Day: March 13, 2005

The Wicker Man / Spirited Away

Just watched The Wicker Man and Spirited Away by Miyazaki

Several here would have a field day using Wicker Man as text: Comparative religion, worker exploitation through religion, cultural imperialism, and as a great example of the post-hippie New Age rise in paganism and anti-authority to which the time period (early 70s) gave rise.

One of my favorite scenes in the film shows the police officer, a devout Christian, watching in horror as a teacher instructs a group of children about pagan rites. This fascinates me in light of the current Darwinism / creationism debate going on in red states school boards across the country. I would imagine either side could identify with both the teacher and the officer; the pure outrage of teaching young people something so clearly erroneous and idiotic as creationism…or Darwinism.
Continue reading The Wicker Man / Spirited Away

Yes Men

God, I wanted to love this film. Two pranksters take on the WTO, getting invited to conferences to present (as reps of world trade) on globalization in some wonderfully twisted provocations. The actual pranks are quite good–a speech lamenting the Civil War in America, for instance, because normal market forces would have eventually and more peacefully evolved from unpaid labor (shipped to a new country) into efficiently-paid labor forces kept in their own cheap homes/countries (while the corporations run the forces from afar).

Three solid speeches/pranks, and lots and lots of filler. The pranksters hang out and talk, inanely, about how they’re prepping the prank. We see them sleep, or shop for the right suit. I was so sad to see such lousy, sloppy filmmaking for a subject–and a mode of satiric intervention–I find so important.

1. Back to documentaries–here’s a good example of a bad one.

2. And they remind you why Michael Moore is actually one hell of a talent. His ability to shape agit-prop narrative, to entertain as he attacks…. I wish I could recommend “The Yes Men,” but you’d be much better revisiting Moore’s tv show “The Awful Truth.”

Speaking of tripe

I gave “The Transporter” a shot, after my brother weighed in on how amazing it was. It wasn’t. I would call it, if you will, the flip-side to “Goodbye Dragon Inn.” A lot happens in this film, but you don’t care, whereas in that film, as I understand it, nothing happens, and you don’t care.

Maybe that reveals something about pure cinema–the purest product provokes the most sincere and deeply existential apathy.