Devil’s Doorway (1950)

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Obviously, I love a good Western. For the last two years, I’ve dedicated the month of March to the genre. A great Western is transcendent. Even a bad one can be a lot of fun. But there is no getting past the casual racism that is found in a great many Western. This is especially true in Westerns from the 1930s into the 1940s. Hollywood thought nothing of making Native Americans nameless, blood-thirsty savages who wanted nothing more than to rape the women, kidnap the children, and murder the men.

Slowly, Hollywood changed. By the 1950s they sometimes (but not always, not even all that often) made films that depicted Native Americans with an ounce of empathy. Devil’s Doorway is a film that points to the realities of how Native Americans were treated by white folk. Even ones who fought valiantly in the Civil War.

Unfortunately, the lead Native American is played by a decidedly white fella.

Were the film really good, I might be able to forgive that lapse in judgment. But as it is, the film isn’t great and so that bit of indiscretion stands out like a racist thumb.

You can read my full review here.

Watch Victoria Williams Perform “Century Plant” & “Crazy Mary” at the House of Blues

My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris

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I wish this book had come out when I was a teenager. I think it is safe to say now that I was a weird kid. Especially in rural, conservative Oklahoma. I liked horror movies and heavy metal. I grew my hair long and wore Doc Martens everywhere, even with shorts.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters is about a precocious, weird little girl who likes horror movies and pretends to be a werewolf. When her neighbor dies she dons the hate of a hard-boiled detective. It all takes place in the turbulent 1960s in Chicago.

Emil Farris’ art is a wondrous mix of styles and genres. It is a two-volume book and I reviewed Book Two for Cinema Sentries. Both are highly worth picking up.

Animation in August: Princess Mononoke (1997)

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Like most kids, I suppose I grew up watching animation. I loved Disney films and the movies of Don Bluth. Every afternoon and Saturday morning I watched television series like G.I. Joe, Thundercats, The Smurfs, and Muppet Babies. Later I fell in love with the films from Pixar.

While these types of films told different stories and used somewhat different animation styles, they all held a certain familiarity. They were all distinctly American.

Princess Mononoke was the first Studio Ghibli film I’d ever seen. This was the late 1990s, maybe or possibly early 2000. I was just becoming a true cinephile. I’d heard rumblings about Studio Ghibli for a while but I think this was the first big breakout it had in the States. Or maybe just in my orbit. It definitely got a big American release because the English dub included folks like Billy Crudup, Billy Bob Thornton, Claire Danes, and Gillian Anderson.

Anyway, I sat down with Princess Mononoke with high hopes. All the critics loved it. Honestly, I was a little disappointed. No, disappointed isn’t really the right word. I just didn’t know what to make of it. It was like no movie I’d ever seen before.

The animation was strange. In the opening scene, a demon attacks a village. But it doesn’t look like any demon I’d ever seen before. It wasn’t full of fire and horns. It was an enormous boar covered in slithering black worms. Later we meet tree spirits with human bodies and rattle-like heads, and a Great Forest Spirit with a deer-like body and an almost human face.

The story wasn’t like typical American animation with clear-cut good and bad guys. The characters were murkier. Our hero sometimes brutally murdered his enemies. The villain, if you can even call her that, rescued young women from a life of prostitution.

I think on that first viewing I just didn’t know how to process what I was watching. It was so different than anything else I’d ever seen, I wasn’t sure of what to make of it.

I’ve seen it several more times since then (and many more Studio Ghibli films) and now I just love it. What was so strange on that first viewing is endearing to me now. I love that it is different from most animated films.

So, quickly, the story involves Ashitaka (Crudup) the last prince of a small village (the one that gets attacked by that demon). He kills the demon and in the process, his arm is infected by it. This gives him super strength, but also seems to possess him at times and ultimately will kill him. When he learns that an iron ball lodged inside its body is what turned the Boar God into a demon he sets off to find out how it got lodged there.

The iron ball was actually a bullet from the newly invented gun (the film is set vaguely in the time before modern warfare) and it came from Iron Town, which is run by Lady Iboshi (Minnie Driver). She’s ostensibly the villain. But she’s also the one I was talking about earlier who has rescued women from a life of prostitution and given them a certain amount of autonomy. She also uses old men, warn down by disease and injury in her town. In many ways, she’s a good person. But she also has no problem destroying nature (and the gods that protect it) to enrich herself.

Ashitaka is ostensibly our hero, and yet we see him cut the heads off of numerous soldiers (accidentally, sort of – his demon-possessed arm gives him super strength which does most of the brutal damage but he’s still out to kill them.)

It is a movie filled with morally ambiguous characters, people who aren’t fully good or fully evil. They are complex, just like real people. And those gods? They have no problem with destruction either. The Great Forest Spirit indiscriminately kills.

The titular Princess (Claire Danes) is a human girl, raised by a wolf goddess and she hates humans. She wants to destroy them.

I love that. It is a complex, beautifully drawn story. The animation, while strange to my American eyes at first is beautiful as well.

Hayao Miyazaki who founded Studio Ghibli, and wrote/directed this film is one of the greatest animators of all time. I won’t say Princess Mononoke is his greatest achievement, but I won’t deny it either.

Wilco – Oklahoma City, OK (04/25/05)

Wilco
Bricktown Events Center
Oklahoma City,OK
April 25,2005

source info: CSB>d8>imac>spin dr wave>toast>lacie external>fujifilm 80 cdr
10 yards back floor right stack#
files renamed, reflacced and tagged.

setlist:

Hell Is Chrome
Muzzle Of Bees
Hummingbird
I Am Trying To Break Your Heart
Handshake Drugs
A Shot In The Arm
At Least That’s What You Said
Jesus, Etc.
Hesitating Beauty
One By One
Theologians
I’m The Man Who Loves You
I’m Always In Love
Poor Places
Less Than You Think
Spiders (Kidsmoke)
Encore break
Encore 1:
Radio Cure
The Late Greats
Kingpin
I’m A Wheel

Encore 2:

Misunderstood
Monday
Outtasite (Outta Mind)

Encore 3:

Heavy Metal Drummer

Bela Fleck – San Luis Obispo, CA (04/10/01)

Bela Fleck & The Flecktones
4/10/01
Cuesta College Auditorium
San Luis Obispo, CA

Neumann AK-40’s (x/y) >LC3 >KM-100’s >Beyer MV-100 >SBM-1 >Sony TCD-D7,
DAT Master Transferred: Tascam DA-30 >HHb CDR 800 PRO Via Analog i/o,
CD Masters >FLAC (Level 8) Via xACT 2.35

(Recorded, Transferred, FLAC’d, Tagged (Via xACT 2.53) & Front-Cover Artwork By OldNeumanntapr)

Set I
Disc I:

Imagine This
Scratch And Sniff
New Waltz
Bil Mon
Victor Wooten Solo
Throwdown At The Hoedown

Set II

Futureman Solo

Disc II:

Sherpa
Puffy (Is Free)
Two Horny Blues
A Moment So Close
Béla Fleck Solo (Costa Brava, Classical)
Bela Solo (Linus & Lucy, More Classical)

Encore:

Throwdown At The Hoedown (Reprise)

OldNeumanntapr:
This was another Bela Fleck show at the old Cuesta College Auditorium, which was located on the old campus behind the creek and once a part of the National Guard army base. The theater was built back during World War II and had amazing acoustics and a lot of charm but was a real eyesore and was eventually deemed to be not worthy for earthquake retrofitting and was abandoned in the late 2000s. Again, because of the cramped spaces in the aisles, the theater would not allow microphone stands so I had to hand-hold the Neumanns on a T-Bar. After the show I got my ticket stub signed by Bela.

Do NOT Convert To MP3.
Enjoy! Share freely, don’t sell, play nice, don’t run with scissors, etc. 😉

Friendly Persuasion (1956)

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Gary Cooper has a reputation for playing tough characters – the very epitome of the strong and silent type. I always assumed that meant he was rugged and manly. An alpha male. But the more I watch his films the more I find his acting has a vulnerability to it. Yes, his characters are strong, but it is an inner strength – a strength of character rather than might. He is often silent, but that silence signifies a thoughtfulness.

In Friendly Persuasion, he plays a Quaker living on the brink of the Civil War. When the war comes to him and his family he must decide whether or not to fight. How deep does his faith go?

It is actually a much sillier movie than that sounds. It makes a lot of playful fun with Quakerism and their “strange ways.” Honestly, that kind of rubbed me the wrong way. It isn’t a bad movie, as you can read in my full review, but not a great one either.

Not A Pretty Picture is the New Blu-ray Pick of the Week

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It is hot here in Oklahoma. Darn hot. Too hot to do almost anything. What I want to do is go to the movies and sit in the dark with a big bag of popcorn, and a giant soda, and watch something big and dumb while the industrial-strength air conditioning keeps me cool.

Instead, I sat inside my overcooked house (with an underdeveloped AC unit) and chose a very not big or dumb-looking film for this week’s New Blu-ray Pick. You can read all about it here.

Animation in August: Suzume (2022)

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Japan has a thriving animation industry. At a guess, I’d say it is much larger and more successful than American animation. Yet in the States, Japan’s output is mostly a cult phenomenon. That does seem to be changing. The comic book section at my local Barnes & Noble has almost been overcome by Mangas, and streaming services like Crunchyroll, which specializes in Japanese animation have become very popular. My daughter is a big fan.

I mostly know Japanese animation from Studio Ghibli. Oh, I’ve watched the odd film or series with my daughter, and I have fond memories of watching Robotech: The Macross Saga as a kid, but I’ve not really dug deep into the Anime waters.

I’m trying to change that and Suzume was a good start. Like a lot of Japanese animation (I think, again I haven’t seen that much) Suzume mixes intimate human drama with the fantastic.

In a small Japanese town, Suzume (voiced by Nanoka Hara in Japanese and Nichole Sakura in English) a 17-year-old girl lives a quiet life with her aunt. Her mother passed away when she was quite young.

On her way to school, she crosses paths with Souta (voiced by Hokuto Matsumura in Japanese, and Josh Keaton in English) a handsome young man who asks her if she knows of any abandoned towns nearby. He’s looking for a door, he says. She points him in the direction of a small spa resort that was destroyed in bad weather.

He thanks her and she continues on her way to school. But when a friend notices her face is flush from the encounter, she thinks twice and runs to that abandoned resort, hoping to find him. Instead, she finds a strange door standing all by itself. She opens it and sees a field full of stars. But when she passes through the door nothing happens. That magical land is seemingly off-limits to her. On one of her passings, she notices a stone cat statue on the ground. When she picks it up it turns into a real cat and runs away.

With nothing more to see she goes back to school. Later that day she noticed a huge column of smoke emanating from where the resort was. Strangely, none of her classmates can see it.

Once again she runs to the resort to find the smoke billowing out of that door. This time Souta is there and is desperately trying to close the door. With her help he does and with a magical key, he locks it.

He tells her that he is a Closer, and his job is to find these magical doors scattered across Japan in abandoned places and keep them shut. That black smoke he calls a worm and if it escapes it will cause massive Earthquakes.

That cat is a Keystone and they must get it to return to one of the doors to keep the worm in place forever. But the cat is mischievous and is enjoying its newfound freedom. It sets to scurrying around Japan. Also, it turns Souta into a three-legged chair.

Suzume and Souta then spend the rest of the film chasing after the cat and closing all the doors before the worm can cause too much damage.

The basics of that plot do nothing to explain just how wonderful this film is. The animation is simply gorgeous. The backgrounds reminded me of the less fantastical Ghibli films in that it is detailed and layered with just enough artistic flourishes to make them fantastical. The characters are drawn realistically and well. There are some wonderful shots where the camera pulls back to show the scope of the worm and the cities it is about to destroy that are just awesome. And the magical world beyond the doors is exquisite.

There is a lightness to its execution and a playfulness. When Souta becomes a chair it is joyful and very funny. But there is a soulfulness too. I believed in their developments, and in their plight.

It is perhaps just slightly too long, and there are a few moments that drag just a little bit. But mostly this is a wonderful film.