A bravura opening shot pulls from rainswept Tokyo in through a hospital window to a girl waiting by a patient’s bedside, recalling nothing so much as the heroine of everyone’s favourite anime identity thriller Perfect Blue (Satoshi Kon, 1997) reflected against a train carriage window with a Tokyo cityscape visible beyond, but where Kon uses such imagery as an entry point to multilayered realities, Weathering With You’s vision never really extends beyond trying to recreate and repeat the formula that rendered its director’s previous Your Name (Makoto Shinkai, 2016) such a runaway success.
Like Your Name, Weathering With You centres on a teenage boy/girl romance but instead of the gender body swap and time travel devices in the earlier film – which probably shouldn’t have worked but somehow did – Weathering has an equally flimsy plot device about a girl named Hina who possesses the ability to turn rain into sunshine. This is set against a far more interesting backdrop of Tokyo being permanently shrouded in rain with echoes of global warming thrown in for the closing epilogue, two years after the main story, in which large parts of the city have disappeared beneath the rising sea level.
Most of the film centres around 16 year old runaway Hodaka who has come to Tokyo presumably to escape the type of small town existence portrayed in the rural sections of Your Name as Shinkai tries desperately not to repeat himself, a goal at which he succeeds admirably for about the first reel or so, arguably Weathering’s most engaging section. An early highlight during Hodaka’s inbound ferry journey sees him rush onto deck just in time to be caught in an exhilarating downpour only to be saved from being swept away by the swift action of unkempt, grownup Kei who subsequently gives the boy his card and tells him to get in touch if he ever needs help.
Hodaka knows better, so walks away – but after living as a homeless person on Tokyo’s mean and rainswept streets for a while and being unable to secure work to support himself because of Japan’s stringent minimum working age laws, he changes his mind and ends up the technically illegal and poorly paid if housed and fed dogsbody at Kei’s magazine publishing company where alongside a young woman named Natsumi he starts to research supernatural and paranormal stories for possible publication.
Kei sends Hodaka out to investigate the phenomenon of the sunshine girl, who can temporarily cause the rain to stop and the sun to come out, in turn pushing the plot towards boy meets girl romance when Hodaka befriends sunshine girl Hina and her primary school age little brother Nagi. Here Weathering repeats Your Name’s teen romantic clichés without holding the audience’s attention quite as effectively.
Shinkai also falls back on a visual, fantasy device, a temple which turns out to be a portal to another world where Hina floats in the sky as if underwater surrounded by mysterious shoals of sky (or are they sea?) fish. Your Name cleverly wove its not dissimilar visual conceits into a complex tapestry but Weathering can’t quite to pull its various constituent parts together, leaving the viewer to founder somewhat even as he or she admires its more impressive elements.
However the rain and sunshine imagery, while it may be a sideshow to the main romantic event, proves itself a considerable and genuinely captivating asset. Much artistry has gone into animating rain dripping down window panes or splashing in multiple drops onto pavement surfaces – and there are a great many such sequences. Equally, when Hina halts the rain for a few hours which she does with Hodaka as they attempt to earn a little extra money, the blue sky, sunshine and bright light provide a welcome contrast to the constant downpour and drab colour elsewhere.
The final flooding of Tokyo builds effectively on all this, but sadly it’s too little, too late. You can’t help feeling that far more could have been done with this flooding concept in both script and overall design. Despite the promise of that opening shot, Weathering ultimately fails to deliver the multiple reality levels of Kon’s Perfect Blue. Worse, it never integrates its ideas into a coherent whole the way Shinkai’s own, earlier and superior Your Name did while its romance simply isn’t as engaging. A great pity.
Weathering With You is out in the UK on Friday, January 17th (2019). On Sky Cinema and NOW TV on February 3rd (2021).
Warner Bros’ latest effort in their strategy to create a self-contained universe out of Toho’s Godzilla and his accompanying trademark monster characters to rival that of Disney’s popular Star Wars and Marvel cinematic universes is a mixed bag. On one level, it’s a hackneyed family story involving a couple splitting apart with their daughter caught in the middle, a plot not of the slightest interest to fans of Godzilla who aren’t paying to see a family drama. On another level, it’s a thinly veiled excuse to recreate Godzilla, King Ghidorah, Mothra, Rodan and others with state-of-the-art, special effects technology and have them fighting against one another, at which aim it succeeds handsomely. In passing, it delivers facile, one-line ideas about nuclear war and global warming. Finally, it wants to explore the iconography of these extraordinary creatures, but scarcely knows where to begin. They are great properties, but you can’t help but wish it was directed and produced by people with a stronger visionary sense.
The family story concerns scientist Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga) with her daughter Madison (Billie Bobby Brown) in tow. Her husband Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler), who when the film starts is out in the wilds studying wolf packs, is attempting to get back in touch with his daughter by email. Insofar as this family dynamic drives the characters, it feels pretty redundant. Farmiga upstages the rest of her onscreen family, investing her essentially cardboard character with pathos well beyond what the hackneyed script deserves. The presence of scientists played by oriental actors Ken Watanabe and Ziyi Zhang seems curiously peripheral, even though at one point the former plays a significant role in attempting to rejuvenate an apparently dead Godzilla.
Much more interesting is Emma’s use of a device she’s built called the Orca to produce sound frequencies mimicking those of Titans in order to make them behave in certain ways. Her falling in with crazed military type Jonah Allen (Charles Dance) suggests her as a megalomaniac determined to unleash the giant beasts and cause havoc on Earth, but then she presents an alternative scenario in which mankind has ruined the planet through global warming and the monsters are its way of getting out of control humankind back in its rightful ecological place thus saving the planet from extinction. Promising concepts, but sadly they’re never really developed into anything. The same is true of ideas about Godzilla absorbing radiation so that he can produce self-immolating blasts which nuke his one-on-one adversaries in battle while he survives.
Put aside the many shortcomings, however, and the recreations of giant radiation-breathing lizard from the sea Godzilla, flying creature Rodan, Mothra the giant moth and, most especially, three-headed King Ghidorah, greatly impress. The latter is the real star here, with his three heads swirling around menacingly on their long necks. Ghidorah possesses hydra-like qualities, but only once do we see a missing head regenerate, one of numerous elements on which the filmmakers fail to capitalise. A line of script somewhere posits him as a being from outer space who’s come to Earth and upset the balance of the monster ecosystem by displacing the ruling Godzilla, another idea which is nice as far as it goes, but doesn’t go very far. Kong is name-checked a few times and appears occasionally in static images to remind us that Godzilla vs. Kong is due out next year.
A mysterious organisation called Monarch, the corporate logo of which coincidentally resembles that of Extinction Rebellion turned on its side, has a series of numbered Outposts around the globe where various giant beasts are held in underground storage facilities. As titles such as ‘Monarch Outpost 61, Yunnan Forest, China’ appear on the screen, they create a believable sense of a covert, global network.
Yet in terms of developing an overall mythology, the whole is nowhere near as satisfying as the vision behind Warner Bros’ underrated kaiju (giant monster) movie Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro, 2013). Toho’s original Japanese Godzilla/Gojira (Ishiro Honda, 1954) and the more recent Shin Godzilla (Hideaki Anno, 2014) both proved the property capable of incisive socio-political comment even as its men-in-rubber-suit monsters of the fifties or their later computer-generated effects counterparts satisfyingly burned and stomped Tokyo. The new Godzilla: King Of The Monsters doesn’t really have anything like as much to say, preferring to trade in spectacle and fall back on monsters fighting each other, sending in troops with guns whenever the proceedings need another boost to keep the adrenaline up. In other directorial hands, it could have been very special indeed: on so many levels, a seriously wasted opportunity. That said, the creatures themselves are fabulous – and they get an awful lot of screen time.
Godzilla: King Of The Monsters is out in the UK on Wednesday, May 29th. Watch the film trailer below:
In an ever-changing world, the documentary film helps us comprehend things greater than our simple daily lives. Owing a debt to the pioneering work Nanook of the North (Robert J. Flaherty, 1922), Walk this Way follow in the footsteps of that film in delivering cutting-edge documentaries about topics that really matter to humanity.
Partnering with DMovies this year, The Film Agency, in association with Under The Milky Way, are combining forces again in the Docs from around the World Collection. A means of this, all parties plan to shine light upon films from across the globe which might have escaped audiences upon their initial release. All from a very European perspective (all films are co-productions from the Old Continent).
By using the power of the medium, as well as VoD, DMovies, The Film Agency and Under The Milky Way seek to support true independent filmmaking. In our shared targets, we sat down with Walk this Way Coordinator Nolwenn Luca to discuss this particular collection further.
DMovies – Why documentaries? Are people more likely to watch docs on VoD than the cinema? Is this an opportunity to catch the hidden gems of European documentary-making?
Nolwenn Luca – The Docs from around the World Collection take the main stage, inviting the audience to travel around the world and discover how complex and rich current societies are. The documentary is the place of new interrogations of the man by the man. Not to establish certainties but to reformulate on the scale of human microcosms the essential questions of life.
Walk this Way defends the diversity of European documentary works. The public thanks to the programme have the chance to have access to films that they would not have been able to discover otherwise if they were not available in VoD. The idea is to give a second chance to the movies to meet their audience. If the film has not had the opportunity to have a theatrical release in a country we propose it in VoD as an alternative. In recent years, the VoD offer for documentaries has grown considerably, giving viewers a wide choice to watch quality movies from home.
DM – What is it that these films have in common? Perhaps a desire to reveal the dirty truth, to deep-dive into controversial topics, etc, or something along the lines?
NL – The Collection will take the public through intense investigations from characters going around the world to find answers. Whether they address our love of nature and art, our fascination for criminal minds or our eating habits, these movies will definitely give to the audience food for thought. These films tackle fascinating and relevant thematic with broad interest and are therefore marketable on VoD to several niches.
DM – Can you please tell us a little bit about the curatorship? Roughly how many docs are made for cinema each year in Europe, and how many did you have access to? Any nice figures to give the initiative a grounded aspect!
NL– The documentary is a format that is growing rapidly. Documentary production in Europe has almost doubled over the 2015-2016 period, reaching 698 films in 2016, or about a third of the films of the year in Europe. On average over the period 2007-2016, documentary films represent 1.4% tickets to all genres. In general, feature-length documentaries have a lifetime in room superior to that of all the films.
Documentary is a genre that can easily reach a large audience beyond their country of origin. In general terms, documentaries perform relatively well on international VoD distribution channels partly because they do not request a high level of marketing and promotional expenditure to find their audiences. Already 26 documentaries released in VoD around the world since 2015 with Walk this Way.
What will happen when the food runs out of food? Well, in his 2015 documentary Valentin Thurn places this very notion front and centre!
Exploring the scientific, agricultural and environmental ways we can prevent global food shortages, all due to global warming, it’s not a feature filled with bias but educated solutions to an impending world problem. Globe jumping from India to England then Germany, the multifaceted nature of its tone makes the issues it is dealing with a tangible reality for the viewer.
Part of Europe’s natural beauty, The Alps are towering force over every country they touch. Approaching the scope of the natural phenomena in a highly cinematic manner, directors Peter Bardehle and Sebastian Lindemann deploy a cineflex camera to capture every inch of its beauty in filmic splendour. Telling the tale of its history, socio-political and geographical story, the sweeping shots of the snow-tipped mountains interpolate you into its vistas. Accompanied by the Germanic tones of Emily Clarke-Brandt, man and nature are combined into one form.
This Spanish documentary explores Tomeu L’Amo’s maverick purchase of surrealist artist, Salvador Dali’s, first work for a cut-price 25,000 Spanish pesetas in 1988 (£132 in today’s money). Scratching away at the persona of L’Amo, scenes from the documentary allude towards a recent trend of re-creating history or pastness through a post-modern reimagination. Though the elaborate nature of the man could shadow the work, what emerges is a contemporary discussion on elitism, to which is unearthed in many aspects of society. Unlike the recent retelling of the life of Van Gough in Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, 2017) it is undeniable that The Key to Dali is grounded in the real world, opening pathways for art fans or not into the world of painting.
Adopting the same global view as 10Billion (Valentin Thurn, 2015), Barbara Eder’s hard-hitting work on the men and women whose job it is to investigate killers does not any soft punches. Intertextually referencing The Silence Of The Lambs, (Jonathan Demme, 1991) in numerous conversations, the grotesque nature of the classic is expressed as a means of the verbal descriptions. Not venturing into sadistic footage of murders etc, it holds respect for the victims. A natural intuition, we as humans constantly seek to explain the un-explainable and Eder’s film elicits this notion poignantly..
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5. Free Lunch Society (Christian Tod, 2017):
What would you do if your income were taken care of? Just a few years ago, an unconditional basic income was considered a pipe dream. Today, this utopia is more imaginable than ever before – intense discussions are taking place in all political and scientific camps. Free Lunch Society provides background information about this idea and searches for explanations, possibilities and experiences regarding its implementation.
17-year-old Kevin, sentenced for violent behaviour, is just let out of prison. To start anew, he moves in with his aunt and her family and begins an apprenticeship at her store. Quickly he adapts to his new home and gets along well with his cousin Sammy, in his last year of high school. Through Sammy and his friends, Kevin meets John. Upon discovering John’s unbearable situation with his mother, Kevin feels the urge to help his new friend. One evening fate intervenes and questions of betrayal, trust and loyalty start to direct their daily lives more than ever.
Loneliness, disillusionment and the experience of first love reveal the character of Raya, a 17-year-old living in rural Latvia with her grandmother and her little brother Robis. A staggering turn of events shakes up their lives, and the young girl must come to decisions that even a grown woman would find difficult to make.
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8. Quiet Bliss (Edoardo Winspeare, 2014):
Three generations of a family have to move back to their picturesque coastal town of their family’s origin and survive off the family farm after their family company goes bankrupt. A feel-good drama about possibilities after a crisis.
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9. Fair Play (Andrea Sedlácková, 2014):
Set in Czechoslovakia in the 1980, young and talented sprinter Anna (Judit Bárdos) is selected for the national team and starts training to qualify for the Olympic Games. As a part of the preparation she is placed in a secret “medical programme” where they begin dopeing her with anabolic steroids. Her performance improves, but after she collapses at training, she learns the truth. Anna decides to continue training without the steroids even though her mother (Anna Geislerova) is worried that she won’t be able to keep up with other athletes and might not qualify for the Olympics, which she sees as the only chance for her daughter to escape from behind the Iron Curtain. After Anna ends last in the indoor race, her mother informs the coach (Roman Luknar) that Anna is no longer using steroids. Together they decide to inject steroids to Anna in secret, pretending it’s nothing but harmless vitamins.
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10.God Willing (Edoardo Maria Falcone, 2015):
A young man’s decision to become a priest affects his whole family, especially his father.
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11.I Can Quit Whenever I Want (Sydney Sibilia, 2014):
A university researcher is fired because of the cuts to university. To earn a living he decides to produce drugs recruiting his former colleagues, who despite their skills are living at the margins of society.
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12. One Wild Moment (Jean-François Richet, 2015):
Two friends bring their daughters with them on a beach vacation and find themselves in an awkward situation. A remake of In a Wild Moment (Claude Berri, 1977).
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14. Heart of Glass (Jérôme de Gerlache, 2016):
Heart of Glass is a journey. A road trip through several countries on two continents in pursuit of a story. The story of a young glass blower with a singular talent: Jeremy Maxwell Wintrebert. The film follows him in his daily life working in the studio and on the road. Jeremy recounts growing up in Africa, where he drew inspiration for his first pieces. He speaks of his family of Franco-American origin, difficult events he faced, the challenges of returning to Europe. He speaks of his first encounter with glass at age 19. The first time he saw the hot glass moving at the end of a blow pipe was his seminal moment. The way the glass, fluid, delicate and mysterious, danced that day has forever changed him. The film reveals how passion can undo a tragic fate and is sadly not a Blondie documentary.
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14. Step Up to the Plate (Paul Lacoste, 2012):
In 2009, the three-Michelin-stars French chef Michel Bras decides to hand his restaurant over to his son Sebastien. Between Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino (2004) and Raymond Depardon’s La Vie Moderne (2008), this documentary draws a moving and joyful portrait of this outstanding family devoted to the haute cuisine for three generations…
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15. Santa Claus (Alexandre Coffre, 2014):
One night, a burglar in a Santa Claus costume is surprised by Victor, a young boy who believes he is the real Santa Claus. Victor then follows him, and they embark on an unexpected adventure that will change their lives.
The documentary An Inconvenient Truth (Davis Guggenheim, 2006) was based around former US Democrat vice president Al Gore’s travelling show which warned of the dangers of climate change. In some ways, much has happened since; in others, not much has. Throughout the subsequent decade, Gore has consistently spoken out about the environment.
Title aside, the new film works very well as a standalone entity: you really don’t need to have seen the first one. Gore journeys to the Arctic to be shown the Polar ice cap melting first-hand, little rivulets become streams which become torrents. Solid areas are now seascapes. Elsewhere, an arctic station which a year ago stood flat on the ice now stands as if on stilts, the ice having melted so much that its level has dropped by over a storey.
He visits Miami, the most flood-endangered city in the world, where coastal roads are below flood waters. He finds hope in the rise of solar energy as a viable alternative to fossil fuels and meets with the Republican mayor of Georgetown, Texas, a town which now runs entirely on renewables.
Much of the film is spent in the run up to the 2016 Paris climate change talks, where Gore is presented as its saviour when India is struggling to agree with proposals to which most other countries have signed up. Gore, who today half-jokingly describes himself as a “recovering politician”, is part campaigner, part showman. However, there’s no doubt he’s getting the message out and mobilising people. The implications of what Gore is saying are terrifying. They were terrifying back in 2006 and they’re even more terrifying now.
As for the UK, it’s conspicuous by its almost total onscreen absence (I noticed one shot of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown). Given our current Tory government’s enthusiasm for building nuclear power plants, encouraging fracking and slashing subsidies for renewables, that’s not altogether surprising.
This writer believes that the climate change issue is the single most important one facing humanity today. I applaud Gore for his tireless, pro-environment campaigning: the more people see this movie and are moved to action by it, the better.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power is out in the UK on Friday, August 18th.
Special previews with Al Gore satellite link up on Friday, August 11th.
