Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #339: Spirited Away

The United-States has Pixar and Disney, but Japan has Studio Ghibli. Its founder Hayao Miyazaki has directed many of its most successful titles, including 2001’s “Spirited Away” which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature and became the highest grossing film in Japan. Like many of the studio’s greatest hits, it uses hand-drawn animation to create a fantasy world filled with creatures you can only dream of and then animate. The title is appropriate, as “Spirited Away” takes you for a ride into a spirit world.

I first saw this Ghibli creation in January of 2012, as my brother had received it for Christmas. That’s pretty much how it has been going during Christmastime for the past few years in my family: we buy each other movies or TV shows, watch a few in the days after December 25 and then we move on into the new year. It’s nice to take a few hours out of the busy holiday season to just sit in front of the television and watch a movie as a family, even if we don’t always have the same taste in movies. I am pretty sure our mom had never seen a Japanese animated movie, but it was one of the most family friendly titles on my brother’s Christmas list: we could have ended up watching the first season of Robot Chicken.

Set in a less crude environment, “Spirited Away” opens in modern-day Japan as ten-year-old Chihiro Ogino (voice of Daveigh Chase) and her parents (Michael Chiklis and Lauren Holly) are travelling to their new home. Like most kids her age, Chihiro is not looking forward to adapting to a new home. Her trip takes an extended hiatus when her father makes a wrong turn and they end up at what they think is an abandoned amusement park. Starving, Chihiro’s parents eat at an empty restaurant stall. While they are busy stuffing their faces, Chihiro meets Haku (Jason Marsden) a young boy who warns her to leave before the sun sets.

Unfortunately for her it is too late. By the time she finds her parents the have been transformed into two pigs stuffing their faces and they are all trapped in the park. In order to help her survive in this world, Haku helps Chihiro get a job at the bathhouse, a massive building run by the witch Yubaba (Suzanne Pleshette). It is there that the animators go wild. The bathhouse is filled with ghosts, spiders, frogs, dragons and other assorted creatures. One of the most intriguing looking is Kamaji (David Ogden Stiers) a six-armed engineer who operates the bathhouse’s boiler room.

While working at the bathhouse, Chihiro learns the rules of the game. Yubaba controls both her and Haku through their names. Once she forgets her name, she will be stuck there forever. As she helps certain spirits and explores the world of the bathhouse, she forms a plan to free both herself and her parents.

This makes for a simple a strong storyline. A young heroine is stuck in a magical world and must embark on a quest to save herself and her family. All along she of course forges a friendship with Haku who ends up needing her as much as she needs him.

Then there is the story’s villain. You see a witch called Yubaba who can transform into a giant bird and holds a ten-year-old prisoner, and you immediately think this old crone is nothing but pure evil. Yet she is an interesting character who does care for at least one person in the bathhouse: her gigantic son, whom she keeps inside a room filled with toys and pillows.

All of these characters, creatures and spirits are brought to life thanks to gorgeous hand-drawn animation Studio Ghibli is known for. While most American animation studios have gone the way of computer generated imagery, Ghibli’s pencils remain firmly on paper. They still manage to create gorgeous backgrounds and creatures. One not-so gorgeous creature is a spirit of a polluted river that is carrying so much grim and filth it sends the bathhouse into a panic. Seeing all of the creatures in the bathhouse trying to wash that filthy spirit is one of the most impressive sequences in the entire movie.

This movie is a feat for the imagination for its story, characters and the animation that brought it all to life. If you like Japanese anime, or animated movies in general, it makes for a great Christmas present.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #97: Reservoir Dogs

One of the most surprising things about Quentin Tarantino’s debut film Reservoir Dogs (1992) is the fact that it has never been adapted for the stage. They will make a show out of Beauty and the Beast , Monty Python and the Holy Grail , and even Spider-Man , but somehow a movie in which most of the action takes place in a warehouse has never made it to Broadway? In any case, this was the movie that announced the arrival of the insatiable film fan that could regurgitate everything he had learned watching movies at the video store into stories filled with sudden bursts of violence, sharp-dressed characters, awesome soundtracks, and crackling dialogue. Since this violent piece of American cinema came out at a time when I was still learning basic math in elementary school there was no way I would watch this on the big screen. However as the years went by it became a cult classic, and even a classic of the independent movies genre, and was re-released on special edition DVD for its

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #49: Evil Dead 2

What do you get when you mix buckets of fake blood, creative camera operators, the humour of the Three Stooges, and a man with the most recognizable chin in Hollywood? You get Evil Dead II (1987), the horror classic that somehow manages to remake the original in the first 15 minutes and yet feel entirely original. Even though it is mostly set in a cabin in the woods, that staple location in the horror genre, it feels like a roller coaster ride. This is especially true once the film's hero, the scrappy Ash Williams, embraces the madness by arming himself with a sawed-off shotgun and attaching a chainsaw where his hand used to be. "Groovy" indeed. This gore-soaked franchise has had a long run, starting off with one low-budget movie directed by a young Sam Raimi and then growing into two sequels, a remake, comic books and a TV show with three seasons. My starting point was the third entry, Army of Darkness, which moves the action to the Middle Ages with the same

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #102: The Hustler

Robert Rossen’s The Hustler (1961) is proof that any sport can be used for good cinematic drama even if that sport is pool. Although this is not a game that involves a massive sport arena and bloody boxing gloves, things can get dramatically interesting if the monetary stakes are high, and visually arresting if the filmmakers shoot from the right angle. It also helps a lot if the man putting his money on the table is played by a young Paul Newman in a career-breaking role. Prior to watching the film I had a vague idea of the meaning of the word “hustling” and a rather passive interest in the game of pool. It’s a fun game to play if you are having a couple of nachos and chicken wings on a Friday evening with friends, but I didn’t see it as a spectator sport. Watching The Hustler in the classics section of Netflix two years ago was a bit of an education since it shows the sport as a way of life for some people, and a huge source of revenue for big time gamblers. Newman star as

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