Capsule Reviews: Satoshi Kon and Silver Lake

Millennium Actress [Satoshi Kon, 2001]

Thank you, Shout Factory, for bringing this out in theaters! This is one of my very favorite films, and the new dub is pretty solid. At some point, I should really do a proper review of this film, which is a first-order masterpiece. Before I die, I’d like to have one more chance to see this on the big screen.

As you might guess, I saw this back in September, and one of the benefits of seeing Millennium Actress on the big screen is that the kinetic effect of the film is simply overwhelming. Kon was a master at keeping things moving and conducting the movements of his viewers’ gazes, even as he conducts his motifs like a symphony of images and sounds and dialogue. The one thing (only one!) that did not hold up as well on the big screen was the computer-generated stars at the film’s finale. They feel flimsy and thin. In a film that is a masterpiece of animation of boundless imagination and creativity, it’s a component that feels like a cost-saving measure, which is a shame. That said, it is a masterpiece, and one of the Great films.☕︎

Tokyo Godfathers [Satoshi Kon, 2003]

We saw this in March with the GKIDS dub, and it was amazing. Like Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers demonstrates Kon’s mastery of movement. Here, it’s less the general movement of the scenes and more the fluidity of people and objects within them. The exaggeration of objects and people works for both comic and dramatic effect, heightening the emotional content of scenes while functioning as a bit of a release. The final chase is incredible, and the juggling of multiple plot points is awe-inspiring. This time around, I was also struck by the incredible soundtrack. We lost Kon way, way too soon.☕︎

Under the Silver Lake [David Robert Mitchell, 2018]

My most immediate impression of this bewildering film is that it is one of the best adaptations of Thomas Pynchon not based on something actually written by Pynchon. Andrew Garfield is surprisingly well-cast as a feckless millennial (but I repeat myself), and the only things that seem to be able to get him out of bed are sex, games, movies, and underground comics (and sometimes those very same interests keep him in bed). He develops an obsession with a woman in his apartment complex that leads him on an odyssey through the Silver Lake neighborhood in Los Angeles suffused with strange synchronicities and encounters with the various eccentrics and hipsters who dwell therein.

I enjoyed this film more than I enjoyed Inherent Vice, P. T. Anderson’s worthy adaptation of a Pynchon novel I haven’t read, maybe because Mitchell’s movie is just a bit more strange; maybe, too, because I vibed more with its generational specificity. It’s an incredibly cynical film, and it feels apocalyptic in multiple senses of the word. In that way, it evokes other great rambling films in which the bizarro contours of the cities become characters in themselves. I’m thinking about Alex Cox’s Repo Man, the Coens’ Big Lebowski, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., or maybe Robert Altman’s Short Cuts; Scorsese’s After Hours also springs to mind, even though it’s a NYC movie. Before watching Mitchell’s movie, I had no idea that there even was a Silver Lake neighborhood in L.A., but it’s the kind of movie that crystallizes in my mind a conviction that I now know it in the same way that people who watch Woody Allen movies can feel like they know the Upper West Side, even if they’ve never set foot east of the Mississippi.

Between Under the Silver Lake and It Follows, I feel like Mitchell is already a major voice, but he hasn’t quite yet delivered his masterpiece. But I’m excited to see what he does next.☕︎

Musings inspired by the May/June ’11 issue of Film Comment: thoughts on Woody Allen, Francis Lawrence, and genuine populism in film criticism

The new issue of Film Comment is out; though it hasn’t yet arrived in my mailbox, some of the goodies are available online.  I’d like to comment on three of the articles.  First and foremost, David Bordwell contributes an article on how the divide between ivory tower intellectuals (my term, not his) and amateur film buffs (ditto) is bridged by his own innovative work.  My summary of his thoughts may cast him in a bit more of an egocentric role than his own words, but given how much I esteem his work, I won’t begrudge the man a little egocentricity.  He’s earned it.  On a basic level, it seems to me that his argument is thus: there needn’t be a sharp, hostile divide between highly theoretical analysis and less analytical celebrations.  He ends the article by citing the Web as a place where that divide can be bridged constructively:

We have liftoff!

For my first post on this blog, I thought it would be prudent to create a set of links to articles I’ve already written for Playtime on topics relating in some way to religion.  Sort of a house cleaning thing.  I’ve touched on religious topics over there already, and I expect I will again in the future.  Not all of these are even explicitly relevant to Christianity, but they provide some illumination of my continuing evolution as a critical writer, providing some context for what is to come.  Be forewarned: some of these articles make liberal use of salty language.

Hey — nobody’s perfect.  And I ain’t nobody.