Movie Night Narratives

Yesterday was Movie Night again, so John picked us up at 4 PM (a couple of hours later than we’ve been leaving lately) and we picked up a box of 25 tenders at Chicken Express. Once settled in at Babeloth we began watching two DVDs of my choosing. They were a little quieter than our usual fare, perhaps, but I think they still engaged the boys. There was enough action and oddity for that.

First up was Big Fish (2003) directed by Tim Burton. Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) is dying, an outsize storyteller famous for spinning outlandish yarns about his life. His son William (Billy Crudup) who has grown disenchanted with his father’s tales (which has led to a falling out and a separation of three years) is soon to be a father himself. He and his wife return to Alabama, where Will hopes to finally learn the truth of his father’s life and come to some terms before he passes away.

Edward’s life is told in a series of fantastic flashbacks, involving witches, a giant, a lost town, a circus, a heroic army career, but most of all a romantic quest for the love of his life, Sandra (Jessica Lange). Will desperately struggles with trying to find the truth, but finds odd, ambiguous, conflicting accounts from various sources including his mother.

Edward has a final stroke and is lying near to death. Will takes up a final vigil in the hospital. When everyone leaves, Edward wakes up, obviously struggling. He has lived all his life by stories; now he requests his son to tell him a story to help him die, to ‘tell me how I go.’ In desperation Will weaves a final fantasy, a somehow joyous reunion of Edward with all the figures of his life story. In the end, he does not really perish. ‘You become what you always were, a really Big Fish.’ Edward breathes out his last word, ‘Exactly,’ and satisfied, passes away.

At the funeral, Will is astonished to see figures from his father’s tales turn up to pay tribute. There is a giant, but not as huge as Edward had him; there is a pair of twins from his army stories, but not conjoined. It seems there was truth in all his stories, mythicized, but true. Finally seeing that his father was not simply a liar, Bill becomes a happier man when his son is born, passing on Edward’s tales.  ‘A man tells his stories so many times that he becomes the stories. They live on after him, and in that way he becomes immortal.’

Our second movie was The Wind Rises (2013) from Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.  It was one of Miyazaki's several farewell films. It tells the story of Jiro Horikoshi, who dreams of flying. Because of his nearsightedness he can never be a pilot, so he becomes an aeronautical engineer. He is spurred on by the thought of his idol, Count Caproni, an Italian airplane designer, whom he meets several times in his dreams. The dream Count tells him ‘The wind is rising. How will you live?’ Jiro knows that all his work on airplanes will be used by the government for military purposes, but what can he do? They are the only people who have the resources to fulfill his dream of beautiful flight.

Jiro is a student in Tokyo when he saves Nahoko Satomi from the Great Kanto Earthquake. But in the aftermath, he loses track of her. He struggles with designing planes after graduation; Japan’s ‘allies,’ the Germans, refuse to share technology. His project fails testing and is rejected. For a rest, Jiro goes to a summer resort, where he is accidentally reunited with Nahoko. She has been searching for him all these years. A German tourist, Castorp, witnesses their growing romance and warns Jiro of Hitler’s plans for another world war.  In the end, Castorp flees from the ‘Special Higher Police’. ‘The wind rises.’

Jiro wants to marry Nahoko, even though she has been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Their love is a beautiful dream, that, if undertaken in reality, comes with tragic consequences. ‘How will you live?’ Jiro accepts that love, and Nahoko goes to a sanitorium to try to recover a little, and Jiro, because he is wanted as an associate of Castorp, goes into hiding at his boss’s house. From there, he can still work on planes. When Nahoko suffers a ruptured lung, they decide to go ahead and get married and enjoy the fleeting time they have together.

As Jiro goes to the final test of his prototype, Nahoko quietly tries to return to the sanitorium. At the height of his plane’s success, his spirit is suddenly darkened by a premonition of Nahoko’s death, a rising wind.

After Japan has lost the war, Jiro again dreams of Caproni. He laments that his work was used for so much war and death; Caproni comforts him with the thought that at least he finally fulfilled his dream of a beautiful plane. Nahoko’s spirit also appears, urging him to live on. Jiro and Caproni walk off into their shared dream of beauty and flight.

Once again, a bonus feature of our viewing was Actor ID; in Big Fish, Ewan McGregor, Helena Bonham Carter, Robert Guillaume, Steve Buscemi, Danny DeVito, and Deep Roy; in The Wind Rises (English dub), Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Martin Short, Werner Herzog, Stanley Tucci, William H. Macy, and Mandy Patinkin. And (we learned later) Elijah Wood and Ronan Farrow, though we didn’t identify them while we were watching and only learned later.

I only thought later that there was a sort of connecting theme between such diverse films: the thought that dreams and narratives give shape and meaning to our lives, beyond mundane and observable facts, beyond compromises with the world. 

 

Wideo Wednesday: Movie Night Review

Yesterday was another fun Movie Night. Movie Night has evolved into one evening every two weeks when my nephew Kameron and I go to visit my brother John and his kid Joey. We select movies and TV shows that we want to share and that we think others will enjoy, and we have a good meal. We can usually get through two movies every night, with an episode or two of classic TV series to round it off. Last night was no exception; not only did it provide a history lesson for us all, it also indulged one of our favorite pastimes, Spot the Actor, where we identified familiar favorites and recounted where we knew them from. Being BBC productions, it was a fertile field.

First up was The Gathering Storm (2002). “The Gathering Storm is a BBC–HBO co-produced television biographical film about Winston Churchill in the years just prior to World War II. The title of the film is that of the first volume of Churchill's largely autobiographical six-volume history of the war, which covered the period from 1919 to 3 September 1939, the day he became First Lord of the Admiralty.

“The film stars Albert Finney as Churchill and Vanessa Redgrave as his wife Clementine Churchill ("Clemmie"). The film also features a supporting cast of British actors such as Derek Jacobi, Ronnie Barker , Jim Broadbent, Tom Wilkinson, Celia Imrie, Linus Roache and Hugh Bonneville, and is notable for an early appearance by a young Tom Hiddleston.” – Wikipedia.

We of course followed it with the sequel, Into the Storm (2009). “Into the Storm is a 2009 biographical film about Winston Churchill and his days in office during the Second World War. The movie stars Brendan Gleeson as the British Prime Minister. The Second World War has recently ended in Europe, and the people of the United Kingdom are awaiting the results of the 1945 general election. During this time, Winston Churchill goes to France for a holiday with his wife Clemmie. Through a series of flashbacks, Churchill recalls some of his most glorious moments during the war, and the effect it had on their marriage.” – Wikipedia.

For the first few moments of the second film I felt a little bit of a jar as our Churchill was switched from Albert Finney (who I will always associate with The Dresser and Big Fish) to Brendan Gleeson (Mad-Eye Moody in Harry Potter), but I was soon caught up in the tale and it ceased to make any difference; they were both Churchill.

Our last viewing as we wound down was Episode Two of the 1972 series The Shadow of the Tower. “Episode 2: Power in the Land. Henry consolidates his power when Elizabeth gives birth to Prince Arthur, legitimizing Henry's claim of descent from the legendary monarch.” – IMDB. The conspiracies of a couple of brothers and the clash of the powers of Church and State are also part of the plot. As an amazing instance of Spot the Celebrity John was able to identify the Earl of Lincoln as the father in Pink Floyd’s The Wall (movie, 1982).

We need to start keeping a list of viewings that get suggested every night we watch something else. Kameron thought of The Wind Rises because of the WW2 aviation scenes, and John mentioned that he had never seen Big Fish, which I think he really must. A post like this might help me remember things next time when possibilities are mooted once more.

 

Mistah Barlow, He Dead

Last night, as per our biweekly Movie Night over at my brother John’s, as an October/Halloween theme, we watched the 1979 miniseries, Salem’s Lot. This was a kind of a theme continuation of our watching The Shining (1980) last time. I hadn’t seen the Lot in a long time and was pleased to find that it held up surprisingly well. Perhaps not so surprising when you learn it was directed by Tobe Hooper, a name that meant little to me at the time but who is a horror legend. The show now has an added dimension for me, that of nostalgia for a bygone cultural era. I also found the ‘regular’ vampires to be more frightening than Barlow, the head vampire, whose appearance was based on the 1922 Nosferatu. Perhaps because they were more prevalent and personal, while Barlow looked more like a special effect. Old Nosey was not so ubiquitous or well-known at the time.

We had another ‘undead’ film for our second movie, Black Sunday (1960). I’d been seeing stills from it for years, but never had watched it before. It’s original title in Italian was The Mask of the Demon, and it was largely based on a story by Nikolai Gogol. “The film takes place in Moldavia and tells the story of a witch who is put to death by her brother, only to return two centuries later to seek revenge upon his descendants.” – Wikipedia. It, too, was full of period charms – not necessarily the period where the story takes place, but for a certain period of filmmaking. It was alternately lush and stark with good horror effects and scenography.  Dubbed, of course, but after a bit my mind just blipped over the fact. Full of a vampiric vibe, reportedly to appeal to the same viewers who enjoyed Hammer Film’s 1958 Dracula. John tells me that Mom remembered seeing it in the theater back in the day.