{"id":2901,"date":"2016-03-14T07:00:17","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T14:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/?p=2901"},"modified":"2016-03-14T10:38:19","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T17:38:19","slug":"an-obnoxious-reason-for-walking-out-a-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/2016\/03\/an-obnoxious-reason-for-walking-out-a-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"An obnoxious reason for walking out of a movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

Have you ever walked out of a movie theater? I have. I walked out of\u00a0Supari<\/em>, once upon a decade ago, and I walked out after 30 minutes of that Vishal Bharadwaj film with Pankaj Kapur and Imran Khan whose name I cannot recall, it was\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>bad. Oh yes,\u00a0Matru Ki Bijli. <\/em>A\u00a0screening of Profundo Rosso\u00a0<\/em>that was part of a double-feature, and it was so late in the night that my brain had turned to mush.\u00a0I am fairly sure this\u00a0number would have been higher had I not been with other people in the theater.\u00a0Rajkumar Hirani’s PK<\/em>, for example, and even the first\u00a0Hobbit <\/em>movie. In all these cases, I walked out because the films did not engage me in\u00a0any\u00a0<\/em>way; there was some amount of revulsion involved, and the thought that if I did not allow more of my time to be wasted in that darkened theater, it would imply redemption of some sort.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I walked out of a theater\u00a0for another reason altogether. It’s possible that in doing so, I startled the rest of the audience. I had been the first person to arrive at the theater, half an hour before showtime, and was able to pick the best seat in\u00a0that sea of red faux-leather, that perfectly centered spot that brings the rectangular screen,\u00a0uh, square in the\u00a0center of your vision. There I sat, indulging myself in butter-covered food of the gods, acknowledging the matinee crowd that traipsed in slowly, film buffs, couples out on dates, parents with young children in tow,\u00a0or the other way round. We laughed as the ads played, and the sounds of my chewing found sympathetic patterns in the mastication of other film-goers.\u00a0The film trailers got over; the passive-aggressive switch-off-cellphone ads got some of us to double-check our devices, and we clapped as the theater darkened for the\u00a0main feature. And once the movie began, it took me about 20 horrific\u00a0seconds to realize what I was in for. To decide I did not want to see it anymore.<\/p>\n

The movie was Mamoru Hosoda’s\u00a0Boy and the Beast<\/em>, and you see, the version playing on that particular screening was\u00a0the one dubbed into English.<\/p>\n

No. No no no no.<\/p>\n

In my head, there is a clear breach of expectation that happens when I go to watch a film in one language and get another. It does not have to be Japanese anime; I have found myself cringing when listening to Pixar movies\u00a0dubbed in Spanish, or even a Cantonese film in Mandarin. For anime, it hits me in the worst kind of way; the closest analogy I can give is when you go to a restaurant and order a plate of samosas. When the waiter brings the plate\u00a0in, you smell the delicious samosa-smell and your mouth begins to water. The waiter has even remembered to bring chutney, and it’s the right kind of chutney, the syrupy, tangy\u00a0tamarind recipe that goes perfectly with samosas. Eagerly, you pick up one of them. It is the perfect temperature too; freshly fried and kept aside for just the perfect amount of time that you know there will be no waiting for the filling to cool down, and that your tongue is safe. You dip the samosa in the tamarind chutney and bite into it. How would you feel if\u00a0that\u00a0samosa, for some reason, is sweet, instead of salty?<\/p>\n

When the opening narration in the movie began in English, in my head, I was sure that there was A Problem, and only Swift Decisive Action could solve it. I remembered that I had double-checked\u00a0to see if the matinee show had the original language or not, and the website said that only the 4 PM show would be dubbed. [ref]This had happened once before, you see, with a screening of a Ghibli movie, where but for an\u00a0epiphany just before clicking the buy-button, I would have been sobbing through a dubbed movie after having taken a bus across town.[\/ref] I could be that hero the rest of the audience needed. I ran outside, and the girl selling\u00a0tickets was gone, and so was the manager, who had been lounging around reading a newspaper. There was only the guy selling popcorn, and he agreed with me, that the movie playing should be a subbed version. The manager came into view, finally, and he pointed out that Saturdays they only have two shows,\u00a0and the 7 PM screening is when I would see the subbed version, if I wanted to come back. Unsure about my plans for the rest of the day, I got a refund. At 7 PM, however, I had come back. This time I did not buy the popcorn, and I made sure to ask about which language would play, before getting my ticket.<\/p>\n

\"the-boy-and-the-beast\"<\/p>\n

The movie? It was okay. Visually stunning, like Mamoru Hosoda films are. Hosoda and Makoto Shinkai are two anime film-makers who have distinct visual styles of storytelling.\u00a0More importantly, their films contain\u00a0stories with\u00a0an\u00a0emotional depth\u00a0that other, more lackadaisical animation film-makers either glaze over or dumb down. This however has the fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your point of view) of appending any discussion of the two film-makers’ work with a comparison to Hayao Miyazaki’s ouevre. I am guilty of making the same analogy when it comes to selling any of their work to my friends, to be honest. But here’s an admission \u2014\u00a0I think Hosoda and Shinkai, the latter in particular, bring in more emotional honesty and vulnerability into their work than Miyazaki ever did. Miyazaki protagonists are idealized archetypes, asexual and wide-eyed. These latter-day filmmakers make their characters more fragile and human, and that makes their work much more appealing to me.<\/p>\n

On\u00a0the surface, Hosoda’s style\u00a0is much more aligned with the aesthetics of Studio Ghibli \u2014\u00a0a little-known fact is that he was tapped to direct\u00a0Howl’s Moving Castle<\/em>, but Miyazaki took over due to creative differences. Much like the veteran film-maker, Hosoda’s work is rooted in Japanese tradition. Scenes from\u00a0Wolf Children\u00a0<\/em>play out\u00a0like extended homages to\u00a0My Neighbor Totoro<\/em>, and both\u00a0Wolf\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Summer Wars\u00a0<\/em>are\u00a0as much about family ties and bonds with nature as any Ghibli movie you can think of. In\u00a0Boy and The<\/em> Beast<\/em>, there are striking similarities to\u00a0Spirited Away<\/em>, <\/em>especially with the concept of a parallel world that exists just beyond our world, and one human child that makes his way to the other side. There,\u00a0Chihiro became Sen,\u00a0with\u00a0a\u00a0flick\u00a0of the characters in\u00a0her name;\u00a0here Ren becomes Kyuta\u00a0<\/em>because he is aged nine. There, our heroine\u00a0was trapped in the land of the Others, who are unfamiliar and mostly horrific and unkind to trespassers; here, Kyuta\u00a0willingly crosses over into\u00a0a world of beasts\u00a0who, though suspicious of the motives of the runaway human, mostly accept him in time. The theme of finding your family \u2014\u00a0blood or surrogate \u2014 loom large throughout the movie’s storyline, as does the idea of belonging.<\/p>\n

My main issue is that most parts of the film feel rushed. It opens with a narrator explaining the situation, skimming through the world-building, telling us more than we can see. We never really understand certain characters’ motivations. There are too many montages \u2014\u00a0one where the characters go on a journey of self-discovery, for example, and meet a variety of powerful beasts in that world\u00a0\u2014no payoff to those scenes follow. Things get interesting when Kyuta begins his training under Kumatetsu, and the central theme of the film, that of these two unlike creatures finding themselves through each other,\u00a0is cemented in this all-too-brief sequence. The third act falls apart almost completely, especially as grown-up Kyuta begins going back to the real world. Subplot brimming with threats and conflicts come out of nowhere, as do the resolutions; the romantic angle is all Jungle Book meets anime cliche, Ren’s meeting with his biological father is angst and adolescent fury, and the final boss-fight involves a character who is woefully under-explained.\u00a0The only place, therefore, where\u00a0Boy and The Beast really\u00a0<\/em>succeeds is in making us\u00a0root for the titular characters right off the bat.<\/p>\n

All in all, the\u00a0movie suffers just because Hosoda’s previous work has been\u00a0so\u00a0<\/em>good. Of course it’s a wonderful movie, full of wit and charm and moments, but it manages to not live up to expectations. But hey, this is from the guy that hated Howl’s Moving Castle\u00a0<\/em>the first time he saw it, and changed his mind later. If you get a chance to watch it, please do \u2014 and if you haven’t seen any of Hosoda’s previous work, check them out\u00a0after\u00a0<\/em>this one.<\/p>\n

\"hosoda2\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Have you ever walked out of a movie theater? I have. I walked out of\u00a0Supari, once upon a decade ago, and I walked out after 30 minutes of that Vishal Bharadwaj film with Pankaj Kapur and Imran Khan whose name I cannot recall, it was\u00a0that\u00a0bad. Oh yes,\u00a0Matru Ki Bijli. A\u00a0screening of Profundo Rosso\u00a0that was part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,30],"tags":[410,621,624,623,622,97,346,625],"class_list":["post-2901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-toons","tag-anime","tag-boy-and-the-beast","tag-hayao-miyazaki","tag-makoto-shinkai","tag-mamoru-hosoda","tag-movies-2","tag-studio-ghibli","tag-walking-out-of-movie-theaters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2901"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2909,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2901\/revisions\/2909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beatzo.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}