Recent viewings

Taking a brief break from fantasy-baseball ramblings:

The Sandbaggers, season 1, episodes 1 and 2. Late-1970s British spy drama about a cadre of "special operatives" working for the British government during the Cold War. Interesting for focusing more on the domestic bureaucratic difficulties faced by the "sandbaggers", and their sometimes dicey relationships with their NATO allies, than on their Soviet foes. In the first two episodes, there's very little action, but no shortage of tension as cold-eyed British spymaster Neil Burnside attempts to pull the right political strings to get his operatives permission to do their jobs as he thinks they should be done, while attempting (not always successfully) to keep them from being sent on suicidally stupid missions. The science-fantasy gadgets, improbable feats, and one-sided cheerleading of the James Bond movies are nowhere to be seen. In the first episode, a furious but icily calm Burnside explicitly states to someone who has placed his agents in unnecessary danger: "If you want James Bond, go to the library." The moral hypocrisy of politicians is highlighted in the second episode, where we find that for the Sandbaggers, that much-vaunted "licence to kill" depends more on the political convenience of current officeholders than on moral principle. For once, the typical British television low-budget production adds to the realism rather than detracting from it, as the shabby, crowded offices, clunky 1970s telephones and intercoms, and rusty little cars used by the operatives are all too believable for "overworked and underpaid" public servants taken for granted by the politicians they serve.

Grave of the Fireflies. As usual with Japanese animation, the scenery is gorgeous, although the foreground characters are sometimes a bit too much like caricatures for my taste. As is also frequently the case with Japanese animation, it addresses a story much, much grimmer than Western animation usually tackles. Those who see this movie expecting a lighthearted, Disneyesque "family film" are in for a surprise. Within the first fifteen minutes of the film, our oh-so-cute protagonists, a young boy and his even younger sister, are subjected to a brutal incendiary American air raid, driven from their idyllicly-portrayed home, and made homeless refugees. And then it gets worse. Much worse. The same movie that portrays its 1940s Japenese villages and countryside in lovingly detailed, shimmering, nostalgic watercolors, also forthrightly portrays the aftermath of aerial incendiary warfare against civilian populations. This includes stacks of charred bodies, and in particular the visibly horribly marred body of a major character. Later, we see the corpse of said major character visibly crawling with maggots. This is not to say that every scene is a horrific shocker. There are, in fact, plenty of scenes in which we, the viewers, get to watch while the protagonist tries valiantly to create an idyllic, sheltered life for his little sister despite the horrors that surround them, and for a time, we get to witness some of those glorious moments in which children discover, for the first time, beauty that adults have long since learned to ignore. The back-and-forth pendulum-swing between the two cannot be supported forever, and by the end, not one Disneyesque cliche or plot device is left standing. Family values? The goodness and generosity of the human race? The belief that fate, or God, intervenes to protect the cute? The "noble savage" dream of living off the land? No, no, no, and no. I found a certain montage of scenes near the end rather cloying, but no doubt it's not that different from what was going through the protagonist's mind. I've had the experience of being haunted by similar imagined images. I can't say I enjoyed this movie, but I respect the makers for telling a story so radically different from what audiences of animated films expect (at least in the Western world), and for rigorously avoiding an easy cop-out Hollywood ending.