Topic: The Movie Thread

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Watched two movies recently. The newest Makoto Shinkai film Weathering With You and Sam Mendes' Oscar buzzy 1917.

Weathering With You is... a film I'm conflicted about. On one hand, like all of Shinkai's films (even the short, low-budget ones he made at home), it's beautifully animated. Moreso than any of his previous works, Weathering is a work of pure visual art, making every second of this nearly two-hour film entrancing to look at. The attention to detail in the environments is nearly photorealistic this time around, and simple sequences of, say, rain hitting the neon-lit pavement of dark Tokyo streets (and, good god, will you see a lot of rain in this film) will leave one gawking in wonder at the sheer artistry on display. The soundtrack, prominently featuring songs from indie rock band Radwimps, whose music also featured heavily in Shinkai's previous film, is mostly excellent. The film is filled with realistic, likable personalities, and it's fun to watch them interacting on-screen.

The issues I have relate partially to the concept of the film, partially to the tone, and partially to the structure of it overall. In Weathering, we follow a young runaway named Hodaka who tries to survive on the unforgiving streets of Tokyo before being taken in Keisuke Suga, a man who had saved his life on the trip there and who, we come to find, runs a small publication dedicated to yellow journalism. The city of Tokyo (and, presumably, other parts of the world) is suffering from an endless rainfall (while the actual origin of this phenomenon isn't given much focus in the film, it seems to be some sort of new, abnormal climate phenomenon). After being taken in by Keisuke and helping him to write for the paper, Hodaka comes across a young girl named Hina, a so-called weather maiden or "sunshine girl," who is able to use mysterious powers to temporarily will away the rain. Hodaka convinces Hina, who is struggling to pay the bills for herself and her younger brother after the death of her only parent, to start a business and use her business to help enrich herself.

There's obviously more that happens, but this is the basic setup of the film. Unlike most of the auteur's films, it's a bit of an involved set-up, and it takes awhile to get going. There's too much going on thematically, between the implicit social satire, the weird mythology surrounding weather maidens, the elaborate climate change analogy (an element of the film that's just sort of hand-waved away at the end without much consideration), as well as at least one momentous moral decision made near the end that makes me wish the film had reflected to some degree on its wholesale rejection of utilitarianism.

What's here is certainly interesting, but it doesn't really help the plot. Previous Shinkai films work so well because they're always about people in love who find some sort of overwhelming social or natural force coming between them. That... exists here as well, to some extent, but it's much less totalizing and, as a result, much less impactful.

Which leads me into my biggest issue with the film: it's almost completely lacking in the overwhelming sense of longing and loss that has typified his work since the very beginning. Part of this is, as has been mentioning, the lack of stakes in this film compared to a lot of his other previous work (particular Your Name and Voices of a Distant Star, but also, in a more grounded and perhaps devastating sense, 5 Centimeters Per Second). More generally, though, the sense of 'mono no aware' generally found in his work is almost nowhere to be seen here. The sense of deep loneliness, pain, and longing for connection that forms the emotional core of his work is somewhat muted here (beyond the very beginning of the film, when we find out how tough it is to survive in Tokyo as a runaway with nothing to his name), and the result is that the film's climax doesn't smack you with the same emotional impact as most of his other work (although I can, perhaps, do without something so emotionally potent that it ends up putting me in a melancholic funk for days on end, like after the first time I viewed 5 Centimeters Per Second).

I've tried to avoid mentioning Your Name to this point, but, honestly, the film practically invites invitations to Shinkai's breakout 2016 masterwork. Both films feature plots that mix elements of Eastern mysticism, teen romance, coming-of-age dramas, magical realism, and disaster flicks. Both films feel distinctly YA-oriented. The Radwimps music, which so helped to distinguish Your Name from Shinkai's previous work, also perpetuates the feeling that Weathering is more in line with that film than anything else Shinkai has made in the past. Most importantly, though, Weathering's plot structure is very similar to the basic structure of Your Name, despite the content not really justifying it. I think, despite his amazing success, Shinkai will only wither as a talent if he doesn't allow himself to escape from the influence of his previous film. It also really doesn't help that, as decent as it is (I know my post sounds negative, but I really did quite enjoy my time with this film), Weathering fares poorly when compared to Your Name, which was, in turns, funny, deeply romantic, brilliantly crafted (the mid-film twist was so devastating and well-done), and ultimately far more than the sum of its parts.

This impression sound distinctly negative, but I don't really mean it to. Weathering With You is a beautifully animated and deeply enjoyable little film that I'd recommend to almost anyone. It's better than the vast majority of films released in a given year (and certainly a good deal better than several of Shinkai's own underwhelming mid-career films, which often lacked the sense of identity that made 5 Centimeters and Voices so memorable), and I had a smile on my face almost the entire time I watched it. But, as a fan of Shinkai's work, and especially coming on the heels of one of the greatest animated films of all time, I feel like one was just not quite as good as I was hoping it'd be. Take that less as a condemnation of this particular film and more of a sign of my deep respect for Shinkai as an artist.

As for 1917... look, the film is going to win awards, and I'm cool with that. It's certainly interesting enough. But the film feels gimmicky. For those who don't know, it's a WW1 drama about two English soldiers who are tasked with crossing a large amount of terrain to call off an attack that'll otherwise lead to 1500 or so troops being ambushed and slaughtered by German forces. That's the setup for this film, but it's also the bulk of the plot, if it can even be said to have one. The gimmick behind this film is that the entire thing feels like it's composed of one unbroken shot throughout (like other films that do this, of course, it's actually not, and clever editing is used to hide the seams), sort of like the recent God of War game. I suppose the intention was to immerse the viewer in the immediacy of the setting, which I initially hoped it might, but the effect, instead, was sort of the opposite: the gimmick robbed the film of any sense of potency or reality for me. When characters are forced to travel long distances, you need broken shots to impart a sense of time passing without it happening in real time. As it stands, the main character makes a journey that's supposedly 8 or so hours over the course of less than two real-time hours. The effect of this, between the constantly shifting scenery and the need for stuff to happen in lieu of things like plot or character development (there's a lot of talking in this film, but I left it feeling like these people were still pure strangers to me), is that the film feels like... a live-action Naughty Dog game, maybe? Or a WW1-themed amusement park ride? The film hurriedly shuffles the main character (and the viewer along with him) from set-piece to set-piece. Stuff happens, things blow up, people die, but it all felt supremely staged and artificial to me.

Don't get me wrong: as a technical achievement, it's fairly impressive. The sets, makeup, and whatnot are impressive, and the film is filled with striking imagery. But it all seems a bit hollow by the end. It attempts to top the horrifying, immanent experience of war that was so successfully communciated by Christopher Nolan's excellent Dunkirk, but the impression I had, by the end, was that the director had no understanding of how to get inside the minds of his characters, and, as a result, he left me feeling a bit cold by the conclusion.

@nessisonett