quiet trickster

You can probably tell that I’m flagging, right? I couldn’t think of anything to write about the World Animation 2 selection, and by the time I got through today’s four films, I was only able to write about two of them. Oops…

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: More pure Hollywood froth from Anita Loos - ably aided, this time, by Hawks (always my favourite Hollywood golden age director - responsible for just about all my favourite Hollywood films, in any genre).

It’s quintessential Marilyn, of course, with sterling support from Jane Russell (Hawks actually appears to have preferred brunettes, himself, over the years). It’s also the second film in as many days to feature Olympic hopefuls in swimming trunks - entirely improbable set dressing as Russell sings ‘Ain’t Anyone Here For Love?’

Tekkonkinkreet: Being anime, I came away full of remarkable visions and very little clue as to what’s going on. Being anime, perhaps knowing what’s going on is not quite the point.

It’s a softer visual style than I’m familiar with from things like Studio Ghibli’s work - but with the same riotous detail. It’s a fully realised world, although whether it’s on Earth, or somewhere else entirely, is never quite defined.

It starts with a relatively low key story - street urchins, street thugs, yakuza, slum power struggles, with orphans Black and White at the centre. It gets stranger with the arrival of creepy Mr Snake and his apparent supermen assassins, but… you really want me to attempt to explain it?

The names of the central character kind of clues you into what the story’s about - simple, eccentric White is seemingly oblivious to the hardships they’re experiencing, and troubled, violent Black is torn between protecting White and establishing his supremacy in the squabbles with rivals over the slum they live in. As the various elements of criminality are taken out, the film becomes a dream-world battle between Black’s darker side, the Minotaur (astrology and the zodiac are a theme touched upon but never fully developed w.r.t. this bull…), and the balancing force of White.

There are nice touches along the way - each level of thug or criminal is revealed as more human - the thrusting young yakusa worried for his pregnant girlfriend, the aging yakusa resigned to being out of step with the times.

Weirdsville and The Counterfeiters have kinda gotten a rough deal here, as the last two films I saw: Weirdsville deserves it, but The Counterfeiters is pretty good, for, y’know, a depressing film about barely surviving the Holocaust…

OK, it’s true - I don’t know enough (read: anything) about the 1956 revolution in Hungary, so I can’t really judge the accuracy of the film (as with I served the King of England)

I mean, I know there was a revolution, I know tanks were involved - it was in the news last year (the anniversary, not because they’d only just caught up with it). But I certainly have no idea whether any part of the film’s water polo player turns revolutionary story has any basis in fact. I assume that Hungary did win Olympic Gold that year, because even if the revolutionary isn’t real, why would you make that up? It’s not the most inspiring game, sleek torsos notwithstanding (mm, swimming trunks).

My impression of the film is that it’s pretty much a water polo player itself - sleek, handsome, well put together, expensive, and not altogether too bright.

It’s certainly all very noble and heroic, with just enough gore and arbitrary violence to stop it being too rose-tinted - but it too often slips into overt emotional manipulation (killings of a young boy, a pregnant women - and the long drawn out countdown to the execution of the girl that the polo player turns revolutionary to impress) and so it never rises above a glossy, Hollywoody action epic, a peculiar mix of sports movie and war movie.

In an aside, I recognised the actor playing the lead’s friend from the great little black comedy Kontroll - seek that film out instead…