culture
Rep Cinema This Week: Castle in the Sky, The Crash Reel, Don Jon
The best repertory and art-house screenings, special presentations, lectures, and limited engagements in Toronto.
Still from Castle in the Sky.
At rep cinemas this week: Studio Ghibli’s first film, a documentary about an injured snowboarder, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut.
Castle in the Sky
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
Hayao Miyazaki had his first real hit as a filmmaker (many years into his animation career) with 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, but didn’t launch the famed Studio Ghibli, the imprint behind all of his subsequent releases, until 1986’s Castle in the Sky. You could call the film the Rosetta Stone of the Japanese animation house, insofar as it works as a thematic and stylistic ledger for the string of gorgeously hand-drawn, ecological fables that would follow over the years.
While it has most of Miyazaki’s hallmarks—among them, a plucky heroine and a natural world endangered by modern industry—Castle in the Sky is more of a straightforward action-adventure than later films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, somewhere between Jules Verne and early Spielberg. It follows the frenzied journey of Sheeta, a kidnapped young woman with a magic crystal that may or not come from Laputa, a mysterious floating city in the sky, and Pazu, the dreamy engineer’s apprentice she stumbles upon while fleeing a cadre of shady military goons who are after her precious rock.
Hard as it is to fault a film as impeccably crafted as this one, one is nevertheless tested by the episodic structure, which begins to wear a bit thin after what feels like the dozenth consecutive chase set piece. Its parable about the importance of remembering that we all come from the earth also lands a bit more awkwardly than the moral in Miyazaki’s best films, perhaps because of all the motion and din. Even so, Castle in the Sky has an infectious forward momentum and some of the most resonant images in the Studio Ghibli canon, including our first distorted image of the lost kingdom—as startling as anything in modern fantasy filmmaking.
Thursday’s screening will be introduced by acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. Sunday’s screening will be of the film’s English dub, which features voices by Anna Paquin, who acquits herself nicely, and James Van Der Beek, who does not.
The Crash Reel
Directed by Lucy Walker
TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West)
In its first act, Lucy Walker’s documentary The Crash Reel works as something of a snowboarding companion piece to Rush, Ron Howard’s film about dueling Formula One drivers. Chronicling the professional rivalry and sometimes friendship between up-and-comer Kevin Pearce and established star Shaun White leading up to the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the film nicely delineates the odd mix of thrill-seeking and technical finesse that defines snowboarding culture for those at the top of the game. That all changes when Pearce sustains a serious brain injury while training, sending him into a long, delicate recovery, and transforming the film into a more personal story about a pro athlete’s rebirth as a survivor of a head trauma.
Walker has a knack for capturing the verve and resilience of these athletes via every manner of training montage, and she’s found a good subject with Pearce and his well-to-do family, who walk him through every minute phase of his rehabilitation, and share with the filmmakers their candid dinner conversations about what his injury means for them as a unit. But there’s a distracting hesitancy to the film’s structure, which reveals itself as Pearce slowly comes back to himself while the doc struggles to find a new direction.
Perhaps this indecisive storytelling is a consequence of the divided nature of the project, which aims both to appeal to snowboarding fans and also to caution viewers about the dangers inherent in this sport. White, for instance, gets discarded as a narrative subject soon after Pearce is injured, while the film begins to spend an inordinate amount of time profiling Pearce’s brother David, a former Special Olympian with Down syndrome. There’s an interesting story in the brothers’ parallel paths, but Walker hasn’t quite grasped it—she barely addresses David’s own skiing career, which was accomplished enough to have earned him a medal, and instead trades in abstract feel-good messaging about how he ought to accept his disability, as his brother is accepting his life after the fall. Unlike its dedicated, single-minded subject, then, The Crash Reel has a lot of potential but not as much follow-through.
Don Jon
Directed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
The Royal (608 College Street)
Movie star and hitRECord founder Joseph Gordon-Levitt makes his directorial debut with this loud, splashy, and ultimately predictable portrait of a young New Jersey muscleman with a porn addiction and a penchant for clubbing. Gordon-Levitt stars as the titular Jon, who spends his days tending to his list of favourite things—“My body, my pad, my ride, my family, my church, my boys, my girls, and my porn,” as he tells us repeatedly in voiceover—and his nights as a pick-up artist seeking perfect women, whom he and his buddies snidely call “dimes.”
Anyone who’s seen a movie about a good-hearted ruffian will know from the first frame that Jon will soon be rehabilitated, first through a relationship with Scarlett Johansson (a dime), then through a more substantial friendship with the earthier (read: older) Julianne Moore. If you can tolerate the tired premise and retrograde attitude toward women, though, this is a decent first feature, likeable in an obnoxious sort of way, just like Jon.