The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013)

Yeah, it's one of those foreign films that had to wait a year for the Academy to notice. I made a point to see it before the Oscars for the sake of knowing as many Best Animated Feature nominees as possible, tho I knew from the outset it wouldn't win. The last non-CG winner came out in 2005, and TTotPK sports a watercolor look with a dash of charcoal.

I had thought that director/writer Isao Takahata, being older than Hayao Miyazaki, had retired. He has made few movies in the last 15 years, none of them well known in my circles. His works tend to be more quintessentially Japanese than Miyazaki's, as evidenced by Disney's embarrassing attempt to redub Pom Poko for an American audience. But I'll give him credit for variety: The tragedy Grave of the Fireflies and comic-in-motion My Neighbors the Yamadas could hardly have differed more. TTotPK, based on a Japanese folktale, makes a worthy addition to his legacy.

Broken Blossoms (1919)

I first heard of this silent as evidence that D.W. Griffith was not really a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, just a storyteller who used whatever structure he found convenient. Coming four years after The Birth of a Nation, it has also gone by The Yellow Man and the Girl. Despite what you'd think, it tries for a positive depiction of a man from China and his feelings for a young white woman (Lillian Gish), while the main villain (Donald Crisp) is a white bigot. Sure, a white actor plays the protagonist, identified only as the Yellow Man, but he's more convincing than some cross-racial actors from much later decades and appears to mean no insult.

That said, there's not much of a romance. I thought I'd remembered reading that they got married, but no, not even close. The only line between them (as far as the intertitles tell us) is "What makes you so good to me, chinky?" Yeah, real sweet. The man shows clearer passion, which the narrator assures us is most "pure and holy." So...chaste? I wonder if Griffith even entertained the idea of letting them be happy together for long. I'd've given him major bonus points for that.

Boyhood (2014)

It finally came via Netflix, and boy (heh), am I relieved not to have seen it in a theater. Oh, I've sat thru longer movies without breaks and felt fine about them, but when the action takes place across 12 years with 143 scenes, not always clarifying the year, it sure feels longer than 2 hours and 45 minutes. A $2.4 million budget across that time won't get you much in the way of visuals, either. I started getting uncomfortable in my seat about half an hour in.

Not to say it bored me. I didn't find myself waiting for something great to happen. And yet...nothing great does happen. It's never especially funny, intense, heartwarming, or tragic. Like in same director Richard Linklater's Before trilogy, the apparent point is to keep everything credible -- pretty much the opposite of escapism. That's basically the whole advantage to the 12-year shoot: no fake aging and no anachronisms. IMDb trivia indicate that the makers threw in some personal elements from reality to boot. You can call it sweet; I just say, "That's all well and good, but how is it for art and entertainment?"

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

This was probably not the best choice to follow on the heels of Play. I don't mind multiple foreign films in a row, especially from different countries, but it's also another artsy drama about people getting away with a crime against the innocent. The key difference is that this one has a sort of happy ending, insofar as the victim chooses to go along with it.

Based on a novel by Kōbō Abe, the story focuses on a Tokyo teacher, Niki Jumpei (or Junpei, depending on the source), who heads to a desert to study native insects. Having missed the last bus of the evening, he takes nearby villagers' suggestion of rooming with a young widow (never identified by name) who lives at the bottom of a sand pit. She spends the night shoveling the ever-shifting sands, partly to collect it for sale and partly to prevent it from burying the cottage altogether. Jumpei offers to help, but she says she wouldn't have him do it on his "first night." He'd already told her he would stay only one night. That was his first warning....

Play (2011)

A Meetup group on international cinema invited me to this entry in a Ruben Östlund festival. I would not have come otherwise, and not just because of the bland title (which works a little on a few levels). Force Majeure looked more promising but had a less convenient showtime. Still, director Östlund himself recommends Play most strongly -- as his most provocative.

In the Swedish tradition set by Ingmar Bergman, this is not an entertainment film. It will irritate you if you ever faced bullies or thieves, so I hope you don't mind anger at fiction. Mostly it's five teenage boys harassing three sixth-grade boys (mostly just intimidation with feigned innocence and mockery) for hours until the latter surrender their valuables, far from home. I knew better than to expect justice. What I didn't readily know was the point -- or the several points.

The Secret of Kells (2009)/Song of the Sea (2014)

As with the How to Train Your Dragon series, I don't feel like I can review my most recent viewing without also reviewing another. SotS isn't a sequel, and even "spiritual successor" is a stretch (sorry about this sibilation), but it and TSoK have a lot of uncommon facets in, er, common. Both come from minor French-Belgian-Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, under the direction of illustrator Tomm Moore. Both work from Celtic folklore, keeping it simple enough for kids, and have Brendan Gleeson as their best-known voice actor. Both star a prepubescent human boy and a youthful female sprite, with a pet tagging along for good measure. Both have beautifully haunting music and a captivating 2D style that manages to be cartoony and artsy at the same time. Both have been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, and I don't expect SotS to win either. With so little brand recognition, they're inherent niche players, however undeservedly.

The Wind Rises (2013)

Finally, I've seen every Best Animated Feature nominee from that year and, more importantly for myself, every feature ever directed by Hayao Miyazaki! Funny thing, tho: I kept swinging between eagerness to see it and trepidation. It seemed odd that his farewell piece would be his only non-fantasy (not counting The Castle of Cagliostro, which is fantasy only in the typical James Bond sense). In fact, it's based loosely on the life of real WWII plane engineer Jiro Horikoshi, whose vision prevented him from flying but whose "vision" let him excel at what he considered the next best thing.

Nevertheless, I detect enough commonalities to accept it as somewhat representative of Miyazaki's work. He showed a penchant for flight in Castle in the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso. He expressed interest in serious illness within families in My Neighbor Totoro. Several of his stories take place a while back. His penultimate co-writing, From Up on Poppy Hill, presents a similar level of realism and Japanese identity. The occasional desolate landscape does not detract from Studio Ghibli's signature background beauty, with that odd anime combination of modern crispness and old-fashioned low frame rates. And if you really demand a touch of whimsy, the protagonist does have quite a few dreams and daydreams, albeit less bizarre than mine.

Birdman (2014)

At last I've seen half the Best Picture nominees, and one of the most favored at that! I had not been excited to see it, because what I'd read made it sound like The Wrestler with a little magic realism (which could be very good, just not worth excitement going in). Fortunately, what I got was far more distinctive and only occasionally predictable.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu, previously best known for Babel and Amores perros, must have since taken lessons from his buddy Alfonso Cuarón, because this film loves long tracking shots even more than Gravity. Normally this technique helps you feel more present, but whenever it becomes clear that things have not been happening in real time, the scarcity of obvious cuts to other cameras enhances the surreality instead. And for all the credible dialog and genuine show biz concerns, you'd better believe it's surreal.

Zodiac (2007)

Until Netflix announced the end of its streaming, I kept vacillating on whether to see this, because I find David Fincher enjoyable only about half the time. Another serial killer story under his direction could have invoked unwelcome memories of the popular but extremely disturbing Se7en. Fortunately, having seen Dirty Harry (which gets referenced in Zodiac), I knew that the real killer who called himself the Zodiac had more conventional murder methods. If you can take bloody stabbings and shootings, both survived and not, with no autopsy details, then you can probably take this movie.

The only professional review I'd read -- a mere blurb -- noted the large proportion of time characters spend talking, rather than...I dunno, being Dirty Harry? What did he expect? One fictionalized friendship aside, it aims for a mostly true story -- so seriously, in fact, that the producers hired a PI to find one of the Zodiac's live victims (other relevant characters were more readily reachable). That said, it does feel like they didn't need 2 1/2 hours to tell it. We get the picture: It was a hard case to crack. The mystery is still not officially solved after 40+ years, which limits the potential for satisfaction among viewers at the end. But the mere fact that the film got the case reopened does it credit.