This week was a miss-schedule, where the original plan was to have Rob present Woman in the Dunes, but we canceled last week due to the train fires and made a mistake with the timing of Rob’s flight this week, so we will be postponing Woman in the Dunes and field-tripping it to Kabuki to see Jojo Rabbit.
There won’t be a long critical / personal essay for this one since no one has seen it yet.
I will share an interesting bit of an interview with Taika Waititi I heard the other day:
GROSS: I have the novel your movie is based on sitting right next to me. I haven’t read the whole thing. I’ve read parts of it. It is by no means a comedy. Why did you decide to take this novel and take a lot of liberties with it but also turn it into a comedy?
WAITITI: Because I don’t really know how to do the straight drama and have no real interest in doing that. I think there are plenty of filmmakers who do it very well. And I don’t think we need another depressing filmmaker in the world.
This tension is something I have thought about quite a bit myself in my own work – the world is pretty bleak, and I want to be honest in anything I do, but at the same time, I agree that we don’t necessarily need more depressing films.
There’s a real art to being true to the world and maintaining a sense of humor in your treatment of it.
This struck me a few weeks ago when I went to see Lion King on Broadway. It’s really a quite serious story, with murder and betrayal, questions of governance, the appeal of Waldenponding / running away to live a wife of ‘no worries,’ love, death… I recently heard over dinner it’s based on Hamlet, one of the best and darkest stories of the Western canon…
And yet, the show Lion King manages to maintain a sense of humor, to sing, and dance, and generally have fun despite the heavy material.
Something to aspire to…