The Honoraries: Hayao Miyazaki

Welcome to "The Honoraries" a daily miniseries honoring the careers of the three Honorary Oscar recipients of 2014 (Maureen O'Hara, Hayao Miyazaki, Claude Carriere) and the Jean Hersholt winner (Harry Belafonte). Here's Tim...

It’s annoying when people who already won competitive Oscars get tapped to receive an a Honorary award, as in the case of Hayao Miyazaki (his win was in 2002’s Best Animated Feature category, for Spirited Away, and it was hugely deserved). But, on the other hand, it’s Hayao Miyazaki. His body of work is among the strongest of any working director, and his recent retirement has caused a fundamental shift in the landscape of international animation. I can’t imagine anybody who has seen more than a couple of his films (or even just one, if it’s the right one), could possibly deny that his talent is of a magnitude that even two Oscars is… well, it’s “fine”, but maybe three would have been okay, too.

And for those of you who haven’t yet had the pleasure, I am happy to take this small chance to tell you what makes him so wonderful. Not by focusing on one film, as other entries in the Honoraries have done (but if you want my picks for The One You Have To See, it would be My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, in that order. And that’s three, not one, but it’s Hayao Miyazaki), but by touching on some of the career-wide trends that have made all of his films, without exception, worthwhile and important and beautiful.

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Calendar-Man v. Film Culture: The Bubble-Bursting Wars

With every studio hopping on the "universe building" trend that Marvel perfected for cinema -- too bad Pixar's early "all original concept / few sequels" success didn't translate to cross-studio trends -- cinema will be becoming a lot more like television. It already has, of course, with those annual editions of popular franchises playing like big budget TV miniseries with all their episodes smashed together for one bingewatch a year (think Hunger Games, Twilight, Harry Potter). With the Star Wars universe now planning annual showings and Bond & Star Trek till and that planned resurrection of the entire original iconic movie monsters, one has to wonder if Original Content will finally be put down by the 2020s. Or will the bubble burst and audiences will grow tired of continuing stories with overly familiar characters and often padded multi-part stories with no resolutions. You know, the kind they can get at home on television for free?!

This comic panel has been slightly altered to better illustrate my argument.

All entertainment trends are cyclical. This is a fact, however much people valiantly argue year after year that whatever's hot right then will live on forever. But when exactly will the bubble burst?

I was initially very excited about the growing genre of superhero movies -- like many boys I spent countless hours in childhood and adolescence dreaming of seeing my favorite characters on the page in live action environments (X-Men, The Avengers, The Teen Titans, Cloak & Dagger, Green Lantern and Daredevil figured chief amongst my fantasies in this regard). But even though I wanted this, I'm already kinda bored of seeing it actualized especially since so much of it plays more like a nightmare (see the first film versions of Green Lantern and Daredevil - or better yet, DON'T, if you've managed to escape them).

Backstage blog handwringing and the superhero glut after the jump...

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The Honoraries: Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones (1954)

Welcome to "The Honoraries". We're celebrating the careers of the Honorary Oscar recipients of 2014 and the Jean Hersholt winner (Harry Belafonte). Here's longtime TFE reader and new contributor Teo Bugbee, whose work you might have read at The Daily Beast, on Belafonte's biggest film...

Even in the fantastic canon of classic Hollywood musicals, Carmen Jones is a standout. It’s got all the colors—Deluxe, not Technicolor, which as any John Waters fan will tell you is the real deal—it’s got the timeless score by Georges Bizet, but before we talk about the film itself, let’s take a minute to look at the backstory, if only because what was going on behind the scenes in Carmen Jones is at least as interesting as what made it on film. 

Though he never really made particularly political films, director Otto Preminger was a modern man when it came to his politics, and he proposed the idea of adapting the Broadway smash Carmen Jones into a film as a means of showing off the black talent that he felt Hollywood was excluding. But despite Preminger’s substantial box office clout, no major studio wanted to take on a film with an all black cast. So Preminger took Carmen Jones to United Artists and set out making it basically as an independent film.

Harry Belafonte was brought on immediately as Joe, but Preminger took a longer time to find his star, testing a number of black actresses. 

Lusty affairs and a singular film after the jump...

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Set Photos of Punk-Rock Meryl Streep

Margaret here, trying not to freak out about these set photos of Meryl Streep. Pretend for a moment that the magic of internet reporting hasn't told us exactly what she's filming right now. (It's the Diablo Cody-penned, Jonathan Demme-directed dramedy Ricki and the Flash, wherein La Streep plays an aging rock star.)

This is so full of possibility. As long as she's in this getup, let's indulge in some fantasizing...

 

She wears motorcycle boots! She sports extensions! She makes out with Rick Springfield!

THINGS MERYL STREEP COULD BE FILMING IN THAT COSTUME

1. A Freaky Friday meta-sequel where Meryl switches bodies with the real Lindsay Lohan and starts clubbing all night and missing call times while Lindsay ends up on the fast-track to an Oscar win

2. A Mike Nichols-directed commercial for Meryl's new campaign as the Spring 2015 face of Hot Topic

3. The music video for Rick Springfield's "I'm F*@#ing Matt Damon"-style parody song "Gummer's Girl"

4. HBO's new docu-series about the underground Oscar-winners' punk band where Streep plays bass alongside a be-mohawked Helen Mirren on lead guitar and a buzzcut Judi Dench on drums

5. A  prank video where unassuming Forever 21 shoppers get the shock of their life when the mannequin they're admiring reveals herself to be acting legend Mary Louise Streep

6. Bonus scenes as a fourth witch for the DVD re-release of Hocus Pocus

7. The sequence in a Boy George biopic where the famous bowler hat can't be found anywhere

8 Season three of Orphan Black, where she challenges all the Streep comparisons heaped upon Tatiana Maslany by playing the clone Sarah and daring the audience to notice the difference

9. A YouTube makeup tutorial for getting the Rebecca on How to Get Away with Murder look

I hope she does them all. Name a tenth possibility!

Tweets o' the Week

Movie and showbiz tweets that amused / thought provoked most these past several days. Worth retweeting or sharing for you if you're not on twitter... 

"INTERSTELLAAAAAAAA" --FilmCritStanleyKowalski

— Ali Arikan (@aliarikan) October 29, 2014

You liked @PrideMovie? Good way to show it is to donate to a charity or NFP that "has nothing to do with you," then think about how it does.

— Nick Davis (@NicksFlickPicks) October 25, 2014

You think you know somebody then one day you come home and catch them watching EAT PRAY LOVE.

— Jenelle Riley (@jenelleriley) October 30, 2014

The sticker on the Japanese DVD box for The Paperboy pretty much sums up my thoughts pic.twitter.com/ePpYXdxriy

— Robbie Collin (@robbiereviews) October 24, 2014

 

WANT MORE? Click on for The Gummers, The Zeéeeee, Superhero priapism & "Carrie" hilarity

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