Hello folks, and welcome back to my small slice of the internet. Summer arrived in force this week, heralding ninety degree afternoons and a whole lot of general dampness. I’m not complaining, though; I’ll take oppressive heat over oppressive cold any day, and will be enjoying my newly walkable city until the next eight-month winter arrives. Boston is actually quite nice in the summer; we’ve got a wide array of public parks, Cambridge is essentially an urban college town, and we’re positively lousy with colonial architecture and monuments. I am in fact convincing myself to go for a walk as I type, so let’s wrap up this aimless preamble, and get to the real meat of the article. A new week has passed, some excellent films have been screened, and I’m eager to share my findings with you. Let’s get to it!

This week saw me enjoying my first in-theater film since the pandemic began, breaking my fast in order to check out David Eggers’ The Northman. His previous films The Witch and The Lighthouse were two of my favorite recent films, so I was beyond excited to see what he’d do with a much larger budget. The result is Eggers as all hell – bleak, ambiguous, and unflinching in its portrayal of a world both alien and real, the existence and ethos of a humanity long past.

With three films under his belt, it’s beginning to seem like Eggers’ principal interest is actually cultural anthropology. Each of his films essentially sets up a tiny historical diorama, setting a group of characters in a difficult situation, and then watching as their own cultural assumptions inevitably destroy them. The earnest pilgrims of The Witch were undone by their assumed righteousness, while the keepers of The Lighthouse could never sate their loneliness through male intimacy. Eggers never makes judgment calls or announces verdicts; he commits to the worlds and feelings of these characters earnestly, letting the course of their journeys dictate our impression of their lives. And so it goes for The Northman, which presents a man destined for Valhalla in all his terrible glory.

The Northman is based on the same legend that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the vague plot beats are much the same: a king is killed by his brother, who then takes his wife, leaving the king’s son to set things right. In this case, the time between the killing and the returning is stretched some number of years, allowing young prince Amleth to grow into a distinguished raider in his own right. Our reintroduction to Amleth sets the tone for our relationship with him, as we follow him through a village raid that erupts with epic violence, and ends with the stark image of the village children being led into a flaming hut.

From that moment on, it is clear that Amleth is being guided by principles beyond our understanding. Perhaps more so than either of his previous films (each of which possessed a more recognizably sympathetic protagonist), The Northman commits deeply to the world as Amleth sees it, presenting a vision of continuous prophecy and fated destruction. It is hard to say that Amleth “strays” or “fails” at any time, given he is continuously led by unmistakable portents, and fundamentally driven by a philosophy that allows no room for wavering. And yet, as in all Eggers films, Amleth’s nature leads him to misunderstanding and tragedy, in ways he himself could never recognize.

It’s an odd thing, an epic entirely divorced from our modern expectations of righteousness and drama. While Amleth exults in his glorious revenge, we are the ones left to taste the ash in our mouths, having long since lost any faith in Amleth’s journey. And yet, his adventure is so grand and dangerous, his visions so alluring, his conviction so steady! Trust Eggers to make his first “happy ending” feel so bizarre and empty, so distant from our experience that it feels like a legend of another species. And please Eggers, give us another one.

Desperate for more One Piece, my house also churned through all of the franchise’s arc summary films, from the East Blue all the way through Water 7. This process was for the most part a waste of time, as most of these films didn’t significantly elevate or alter the original material. Fortunately, there was one shining exception: Episode of Chopper Plus: Bloom in Winter, Miracle Sakura.

While all of the other summary films stick largely to the aesthetic of the show proper, Miracle Sakura embraces simplified shading and linework more reminiscent of Baron Omatsuri, or the Tequila Wolf episodes (this film’s character designer/animation director Naoki Tate was also Tequila Wolf’s animation director). If you’ve seen either that film or those episodes, you know this is a very good sign, and the results are indeed spectacular.

Absent any need to conform to rigid character models, Miracle Sakura’s animators are free to express the cast’s feelings through vividly idiosyncratic cuts of movement, with character forms frequently dissolving into pure splashes of evocative energy. Character acting unbounded from loyalty to character design can frequently feel more real than realism, with the felt experience of a moment bleeding into its overt visual representation. Tate’s vision of One Piece is one of my favorite interpretations of this vast chimera of a franchise, and Miracle Sakura is a two hour testament to his unique aesthetic. If you like One Piece and animation, watch Miracle Sakura.

We then checked out a recent Guy Ritchie feature, The Gentlemen. While Hollywood success has seen Ritchie somewhat branching out from his wheelhouse, it’s clear the guy’s heart rests with grimy, breakneck tales of London criminality. The Gentlemen falls directly within Ritchie’s preferred strike zone, and if you’ve seen films like Snatch, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or Layer Cake, you already know precisely how you’ll feel about this one. His films mostly ride on flash and momentum, charging from one setpiece to another too quickly for you to complain how it all fits together. The Gentlemen is no different, and is most distinctive for the fact that Hugh Grant plays a deliciously against-type scumbag private investigator. That’s fun to see, but fails to make this anything close to an essential watch – more just an energetic background feature, if you enjoy Ritchie’s style.

Next up was an intriguing animated production, Jorge Gutierrez’ The Book of Life. The film follows two young men, Manolo and Joaquin, who are each vying for the love of their mutual friend Maria. Unbeknownst to them, their contest has a much greater significance: La Muerte, ruler of the Land of the Remembered, and Xibalba, ruler of the Land of the Forgotten, have made a wager over who will win, with Xibalba claiming La Muerte’s lands if he succeeds. When Xibalba’s trickery ends up getting Manolo killed, our young hero will have to journey through the lands of the dead in order to set things right.

Frankly, even that description vastly compresses all the stuff this story’s got going on. Manolo and Joaquin actually have a charming friendship, there’s a great thread of drama regarding Manolo’s relationship with his family’s legacy of bullfighting, and all of this is contained within a larger framing device of modern-day children visiting a history museum. In spite of all this, the film manages its various internal narratives with grace, leaving the audience free to appreciate its singular art design. 

Even before the film reaches the realms of the dead, its woodblock-modeled character designs feel marvelously expressive and genuinely original, combining the freedom of form native to animation with a uniquely tactile sense of hand-modeled puppetry. And once Manolo reaches the underworld, the film blooms in a glorious celebration of light and color, making the most of one of the most visually enthralling global festivals. I felt the film’s song choices were occasionally questionable, and the comedy has a few misses, but on the whole, The Book of Life is a visually stunning and often moving adventure, perfect for either families or animation enthusiasts.

Our last film of the week was a concise little scifi drama, the 2018 feature Prospect. Jay Duplass and Sophie Thatcher star as a father-daughter pair of interstellar prospectors, currently investigating a tip about a planet on a soon-to-be-discontinued transport line. It’s clear that Duplass is suffering from a bit of that old gold rush mania, and when they discover a pair of rival prospectors, he attempts to take their winnings as well. A brief firefight results, ending in Thatcher now alone with the remaining bandit (Pedro Pascal). Though they have no reason to trust each other, the two will have to work together to survive a hostile planet, and lift off in time for the last train home.

I was so damn impressed by Prospect’s understanding of its own scale, and embracing of all the textural weirdness endemic to grounded science fiction. The film introduces no variables that are not essential, and the flourishes of fantasy invention it does include are all fascinating and believable in equal measure. Its aesthetic possesses that Ridley Scott-esque feel of a future that already feels old and dilapidated; the ships and weapons are beyond our imagination, but also clearly second-hand and past the point of warranty coverage. Much of this film’s drama involves the navigation of various air filters, as well as the profoundly technical process of harvesting their alien gold.

Though its setting paints it as science fiction, Prospect’s bones are those of a western, and it executes on those narrative fundamentals with total confidence. As with most great westerns, the magnificent desolation of the story’s surroundings feels like a character unto itself – and on top of that, the film also succeeds as a character story, building a convincing relationship between its two unlikely stars. Pascal is a scene-stealing sonuvabitch, with his loquacious southern affectation making it impossible not to like him, but Thatcher also puts in a convincing performance. All in all, Prospect simply succeeds, embracing its intimate scale to tell an accomplished tale of greed and perseverance.