Change Your Image
rampant1970
Reviews
Little White Lie (2014)
Who am I today? Better than yesterday, not as good as tomorrow.
Lacey Schwartz is a filmmaker inspired by confusion about her own origins. Her film draws a gently curved line from her birth in 1970s New York to her wedding. Along the way she discovers her true racial, ethnic, and genetic identity. She is a strong, creative, Black Jewish woman in America, who embraces her family, culture, and community.
I watched this film on PBS's Independent Lens. Many thanks to their team for bringing another great story to my TV.
I admire Ms. Schwartz's honesty and the care she takes in showing the mile markers along her journey. Some events are obviously painful or discouraging, but Lacey's integrity and kindness keep her family bound by love and understanding. She walks a fine line between being a daughter and a filmmaker with grace.
As a child of divorce, I particularly admire Ms. Schwartz's persistence to achieve an open understanding with her now divorced parents and their extended family, including her husband's own diverse family. Her wedding certainly was a joyous event and a very effective and affecting climax to the film.
Finally, after watching this film, I got a chance to think, "This is what America can be." And that makes me happy, because we all can draw strength from this film and its maker. Happy Martin Luther King Day 2016, America.
E Haku Inoa: To Weave a Name (2012)
Mother-and-Child Reunion
Christen Hepuakoamana'a Marquez has made a beautiful film that educates the viewer on the Hawaiian culture and shows how a mother and daughter reconnected through patience, understanding, and sharing their heritage. Christen's Hawaiian mother and Caucasian father met when her father was working as an architect in Honolulu. After marrying and having three children, the family situation became difficult because Christen's mother, Elena, developed worrying symptoms of her previously diagnosed schizophrenia. The family subsequently separated, and Christen's father, the three children, and Elena's twin sister Linda moved to the mainland, leaving Elena on Oahu.
As the film begins, Christen and her brothers have not visited their mother for about ten years. They are all proud Hawaiian-Americans, but mostly live as mainlanders. Christen feels disconnected from her heritage. Christen's first step to prepare for her film was to study hula in NYC. Next, she interviews her Auntie Linda to learn about her youth as a hula student and performer with Christen's mother. Elena is a Kumu Hula, an advanced Hawaiian dancer who becomes a teacher after having completed intense training and testing. Christen realizes that if her mother will teach her three adult children the meaning of the Hawaiian-language names she gave them, it will be a culturally significant and symbolic step to repair their family bond. Christen's 66-character Hawaiian name is abbreviated in her professional name above.
Meanings of most western names are obscured from their linguistic or cultural origins. Few people appreciate what a cooper, a harper, or a mason represented to a town in England, but they name their children for them. When people ignorantly name their kids Apple or Blue, they discard ancestral names that could link children to their heritage. Other cultures like the Hawaiian culture use names to explicitly define hopes and aspirations for children.
Christen also interviews her father and brothers to introduce them and give her father's perspective on their history, Elena's illness, and the family's breakup. The beginning section of the film is a succinct view of a family who bear the traces of past trauma.
Christen and her brothers visit their mother on Oahu for a couple weeks. The visit is good, but not cordial, and while Elena accepts her sons and reveals their names' meanings, she does not explain Christen's Hawaiian name. Christen's identity as a filmmaker seems to be a barrier between them. The constant presence of the camera may have been intellectually acceptable to Elena, but I don't believe she was emotionally prepared to have her day-to-day life exposed. Also, Christen tries to start helping her mother clean out her apartment, since she allowed clutter to overtake her life while obsessively researching family genealogy and planning a future family reunion in exhaustive detail. Christen's implied criticism of her mother creates conflict in an already tense situation.
Christen goes back to the mainland unfulfilled. However, she is not deterred from her goals. She does further research and preparation, and later returns to Oahu to stay with her mother for three months. She is less confrontational and more engaging with Elena. She listens carefully and accepts her mother's limitations.
One key to Christen's preparation was to learn a Hawaiian language chant intended to ask a Kumu Hula to accept an apprentice. Christen performs this chant for her mother successfully, but Elena does not give formal acknowledgment of her chant by giving another chant in return. Christen shows herself as a willing supplicant, but Elena does not completely accept her.
Christen interviews her mother's doctors from her dark period by phone, and also consults a Hawaiian cultural leader. She learns Elena experienced debilitating side effects from psychotropic drugs and refused to resume taking the pills after the birth of her third child. Conflict with her family, doctors, and social workers increased her symptoms and led to the family breakup.
The film treats mental illness inquisitively and realistically. There is a connotative difference to me between managing a chronic illness and treating an acute disease. Elena's experience with her illness has taught her to manage her life, but she has rejected western medicine's attempt to "cure" her by suppressing her personality with drugs.
The Hawaiian leader tells Christen that she must accept her duty as a Hawaiian woman to inherit her mother's legacy and be a responsible bearer of Hawaiian culture. Elena has waited for her daughter to desire and accept her legacy.
Two happy events advance the rising action of the film. Elena and Christen have a great day visiting Kawai, a friend from Elena's hula life twenty years ago. Christen sees her mother as a happy, fulfilled, and completely engrossed Kumu Hula. Kawai's friendship with Elena reveals her potential as a teacher that was overwhelmed by her mental illness and obsessive tendencies.
Another climax comes when Christen accompanies Elena to visit her other four brothers and sisters on the Big Island. It is Elena's first airplane trip in decades, and the reunion is very happy for all. We see Christen and Elena in a smiling crowd of extended family hopeful for closer ties in the future.
After returning to her mother's apartment on Oahu, Christen brings her own handwritten translation of her Hawaiian name to her mother. It is lyrical and beautiful. Elena sees that her daughter has correctly understood her Hawaiian identity represented in her name. Elena complements Christen and accepts her more lovingly than before.
I think Elena accepts Christen's identity as a filmmaker and the gift that this film gives the world. Christen started with the intent to help her family and to responsibly illustrate Hawaiian culture to a wider audience. This filmmaker succeeds by showing her audience how she broke down barriers of time and distance to reunite herself and her brothers with their mother and their extended family.
Gake no ue no Ponyo (2008)
Ponyo is very lovable
Ponyo is a beautiful animated film with some dark undertones. It features a kid-sized story of longing and love with ecological implications, but it is not preachy. Hayao Miyazaki has fused Andersen's Little Mermaid with Japan's native myths and his trademark steam punk flights of fancy, and the result is very rewarding. There are some scary moments of oceanside storms and flooding, but they are thrilling, not horrific.
If you've ever wanted to run with the waves along the shore, ride on a jellyfish as an elevator, completely transform yourself, or make a friend for life, Ponyo is a fable for you.
The Amazing Screw-On Head (2005)
Calling Screw-On Head! We need you!
If you missed Amazing Screw-On Head from Sci-Fi channel, then rent, buy or download it now! This short animated film is brilliant, hilarious, and perfectly employs the visual textures and grimy, baroque aesthetic of Mike Mignola's world. It uses elements of Lovecraft, Universal Monsters, steampunk mecha, and Wild Wild West to plunge the viewer into a completely absorbing adventure.
Amazing Screw-On Head is stylistically superior to both the 2004 live-action Hellboy and the 2006 Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms. This production has more in common with Mignola's concept work on Bram Stoker's Dracula, Blade II, and Disney's Atlantis. His monsters are both horrific and lovable, his hero is upright (when attached to his body), and his villains are truly sinister.
Attn Cartoon Network and Sci-Fi: Screw-On Head should be a template for future Hellboy and BPRD animated specials.
Kaze no tani no Naushika (1984)
Miyazaki is the master
Please vote high for Nausicaä, and get it into the list of top IMDb animated films. This film has a great average rating, but it needs more votes!
Parental Advisory: This film is not for young children. The MPAA wasn't kidding: "Rated PG for violence." Please rent or buy Nausicaä, and give your teenagers something to think about.
Nausicaä was my first Miyazaki or Studio Ghibli film, and it broadened my horizons. Miyazaki-san and the best of Japanese animation are on par with Disney's Fantasia as the most creative, most beautiful animation ever produced. Thanks to Miyazaki, I am more a fan of animation today than I was at age 10.
Studio Ghibli stories are fascinating for me as an American with no direct window into Japanese culture. They draw archetypes from a rich mythos completely separate from European culture to challenge your assumptions and your view of life.
Nausicaä has a completely compelling heroine, the requisite cute animal sidekick, brilliant steam-age technology mixed with magic, and a message. Some of my friends find the environmental and anti-war themes of Nausicaä to be heavy-handed, but I think allegory is more effective than persuasion.
Think about it this way --- which is a more memorable criticism of war --- the nightly casualty figures from Vietnam or Iraq, or a grieving family at Arlington, a photo of a naked Viet girl running from a napalm attack, and The Wall. Would you rather hear about the perils of environmental crime from Erin Brockovich or Al Gore?
In the late 80's, four films affected me to the degree that I was taken aback for hours after watching them --- Gandhi, Matewan, Testament, and Nausicaä. I felt the impact of each of these stories on individual characters and on nations; I saw the truth in them.
Many thanks to Miyazaki-san for Nausicaä. She ranks high among his greatest gifts to us.