MOVIE DIARY 2023: I CAN DO ANYTHING A BRAINLESS MAN CAN DO. AND WHAT'S MORE, I CAN DO IT BETTER.
Hello! We’re back again this week with TWO SPECIAL GUESTS! HOW DO WE KEEP DOING THIS?? This time we’ve got graphic novelist and TV writer Hamish Steele and podcaster and cool online person Erin Rose O’Brien! I met Hamish at my old job where I would accompany him on his visits to the US for his appearances at comics conventions and escort him to fine American institutions like Popeyes. Erin has been an online mutual for a few years now, and I think she’s hilarious and has excellent taste. I’ve been wanting to get Erin on MOVIE DIARY for a while, so this is obviously huge for me!
Whisper of the Heart 耳をすませば (1995) - dir. Yoshifumi Kondō
Written by Hayao Miyazaki , Based on the manga by Aoi Hiragi
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: HAMISH STEELE
There are a lot of bad movies about the making of great art. The cliche of the rock biopic where we see Freddie Mercury catch a glimpse of a fat-bottomed girl, followed by one shot of him playing the song on piano before another of him belting it in Wembley Stadium (I have not seen Bohemian Rhapsody). Inspiration and creativity is one of the hardest things to capture on film.
Whisper of the Heart, however, is a great movie about the making of bad art. Or at least… unrefined, naive art. It tells the story of Shizuku Tsukishima, an inspiring Weird Al Yankovic who is writing a parody of Take Me Home, Country Roads about the “Concrete Roads” she calls home. But she wants to make something more. She sets out to write an epic, fantasy novel! And like all epic fantasy novels written by 14-year-olds… it’s shit.
Throughout the film, she visits an old antique shop which serves as her muse. It contains a gaudy piece of furry art (the Baron) which Shizuku adapts into the main character of her story. But the shop, like inspiration, cannot be called upon whenever she wishes. It keeps odd hours and sometimes she sits inside for hours with no thoughts, head empty.
The world of Shizuku’s novel is represented by a few gorgeous sequences of whimsical, fantastical cities floating in the sky which she flies through hand in hand with the Baron. But these are the kinds of worlds that are dime a dozen in a Studio Ghibli film. As pretty as they are, they don’t hold a candle to the scenes of Shizuku riding her bike down the busy motorway, picking up groceries at the 7/11 or squeezing past drying clothes and piles of books in her cluttered apartment. To me, the worlds of her fantasies are hollow, almost a parody of a Ghibli movie, while the world around her is full of detail, life and beauty. She hasn’t yet learned the overused but admittedly true mantra - “write about what you know”. The opening shot of a night-time Tokyo, with Olivia Newton-John’s cover of Country Roads playing (I have never been so ALL IN on a movie from the first second as this) gives the idea of a character with too many disparate inspirations, and no clear voice yet.
And this is because unlike so many movies about artists, Shizuku’s talent isn’t depicted as some divine gift. She’s not some brilliant, undiscovered genius who just needs to be let to fly. She’s not Remy from Ratatouille, a film which claims anybody can cook but only magically gifted ones should. Shizuku’s writing is constantly depicted as work, as a skill she is studying, crafting. It takes a toll on her body, on her family, on her school work. Her parent’s concern that her writing is absorbing her life isn’t shown to be the cruel, anti-art sentiments of oldies who don’t “get it”, but as a sincere worry for their daughter going down a life they know from experience is hard.
Shizuku’s love interest is Seiji Amasawa, the grandson of the antique shop owner and someone who is training to be a violin-maker. Frequently, Shizuku’s writing is compared to that of violin-making. Both are physical skills that take years of practice and honing. Writing sits beside woodwork. The act of putting pen to paper to write a lyric is the same as sanding down wood to make a violin. Both are required to make music, as shown in one of Whisper’s standout scenes where Shizuku and Seiji’s art brings several generations together in song.
But this film itself is a piece of art, created by humans who took things too far. This was the last film by director Yoshifumi Kondō. He died during the production of Princess Mononoke, speculated to be partially due to the intense stress of working on productions of this scale. For years, the working conditions in Studio Ghibli have been criticized for overworking their teams. Whisper of the Heart is not a film about the joy of creativity, it’s a cry for help. To choose a life of art can be to choose a life of pain, work, loneliness, death. And yet we can’t help ourselves. Our only hope is to find someone to share that life with who does get it.
There are many movies I wish I’d seen earlier, but I’m so glad I watched this now, in 2023 as a 32-year-old. It hit me like a brick. I think if I’d watched it at Shizuku’s age, I’d have had an entirely different experience - cheering her on to throw away all her responsibilities and dive head first into the world of her fantasies. But now all I want to do is give her a hug, tell her to slow down and rehydrate.
It’s ironic that one of the modern legacies of this film is the “lowfi hiphop beats to relax/study to” youtube playlist, which redraws a frame from this movie of Shizuku studying over music. Many times when struggling to create art, that off-model Shizuku has been there for me, long before I’d watched this film.
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Hamish Steele is an Eisner-award winning graphic novelist and tv writer. He recently showran Dead End: Paranormal Park for Netflix, based on his DeadEndia books which are now available to buy from all good bookstores. hamishsteele.co.uk
Bolt Driver (2021) - dir. Van Alpert, Nick Corirossi
SPECIAL GUEST WRITER: ERIN ROSE O’BRIEN
Over the weekend, my boyfriend and I planned to watch Bolt Driver. “It’s genuinely icky,” I warned him. “I’m pretty sure he goes to the same porn convention as Conner O’Malley.”
“Well, is it gonna make you feel worse?” We’d had a long day—a bit more than we’d bargained for. Finally, time to unwind with some filth. We started Bolt Driver, shut it off, and opted to watch “Griffin’s Amiibo Corner.” (Griffin’s dry, unsmiling “Too Funny!” has entered our mutual lexicon.)
My boyfriend is a former Los Angeles resident. I visited him twice while he still lived there and saw Los Angeles with the rosiest of glasses—the Carly Rae Jepsen of it all, a shimmering summer of leaping toward a certain happiness. Love, maybe. But he sees his time there differently—an isolating experience during the darkest days of the pandemic. Bolt Driver was not going to make a compelling argument for ever living in Los Angeles.
Bolt Driver is a 2021 found footage movie starring Nick Corirossi and directed by Corirossi and Van Alpert. It is a comedic plot-for-plot ripoff of the seminal 1976 Scorsese-Schrader Taxi Driver. Except crucially, Bolt Driver is set in L.A., and “Travis” drives for Lyft-esque Bolt. Travis is obsessed with OnlyFans girls and, later, one specific girl, journaling, “Maybe I’ll save these OnlyFans girls from their gamer-influencer boyfriends, and they won’t crop me out of their pictures.” It’s a bit more than just parody; it personifies a type of “Guy” that can only exist in America in the 2020s.
Corirossi understands what it means to be a certain type of “Guy.” He’s probably best known for playing “comedian” Craig Healy. Since 2011, Corirossi has played Craig with increasing desperation to be someone. Across Vioobu’s suite of Healy-hosted shows, Craig is an unintelligible clip show host, Louie-esque dramedy star mugging for Emmy noms, and the host of Craig Fixada America. (Now Craig is the face of Seppita Mobile—that’s another thread.)
Craig Fixada America embodies smug post-Trump comedy with such a straight face. It’s the type of “comedy” that happened when late night talk hosts dropped the jokes to say something serious—and eventually, turned the late night tradition into a reporting-based genre. The late night host must believe in America and stand for something—and it’s up to them to really stick it to the Prez. That’s Craig Healy.
In Craig Fixada America, you meet a full panel of men wearing identical outfits clapping, “This! Is! Not! Normal!” Craig walks back on a homophobic joke about Putin and Trump, even noting, “Craig not’a’da write the joke… Craig don’t know how a’da’ Photoshop…” In my favorite part, Josh Fadem plays “Shawn-López Blumenthal,” who raps about William Henry Harrison, “—there’s really no comparison, making all my predecessors lookin’ so embarrassin’.” López-Blumenthal and Healy later urge you to “Dress Rehearse the Vote” by practicing filling in circles before voting.
The meta-text of Craig Healy is one of a man so desperate to be famous that he will change his entire persona and ambition to suit the current trends in comedy. Like Travis in Bolt Driver, Craig Healy is a “Guy” stuck in the current American condition looking for a way to make his mark. For Travis, that’s an OnlyFans girl, or joining a Republican campaign, or suicide—for Craig, it’s fame, baby.
Bolt Driver is shot on iPhone. It’s punctuated by Travis wearing Snapchat filters, speaking monotonously into the camera, wondering if, perhaps, women would talk to him if he drove them around “or something.” iPhone quality makes the movie feel dash-cam-esque, like footage we’re not supposed to see; when Travis hits on girls going to a “Shia LaBeouf party” we anticipate disaster—whether it’s them or other women down the line.
Los Angeles, as portrayed in Bolt Driver, is also on the cusp of disaster. News reports of wildfires on TV punctuate Travis' moody sunset neon walks. Before we watched Bolt Driver, I suggested we watch First Reformed—which my boyfriend hasn't seen (great date movie, imo). Beyond its haunting ecological themes, I think a lot about how First Reformed is a story about how obsession corrupts. Obsession with a person or with things outside of our control, obsession with the sins of selves and society. "How often we ask for genuine experience when all we really want is emotion."
Early on, we see Travis as a parody of the Schrader-man, a diary-writing, isolated guy hunched over his internal monologue. The more we learn about Travis, the more details of the current American masculine experience Corirossi colors him with. He laments that he won't see the new Avengers when he's gone—but maybe you'll tell him about it in heaven. To an extent, Travis looks for online fame like Craig Healy; Travis constantly posts about his parasocial exploits (though later, we learn his audience is humorously small).
Bolt Driver manages to buck its simple “parody” label (sort of) by being a character study of the “Guy”—alienated, horned up, angry at society, grasping for an American dream of a hot girlfriend, a gun, and total control. If Bolt Driver Travis saw any Schrader-man movies, he’d probably be like, “He’s just like me, for real.”
My boyfriend and I watched Bolt Driver in complete silence.
We queued up My Neighbor Totoro after.
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Erin Rose O’Brien (She/Her) is a writer, occasional podcast host/guest, and online scoundrel. You can follow her on Twitter @er0b, and on Letterboxd where she has the top review of Original Cast Album: Company.
Opening Night (1977) - dir. John Cassavetes
Cait wrote about this one last month! You should read her post about it because I don’t really think I’ve got a lot to add. I loved this, and it was really cool to see it taking some very unexpected turns. Gena Rowlands is such a powerhouse! She takes full control of this movie from her first scene, and she navigates those unexpected turns of her character with such effortless intensity. I loved the movie’s reflection on art and aging, but even better was its more confrontational approach to these themes thanks to Gena Rowland’s aggressive yet still vulnerable performance.
Humoresque (1946) - dir. Jean Negulesco
Paul (John Garfield) is an obsessive, hot headed genius violinist from a working class New York family. One night Paul and his best friend/mentor Sid (Oscar Levant), a pianist he’s known since he was a child, play at a party for some rich people. That’s where Paul meets Helen Wright (Joan Crawford), a wealthy patron of the arts and married socialite. Helen, drawn to Paul’s talent and his contentious self confidence, takes him under her wing. She introduces him to important society types, opening doors to plenty of opportunities that he’d never had access to before. Things begin to get complicated as their relationship develops into an ill-advised romance.
What a brisk and satisfying movie! It moves at such a relentless clip, but it’s dense with heavy emotions and a lot of style and good humor. I loved it. It also sort of fits under one of my favorite genres, “Romances Where Nobody Gets What They Want.” John Garfield is incredible as hotheaded working class virtuoso violinist Paul. He has such a fire and power in his performance, and you really get a feel for his overwhelming drive. He’s passionate and confident to the point of arrogant, but there’s a tenderness in him that allows you to accept his bravado as charming. I think part of that is because that inherent tenderness connects you to one of the earlier scenes of the movie, a flashback to him as a child (played by Robert Blake! lol) with tears in his eyes when his father initially refuses to buy him a violin for his birthday. We see him as an adult, obsessively devoting himself to his craft and slowly rising in stature in the music world, but inside he’s still that little boy in love with the violin.
Alongside Garfield’s Paul, we get Joan Crawford likewise giving an equally intense performance as Helen Wright, Paul’s patron/love interest. Helen’s a wealthy married woman who spends much of her time on drinking, throwing parties, and keeping a stable of mustachioed himbos at her beck and call. Her husband, a self-described weak man, lets her have her fun, but Helen is ultimately a lonely woman. She meets Paul at one of her parties, and she’s drawn to him because he seems to be the first person she’s ever encountered who’s been brave enough to not take her shit. The two start a complicated, ill-advised romance that could bring scandal on both of them. Getting involved with someone who’s married is always a scandal, but it’d be especially damning for Paul and Helen because of the nature of their artist-patron relationship and because news of this affair could ruin Paul’s budding career as New York’s most popular homegrown virtuoso. Where Paul has a fire deep within him, propelling him forward, Helen has a very well practiced coldness that covers the deep pain of loneliness inside her. She’s got a reputation for being kind of a bitch, and she’s embraced that as a sort of armor or insulation from the world. She’s been protecting herself this way for so long that you can see how painful and difficult it is for her to open herself up to actually loving someone. It becomes doubly heartbreaking when she sees that, after finally allowing herself to be vulnerable and admit to herself that she needs Paul’s love, she will always come second to his dedication to music. The scene where she finally comes to this realization is so brutal and crushing, it feels like a murder when Paul crumples up that note from Helen, and Joan Crawford plays this like she’s been spiritually wounded, it’s incredible. Not only that, but her involvement with Paul, even if they do end up getting married, is still bound to negatively affect his career (I guess getting involved with a married woman and then marrying her right after her divorce was enough to get you canceled back then). Paul would never admit that he would choose the violin over Helen, but Helen knows. She wants Paul to be happy, and she realizes that being with him would only ever make her a hindrance to him, so she makes the drastic and dramatic decision to get drunk and walk right into the ocean. It’s maybe a bit of an over the top response, but this is the movies! This is melodrama! This is operatic tragedy! This is the kind of stuff they make classical music about! And Joan Crawford takes us through this emotional whirlwind effortlessly, making Helen’s pain real and tragic.
Aside from all the pathos, I thought Humoresque also had a lot of other fun things going for it. I loved Oscar Levant as Sid, Paul’s pianist and best friend/mentor. Levant plays Sid with this really great self-deprecating sense of humor, and the man has jokes! He just rattles them off, joke after joke after joke, and it’s always through this cutting deadpan. He’s there as a typical best friend character, the only one who’s ready to point out the truth about the situation to his temperamental, sensitive genius best friend and partner. Every scene with Sid has him saying something hilarious, and he has excellent chemistry with everyone so it never comes off as only rude. There’s a playfulness to his jabs that reveals that Sid cares about Paul and that he wants the best for Paul both as a professional musician and as a good man.
I thought one of the more fun things about Humoresque was its use of montage. There’s this great montage where it’s just image after image of the noisy city life of New York juxtaposed with Paul going about his day to day. The quick cuts are punctuated by images of Paul furiously practicing on his violin. The montage leads directly to a scene with Paul and his best friend/mentor Sid (Oscar Levant), a pianist, as they wrap up what we can infer is just the latest in hundreds and hundreds of practice sessions exactly like this. It’s really thrilling to experience, this frantic, almost violent, classical music swelling while we see ordinary working men and women hustling and bustling their way through their lives in the city. The end too is an incredible montage of Paul playing Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at his big concert as Helen, miles away at her house by the beach, spirals in anguish before she decides to drown herself in the ocean in an effort to spare Paul from her and her fraught reputation (extremely A Star Is Born (1937) or any of the other A Star Is Born’s, really). Emotionally resonant classical music playing over a montage of intense imagery, it works every time!
The third part of the blog, where I plug the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord
We’ve been getting a couple more members on the MOVIE DIARY 2023 Discord, and it’s been really positive for me as an egoist, so please join in if you want to bring ~your voice~ to the MOVIE DIARY 2023 community!
Former MOVIE DIARY 2018 special guest Mattie Lubchansky’s new graphic novel Boys Weekend is now on sale! I just read it, and I thought it was great! Loved all the Verhoeven-esque corporate hell future visual gags, and it was great to see Mattie’s work in a longer format to give it space to breathe a bit, letting characters and jokes develop in a natural and satisfying way. Really funny and moving stuff. Great job, Mattie!
Street Fighter 6 update: World Tour mode is getting a bit repetitive, but I think it’s still fun. Personally I think it’s totally fucked that the only way to unlock alternate costumes for the fighters is to either spend all your time grinding away at World Tour mode or spend actual real American dollars on microtransactions. All I wanna do is fight and collect cool fits! Hit me up if you wanna fight sometime by the way (I’m playing on PS4, idk if that matters, I don’t really do a lot of online play).