Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Castle in the Sky)

Tech-savvy warlords battle each other in the air while humble farmers toil on the ground.  Workers tell tales about huge buildings in the clouds, though most are too afraid to travel outside their village.  The villagers rely on a rare crystal whose power can be easily misused for violent purposes.  A young, adventure loving princess is one of the few who can harness the power of the crystal, but that doesn’t stop a number of warring factions from attempting to use the mineral for their own selfish needs.  One such villain plans to use the crystal to activate a series of long-dormant, hulking robot beasts that are rumored to live in a castle in the sky.

If the plot of Castle in the Sky (1986) sounds a little familiar, it’s because the film is only a slight variation on Hayao Miyazaki’s previous movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984).  Once again there is a collision between a peaceful, old-fashioned village and a series of warring, high-tech societies.  Once again there is an environmental theme, which is once again expressed through a heroic princess who is the only one can utilize nature’s power to a righteous end.  Once again there are arrogant, power-hungry warlords who want to use a natural power to devious ends.  And once again those villains want to seize their power by activating ancient, destructive beasts.

Miyazaki’s third feature is largely a remake of his second, albeit with some noticeable cosmetic changes.  But Castle in the Sky does mark a genuine improvement over Nausicaa (and Miyazaki’s first film, 1979’s Castle of Cagliostro) in the sense that there are no completely extraneous characters.  Every major figure in the film has something to do, and even if the heroine and her male sidekick/chaste romantic interest have scarcely more personality than Princess Nausicaa, at least they each have a complete character arc.  And some of the supporting characters are genuinely eccentric.  A family of shy, bumbling sky pirates, led into combat by their domineering, clown-haired matriarch, keep the film lively even as the plot goes through the “fantasy 101” motions.  Even the most ill-defined of the film’s major characters, a villainous army general, has a clear function in the plot, so it doesn’t seem like a waste of the film’s generous running time to feature him in scenes the way that it did with, say,  the master swordsman in Nausicaa.

Castle in the Sky does have a few of the impressively large action set pieces that we’ve come to expect from Miyazaki.  The master animator boldly opens the film deep in the middle of the action, with the princess being chased through a giant air ship by the sky pirates, as if this was a late chapter in an ongoing serial and not the beginning of a children’s film.  A massacre that occurs when one of the aforementioned robots is unleashed is genuinely intense and brutal, with Miyazaki grippingly building the intensity by continuously increasing the scope and scale of the destruction until the screen is virtually filled with blood-red fire.  But overall Castle in the Sky, like Nausicaa, is too convoluted, lumbering, and lengthy to be consistently thrilling.  The ambitious, wide-canvas style that Miyazaki is quickly turning into his signature style does give Nausicaa and Castle in the Sky a truly epic feel, but its easy to miss the fleet-footedness and insouciant wit of Castle of Cagliostro, which remains Miyazaki’s most enjoyable film to this point.

UP NEXT  My Neighbor Totoro

The Masterpiece Test: The Mystery of Picasso

Year of Release  1956

Country  France

Length  75 min.

Director  Henri-Georges Clouzot

Cinematographer  Claude Renoir

Editor  Henri Colpi

Original Score  Georges Auric

Cast  Pablo Picasso

Beauty  A documentary in which Pablo Picasso creates twenty one-of-a-kind drawings, paintings, and collages obviously meets the basic beauty requirements for a masterpiece.  The Mystery of Picasso’s novel yet low-key approach to presenting those pieces of art  – Picasso creates each of his works on a special transparent canvas that fills the screen, allowing the viewer to watch the artist’s inspiration in action – is what makes it so spellbinding and delightful.  While there understandably isn’t anything on the level of, say, Guernica in this batch of artworks, each piece is nonetheless gorgeous and distinctive.  It’s a pleasure to watch a vague germ of an idea transform into something completely different by the time Picasso is satisfied with it (or tired of it).

Strangeness  Supposedly all of the pieces created for The Mystery of Picasso were burned immediately after filming, so that they would only exist for the movie.  If there is any truth to this bit of trivia, then the film is unique and special simply for containing these artworks by one of the world’s great masters.  Even if the pieces are out there in somebody’s private collection, as some scholars allege, the film still holds value for demonstrating in minute detail Picasso’s process.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  By essentially turning the screen into Picasso’s canvas, Henri-Georges Clouzot allows viewers the greatest possible opportunity to see a master at work.  The first few drawings are shown developing literally stroke-for-stroke, while the latter pieces employ smartly timed jump cuts to trace the evolution of some of the more ambitious pieces.  Clouzot also changes the film’s aspect ratio as Picasso moves onto larger works, bringing a welcome dramatic flair to this stylistically modest documentary.  The process of creation has perhaps never been as viscerally realized as it is in Clouzot’s film.

Tradition  Clouzot actually wasn’t the first to film Picasso’s works in action.  A Belgian film called Visit to Picasso (1949), which I haven’t seen, features the artist painting images on glass plates from the viewpoint of the camera.  That said, it’s hard to come up with any contemporary equivalents of Clouzot’s documentary.  Stan Brakhage’s shorts in which he painted directly onto film strips seem like The Mystery of Picasso’s closest relatives.

Repeatability  Art history students and aspiring painters could probably learn a lot from rewatching Clouzot’s film.  Or perhaps not; despite the film’s introductory voiceover suggesting that we only need to watch Picasso’s brushstrokes to understand what he’s thinking, the artist’s seemingly improvisatory technique isn’t really any easier to grasp by the end of the film.  The brief interludes where Picasso takes a break and has brief discussions with Clouzot don’t really shed any light on the artist’s process, and mostly serve to disrupt the film’s flow.

Viewer Engagement  It may not ultimately give viewers any real insight into what made its titular artist tick, but The Mystery of Picasso is a highly enjoyable and lovely film that offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of a great artist at work.

Morality  Part of the point of The Mystery of Picasso seems to be that half of Picasso’s genius was in simply putting in the work.  The emphasis on process, and the (sometimes stroke-by-stroke) evolution of the works of art onscreen suggests reasonably that Picasso was not magically imbued with talent, but that he became a great artist by constantly trying new things and pursuing each of his ideas to their logical end.  Unfortunately, Clouzot’s film occasionally seems divided against itself, with Georges Auric’s incongruously pompous musical score frequently aiming for a tone that suggests that the work being shown on screen is some sort of transmission from the gods.  The film would’ve been better off if Clouzot didn’t take his occasional awkward half-measures toward attempting to explain Picasso’s talent, and simply let the works of art speak for themselves.

The Mystery of Picasso fails the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A more ambitious and biographical look at an artist, Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch.

TV on DVD: The Shield (Season Four, Discs Two, Three & Four)

Episodes covered:  Tar Baby, Insurgents, Hurt, Cut Throat, String Theory, Back in the Hole, A Thousand Deaths, Judas Priest, Ain’t That a Shame

It is a mark of The Shield’s unpredictable plotting that season four’s major storyline’s reach their dramatic climax not in the season finale (“Ain’t That a Shame”), but in the extended-length tenth episode “Back in the Hole.”  At times, the series’ messy, cases-piling-on-top-of-each-other style of storytelling can be frustrating, as certain plot elements seem to get short thrift or disappear altogether in favor of unnecessarily repetitive character arcs or insignificant standalone cases.  But the busy layering of plots also gives the series a lifelike pacing that contrasts nicely with its amped-up action movie tone, and allows the storylines to organically reach the dramatic high points that make “Back in the Hole” The Shield’s best episode to this point.

The payoff was particularly strong for season four’s two most prominent new characters, Monica Rawling and Antwan Mitchell.  It is a testament to Glenn Close and Anthony Anderson’s fully lived-in performances that these new faces were able to suggest enough personal history to make their ferociously intense interrogation sequence in “Back in the Hole” feel like the culmination of four seasons of character-building rather than ten episodes of plotting.  The writers spent the middle part of the season turning Antwan into a disappointingly typical villain (particularly in the final scene of “Tar Baby,” where his moustache-twirling murder of a young girl informant didn’t jibe with the much more ambiguous community leader we’d been introduced to at the beginning of the season), but the full complexity of the character immediately clicks into place during his interrogation.  As Rawling picks away at Antwan’s psychological defenses, reminding him of his years as a powerless abused child, tears well up in the gang leader’s eyes, and suddenly this charismatic cypher feels like a real, complicated human being.

Though Rawling’s grilling of Antwan is ruthless, it is clear that her desire to put him behind bars is based on a sincere and passionate desire for justice.  It is impressive that Close and the writers never turned Rawling into a villain, even though she was essentially the Dick Cheney figure in this season’s blunt Iraq war metaphor.  Her zero-tolerance, morally inflexible tactics represent a different type of corruption than the ass-covering, bending-the-rules modus operandi of the rest of The Shield’s ethically ambiguous characters, and the show was able to get a lot of mileage out of the collision of her well-meaning brand of injustice and the other characters’ more self-serving forms of moral turpitude. 

While season four’s new major characters provided a riveting counterpoint to the established players, the development of many of the show’s longer running storylines had a mixed success rate.  It was interesting to see the Strike Team working separately and at odds at the beginning of the season, especially during the stretch where Shane was essentially functioning as the dark mirror version of Vic (just as ethically compromised but with less competence).  But the writers quickly dropped the storyline about Antwan blackmailing Shane into killing Vic in favor of the more familiar and less tense storyline of the Strike Team coming together to get Shane out of his mess.  The fact that the old team wound up working together for most of the season despite technically being assigned to different precincts undercut the power of their tenuous reconciliation at the end of the season, and also made the introduction of Shane’s vice squad partner Army seem borderline pointless.  Here’s hoping that if Army  returns in season five, the writers find something for Michael Pena to do, because he was largely wasted as Shane’s lackey.

The Strike Team has always been The Shield’s most problematic partnership, and over the years they’ve largely proven less interesting than the Barn’s other teams.  Dutch and Claudette’s season-long investigation of a series of convenience store crimes wasn’t terribly compelling in and of itself, but it did provide a stable framework for exploiting the tension that had been growing in their partnership since late in season three.  The payoff in “Ain’t That a Shame,” which found Dutch turning down a promotion in favor of sticking by Claudette, even though her morally uncompromising ways make the partners the outcasts of the Barn, was truly the culmination of four years of smart character-building.

Danny and Julian were very much in the background of season four, and mostly functioned as representatives of opposing viewpoints about Rawling’s property seizure policies.  It was perfectly in character for Danny, who has always shown a reactionary streak, to support Rawling’s no-nonsense style.  Julian’s turn from naïve support to principled opposition of the property seizures was equally organic, and the definitive turning point – the police raid on an in-session church that was harboring drug paraphernalia in “Insurgents” – was one of the season’s most gripping moments.  Fortunately, Danny and Julian share a certain respectful bond that transcends politics, as seen in the quietly moving moment when Julian is the only cop who shows up to tend to a recovering-from-a-shooting Danny in “Ain’t That a Shame.”  While it might have been nice to see more of Michael Jace this season, it was something of a relief to see the writers lay off of his ongoing struggle with his sexuality, which had become tiresome and one-note in season three.

Another somewhat tedious element of the previous season of The Shield was the Aceveda rape storyline, which the writers ingeniously wound up justifying by making it an integral part of the political complications that ultimately undercut Rawling’s investigation of Antwan by allowing the One-Niners leader to make a deal with the DEA.  I’m not sure that the show needed so many scenes of Aceveda enacting rape fantasies with a high-class hooker – the scenes felt equally like excuses to give Benito Martinez something to do and desperate grabs for controversy – but the payoff in “Back in the Hole,” which found Aceveda basically reenacting a version of his rape where he was the one in charge, was powerfully executed.  Better yet, the councilman’s decision to move on from his humiliation at all costs led to some interesting plot complications in the final three episodes of the season, where Aceveda basically hired Antwan to kill his rapist in exchange for a deal with the DEA. 

The political complications that ensued – with Rawling and Vic racing to capture a Salvadoran drug dealer before Antwan could testify against him – featured the series’ most intricate and exciting plotting since its two part season one finale.  But really the fourth season took the sophisticated action movie feel of those two hours and maintained it for an entire season, making this the most consistently satisfying season so far.  There is still the sense that the writers are consciously avoiding pushing the series’ overarching storylines too far ahead – I’m not sure that Terry Crowley has even been mentioned since season two, and the Armenian Money Train thing seems to have definitively ended in season three – but by focusing explicitly on the ways that the Barn’s policies fail the community of Farmington, season four got to the heart of the show’s themes in a way that previous season’s only did sporadically.  And with Rawling’s Internal Affairs guy digging up some definitive dirt on the Strike Team at the end of “Ain’t That a Shame,” it’s only a matter of time before Vic starts to real feel the results of his past actions.

Quick Thoughts:

-  The storyline involving Dutch dating Vic’s ex-wife seemed promising when it started, but did not pay off.

-  I also wish that the Barn’s overly forceful raid of the church would’ve led to greater consequences.  We saw that the media had picked up a damning freeze frame of a smiling Vic tackling a churchgoing One-Niner, but the outrage surrounding this incident was never really explored and mostly felt like an abstraction.

-  While there were some plot elements that didn’t fully pay off, it was nice to at least see the show drastically downplaying the standalone cases this season, with most of the police work relating in some way to the asset-forfeiture storyline.

-  I recommend checking out the documentary on disc four.  It provides a lot of interesting insights into Glenn Close's working methods, and details the surprisingly complicated evolution of a memorably profane line of dialogue in "Back in the Hole."

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind)

Hayao Miyazaki followed the critical and commercial success of his debut feature, The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), by creating a manga series known as Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind.  The origins of the series, which began its twelve-year serialized run in 1982, are somewhat controversial.  Some say that Miyazaki originally intended for Nausicaa to be an anime, but couldn’t find funding for a feature film, while others claim that the director started the manga on the condition that it would never be adapted to film, and that he was only later convinced by financers to turn his story into a theatrical release.  Regardless, Miyazaki wound up releasing a filmic version of Nausicaa in 1984, adapting only the portions of the story which he’d already completed in the manga (roughly a quarter of the story that was ultimately completed in 1994).

Like Cagliostro, Nausicaa freely blends medieval fantasy adventure with space age sci-fi, though it replaces the earlier film’s spy elements with a post-apocalyptic wasteland motif.  The story is set a thousand years after a world war known as “The Seven Days of Fire,” which destroyed the earth’s ecosystem and turned human civilization into a scattered series of settlements.  The various villages face the constant threat of being engulfed by the toxic jungle that now takes up most of the earth.  While humans can’t survive long in the toxic environment, insects have thrived and become enormous, threatening beasts.  Princess Nausicaa, a skilled wind glider who often enters the toxic forest in order to gather supplies for her settlement, is one of the few who seem willing or able to communicate with the insects rather than enraging them.  But when several other warring kingdoms crash land in the Valley of the Wind, Nausicaa and her peaceful settlement are thrust into a complicated conflict involving a long-dormant “Giant Warrior” who may be able to eliminate the insect threat, but who may also pose a lethal threat to the humans.

The plot is about as convoluted as it sounds, and probably more well-suited to a lengthy comic book series than a two-hour film.  Sadly, the film quickly gets bogged down with long expository scenes, and Miyazaki never finds a way to effectively incorporate all of the plot points and characters into one distinct, compelling vision.  Cagliostro had several peripheral characters that seemed to have been included simply because fans of the Lupin the III series would expect them to be there, but every character besides Nausicaa gets short thrift in Miyazaki’s second film.  While the characters in Cagliostro were largely archetypal in conception (and in their physical design), many of them were given enough personality to at least partially transcend their generic origins.  Not so in Nausicaa, which features such hackneyed figures as the noble swordsman, the blind but wise old lady, and the arrogant and power- hungry soldier, and then doesn’t give any of them enough screen time to become anything more than walking action figures.  Miyazaki is wise to temper his earnest environmental and anti-war themes by acknowledging that nature is often harsh and inhospitable to humans, and the animators admirably make no attempt to make the slimy, multi-eyed giant bugs cute in any way.  But otherwise the low level of ambiguity and nuance in the film seems wildly out of proportion to the complexity of its plot.

Fortunately, Nausicaa’s stunning hand-drawn animation ensures that the film is at least as compelling as it is frustrating.  The world of the film may be made up of a thousand different fantasy and sci-fi clichés, but its indigo hue and wide-open vistas are as unique as they are breathtaking.  There are a lot of nice little touches, such as the way that the wind rustles through the characters’ hair, that earn the animators points simply for degree of difficulty.  Nausicaa’s action sequences aren’t as crisp as those in Cagliostro, but they do feel impressively huge and they are edited with a clarity that is sadly lacking in most modern action films.  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind is bloated with plot and underdeveloped characters, but it is proof that even a heavily flawed Hayao Miyazaki film is well worth staring at for a couple of hours.

UP NEXT  Castle in the Sky

The Masterpiece Test: Nashville

Year of Release  1975

Country  USA

Length  160 min.

Director  Robert Altman

Screenwriter  Joan Tewkesbery

Cinematographer  Paul Lohmann

Editors  Dennis Hill, Sidney Levin

Sound  Chris McLaughlin, William A. Sawyer

Original Music  Robert Altman, Arlene Barnett, Jonnie Barnett, Richard Baskin, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Gary Busey, Keith Carradine, Henry Gibson, Juan Grizzle, Allan F. Nichols, Dave Peel, Ben Raleigh, Joe Raposo, Lily Tomlin

Cast  David Arkin, Barbara Baxley, Ned Beatty, Karen Black, Ronee Blakley, Timothy Brown, Keith Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Robert Doqui, Shelley Duvall, Allen Garfield, Henry Gibson, Scott Glenn, Jeff Goldblum, Barbara Harris, David Hayward, Michael Murphy, Allan F. Nichols, Dave Peel, Cristina Raines, Bert Remsen, Lily Tomlin, Gwen Welles, Keenan Wynn, voice of Thomas Hal Phillips

Beauty  Though it’s widely regarded as a classic today, Nashville was a somewhat controversial film in 1975.  Many real-life Nashville musicians found the film to be an inaccurate portrayal of the city’s music scene, and felt that the songs used in the film (most of which were written or co-written by the actors singing them) were inferior to the songs actually being produced in the city at that time.  This ignores the fact that many of the songs used in the film aren’t necessarily supposed to be good, and one of the chief pleasures of Nashville is that it provides a wide variety of music that is being performed by characters of convincingly varied skill levels.  The tone is set early on, as the film keeps editing back and forth between an old populist hack (Henry Gibson) singing a hilariously overwrought Bicentennial tribute and a passionate gospel group that is belting out a sincerely soulful tune.  Musical performances take up at least an hour of the film’s 160 minutes, and they run the gamut from the old-fashioned country of a psychologically troubled starlet (Ronee Blakley) to the slick post-hippie folk rock of a noted womanizer (Keith Carradine) to the unskilled shower singing of a waitress (Gwen Welles).  In each case, the music feels appropriate for the character performing it, which is an impressive feat considering the variety of genres on display.

Strangeness  Taken individually, the stories of Nashville’s twenty-four main characters would not be that interesting.  For the most part, they are each fairly one-note and would probably come off as fairly banal clichés if they weren’t played by such an excellent ensemble cast.  But the strength of Nashville, and what makes it such a distinctive and unique film, is that it brings the clichés of different types of music-industry stories and brings them into contact with each other in every conceivable combination, producing genuinely exciting and odd results.  Broad, cartoonish parodies of red-state mentalities (Gibson) rub up against tragic tales of damaged stars (Blakley), while an assassin out of a psychological thriller (David Hayward) shares scenes with a wide-eyed groupie (Shelley Duvall) from an exploitation movie.  It’s as if Robert Altman had considered every generic way to make a movie about this subject matter, and then threw them all into a blender to produce a stranger, more exciting result.

Unity of Form and Subject Matter  The mosaic structure of the film’s various plotlines is reflected in Chris McLaughlin and William A. Sawyer’s innovative sound work, which uses extensive multi-tracking for overlapping dialogue.  Altman had been working on various methods of creating the aural equivalent of deep focus cinematography since at least McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), but Nashville undoubtedly represents his most sophisticated and masterful orchestration of audio cacophony.  The sound work is a perfect fit for a movie that criss-crosses genres and storylines so freely.

Tradition  The granddaddy of large ensemble films is Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), a film that clearly had a strong impact on Altman’s trademark style.  The rule-breaking dissections of the French New Wave also served as an inspiration, with Jacques Rivette’s genre cross-pollination serving as a general forbearer to Nashville’s aesthetic, while the famous traffic jam sequence from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967) seems to have directly inspired a similar scene in the first half hour of Altman’s film.  Large ensemble works without a central character seem to have proliferated since Altman’s ‘70s glory days, with examples ranging from Paul Thomas Anderson’s early films through Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000) taking inspiration from Nashville.  Altman himself tried several times to repeat the formula of Nashville, in films such as A Wedding (1978) and Short Cuts (1993), though often with diminishing returns.  Large ensemble storytelling has ultimately found a home on serialized cable television, where ambitious shows like Deadwood and Treme have enough time to fully flesh out their many characters and give a 360-degree view of their settings in a way that movies can barely approach.

Repeatability  There is enough going on in Nashville for it to remain compelling on multiple viewings, and the overlapping stories and dialogue bits make it possible to experience the movie in different ways at different times. 

Viewer Engagement  Since Nashville doesn’t have a main character or central identification figure, it is largely up to the viewer to determine how they experience the film.    Different bits of dialogue and storylines may pop out at different viewers on different screenings, and the cacophony of the dialogue and the flexibility of the script allow the audience many opportunities to choose what to focus on.  Unfortunately, the film is occasionally weighed down by a cold and distant cynicism that seems at odds with its spirited aesthetic, and the wild shifts in tone can make Nashville a somewhat baffling, if exciting, experience.

Morality  A large part of what makes Nashville such an interesting and vital film is its refusal to settle on any one style or point of view, as it is constantly reshuffling characters and putting them in contexts that challenge the viewer’s perception of the film’s milieu.  The free-form, non-hand holding approach does make the film somewhat uneven in both tone and the quality of its individual scenes (in addition to giving a number of its characters short thrift), but that is forgivable considering the impressive ambition of its approach.  Sadly, Altman drops the ball with a heavy-handed finale revolving around an assassination at a political fundraiser, ending with some sledgehammer visual symbolism as storm clouds hover over a giant American flag.  In fairness, this final scene is reasonably well-executed in its own right, but it seems to belong to a different, simpler film.  Altman should’ve left the political sloganeering to the sleazy political vultures, corrupt managers, and careerist musicians that Nashville spends so much time making fun of.

Nashville fails the Masterpiece Test

UP NEXT  A much smaller-scale look at the art world, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso

Understanding Auteurs: Hayao Miyazaki (The Castle of Cagliostro)

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki has a reputation as one of the finest filmmakers working today.  Miyazaki’s creative leadership of Studio Ghibli, the animation studio that he co-founded with director Isao Takahata and producer Toshio Suzuki, has led many to dub Miyazaki as the “Japanese Walt Disney.”  But whatever whimsy and sentimentality crop up in Miyazaki’s work is offset by a deeply weird, surrealist sensibility that doesn’t lend itself easily to toy deals or happy meal promotional tie-ins.  Miyazaki doesn’t shy away from using populist humor or cute, family friendly creatures in his movies, but his is clearly a deeply personal, singular sensibility, and he isn’t afraid to challenge, frighten or even confound his audience.

I was certainly baffled both times I saw Spirited Away (2001) on DVD and the one time I caught Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) in a now-defunct West Bend movie theatre.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – great works of art are always inherently difficult to process on some level, and the avant-garde at its best is able to tap into some fundamental yet hard-to-describe truths on a level that traditional, straightforward works can’t approach.  And although I would have a hard time giving a plot synopsis or even giving any sort of coherent thematic analysis of Spirited Away (and not just because I haven’t seen it in a few years), I still found it so ravishingly beautiful that I wouldn’t hesitate to call it one of the finest animated films I’ve ever seen, and perhaps one of the best films of the past decade.  But I’m of two minds about Howl’s Moving Castle, which I found stunning visually but couldn’t connect with on any other level. 

My experience with Howl’s Moving Castle discouraged me from exploring the rest of Miyazaki’s oeuvre.  Whatever curiosity I’ve had about his work has always been offset by a fear that I would be completely perplexed by his oddball vision.  It’s not that I have an aversion to oddity in art – I would actually go as far as to say that strangeness is a prerequisite for greatness, and most of my favorite filmmakers (Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick, Orson Welles, Werner Herzog, etc.) made highly idiosyncratic works that are difficult to categorize and that can’t be fully unpacked even after many viewings.  I could blame my failure to connect with Howl’s Moving Castle on a bias against children’s films, since it’s true that I’m rarely the first in line to see anything that appears to be aimed at anyone under the age of ten, but I would have to ignore the fact some recent computer animated work by Pixar and some hand-drawn films by Sylvain Chomet and Michel Ocelot are among the most enchanting things I’ve seen in the past decade.  (Besides, even a novice like me can see that Miyazaki’s films are not necessarily aimed at children - or at least not just at children).  And while it’s true that I don’t have a very firm grasp of the history of anime, or its stylistic conventions – aside from genre landmarks like Akira (1988) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988), I really haven’t seen much – that can’t be the reason that I’ve been so thrown off by Miyazaki’s style, since he is clearly following his own muse rather than adhering to an inscrutable foreign tradition. 

I have to admit that the reason that I’ve remained ignorant of the work of Miyazaki for so long is probably simply that I’m afraid that I won’t “get it,” and I hate to be that guy who is so thrown off by a work of art that I can’t properly appreciate or evaluate it.  Miyazaki’s work is very difficult to compartmentalize, both because he shifts so quickly between different tones and because it’s hard (for me) to identify when he’s playing off of certain Japanese cultural tropes and when he’s simply making stuff up.  The English voiceovers added to the Disney-distributed editions Miyazaki’s films are also an obstacle to my enjoyment; while they nicely free up my eyes to pay closer attention to the astonishing visuals rather than subtitles, they also tend to feature distracting (and frankly pointless) appearances by celebrity actors rather than trained voice performers.  Miyazaki’s deal with Disney prevents them from drastically altering his films (part of the reason that Studio Ghibli was founded in the mid-80s was so that Miyazaki could retain creative control over the international versions of his films), but I do wonder if, for example, Billy Crystal’s goofy vaudeville-style voiceover as one of the comic relief characters in Howl’s Moving Castle may have given his scenes a tone that Miyazaki did not intend.  The DVDs helpfully include the option to view the film’s with either subtitles or the English dubs, but it’s hard to decide which version is preferable, especially as I imagine it may vary from film to film.

Thankfully, few of these concerns apply to Miyazaki’s first feature length film (he’d previously worked on several anime television series), The Castle of Cagliostro (1979), which is about as easy an introduction to the work of a filmmaker that I can imagine.  A narratively streamlined adventure film with a breathless pace, a goofy sense of humor, and iconic, easy-to-grasp characters, Cagliostro is presumably the furthest from the avant-garde that Miyazaki will be in his career as a filmmaker.  But even when making a crowd-pleasing blockbuster in what appears to be a sort of “house style,” Miyazaki brings enough personality to the proceedings to set his film apart from the pack.  Cagliostro isn’t an original Miyazaki creation – he and co-screenwriter Haruya Yamazaki were tasked with making the second film in the Lupin the III series, spun-off from a popular television series that was based on a manga series created by Monkey Punch (who based his creation on a series of French adventure novels by Maurice Leblanc) – but the film doesn’t bend under the weight of his complicated creative lineage, and it’s an easy-to-follow and engaging story that doesn’t require any prior knowledge of its source material.

Lupin the III is a master thief with a carefree attitude and a playful spirit.  He works alongside a sarcastic, laidback marksman named Daisuke Jigen and a focused master samurai named Goemon.  In the midst of apparently randomly cruising around Europe looking for adventure, Lupin and Jigen get in the middle of a wild car chase involving a mysterious woman and a band of thugs tailing her.  Despite knowing nothing about the situation, Lupin decides to rescue the woman, who promptly disappears but leaves him a distinctive and mysterious ring.  Lupin eventually comes to learn that the woman, Clarisse, is the princess of Cagliostro and is soon to be married to a villainous Count, who needs Clarisse’s ring to perform a ritual that will allow him to uncover the fabled Cagliostro treasure, which will add to the fortune that he’s made from his counterfeit bill empire.  In order to enter the Count’s heavily guarded castle, Lupin tips off his longtime rival, easily-agitated Interpol agent Zenigata, to his whereabouts, using the subsequent distraction to sneak his way past the Count’s guards and remote-controlled lasers.  Gradually Lupin and Zenigata are forced to join forces to rescue the princess and bring down the Count’s illegal operation, though complications arise when Lupin’s rival thief (and sometime lover) Fujiko turns out to already be attempting to swipe the counterfeit cash.

The characters are all fairly basic archetypes; even if the viewer isn’t familiar with the long-running Lupin series (as I wasn’t), they will be able to quickly identify each character’s basic function within the series’ universe, and there aren’t any unexpected twists in their personalities along the way.  There is no hint of moral ambiguity in the Count, and Clarisse is about as complicated as Princess Peach from the Super Mario Bros. video games.  Also, a few of the supporting characters have practically nothing to do in Cagliostro, and seem to only have been included in the script because fans of the series would expect them to show up at some point (samurai Goemon, who appears maybe five times in the whole film and does nothing of note, feels particularly shoehorned in).

These very simple characterizations may prevent Cagliostro from being a particularly sophisticated or original film, but the basic plotting allows the film to focus its full attention on its wonderful visuals and its many dazzling action scenes.  The film opens in the chaotic aftermath of a bank heist, and quickly establishes its tone when Lupin and Jigen decide to throw the cash out the window (it engulfs a bunch of passing cars, but magically doesn’t seem to cause any accidents), apparently more concerned with the excitement of the heist itself than any potential profits.  Miyazaki moves at the same jazzy pace as his heroes, flitting quickly between thrilling sequences like the aforementioned car chase, Lupin’s underwater stealth entrance into the castle, an out-of-control helicopter versus turret skirmish, and an awesome one-on-one battle in and out of a huge clock tower.  The animation team brings a real sense of dynamic momentum to these action scenes, and Miyazaki oversees a lot of vividly eccentric details, such as when a flash grenade tossed by Lupin causes one scene to play out on an entirely yellow background, with the characters appearing as black silhouettes.  There may not be a real sense of stakes in the by-the-numbers story – when one of the heroes is shot down in a helicopter, there’s no question of whether he’s going to get back up again – but Miyazaki’s incredibly visceral action scenes make Cagliostro even more exciting than the best James Bond or Indiana Jones adventures, and he gives the Count a surprisingly brutal death scene.  Even the scenes of comic relief or exposition have a sense of fun to them that is largely missing from contemporary action blockbusters.  The Castle of Cagliostro may not be complex or unique enough to mark reveal Hayao Miyazaki as a genius, but it is too damned entertaining for anyone to deny him his place as one of the world’s premier action directors.

UP NEXT  Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

TV on DVD: The Shield (Season Four, Disc One)

Episodes covered:  The Cure, Grave, Bang, Doghouse

I’m not very familiar with Glenn Close.  I’ve seen fewer than ten of the sixty-four projects she’s credited with appearing in on IMDB, and out of those, the only one of her roles that I remember fairly clearly is her crazed stalker in the terrible thriller Fatal Attraction.  And I haven’t seen a single episode of Damages, the FX (and now DirecTV) series that was so heavily built around its star that its working title was Glenn Close TV Project.

But I no longer feel like I need to have seen The Big Chill or Reversal of Fortune to understand why Close is such a highly respected actress.  Close’s work on the fourth season of The Shield is strong enough to justify any praise that she’s received in her career – a claim I feel comfortable making even after only seeing the first third of the season.  The veteran actress plays Monica Rawling, the new Captain of the Barn (Aceveda has finally moved on to the City Council position that it seemed like he would’ve already been in at the start of season three).  Though Monica is a character who’s never been mentioned in previous seasons of the show, and who (apparently) won’t be around after this season is over, she feels like a fully realized and fleshed out character the second she steps on screen in “The Cure.”  Rawling radiates the decisiveness and toughness that a person in her position needs to have in order to be in charge of institutional bullies like Vic.  Her years as a Farmington beat cop would be evident even if they weren’t spelled out by the dialogue, and her desire to make her district a safer place seems both sincere and well-informed, even if her zero-tolerance methods for reducing crime are highly dubious.  Basically, Monica feels like a real person instead of a character that this season needs to drive its storyline, and Close’s grounded portrayal is largely responsible.

Of course, the writing staff deserves some of the credit for making Rawling such a fascinating presence, and for integrating her into all of the other characters’ lives in a way that the many new characters introduced in the previous season weren’t.  Her relationship with Aceveda is unsurprisingly somewhat hostile, as she quickly establishes herself as a very different type of leader that isn’t afraid to do things that make the department look bad as long as the ends justify the means.  Rawling’s no nonsense attitude and her policy of putting as many bodies as she can spare on major cases endears her to Danni, who has been trying to get off of basic foot patrol since season one.  The new Captain’s policy of giving everyone something useful to do doesn’t extend to Dutch and Claudette, as the latter’s righteous quest to expose wrongful arrests has continued to alienate her and her partner from the rest of the police department – and the District Attorney’s office, who refuse to cooperate with any case where Claudette is the primary investigator.  Rawling seems to recognize that Dutch and Claudette are skilled detectives, but is refusing to take them off the sidelines until the latter apologizes to the D.A. – something that is obviously a major source of frustration for the ever-ambitious Dutch, who has gotten off on the wrong foot with the new Captain on a personal and professional level. 

Of course, Rawling’s most prominent tentative relationship on the show is with Vic.  After the events of last season, Vic’s Strike Team has been disbanded, with Shane heading off to a different precinct’s vice squad, Lem working for a juvenile detention center, and Vic and Ronnie doing menial surveillance work at the Barn.  Encouraged by Vic’s impressive arrest rate, Rawling puts the corrupt cop in charge of a new anti-gang task force.  Though she cautions Vic against using methods that will draw the suspicion of Internal Affairs, Rawling seems disturbingly undaunted by Vic’s “anything to get the job done” approach, and it will be interesting to see which lines she’s willing to cross as the season goes on.  Some of her methods may actually be more damaging than Vic’s, as suggested by her controversial “asset forfeiture” policy, in which she and the officers in her command take away any property purchased by drug money – even if it means throwing innocent children out in the street, as happens when she and Vic seize a home bought for a crack dealer’s mother and young siblings in the episode “Bang.”

That sense of the toll that rough and/or corrupt law enforcement takes on the underprivileged people that the law is supposed to protect is something that was largely missing from the first three seasons of The Shield, but it seems like it will be a major concern of the show’s fourth year.  Since the events of the show have always been depicted from the point of view of the police, even the most prominent criminal characters from the show’s past have tended to seem like thematic abstractions at best, and unambiguous villains at worst.  The Shield has featured frequent scenes of police brutality at its worst, but because the criminals have been so poorly defined in comparison to the law enforcement characters, the show has sometimes undercut its own points by making the guys on the wrong side of the law seem like nameless, faceless thugs.  The writers seem to have recognized that this was a problem, as they’ve structured most of this season’s early plotlines around the various ways that the Barn has failed Farmington, whether they are literally beating the puke out of a gang member in “Grave” or giving serious jail time to a man with a few pot plants in “Doghouse.”

These failures of justice open the door for truly savvy criminals like Antwan Mitchell (Anthony Anderson, in a riveting performance that far outpaces any of his other work I’ve seen), the ex-con leader of the One-Niners, who is able to gain the support of his community in a way that the police won’t ever be able to.  Since returning from a decade-plus prison stint, Antwan has rebranded himself as a compassionate community leader, more interested in providing support for his fellow citizens than in making a profit off of their misery.  Antwan is hands down the most intriguing criminal character seen on The Shield to this point, because it’s genuinely difficult to parse how seriously he takes his black pride rhetoric and how much he’s simply using it as a smokescreen for his drug dealing operation.

Antwan can’t be too noble a person, because he’s got an under the table deal going on with Shane.  It isn’t exactly clear what the terms of Antwan and Shane’s deal are, but we’ve already seen Shane cover up a murder committed by Antwan’s crew (in “The Cure”) and we’ve seen both men give each other compromising information about their respective organizations.  Shane collaborating with Farmington’s most prominent gang leader while Vic is running an anti-gang task force is clearly going to be a great source of drama going forward, especially since neither Vic nor Shane can really afford to turn the other in, given all of the dirt they have on one another, from the Terry Crowley murder to the Armenian Money Heist.  The Shield seemed to be losing some steam in season three, but season four is shaping up to be its most intense and dynamic collection of episodes to date.

Quick Thoughts:

-  Nice cameo by Katey Sagal as Gilroy’s widow in “Grave.”  Few actresses are better at instantly projecting the scars of their characters’ hard lives, and Sagal does it here in just two scenes.  Sagal is the wife of that episode’s writer, Kurt Sutter, and she currently stars in her husband’s terrific (if uneven) series Sons of Anarchy.

- Shane’s new partner Armando “Army” Renta (Michael Pena) hasn’t played a big role so far, but it will be interesting to see how far he’s willing to follow Shane down his flamboyantly corrupt path.

-  Julien is the only one of the major characters without a clear, compelling storyline so far this year.  I hope that the writers find something for him to do, as Michael Jace still provides one of the show’s most intriguing screen presences.

- I didn’t really get around to addressing the continuing fallout from Aceveda’s third season rape, but his newfound passion for extremely rough sex has provided some reminders that The Shield’s extreme content can still provide some genuinely shocking moments even after forty-odd episodes.  How long before his predilections put his political career at risk?