The Secret of Kells

Ah, what a beautiful film.

The Secret of Kells centers on Brendan, a young monk in Kells, an Irish monastery and fortress against the invading Norsemen.  The abbot cares about one thing: building a wall big enough and strong enough to keep the Norse at bay.  Yes, there’s a scriptorium, but that seems almost an afterthought.  The illustrators there are workingmen.  They await the coming of a true master.

When one arrives, fleeing the Norse who’ve overrun his island monastery and bearing an illuminated manuscript that will one day become the (real life) Book of Kells, Brendan goes right to him.  What, after all, is the point of a monastery that ignores things monastic?

Ok, so there’s your hook.  But the secret of The Secret of Kells lies not in the story but in the presentation.  Its animation feels like illumination, with an overlapping 2-D style reminiscent of Sita Sings The Blues.  It weaves designs of Celtic symbology with Latin influences and brings to life many of the motifs of both.

This is a beautiful, imaginative film – the kind that, as a father, I’ll be able to watch over and over again, seeing new things each time.  If you value quality animation, you’ll love this film.

Red Beard

At first, I thought that Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard could as easily have been entitled ‘Hero Doctors.’ Red Beard is the head of a small charity clinic serving the rural poor in late Tokugawa-Era Japan, just before the Meiji restoration. We see him mostly through the eyes of Dr. Yasumoto, a recent grad on his way up before his exile to this backwater facility, and he is as heroic as can be. He leads his team. He saves lives. He comes up with funding. He does all the things Hero Doctors do.

But there's more going on here than that. Kurosawa understands that the laws of cinema dictate that Yasumoto will come to love the clinic and the people it serves. While he spends enough time on that story to create a binding narrative, he seems much more interested in the lives of the rural poor, their victories and losses and the beliefs that govern their world. Red Beard takes many long detours from Yasumoto’s tale to explore his patients’ lives. This gives the (three hour long) film a sense of pace and place, taking the time to immerse us in an entire community, not just the individual challenges faced by one guy.

Toshiro Mifune, surely one of cinema’s greatest talents, plays the eponymous Red Beard with just the right balance of authority and humanity. Yuzo Kayama does a fine job of getting us on the callow Dr. Yasumoto’s side and walking us through his character’s development. The clinic feels like a real clinic, the people like real people (Ok, we have to overcome the fact that some of the bit players were unwilling to get Tokugawa-era haircuts and went for wigs instead, but big deal – these were contract players, and Toho Studios had many concurrent productions running nearly all the time.), and the village, though it must have been a studio, like a real village.

Don’t be put off by Red Beard’s running time. Treat it like a book: watch a couple of chapters a night and enjoy the experience. Time with Akira Kurosawa is always time well spent.

OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies

I giggled like a ninny for nearly the entire running time of OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies.

There are 146 OSS 117 novels.  The series, chronicling the adventures of Franco-American superspy OSS 117, began in 1949, went through three authors, and saw its last published novel in 1992.  The French made seven OSS 117 films from 1964-1970, part of the Eurospy genre that ripped off and riffed on the success of James Bond.  OSS 117 is supercool.  He gets the job done.  He’s so awesome that Ian Fleming essentially ripped off the OSS 117 novels to create 007.

And in 2006’s OSS 117:  Cairo, Nest of Spies, he’s a meathead.  A charming meathead, no doubt, but one so delightedly and blindly French (the American part of the character’s heritage doesn’t make it into this adaptation) that he hands out photos of then-president René Coty (the film’s set in the mid-‘50s) to incredulous Egyptians as keepsakes and tokens of his patronizing goodwill.  It’s a one-joke movie, but the picture grooves along on such a fun retro vibe of smug delight in all things French that we can’t help but groove along with it, snigger at 117’s blockheadedness, and generally enjoy a spy caper so outlandish and silly that there’s not much to do but have a great time.

The filmmakers do a wonderful job of creating an era, paying attention to details from the cut of a suit to the proper period footage for the rear-projections in driving sequences.  The move looks and feels like a film made in the early ‘60s, and everything pops in a color process we’re just not used to seeing in a new print.

So not only is the movie funny, it’s technically adept and well made all around.  I look forward to OSS 117: Lost in Rio.