7-Nov-99 What, a movie?
last night we went to the Coolidge Corner theatre with Sue and Richard to see Princess Mononoke. I wish I could say I had taken any initiative, but it was Sue's idea.
I liked the movie a whole lot, especially the imagination in drawing the mythical characters. I don't watch X-Files so Arlene had to tell me that the demon worm growth effect was like the alien disease on that show. The demon boar at the beginning was just about as scary as you could ask for. What don't you want to run into on a dark night? Something big, malevolent, and demonic? Spiders, snakes, worms? Glowing red eyes? Got it all. The night walker was gorgeous. I liked the attention to detail, which worked in a very different sense from Disney animation. I mean, Disney animation is magnificent for attention to a sense of depth, perspective, how things move differently in different layers. This was more often animated by moving characters on a flat background, but there were a lot of extras besides the cast. I particularly liked the variety of birds in the background towards the beginning (as the plot got thicker and you were more interested in it, the background may have been less complex).
All right, I agree that Princess Mononoke herself was not the most important character. She was important enough to rate the title, though. “Princess” is always going to make a better movie title than “Prince”
The plot may have been a little complex and the logic a bit hard to follow. I think there's something in Japanese storytelling that allows for that and that is comfortable with leaving a lot of things unexplained, or explained less fully than in western storytelling. One of the few non-Kurosawa Japanese films I've ever seen was an inflight movie on my way to Japan. I think it was about a washed up actor trying to make a comeback in a samurai movie, but I couldn't follow the story at all. It could have been the subtitles or being up too long traveling that did me in, but I think it was the storytelling style that was just different. OK; that's not a criticism of Princess Mononoke, just an observation. You have to take the movie on its own terms.
The characters were remarkably complex and three-dimensional, especially for cartoon characters. The woman in charge of Irontown was certainly responsible for destroying a lot of environment, but she wasn't all bad. The women operating her ironworks were grateful to her for getting them out of the brothels in the city, and her leper gunsmiths said she was the only person who treated them decently. Even the most duplicitous character, the one responsible for the most trouble, laughed at the end and said, “I give up.” You won't find a Disney villain who'll let you like him that much.
It's not a movie for kids, but not because of the violence. The thing that makes it not a kids movie is the lack of a clear sense of good versus evil -- like the real world.
We went to World's End in Hingham yesterday afternoon. World's End is a nature preserve on a peninsula that pokes into Boston harbor from the south. A little farther east is Nantasket Beach, the barrier beach that is the natural southern breakwater of the harbor. World's End is a natural bird trap in spring migration -- birds fly over it, come to the end and see the water ahead, and stop to rest. We had heard it mentioned in bird reports for years and years before we ever went to look for it. It's a beautiful place to walk, with rocky hills, an open knoll with a view of the harbor, and cliffs overlooking the bay.
Hingham is one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts, only a few years less old than Plymouth. We drove past lots of gorgeous old colonial houses with rows of pumpkins above the front doors.
The Trustees of Reservations, the private conservation organization that owns World's End, had a statewide volunteer day yesterday. We didn't sign up, but recognized it when we got there. People were walking around picking up trash from the trails and beach. I had a plastic bag in my pocket and we picked up what trash we ran in to, but there wasn't an awful lot left. There weren't an awful lot of birds, either. Besides a lot of crows and a few bluejays there were mallards, black ducks, and bufflehead in the water and chickadees and a downy woodpecker in a thicket. When we were almost back to the parking lot we saw a few birds fly down towards the trees along the water and left the path to track them down. I looked over and saw one bird on top of a birdhouse. Holy smokes! A bluebird! That's only about the fifth place we've seen them in this state.
I set a couple of mousetraps in the garage yesterday because I figured that's where the mice get into the house. The traps in the cellar weren't touched, but, sad to say, there was one squashed mouse in the garage this morning. I'm really pretty callous by now about disposing of mice. Still, I wish I didn't have to. You know what the worst part is? Normally I like peanut butter. When I was trapping a lot of mice a year ago, using peanut butter for bait, I completely lost my appetite for it. I had just about recovered.
Charley has two photos in another show at the Cambridge Art Association that had an opening reception this afternoon. We were over there to see it all. There was a lot of excellent photography there in addition to his (paintings and sculpture, too.) One photo I particularly liked was a seascape, maybe sunrise over water. There was nothing darker than a light gray in it -- maybe a value 2 on a 16-color gray scale. You had to look twice to see that there was any image there at all, but it was wonderful. It just shows that sometimes you don't need a full range of tonality to have a good picture.
 |
 |
 |
|
 | |||