Hayao Miyazaki’s MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO wonderfully captures the joys and fears of being a child
MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO (Hayao Miyazaki, 1988)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
December 16 – January 5
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.nausicaa.net
In many ways a precursor to Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece, Spirited Away, the magical My Neighbor Totoro is a fantastical trip down the rabbit hole, a wondrous journey through the sheer glee and universal fears of childhood. With their mother, Yasuko, suffering from an extended illness in the hospital, Satsuki and her younger sister, Mei, move to a new house in a rural farming community with their father, anthropology professor Tatsuo Kusakabe. Kanta, a shy boy who lives nearby, tells them the house is haunted, and indeed the two girls come upon a flurry of black soot sprites scurrying about. Mei also soon discovers a family of totoros, supposedly fictional characters from her storybooks, living in the forest, protected by a giant camphor tree. When the girls fear their mother has taken a turn for the worse, Mei runs off on her own, and it is up to Satsuki to find her. Working with art director Kazuo Oga, Miyazaki paints the film with rich, glorious skies and lush greenery, honoring the beauty and power of nature both visually as well as in the narrative. The scene in which Satsuki and Mei huddle with Totoro at a bus stop in a rainstorm is a treasure. (And just wait till you see Catbus’s glowing eyes.) The movie also celebrates the sense of freedom and adventure that comes with being a child, without helicopter parents and myriad rules suffocating them at home and school. The multi-award-winning My Neighbor Totoro is screening in a new 35mm print December 16 to January 5 as part of the series “Castles in the Sky: Miyazaki, Takahata & the Masters of Studio Ghibli,” a dual presentation of the IFC Center and GKIDS’ New York International Children’s Film Festival. The 2006 rereleased dubbed version, featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning (Satsuki), Elle Fanning (Mei), Lea Salonga (Yasuko), Tim Daly (Tatsuo), and Frank Welker (Totoro and Catbus), will be shown at all morning and afternoon screenings; the original Japanese version with English subtitles will be shown 6:00 and later.
The series also includes such other Miyazaki works as Howl’s Moving Castle, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Ponyo, Spirited Away, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Porco Rosso, Princess Mononoke, and Laputa: Castle in the Sky in addition to such lesser-known Studio Ghibli films as Hiroyuki Morita’s The Cat Returns, Tomomi Mochizuki’s Ocean Waves, Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday, and Yoshifumi Kondo’s Whisper of the Heart, all being shown in new 35mm prints.
Livia Bloom’s “Documentary in Bloom” series at the Maysles Cinema usually introduces new nonfiction films, but it has something a little different in store for December: the U.S. theatrical release of a thirty-six-year-old French work. It’s hard to believe that Daguerreotypes, Agnès Varda’s absolutely charming look at her longtime Parisian community, has never had a theatrical run in America, so it is exciting that her wonderful little tale is finally being shown on the big screen. In Daguerreotypes, Varda, who has made such New Wave classics as Cléo de 5 à 7 and Le Bonheur as well as such seminal personal documentaries as The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès, turns her camera on the people she and husband Jacques Demy lived with along the Rue Daguerre in Paris’s 14th arrondissement. Varda, who also narrates the seventy-five-minute film, primarily stands in the background while capturing local shopkeepers talking about their businesses and how they met their spouses as customers stop by, picking up bread, meat, perfume, and other items. Varda uses a goofy, low-rent magic show as a centerpiece, with many of the characters attending this major cultural event; the magician references the magic of both life and cinema itself, with Varda titling the film not only after the street where she lives but also directly evoking the revolutionary photographic process developed by Louis Daguerre in the 1820s and ’30s. Daguerreotypes will surely have a different impact now than it did back in the mid-1970s, depicting a time that already felt like the past but now feels like a long-forgotten era, when neighbors knew one another and lived as a tight-knit community. The film will be proceeded by the 1965 short Elsa la Rose, a twenty-minute documentary directed by Varda and Raymond Zanchi and narrated by Michel Piccoli that explores the loving relationship between French writers and communists Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet.
We really wanted to like Bad Santa a lot more than we did. Terry Zwigoff, who brought us the delightful Crumb (1994) and the terrific Ghost World (2000), reaches for the bottom of the toilet in this foul-mouthed, dingy, and dirty holiday tale of a drunk, debauched Santa (Billy Bob Thornton) and his curse-spewing sidekick elf (Tony Cox) who go to different malls each year and rob them after Santa mistreats the kids who line up to ask for presents. Hey, we love our comedy as low grade as the next person, but we have to admit it bothered us when Thornton let loose with a torrent of filthy language in front of kid actors. The story was devised by executive producers Joel and Ethan Coen, who had good intentions that go awry in the end. Bernie Mac, Lauren Graham, and especially John Ritter add fun support. And although Brett Kelly as the Kid, Norman Thurman, is funny at first, eventually the maudlin aspects of his developing relationship with Santa get overplayed and bring the movie down a few notches. Bad Santa is screening just past midnight Friday and Saturday at the Nitehawk Cinema in Williamsburg, where a few drinks before going in should help a whole lot.
