IdyllopusPress Presents

Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” was one of this week’s choices from Netflix and it was great. Netflix gives it a rating for kids over 10 because of some scary moments. I sat to watch it with H.o.p., waited for the supposedly scary moments but there weren’t any that weren’t well-cushioned and were worked seamlessly into this beautiful fantasy. It’s been compared to “Alice in Wonderland” but it has far more in common with Japanese writers such as Haruki Murakami. Like a lightweight child’s version of Haruki.

The tale concerns a 10 year old girl whose family is moving. Uprooted from the familiar, she is apprehensive. On their way to the new neighborhood, she and her parents come upon what her father says must be an old abandoned theme park and via it our protagonist is transported into a surreal world where she is placed at risk of losing her identity, and in order to escape she must undergo a series of fantastic adventures circulating around a bath house where the spirits of things come at night to be refreshed. During the course of those adventures she does a good bit of growing up through the lengths to which she’ll go to help those she loves. In so doing she also ends up assisting a giant, tyrannical baby to progress outside its nursery, and helps tame the voracious appetite of No Face, a lonely monster that befriends her, becomes also tyrannical but is whittled back down to manageable size. And all somehow accomplished with very little judgment taking place on these “monsters”. Chihiro (the heroine) is too involved in her mission to judge. The monsters follow her along and attempt to thwart her from her tasks in their bid for her attention–and while in most films you would have the protagonist doing battle with these symbolic spirits, little Chihiro instead not only permits them to accompany her but treats them with compassion, simply not allowing them to interrupt her mission. In a Disneyesque fairy tale they would radically change aspect, but in “Sprited Away” these spirits are what they are and are just reformed to live in moderation, not allowed to take over the run of the bath house, and even some helpful qualities discovered along the way.

What a wonderful story for a child. And the animation is both breath-taking and as entertaining and amusing as any I’ve ever seen.

H.o.p. and I watched it twice through and he fell in love with it. He wants to keep it and I’ll buy him a copy, it’s an essential. Marty occasionally wandered through before going down to the studio and I said don’t watch, don’t watch, you have to see it from the beginning.

H.o.p. and I ended up discussing the film most of the day as he kept asking questions about it.

Earlier, I had been doing some reading of different books on Auschwitz, trying to decide which couple to at least pick up from the library. Only a movie as good as “Spirited Away” could cut through those horrors and restore a little light.

One of the books I’m interested in reading is “We Wept Without Tears: Testimonies of the Jewish Sonderkommando from Auschwitz” by Gideon Greif.

Speaking of the 50′s blacklist. Night before last we watched “The Producers” again, which stars Zero Mostel who was blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee back in 1955. I’d only seen “The Producers” once before, many years ago, and was glad when Marty picked it up earlier in the week. I remembered that the first time I’d watched it I was expecting to love it, didn’t, and I’d been wondering if I’d feel differently now.

It’s a film I want to love. The casting is remarkable. The acting is fearless, ferociously over the top. The plot is great. Everything is tuned to suck you right in the moment the film starts rolling, drag you relentless around the reel and leave you breathless and begging for more. What kills it for me is the style of cinematography. It was shot by Joseph Coffeey who doesn’t have a long list of credits, has only 3 films for which he’s listed as cinematographer and eight for which he was a camera operator. One of his credits for cinematographer is “Up the Down Staircase.” Again, “Up the Down Staircase” is a film I’ve not seen since I was a kid, but I remember it as having a successful moodiness to it. Then I notice that the last film he’s apparently worked on before “The Producers”, this time as camera operator, was Samuel Beckett’s “Film”, directed by Alan Schneider and starring Buster Keaton. I thought if I was a director and was doing “The Producers” this is exactly what I would want, a whiff of Beckett’s tragic-comedy in the film grain. And perhaps there’s something to it because I look up “Film” and find a 1969 article by Alan Schneider on what Beckett wanted in “Film” and initially they’d wanted Charlie Chaplin or Zero Mostel.

Seeing that “Up the Down Staircase” was black and white, as was “Film”, I rerun “The Producers” in my mind and wonder if I’d feel differently about the same movie if it was desaturated. Maybe not. There’s no mood to the cinematography and I can’t convince myself it’s just because Coffey was shooting with black-and-white in mind when he was doing color. The lights are too bright, sterile and even. The style of shooting effects watching a play, and you want that broadness here, room for Wilder and Mostel to have their way with the stage, up down and all over it, chewing up every morsel of real estate. But the camera needed to move with them. It needed to be involved, in the mess, following every swing as an unblinking participant rather than a polite member of the audience with ticket in hand. Wanted a Coen brothers kind of brutalness to it. That “The Producers”‘ cinematography comes off to me as 70s television sound stage spartan and uncreative, probably has more to do with Mel Brooks. It’s a style that worked great with “Blazing Saddles”; by then he was pulling back and making full use of the staging area as scene shaping story and performance, a part of the plot. Perhaps he was on his way there with “The Producers” but the style didn’t fit here and wasn’t radical enough to be useful anyway.

So I don’t like “The Producers.” It’s a film I want to love. Really want to love. The idea of two men making money off a sure flop, the musical “Springtime for Hitler”, is as bitterly insane as it gets. Dick Shawn as the beat-hippy actor playing Hitler is more an audacious mess than I remembered. The plot, even today, is gutsier than I think many imagine, and perhaps one reason the movie’s enjoyable for so many is the cinematography keeps the social commentary on a soft poke-pinch level for those who don’t want to get too scratched up swimming through the gutter, down through the grating to the dark sewers.

I’ve not seen “The Producers” with Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick and Uma Thurman and don’t really want to. If anyone wants to convince me otherwise, feel free to try.