THE BOY AND THE HERON (GKids – Dec. 8): Hiyao Miyazaki, a legend of animation (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke), had announced his retirement as a feature film director a decade ago, upon the release of The Wind Rises. But at the age of 82, he’s returned with The Boy and the Heron. If this is his true valedictory film, it seems like a more fitting choice to conclude his career than the relatively straightforward Wind. Based (although apparently very loosely) on the book How Do You Live?, which Miyazaki had read as a child, Heron is as sumptuous, imaginative and enigmatic as the filmmaker’s classics. Set during World War II, it centers on Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki), whose life is repeatedly wrenched when his mother is killed in a bombing, and then his father marries his mother’s sister and moves them to the countryside. The adrift boy comes to wander the grounds of the family estate, repeatedly encountering a heron, who seems to be fixated on him. Mahito finds an abandoned tower hidden in the forest, and when he enters, his concepts of time and reality change forever. The Boy and the Heron is filled with astonishing ideas and imagery, including totalitarian parakeets and formless pre-human beings. It’s also action-packed and quite funny, especially as the heron proves not to be a mere stately bird. Some of the story’s logic may be so deep in Miyazaki’s consciousness that it’s not readily available to audiences on a first viewing. Even so, the filmmaker never fails to provide eye-filling, spectacular images to carry one along to his wondrous lands.
DUMB MONEY (Columbia/Sony – In release): One of the bizarre things that happened during the peak of Covid was the rise of “meme investors.” These were ordinary people, loosely organized by Reddit and YouTube postings, who seized on legacy stocks that were being shorted by Wall Streeters getting rich off their conclusion that the companies and their industries had no future. The meme investors drove up the price, ruining the experts’ bets that the stocks would crater. They targeted several stocks, the most prominent being GameStop, the declining brick-and-mortar vendor of video games. Dumb Money, directed by Craig Gillespie from a script by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo (based on Ben Mezrich’s book), takes a down-the-middle populist can you believe this? approach to the story, not dissimilar to Gillespie’s previous true-life projects I, Tonya and Pam & Tommy. It focuses on Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who literally posts videos from his basement touting GameStop and blasting the investment funds trying to load the company into an early grave. His picks are seized upon by others, personified here by single mom nurse Jenny (America Ferrera), college students Riri (Myha’la Herrold) and Harmony (Talia Ryder), and GameStop store employee Marcus (Anthony Ramos), and the stock zooms. This puts hedge funds like the ones headed by Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) at risk, and they respond by bending the rules in their favor, notably through the RobinHood investment app run by Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan). Dumb Money doesn’t have much more on its mind than regular folks being nicer than billionaires, and the fun of watching the latter take a beating at the hands of the former. The story lines that try to develop the meme investors as characters (including Shailene Woodley and Pete Davidson as Gill’s wife and brother) are thin. This isn’t the place for the nuances of The Big Short or The Social Network. On its own unambitious terms, though, Dumb Money works, propelled by Gillespie’s skill with his great cast and a breezy pace (the editing is by Kirk Baxter, who often works with David Fincher). It wouldn’t be wise to put one’s life savings into Dumb Money, but investing the price of a movie ticket would be a reasonable bet.
NORTH STAR (no distrib): TIFF’s less distinctive film about a trio of sisters, compared to His Three Daughters, was North Star, the feature directing debut of Kristin Scott Thomas, who also wrote the script with John Micklethwait. The story is inspired by Scott Thomas’s own family, and one of the sisters (Victoria, played by Sienna Miller) is a famous actress, although a star of junkier franchise movies than her real-life counterpart. Victoria’s sisters are Katherine (Scarlett Johansson), a British Royal Navy officer who’s about to become the first woman to captain a UK aircraft carrier, and Georgina (Emily Beecham), the less glamorous of the three. They’re gathered for the third marriage of their mother Diana (Scott Thomas). None of the woman have much regard for their new stepfather-to-be, a nice enough guy who can’t hope to compete with their family history: after Diana’s first husband (father of Katherine and Victoria) died in action, she married his best friend, who also died a naval hero. But each of the daughters also has her own romantic problems, as Katherine and her wife (Frieda Pinto) are in danger of becoming estranged, Katherine has to choose between the tycoon who’s been courting her and the old boyfriend who’s very much on the scene, and Georgina’s husband may be cheating on her. All this is pleasant enough, if not tremendously compelling, and it’s been lyrically photographed by Yves Belanger and designed by Andrew McAlpine. The actresses are all good company, once one gets past Johansson’s vague British accent, and there’s some low-velocity wit to the script. Despite Scott Thomas’s personal ties to the story, North Star feels insubstantial and familiar. It does prove that she can deliver a professional, mildly likable piece of work as a filmmaker, and perhaps that was all she wanted.
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