Review of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Shane Black, previous best known as the writer of the “Lethal Weapons” series, delivered a crowd-pleasing comedy-noir with his 2005 directorial debut, “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” The film proved that Black had more than a golden pen and showed off his visual acumen, originality and sizable knowledge of noir history on and off the screen. Unfortunately, Warner Brothers second-guessed the film’s viability and blundered the distribution by opening on only 8 screens and expanding to a peak of merely 226 theaters. With almost no marketing or support, the film grossed just 4 million in the US (it made three times that abroad) when it had mainstream blockbuster potential and ended up being labeled the most overlooked film of the year by several critics.

The title, incidentally, comes from film critic Pauline Kael’s 1968 quote: "Kiss kiss, bang bang. This is perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. This appeal is what attracts us, and ultimately what makes us despair when we begin to understand how seldom movies are more than this."

The film picks up with Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jr.), a criminal who ran into a casting session while fleeing the police. He does such a good job acting the part of a crook who just got his partner killed (exactly what has just happened to him in reality) that he lands the part and is flown to L.A. to receive detective lessons from “Gay Perry” (Val Kilmer) in preparation for his role. At a party, he is reunited with Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan), his childhood crush, now an aspiring actress.

On Harry’s first night of detective practice, he witnesses a car dumped into a lake with a dead girl in the trunk. Perry and Harry can’t go to the police since they broke open the locked trunk with a bullet that ended up in the victim’s head. The body beats Harry back to his hotel room, and he quickly realizes that he’s being framed for the crime. To make matters worse, Harmony’s sister has been killed and she thinks Harry is a real private eye who might be able to help her find the truth. Like all good mysteries, the two cases turn out to be connected.

After a brief flashback intro, the film kicks immediately into high gear with one of my favorite credit sequences ever. It’s full of the cartoon graphic art style used in the intros of “Catch Me If You Can” (2002) and “Casino Royale” (2006), but with a pop-art noir twist. The black, white and red palette boils noir to its essence, best captured in a sequence of screenplay pages (from the actual film) splattered with blood and lipstick. Kiss kiss, bang bang indeed!

When the plot really gets started, we are joined by Harry Lockhart, clearly drunk at a party of L.A. bigwigs and hopefuls. Robert Downey Jr. not only stars, but immediately starts delivering a narration of his own adventure. I’d consider this a risky move, since narration is fairly frequently despised for being redundant and expository. Shane Black, however, gives it a post-modern self-awareness that is irresistible fun. Downey is a comedic revelation, and a slyly ironic casting inspiration: an actor turned criminal (he did jail time in 1999 for cocaine possession) playing a criminal turned actor.

Downey delivers Black’s often hilarious prose with quick, stammering wit and timing: trying to hit on an attractive girl at the party who asks him what he does for a living he replies, “I’m retired. I invented dice as a kid.” The girl looks mildly impressed and claims she does a bit of acting. The film immediately cuts to a brief clip of her in a horror movie, topless and screaming, before she gets her head knocked through the air by a monster.

[Image (bottom): Harry interrupts the reel partway between two frames to give some background that he forgot to fill in.]

Downey constantly breaks the fourth wall to cobble together the story. He’s always apologizing for one thing or another like withholding information to create suspense, making fun of a scene with obvious foreshadowing or acknowledging that the ending cheats a little. His interplay with Val Kilmer is excellent. Kilmer’s capable, sarcastic, homosexual detective delivers all his lines with a mean deadpan that leaves Harry Lockhart behind and creates some of the funniest exchanges of dialogue.

Michelle Monaghan gets to have plenty of fun as the exceedingly appealing girl-next-door character. She gets to be funny and sexy without having to be ditzy, victimized or villainized (a rarity in noir). Harmony’s romance with Harry is contagiously charming without getting sappy or dragging the plot.

Harmony’s backstory is easily the best of the cast with a humorous childhood magic show episode (the opening flashback), a “discovery” as an actress when she gets on the news following a break-in by a drunken man in a robot suit and an acting stint in a ridiculous commercial for beer featuring a brilliantly awful CG bear.

[Image (bottom): “I prefer Genaro’s, but I’m a bear, what do I know? I suck the heads off fishes.” Now that’s a tagline!]

I’ve probably made the film sound really discombobulated and entirely comedic. It actuality is very absurdist and full of sidetracking comedy vignettes, but Shane Black has a wonderful ability to make everything tie back into the film (think “Hot Fuzz” (2007)). Sometimes the tie-ins aren’t even that relevant, but its keeps the film feeling coherent and clever. The mystery at the center of the film is not treated as a throw-away setup for quick gags, and elements of the plot are actually quite engaging. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” does have some trouble selling the sadness, pain and darkness on the side of its criminal underbelly, but the black humor and likable trio easily sustain the light-hearted overbelly (yes, I am going to pretend that is a word).

So while you won’t feel the desperate grittiness and steely cynicism of vintage cold-blooded noir, Black does prove he knows the ropes and tropes. The film’s chapter titles come from Raymond Chandler stories, but smartly follow the action as well. “The Lady in the Lake,” for instance, is used for the chapter where Harry and Perry witness the car and corpse being disposed in a lake. In a particularly post-modern gesture, the leads are both fans of a fictional writer named Johnny Gossamer whose dime-store novels have cheesy titles and lurid covers that perfectly emulate the real thing. Gay Perry insists that real life detective work is really quite boring, but all of Gossamer’s literary clichés (shared by the genre at large) end up playing out in their real life adventures.

Despite all the digressions, the pacing is actually quite fast. It’s clear that Blane’s experience with “Lethal Weapon” (1987) and other screenplays prepared him for the blend of comedy and action that he so expertly weaves here. The visuals are snappy and kinetic with lots of commotion and little absurdist touches. The parodies of swanky L.A. clubs with overly-serious hipness in the form of weird mimes and reindeer themed strippers are treated with offhand surrealism. Black also gets to poke fun at and pay tribute to the contrived eroticism of cheap noir fiction in a scene where Harmony runs through traffic with a Christmas novelty costume and a loaded revolver. Strangely, it all makes sense in the context of the elaborate plot.

The cinematography and sets show a savvy color sense. More complicated than just black and white, Black leans on surprising saturated colors. Reds, blues and yellows get used for lens tints, interior decoration and composition accents in an eye-catching, modish way. The color themes don’t appear to have any particular meaning and generally style triumphs over depth in much of the presentation, but it certainly works as a visual experiment. The shadowy off-kilter atmosphere of the genre still shines (er… darkens?) through, with plenty of blackness, high-contrast lighting and high angle shots.

[Images: Yellow, blue and red getting unusual attention for a noir picture.]

Ultimately the film’s humor might fall on fallow ears for many audiences. There are a couple misses in the dialogue and a few jokes that reach too far. The humor is also dark enough to disturb some sensibilities. One scene involving Russian roulette had me laughing out loud and then feeling like I was a psycho. For myself, I can say that I totally got into the mood of the film, resonating with the humor, the action and the quirkily charismatic lead trio. The film joins “Brick” (2006) and “Red Rock West” (1994) as under-rated modern noirs that deserve more attention and acclaim.

Walrus Rating: 9

[Image: Harry hanging from a hand protruding from a coffin suspended on the bridge of a highway. Don’t ask how things got to this point…]

The Power of Normalization in Queer Asian Cinema

Ang Lee and Nagisa Oshima are very different directors in terms of style, themes and content, but they share an interesting overlap as heterosexual East Asian directors who have tackled homosexual issues in contemporary films. I’ll be focusing specifically on “Wedding Banquet” (1993) and “Taboo” (2000), respectively. The Asian connection is perhaps more tenuous than it seems, with Ang Lee heralding from Taiwan and setting his film in modern New York and Oshima coming from Japan and setting his film in the late Tokugawa period (1860’s). However, commonalities can be seen in the decision to approach queer material in societies where repression, tradition or convention mark such topics as marginalized or minority, if not fully taboo. In the case of “Taboo”, the violation of societal norms lies more within the context of modern Japanese sensibilities than the historical setting of the samurai tradition. I intend to explore the ways these two films deal with queer topics and will analyze their use of normalization as a means of accommodating both gay and straight audiences.

Both directors traditionally take extraordinarily different (almost opposite) approaches to film. Ang Lee focuses on uplifting stories of domestic life, filmed with mainstream audiences in mind and realism, clarity and continuity as guideposts. Nagisa Oshima seeks out controversial issues and provocative material and shoots them with art-house (often experimental) techniques and overtly political agendas. The approach to “The Wedding Banquet” is, thus, fairly easy to predict, centering on character-driven family dynamics, domestic quotidian moments and a general humanist philosophy where a compromise can be found between tradition and modernity.

Oshima, on the other hand, could reasonably be expected to take a more aggressive position (for instance, showing outrage at their unjust treatment or shooting sexually explicit scenes) given his history with films like “Night and Fog in Japan” and In the Realm of the Senses. Nothing could be further from “Taboo”, which treats male-male relationships with cool reserve and aesthetic dispassion at the core of a plot where several (largely apolitical) themes and ruminations are entertained.

Typical negative responses to these films accuse Ang Lee of softly pandering to both sides and Nagisa Oshima of selling out (or at least selling short) his transgressive reputation. These complaints often target two areas: the absence of sexually explicit content and the failure to address the specific hardships and stigmatization of the individual homosexual within the larger heteronormative majority. Gao Wai-Tung, the gay protagonist of “The Wedding Banquet”, appears to have a strong personal relationship and an implied community of support, despite his conflict with his tradition-bound parents. In “Taboo”, the viewer is given every reason to believe that homosexuality is a respected and permissible persuasion. In neither film are the gay characters situated as victims, or even outsiders.

Is such a depiction progressive or overly cautious? The answer is, of course, not simple or singular. Japan and Taiwan both have histories that grant them experience as outsiders (in the sense that the Western world, and Hollywood in particular, have often situated them as an exotic “other” summed up in the term “Orientalism”). They also have instances of national trauma that have led to victim mentalities (the atomic bombs in Japan, oppressive foreign occupation and the Febuaury 28th incident for Taiwan). While none of the issues I have just mentioned seem to have a direct relationship to queer theory, I would like to suggest that contemporary East Asian directors are especially endowed with an awareness of the long term ramifications of reiterating and internalizing an outsider/victim position.

While it is certainly important to remember the past, it is reasonable that such directors would find it more effective to evolve a cultural landscape of sexual normalization where homosexuality is not treated as controversial, alienating or oppositional, but as fundamentally akin to and almost interchangeable with heterosexuality. By handling the material subtly, by refusing to shock mainstream moderates and by playing up humanist similarity over sexual difference, both directors achieve a wider audience: disseminating their opinions more expansively and avoiding the niche labels of “gay film” or “queer cinema” that would eliminate most heteronormative conservative viewers. Their approach also evades the problem of backlash that might drive moderates to feel more distant or different from the gay community.

So while these films are not necessarily progressive in terms of envelope-pushing, they are likely to affect more audience members than the avant-garde or controversial forefront. The “agenda,” in the Marxist sense, is more effective purely for being disguised; integrated into a conventional narrative and structure that does not call undue attention to itself. “Taboo” and “The Wedding Banquet” are progressive in the sense of tipping the scale back towards statistically equivalent cultural representation for minority communities.

This model leads to further questions as to the intended audience and modes of reception for such films. As I’ve suggested, I think both films are intended for a mainstream audience (perhaps less so for “Taboo”) and would have to reach both heterosexual and homosexual viewers to have the gradual normalization affect I mentioned earlier. As for the question of whether gay viewers will resonate especially with the material, I can only speculate.

“Taboo” does not seem to call forth audience identification or sympathy, although the androgynous beauty and poetic fatality of the central character, Kano, (already aesthetically discernable to heterosexual audiences) could only be strengthened by a sexual response/desire. A heterosexual equivalent might be the archetype of the femme fatale in film noirs. Since Oshima is heterosexual, one can (naively) presume that he is not focused on sexual spectatorial pleasure. “Taboo”’s visual perfectionism, however, would seem to invite us to indulge fully in the seductive cinematography and well-crafted imagery, so why not also the young male cast?

In “The Wedding Banquet”, the gay protagonists may or may not strike gay viewers as attractive, but they are far more likely than “Taboo” to elicit sympathy and identification. The audience is encouraged through realism, light comedy and character development to accept and relate to the characters. The leads also possess such positive traits as kindness and work-ethic that are values universally accepted by mainstream society. Normalization, here, seems to diminish and tame the possibility of sexual desire in the spectator in the way that has a long tradition in American romantic comedies: conspicuously attractive leads pursue romance, but are never shown nude or engaging in explicit sex.

Ultimately, both films succeed at furthering an enlightened sexual agenda, although neither breaks new ground in queer cinema or satisfies all possible viewer positions. The goal of pleasing the far-left, middle and conservative demographics simultaneously is near impossible, but reasonable critics are likely to understand that there is room on the cinematic and political spectrum for gay-themed films of all varieties. “Taboo” and “The Wedding Banquet” would seem to fill a notable gap in the middle-of-the-road, an area that appears to have an expanding market. Ang Lee’s "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) would seem to prove this shift and verify that his formula works at gaining widespread attention and acceptance for gay-themed romances.

Review of Strip Nude for Your Killer

[Image: Red light district or photography dark room? You’ll get a little bit of both before this movie is done.]

It isn’t very hard to figure out who producers were targeting with the lurid title “Strip Nude for Your Killer” (1975), a giallo by Andrea Bianchi. While many gialli flirt rather harmlessly with sexual material, “Strip Nude” is an outright attempt to combine the giallo with “adult entertainment” and it easily outstrips (such a bad pun) most gialli in its shameless reliance on nudity. However it’s not an entirely wasted exercise and flickers of potential in the story and technical craft occasionally appear.

The film stars Nino Castelnuovo as fashion photographer Carlo Bianchi (note the director sneaking his name in already) and Edwige Fenech (with short hair!) as model/photographer Magda Cortis. After a tasteless intro wherein two doctors drown a corpse in a bathtub to disguise a botched abortion, we are introduced to Carlo. He stalks and seduces Femi Benussi (last seen in “The Killer Must Kill Again” from the same year) within minutes using hilariously cheesy pickup lines and promises.

[Image: (from left to right) Catelnuovo, Benussi and Fenech.]

We soon arrive at the modeling studio where Carlo works. It exists somewhere in the limbo between the fashion and pornography industries. It doesn’t take long for the killings to begin, and it becomes clear that everyone at the agency is a target. The gloved killer has a photo of all the employees and begins to exterminate them one by one.

[Image: (from left to right) Fenech, forgettable gay victim, forgettable ditzy victim, forgettable male stud victim, botched abortion victim, forgettable lesbian victim, forgettable obese victim and Nino.]

The title ends up being a bit of a misnomer, since no one actually strips nude for the killer. Most of the victims had already stripped before the killer arrives or get stripped after they are killed.

[Image: There are at least two things I would do before entering a dark room where I just heard scuffling and death-cries: 1) Call the police. 2) Put something on over my lingerie. However, to be honest, I wouldn’t enter the room at all and I wouldn’t have been wearing lingerie.]

The deaths tend to be pretty standard affairs, with the only variation being that the killer must have running water nearby to work up a psychotic murder fervor. Despite this, two scenes take place by prominent outdoor fountains without anything happening. One suspects that Bianchi has a lot of fun misdirecting audiences in unusual ways. My favorite example occurs when the audience has just seen the gay photographer killed by someone in a leather outfit and motorcycle helmet. Bianchi then cuts to the studio on the next day, where two of the suspects are being photographed for a sexy motorcycle spread.

The most awkward and darkly humorous kill is inflicted upon the bumbling, obese, cuckolded husband of the studio owner. After embarrassingly admitting his impotence to a kindly model, he gets attacked while clutching a deflated sex doll in one hand and a knife in the other. I don’t know whether to feel worse for the victim or the first person who stumbles upon the scene of the crime.

Outside of the murders there is very little to get invested in during “Strip Nude for Your Killer.” The heavy doses of bad dialogue and bare skin are more often inadvertently funny than suspenseful or erotic. Edwige Fenech easily does the best acting in the film, and that doesn’t say much.

“Strip Nude for Your Killer” doesn’t get a recommendation from me, but it does offer some insights into the extremes of sexuality that the genre was willing to go. It offers a straight forward mystery without many clues or clever twists, but with rare moments of shock and tension. Not a particularly good thriller, but if you like your exploitation cinema with an extra couple of X’s, this is a film for you.

Walrus Rating: 3.0

Oh, before I forget I should do an art comparison. The picture is distinctly surrealist, but whether it is imitation Dali or imitation Magritte I’m not quite sure. I went with Rene Magritte because the floating rocks theme appears in his work so often.

Flatland Movie Available

I recently recieved an email that "Flatland: The Movie" is now available. The shockingly steep $30 price tag (for a half-hour short) has soured me on the whole thing, but I thought I should follow up on the article from back in February. Math nerds with deep pockets can celebrate.

To purchase your copy, try the official website.

Pacing Scale

Below I've provided a scale of pacing by director from fastest to slowest. It is based mostly on my general estimates of the cut-rates combined with a more subjective value of the overall pacing. It semi-averages across the director's entire career so, for instance, Tony Scott's hyperspeed "Domino" and brisk "Top Gun" are tempered somewhat by "The Hunger." Basically, I am trying to say this isn't an exact science.

I'd also like to mention that I don't consider fast pacing to be an intrinsically good quality nor slow pacing intrinsically bad. I am of the opinion that Bay and Schumacher are awful directors while Hsiao-Hsien and Angelopoulos are genius. Just the same, the pacing should be consistent and fit the aethestic of the film as a whole.

Fastest

Baz Luhrmann
Sergei Eisenstein
John Woo
Michael Bay
Roberto Rodriguez
Luc Besson
Tony Scott
Joel Schumacher
Quentin Tarantino
Tom Tykwer
Oliver Stone
Stephen Spielberg
Martin Scorsese
Tim Burton
Howard Hawks
Alfred Hitchcock
Billy Wilder
Sam Peckinpah
Orson Welles
William Wyler
David Lynch
Francois Traffaut
David Lean
Roman Polanski
Akira Kurosawa
Peter Greenaway
Eric Rohmer
Jean Renoir
Wim Wenders
Kenji Mizoguchi
Jacques Tati
Yasujiro Ozu
Andrei Tarkovski
Tsai Ming-Ling
Hou Hsiao-Hsien
Theo Angelopoulos
Bela Tarr

Slowest

Review of Where Is the Friend's Home?

Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami has one of the best reputations on the international art film circuit today, and yet it still feels like his name recognition on the streets of America is absolutely nil. Despite winning a Palme d’Or in 1997, being named the greatest active non-US director by The Guardian in 2006 and getting dubbed the world’s best filmmaker by Werner Herzog (who has indie fan and college campus buzz to spare), Kiarostami couldn’t even get a visa to enter the US for a film festival.

On one hand, it isn’t terribly surprising Kiarostami doesn’t have a huge stateside fandom since his films resonate primarily with the generation of maximally ivory tower middle-aged critics who have the ear of a very select New York intellectual audience. Even middlebrow critics aren’t always enthusiastic. Ebert’s 1-star scathing review of “A Taste of Cherry” (1997), for instance, has been only the first in an ongoing campaign against the director. Kiarostami doesn’t have the obvious youth appeal of Spike Jonze or the provocative headline-earning of Lars Von Trier or the cult virtuosity and wit of the Coen brothers. Instead, he is minimalist and often political. Distribution has been difficult for the director and, of course, he must contend with the middle-America’s generally negative reaction to anything Iranian. None of this adds up to a blockbuster sensation.

My own reactions have been somewhat mixed. “Where Is the Friend’s Home?” (1989) is the fifth film I’ve seen by the director (a small fraction of his total output) and I think I’m finally coming to understand his unique style and simple tales. While not the masterpiece that I considered “A Taste of Cherry” to be, the film is accessibly light and irresistibly winning. It begs to be called poetic and lyrical and hypnotic and full of humanity and all those other descriptors that inadvertently drive movie-renters to set the DVD back on the video store’s shelf and to continue looking for “Torque” (2004) like they originally intended.

I myself am not always that into experimental forays into minimalism (see “Goodbye Dragon Inn”), although the best ones can break through my outer crust of low-attention-span pop-culture barnacles. “Where Is the Friend’s Home?” comes burdened with two additional factors that could also potentially prevent my connecting with it: repetition and child actors. Despite the odds, however, I must admit that I quite liked the film and found myself neither bored nor annoyed.

So what is the film about? It’s about an eight-year-old named Ahmed (Babek Ahmed Poor) who accidentally takes home his friend’s homework notebook. The friend, Mohammad Reda Nematzadeh, is berated by the teacher in the film’s opening and Ahmed knows that if he doesn’t return it the boy will be expelled. Basically the entire film (about 83 minutes) follows Ahmed’s journey to return the notebook before the next day.

Though outwardly simple, the film isn’t empty, an important distinction for such works. Ahmed’s performance really helps to drive the film. His naïve morality makes him instantly likable and the camera’s insistence on participating only within his world grants a limited perspective that is wholly convincing and sympathetic. Ahmed hardly seems to “act” since he talks and behaves in a naturalistic way completely devoid of self-consciousness or staginess. The quietly stirring approach adopted by director and star is at least on the level of Italian neo-realist classics like “The Children Are Watching Us” (1944) and the critically acclaimed Indian film by Satyajit Ray, “Pather Panchali” (1955).

Throughout the film, Ahmed is hindered, punished, misdirected and derailed by adults. The adult world is too caught up in self-importance, rules, punishments and agendas to understand the enormous significance Ahmed places on his appointed task. They view the child as a servant, a trainee or a distraction when they bother to view him at all. Without ever directing any true malice at the boy (safely avoiding melodrama or exaggeration) they impose upon him arbitrary restrictions or treat him as insignificant. The audience can easily identify with him through their memories of being frustrated, confused and neglected simply because we were not old enough to be taken seriously.

An extended conversation between his grandpa and another old man (“Every week my father would give me a penny and every fortnight he would give me a beating. He would sometimes forget the penny, but he never missed a beating.”) perfectly captures the absurdity and arbitrariness of old-world ideas about discipline. I much prefer the personal experience of Ahmed’s journey and the universal themes of generation gap disconnect to the more abstract political readings of the film as a veiled anti-authority statement.

The visual technique is nearly documentary in tone. Except for the schoolroom scenes bookending the film it takes place entirely outdoors. The setting comprises dusty, crumbling old-world alleys in rural villages and the yellow-gray calm of the hillsides in-between. The same locations, and even the same camera positions, are often visited twice or more. Repetition, not with a sense of ritual but merely routine, literally and thematically dominates the film. Ahmed dialogue rarely varies since his pleas require a certain amount of stubbornness and annoyingness simply to get attention. His search is often circular, zigzagged or dead-ended with as much backtracking as exploration. It works because the mood is right and the sense of hope and allegory keep the mind at work when the narrative flow sails into dead water.

As the story consumes time (the word “progresses” is too strong) the changes in light shifts the familiar sites into more desperate shades, a gradual transformation reflected also in the boy’s unassuming face. Just as the film looks like it is reaching an inevitable anticlimax (I mean how many outcomes can there be? He finds the friend’s house or he doesn’t…) the boy joins an old man for a rambling nighttime stroll to the final destination and Ahmed makes a strange choice that adds an element of mystery. The final scene is wonderfully handled, full of just the right amount of tension and poignancy. The last shot is so simple that I found it hard to comprehend how I could be so touched and pleased by it. It ends with a precise abruptness that proves Kiarostami’s slow pacing isn’t for lack of timing sense.

“Where Is the Friend’s Home” is a satisfying film and if watched at a time when the viewer isn’t rushed or antsy, it should be a pleasure for even the jaded. It doesn’t have the sugar-coating or proselytizing that turns me off to so many “heart-warming family gems” and there is a certain alluring formal rigor underneath the laidback realism. It works as a great introduction to the director though it doesn’t match the genius of “A Taste of Cherry.”

Walrus Rating: 7.5

Review of The Place Promised in Our Early Days

Japanese animator Makoto Shinkai came to prominence with his 24-minute short “Voices of a Distant Star” (2002), famed for being a well-regarded anime made entirely by Shinkai on his household Mac. His follow-up feature “The Place Promised in Our Early Days” (2004) also met with acclaim from the few who saw its Japanese satellite television release. The film failed to get theatrical distribution abroad, but it has been released on DVD. The low-profile distribution and lack of fanfare have made the film an instant victim of neglect, a sad fate for a film that is remarkably unique and beautiful.

The film tells the stories of Hiroki and Takuya, two young friends in an alternate history Japan divided by the Alliance (US) and Union (presumably the Soviet Union). The boys live out their “early days” (8th grade) in the sunny countryside near the border, just across the water from the Union’s enormous Hokkaido Tower. The mysterious building rises so high that it’s top brushes the limits of atmosphere and transcends the camera frame in every shot (until the finale). As the story progresses, we learn that the tower was built by a brilliant scientist (now dead) and pulls in matter from a “branch” universe to replace an expanding radius around it.

Hiroki and Takuya are both prodigies and work diligently at constructing a plane during their off hours at a guided missile plant (yes, one that hires junior high students). They dream of one day visiting the tower and even promise to invite Sayuri, their mutual friend/girlfriend. It’s a promise they can’t keep, however, when Sayuri abruptly disappears.

Three years later, Takuya is working as a scientist on parallel universe applications while Hiroki is a high school student in Tokyo where he wanders around as a melancholic, unfulfilled husk. The approaching outbreak of war and the rediscovery of Sayuri trigger a chain of reunions and a plan to visit the tower before it is destroyed forever.

One can’t talk about “The Place Promised in Our Early Days” without first mentioning how gorgeous it looks. The artistry, while somewhat different in style, easily rivals the best of Miyazaki’s better known films. The images, particularly the relatively realistic landscapes, really capture one’s attention and sustain audience interest. Where many animes rely on fantasy and science fiction to create wonderment, Shinkai focuses first and foremost on the natural beauty of ordinary places often quite familiar to the world we know.

Though the setting (excepting the tower that overlooks many a scene) is realistic, one must admit the lighting tends to be magically idyllic and conspicuously rapturous at every hour of the day. The use of lighting effects (particularly with sunlight) dominates the film in the way that material properties (specular shine, reflectivity and transparency) dominates “Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence” (2004). “The Place Promised in Our Early Days” in virtually a crash course in pretty lighting phenomena. Here are some of the many effects you’ll be treated to:

1) Filtered shafts of light.

2) Lens glare (upper left) and lens flare (lower right).

3) Atmospheric effects like haze and cloud glow (note the way the lightning in the second example illuminates the nearby clouds).

4) Saturation (reduced contrast under strong rear lighting).

Much of the visuals are simply keen artistic expressions rather than CG modeled demonstrations of an actual physics engine (such as in “Ghost in the Shell 2”). As such, the effects aren’t very dynamic. You won’t see many whirling dust motes in the shafts of light or shifting shadows or drifting clouds like you would if the system was really using radiosity (dynamic illumination). So while realism tends to give way to dramatic effect, the upside is that the film comes really close to reality and ends up looking even better courtesy of a little artistic license. The lack of a killer physic engine does mean that some materials like smoke and water don’t look as good as they could. You do get a hint of sparkle on choppy water, though, which is a nice quick fix.

I’ll stop talking about the graphics in a second, but I did want to mention that the character design is not nearly on the same level. The characters aren’t off-putting or drawn badly, they just lack much originality and detail. They are a bit too stereotypical (cartoon uniformity of color, big-eyes, etc.) to draw us in through verisimilitude or individuality and so I feel Shinkai misses a chance to make us identify with and remember his characters.

This is a shame, considering that despite the visual splendor, this movie is really about personal encounters with growth, hope, friendship and love. It’s misleading because we have all the signs of a sweeping, momentous epic: vast political entities fighting each other on an international scale, a mysterious looming structure, heady metaphysical dalliances with dreams and parallel universes and, of course, a giant explosion. By the time one gets to the finale, one might easily experience it as an anticlimax. The lack of explanations, a 50-50 mix of pleasant ambiguity (how were the tower and Sayuri connected?) and plot holes (why didn’t the Union get rid of the tower themselves when they realized it was dangerous and out of their control?) disappointed and angered many viewers.

However, I’m not of the popular opinion that the film is utterly opaque and too confusing to understand. While I admit that I still have some unanswered questions, I don’t think the outmost layers of meaning are that obscure. The tower served as a target of mystery and wonder for the young characters. Their dream of visiting the tower was barred by the military-guarded border while its power within their imagination was diminished by a scientific understanding and years of frustrating inaccessibility. As they entered the adult world, they no long experienced the wonder, enchantment and awe that once held them rapt. Giving up on the trip to the tower was a form of despair and a symbol of their missed opportunity for adventure, romantic fulfillment (Hiroki) and sated curiosity (Takuya).

The film deals with plenty of other motifs too, although I hesitate to probe too deeply. Is the Miyazaki-esque lesson about keeping your promises at all costs that interesting? Should one bother to dig up the obvious phallic potential of the rising tower or the equally obvious connections between the atomic bomb and the climactic explosion? There seems to be less point in doing so the further it gets away from the scope of character development.

[Image: Religious iconography, irony or just more fun with lighting?]

One certainly can’t claim that the film does not offer up enough food for thought, however many would argue that the real meat of an anime is the action scenes and plot twists and those are quite utterly lacking. If you can’t tolerate drama and dialogue without a giant robot or a samurai showdown, this film probably won’t go over well with you. For me, it was a pleasant alternative to your typical anime clichés and compares well with “Wings of Honneamise” (1987), though somewhat below the ingenuity and originality of Satoshi Kon.

[Image: An interesting takeoff point for a montage digression about technology and biology.]

If the film has a major flaw, I’d say it was the difficulty reconciling the tight-focus character drama and the wide-focus “big picture.” Shinkai keeps the camera far back to soak in the masterfully-painted settings (often leaving the subject matter completely behind) when he should be keeping us grounded to the characters and giving them enough facial detail to distinguish some expressive nuance.

The titanic scale of the tower and the global conflict seems extraneous considering that they are hardly exploited as elements of tension, action or adventure. Then there is the matter of the dream worlds and parallel realities which are ultimately left unexplored. It seems to work on a thematic level by suggesting that the missed possibilities and alternatives of the past still hover invisibly around us, but little comes of it. Shinkai needed to make up his mind about whether he was making a film about emotions, identity and relationships or about society, technology and war. Sometimes he feels like he is going down one path, sometimes the other and the result is that neither gets the fullest possible treatment.

Oh, and as always, avoid the dub. Although it isn’t terrible, it cakes on the cheesiness and melodrama a little bit thick.

Walrus Rating: 7.5 (Leaning higher)