Cinema at Home

ちえ(Chie)

M, my course mate in a Japanese course, is a big Miyazaki fan. He recommended Chie to me, a Gibly studio-associated production.

The style of drawing is not typically Miyazaki, and the reality setting, in spite of the appearances of 3 superpower cats, is far from the colorful and unconfined imaginary worlds that Miyazaki's works usually feature.

I watched it in French (M's DVD only provided 2 choices: French or Japanese) and managed to understand most of the story, but, inevitably, I must have missed some details that are only disclosed in dialogues . Some episodes and transitions remained unexplained to me, I am afraid.
I like the story which develops along with Chie's simple and everyday life, especially when she struggles to run a barbecue business in order to support herself and her lazy father, and when she acts her optimism when being faced with her parents' divorce. Yet, I don't quite understand another story line which introduces a family feud between 3 cats. Their presence is funny for sure, but I am not yet convinced that they are in any way essential to the narrative.


The Nightmare Before Christmas

I watched this film for one of my classes before Christmas.
K's brother loved the film as a tragedy. He told me that the story is about the fate that one can never be someone else.
What he said is interesting, I think. Does it mean that someone else is always closer to one's ideal self? Isn't it more difficult to just be oneself?
Or is one's own self always an inconvenient fact that s/he wants to avoid?


Ponyo

Ponyo is very much a Miyazaki film, presented in vibrant colors and structured by an incredible imagination.

I am not particularly fond of the story itself. What I have enjoyed most in Miyazaki films is the feeling of texture that he can accurately create: the textures of bubbles, jelly fish, ocean waves, and nature. I remember when Ponyo's goldfish siblings try to release their elder sister from a bubble that confines her, they gnawed at the bubble with their toothless mouths. The sound effect and the image work perfectly together that it creates a wonderful sensation of itchiness on the skin as if one's also experiencing thousands of gentle kisses.

Ponyo is such an energetic 4-year-old girl! She does not seem to stop running until she gets where she wants, a very typical Miyazaki character driven by her innocent and powerful determination.

Cinema at Home

K and I watched some films together to celebrate the end of the year.

I haven't been to the cinema much after I left York, and much less after busy everyday life and language barrier have inconvenienced my leisure life.

Well, language barrier is just an easy excuse. The main reason is probably that I have tried to avoid the feeling of disappointment that might inflict on me after unsatisfactory viewings.

It is rather a stupid reason somehow, as so many good stories are simply missed. Perhaps, there is no such a thing as 'bad' story, as I have often argued with K in the aspect of literature. The deciding factors to one's enjoyment are his/her preference and interpretive approach. Whatever story gives pleasure, whatever pleasure it is. More precisely displeasure is also a kind of experience, I would think.


The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon is a BBC documentary about Mitchell and Kenyon's business of filming their town people around a century ago when film was just a totally new idea to the world.
I heard about the discovery of the lost trove of M & K's film reels around 2 (?) years ago when I was still in the UK. The news came with a photo of the first-ever filmed official football match. The news was interesting, but seeing the documentary itself was even more fascinating. M & K's business was to propose to film people (mostly the working class) and invite them to pay to see themselves in the theatre.
This business idea fascinated me in that it played with the curiosity of the public about their own images and about this new invention in the world.

M&K seldom made stories (except some attempts), but the everyday-life images that it collected around the Edwardian period are themselves fascinating reflections of a foregone past.

I was amused and surprised.


Changeling

Director: Clint Eastwood

Changeling is an adaption of a real case in 1928 in Los Angeles. The story is saddening, but it was compelling with the dialogues nicely written and acting impressively carried out.

It was probably my first time to see and to remember Angelina Jolie in a film. It is a story about a mom's unending search for her son throughout her life and her fight against the corrupted and dysfunctional police system in the first half of the twentieth century in California. I think AJ's acting is great in general, especially when she is performing the role of Mrs Collins as a determined and clear-minded woman. There are moments, however, when I felt that the actress fails to convince me that she is as attached to her son as she should have been. She does not really show strong attachment to her son, for instance, no hug, kiss, or affectionate conversation is portrayed when Mrs Collins and Walter, her son, spend time together.
Or is it simply my misconception of familial attachment? Maybe it is precisely the reality that the emotional tie between family members is not usually visible and does not need to take the form of physical contact at all.

Frozen Britain

Source: BBC Photo

Recent reads

Jhumpa Lahiri
Interpreter of Maladies
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999.

I have spent the entire new year holiday struggling with a bad cold. Nothing much I could do except sneezing, coughing, blowing my nose and sleeping away the joyous time of celebration. In some moments that I was able to stay awake, I managed to finish reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies, which I had started reading about a month ago.

I always prefer short stories to fictions or novels as the moderate size of the former is more friendly to my attention which easily loses its power of concentration.

I do enjoy most of the stories in this collection. They do not feature dramatic moments that attempt to astound or impress readers. Instead, Lahiri narrates in a peaceful, quiet, and matter-of-fact style the pain, joy, struggle, failure and survival of Indian immigrants in England, United States, or back in the native country.

The sense of pain and loss that some characters suffer from remains powerful through the narrator's quiet and observatory tone of narration. It engages my thought as if the steady pace of the narrative is stroking my nerve gently and regularly till the end. The author does not try to hammer into readers anything that she writes, but it simply grips attention. I love some of the stories which end with unresolved loss and longing, a kind of incompleteness that stories of immigrants usually share. Some are presented through the viewpoints of children adding humor to or emphasizing the endured suffering. Some are about aspiration, self-delusion, and disillusion.

Of course, there is also a small number of some tuning the song of survival in the end. However, to be honest, I find them somehow unfitting to the collection, a collection of stories about how individuals struggle to fit into their new world. Positive and happy ending is what we need in reality, but sometimes I think a short story is at its best when it does not conclude the plight, and it is more effective when it continues to provoke thoughts rather than to soothe the sufferers.