Film Review: The Squid and the Whale

Rgh. Neighbour's smoking is keeping me awake. Maybe I'll be sleepier in 20 minutes. Maybe she'll stop.

Over the weekend we rented The Squid and the Whale. Excellent movie. It's based on the director's childhood, as the son of a writer-couple who divorced in the mid-80s. A fair bit of family dysfunctionality, as well as teen awkwardness, including the older brother who plagiarizes Pink Floyd at a school talent show (as he explains later, "I felt I could've written it, so the fact that I didn't is merely academic"). The father is a blowhard elitist who has passed his career peak; whose personality has rubbed off too much on the older son. The mother is somewhat overly-disclosing, and quite fed up with living with her (ex-)husband. Some wonderful lines between the two of them. ("Him: All that work I did at the end of our marriage, making dinners, cleaning up, being more attentive. It never was going to make a difference, was it? You were leaving no matter what. Her: You never made a dinner. Him: ...I made burgers that time you had pneumonia. Her: [laughs] Burgers.)

Less whiny than Woody Allen, and at least as biting humour, with lots and lots of scenes in Manhattan and Brooklyn that made me nostalgic.

Film Review: Howl's Moving Castle

I'm not quite sleepy yet, so another film review.

Howl's Moving Castle is... probably better cinematically than Castle in the Sky and not quite as good as Spirited Away. In my opinion, at least. Miyazaki is a visual genius. The war scenes in particular... were clearly by someone who had lived through air raids. And the flowingly organic machinery were just beautiful.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. HMC is a romance fantasy, along the vague lines of Beauty and the Beast except most of the characters are cursed at one point or another with different needs to be met in order to be freed. At the same time it's the story of an adopted family running from a warring Wizard Queen. Running in a castle on spindly stick legs. Lots of fun, that castle.

In addition to really fun visuals, it has very well done voices by Jean Simmons (Grandma Sophie), Christian Bale (Howl), Lauren Bacall (Witch of the Waste), and Billy Crystal (as Calcifer, the incredibly cute but powerful fire-demon). I don't usually note who does voies for an animated film, but these actors seemed particularly well-suited.

So, why didn't I like this as much as Spirited Away? The plot, in the last third, seemed to unravel, and the last 5 minutes felt like a letdown. It was particularly a frustrating to me because the story seems to fall apart relatively shortly after a breathtaking scene involving tiny shooting stars falling and skittering across the waves... Dunno, maybe if I see it again, it will be less frustrating.

Yes, worth seeing if you like anime.