4v291o

Whoa nelly… give Kelly the mf’ing Palme…

Wears its dripping, festering, calcifying, lop-sided heart on its sleeve, and by god I relished it.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Monday May 19, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 18, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Saturday May 17, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 16, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

Watched on Thursday May 15, 2025.

A Gentle Creature 2: Kafka’s Revenge

Watched on Tuesday May 13, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Watched on Wednesday May 14, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 11, 2025.

Watched on Friday May 9, 2025.

Watched on Sunday May 4, 2025.

Jared Hess (no relation) is the Taika Waititi it’s okay to like. Not the abomination I had prepped for. Liked how Momoa’s retro junk shop even had a sign for “DVD’s”.

Watched on Friday May 2, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 28, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 26, 2025.

Watched on Monday April 21, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Do we know if David Lynch saw this before he died?

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 20, 2025.

Watched on Saturday April 19, 2025.

Imagine the U-Bahn scene in Possession, but that’s the whole film.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Plastic surgery has gotten considerably worse in the last 80 years.

Watched on Friday April 18, 2025.

Wow I get to be the first review of this gloriously silly slapstick Samurai revenge caper. Best try to say something interesting…

Beautifully put together. Becker a true artist behind the camera. Made me think that it's not that modern films are too long, it's perhaps that they're not fast enough. Story a little wispy mind…

Keaton’s performance is a all-timer. Ron Howard’s stopped clock moment.

Zero undercoverness in this movie. Like not even a hint.

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

Watched on Sunday April 6, 2025.

1. Sirât
2. The Mastermind
3. A Simple Accident
4. Mirrors No. 3
5. The Secret Agent
6. I Only Rest In the Storm
7. The Phoenician Scheme
8. Enzo
9. Alpha
10. Nouvelle Vague

...plus 27 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Caught by the Tides
2. Nickel Boys
3. The Shrouds
4. Afternoons of Solitude
5. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
6. All We Imagine as Light
7. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
8. Hard Truths
9. Timestalker
10. Janet Planet

1. Caught by the Tides
2. The Shrouds
3. All We Imagine as Light
4. Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
5. Megalopolis
6. Scénarios
7. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
8. Kinds of Kindness
9. Misericordia
10. It's Not Me

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

20 from the 2020s

• Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
• Asteroid City
• Benediction
• Bergman Island
• The Boy and the Heron
• Close Your Eyes
• Crimes of the Future
• Days
• De Humani Corporis Fabrica
• Drive My Car

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Possession
• Paddington
• Metropolis
• A Clockwork Orange
• Dogtooth
• Seconds
• Emmanuelle
• Bride of Frankenstein
• The Skin I Live In
• Annie Hall

...plus 13 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Top year!

1. The Zone of Interest
2. Asteroid City
3. The Taste of Things
4. About Dry Grasses
5. Close Your Eyes
6. Fallen Leaves
7. May December
8. The Delinquents
9. Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell
10. Pictures of Ghosts

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

No notes

1. Saint Omer
2. Showing Up
3. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
4. Crimes of the Future
5. Nope
6. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
7. RRR
8. Mad God
9. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
10. Human Flowers of Flesh

Well… this was me… (Alphabetical)
Avoided films and directors I picked for 2012 ballot.

1. Femmes femmes
2. India Song
3. The Long Day Closes
4. The House in the Woods
5. Lightning
6. My Neighbor Totoro
7. Public Housing
8. Some Came Running
9. Touki Bouki
10. Trouble Every Day

1. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
2. Showing Up
3. Scarlet
4. Crimes of the Future
5. Leila's Brothers
6. Pacifiction
7. Brother and Sister
8. The Super 8 Years
9. R.M.N.
10. Enys Men

...plus 31 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

This is films seen in 2021…

1. Titane
2. Bergman Island
3. Drive My Car
4. Licorice Pizza
5. Memoria
6. Parallel Mothers
7. Il Buco
8. Happening
9. The Tsugua Diaries
10. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Parallel Mothers
2. The Great Movement
3. Il Buco
4. Happening
5. The Card Counter
6. Full Time
7. Dune
8. Official Competition
9. The Power of the Dog
10. The Lost Daughter

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Little Women
2. A Hidden Life
3. Amazing Grace
4. Uncut Gems
5. Vitalina Varela
6. About Endlessness
7. The Souvenir
8. Pain and Glory
9. Ad Astra
10. Martin Eden

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. About Endlessness
2. Ad Astra
3. The Painted Bird
4. Ema
5. Marriage Story
6. Wasp Network
7. Irreversible
8. Babyteeth
9. The Laundromat
10. The Perfect Candidate

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Mini essays on 11 features directed by Hayao Miyazaki, originally published as liner notes for a limited edition Blu-ray collection.

1. Lupin the Third: The Castle of Cagliostro

   Officially this flamboyant, joyfully anachronistic caper movie is one of Miyazaki's pre-Stuido Ghibli works as a director and co-writer, but that should in no way invite viewers to dismiss it as a lesser addition to his worldbeating canon. A feature length spin-off from the Manga-inspired animated TV serial, Lupin III, of which Miyazaki directed numerous episodes, the film is based around the wacky travails of the lovably cocky “Wolf” (as he is known in the English-language dub of the film), a Raffles-like cad and master criminal who dresses in an emerald green sports jacket and skinny yellow tie. He also boasts unkempt, fuzzy sideburns – possibly the key visual trait to disassociate him from his regal, moustache-twirling and immaculately turned-out foils. The story takes place in the fondly homogenised pan-European trappings so beloved of the director, and involves Wolf's attempts to usurp a master counterfeiter based in the enclosed gothic principality of Cagliostro – a place presented as an amalgam of Vatican City and Monaco. Though the intrigue of the film, which offers an ironic play on fairytale mythos with the knight in shining armour set on rescuing a misty-eyed damsel (Clarisse) from an inescapable tower, Miyazaki embellishes this core conceit with ripe characters, dizzying action spectacles and evocative production detail. Even at this early stage in his career, the director proves himself a master of staging, editing and pacing, with an early cliff-side car chase sequence (involving Wolf's modified Fiat 500 and a battered 2CV) rumoured to be one of Steven Spielberg's all time favourites. A deadly duel inside the mechanical workings of a portentous clock tower also introduces his interest in the constituent cogs and gears of primitive machinery, here co-opted as an ever-shifting battlefield. For the purposes of this film, the character of Wolf was famously modified, and with the gift of time we can see it was for the better. In the original TV series he possessed a bawdiness which made him a more obviously ambivalent anti-hero, but in this cinematic recalibration, he becomes a far more interesting and finely-shaded prospect. Though he is innately driven by the quick-fix lure of crime, Miyazaki infers that his love for Clarisse might just be enough to suppress this desire and make him a changed man. The ambiguity of Wolf's motivations dashes the patina of tenderness with a strain of pitch black humour and light cynicism – now he is a true man of mystery.

2. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

   There is a sassy female ing character in 1979's The Castle of Cagliostro named Fujiko who is one of Wolf's fearless help-meets as well as being a fellow thief. She travels by glider, wears a low-cut camo catsuit and displays all the moxie and cunning of her male counterparts. It's possible to spot echoes of Fujiko in the character of Nausicaä, the red-headed, constantly-airbourne princess/warrior at the centre of 1984's operatic and ornate fantasia, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Fujiko goes about her business with wise-cracking elan, though Nausicaä is a more pensive, even melancholy creature. And there's good reason too. Where Cagliostro was spry and flippant, Nausicaä heralded Miyazaki as a filmmaker unafraid to charge his films with rich political and social subtexts, and this story about an increasingly desperate crusader unable to make herself heard among the arrogant hub-bub of self-destructive hoards is all the more awe-striking for its utter sincerity and ion. A massively decimated human population has divided into warring factions following an apocalyptic fire that has ravaged the Earth. Added to that, poisonous natural spores which float like snowflakes make it impossible to breath the air without serious health risks – a motif said to be inspired by the controversial rash of mercury poisoning in the Japanese city of Minimata during the 1950s. In the mysterious Toxic Jungle, mutant insects defend their territory from intruders. Giant stampeding molluscs called Ohm remain the most deadly human threat, their relentless charge the cause of raised townships and lost lives. Due to her anti-violent stance, Nausicaä becomes an heroic peacemaker, (nearly) always adopting diplomatic means to defuse a violent situation. Despite surface suggestions to the contrary, this is a film about how humanity can achieve self-preservation with relative ease, and it's that omnipresent feeling of hope that imbues the film with its breathless dramatic tension. It also deals with the widespread fear that humans believe they need to be the dominant species on Earth in order to survive, and will stop at nothing to secure this lofty status. The exhumation of a controversial super weapon in the form of the Giant Warrior – a metaphor for the atomic bomb – to destroy the Ohm is an example of a collective inability to see the wider implications of drastic action. Yet Nausicaä remains a clear-eyed symbol of enlightenment and a reminder that the benign act of “saving the planet” can itself be the instigator of deep-set future woes.

3. Castle in the Sky

   While The Castle of Cagliostro and Nausicaä both featured flying contraptions of various stripes, sizes and styles, 1986’s Laputa: Castle In the Sky is arguably Miyazaki’s first film that’s actually about the metaphysical tenets of human flight. Its pre-credit sequence depicts the mid-air sabotage of a dirigible by a family of pirates looking to locate a young girl, Sheeta, who is in possession of a mysterious Aetherium crystal necklace. As a way to escape her captors, Sheeta opts for jumping from an open window. Death seems all but inevitable, yet a strange force takes over; the stone in her necklace starts to shine, her vast plummet is naturally softened and she gradually begins to float gracefully downwards. She falls directly into the arms of the industrious young scamp, Pazu, an apprentice at a ramshackle mining concern. In just one scene, we have all the narrative rudiments of the sweeping drama that ensues – a powerful substance which offers the key to flight (or, at least, defying gravity) and the seeds of a tender pre-teen love story. In the Gulliver’s Travels-quoting Laputa, Miyazaki demonstrates a keen sensitivity towards young people and is particularly adept at not just understanding how they behave, but how they project and camouflage emotions. It’s obvious the Pazu and Sheeta are star-crossed from the off, but instead of swiftly cementing their romance and using it as a sentimental bargaining chip later in the film, Miyazaki keeps things tantalisingly chaste – you want these characters to survive solely so they will grow to comprehend their own feelings and urges. It’s a film that’s packed with daring air sorties, explosive raids and death-defying acts of bravery, yet the shots of Pazu and Sheeta just staring and smiling at one another in doe-eyed accord are just as heart-stopping. The narrative end-point of the film is the floating, cloud-covered isle of Laputa which was once a dominant power in the global rat-race due to its dynamic and destructive technology. Killer robots – now put to use as friendly gardeners – are sought after by stop-at-nothing bureaucrat Mishka, developing on the theme of how power-hungry despots are seldom able to comprehend how they will leave the world for the generations primed to carry the torch.

4. My Neighbor Totoro

   This profound and whimsical pastoral from Miyazaki is at once a continuation and derivation from all that has come before it. On paper, the film’s undisputed masterpiece status seems somewhat precarious, as it remains resilient to a direct thematic reading and deliberately neglects rote storytelling techniques and cosy character arcs. It’s long-lasting brilliance and assured placing in the canon of great animated (and non-animated!) feature works perhaps derives from its sui generis nature – an open text which can be read as all things to all viewers. Roistering toddler Mei and her older sister Satsuki arrive at an old house to which they’ve moved with their father in order to be close to their ailing mother while she convalesces at a nearby hospital. There is nothing more to say about the plot, as the remainder of the film chronicles the hushed ebb and flow of rural life while allowing us to monitor the changeable emotional state of the girls as they become savvy to the concept of their mother’s mortality. Miyazaki expounds poetically on the safety mechanisms of the mind, proposing that in times of great mental pressure (pressure that we may feel yet not truly understand), the very young tend to retreat into a world of personal fantasy. Cue the entrance of a rotund, roaring yet entirely benign woodland creature named Totoro who appears at the base of a nearby camphor tree and dutifully steps in to usher the girls through this period of high trauma. The film channels the inquisitiveness and dream life of young children as well as offering a dainty cross-cut of primitive life in the Japanese countryside. Much of the film’s drama emanates from space left behind by the absent mother, leaving Satsuki to cook food and both girls to make their own way home from school in the driving rain – where they politely decline a lift from a bus which resembles an oversized Cheshire cat. Cinema is about having the guts to place yourselves in the shoes of another, and with My Neighbour Totoro – still one his crowning artistic achievements – Miyazaki chose to look at the world through the eyes of a young female child. As well as grounding the film’s fantasy elements in a credible framework of reality, and therefore entirely justifying their presence – even if they don’t always “make sense” – the film crystallises what it means to be part of a family, and how dynamics can alter in subtle but seismic ways when a mother or father is removed from the equation. It’s most radical gesture, though, is its rejection of conservatism and a proposal that while family life has its benefits, loneliness and self-reliance is also a vital ingredient to attain spiritual maturity.

5. Kiki's Delivery Service

   Independence and the arduous task of carving out a niche for yourself in a world overrun with people and creativity is at the centre of this fiercely charming Girl’s Own adventure yarn about a 13-year-old trainee witch heading off – from country to city – on a year-long voyage of personal discovery. Akin to those old Hollywood melodramas about wide-eyed starlets heading to new climes and looking to seek their fortune (albeit with less scandal and heartbreak), Kiki’s Delivery Service from 1989 sees the tenacious Kiki blithely depart from her parents as if it’s an entirely natural rite of age. Once she secures new digs and a job, they are never mentioned again. Though the upbeat nature of the story means this never really becomes a point of concern, there is something rather melancholic about the idea of teenagers neglecting their parents (and, in this case, vice versa). And so, the film is essentially about Kiki’s search for a new family, finding replacement parents in kindly bakery owners Osono and her husband, a new playmate in bespectacled aviation buff Tombo and a new grandparent in the shape of an elderly lady looking for urgent delivery of her signature dish: a herring and pumpkin pot pie. The world in which the film takes place, a coastal Mitel-European burg which looks to exist in somewhere on a cultural and architectural fringes between and Italy, is one where the local denizens are unperturbed by magic, as Kiki triumphantly flies her broomstick (with fast-talking feline enger, Gigi) in broad daylight. Once entrenched in this new life her powers of flight and capacity to communicate with Gigi begin to fade. Her spiritual journey to stoke the dormant flames of her abilities runs in tandem to her outsider status in the local community. Kiki wants to fit in with her peers, go to parties and wear fancy dresses instead of her regulation black smock, but her odd situation makes it difficult. Much like My Neighbour Totoro, fantasy elements exist to emphasise the essential humanity at the centre of the film, with Kiki’s growing pains all the result of the fact that she is a young girl, not a young witch.

6. Porco Rosso

   A doleful aria to aviation cinema classics such as WIlliam Wellman’s Wings (1927), Howard Hughes’ Hell’s Angels (1930) and Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings (1939), 1993’s ultra-melancholic Porco Rosso also draws in the lilting, impossible romance of Hawks’ To Have and Have Not (1940) and Michael Curtiz’ Casablanca (1942). The film employs a bold fairytale sheen by choosing to have its lone-gunning, dog-fighting hero as a human/pig hybrid. Though Porco (née Marco) is revered for his flying nous and ability to rid the skies above the Adriatic sea of pirates, his dedication is borne out of a need for privacy. He’s ashamed of how he looks, he’s ashamed of what he does and he’s ashamed of past deeds – he’s also head-over-heels in love with local chanteuse and bar-owner, Gina, a prize his pre-eminent sense of self-loathing prevents him from claiming. He is also a pacifist (using a loose definition of the term) who is happy to slug it out to win the heart of a cherished maiden, but unwilling to shoot down rival planes in ways that might injure or kill the pilot. Despite the fact that characters refer to Porco Rosso (“Red Pig”) as a pig, there’s a suggestion that his physical presence is a purely cinematic construction – that Miyazaki is presenting Porco to the audience in the way he self-identifies rather than how he is literally seen by his friends, enemies and co-conspirators. This physical manifestation of personal shame pushes the material into the realms of light fantasy, sweetening the revelation that the rise of Italian fascism means that Porco may once more have his skills co-opted for the purposes of international war. Porco, however, is a far more complex character than a mere symbolic stooge for an anti-war screed, as his fear is that the conflict will mean his beloved enemies will be gone and he’ll be out of work. Or, worse, he'll no longer have a reason to rev up the engine of his beautiful red sea-plane and dance through the skies. As a project, Porco Rosso was originally designed as a medium-length work to be exclusively screened on Japan Air flights, yet Miyazaki expanded it to a full feature to reflect his devotion to the world of planes and flying. As usual, the film also offhandedly toys with gender stereotypes, revealing Gina as more than an elusive love interest, and also presenting Fio, a seventeen-year-old female engineer who soups up Porco’s plane and is also the only character capable of achieving stability through verbal rather than physical means.

7. Princess Mononoke

   Within the first 15 minutes of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s abrasive and breathtaking battle saga from 1997, a henchmen has his forearms sliced off by a whizzing arrow, and another his entire head via the same means. It’s a bracing display of near-slapstick violence which sticks in the craw because it seems both unprecedented in what, from our experience of the director’s previous films, is ostensibly a family film. In Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind – the Miyazaki film this most closely resembles – one character, an elderly sage, is gunned down at close range, but the violence occurs entirely off-screen. While the all-pervading spectre of mortality has been a recurring motif of Miyazaki’s cinema, it has never presented been presented with such little gravitas. It’s a sign that the film we’re about to watch takes place in a world where life (human, animal and plant) is a cheap commodity and it must be dealt with so that it does not interfere with industrial progress. The genius of Princess Mononoke is its non deference to binary shades of good and evil – everyone and everything in the film exists in a moral vortex where their actions possess some kind of unavoidable collateral damage. The princess herself (known as San) is an acrobatic, knife-wielding warrior who was abandoned as a youth and brought up by wolves. She is also the tragic figure at the center of an inexorable war pitting man against beast, industry against nature, the personal against the collective, and rationality against magic. The glamorous Eboshi, who dresses in classical period attire rather than the functional robes of her cohorts, is the founder of Irontown, a fortified mining hamlet on the cusp of expansion. Her gender-neutral employment policy also finds a place for social outcasts, and her simple desire is to catalyse industrial progress. She is ostensibly the antagonist of the piece, and while she is open to warmongering to extend her cause, Miyazaki refuses to frame her as out-and-out evil. The woodland creatures attempting to preserve their lands, all aware that Eboshi’s short-term gains will have detrimental long-term effects, are the ones presented as more outwardly violent, with a gang of gorillas pleading to eat the injured hero Ashitaka to ingest his powers, and one of San’s wolves reveals how she wanted to bite his head off while he slept. The film’s violent imagery, capped off with boar-god Okkoto possessed by a suppurating, slug-like demon, perfectly illustrate the inevitable, gory fall-out from war, whatever side you’re on and however forthright and ionate your beliefs.

8. Spirited Away

   We’ve seen what happens when people are transformed into pigs within Miyazaki’s oeuvre, back in 1993’s Porco Rosso. Yet the majestic and darkly allegorical Spirited Away tells the story from the perspective of a pig couple’s gangly young daughter who is posted on a psychedelic, must-win mission to have them returned to human form. The literal reason for their being struck with this curse is because they tres on a haunted food market and, echoing the Original Sin of Biblical verse, are unable to suppress the temptation of consuming the forbidden fruit laid before them. Their greediness, though, is a signifier of the various subtle ways they neglect their daughter, Chihiro: cooping her up in a car; moving her away from friends; and remaining deaf to her pleas not to wade into potential danger. Spirited Away is not so simplistic as to be a moral lesson about the hazards of greed, as it's more interested in exploring causes and effects and how this greed can manifest in various forms. As with Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service and Mei from My Neighbour Totoro, Chihiro’s wondrous odyssey is spurred on by her relationship with her parents, but develops to include the need to forge (or at least understand) the nature of independence, empowerment and identity. Also like Kiki, she has to find employment fast, recognising it as the only way she can save her folks from the slaughter. The witch Yubaba, proprietress of a giant bath-house to the spirits, offers her a job in return for her name (she is renamed Sen), which is Miyazaki’s way of threatening Chihiro’s connection to her old life, but also suggesting how easy it is to be consumed by work. Sen toils tirelessly, winning over her skeptical peers while also being given more dangerous tasks and uncovering a conspiracy which keeps a young male co-worker (and, later, paramour), Haku, in bondage to Yubaba. The tonal complexities and formal daring of Spirited Away led it to become a box-office smash hit, as well as earning it the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature the following year. Its cinematic riches are far too abundant to list here, though it must be said that Chihiro’s silent, contemplative train journey in the company of the Noh-masked No-Face is arguably the most eloquent, poignant and stunningly realised sequence the director has ever realised.

9. Howl's Moving Castle

   Almost operating as a inverted companion piece to 2001’s Spirited Away, Miyazaki’s exquisite adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 fantasy novel, Howl’s Moving Castle, tells a similar tale of a woman annexed from her banal life and charged with overturning a curse. Only this time the hero isn’t a ten-year-old girl, but an introverted young woman, Sophie, who is trapped inside the body of her older self. Some may baulk at the idea that being old is a curse, but this is quickly revealed as the narcissistic Witch of the Waste’s notion of a curse, so vain is she with regard to superficial beauty and the way it fuels her constant yearning to win the heart of the dashing and illusive wizard Howl. Sophie’s curse, it transpires, is a gift, allowing her to see the world and her own future with a unique sense of clarity. Pluckily overcoming the physical strain of her new body, she convenes with Howl on a hillside when she accidentally crosses paths with his clanking mobile castle. Where Sophie takes full advantage of this opportunity to become more outgoing and charmingly combative, Howl uses his bluster and vast magical arsenal to close himself off from the world, keeping with him a small retinue of disciples, including fire demon Calcifer and boy-servant Markl. His castle has a dial by the front door which, when rotated, transports the room to a different geographic location, allowing Howl to live out numerous lives under numerous guises. A war rages in the backdrop and bombs fall on a nearby township. Howl later reveals an ambivalence towards fighting for his country, and ushers Sophie in to save him. The complex machinations of the film, its fluid treatment of time and space alongside the fact that virtually all the characters have some kind of imposed duel identity, all coalesce into a ionate declaration on the essential vibrancy and mystery of mankind. The wonderful score by long-time Miyazaki collaborator, Joe Hisaishi, takes the form of a languid waltz which perfectly captures the concept of characters spiralling around in complex formations but retaining a demeanour of grace at all times. One of the film’s punchlines, which reveals the surprising nature of the ongoing war, is far from a convenient tying-up of plot strands, and more an evocation of the idea that the fate of many sometimes hangs on an idle demonstration of power which, in the moment, may appear to have little Earthly significance.

10. Ponyo

    Though many of Miyazaki’s films possess the grandiloquent, expressive qualities of opera, it wasn’t until the enchanting and melodious Ponyo from 2008 where it actually felt like we were watching something directly inspired by the world of classical music. The fact that the pint-sized heroine of the piece is named Brunhilde is the first clue that this film owes as much a debt to Richard Wagner’s The Ring Cycle as it does to Hans Christian Andersen’s Danish fairytale, The Little Mermaid. Add the fact that the film’s spine-tingling prologue plays out, dialogue free, underneath Joe Hisaishi’s swelling, rippling score, with the animation itself betraying a near-abstract sense of musicality. A sequence later on, in which Brunhilde has escaped from her father in order to reconvene with Sōsuke, the boy who activated her transformation from goldfish into human, the score riffs on the famous Ride of the Valkyries theme with accompanying tsunami-sized waves crashing violently onto the shoreline. Miyazaki is in no way attempting to simulate the chest-thumping histrionics of opera, as instead he adapts, modifies and grounds them in a simple human story. Ponyo is the name given to Brunhilde by Sōsuke, and unlike in Spirited Away, here is a case in which a character actively wants to forget her family, her past and her old identity in order to become immersed into another world and embrace another, brand new life. But the burden of this responsibility is divided equally Ponyo and Sōsuke – he must want to love her as much as she wants to love him for the transformation to have a lasting effect. Though early shots in the film show fishing boats dredging the sea-bed and lifting all manner of debris into the path of the pristine sea life, Miyazaki does take this as an opportunity chastise audiences about evils of pollution, presenting it merely as an everyday reality and something which will probably return to bite us in the future. In a film like Laputa, where the romance between its pre-teen heroes is expertly subdued, here the director goes for the opposite tack, identifying that love for children at that age cannot be thought of as anything other than acts of purely physical affection. This deceptively modest film boasts some of the most sublimely staged sequences in the entire Ghibli canon as well as expounding on the precarious business of trusting and relying on other people – in this case, placing future existence of mankind in their hands.

...plus 1 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Other Side of the Wind
2. Roma
3. The House That Jack Built
4. Leave No Trace
5. If Beale Street Could Talk
6. The Wild Pear Tree
7. Asako I & II
8. The Image Book
9. Hereditary
10. Burning

...plus 16 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Wild Pear Tree
2. Burning
3. Leave No Trace
4. The House That Jack Built
5. Asako I & II
6. In My Room
7. Girl
8. Sorry Angel
9. Long Day's Journey into Night
10. Ash Is Purest White

...plus 24 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

(Alphabetical)

1. [REC]
2. The Addiction
3. Amer
4. Audition
5. A Bay of Blood
6. Beetlejuice
7. The Beyond
8. The Blair Witch Project
9. Blood and Black Lace
10. Blood Feast

...plus 90 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Call Me by Your Name
2. Zama
3. Let the Sunshine In
4. Person to Person
5. The Beguiled
6. The Florida Project
7. The Shape of Water
8. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
9. Song to Song
10. Logan Lucky

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Yet to see: Adjustment & Work, Blind, Canal Zone, Deaf, Domestic Violence 2, High School 2, Juvenile Court, Manoeuvre, Missile, Multi-Handicapped, Sinai Field Mission.

1. Public Housing
2. Welfare
3. Belfast, Maine
4. National Gallery
5. La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet
6. Law and Order
7. Near Death
8. Titicut Follies
9. Domestic Violence
10. Primate

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Les Misérables
• T2 Trainspotting
• Nocturnal Animals
• It's Only the End of the World
• The Square
• Special Correspondents
• Zoolander 2
• The Theory of Everything
• 50 First Dates
• Trance

...plus 23 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Tree of Life
2. Eden
3. Punch-Drunk Love
4. Ghost World
5. Wendy and Lucy
6. Tabu
7. The Headless Woman
8. Everyone Else
9. Millennium Mambo
10. In Vanda's Room

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Won't let me log György Kristóf's Out, which would be No. 25.

1. The Beguiled
2. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
3. The Florida Project
4. Napalm
5. Let the Sunshine In
6. Faces Places
7. You Were Never Really Here
8. Lover for a Day
9. Western
10. Happy End

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. My Darling Clementine
2. The Sun Shines Bright
3. Wagon Master
4. Young Mr. Lincoln
5. 7 Women
6. They Were Expendable
7. The Quiet Man
8. The Searchers
9. Drums Along the Mohawk
10. The Iron Horse

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Road
2. Sleepwalk
3. Fedora
4. Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels
5. The Return of the Living Dead
6. Belladonna of Sadness
7. Christine
8. Elephant
9. Hairspray
10. Nathalie Granger

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Toni Erdmann
2. Certain Women
3. Sully
4. Everybody Wants Some!!
5. Julieta
6. Voyage of Time: Life's Journey
7. The Death of Louis XIV
8. My Life as a Zucchini
9. Hacksaw Ridge
10. Hail, Caesar!

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Nashville
2. Tommy Boy
3. Back to the Future Part II
4. All the King's Men
5. The Running Man
6. Death Wish
7. Trading Places
8. Up in the Air
9. American Psycho
10. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Toni Erdmann
2. The Death of Louis XIV
3. My Life as a Zucchini
4. Paterson
5. A Quiet ion
6. Julieta
7. Personal Shopper
8. Staying Vertical
9. Graduation
10. Loving

...plus 25 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Wanda
2. Carol
3. Christine
4. Joy
5. Margaret
6. Iris
7. Gloria
8. Hanna
9. Selena
10. Gia

...plus 15 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Boring, I know, but…

1. The Man Who Wasn't There
2. No Country for Old Men
3. Inside Llewyn Davis
4. The Hudsucker Proxy
5. Hail, Caesar!
6. Miller's Crossing
7. The Big Lebowski
8. Burn After Reading
9. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
10. Intolerable Cruelty

...plus 7 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. My Golden Days
2. Knight of Cups
3. Sunset Song
4. Aaaaaaaah!
5. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
6. Carol
7. No Home Movie
8. The Assassin
9. Right Now, Wrong Then
10. Cemetery of Splendor

...plus 30 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Sunset Song
2. Right Now, Wrong Then
3. Afternoon
4. Taxi
5. Evolution
6. No Home Movie
7. In Jackson Heights
8. Office
9. The Apostate
10. Francofonia

...plus 18 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Pacific Rim
2. Blade II
3. Cronos
4. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
5. The Devil's Backbone
6. Hellboy
7. Pan's Labyrinth
8. Mimic

1. The Tree of Life
2. Tabu
3. Two Days, One Night
4. Like Someone in Love
5. Margaret
6. Only Lovers Left Alive
7. Boyhood
8. The Portuguese Nun
9. The Day He Arrives
10. House of Tolerance

1. The Margin
2. Decalogue I
3. India Song
4. Golden Eighties
5. Belfast, Maine
6. Drums Along the Mohawk
7. One Way Boogie Woogie
8. Pictures of the Old World
9. Duelle
10. 25th Hour

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. The Inbetweeners 2
2. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
3. Winter's Tale
4. Serena
5. Interstellar
6. The Riot Club
7. 3 Days to Kill
8. Grace of Monaco
9. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
10. '71

1. Two Days, One Night
2. Boyhood
3. Eden
4. Horse Money
5. Jauja
6. Clouds of Sils Maria
7. Goodbye to Language
8. National Gallery
9. Li'l Quinquin
10. Gone Girl

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Two Days, One Night
2. Jauja
3. Goodbye to Language
4. Bird People
5. Mr. Turner
6. Clouds of Sils Maria
7. National Gallery
8. Li'l Quinquin
9. It Follows
10. The Homesman

Not seen: The Last Temptation of Christ, Boxcar Bertha

1. New York, New York
2. Casino
3. The King of Comedy
4. GoodFellas
5. Taxi Driver
6. Hugo
7. Gangs of New York
8. Mean Streets
9. Raging Bull
10. The Last Waltz

...plus 12 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Concept (c) T. Robey Holdings

First viewings only.

1. My Friend Ivan Lapshin
2. Illumination
3. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
4. Onibaba
5. The Innocents
6. The Confrontation
7. The Big Sky
8. Christmas in July
9. The Sun Shines Bright
10. ¡Qué Viva México!

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Stray Dogs
2. Only Lovers Left Alive
3. Snowpiercer
4. Story of My Death
5. Bastards
6. Gravity
7. Blue Jasmine
8. Drug War
9. Her
10. Night Moves

...plus 40 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Stray Dogs
2. Night Moves
3. Tom at the Farm
4. Under the Skin
5. The Wind Rises
6. Jealousy
7. Miss Violence
8. The Zero Theorem
9. The Policeman's Wife
10. Joe

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Everyone doing it, so…

1. The Day He Arrives
2. Night and Day
3. Woman on the Beach
4. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon
5. On the Occasion of ing the Turning Gate
6. The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well
7. The Power of Kangwon Province
8. In Another Country
9. Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors
10. Oki's Movie

...plus 3 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

Not seen: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi's A Castle In Italy and Roman Polanski's Venus In Fur.

1. Only Lovers Left Alive
2. The Past
3. A Touch of Sin
4. Inside Llewyn Davis
5. Blue Is the Warmest Color
6. Nebraska
7. The Great Beauty
8. Behind the Candelabra
9. Like Father, Like Son
10. Heli

...plus 8 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Dawn of the Dead
2. 300
3. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
4. Watchmen
5. Sucker Punch

1. Waking Life
2. Slacker
3. Bernie
4. Dazed and Confused
5. Before Sunset
6. School of Rock
7. It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books
8. A Scanner Darkly
9. Before Sunrise
10. SubUrbia

...plus 5 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Death Proof
2. Jackie Brown
3. Pulp Fiction
4. Django Unchained
5. Reservoir Dogs
6. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
7. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
8. Inglourious Basterds

1. Tokyo Story
2. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
3. Yearning
4. The Only Son
5. My Neighbor Totoro
6. High and Low
7. Boy
8. Fireworks
9. Intentions of Murder
10. Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974

...plus 20 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Drug War
2. Sleepless Night
3. The Unspeakable Act
4. The Girl from Nowhere
5. Gebo and the Shadow
6. Inori
7. White Epilepsy
8. The Future
9. Penumbra
10. Me & You

...plus 6 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

1. Keith Lemon: The Film
2. Wrath of the Titans
3. Gambit
4. The Hunt
5. Young Adult
6. The Dictator
7. The Iron Lady
8. Iron Sky
9. Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
10. 360

20 films seen for the first time in 2012. Thoroughly ashamed it took me so long to catch some of these.

1. Out 1
2. L'Enfant Secret
3. Diaries, Notes, and Sketches
4. Lonesome
5. Sans Soleil
6. The Ladies Man
7. By the Bluest of Seas
8. Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages
9. Easy Living
10. Greed

...plus 10 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.