297. Departures

Song - De Neus Umhoeg (Rowwen Heze)

Movie: Departures - Okuribito (Yojiro Takita, 2008) . 

Daigo (Masahiro Motoko) is a cellist who has spent most of his youth pursuing a musical career, knowing deep down that he is a merely moderate talent. When his orchestra in Tokyo disbands, he suggests to his wife Mika (Ryoko Hirosue) to move back to his hometown, where they can live in the house of his mother who died two years ago (his father abandoned them when he was a kid). Daigo hasn't been back for much longer, missing the funeral because "he was living abroad." That might be technically true, but we get the sense that he was abroad precisely so he would have a good excuse to not deal with the complexities, both practical and emotional, of his mother dying. He's now reached the point where he can't run away from such complexities, but actually being an adult who takes responsibility for difficult decisions is different than merely acting like one. It requires a leap that's hard to make, and Departures is above everything else a really perceptive film about how it feels to be stuck in the strange confusing place between becoming mature and genuinely feeling that your maturity is an authentic part of your self you can act on.  I loved the small moment when, in conversation with his wife, Daigo strokes his chin in weary contemplation and becomes briefly self-conscious about it, baffled that such a distinctly 'adult' gesture suddenly comes so naturally to him.

Departures depicts Daigo's transition through a story of morticians following traditional rituals to prepare the dead for their burial or cremation, a controversial topic in Japan where there is a social taboo on dealing with death. When Daigo responds to the job ad looking for someone to work with 'departures', he thinks he will be some sort of travel agent. He remains convinced of the same after a phone conversation with his boss-to-be, and only finds out that he will be actually working as an assistant mortician after being offered the position, when he has essentially no choice but to accept it. At first sight, this may look like an obvious plot contrivance the film is forced into, being unable to show someone voluntarily wanting to work as an embalmer. However, earlier in the film we've seen Daigo lie to his wife about the true cost of his cello, and he continues to lie to her once he gets the job. When she finds out and leaves him in disgust, his dinners amount to bread and butter, while the dishes keep piling up. In other words, Daigo is exactly the kind of guy who may end up in a career he doesn't want, simply because he'll prefer to let life happen rather than get uncomfortable addressing potential frictions and misunderstandings. 

You get no points for guessing if his new vocation makes Daigo more comfortable with the acts of adulthood and whether it eventually makes his marriage happier. Such predictability isn't a major issue when a film is so immensely likeable and absolutely spot on in presenting the dynamics between a kindly, yet stern boss, his new apprentice/colleague and their supportive office manager during the first days on a niche job. I do think that in trying to make death feel more 'normal' it overcorrects a little, making it seem a bit too clean and agreaable, but I rather liked the patience and attention to detail with which Takita depicts the encoffining rituals. In front of their grieving families, the bodies are shaved, washed, dressed and cleaned up for their 'final journey, following a strict order the 'nokanshi' never deviate from. The families watch the procedure while sitting on the floor, with each ceremony creating a personal connection to the departed by incorporating objects that were important to them during their life. Takita shows it all from the point of view of the bereaved; the camera remaims close to the ground, making sure to not 'hover' over the dead, at least until they are placed in the coffin. Everything is filmed to emphasise as much as possible the dignity of the custom and to show how it creates the sense that everyone's life, regardless of background, was important enough to warrant such reverent treatment. It's notable that the film begins with the procession of a trans person. The family quibbles about whether they are burying a man or a woman, and they try to convince Daigo and his boss (Tsutomo Yamazaki, a veteran of Akira Kurosawa's films) to take a side. They remain stonefaced throughout. They might have an opinion, but their job is to give the dead a worthy farewell, regardless of their thoughts about them. 

296. Con Air

Song - I'm Going Home (Ten Years After)

Movie: Con Air (Simon West, 1997)

One more reason for radical climate action! You can't make a movie like this when your house is burning down. Similarly to Titanic (released in the same year), Con Air is a testament to the excesses "kings of the world" can afford to indulge in. Do you wanna tie up a Corvette cabrio to the back of an airplane and fly it high up in the air? Go ahead, you are untouchable and unstoppable! Who cares if the Corvette gets destroyed (spectacularly!)? Another super car is right around the corner, and saving resources is for wussies. The climax in Las Vegas was scheduled to coincide with the actual destruction of a hotel, and you better believe everyone involved was more invested in maximising entertainment potential than in following circular demolition guidelines and material passports. They all did a fantastic job. 

Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is an Army Ranger who had to go to jail after accidentally killing a guy harassing his pregnant wife. After years of thoughtful letters, he is now finally on parole and just a plane away from meeting his daughter. He even brings along a cute stuffed rabbit, so you know that when the rapists, serial killers, white supremacists, black nationalists, drug dealers, and all the other remorseless criminals hijack 'con air', Cameron will be the hero to save the day. Cage of course gets many moments putting him in the spotlight as a cool, laidback (Southern) badass, with particular highlights being his drawling command to "put the bunny back in the box" and his response when the bunny is not put back in the box. But you don't cast actors like John Malkovich, Steve Buscemi, Ving Rhames, and Danny Trejo as his adversaries for no reason. They all go more over the top than Cage, and also get many crowd-pleasing scenes where they get to be the top dog and express it victorioulsy and appealingly. The movie is basically designed for people to constantly be yelling 'Hell yeah' without caring at all whether the acts set up to elicit such a reaction are heroic or completely despicable. 

By the time all the criminals start dancing around to Sweet Home Alabama, and this is presented as a karaoke session you'd wanna take part in, you'll have to accept that for Con Air distinctions between heroes and villains are solely relevant for entertainment purposes. Much of what, say, John Malkovich says and does here is completely unacceptable in polite society, but the film knows that it is ridiculously entertaining to watch Malkovich casually commit horrific violence and use colorfully degrading language, and it uses every tool at its disposal to ensure that the audience revels in it, uninhibited by any moral qualms. Some may call this nihilistic, and maybe it is, but I laughed very much when they threw Dave Chappele's dead body out of the plane and followed it falling down as it eventually splashes on the car of an ordinary older couple stuck in traffic in a mid-sized city. It's almost Looney Tunes, which is ultimately a more moral approach to depicting violence than whatever the Avengers films (and way too many other contemporary action blockbusters) were doing, developing convoluted backstories to justify way more death and destruction than Con Air can even dream of - it's how you get folks like Chris Evans to proudly photograph themselves signing actual bombs the US military will drop over some Middle East nation. 

295. Truly Madly Deeply

Song - Eternal Flame (The Bangles)

Movie: Truly Madly Deeply (Anthony Minghella, 1990)

"My feet will want to march to where you are sleeping, but I shall go on living." This line from a Pablo Neruda poem, quoted late in Truly Madly Deeply encapsulates it better than anything I could write about it. The film never pretends that Jamie's (Alan Rickman) ghost is a real feat of magic, or that Nina (Juliet Stevenson) believes it is. She quickly clocks that he is a figment of her imagination and though she decides to indulge her runaway brain, she also accepts it rationally as just another challenging part of her grieving process.  The scenes between Rickman and Stevenson are wonderful and express how much of a void his death left in her life, but it's no coincidence that the best and most romantic scene is a date with a new potential partner.

In the late 80's/early 90's a group of British actors and directors (seemingly all of them somehow, someway connected to Emma Thompson) emerged that influenced much of the British cinema I grew up with. They brought to their characters and movies a cheerful wit, grounded in reality that seemed to be an extension of their actual personalities. They carried themselves with a confidence that they could be at comfort in any context with any people, and that they welcomed this opportunity to interact with the world around them and be part of shaping it. And though their attitudes and roles were far removed from the cinema of council homes and mine workers, you still always got the sense that they didn't forget their working class roots and sensibilities; that even though they were sometimes walking in the same circles as the Tony Blairs and Richard Bransons, they could see through the bullshit, call it out, and keep at least one foot in the realm of the ordinary people. In other words, they were cool as shit people that folks like me (as my gushing peace on Da 5 Bloods showed, I have more sympathy for socialism than the average fan of American-led liberal globalisation, and more sympathy for American-led liberal globalisation than the average socialist) could see as a wonderful examples of how to be in the world. 

If you want to see many of these actors in one place you can watch Sense & Sensibility, Peter's Friends or Love, Actually, but to my surprise no film embodies their spirit as wonderfully as Truly Madly Deeply (and the same can be said for Juliet Stevenson's performance in it). I absolutely loved it, pretty much from the first seconds, filmed to make London at night feel like a place where even at your most heartbroken you can strike a beautiful, poetic figure, In voiceover we hear Nina calmly explain to her psychiatrist that she is hearing Jamie talk to her, sometimes even in Spanish, a language he didn't speak when alive. These scenes immediately set the mood for what's to come. Everything that happens in the film is informed by the idea that the world is an interesting and fun place and that it's interesting and fun to be able to engage it with curiosity, intelligence and confidence. Nina is able to do so, and Truly Madly Deeply is above all about observing her be. It never presents her as just a generic grieving woman, but forces you to consider her as a full person with many interests, opportunities and happy moments in her life. 

Nina does break down once, sobbing and yelping uncontrollably. Minghella films it all in a close-up he holds for a long time, leaving almost no distance between Stevenson and the audience. It's a scene of raw despair that quickly makes way for a more lighthearted touch, without ever dismissing or forgetting Nina's vulnearbility. It's a great example of how confident the film is juggling different tones and moods. It shifts between magic realism and psychological drama, and between romantic fantasy and slapstick comedy. Once Jamie's ghost has settled down he brings along some of his friends from the underworld. They keep Nina from sleeping with their disagreements about whether to watch Five Easy Pieces or Hannah and Her Sisters. Most of these 'friends' look like regular people, but Minghella also has a few folks stand around looking like tbey are extras in a Dracula film.. It's a very funny detail in context that's also a testament to the film's commitment to find something worthwhile about every single character it introduces, including the rodent control friend who comes to inspect Nina's house for rats. He does his job seemingly oblivious to Nina yelling for Jamie to appear, until before leaving he kindly explains he is gonna tell his dead wife about his day, as he has been doing for the past 12 years. His words symbolise the optimistc solidarity that anchors the film.  It's a beautiful fantasy, your lover returning from the death as a ghost you can touch and talk to, but Truly Madly Deeply imagines something even better: the ability to continue in the face of an ugly reality. 

294. Fearless

Song - Love You More (Racoon)

Movie: Fearless (Peter Weir, 1993)

In Witness, Peter Weir sent Harrison Ford, playing a New York cop, to an Amish community. Dead Poets Society had a progressive, free-spirited professor teach poetry in a rigidly conservative boarding school. Green Card forced two strangers to live and act as a married couple. In Master & Commander, a pacifist man of science found himself on a warship on an irrational mission. With this in mind, it's perhaps no surprise that at the height of his powers Weir stretched his interest in exploring what happens when people are placed in situations antithetical to their (preferred) way of life to the breaking point. The Truman Show and Fearless both turn the entire world into an alien environment to its main characters. The main difference is of course that in The Truman Show external factors are to blame, while in Fearless the problem is entirely psychological. Max Klein (Jeff Bridges) miraculously survived a plane crash and now he feels he should be dead. What's more, he isn't entirely sure he is alive, despite all the empirical evidence for it. If that makes it sound like a twist is coming, it's not. Max really is alive (and with only a minor scratch to remind him of the accident) and the film is about how he and the people around him try to make sense of the situation. 

Fearless is a good film that at times purposefully keeps a little distance from the audience. Max is utterly confounding and his behaviour changes dramatically from scene to scene. It's never entirely clear what his character is building up to, how he feels, or why he takes certain actions and it's as impossible for us to understand him as it is for the others around him, or even for himself. That is sometimes a little frustrating, but it's the only way to put you in the shoes of Max and his loved ones. It makes sense then that Fearless is at its best when Weir's filmmaking matches the absurd irrationality of the situation. I loved the moment when Max, in one of his many reckless attempts to show/confim that nothing can hurt or kill him, disregards a warning sign to keep out of a construction area, and ends up walking along an empty highway, framed against the San Francisco highline as if he is the only sign of life in the city. Even better is the detour Max takes with Carla (Rosie Perez), a fellow survivor who feels guilt over losing her baby in the crash. Trying to find a way through their confusion, they end up in a mall where they decide to buy gifts for their dead family members. Conveniently, at just the right spot there is a piano player playing just the right tune for a dance. It's a brush with magic realism that sets up the film's best scene, one that fully embraces the frantically shambolic headspace of Max, leading to a terrible decision with positive consequences. 

I wish the movie took that stylistically evocative and subjective approach a bit further. Jeff Bridges' wonderfully ambigous performance (At certain moments, his tone of voice, facial expressions and dialogue are all incongruent with each other and often you just cannot get a reading of his emotional state) and the agressive close ups of Max eating strawberries (as a kid he had an almost deadly allergic reaction to them) go a long way, but Weir still communicates Max' unstable state of mind mostly through conventional dramatic realism. In addition, the film also sometimes tries way too hard to become a statement on The Way We Live Now, in particular with the inclusion of an insurance lawyer who is shamelessly exploiting the dead in trying to squeeze out more money for the survivors of the plane crash. He is pointedly funny the first few times he appears, but Tom Hulce' hysteric performance contributes to him way overstaying his welcome. 

293. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back

Song - Time To Say Goodbye (Con Te Partiro) (Andrea Bocelli & Sarah Brightman)

Movie: Star  Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980)

I was over the moon after seeing the 1977 film and wanted to stay with it without immediately bingeing the entire original trilogy. I also thought it would be fun to try to replicate the experience of the original audiences and wait a bit before seeing the sequel. Now, while there are far worse ways to spend New Year's Day, I was somewhat disappointed by Empire Strikes Back. It's a good film, but it was not exactly what I was hoping to get out of Star Wars. Thus, having become a typical Star Wars fan, I immediately turned to Return of the Jedi, hoping to get my fix there. It did it's job, and then some. It's one of the most eccentric, goofy and joyous Holywood blockbsuters I've ever seen, builidng upon my favourite aspects of the original. The first half is essentially a hang out film with all the bizarre creatures of its world, with the plot even stopping briefly for a musical performance of a band of freaks. And the images of a scanitly clad Carrie Fisher lying in front of Jabba The Hutt strike an absolutely perfect balance between the lurid and the innocent. Later on, the film straddles a similar line with its depiction of the Ewoks. I had no idea of them, but they are a great invention; a primitive tribe of souped up teddy bears that are alternately both kinder and more aggressive than you'd expect. Their decision to help our heroes defeat 'The Dark Side' hinges on their belief that C-3PO is a deity. 

The Empire Strikes Back has none of the imagination or distinct personality of either the 1977 film or Return of the Jedi. It's a much more straightfoward blockbuster, albeit with a first hour that should be thought in film schools as a masterclass in editing, highlighting that the wipe is much more than just a quirky old-fashioned effect to transition between scenes. Han Solo, Luke and Leia are separated from each other and from other rebels, fighting the Empire in two or three different locations simultaneously, yet the movie makes you feel as if they are fighting together and that actions taken in one place directly affect events in another. The movie is in such a rhythm that at a certain point it can even resort to more traditional cuts and still create the same effect. It helps that everytime we go to another location everyone is always in movement, and that the film is not afraid to ocassionally move away from scenes before they have shown what they are seemingly set up to show. The approach almost reminds of a live broadcast of sports games happening simultaneously, which would cut away from the Real Madrid game in the middle of a corner kick, because something more interesting is happening in the Manchester City game. 

That first hour is an amazing feat, but The Empire Strikes Back quickly loses steam afterwards, becoming a bit of a retread of the first film with worse dialogue, flatter characters and less interesting locations and creatures. Cloud City is barely any different from the average futuristic metropolis and Dagobah, the swamp where we find Yoda, is a darker version of Eden without much interestng details beyond that. Yoda himself is cool though and one of the examples of what I like about Star Wars. It's wonderfully funny and counterintutive for a big-budget blockbuster about the fight between good and evil to present its great wise mentor as a Muppet puppet, especially when it sets up Alec Guinness at his most regal as his student. I also liked Han Solo's final words, one of the great Harrison Ford one-liners, that gets a delightful call-back at a crucial moment in Return of the Jedi. I would have likely been more disappointed by the Empire Strikes Back if I had seen it in 1980, as it clearly anticipates Ford not coming back. Han Solo is as far as I am concerned key to Star Wars and Lando Calrissian/Billy Dee Williams is no replacement. Ford did obviously return for the sequel, and as a result Lando's scenes are the weakest part of Return of the Jedi, playing as if they are only there out of narrative obligation.  

I am looking forward to rewatching the original trilogy, and will see the prequels too, but I am getting an inkling of why people don't like them. To my understanding they go into more depth into what makes the Dark Side evil, and into what makes the Force a concrete force that can shape personalities and societies. Part of my resistance to Star Wars was my impression that the original films take this stuff too seriously. They really don't - beyond knowing that Darth Vader is Luke's father (I don't know if Dutch people were really that taken aback even in 1980 by that revelation) it remains largely unclear what Darth Vader is or does and how the evilness of the Empire actually affects lives in the Galaxy. It would go to far to call all of that just a MacGuffin, but the heroes' adventures and interactions with each other and with the various creatures in Lucas' world are more important to the original movies than any real considerations of the mythical/moral reasons behind those adventures. I prefer that and I like the films' trust that John Williams and James Earl Jones are enough to turn Darth Vader into an iconic villain without needing to rely too much on overwrought backstories or self-important myths.