Author Archives: Reid Mukai

Media and Me

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As was often the case during my stay at Neuro ICU, I’d be kept awake by anguished thoughts of the recent past or anxious thoughts of the present and future. As an escape, I’d delve into memories from the distant past; the earliest experiences I could recall from my childhood in a small suburban home in mid-70s Concord, California. More often than not, these memories would have some connection with mass media, from singing along with my brother to early rock music from our parent’s record collection to listening to soft rock on AM radio with my mom in the kitchen as she cooked or cleaned. Sometimes she’d play heartfelt renditions of her favorite songs on the piano with the help of sheet music or songbook collections. 

Even before I could read I was fascinated by comics, Mad Magazine, and images in storybooks, but my favorite media, despite relatively limited offerings at the time, was television. Like many kids of our generation, my brother and I were encouraged to watch public television programs like Sesame Street, 321 Contact, and The Electric Company. We also gravitated towards re-runs such as The Twilight Zone, Time Tunnel, Star Trek, Batman, Lost in Space, and Spider-Man as well as more ‘contemporary’ shows like Space: 1999, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, In Search Of…, Quark, The Muppet Show, Star Blazers, and various Saturday morning cartoons. On special occasions we’d catch Rankin/Bass and Peanuts holiday specials and rare (for that time) airings of feature films such as Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, and their numerous sequels.

The first feature film I can recall seeing in a theater was Star Wars (1977), which reinforced my interest in all things sci-fi and also spawned a craving for Star Wars tie-ins from toys, lunch boxes and trading cards to comics, children’s books and soundtrack album. Earlier that year my parents let my brother and I stay up late with them to watch the network premier of 2001: a Space Odyssey, which was an equally formative experience. Both films inspired an appreciation for the medium which would expand through the 80s and beyond. The success of Star Wars led to a wave of genre films, many of which I was fortunate enough to have seen in theaters including Lord of the Rings (1978), Superman (1978), The Black Hole (1979), Flash Gordon (1980), and Clash of the Titans (1981).

My childhood experiences were fortunately not entirely mediated, but media was definitely a large influence on my developing interests and worldview. It may also have been a causal factor or symptom of ADHD, which I had no idea I had until college.

Saturday Matinee: Moon Garden

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By Nick Allen

Source: RogerEbert.com

Every now and then, a new film surprises you with something that should always be true: movie-making is magic-making. Especially so when its tricks happen in-camera, with instruments as practical as lighting, costumes, sets, and ideas. Ryan Stevens Harris’ “Moon Garden” is one such escape from zeroes and ones overload and general cynicism about where movies may be going. It is a horror/fantasy that puts every bit of its imagination on the screen and constantly impresses with its DIY spectacle.

Written and directed by Harris, “Moon Garden” primarily takes place inside the mind of a little girl named Emma (Haven Lee Harris, Ryan’s daughter). The five-year-old is currently in a coma, having tumbled down some stairs one night after trying to get her parents (Augie Duke and Brionne Davis) to stop fighting. Emma wanders a shadowy, dirty, and mysterious realm as her body lies in a hospital, with her parents sitting beside her. Lights flash, and radio signals echo. The population is unpredictable: strange, freaky characters tear themselves up from the ground; others reflect the woman Emma may become.

Harris’ film holds your attention scene-by-scene, even in a few moments in which the pacing gives way to just admiring the craftsmanship or the emotions are muted by symbolism that doesn’t feel airtight. It’s the type of project that warrants a second viewing, partly to catch its connections but also to savor the textures you might have missed on your first visit. 

“Moon Garden” is most emotionally incisive about a child processing what’s around her, namely the growing unhappiness between her parents. And as Emma travels through different parts of this world—like when she climbs a ladder through the clouds—Harris shows us the memory of her doing something similar with her father. It’s one of the happy thoughts, contrasted with another real-world flashback where Emma hides under some sheets with her mother, only for the claw-like hand of her upset father to tear it open. That memory inspires one of this horror story’s simple but effective sets, a tunnel made of bedsheets. 

“Moon Garden” is a whole mix of creations, a lovingly scrawled sketchbook come to life by a compulsive creator. One of Harris’ greatest feats is the main villain known as Teeth, who taunts Emma, and ushers in the film’s more overt horror elements. Dressed in a long black coat and cap, it hovers above the air with spindly, long fingers. You can’t see its eyes, but you can constantly hear its chattering chompers, which becomes one of many unsettling atmospheric features from Harris (also the film’s sound designer). Sometimes Teeth places his namesake on the ground, and Harris’ camera, often placed low, studies it, and fears it. As in so many scenes of “Moon Garden,” Emma’s rapt curiosity becomes our own.

Harris’ apparent influences across these fields should help recommend this film alone: there’s a bit of Jan Svankmeijer, Steven Spielberg, Tarsem Singh, Guillermo del Toro, and David Lynch throughout, but not in a thrifting fashion. Just as the film does not over-simplify its dream passages, it also does not pander to film lovers who are primed to champion this gem. (Which was shot on expired 35mm film stock and vintage rehoused lenses!)

As Emma, Haven Lee Harris gives the kind of work a filmmaker would want from a child performer. She is incredibly reactive to this world, holding our attention while sharing the frame with far more intense, adult supporting characters or sets. She is a natural within the film’s changing environments, and in its many wordless passages, doesn’t strike a false note. It’s so rare to see a child actor’s performance that doesn’t take you out of the story in some way; that’s so invested.

“Moon Garden” is not just eloquent with its designs, but filled with plenty of in-camera magic tricks. With time-lapse savviness, fruit decays on the ground at warp speed; nimble, non-showy cuts make characters vanish with their clothes dropping to the ground. We meet another one of Harris’ striking characters, Phillip E. Walker’s Musician, through a sight that is wondrous but also simple: an organ being pieced together, by showing his destruction of it with a large mallet in reverse. 

Ever connected to the emotions at play, Harris then builds that scene to a returning but always wrenching motif, Pete Ham and Tom Evans’ inimitable ballad, “Without You.” Emma’s mother sings the first verse and chorus softly into the girl’s ear in the hospital, causing it to play in Emma’s coma wonderland as a radio transmission with gentle accompaniment by Musician’s organ. Emma smiles softly, warmed by the sunlight-orange lighting that shares the frame with the heavy blues that matches her eyes. (Harris is also the movie’s colorist). “Moon Garden” is rife with such hard-worn and graceful touches, from a gifted filmmaker who is primed to share with us more of his dreams. 

Watch Moon Garden on Kanopy here: https://www.kanopy.com/en/product/13620761

Saturday Matinee: Strawberry Mansion

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2021’s “Strawberry Mansion” & The Life-Stealing Future Becoming Real: Film Review

By Caleb R. Newton

Source: Captured Howls

“Strawberry Mansion,” a film both written and directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley that had its world premiere in 2021, delivers a rich, poignant, and gripping perspective on what it actually means to live in a world like we’ve constructed for ourselves in this age.

The movie is set in the near future, but everything seems designed in such a way to highlight a continuity with the present — and the past. Although here, the government imposes taxes on items the mind creates in dreams, the world doesn’t look like a dystopian hellscape. It pretty much just resembles the exact environment in which humanity can be found now — though I’ve yet to see a chicken shake offered for sale anywhere and might recoil if I did.

James Preble, a main character in “Strawberry Mansion” who was portrayed by Audley, dresses in a fashion evocative of past styles. Viewing dreams had by another main character, we often see that other figure — Arabella Isadora, played by Penny Fuller — as a substantially younger version of herself, captured instead by actress Grace Glowicki. (To accommodate the tax regime, dreams are recorded.)

Does Advertising Care About Us?

And then we get to “Buddy.” Linas Phillips’s Buddy, as he’s known, appears time and again in dreams had by Audley’s character, and this initially unexplained figure is often, quite simply, hawking wares. In a later scene in which Preble and the younger Isadora are trying to escape Buddy’s presence in a dream world, which follows a revelation that Buddy is essentially serving as an avatar for the in-dream advertising ambitions of major corporations, he starts multiplying, appearing again and again alongside himself in a scene that actually captures with startling precision what it’s like to live here.

Think about it. How many ads do you see on a daily basis? On the internet, where reliance on such an advertising presence has been made mandatory in some cases for financial survival, or on television, where it’s much the same, these ads persist. Head outside, and you might see a billboard (or five). While New York City has a lot to offer, one of the tourist traps is Times Square, and if you actually look around in that area of Manhattan, it’s ad after ad after ad.

While it would be ignorant to categorically dismiss advertising as immoral, it would also be ignorant to simply gloss over its effects and the possibility for nefarious manipulation. It’s a massive global industry. How does it actually affect us? Actual human desire, meaning the things that might emerge from nothing but individual ambition — is there a danger of that simply being squelched?

It was compelling when, later in the movie, Buddy simply watches as Preble is slowly smothered and faces potential death. The locus of interest for so many of these advertising ambitions is not making you a better person. It’s making money. While this feels straightforward, how many people don’t have quite the same level of media literacy and might be more easily duped by these efforts?

Finding a Place to Live

“Strawberry Mansion” doesn’t simply moralize. It’s also a touching story, as Preble and Isadora connect. In dream sequences early in the film, the audience sees the younger Isadora partly with the aid of low-angle shots that give her an almost-angelic air, which connects with how Preble himself will eventually see her (and be helped by her). (She’s also dressed in white.) The physicality with which Audley portrays Preble seems to gradually loosen up as he realizes the truth of the system in which he’s been working and the connection he has with the woman he’s met both in her older and younger versions.

In totality, “Strawberry Mansion” feels inspiring in a very direct sense. Whether it’s in the self-directed dream logic of key plot points or the explicit statements in dialogue about making your own personal choice (rather than what’s being pushed by “Buddy’s” handlers), you can find your own path. After searching for the younger Bella in a dream world, the reunited Preble then sets himself down a similarly epic, sweeping quest to reconnect with his own body and life in general before it’s too late. (There’s a time crunch.) “Strawberry Mansion” highlights the opportunity for a gentle embrace of life amid utter absurdity.

Saturday Matinee: The Adjustment Bureau

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By Richard Propes

Source: The Independent Critic

The good news is that The Adjustment Bureau is better than it looks.

Based upon a novel by Philip K. Dick, The Adjustment Bureau stars Matt Damon as a man who gets a glimpse at what fate has in store for him and decides that he wants something different. On the brink of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate, Damon’s David Norris is faced with defying fate and chasing beautiful ballet dancer Elise Sellas (Emily Blunt) under, across and all around New York if they are to have any chance of being together.

Now then, back to that godawful movie poster. It sucks, doesn’t it? It made me NOT want to see the film. The movie poster made put off seeing The Adjustment Bureau as long as humanly possible and I don’t even pay to see most films.

Philip K. Dick, the writer of the original source material for films such as The Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall, is far more known as a sci-fi than a romantic writer (Duh!). However, the strength of The Adjustment Bureau lies in the romance and the chemistry between David and Elise. The buttoned-down David and the wild child Elise are not only cute together, but Damon and Blunt have a strong chemistry together that allows this film to work far better than one might expect. The two meet at a Waldorf-Astoria dinner in what is obviously a pre-destined meeting arranged by Harry (Anthony Mackie) and Richardson (John Slattery), two fedora-laden mysterious guys whom we learn are essentially angels whose specific assignments are to ensure that fate takes its course by “adjusting” events, relationships and experiences to ensure it all lines up as it’s supposed to line up. The problem is that once David and Elise have their initial meeting, that’s it. No more. Nadda.

Well, unless, David can change the course of fate.

In fairness to Dick, The Adjustment Bureau isn’t exactly faithful to its source material as much as it takes that central concept and creates another world out of it. This film shouldn’t necessarily have you running off to devour Philip K. Dick’s writings, and to do so will likely only end in disappointment this time around.

All of this could be remarkably campy and silly if not for the convincing romance of Damon and Blunt, along with the weighty and surprisingly impactful performance of Terence Stamp as the superior of Harry and Richardson who adds tremendous gravitas to the entire affair.

Nolfi, who penned The Bourne Ultimatum, makes his directing debut here and while it’s far from flawless it’s certainly admirable enough given the complexity of the material to ensure he will get a second shot at the big screen. While the film’s final third very nearly derails the entire thing, Nolfi manages to keep it afloat just enough that audiences will likely leave the theatre thinking this was a couple of hours well spent.

Matt Damon continues to widen his range, having exhibited gifts recently for everything from action to comedy to westerns and thrillers. While he doesn’t excel here, he most assuredly convinces and he’s strong enough in the romantic department to sell the vast majority of the film. There is an argument that the romance is noticeably light on actual emotion, however, this may very well depend upon how you take the somewhat more stoic romanticism of Damon.  The nearly always  dependable Emily Blunt shines as well, an intriguing blend of romantic spark and sci-fi sizzle. Terence Stamp steals virtually all of his scenes, seemingly embracing his best role in years.

The Adjustment Bureau would have been a far more successful film as a romantic drama with light elements of action/sci-fi, but too often it seems as if Nolfi feels compelled to tip his hat to Philip K. Dick or Bourne or somebody. The result is a film that bounces once too often between flimsy and weighty, never quite deciding what kind of film it really wants to be. The Adjustment Bureau is far better than nearly anyone will expect given its misguided trailer and simply awful movie poster, but just about the time the audience adjusts to a rock solid romantic drama Nolfi nudges us back towards where our cinematic fates must want us to be.