Room with a View: FROM UP ON POPPY HILL

Studio Ghibli, the beloved Japanese animation studio best known for its fantasy masterpieces like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Castle in the Sky, has an impressive track record. So sharply observed and deeply felt, these films are special in the way they have an instinctual feel for characters’ internal lives and daily routines expressed through meticulously gorgeous animation that’s beautiful in both design and gesture. When making a film that’s considerably more realistic in approach, like the harrowing World War II drama Grave of the Fireflies or the tender young romance of Whisper of the Heart, this asset can been seen clearly. Take away the fantasy and their films are still full of magic. Ghibli’s latest film to hit American shores is From Up on Poppy Hill, a gentle, observant film with drama kept decidedly small, sweet, and casual. Much like the studio’s earlier human dramas, this is a film that takes plots that could seem stale and lets in fresh air by providing breathing room, space for stillness, pauses of atmosphere and tender emotion.

With a light dusting of nostalgia in the imagery, Poppy Hill takes place in the early 1960s in a small seaside Japanese town. The main character is Umi, a girl who lives with her grandmother and helps run the family’s boarding house. The building contains a number of characters briefly but evocatively glimpsed, a collection of women young and old who encourage one another and are as much friends as landlords and tenants. The film is mainly concerned with the girl’s routine, going to school and rushing home to work. Every morning she runs signal flags up the building’s flagpole, a habit that keeps alive the memory of her father, a sailor who died in the Korean War. She yearns to know more about him, but her mother is away studying in the United States. This develops into a softly, richly felt subplot.

Life moves forward. A tentative romance starts between the girl and a charismatic schoolmate. The boy and girl are feeling the first blushes of puppy love, strong enough to pull them towards each other, but unspoken, so that rather than being together for the sake of being together, they must find other, more practical reasons to meet. Other subplots include the boy’s interest in his family’s past and their schoolmates’ struggle to save their historic clubhouse from certain doom at the hands of the school board. Many of these plot threads center on the kids, the first post-WWII generation, looking to apply knowledge and lessons of the past in their present and future. The film, alive with period music and subtly rendered detail, works calmly around its theme of memory.

What makes all of this work is the patience with which it plays out. One character, dismayed over a new piece of information, bemoans that it’s like something out of a “cheap melodrama,” but the film never feels emotionally chintzy. It’s too willing to take the time to let characters feel a multiplicity of emotions, respond to more than one motivation, feel inner conflict that leaks out into their behaviors. An early moment, so fast you might miss it, is indicative of the film’s typical Ghibli touch for allowing close observation in its animation. Two girls approach the boy-dominated clubhouse and ask a simple question of two boys hard at work. When the boys respond, their cheeks gain subtle bright smudges of red. They’re both excited and embarrassed by the prospect of talking to girls. It’s a nice throwaway detail that’s hardly necessary but makes all the difference.

The film, co-written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro, feels consistent with the studio’s house style of emotionally engaged visual detail. There’s something refreshing about a film that’s so confidently small, so willing to simply sit with its characters in their world and see what happens. Though the narrative gently pulls them along, there’s a sense that it’d be just as well if it didn’t. Per usual, Ghibli delivers an animated film with a sense of place and purpose that unfolds at a welcome unhurried pace. It’s practically a guarantee that even a minor Ghibli effort, as this is, will be better than most animated features you’ll see in a given year.

Left Behind: THIS IS THE END

You can almost see the good version of This is the End within it, which makes it all more disappointing this isn’t that. The concept’s solid. Some celebrities are having a party at James Franco’s house when the apocalypse happens. That’s kind of funny, right? What follows is a film that’s entirely too self-satisfied and cripplingly indulgent, resting for far too long on the audience’s assumed delight at watching recognizable faces play themselves. The only truly apocalyptic aspect of the film is the feeling that we’ve well and truly gone past the point of caring about the umpteenth narrative of stoner manchildren haltingly realizing they need to grow up. If This is the End should represent the end of anything, it should be Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, and the others putting aside this played out character arc once and for all.

Filled with the gentlest of self-critical mockery and hyperbolic play with personas, the film is, for the most part, locked up in Franco’s mansion while fiery Armageddon rages outside. The opening bit of spectacle swallows up a bunch of welcome cameos and scoops up extras in the Rapture, leaving us with Franco, Rogen, Baruchel, Hill, Craig Robinson, and Danny McBride huddled together with dwindling supplies. They fight over survival strategy, have extended comic riffs, and develop spats extrapolated out of their fictional relationships. As is to be expected with this group’s standard R-rated comedy routine, there are endless gross out gags, cultural references both obscure and obvious, and lengthy conversations about every natural bodily function and a few unnatural ones as well. It’s rarely surprising, even at its most unexpected.

This has been written and directed by Rogen and his long-time writing partner Evan Goldberg. It’s pretty clear that every bit of the film is a result of a funny (more likely funny at the time) idea that either they or a member of the cast fumbled their way towards during some session of brainstorming or improvising. The result is an uneven experience, sometimes funny, usually not, as if a sloppy dorm room thought experiment has somehow made it to the big screen largely unchanged. Like, dude, what if the world was ending? And what if we hid in this house? Like, you’d be like this and I’d be like that and, oh man, you know so-and-so would totally die right away. But the difference between engaging in this kind of freewheeling teasing in a hypothetical scenario with your buddies and doing that but for a worldwide audience of moviegoers is that when a major studio bankrolls you, each dumb digression is literalized. You might think suggesting a friend would eventually get possessed and projectile vomit demon juice is a funny idea, but when seen on the screen, there’s a good chance it’ll look like overkill at best, an inside joke at worst. And so it goes here, over and over again.

I’m mostly frustrated with the way the creative energies behind this movie conjure up world-ending stakes and then use them to only poke soft fun at their public personas and circle the same tired types of jokes they’ve been making in film after film for years now.  It could be funny to take a celebrity perspective on disaster. It gets there a couple of times, like when Jonah Hill says he’d expect celebrities to be saved first: “Clooney, Bullock, me, and, then if there’s room, you guys.” But the film dwindles away into disconnected silliness that grows tedious as the claustrophobic minutes tick by, the guys repeating the same basic actions and tics. When the group finally gets out of the house, the energy picks up with the kind of surprises and surprise cameos this thing could’ve used more of. But by then we’re in the last ten or twenty minutes of the picture and it’s all too late. The movie is just a big concept filled up with small ideas, inadvertently saying the only way these guys will grow up is through the intervention of God himself.

Google Hangout: THE INTERNSHIP

The Internship is an amiable hangout movie. It’s little more than a chance to spend time with an appealing cast playing pleasant types. At the center of its appeal is the duo of Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, reteaming for the first time since their successful 2005 comedy Wedding Crashers. They’re both fast talkers, but where Vaughn muscles through with nonstop bravado, Wilson has a spacier syncopation. When both motormouths get up to speed, they find a fine, easy rhythm. This new comedy finds them surrounded by a capable cast that rises ever so slightly above glorified reaction shots in a plot that’s loose to put it generously. And yet I found myself enjoying sitting with this film much more than Crashers, which I’ve always found to be a tad on the grating side. I didn’t realize until I saw this one that my biggest problem with the earlier film was all that pesky plot. Sometimes a good, agreeable hangout is just what’s needed.

As the film begins, Vaughn and Wilson lose their jobs when the company they work for closes. Desperate to find better prospects, they bluff their way into summer internships at Google, where they quickly find themselves bewildered on the wrong side of a generation gap. The interns are placed into teams and the kids – a young manager (Josh Brener), a cute collegiate nerd (Tiya Sircar), a too-cool-for-school dude (Dylan O’Brien), and a self-conscious, socially awkward computer whiz (Tobit Raphael) – who get stuck with the old guys are none to happy about it. They’re an awkward bunch, but if you suspect they just might eventually, reluctantly learn to love each other and work as a team by using each member’s best skills you’d be on the right track. The team that wins the most points in various challenges over the summer, everything from coding to Quidditch, will win jobs at Google. Nods toward typical slobs (our protagonists) versus snobs (led by Max Minghella) plotting, as well as the basic competitive drive, make up the movie’s loose throughline.

It’s not often you find a light, summery comedy about how terrible the job market is. For a while, I remained unconvinced that it would work. But a funny thing happened as I sat there and let the movie play out: it won me over. The way the script by Vaughn and Jared Stern locates the anxieties of the two leads right inside the generation gap – they’re too young to ignore technology, too old to fully “get” it – becomes a somewhat productive dialogue. They grow progressively open-minded about younger people and new ways of doing things, while their teammates grow more open-minded about the value of input from people with more of an old school skill set. It’s a soft movie, but a few of the points it dances around are more perceptive than I anticipated. There’s a nice moment where Wilson and Vaughn chastise the younger interns for being so cynical about their future careers and when the response comes – “Do you even know what it’s like to be 21 today?” with a college degree no longer guaranteeing a job, if it ever was – they’re actually taken aback and consider it.

None of this would work without the cast. Director Shawn Levy, of Cheaper by the Dozen and Date Night, keeps the scenes casual and sociable, letting the ensemble fall into comfortable grooves to fill the scripted sequences with a bit of a loose feeling. Vaughn and Wilson have a relaxed chemistry that’s very appealing. Various supporting roles filled by the likes of Rose Byrne, Aasif Mandvi, and Josh Gad are fine bits of color around the edges. I was most taken with the work of O’Brien and Sircar, two of the college-aged interns who spar and banter with the main guys. Their winning performances are charming and feel like they’re circling some sort of generational truth, mediating their experience through smart phones and admitting to a technologically enabled imagination that’s wilder and more experienced than their real world lives to date.

This isn’t anything great, but it’s sweeter than expected. It’s refreshing to find a big studio comedy that’s just plain nice. (It’s also likely the only Hollywood comedy you’ll see in some time to purposefully allude to a Langston Hughes poem.) The movie hates jerks, lets characters feel bad about bad decisions, and angles for encouragement and hope above all else. It’s miles more humane and watchable than Ted or The Hangover Part II or any other corrosive-yet-popular comedy of the past several years. If this core decency leads the film into its biggest misstep, so be it. The approach to its setting feels miscalculated, so dewy-eyed about how great it is to work at Google – just shy of Wonka in the whimsy department, if the production design filled with pedal-powered conference tables and nap pods is to be believed – that it shoots past elaborate product placement and ends up feeling like it’s having a goof. Still, this is a movie that’s enjoyable to be around. Simply spending time together may not actually solve generation gaps, but it’s nice to think so for a couple hours.

Panic Attack: THE PURGE

The Purge is a sociological thought experiment in the guise of a home invasion horror movie. That wouldn’t be so bad if the central thesis weren’t so ridiculous and obvious. The film imagines that by 2022, the United States will have dropped crime rates down to record lows by instituting an annual catharsis. For the next twelve hours, as of the start of the movie, all crime is legal. (“Including murder,” the emergency alert broadcast helpfully (?) reminds.) And just what does writer-director James DeMonaco think would result from this hypothetical time of total immunity? Nothing good, that’s for sure. This imagined world accommodates a night of chaos in return for a completely peaceful 364 days. The movie posits not so controversially that a society without rules of any kind would probably be bad.

Ethan Hawke stars as a wildly successful home security salesman. That makes sense. I guess if the country is going to explode in looting and murder one night a year, the sales of home security installations would naturally skyrocket. As the movie starts he and his wife (Lena Headey) have holed up in their large home with their daughter (Adelaide Kane) and son (Max Burkholder) to wait out the purge. It’s an issue of class. Those who can afford the protection ride out the night just fine. Those who can’t afford to keep themselves safe – the homeless, the poor, and the marginalized – are the ones who end up dead by dawn. Talk about class warfare. As you might suspect, things inevitably go wrong for Hawke and his family.

It all starts when the son shows some compassion and opens the steel barricades to let a homeless man (Edwin Hodge) hide from a roving band of purging youths. The clean cut, prep schoolers stride up to the front door and demand the return of their prey. Their blonde, blue-eyed leader (Rhys Wakefield) presses his face into a security camera and says it’s their right to kill the man. He’s not contributing to society and they have pent up violent impulses. Win-win. The young man speaks with the entitled swagger of a spoiled kid who it’s easy to imagine thinks reading Ayn Rand has explained the way the world actually works to him. The crowd stalks around the mansion’s perimeter, banging on windows and steel doors. They shout an ultimatum: give up the homeless man or they’ll come in and kill them all.

The tidy plot quickly grows tedious as DeMonaco tries to wring much tension out of the power getting cut and the family and their unexpected guest wandering around in the dark, hiding from each other, getting separated, and fretting about what to do. It feels like much of the runtime is given over to Hawke and Headey apparently getting lost in their own home running down dim hallways, waving flashlights, and shouting endlessly for one or both of their children. Charlie! Zoey! After awhile I felt like maybe if I shouted too we could find them and get on with it. (Only a sense of good theater manners kept me quiet.) The danger should feel real. It would be terrifying to be trapped in your own home with a total stranger hiding somewhere in there with you, consequence-free violence and certain death awaiting you just outside your own front door. But the whole thing feels so ephemeral, a clearly ridiculous concept embraced only as an inciting incident without thinking through the total implications of the central idea.

What kind of government would set up this purge? We hear fleeting references to “the new Founding Fathers” and see widespread acceptance of the purge. How did we get here? Whose purposes does this really serve? There’s all kind of intriguing political allegory that could easily be found, but instead the whole thing grows muddled. Hawke grabbing increasingly more powerful weaponry to fend off the purging hooligans gathering outside feels like a stand-your-ground apologia, where armed good guys struggle against, well, armed bad guys, and no matter what anyone does, the cops won’t care come sunrise. Meanwhile, the us vs. them, haves vs. have-nots subtext that rapidly becomes simply text reads as a hyperbolic argument against total deregulation. This is nothing more than a dimly lit, repetitively dumb little thriller that fails to satisfy politically or on its own genre terms.

Family Plot: STORIES WE TELL

Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell is not a documentary about her mother’s life story. It is a documentary about the stories about her mother’s life. That’s a key distinction. Rather than becoming a simple biographical exploration, Polley puts family members and family friends in front of her camera to tell their recollections and impressions of her mother, actress and casting director Diane Polley, who died of cancer in 1990. This is a movie about how a family reconstructs the memory of a lost loved one and how a family defines itself by the stories they tell about themselves. It’s achingly personal and inherently sloppily complex, but, recognizing that personal detail is just that, personal, Sarah Polley has created a film about itself as well. She reconstructs the facts, as best she can, but also engages both implicitly and explicitly with the question of who can ever really know the truth. Each person involved in the film has the truth they know, with which they’re, if not comfortable, than at least used to. In making the film, Polley, as generous as she is in allowing for each interview to speak and be heard, has inevitably put just one more interpretation into the world.

Though all people, one assumes, are carrying some number of secrets, it is soon apparent that Diane had perhaps a few that are bigger than most. We start with her husband, the person who presumably knew her best. As the film begins, Polley invites that man, Michael, the man who raised her, into a recording studio. She places a thick stack of pages filled with writing in front of him. He begins to recite what we quickly come to understand is his story of his relationship with Diane. He becomes our narrator, linking the varied memories revealed by Polley’s brothers and sisters, aunts and family friends. We learn about Diane through their eyes, but it begins to take on the feeling of literary analysis. To hear them talk about her is to hear discussions similar to what one might hear in an undergraduate course discussing a novel’s main character. Repeated motifs of her life are picked apart for their implications. Actions become rich with ambiguity. Emotion and ambition, spoken and, more often, unspoken, are read carefully. Of course, by virtue of being a real person and not text on the page, these readings are mutable and fallible in ways for which only subjective personal experience can account.

The film is a massive, tricky undertaking that anyone who has sat around a table with loved ones and found contradicting memories behind famous family stories can relate to. That Stories We Tell not only doesn’t fall apart, but grows richer and more intriguing as it goes along is something to be commended. It feels long, but Polley earns her film’s pokiness and digressions. As the story, augmented by archival footage and strategic reenactments, comes into clearer focus, as some mysteries become not so mysterious at all, as the facts lead only to unanswerable questions, it’s clear that this family’s story is one that is both complicated to an observer and simple to those living it. It’s only when they’re forced to stop and think about it, by revelations they’ve recently discovered and through the act of making this documentary, that the attempt to draw a clean narrative arc fails and they’re left seeing the complications of it all.

In the end, those who knew Diane are left wondering, “Why did she do what she did?” and “What was she feeling?” While these questions are worth pondering, they are also meant most for her family alone. Polley makes no effort to solve these unsolvable riddles. Instead, she concludes with a section of film devoted to the participants reflecting upon the very nature of the film. One man, in particular, is a bit reluctant to allow his version of the story to be juxtaposed with others’. His is the version of the story that fills him with satisfaction since, after all, it is the way he experienced his life as it happened. In the end, it is the man who raised her who says that, as writer and director, it is Sarah Polley herself who is controlling this story. Her camera has taken in all views. But by deciding who gets heard saying what when, she has ultimate say. This is an unresolved tension that Polley leaves open, a nagging and tantalizing loose end every bit as rough and deeply personal as the stories her family tells.

To Live Her Life: FRANCES HA

Frances Ha is a trifle – loose, casual, light – but a rich one, full of unexpected layers of sweetness and surprise complexity. Writer-director Noah Baumbach, he of more emotionally unpleasant, though no less thrilling, character pieces like The Squid and the Whale and Greenberg, brings his rawness to a character who is so charming and resilient that it’s hard not to like her. The film follows Frances (Greta Gerwig), a 27-year-old underemployed New Yorker who bounces around small apartments, hangs out with her best friend (Mickey Sumner), goes to parties, makes some money at a rapidly dead-ending job, and circles endlessly for a good way to improve her position in life. She, as one character matter-of-factly lets her know, is old without being grown-up.

Shot in appealing black and white photography and set to a jazzy soundtrack that draws upon French New Wave composers Georges Delerue and Jean Constantin as well as great uses of pop like David Bowie’s “Modern Love” and Hot Chocolate’s “Every1’s a Winner,” the film pulses with an energy that has to skip along to keep up with Frances and her aimless restlessness. She’s continually pushing towards her goals of self-sufficient adulthood, a drive she will usually undercut through some combination of shortsighted thinking and self-doubt. This gives every scene, so carefully observed and precisely performed despite a loose tone, a near-imperceptible anxiety, even when she’s making moves towards some degree of comfort, rooming with a friend or becoming buddies with two sometimes-charming wannabe artists (Adam Driver and Michael Zegen) with lifestyles bankrolled reluctantly, they claim, by generous family.

Often very funny, the film gets big laughs not necessarily out of jokes, but out of situations and interpersonal dynamics so sharply drawn that recognition and empathy spark chuckles. A scene in which Frances finds herself at a dinner party with more accomplished peers plays humorously off of the ways in which she stretches to ingratiate herself as an intellectual – not-so-casually referencing how much she reads – and failing when defaulting to post-collegiate gossip and introspection so haphazardly philosophical she starts to fear she sounds stoned and says as much. The movie’s setting amid those privileged to live lives of such purposeful searching touches upon issues of class and economic conditions, but Baumbach neither cheapens them nor lets them overwhelm the film’s modest character sketch goals and good humor. When Frances hesitates at the ATM when confronted with the fee to be charged, it’s resonant without being heavy-handed. And that’s the way Baumbach and his cast operates here, with a film so light and enjoyable that the resonances and comedy appear casually, naturally.

This is the kind of film that’s a great delight mainly (though not only) for the way it introduces us to an interesting, appealing character. As played by Gerwig, who is also the co-writer, Frances is a person we like spending time with and want to see succeed. Throughout the film’s episodes, she seems to drift away from her goals, finding her way forward through trial and error, but Gerwig deploys winning misdirection in her encounters. Frances may be desperate, even depressed at times, but she diverts her acquaintances’ and colleagues’ attention with affected optimism that’s maybe truer than even she believes. Gerwig has a great physicality here, matching her winning line readings and occasional monologues, beautifully precise and unfussy turns of phrase, with a sense of movement and nonverbal reaction that finds exactly the right emotion to communicate. Gerwig’s performance is the kind that pulls focus without distracting: a real star turn.

It’s refreshing to see a film that takes women seriously by treating female friendship as real nuanced relationships instead of secondary concerns to romantic relationships with men. Frances interacts with her friends with a mixture of love and antagonism, competition and compassion, a mixture that shifts, grows, and evolves. Perhaps not since Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco has there been a film so truthful about this. Frances Ha is a film about a young woman striving towards a better life without once feeling the need to make her future contingent upon her romantic prospects. Instead, she simply exists amongst a group of people in a film that provides each and every character with a generous sense of a life lived. Some gentle fun may be poked at broad generalizations – yuppies, parents, hipsters – but each character comes into the picture with a past unspoken and leaves with a sense that their life continues beyond the frame. It’s a sharply written comedy with a light touch, but one that rings with truth.

Vanished: NOW YOU SEE ME

If you had stopped the heisting magician thriller Now You See Me halfway through, I’d have been just as happy with the movie’s conclusion. Actually, I’d have been a smidge happier, since that would mean I got to leave the theater an hour earlier. Everything about the movie feels arbitrary to its core. If, at the midway point, you’d asked me to explain who the characters are, I’d have been at a loss. They’re given absolutely no characterization outside of what the plot demands of them, which is very little and up to change with the whims of the twists. If you’d asked me to describe the plot, I would’ve vaguely muttered something about stolen money and investigating cops. What happens makes little to no sense in the moment and less when you stop to think about it. By the movie’s conclusion, it’s easy to tell that Important Things are cohering, but awfully hard to figure out why or why we should care.

Within the first few scenes, it’s clear the movie has already failed Siskel’s lunch test: Is this movie more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch? When you see the names in the cast, it’s easy to think a filmmaker can start with this much talent at his disposal and end up with at least a mildly diverting film. (You’d be wrong, by the way.) Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, and Dave Franco play magicians who are given the blueprints for an amazing trick under mysterious circumstances. Michael Caine plays their bankroller (and a reminder that The Prestige is a much better magic thriller). Mark Ruffalo and Melanie Laurent are detectives who enter the picture when the magicians appear to heist millions of Euros out of a Parisian bank during their Vegas act. Finally, there’s Morgan Freeman as a magician debunker who exists herein as Mr. Explanation. I knew something had gone horribly wrong when I actually forgot he was in the movie when he wasn’t in a scene.

The arrogantly nonsensical plotting from screenwriters Ed Solomon, Edward Ricourt, and Boaz Yakin does nothing to explain why these magicians are suddenly famous. Their act looks lousy with terrible patter and a sparse collection of cheap tricks, the worst of which are clearly aided by CGI. But, they’re famous nonetheless and though we never get a good sense of their personalities or how they relate to each other beyond what we surmise about the actors themselves from other roles and public personas, they’re supposed to be, well, I don’t know. Are the magicians our protagonists? Maybe. Their stunt ends with the possibly stolen money rained down on the audience. How very Robin Hood of them. But then there’s the dogged detectives, who have a slight edge in the sensible, stable characterization department. I liked them more, but couldn’t make heads or tails of what the movie was trying to do with them.

I’d have actually gone along with it if it gave the actors more memorable reasons for doing what they do. Maybe the problem isn’t that it’s nuts, but that it’s not nearly nuts enough. Either way, I sat dumbfounded by how little I cared. Director Louis Leterrier, who started his career with promising actioners like The Transporter and The Incredible Hulk before hitting Hollywood junk like Clash of the Titans, films Now You See Me in a blur of fast-moving images that can’t move fast enough to outrun the looming sense of unsatisfyingly unstable plotting. Scattershot plot points, aggressively explained shrugs of twists, and nothing characters all contribute to a singularly mindless two-hour sit in a theater. It’s not that it doesn’t make sense to me; it’s that the movie can’t even be bothered to come up with parameters for itself with which it could make sense. At least this movie about magic manages to pull two good vanishing acts. The first was when my money disappeared from my wallet. The second was when the movie’s specifics left my mind almost entirely even a mere 12 hours after leaving the theater.