REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.

But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi, does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.

On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of monkey-like creatures called Ochi. These little guys may or may not be eating the sheep herds, but William DeFoe sure thinks they are. Makes sense. These guys totally look like the kinds of beasts that would naturally feast on livestock ... Our protagonist, Yuri, finds one of their young in a trap and spends all of ten seconds deciding whether or not to help it out. Daddy DeFoe's not a fan of this idea, but that's fine and good. Yuri's not a huge fan of her dad either. All interested parties find themselves converging over whether or not this little guy gets to go home.

The real star of the show is the golden monkey on Yuri's shoulder. Ochi reportedly had six different puppeteers orchestrating him at any given moment, resulting in an intricate tactile performance. The best thing we can ask for from this film is that storytellers might be curious to replicate this kind physical filmmaking, willing the fantastical into our world without always relying on the interface of computer-generated creatures.

But tragically, the magic of the puppet-work only winds up working against the movie.

The Ochi are presented as wholly natural in this world. Director Isaiah Saxon likened it to an existing primate species that hadn't featured on a BBC special yet. They are not supernatural and have no magical properties that would trigger the kind of superstitious hysteria that fuels this movie. Neither is Daddy some capitalist overlord trying to raze their territory to build like a shopping mall. The plight of the Ochi has no basis in real world discussions about deforestation, nor of adult distrust of childhood innocence or the concept of progress. And so the movie utterly fails to capture the realities of why people ever hated the mysterious or precious things of the world in the first place.

The movie quickly devolves into a lampoonery session for William DeFoe, who gets to the mouthpiece for some kind of amorphous archaism. William DeFoe hates the little critters because that generation can just be so backwards sometimes, don'cha agree? What attempt there is at psychology winds up feeling very shallow and incurious. The movie has this unspoken suggestion that his character is so mired in traditionalism because he just can't conceive of a world where it was okay for his wife to have left him. Yuri's dad has no microtraumas that would benefit from some examination, only a patriarchal delusion handed to him by some invisible hand in the sky.

More disappointing, there's no sign that Yuri herself ever bought into the propaganda she was raised on. And so her rescue of and subsequent adventure with the creature carries no thematic weight. Helena Zengel herself plays a believable weird girl, but her character is not being challenged and is taking no leap of faith. This is How to Train Your Dragon where it never crosses Hiccup's mind that the dragon might kill him if he lets it go. Congratulations, Yuri, for finding it in your heart to not kill fluffy Grogu ...

There are fleeting suggestions of ET that make you wish the movie was better than it actually is. Mostly in the golden lighting, or the wide shots of the mountain scape. I love childhood reverence for the mystical as much as the next film critic, but this film isn't really about the natural love children have for the small things of the world, or the tease of future discovery. It's about grown-ups.

Even if it doesn't want to be.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: Lilo & Stitch

By now the system errors of Disney's live-action remake matrix are well codified. These outputs tend to have pacing that feels like it was okayed by a chain store manager trying to lower the quarterly statement. They also show weird deference to very specific gags from their animated source yet don't bother to ask whether they fit well in the photorealistic world of live-action. And combing through the screenplay, you always seem to get snagged on certain lines of dialogue that someone must have thought belonged in a children's movie ("Being gross is against galactic regulation!). These are all present in this summer's live-action reinvention of "Lilo & Stitch." But mercifully, this remake allows itself to go off-script here and there. The result may be one of the stronger Disney remakes ... whatever that's worth. The 2002 animated masterpiece by Dean Deblois and Chris Sanders (who voices the little blue alien in bo...

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Do Clementine and Joel Stay Together or Not?

Maybe. The answer is maybe. Not wanting to be that guy who teases a definitive answer to a difficult question and forces you to read a ten-page essay only to cop-out with a non-committal excuse of an answer, I’m telling you up and front the answer is maybe. Though nations have long warred over this matter of great importance, the film itself does not answer once and for all whether or not Joel Barrish and Clementine Krychinzki find lasting happiness together at conclusion of the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Min d. I cannot give a definitive answer as to whether Joel and Clementine’s love will last until the stars turn cold or just through the weekend. This essay cannot do that. What this essay can do is explore the in-text evidence the film gives for either side t...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Millennium Actress: How Personal IS Art?

So here’s a question: how much do you really know about your favorite actor? Follow-up question, do you sometimes wish you knew less? It is a truism that the people making the magic onscreen are not necessarily mirror reflections of the heroes they are bringing to life. The players in your favorite romantic drama have cheated on their spouses. Your favorite action hero has enabled abuse. Or, he’s just a loser. And all of us lost at least one favorite to #MeToo. But just the same, we cannot deny our fascination with those people on the big screen. Film historian, Ty Burr, described in his book, Gods Like Us , Gone with the Wind (1939) “The fascination with stars is in large part a desire to unlock the nagging puzzle of identity—who are these people who we know so well and not at all? ... The violence done to Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin by the mobs in the public square was on some level a rapacious desire to unclothe them, flay them, burrow to their essence....

REVIEW: Belfast

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the world needs more black and white movies. The latest to answer the call is Kenneth Branagh with his semi-autobiographical film, Belfast . The film follows Buddy, the audience-insert character, as he grows up in the streets of Belfast, Ireland in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Though Buddy and his family thrive on these familiar streets, communal turmoil leads to organized violence that throws Buddy's life into disarray. What's a family to do? On the one hand, the father recognizes that a warzone is no place for a family. But to the mother, even the turmoil of her community's civil war feels safer than the world out there. Memory feels safer than maturation. As these films often go, the plot is drifting and episodic yet always manages to hold one's focus. Unbrushed authenticity is a hard thing to put to film, and a film aiming for just that always walks a fine line betwe...

Meet Me in St. Louis: The Melancholy Window of Nostalgia

I don’t usually post reviews for television shows, but it feels appropriate to start today’s discussion with my reaction to Apple TV+’s series, Schmigadoon! If you’re not familiar with the series, it follows a couple who are looking to reclaim the spark of their fading romance. While hiking in the mountains, they get lost and stumble upon a cozy village, Schmigadoon, where everyone lives like they’re in the middle of an old school musical film. She’s kinda into it, he hates it, but neither of them can leave until they find true love like that in the classic movie musicals. I appreciated the series’ many homages to classical musical films. And I really loved the show rounding up musical celebrities like Aaron Tveit and Ariana Debose. Just so, I had an overall muddled response to the show. Schmigadoon! takes it as a given that this town inherits the social mores of the era in which the musicals that inspired this series were made, and that becomes the basis of not only the show...

REVIEW: Materialists

In seminal romantic comedies or dramas, the mark of great writing was in artfully burying the lovebirds' insecurities and hangups in artifice. Pretense. The lovebirds didn't know how to honestly approach their own feelings at first. The distortion revealed the personality of both the situation and the relationship. What's more, it was just fun. The film would slowly thaw this facade until Cary Grant and Irene Dunne finally had, what Materialists calls, the ugliest parts of themselves laid bare for one another. Only then were they ready to embrace. Yet with Materialists , out this weekend, even in moments when the situation calls for vulnerability, the characters are oddly empirical and clinical with describing the things about them that they are ashamed of. These players might as well be performing a passionate reading of a Walmart receipt. Yes, Materialists is very obviously about the transactionality of the dating scene, but the movie ...

REVIEW - The Little Mermaid

There's been a mermaid on the horizon ever since it became clear sometime in the last decade that Disney did intend to give all of their signature titles the live-action treatment--we've had a long time to prepare for this. (For reference, this July will mark four years since Halle Bailey's casting as Ariel made headlines.) Arguing whether this or any of the live-action remakes "live up" to their animated predecessor is always going to be a losing battle. Even ignoring the nostalgic element, it's impossible for them to earn the same degree of admiration because the terrain in which these animated films rose to legend has long eroded. This is especially the case for The Little Mermaid . Where this remake is riding off a years long commercial high for the Walt Disney Company, the Disney that made The Little Mermaid in 1989 was twenty years past its cultural goodwill. Putting out an animated fairy-tale musical was not a sure thing, yet its suc...

REVIEW: Mickey 17

Coming into Mickey 17 having not read the source material by Edward Ashton, I can easily see why this movie spoke to the sensibilities of Bong Joon Ho, particularly in the wake of his historic Academy Award win five years ago. Published in 2022, it feels like Ashton could have been doing his Oscars homework when he conceived of the story--a sort of mashup of Parasite , Aliens , and Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times . Desperate to escape planet earth, Mickey applies for a special assignment as an "expendable," a person whose sole requirement is to perform tasks too dangerous for normal consideration--the kind that absolutely arise in an outer space voyage to colonize other planets. It is expected that Mickey expire during his line of duty, but never fear. The computer has all his data and can simply reproduce him in the lab the next day for his next assignment. Rinse and repeat. It's a system that we are assured cannot fail ... until of course it does. I'll admit my ...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog