A heron, a TV play, a doll, and a corpse: recent viewing

Perhaps it says something about how fast the cinema-to-streaming route moves that I have three 2023 movies in today’s post. Though I caught THE BOY AND THE HERON (2023) in the theater last month, as the one movie that fit my and TYG’s schedule that weekend. Fortunately this Hayao Miyazaki film was worth it.

It’s WW II and young Mahito and his widowed father have moved out of Tokyo to escape American bombing. Dad’s remarried so Mahito has to share the house with his pregnant stepmom — at which point I figured this would be a gentle, heartwarming fantasy on the lines of My Neighbor Tortoro but nope. Instead, a strange talking heron shows up, taking a spooky interest in the kid and eventually leads him into another world where Mom may still be alive. At this point it gets just as weird as Spirited Away, though not so strange visually (TYG and I discussed whether this film is equally weird for the Japanese audience or if it’s playing on tropes they’d recognize). With Christian Bale as the father, Gemma Chan as the stepmother, Dave Bautista voicing the King of Parakeets and Mark Hamill as a mysterious old man. Excellent. “Mahito has become a little budgie!”

While I like a lot of Wes Anderson’s work, ASTEROID CITY (2023) fell completely flat for me. The introduction informs us this is a 1955 TV play (live TV drama was a common thing in the medium’s early years — the much superior Vast of Night has a similar opening) about the eponymous science camp, the parents of the kids in attendance, government officials watching the young researchers and OMG men from outer space! The intentional artificiality of the set-up (reflected in the sets, which I admit are great) completely turned me off to this — after about 40 minutes I found I could go into the kitchen for a snack without any need to pause it. Despite having Ed Norton, Tom Hanks, Steve Carrell, Adrian Brody, Margot Robie and Liev Schrieber in the cast I could have done without it; The Drowsy Chaperone had much more fun being meta about its material. And minor language note, nobody was calling smart kids “brainiacs” in 1955. “I’ve got six and a half minutes before my next line and I have a question I need to ask — am I doing it right?”

Margot Robie is BARBIE (2023), or more precisely Stereotypical Barbie — not an astronaut, judge, doctor, IT professional, etc. — who’s blissfully happy in Barbieland until she finds herself haunted by thoughts of death. Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon) suggests it’s bleeding in from Robie’s real-world owner, which Robie finds bizarre — as Barbie dolls liberated all women to be anything they want, what could possibly be disturbing her? Still, Robie heads into the real world only to discovers that Barbies have not, in fact, accomplished gender equality; worse, Ken (Ryan Gosling) becomes fascinated by this construct called “patriarchy” and decides to import it back to Barbieland.

I did not expect this film to kick off with a parody of 2001 (you have to see it to believe it) but it does, and proceeds from there in a mix of Lego-movie type unreality, humor and sharply pointed feminism, particularly America Ferrera venting about the narrow path for women. Greta Gerwig delivers a great movie with Helen Mirren as narrator, Will Ferrell as head of Mattel (“We had a female CEO once, in the 1990s.”) and Michael Cera as Ken’s Friend Alan (one of several things I had to google, such as confirming yes, there was a canonical Barbie-line doll whose breasts could expand). A movie that deserves its rep and its box office. “This is like the 1500s when indigenous people were exposed to smallpox!”

The Netflix limited series BODIES (2023) adapts a graphic novel for a story about three London detectives — in the 1890s, the 1940s, and 2023 — discovering the same dead body, which embroils them in a century-spanning conspiracy to bring about a world dictatorship by 2043. This shifts from the initial mystery into a straight up War For Time — will the conspiracy bring about its dystopia? — for the last three or four episodes, something that sunk the series for several people I know. I still found it worth watching though. “What could you possibly know of love when your entire existence negates it?”

#SFWApro.