If you know me at all, you know that giving Princess Mononoke four stars is *weird*. I will five-star movies much worse than this one. And the original movie in Japanese, Mononoke Hime (1997), is absolutely a five star movie! This is a magnificent, compassionate, thoughtful story asking questions about the “versus” part of “man versus nature,” and the mythic scale of this folk fantasy is *so* up my alley.

But tonight I watched Princess Mononoke (1999), the version released in the USA with English-speaking voice actors like Gillian Anderson, Claire Daines, and Minnie Driver.

I think all the English dubs of Studio Ghibli movies I’ve seen have significantly altered the way information is conveyed. I get the sense that more mature animation like Princess Mononoke was confusing to Western markets, who only had a blueprint for mass-marketing kids’ animation, and thus feel compelled to simplify the concepts. It feels painful every time it happens. It’s not quite as bad in Princess Mononoke as Spirited Away, but it does mean the English dubs are distinct unto themselves.

The quality of the dub itself is dodgy. The performers involved are good in other contexts, but the voice work here feels paced badly. I suspect a combination of voice director choices and translation choices are to thank. It often feels like they’re trying to rush a lot of words into a few seconds of animation. Plus, inappropriate inflection abounds, leaving Claire Daines rush-shouting half her lines.

It’s a shame that the American-facing presentation is so unfortunate. Studio Ghibli movies have always felt a bit worse for their handling in the translation.

I have zero complaints or criticisms about the source material. As I grow older, I learn to admire the craftsmanship of Princess Mononoke in all-new ways. It’s visually stunning beyond the scope of one little review to describe. The music is so grand and emotional.

It’s fascinating that I have become radical in my politics in a way that Princess Mononoke challenges. The movie itself is radically ecological, which I would say describes me too. But ultimately, Princess Mononoke isn’t about ecological politics. It’s about how choosing hatred will kill everyone and everything, and the only way to do that is to stop choosing hatred.

By taking the focus away from what is right or wrong behavior from the humans — the hero’s goal is always simply saving lives, choosing life over death — the story can speak to anyone by asking, “Are you driven by hatred?

Ashitaka consistently chooses compassion for individuals I don’t think I’d try to save. It makes me look into my own heart and see places where the thrashing poison of hatred has plenty of room to grow.

The compassionate detail Princess Mononoke provides to the story’s factions has always jumped out at me.

Jigo is probably the worst figure in the movie. He is driven exclusively by greed, and validated by the assumption everyone is as greedy as he is, but he also regards Ashitaka as a friend. He’s out to kill nature for the Emperor’s pleasure, and in return, Jigo will get “everything.” Even when the world is falling down around them, Jigo scrabbles for his greedy goals…and then the movie leaves him shrugging it off when he fails. He’s sort of charming. Obviously he’s not good, at all, but the takeaway is one of someone self-centered but affable.

Lady Eboshi is my favorite of the antagonists. She’s afraid of nothing. You can tell the worst has already happened to her, so she welcomes the vengeance of nature’s curse. What powerful compassion it takes to gather a community of sex workers and lepers and gainfully employ them! Eboshi is the ultimate girl boss, stopping at nothing to accrue power in a system that has crushed them all. But she’s trying to take others with her. She’s trying to give her people a fair shot. You could say Eboshi stands to show the way that shit flows ever-downward in an empire: In order to claim any power in the empire as a woman, leper, sex worker, she has to pass the shit further down the empire’s power chain, which means nature.

I want to call Moro, the mother of the wolves, one of the good guys, but that wouldn’t be fair to the neutrality of Ashitaka’s perspective as narrator. All the nature gods are excellent expressions of the animistic understanding of nature. Nature is not good or bad, but it is full of instincts that can lead to your death. Moro wants the humans dead. Yet she has taken her “ugly, beautiful” human daughter, Mononoke, and treasures her the way she treasures her full-wolf sons. Moro is both a violent protector of the forest and a benevolent mother.

Alongside the Moro clan, we also get to know the boars, led by old Lord Okkoto, and the vicious primate spirits of the forest. And the Spirit of the Forest himself: a deer-like creature who turns into a ghostly giant at night. He doesn’t represent life and death. He is life and death.

Princess Mononoke has a humbling view on human hierarchy. For all that Lady Eboshi and Jigo are ensuring that shit continues flowing downward in their system — to the point of successfully killing the forest spirits — life and death are greater than all of that still.

Hence choosing hatred is choosing death, but the story doesn’t frame that as a failing so much as a maladaptive response to a terrible system that does things like letting samurai murder innocents and extinguishing indigenous tribes.

In a historical context, it makes sense that Princess Mononoke would so neutrally portray the humans’ cruelty against nature, human cruelty against humans, and of greater elemental forces against humans. Like all empires, Japanese empires have been responsible for a lot of harm in their country and elsewhere. Here, Studio Ghibli wants us to remember that these were just humans committing atrocities. People who loved and hurt and were trying to better themselves and had passions and could be your neighbors.

The only way to stop that kind of harm is to stop choosing hate, period, and give it nowhere to grow. It’s beautiful messaging in a beautiful movie that doesn’t flinch back from the tragedy of empire. And if you haven’t seen it before, I recommend watching the version with Japanese subtitles, not the English dub.

(image credit: GKIDS)

Mamma Mia! came out at the same time as The Dark Knight. I’ve seen multiple comparisons to Barbenheimer (15 years apart), and I think it’s apt. The parallel sticks out to me because it’s definitely the reason I haven’t seen Mamma Mia! until now. At that point, I was absolutely not interested in some girly disco musical, especially standing in opposition to a Nolan comic book movie.

It’s probably for the best that I grew up a bit. I don’t think I had the sincere heart or feminine slant to love Mamma Mia! yet, and I probably would have just hated it for all the terrible singing. Corny also feels like a descriptor I may have used.

Much time later, I have grown an appreciation for movies where it looks like the cast and crew just wanted a nice vacation. You know? Everyone in Mamma Mia! looks to be having an amazing time. They’re tanned, happy, drunk, and everyone has so much chemistry, you fully believe the relationships are lifelong.

It’s cute how little is going on with the guys, honestly. These three actors were summoned together to be Hot Dad Guys and enjoy the drunk tan vacation. Half the time, they barely interact meaningfully with one another; they’re just hunky props to stand in as dad/husband for the tropes deployed.

Meryl Streep sings badly with gusto, dances with abandon, and wears the best makeup. Christine Baranksi is in this too because you just can’t do musicals without Christine Baranski? She’s the only one who actually sings well. I’m told the low-skill singing is because you’re supposed to sing over them the whole time anyway, but I don’t actually know ABBA well enough for that. I have no choice but to hear Meryl Streep shout-sing her heart out and I sincerely admire her commitment. It wouldn’t work if she didn’t put her whole Streepussy into it.

I just can’t overstate how much everyone seemed to have fun. I’ve grown into someone whose favorite feeling is compersion, and I love vicariously experiencing what may have been one of the better film-vacations of these folks’s lives. The story is really cute. The scenery is so lovely. Colin Firth is full homo. I really liked this.

(image source: Universal Pictures)

This is a great example of The Metropolis Effect. I just coined that–do you like it? It’s meant to describe the experience I had watching Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for the first time, long after it was initially released. I had seen so many movies (TV shows/books/games/music videos) cribbing heavily off Metropolis that the originating movie almost felt modern–even derivative. Coming across it late, I’m already so familiar with the ripples from the rock hitting the pond, seeing the splash that came first is *weird*.

Such is is with The Blair Witch Project. I was eleven years old when this came out, and this wasn’t my kind of movie. It seemed way too scary. Hence I’ve spent twenty-five years experiencing the ripples from Blair Witch without knowing the reference.

Again, I find myself shocked at how modern The Blair Witch Project feels! The retro look is *so* cool right now, I’d absolutely believe everything was some kind of grainy VHS filter. Found footage dominates internet horror. My kids are into horror on YouTube, and I’m telling you, I think I’ve seen about two hundred brilliant twists on everything Blair Witch did so neatly.

The permeability of the membrane between reality and folk myth was punctured by The Blair Witch Project and culture has been streaming through that hole ever since. Or maybe we should go all the way back to Orson Welles narrating The War of the Worlds over the radio and scaring a nation into thinking aliens were invading–which is *really* impressive genetic lineage for a shaky movie that mostly has three cast members we don’t often see very well.

I remember how everyone Back In The Day (spits out dentures) was so confused by this, because it felt real. This wasn’t what movies looked like! But now, *everything* looks like The Blair Witch. There are just as many brilliant filmmakers running around with their friends, doing creepy shit with their cell phone videos that looks so similar.

I just want to keep referencing later projects that seem to borrow from Blair Witch’s magic. For instance, I kept thinking about how this was slower-paced and naturalistic very much like the original Paranormal Activity, too…but Blair Witch was way less boring. Hearing their missing friend calling from the woods had me making Annihilation bear jokes. The Rolling Giant did well capturing a similar ambiance with camera work barely glimpsing the pursuer. Cloverfield tried to scale up the stakes of found footage to kaiju-size. On and on and on.

I don’t know how to comment on this besides thinking it was just brilliant and prescient. I get why it hit so hard. The ending lands flawlessly. It’s a lot of fun, and I’m genuinely glad I waited to see it because I don’t think I could have appreciated it when I was younger. I bet this was a blast to see in the theaters with a crowd, though.

(image credit: Summit Pictures)

Dredd is an early-10s science fiction action movie where a post-nuclear war America has consolidated into a few metropolises, and most people live in giant towers, like whole cities in a skyscraper. Quality of life is real, real bad. A brutal policing force of Judges intervene with crime. They have the authority to judge and kill perpetrators on sight. Massive public car chases and shootouts are common. In this particular movie, Judge Dredd takes a trainee to answer a call, and things escalate.

This is based upon source material also adapted in an 80s movie with Sylvester Stallone, so if it sounds familiar, it should. 2000 AD is a comics classic.

Surely I could come up with involved, over-thinky commentary about how this satire of America’s punitive police-forward culture is just as much participating in the mythology of copaganda as it is criticizing it. Aside from the very fact they differentiate between good cops and bad cops, fundamentally misunderstanding ACAB, any movie that makes bad stuff look cool allows people to take the wrong message. See: terrible IRL cops idolizing The Punisher.

Dredd leaves much room for genuine idolization of this brutal police state. The creators’ intentions are coming from the right place; the observations are keenly made. It’s really more symptomatic of the policing culture’s greater issues that you can’t make a brutal, awful cop that cops won’t wanna mimic. I don’t want this kind of policing satire anymore, no matter how well it’s done. You know?

All that said, Dredd 3D is superlative on every other axis I care about. Imagine someone made a perfect adaptation of the *spirit* of 1990s Boomer Shooters (Doom, Hexen, Quake, et al) wearing the clothes of 2000 AD. That sort of dry action hero paired against absurd numbers of enemies, with a multi-functional gun that can shoot whatever you need (providing you conserved ammunition for the boss battle), and the floor-by-floor level design of Dredd feels like a much better adaptation of Duke Nukem 3D than we will ever see.

Alex Garland is behind the screenplay for Dredd 3D. Considering Garland’s fascinating relationship with feminine gender in Men and the highly metaphoric Annihilation, it makes sense to see him here: Ma-Ma and Anderson are two female characters written and played pitch-perfectly. Is it weird to say the movie Dredd simply doesn’t hate women? There is frank acknowledgment of female objectification in the story, but even visions of sexual violence against women are kept vague, and Ma-Ma declines to commit excessive violence against Anderson. It’s a show of ultimate respect that Ma-Ma simply wants Anderson dead. Not tortured, raped, or skinned–just a whole lotta bullets in the chest and the head. Now that’s feminism I can get behind.

Whenever I think of movies with fabulous editing, Dredd 3D is at the top. The score is kind of a minimal electronic drum-and-bass thing for the most part, but it’s unrelenting, and the dominance of the rhythm draws you from one cut to another with the breathless excitement of a music video. The pacing is outstanding.

Dredd’s also a shockingly beautiful movie, with shots that are like anti-aesthetic fine art. This is a movie celebrating the bright spatter of blood, the shock of angry scars on pallid flesh, and grunge dragged down stucco walls. SFX took great pride in showing every frame of bullets blasting through bodies. It will always hold the title of Best Movie Shown in 3D in Cinemas Ever, for me, because the sparkling slo-mo scenes are the single greatest usage of stereoscoping filming I’ve seen, and it’s almost as beautiful on my flat television.

None of it would be as sweet if Dredd didn’t have the most flawless action movie punchline known to mankind. With a crazy escalating level of violence endangering a city block’s worth of people (and then some), things feel huge. The stakes are big. Ma-Ma turns out to be a major source of criminality for all of Mega City One, and a lot of people die, and cops turn even more corrupt, and a drug lab gets destroyed. Yet the punchline is that this is just another day. Shrug. When he finally delivers “justice” upon the big bad, Dredd’s ready to go home to take a shower and sleep for the next one.

Fabulous.

(image credit: Lionsgate)