Film Week

A review of the films I've seen this past week.

HARRIET THE SPY: BLOG WARS (2010)
Ouch, Disney Channel. Just ouch. As much as I'd like to see Jennifer Stone in something other than Wizards of Waverly Place, she just wasn't a good fit for this. And it's not because of anything she did as an actress, but because this was such a badly written movie. I can't remember how old Harriet is in the original novel--10 or 12 or something--but here she's 16, and what comes across as precocious, smart, and curious in a 10-12 year old comes off here, with a 16 year-old, as surly, snotty, and suspicious. She also comes across as a creepy little voyeur, staring in peoples' windows. The script needed to do a lot more than simply change Harriet's age. It also needed to rewrite her as a teenager. Harriet just comes off as immature and entitled, and there's nothing Stone can do to save it. No stars.

PONYO (2008)
One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. I think a lot of people had trouble grasping the story when this came out in theaters last year, which is weird to me. I saw a distressing number of reviewers who praised the animation but were highly critical of the English dub and of the story itself. I think many of them were trying to shove Miyazaki the filmmaker into a box that he doesn't fit in. It's weird how often some reviewers will cut down American animation for being so formulaic, and then cut down foreign animation which defies formula. What's great about Miyazaki as a storyteller is that he's a storyteller. His messages--and there are his usual themes here of environmentalism, ideal simplicity in life, the capacity of children, the power of love, humankind's uneasy alliance with the spiritual, and his concern with what happens to the elderly in society--are themes interwoven into the story itself instead of something to be hammered into an audience to tell them how to feel. Miyazaki's movies are, in a way, about how you feel as you're experiencing them. I notice I haven't said much about the story itself, because it's hard to describe it without making it sound small. But it's rooted in The Little Mermaid and what reminded me of Japanese Kappa legends. Just see the movie, it's beautiful. **** stars.