challenges him to a fake duel. In the end, Fredrik is comforted by Desiree and asks her to stay with him.

Famed director Ingmar Bergman made several excursions outside his existentialist-depressive dramas which were refreshingly different, among them into the thriller-revenge genre (“The Virgin Spring”), experimental film (“Persona”) and comedy, as in case with his film “Smiles of a Summer’s Night”, included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies. While this last one is his least successful of the three mentioned, it nonetheless serves as an interesting testimony to ‘Bergman-light’ who is much more accessible to the audience. Bergman has no true sense for humor, but a lot of moments in this contemplation on infidelity are just plain fun. The scene where the protagonist Fredrik steps through a door only to fall into a giant puddle on the other side, upon which Desiree bursts into laughter, or the witty dialogue between grandma and Desiree (“Your father threw me out of a window.” - “Was it open?” - “No, closed. I fell straight into a lieutenant colonel. He later became your father.” - “You said your father threw you out.” - “He became your father later!”) are effervescent and charming. The sequence where Fredrik meets Desiree again in her dressing room is also notable because Bergman granted him one of greatest compliments in cinema when he allowed him to say this cherished quote to her: “Your body has the perfection which the perfection is lacking”. Throughout the storyline, it is established that all these characters are in a relationship or married, but secretly yearn or are in love with someone else, which serves as an allegory on society based on suppressed compromise, always shut out from pure joy, which in turn also subtly ignites sensuality as the friction between them slowly grows, and the inhibited passions break loose in the finale. Not all the jokes work, and Bergman again cannot resist not to resort to his “mellow” slumps in some dramatic scenes, which feel out of touch with the rest of the story, yet even in this flawed edition, the movie works much better than expected, almost on pair with Bergman’s more famous films. 

Grade:+++

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse; computer-animated fantasy, USA, 2018; D: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, S: Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Lily Tomlin, Luna Lauren Vélez, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn, Nicolas Cage, Liev Schreiber

New York. Miles Morales is a teenager struggling with high school and his overbearing father, police officer Jefferson. One day, Miles is bitten by a radioactive spider and obtains superpowers. He witnesses how Spider-Man is revealed to be Peter Parker, and killed by Kingpin, a criminal who wants to open a portal to new dimensions to find an alternate reality with his wife and son alive, who died in a car crash in this world. By opening this portal, however, five different Spider-Mans appear from different alternate dimensions: a brown-haired Peter Parker / Spider-Man, Gwen Stacy / Spider-Woman, Peter Porker / Spider-Ham, Peni Parker / SP//dr and Peter Parker / Spider-Man Noir from the 30s. They all combine their forces and stop Kingpin, since his portal is unstable and endangers the world, and then they all go back to their respective Universes. Miles becomes Spider-Man in his world.

The first animated film in the Spider-Man franchize is a surprisingly lively, fresh and creative take on Spider-Man, combined with the multiverse concept, and these additional Spider-Men / Women from other dimensions just seem to multiply and give additional enjoyment value to the movie. Kudos to screenwriters Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for creating a more out-of-the-ordinary story, and squeezing more humor than expected. The jokes work on several levels, whether they are the typical family observations (Miles wants to go to school, but stops when his dad, a police officer, demands over the loudspeaker of the police car to tell that he loves him, with all the teenagers looking at them), high school dilemmas (after embarrassing himself, Miles walks pass other students on the hallway, hoping they didn’t notice it, but as everyone stares at him, a comic-book text shows up above his head, saying: “They all know!”), or just plain clever sight gags (while escaping from the laboratory, Spider-Miles throws a bagel at a villain scientist, and as it hits his head, the text panel briefly says: “Bagel”). In a neat metafilm touch, each new Spider-superhero from another dimension is introduced with the same narration as the first one (“All right, let’s do this one last time. My name is...”), and the last three of them (Spider-Ham, Peni Parker, Spider-Man Noir) are even animated differently, the classic animation or even anime-style, to emphasize how they are worlds apart, literally. Said last three Spider-superhero variations are the least developed character-wise, which comes off as a flaw, whereas the finale is kind of rushed and lacks more philosophical points, yet "Into the Spider-Verse" compensates this through a whole bunch of inspired ideas and contemplations about the randomness of opportunities in life. Rarely will you get so much fun out of modern big budget movies today: Spider-Man to the sixth power.

Grade:+++

Magnolia

Magnolia; drama, USA, 1999; D: Paul Thomas Anderson, S: Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Tom Cruise, William H. Macy, Julianne Moore, Jeremy Blackman, Melinda Dillon, Luis Guzman, Jason Robards, Melora Walters, Felicity Huffman

Gator is the host of a TV show of a quiz for kids. He finds out he is dying from cancer and wants to reconcile with his estranged daughter, Claudia, but she rejects him, accusing him of molesting her... Police officer Jim arrives at Claudia's apartment due to complaints of neighbors for too loud noise. Jim and Claudia begin dating, but she leaves him because she is secretly taking drugs... The 12-year old Stanley helps his team score points at the TV quiz, but when he urinates in his underwear, he refuses to participate just as they were about to win... Earl is dying from cancer, bedridden, but asks his nurse to contact his estranged son Frank, a motivational speaker on how to seduce women. Frank reluctantly arrives to talk with Earl... Former quiz kid, the now grown up Donnie, wants to steal the money from the safe of his boss... During the night, it starts raining frogs, causing disbelief among people.

The only Paul Thomas Anderson film that Roger Ebert included in his list of Great Movies, "Magnolia" is an exhausting, but extremely ambitious hyper-ensemble drama with some 30 characters that juggles with numerous themes and works on several levels, of which Anderson himself said that it is his "best film, for better or worse". It is overburdened and excessive at times, yet the director has such a tight grip on everything that it all aligns into a meaningful point at the end, when all these random subplots are revealed to be connected in one way or another. The greatest performance was achieved by the excellent Jason Robards in his last role as the dying Earl, who fully acknowledges his mistakes and regrets them, wishing that he had a way to correct them. The whole movie is filled with unusual details, ideas, solutions and inovations: the opening presents two mysteries (a scuba diver is found on a tree because he died in a lake, was picked up by a firefighter plane which dumped the water over a fire in a forest; a man jumps from a building to commit suicide, but just as he was falling down, he was shot through a window by accident, so the police arrest the woman with the gun for murder), playing with the concept of extreme coincidences in the law of large numbers. 

In one neat little sequence, a little kid raps the answer of the murder case to the police officer Jim, who doesn't even register it, while in another it presents something you will probably never see in any other film before this one, the one where officer Jim catches Donnie who stole money from the safe of his boss, they both agree it was a stupid idea, and then Jim allows Donnie to return the money and simply lets him go, because he understands him. In another, Gator laments that his estranged daughter Claudia accuses him of molesting her when she was a kid, and when his wife Rose asks him if this is true, he looks at her and says "I don't remember", in a moment that is tragic, bizarre and funny at the same time. Not all moments work, though. For instance, Tom Cruise's character of Frank, a motivational speaker who advises crowds of men how to seduce women, is the weakest link and misguided, since it is unclear why anybody would listen to such an obscure figure at all; whereas it is unconvincing that Linda (Julianne Moore), a woman who married the rich Earl only to get his money, would all of a sudden realize she loves him on his deathbed, since this tenderness between them is never shown in the film. "Magnolia" is something of a Pyrrhic victory: it did everything right, but its overambitious narrative reached a breaking point in the 3 hour long running time, causing Anderson to reach his limit and focus on smaller, different kind of stories for a change, since this format practically self-destructed itself as soon as it was finished.

Grade:+++

Leaving Las Vegas

Leaving Las Vegas; drama, USA, 1995, D: Mike Figgis, S: Nicolas Cage, Elisabeth Shue, Julian Sands, Richard Lewis, Valeria Golino  

Ben, a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter struggling with alcoholism and misery ever since his wife left him, is fired by the film studio. Using their compensation money, he burns all his belongings in his home and heads off to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. He meets prostitute Sera who becomes his girlfriend and allows him to stay at her place. When he has sex with another prostitute, Sera leaves him. She is assaulted by three men in an apartment. Sera finds Ben bedridden in a hotel, who dies from alcohol poisoning.  

“Leaving Las Vegas” is a ‘rough’ and arbitrary, but also honest depiction of addiction (in this case, alcoholism), soulmates and fatalism, but in a way also a surprising depiction of a man with a mindset of just giving up on everything with utter calm. The two protagonists—alcoholic Ben and prostitute Sera—carry the entire film, and are played phenomenally by Nicolas Cage and Elisabeth Shue, who are so good the viewers forgive the movie’s flaws and omissions on all other fronts. For instance, the whole story is episodic and chaotic, without a clear three act structure; the supporting character of pimp Yuri, who disappears after half an hour, anyway, is unnecessary; some technical problems bother (every slow motion scene is an error since it is “foggy” and clumsy); whereas Mike Figgis just films the movie in a straightforward manner. And yet, the core relationship between Ben and Sera is emotionally satisfying and engaging, even though it is a fairytale in some aspects (the typical cliche of the “prostitute with the heart of gold”). It is never clear why Sera is attracted or fascinated by Ben, her client, to start a relationship with him and allow him to stay at her place. Ben is depicted as using alcohol as a form of escapism from the bleak reality, as the only hedonism he can still rely on—among others, he drinks a bottle even underwater (!) in a swimming pool, while Sera pours bourbon over her breasts to incite him to lick-drink it from them. One gets overall what director Figgis and screenwriter John O'Brien wanted to say—two outcasts somehow managed to find comfort in each other, by signing an informal contract that they will accept each other for all their flaws and imperfections, because they at least have a soul—and thus one could apply this rule to the movie as a whole, as well.

Grade:++

Foxcatcher

Foxcatcher; psychological drama / art-film, USA, 2014, D: Bennett Miller, S: Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Carell, Sienna Miller, Vanessa Redgrave

In ‘87, wrestling champion Mark Schultz is contacted by millionaire John du Pont who offers him accommodation on his premises in Pennsylvania and finance if Mark agrees to assemble a wrestling team, with du Pont serving as the coach. Mark brings his brother Dave on board, who was initially reluctant since he has a family already. Their team is called “Foxcatcher” and experiences both succes and failure. When du Pont’s mother dies, he banishes her horses because he hates them. Inexplicably, in ‘96 du Pont one day shoots and kills Dave at his back yard. Du Ponte is later arrested and sentenced to prison for murder.  

“Foxcatcher” by director Bennett Miller is a meandering reconstruction of the John du Pont criminal case, and the phenomenon of the American random shooting and decadence of the rich in one, aggravated by its hermetic, almost autistic filmmaking style. Its main virtues are its three excellent actors, all cast against type, which is especially noteworthy for comedian Steve Carell who plays du Pont without a single shred of humor (except maybe in the macabre scene where he admits to finding out his mom paid a boy to be his friend during his childhood), but Channing Tatum is also incredible as Mark, lost in trying to figure out why du Pont is financing his wrestling team. However, it is difficult not to compare “Foxcatcher” with a similar film, Schroeder’s superior “Reversal of Fortune”, which managed to be consistently interesting, concise, creative and purposeful, as well as being able to deliver a full character portrait of its anti-hero, something which is (sometimes) lacking in Miller’s film. Sometimes fascinating, sometimes boring, “Foxcatcher” is all build-up to the main incident at the end, but when it finally happens, it feels strangely unsatisfactory and detached: it simply lacks a motive or a reason for why he did what he did in the finale. Since even the events we are watching may be irrelevant to that incident, it is disorienting as to what plays a role and to what degree. Alas, the film seems incomplete in the finale. 

Grade:++

Top Gun: Maverick

Top Gun: Maverick; action drama, USA, 2022, D: Joseph Kosinski, S: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Monica Barbaro, Lewis Pullman, Bashir Salahudin, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer

Fighter jet pilot Captain Pete "Maverick" is summoned to be the instructor of a dozen Top Gun pilots because the US is faced with an extreme challenge: an unnamed rogue state is building an underground uranium enrichment facility situated under a crater-like valley, surrounded by mountains with anti-aircraft guns on top of them. Maverick tries to renew his relationship with bartender girl Penny, but his main problem lies in trying to sabotage the career of pilot "Rooster" Bradshaw, since Maverick feels guilt for the death of Bradshaw's father "Goose", and thus tries to dissuade "Rooster" from this suicide mission. Leading the successful squadron attack on the uranium facility, Maverick's fighter jet is shot down, but Rooster returns and they board the enemy plane and fly back to the US Army aircraft carrier.

Made a whopping 36 years after its original, sequel "Top Gun: Maverick" is indeed a brilliant tactical victory—looking at it from the technical perspective—but its strategic value is debatable—since the movie does not offer that much looking at it from the creative or artistic perspective. Tom Cruise is surprisingly good while repeating his role as Pete "Maverick", and together with the 80s nostalgia and good 'old school' filmmaking gives the movie a dose of refreshing feel, whereas the detailed aircraft stunts, manoeuvres and battle sequences—which mostly try to avoid CGI and instead focus on real aircraft—are its main virtues. The storyline is stymied by a lack of truly versatile characters, as well as some naive solutions (just like in the 1st film, the identity of the enemy is never mentioned, and thus it is unknown whom the protagonists are fighting against). The only more mature moment is when Admiral Cain warns Maverick ("The future is coming, and you're not in it!"), which hints at a more somber tone about transience, yet in everything else, the movie is afraid to go to more unpleasant territory, and instead just gives a typically mainstream, cozy and "safe" entertainment, as expected. While this lack of a true risk is indeed too predictable and lame, as opposed to its hero Maverick who is not afraid to risk everything, "Top Gun: Maverick" is still a well made sequel, and has just enough charm to keep the viewers' interest.

Grdae:++