KWIF=Kent's Week in Film.
This Week:
The End of Oak Street (2026, d. David Robert Mitchell - in theatre)
Your Name. (2016, d. Makoto Shinaki - in theatre)
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While David Robert Mitchell, director of It Follows and Under The Silver Lake, hasn't exactly decided to address Willems directly with The End of Oak Street (this film would have been in post-production by the time Willems released his video), it will for certain be an answer to that question. In its first weekend, the film was still surpassed by summer juggernauts The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day. It's looking like it will at least break even, but it's not even coming close to Jurassic Park numbers.
Mitchell's film finds the Platt family struggling to survive when their neighbourhood is mysteriously transported form 1982 to an age of dinosaurs. Up until this moment, mom Denise (Anne Hathaway in her fourth film role) has been plugging away at a novel which hints at her dissatisfaction with her home life. Dad Greg (Ewan McGregor) is struggling with alcohol consumption and employment, and works delivering pizza. Their eldest, Audrey (Maisy Stella) faces graduation and the realization that her interest in astronomy will likely go unfulfilled as community college seems the only post-secondary in reach. While the youngest, Brian (Christian Convey), worries about getting beaten up by his bully's older brother, and crushes on the new neighbour girl.
Once teleported to an entirely different time, it seems a time for the family to come together. Will they bond as a unit or will Greg's perpetual optimism and Denise's pragmatism in the situation only serve to pull them further apart?
The most unfortunate part of The End of Oak Street is that the premise was given away in the marketing. The first teaser didn't give away much, and it was tremendously intriguing. The second trailer kind of gave it all away. So, if you know, you come into The End of Oak Street without the mystery. And so when the Platt's grumpy neighbour complains about the "prank" the kids pulled on him which turns out to be a massive pile of dino-poop, we already know exactly what it is. And when Denise is visiting her elderly friend who is helping edit her book, she's shown a prehistoric plant in her back yard, but they're utterly confounded by what it is. And then there's the lights at night, which may have a mysterious origin, but we know what the effect is the lights are going to have long before the characters do.
These sequences are all handled in quite the Spielberg-ian fashion, but the film spends time pondering these mysteries when we, the audience, are already a few steps ahead. It's not painful to sit through, but it doesn't feel like a satisfying tee-up for what's to come. It might as well have been a single flash with no lead in for pretty much the same effect. It's not like these mysteries weigh on the characters for any significant amount of time or impact their life all that much.
Once the Platts are sent back in time, though, the film kicks off into high gear immediately. Mitchell, for the next 15-20 minutes keeps the creatures hidden, barely glimpses of shadows or tails or spinal plates in the distance or behind buildings or fences. It's cheeky and fun toying with the audience until the reveal of the first full creature, a feathered dinosaur with a sharp beak that is beautiful and terrifying. These feathered creatures seem freshly untethered, like the big open space of suburbia is the ideal hunting grounds they've just been waiting for, and...it gets grisly. They're fast and vicious.
The family have their reasons for coming and going from their home, including searching for their lost dog Starbuck (someone's a Battlestar Galactica fan in the house). The world outside is oppressive and violent, and survival seems impossible. Mitchell's film gives us quiet moments to contemplate how utterly fucked we would be if we were suddenly cast down a few rungs on the food chain. Human weapons, our capacity for violence, aren't at all up to the challenge of what nature had in store millions of years past.
This isn't the Jurassic franchise, for which my own enjoyment ran out a long time ago (but I'm clearly in the minority). It's better. There was the capability to build a franchise out of this but Mitchell chooses to keep it self-contained, to provide an ending that is mostly satisfying if, perhaps, everything works out a little too nicely for this slightly troubled family. The effects work here, for a modestly budgeted picture, is pretty incredible. Even ignoring the creatures (and can you really ignore the brontos having sex or pooping...no, no you cannot) the setting of 1982 homesteads surrounding by vibrant prehistoric flora is incredible.
Hathaway is having a banner year, and while this is a film that casts equal weight to all the members of the family, Denise is the richest character in the picture, and that's in large part thanks to what Hathaway brings to her performance. She is a woman torn by love for her family, disappointment in her partner, and a desire for something more, something of her own. The move in time demolishes the pathway to being someone else, and instead keeps her at home with her family, and she has to grapple both with resentment and with her instinctual desire to protect her family. So little of what is going on within Denise is said explicitly on screen, and instead resides in the movement of Hathaway's eyes and the lines on her face. She's always been a really tremendous actor, but it seems she's leveled up.
Somehow the Jurassic movies have been deemed "family" movies (this perception is part of their success), despite having a nasty streak within them. The End of Oak Street, in dipping its toe into an Amblin-esque production, has this same bent to it. It is ostensibly a family picture (in that it is a movie about a family) but it's got a bit of menace to it, a severity which will disarm and upset and surprise and thrill. I know I let out more than a few uncontrollable chortles as the events on screen.
The End of Oak Street doesn't look like it will be setting any new trends. The next big dinosaur movie will be a Jurassic one and we won't be likely to see others in the meantime. But its good we have this, it's good we have options.
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My youngest, now almost of voting age, is big into anime and manga. Given the physical media I have -- thousands of comics and graphic novels and hundreds of movies and tv shows -- yeah it's kind of disappointing that they turned to basically the one area of entertainment I had basically written off and had virtually nothing of in my collections. But we all find our own paths and interests and rebel against our parents in our own ways.
They were really psyched that Your Name. was getting a limited theatrical run, and they asked if I wanted to go see it with them. Since I have shifted my opinions on anime (somewhat) yeah, I was game. They had seen it before, and obviously it meant something to them to go see it on the big screen (unfortunately we had to see it in the local closet cinema, since the bigger venue showings were in the 19+ VIP theatres). I had asked them what the film was, genre wise (besides "anime"), and they couldn't tell me. Was it romance? Drama? Comedy? Sci-fi? Sort of yes-ish to all. They just couldn't pin it down. Having seen it, I get it now.
Your Name. is a body switch comedy, at least to start. Mitsuha wakes up and is somewhat astonished to find she's in her own body. She feels like she's been living in a dream world, and as she goes about her day in her small village - going to school, hanging with friends, nothing much to do - she's told over and over again that she was behaving differently the day before. And then she goes to sleep and wakes up in the body of Taki, fumbling her way through his life in Tokyo, going to school, hanging with friends, going to his job waiting tables. It's a delirious dream that Mitsuha enjoys at first, the big city life she's always dreamed of, but working so hard is unfamiliar to her.
And then we see the flipside as Taki lives a day in his life after having acting very different the day before when Mitsuha was in charge, followed by a day in his life in Mitsuha's body (and naturally he just can't stop fondling her breasts, which Mitsuha's younger sister catches him doing... every. time. Funny!)
My initial thought, upon watching the plot play out in this first act was how fantastic a premise this is for a complex exploration of gender and sexual identity. Immediately the finale was playing out in my head where Mitsuha and Taki either are trapped in each other's bodies, willingly, and return to their proper homes living as the other gender...or they return to their own bodies but decide to transition.... And then I remembered that Japan isn't the most progressive of nations about these things, certainly not in 2016, and that it would never happen, even if that's the most exciting and impactful this story could possibly get. There is hints though that Mitsuha is a bit gender questioning (before she's even aware of body switching, she does wish she was a boy living in Tokyo, and she also seems pretty into the fetching Ms. Okudera from Taki's work...but neither of these thoughts are explored in any depth).
There's also perfect romantic comedy in this set-up, one which I was not expecting and was excited to see play out. But that's not the film director Shinaki was making, and he lets you know by montaging (montage-ing?) the hell out of what seems like weeks of instances of Mitsuha and Taki switching bodies and living each others' lives. We get voice over from Mitsuha telling us the rules they set up for each other and how they communicate with each other. But it robs us of all the comedic set ups, and building out the supporting cast, as well as inhibits the growth of romantic tension. At the end of a montage, we learn Mitsuha has set Taki up on a date with Ms. Okudera - a woman in her mid-20s to Taki's 17(!) and then both Mitsuha and Taki have conflicted feelings about said date. This is how we learn the body-switchers like each other, but there's only been like 5 minutes of communication between them as presented through montage. It's not satisfying in the slightest (plus "voice-over over a montage of scenes" always gives the perception of a troubled production and extensive reshoots).
The reason Taki and Mitsuha are body switching is as a result of a passing comet. And when the comet passes, neither Taki nor Mitsuha are switching bodies anymore...but they both have fallen for each other. Taki tries to call Mitsuha but cannot seem to locate her. And, like a dream, their memories of each other start fading. This is the "romance" part of a rom com. The "meet-cute" of Taki and Mitsuha was basically looking in a mirror and seeing each other's lives from inside. Now they need to find each other but so many complications get in the way (far too many).
Taki becomes obsessed with finding Mitsuha, sketching everything he can remember of her town. His friend Tsukasa joins him on a trip to try and find the town where Mitsuha lives (he never learned that while he was pretending to be her?!? Or is it just the fading dreamlike memories...this movie is very inconsistent with how their memories work). Ms. Okudera joins them (which, given that they're teens and she's a full fledged adult, seems wildly inappropriate. There's like an Y Tu Mama Tambien set-up here that doesn't happen at all).
And now ***SPOILERS***
Taki does find the village...but it was decimated by a meteorite that fell off the comet 3 years ago! Not only were Mitsuha and Taki body switching, but they were time traveling and never realized it. I guess they don't have calendars or write down dates in school? This film asks for a lot of suspension of disbelief, which is fine for the higher-concept stuff, but then they push you to believe that neither one would have, I dunno, put their details into each other's phone or notebook. Or learn where their exact address is. And then, when the comet passes all the little notes Mitsuha had been leaving in Taki's diary on his phone just spontaneously delete themselves? I have to call bullshit on that one. It's like the film is saying that all evidence of Mitsuha didn't exist, except the fact that Mitsuha went to visit Taki 3 years earlier (he hadn't body switched with her yet, so their meeting meant nothing to him) and she gave him a woven ribbon that he's been wearing as a bracelet every day since. Director Shinaki cheats, and he really didn't have to.
Through drinking some spit-sake (is this a real tradition? Yup... kuchikamizake) Mitsuha made and some mystical shenanigans, Taki transcends time and space and reconnects with Mitsuha, and the third act then becomes Taki-as-Mitsuha trying to save her and her town from the looming disaster.
There is some beautiful animation in these sequences, particularly in the wild trip Taki takes upon drinking the saki, and all the visuals of the comet. Also director Shinaki manages to effectively cross cut between the Taki-as-Mitsuha and oblivious-Taki-from-three-years earlier to create a grand sense of time and scale and the weight that rests on the shoulders of Taki-as-Mitsuha. But in spite of its scale and beauty, it is a complete distraction from what is central to the story, which is the connection between the characters and the romance that has erupted between them. When the climax of the story should be effort to bring these two characters together, it's overly focused on one huge obstacle in their way.
In a grand moment of cosmic collision, Taki and Mitsuha have a moment where space and time allow them to physically connect and it's proposed they write their names on each others hands so that when the dream state starts to rob them of their memories, they never forget each other's names. Taki writes first, and in a cosmic joke, Mitsuha barely gets to draw a line. And stupid-ass Taki writes "I love you" instead of his name. The town is saved but they both forget each other.
In an exceptionally effective coda, five years later (from Taki's time, 8 years for Mitsuha) Taki has been searching for something that he can't explain. He knows he was obsessed by this town that got struck by a comet but he can't remember why, and in more cheats from the storyteller, neither can Ms. Okuder or Tsukasa. The reunion of Taki and Mitsuha is quite satisfying with a sweeping era-appropriate rock ballad (which is in stark contrast to the horrible early 2000's alt-rock stylings of the songs and score earlier in the film, which undermine the film and make it feel like we're watching a sub-par CW teen soap opera).
***End Spoilers***
As I was discussing these critiques of the story my kid was explaining to me various tropes of anime, and how this falls in line with them. This is not a badly made movie, but it's also not a well-told story. The director manipulates the characters and manipulates the edit thus manipulating the audience, hoping you won't notice. Just like with Hallmark movies where I can grade them on a curve because I've seen so many of them, I'm sure if I were more well versed in anime I might hold this in higher regard (or maybe not, I dunno) but as just a stand-alone movie going experience, it had its moments, but mostly left me wishing it were something other than what it is.
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