So we got a new DVD in the mail from Amazon yesterday: the entire first season of The Muppet Show, over ten hours of goodness. Said purchase was inspired by repeated watchings by my kids of that Muppet Show sketch that’s been making the rounds recently, Mahna Mahna. (Thanks, Jaq!)

We watched the show’s first episode after dinner last night, and the kids (and me too) were delighted to discover that Mahna Mahna doesn’t reflect some evolved, perfected, matured Muppet zen, the sort of thing they learned to do over time, but is the type of inspired lunacy they began with. And it’s even more fun in DVD quality. The guest star was dancer Juliet Prowse, who did a delightfully silly number with green vaguely deer-shaped creatures to, of all things, Scott Joplin’s The Easy Winners.

We’re looking forward to the next episode.

The problem with doing moving reviews is that I’m not a movie buff. This is especially a problem when I like a movie. If I dislike a movie, I can always find lots of reasons. But if I liked it, all I can say is whether I liked the movie or not, and mention a few bits that were good. I don’t know what it is that makes a movie great instead of just good, or good instead of adequate. I don’t know the terminology or the techniques they use.

Now, I loved Finding Nemo. I see only a few movies a year, and I’m quite satisfied that Finding Nemo is one of them. But as I said, I rate it below Monster’s Inc. and the Toy Story movies. Why? I dunno. If pressed, I probably would have said something about the open ocean not having a lot of scenery, that is, it all tends to look the same. And in my memory, the movie seems kind of slow–which is ridiculous, because it sure didn’t feel like that when I was watching it.

And now Ian Hamet has come along and said the things I would probably have said if I had known then what I know now, and if I knew what was I talking about. I can sum it up in one word: pacing. Or two words: comic timing. In Monsters Inc. and the Toy Story flicks, the timing is perfect. In Finding Nemo, it’s off. And now that Ian’s pointed it out, I can think of bunches of examples (the scene with the whale, for example, dragged, especially the interiors).

And so they achieve most excellent goodness…but not greatness.

Thanks, Ian!

In his lesser known story
Smith of Wooton Major, J.R.R. Tolkien
has much to say about the land of Faerie, much that’s been mostly
forgotten by modern purveyors of fantasy. Faerie is, of course, the land
of the Fair Folk, the Fairies, a dangerous breed about as unlike
Tinkerbelle as it is possible to be. Faerie lies “beyond the fields we
know” as Lord Dunsany said in
The King of Elfland’s Daughter; a man might wander all his
days the wild world over and never enter its halls, or he might find it
in the forest over the hill.

The essence of Faerie is that it is not for mortal men, though mortals
might stray there. It is a perilous realm, where man or woman might
meet their death, or find their heart’s desire never to find it again.
It has its rules, but they are not for mortals to know; and often they
change capriciously from place to place and from person to person. It is
a place where almost anything can happen and in which few things can be
explained–a place of high fantasy.

Ironically, few fantasy authors have spent much time there. This is
largely Tolkien’s own fault; he was a painstaking systematizer, and
The Lord of the Rings consequently has little of Faerie in it.
(The Blessed Realm of Valinor, the land of the Valar, has a stronger
flavor of Faerie, in that mortals are forbidden to enter it, but even
Valinor is too well mapped and understood to be truly a part of the
Perilous Realm.) Tolkien’s followers have written many books ostensibly
set in Faerie and featuring such luminaries as Oberon and Titania and the
Puck, but even this is no guarantee of success. Faerie has best been
captured, in my reading, by George MacDonald and
Lord Dunsany. H.P. Lovecraft
knew something of its darker
corners, and Neil Gaiman might well be a changeling.

I’ve often written about my notions of the Big Story and the Small Story.
It’s the nature of Faerie that stories about that realm are necessarily
Small Stories, concerned with the fate of individuals rather than the
fate of worlds. And this is a good thing, for individuals are as varied
as snowflakes, whereas systematized fantasy worlds are driven by the
demands of narrative causality into a dreadful sameness.

Over at Banana Oil, Ian Hamet has
recently begun a series of essays about his favorite film makers–the
ones he considers to be absolutely top-tier. And the first essay in the
series concerns Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao (or Hayao Miyazaki, as
he more usually called here in the West). Now, I know about as much
about Japanese animation as you can fit in a thimble without removing
your finger; I figure reading Ian’s essay just about doubled my knowledge
of the subject. But I was intrigued: here’s a maker of cartoons, for
goodness sake, and Ian ranks him as one of the greatest film makers in
history. I can’t even dismiss Ian as an anime bigot, because (IIRC)
Miyazaki is the only animator on the list.

It so happens that Miyazaki’s latest film, Spirited Away,
just won an Academy Award over Lilo and Stitch (a movie I
love); that Spirited Away was seen in this country largely due
to the efforts of John Lasseter, the genius behind
Toy Story and Monsters, Inc. and a man whom I
greatly respect as a storyteller; and that Spirited Away has
just been released on DVD.

As I say, I was intrigued; and so last week I went out and got a copy.
And last night, after the kids were in bed, I slipped it into the DVD
player, and pressed “play”, and…stepped into Faerie.

It’s a Japanese-flavored Faerie, mind you, with Japanese names and Japanese
architecture, and Japanese spirits, but Faerie nonetheless. And it’s a
stunningly beautiful place.

The story is, in one sense, an old one. A young woman’s beloved is
captured by the Queen of Faerie; she steals him back at great risk to
herself, defeating the Queen of Faerie in the process. In Miyazaki’s
vision this tale is transformed. The young woman becomes a spoiled,
petulant young girl; the beloved becomes the girl’s parents; and the
Queen of Faerie is a witch who runs a bathhouse where the gods of Japan
come to be refreshed. The girl enters Faerie in the usual way: by
accident. She and her parents are driving to their new home–

I must digress for a moment. The movie is set in Japan. The food is
Japanese; the signs are in Japanese; the cars drive on the left side of
the road. How come the girl and her parents look caucasian? But anyway–

She and her parents are driving to their new home, and take a wrong turn
down a dirt road. They come to a high wall pierced by a long dark tunnel;
the tunnel entrance is guarded by a stone idol. Despite the girl’s
misgivings, they walk through the tunnel and into another place, and
therein hangs the tale. I could go on, but it wouldn’t avail me
anything–much of the allure and the delight of the film lie in details that are
wholly unexplained.

To say that I’m impressed by Spirited Away would be an
understatement. Most animated features (including Pixar’s excellent
films) are children’s stories; by comparison, Spirited Away
has the stuff of a full-fledged novel; it’s kid stuff only in that the
main character is a young girl, and the movie contains no sex to speak of.
Oh, and it’s about courage, fortitude, love, and personal integrity,
instead of the more “adult” themes of cynicism, disillusionment, and
despair.

I really can’t do this film justice. I’m no film buff, nor am I a
student of Japanese animation; and any attempt I’d make to describe the
beauty of the background paintings would be doomed to failure. You’d
have to watch it for yourself.

So go find a copy and watch it. I’m looking forward to seeing it again,
and I dearly wish I’d seen it in the theater. And I’ll definitely be
looking for other Miyazaki titles.

Over at Banana Oil, Ian says
that he’s shocked, simply shocked, that I’d never before seen The
Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and that I have to see
Once Upon A Time In The West when it comes out on DVD. It’s
another Sergio Leone spaghetti western, and it has an interesting
cast–Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, Charles Bronson, Keenan Wynn, and also Jack
Elam, who I’ve only ever seen before as the sidekick in the James Garner
movies Support Your Local Sheriff (outstanding) and
Support Your Local Gunfighter (eh…so so.). So you know I’m
curious.

And of course, Ian was right about A Town Like Alice, only he
doesn’t know that I think so because I haven’t reviewed it yet. I’ll get
to it sometime this week, probably.

Regarding Charles Bronson…I just had occasion to watch
The Great Escape, another classic movie I’d not previously gotten
around to, and while there was considerable stuff to like about it, I was
most impressed with Bronson. He plays a Frenchman named Danny who
escaped to England at the beginning of the war and enlisted in the RAF.
In the flick he’s a “tunnel king”, that is, he’s in charge of building
the tunnel they’ll use to escape. It’s a role almost entirely unlike his
usual shtick, and if I hadn’t seen his name in the credits and been
looking for him, I’d never have recognized him.

I suppose Ian’s going to be shocked again, now.

Last night was movie night at our house. My friend Dave came over
to watch “The Great Race”, one of my favorite movies of all time, which
despite being a movie buff he had somehow never seen. It’s only been on
TV every year or so for the last couple of decades.

We got a VHS copy of “The Great Race” many years ago, which I watched
occasionally; and then when our kids came along they took to it
immediately. (Little Dave used to be Professor Fate when he went to bed,
with Jane playing the role of Max. Later, when James was older, he
got to be Little Professor Fate.) They still watch it occasionally,
and I’ve certainly seen parts of it dozens of times. But it’s recently
come out on DVD, and last night was the first time I watched the DVD all
of the way through.

If anyone tells you that pan-and-scan doesn’t make a different, they are
lying. The DVD was in the wide-screen letter box format–and the movie
looks entirely different. Scenes that used to consist of alternating
talking heads are now one long shot. Motions and gags that used to be
cut out of the picture are now visible. Of course, on our 24″ TV some bits
of physical humor are almost too small to be seen. Ah, well.

Lilo and Stitch came out on DVD last week, and when I got home
from work on Friday we all (all five of us) sat down to watch it. ‘Twas
wonderful, I enjoyed it just as much as I did in the theater; I think
it’s the best thing Disney has done in years (the Pixar films not
included).

If you’ve not seen it, Lilo and Stitch is the story of
Stitch, an alien creature genetically engineered to be incredibly
smart, amazingly destructive, and effectively indestructible. He’s
exiled by the Galactic Council, but escapes, ending up crashlanding on
the island of Kuaui. Here he meets Lilo, a little girl who is also
amazingly destructive, though in her case it’s all down to nurture
rather than nature. Lilo’s parents died in a car crash when she was
small, leaving her in the care of her older sister Nani. Nani means
well, but things are not going at all well when Stitch comes into
their lives, and with his destructive tendencies, they only become
worse. Lilo and Stitch together wreak more havoc (almost all of it
unintentional) than either do apart–they make a good team.

But here’s the point I really like. Stitch is supposed to be smart–and
he is. He soon realizes that’s there’s no future in being destructive.
He’s all alone; there are no others like him. If he wants to belong
somewhere, his best bet is to make things work with Nani and Lilo, and
eventually he does. This is a movie about family, and especially about
making a broken, battered family work.

On top of that the movie is just a lot of fun. The opening hula
sequence, featuring Pudge the fish and a peanut butter sandwich, is
simply beautiful; I bought a copy of the soundtrack just for the song
that accompanies it. Then there’s the scene where Stitch destroys
San Francisco; and the long sequence where Lilo, in an attempt to turn
Stitch into a model citizen, tries to teach him to behave like Elvis
Presley (it ends on the beach with a brief, though very understated,
tribute to Frankenstein). And how can you not like a social worker
who says things like, “So far you have been adrift in the sheltered
harbor of my patience.”

Anyway, two thumbs up here (both of mine, that is). If you’ve not
seen it, and even if you don’t have kids, buy it or rent it and
enjoy.

I took Dave to see Harry
Potter and the Chamber of Secrets this afternoon, and was not
disappointed. The movie is as faithful to
J.K. Rowling’s
novel as the first one was, and the special effects were even better.
The spiders alone…well, without giving anything away, I wouldn’t be
at all surprised if Dave has nightmares. The whole thing was well worth
the money, and I’ll gladly pay for the DVD when it becomes available.

That said, the movie has the same flaws as its predecessor, only more so.
There’s too much crammed into it to really do most of the scenes justice.
Kenneth Branagh is outstanding as Gilderoy Lockhart, the Defense Against
the Dark Arts professor, but even he isn’t given quite enough screen time
to do the character justice. Must less time is given to developing the
characters of the principles, Harry, Ron, and
Hermione; they simply have too much to do to waste time being themselves.
The dialog suffers correspondingly. Some of the minor characters seemed
rather wooden as well. Draco Malfoy wasn’t nearly as satisfyingly
poisonous as in the first movie, and Moaning Myrtle could have said her
lines better as well.

But, when all is said and done, I’m satisfied. I think of it as a series
of illustrations for the book, and at that it succeeds very well.

I’ll pick just one nit: mythologically speaking, basilisks are lizards, not
snakes. But I can’t blame the folks who made the movie for that.

The Seven Samuria is a good flick. Dave Jaffe brought it over on
Friday night, and we watched it and ate popcorn and (it’s a loooong show)
I went to bed rather later than I usually do. I’m afraid I’m not enough
of a film buff to understand why it’s considered such a classic, though
I will say that Kurosawa certainly understood how to let the images tell
the story. The dialog is kept to a minimum, and used pretty much only to
impart information that couldn’t be gotten across visually. The acting
was good, too, with the exception of the early scene where the villagers
are falling all over themselves emotionally because the bandits are
coming. That was a little too far over the top, a little too pathetic
for words.

If you’ve never seen The Seven Samurai, as I hadn’t, a plot
summary would be helpful.

You see, there’s this small community that’s being preyed upon by
bandits. The bandits are just waiting for the harvest before they make
another attack; until harvest, the community won’t have anything worth
stealing. The community sends out one of their number, a
positive-thinking if slightly odd fellow, to go find some warriors to
protect them from the bandits. He finds a troupe of warriors and brings
them back home, only to find out that they are in fact a troupe of
travelling circus performers. Still, with luck and a little ingenuity,
they manage to drive off the bandits for good, and all is well.

Oh, wait…that’s not The Seven Samurai, it’s A Bug’s Life.
The Seven Samurai is somewhat different–the village sends out
several men who manage to enlist one samurai, who enlists the others
needed, and the successful battle owes everything to the skill of the
samurai and little to any particular peasant. There’s no “Flick the Ant”
in this movie. But there’s a distinct family resemblance.

And I guess that just goes to show how influential Kurosawa is.

As everyone with
children already knows, Disney has just released Beauty and the
Beast on DVD. My kids had never seen it, and as it truly was the
great musical (animated or otherwise) of its day Jane nabbed a copy the
next time she visited Costco. We watched it over a couple of nights,
breaking just after the stunning “Be Our Guest” sequence, and a good time
was had by all. It was better than I remembered, and actually deserves
most of the hoopla.

But then I got to thinking–it’s a chronic problem I have–that the story
as presented simply doesn’t make sense. I’ll grant you the basic
premise: the prince is an arrogant, inhospitable, bad-tempered swine; he
refuses shelter to an ugly old woman; the woman turns out to be a
beautiful enchantress and casts a spell on him, making his poor character
manifest to all. I’ll even buy the time limit on breaking the spell,
though it serves no real purpose but to add suspense.

So we’re expected to believe that a prince–a son of the King
of France–is turned into a loathsome beast (the members of his
household being turned into useful household objects) and nobody in the
wider world notices? OK, so the castle’s enchantment includes a spell of
forgetting on the surrounding countryside…you’d still think his mother
the Queen would notice when he didn’t come home for Christmas. A Prince
of the Blood Royal would be one of the leading citizens of France, and
his disappearance would leave an unmistakeable chasm in the political
landscape.

Well…perhaps this is France way back in the Dark Ages. The prince’s
father isn’t really the King of France; he’s just a minor king of a small
region. Well and good–but the setting is clearly post-Renaissance. We
can tell that from the vast quantities of printed books alone, if the
architecture of the Beast’s castle wasn’t a dead giveaway. And then,
Belle’s father’s inventions bring it to the verge of the industrial
revolution. So this isn’t a tale of the Dark Ages; this is a tale of the
days when France was already a major European power.

After that, the incongruities keep piling up.

This is France; how come the only ones with French accents are Lumiere
and his girlfriend the feather duster?

And what are Cogsworth and Mrs. Potts doing in the prince’s
service? Unlike anyone else in the movie they are clearly English in name
as well as accent. England was, more often than not, the enemy in this
period of history.

Where’s the rest of the prince’s household–his secretary, his courtiers,
his sycophants and hangers-on, and, for that matter, where are his
guards?

When the ugly witch came, what was the prince doing answering his own
door? He had servants for that.

Where does all the food come from? Are the villagers still making
deliveries? If so, they aren’t admitting it.

Once the spell is broken, what is the prince going to use for candlesticks,
teapots, wardrobes, clocks, and feather dusters?

Belle’s father strays into the castle environs by accident on his way to
the Fair. How come nobody else from the village was going?

Belle visits the village bookseller. He’s got a sizeable shop with lots
of books. Who buys them? It’s a very small town; Belle is considered
unusual because she’s a woman who reads; the men seem to spend all their
time in the tavern swilling beer with Gaston. How come the bookseller
hasn’t gone out of business?

And then consider Gaston, the mighty hunter, he who uses antlers in all
of his decorating–where on earth is he finding the deer? We’re well
into the period in history where any deer in France would be dwelling in
the Royal Woods, protected by the Royal Gamekeepers, to be hunted only by
the Royal Monarch and his friends and family. Gaston is awfully
well-respected in the village for a poacher, especially as the prominent
display of antlers all over the tavern might be enough to bring the
King’s wrath down on the entire town.

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere. Clearly the Beast–the Prince that
was–is out of favor with his father the King. He’s been banished to a
castle in a remote part of France where he can dwell in moderate comfort
with a minimum of staff. The greater part of French society has
endeavoured to forget him entirely; consequently, his rebirth as a Beast
goes unremarked. The local villagers notice, of course, and being canny
peasants immediately determine to make the best of it. With the Beast in
seclusion, there’s nothing to prevent them from taking to themselves as
many of the local Royal perquisites as they can grab, the King’s Deer
chief among them.

The result is peace and prosperity–wealth, even–for
the village. This is evident from the hustle and bustle in the opening
scenes of the movie, but even more so from the lack of children. I don’t
recall seeing a single person under marriageable age in the entire flick
except for Mrs. Potts’ kid Chip. And of course it’s well known that
family size is correlated with wealth.

So the villagers are all perfectly familiar with the terms of the
enchantment. So no wonder they call Belle’s father crazy when he talks
about the Beast–Belle and her father are newcomers, and are outside the
Conspiracy of Silence that protects the village’s prosperity.

This in turn explains Gaston’s determination to marry a girl who clearly
detests him–she’s the only young woman in the village who might see
beyond the Beast’s exterior and so break the spell. Once married, she’s
no longer a candidate (another incongruity! This is France, after all).
And then, when it becomes clear that the secret is out, Gaston and the
villagers seek to solve the problem by killing the Beast once and for all.

It doesn’t work, of course; Gaston falls to his death, the other
villagers are driven away by the Useful Household Items, Belle announces
her love, and the Beast changes back into a (not particularly
handsome–didja see the size of his nose?) Prince. Belle weds the
Prince, and they live happily ever after.

By themselves, in a castle in a remote part of France, forbidden ever to
return to Paris. It’s a good thing Belle likes to read, that’s all I can
say.

Friday night my friend Dave came over, bearing Akira Kurosawa
DVDs. We settled down to an evening of fresh-baked home-made chocolate
chip cookies and Ran, Kurosawa’s version of Shakespeare’s King
Lear. Dave is a film buff, and Kurosawa’s pretty much his favorite
director.

I’ve never been fond of the story of King Lear; the old King is a foolish
man, and a bad judge of character. It’s always seemed to me that he got
what was coming to him (not that his two older daughters were great
prizes either). But I have to say, the story makes a lot more sense in
Japanese. Kurosawa transforms it into the story of the Great Lord, an
elderly nobleman who has conquered a great domain for himself,
slaughtering all those who opposed him.

The Great Lord has three sons, Taro, Jiro,
and Saburo, and in his great age he announces (at a party) that he is
handing day-to-day command over to his oldest son Taro; and that each of
his sons will be given command of a castle. He will live with each of
them in turn through the year.

His youngest son, Saburo, tells him that he’s acting like a senile old
fool to trust his children so. And this is where moving the story to
Japan works for me: by challenging his father at a party, before guests,
Saburo (who is only telling the truth, after all) has caused his father
to lose face. The Great Lord gives his son the chance to recant, but
when Saburo remains obdurate the Great Lord banishes him.

Is this a nice way for families to behave? No; but at least it makes
more sense to me.

And then there’s the Lady Kaede. I don’t believe she has any exact
equivalent in Shakespeare’s play; she’s the wife of Taro, and it so
happens, she’s the only survivor of a noble family wiped out by the Great
Lord. It’s as though Lady MacBeth was transplanted into King
Lear–but instead of being ambitious for her husband, she’s ambitious
for revenge. One can hardly blame her, but the portrayal is chilling.

So did I like it? Well enough, considering. It’s a tragedy, and I
usually don’t do tragedies; the tragic flaw usually strikes me as
avoidable stupidity, and I hate watching that. But I’m not sorry I saw
it.