Agrippa
29th June 2009, 04:41
I have too much time on my hands...:D
First Blood (US, 1982)
First Blood (not "Rambo: First Blood") is an inspirational and heart-warming film about what happens when an individual is used by the system and tossed away like tissue. Forced to watch his friends die in a pointless war of imperialist aggression, spit on by petit-bourgeois Leftist protesters, and crushed to discover that the only surviving member of his unit had died from cancer caused by Agent Orange, ex-Green Beret John Rambo finally cracks when harassed by local police for having long hair, wearing military fatigues, and committing the alleged crime of "vagrancy". But when he's taken back to the station to be beaten and tortured, Rambo is one would-be victim of police brutality who doesn't "turn the other cheek". What ensues is a brutal war between state troopers, local cops, and the army reserve on one side - and on the other, a single man, prepared to use every dirty trick from the guerrilla warfare playbook; learned - of course- from his anti-imperialist adversaries in Vietnam. A genuinely emotionally evocative story about a brave proletariat who decides to "bring the war home"!
Gojira (Japan, 1954)
Gojira, (improperly Anglicized as "Godzilla") like First Blood and Star Wars, is a brilliant film that inspired a startling array of insipid sequels. Unlike the family-friendly tokusatsu romps that this black-and-white 1954 horror film inspired, so-called "Godzilla" does not appear as a goofy green superhero, but a jet-black leviathan tragic and ominous humanoid marine mammal ("Gojira" is a portmanteau of the word "gorilla" and the Japanese word for "whale"; 鯨 or "kujira") enraged at humanity for disrupting its sleep with atomic testing, a vengeful Okinawan nature-spirit. The few defenders that this overlooked Japanese contribution to film noir are usually quick to reduce the film's political message to "Godzilla is an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Gojira, like all excellent politically conscious fantasy, is not an allegory. It's a meditation on humanity's wounded relationship to the Earth, the obvious perils of industrial mass-warfare, and most importantly, one of the few and finest cinematic records of post-war Japanese psychological trauma.
Taxi Driver (US, 1976)
Taxi Driver so intensely and vividly captures the manic insomnia of wage-labor in the metropolis. New York taxi-driver and Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (De Niro) is driven to depths of misanthropy and desperation by the emotional and physical stress of his job. Bickle's story of social isolation, fear, and violent desperation is the story of the urban experience. Bickle is forced to deal with the inhuman cruelty of the society he lives in on a daily basis - cleaning the blood and semen off of his seats, having stones thrown at his cab by aimless youth, and lapsing into prescription pill, alcohol, junk food, and pornography addiction. However, unlike his racist, homophobic co-workers, he directs his loathing on humanity as a whole. The only ones he can relate to are women, and even then, he's not good at it, as an attempt that's doomed from the start to rescue a child prostitute (Foster) that he has paternalistic feelings towards from her exploiters illustrates. The spirit of the film is summed up in Bickle's conversation with a reformist politician running for senator riding in the back-seat of his taxi. Paying lip-service to the masses, the senator asks Bickle what political issues are important to him. What follows is a stilted verbal tirade, choked with barely-contained rage, pouring out his hopeless disgust with the unavoidable social ills of metropolitan existence. Despite the obvious emotional intensity of Bickle's rant, the senator struggles to relate. A vast chasm exists between the two men - the chasm of socio-economic class.
Cidade de Deus (Brazil, 2002)
This is essentially the film that the vastly overrated Slumdog Millionaire is a cookie-cutter imitation of. Except Slumdog Millionare has a hokey romantic subplot and an intolerably smug optimism towards the important social issues both films raise. Both films take place in slums, (Slumdog Millionaire, in Mumbai, and City of God in Rio De Jeneiro) but City of God doesn't portray corrupt cops as the "good bad guys", doesn't pull any punches in the heart-wrenching portrayal of how the dehumanizing presence poverty, drug-addiction, and organized crime colonizes even the lives of young children, doesn't portray all women as helpless and in need of rescue, and doesn't show the "good" gangsters as infallible, romantic characters but rather easily corruptible. Based on the autobiography of Afro-Brazilian photo-journalist Paulo Lins, all Netflix users must add City of God to their queues - and remove Slumdog Millionaire
The Wicker Man (UK, 1973)
Unlike the Nicholas Cage remake, which is so bad its good - this film is so good, it's transcendent. Both Cage and Woodward play cops sent to an isolated island-colony to investigate a child-murder. However, Cage's character is an earnest, good-hearted man who drives miles in his police motorcycle to return a teddy bear lost out a car-window by a young child, Woodward's character is (adroitly captured by the actor's sublime performance as) a nosy, self-satisfied bigot whose knee-jerk response to cultural norms is to harass, belittle, disrupt, invade the privacy of others. Woodward's character, a devout Catholic, is disgusted with the island inhabitants' bawdy, musical holiday revelry, practice of herbal medicine, openness towards sexuality, belief in reincarnation, utmost respect for animals and nature, and reverence for the old gods of European Paganism. Having his stodgy approach towards life mocked and undermined at every turn (most memorably by the islanders' charismatic benefactor, an eccentric anarchistic aristocrat played wonderfully by Christopher Lee, in a performance that shows he was born to play Gandalf, not Saruman) in his struggle to uncover anything to validate his warped suspicions of the perverse atrocities that must exist in the lives of modern-day heathens, and to enforce the Christian political order on an island of bemused, uncooperative sun-worshipers, it soon dawns on Woodward's character that he is about to learn an important lesson about what happens to those who attempt to undermine the autonomy of a free people.
Modern Times (US, 1936)
Chaplin was accused throughout his life of being a communist sympathizer, and with good reason given the content of films like Modern Times - which features Chaplin's "tramp" waving the red flag of worker's revolt with an army of angry demonstrators behind him. The personal is not neglected in this sublimely funny film which predates Orwell's 1984 in portraying a dystopian near-future where bosses verbally harass their workers from the comfort and safety of wall-sized video-phone screens - Chaplin's character soon meets up with a female counterpart, another vagabond, whom he soon forms a profound and lasting friendship with when they encounter each other while both on the lam from the law. Although the "modern times" of the film were 70-some years ago, Chaplin truly captures the experiences of modern times - be they those of 1936 or 2009 - what it's like to be a ruffian, a vagabond, picked on by law enforcement, forced to scrounge for food, taking joy in the simple pranksterism of breaking into a toystore at night.
El Espinazo del Diablo (2001)
Like its spiritual sequel el Laberinto del Fauno, Del Toro's el Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil's Backbone) glorifies the blessing's of a child's imagination and instinct, exposes brutality of capitalist counter-revolution using stories set in post-Civil War Spain, mocks the cynicism and materialism of revolutionary intellectuals, and shows the spiritual roots of our suffering and oppression. However, unlike in Laberinto, the primary villains in Espinazo are not the greedy, ruthless totalitarians of Francoist Spain, but a gang of petty criminals. The protagonists, orphans of Leftist militants martyred in the war, housed in aboarding school run by Red sympathizers. Without giving away too much of the plot, I will say that Espinazo paints a fabulous portrait of what experiences are required to develop the will to stand up to oppression - in addition to being a priceless portrayal of a fascinating but neglected facet of 20st century history and a thoroughly gripping and intriguing ghost story. Del Toro churns out a lot of banal, mediocre films, such as the Hellboy series, presumably so he can afford to make beauties such as this and Laberinto. Let's just hope he doesn't phone in the upcoming adaptations of Tolkien and Lovecraft, and stays true to his sharp artistic vision.
Giu la Testa (Italy, 1971)
This is a good example of what does and does not become popular culture. Sergio Leone's films are beloved by three generations of American film aficionados, but Giù la testa ("Jump, You Sucker") one of his sharpest, most thought-provoking Westerns, wallows in almost-total obscurity. Giù la testa at first follows the antics of a macho mestizo peasant-turned-bandito (Rod Steiger) who leads a small army numerous sons and elderly father to appropriate the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Set during the Mexican Revolution, the film introduces a grey-haired, possibly-bisexual political fugitive connected with the IRA (James Coburn) who drives a moped and is an expert demolitionist. Steiger's character forms an unlikely friendship with Coburn's - the latter teaching the former that there is more to life than self-motivated, nihilistic banditry, and the former helping the latter to accept and embrace his total disillusionment with centralized revolutionary parties that seek to limit and control when its members stand up to state oppression, and ultimately only accomplish the installation of the revolutionary intelligentsia as the new bourgeoisie. As the two comrades' dreams of retiring victorious from the Mexican Revolution to live as bandit kings in the US become more and more distant - the tragic, but inspiring ending of this film captures the true spirit of the frontier era far better than any of Leone's films starring Eastwood. Written in the 1960s, at the height of the popularity of "Zapata westerns", westerns with a Marxist spirit, this is a truly brilliant piece of anarchist western cinema, following in the tradition of the Zapata western but also deftly debunking the ideology of Leone's contemporaries.
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (UK, 1967)
This film is a faithful adaptation of a wonderful play written in East Germany during the 1960s, so it perfectly captures the feeling of libertarian frustration with decades of Bolshevik rule - while also offering a precise, articulate critique of universally applicable conditions under capitalism. Set in the Bonaparist regime in France, notorious libertine and political prisoner Marquis De Sade honors his martyred comrade, proto-anarchist Jean-Paul Marat, by directing fellow-patients to perform his life story, under the reluctant supervision of bourgeois hospital-director Abbé de Coulmier. What results is a brilliant musical homage to the opera of Brecht, in which the resentful asylum inmates use the historical class-conflict they attempt to reenact as an outlet to vent their frustration with Robespierre's betrayal and Napoleon's regime. One inmate, portraying French revolutionary Jacques Roux, has his anti-bourgeois, anti-Christian and anti-Robespierran rants constantly interrupted by an outraged Coulmier. The insane asylum setting is an obvious sly reference to development of bio-politics brought around by both the French and Russian revolutions - and the ongoing dialogue between De Sade (portraying himself in the play-within-a-play) and Marat captures the social anarchist vs. individualist egoist debate, while wisely leaving the conclusion of the debate ambiguous and up to the audience to decide. The film, written in the so-called "sexual revolution", teaches us that revolution is not worthwhile if revolutionaries can't enjoy "mere copulation", but the consequences of following through with that philosophy are left ambiguous, as it is Marat's succumbing to the seduction of Corday that leads to his grizzly death. The inmate-actress portraying Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday, is a narcoleptic, and amuses herself by foiling the advances of fellow actor - a compulsive rapist, giving the narrative an obvious feminist bent - however, unfortunately, the film adaptation chooses, in its blocking and direction, in my opinion, to glorify sexual assault, especially at the end where (in both the play and the film) the riotous outbursts of the inmates reaches its crescendo and (in the film, but not the play) male inmates begin raping both aristocratic female audience members and nurses working for the hospital. Despite this disgusting indiscretion in the production of the film adaptation, it, overall, has a fun, British avant garde feel, with a catchy, brassy mod soundtrack. Rent it - but only if you can't see the play performed live.
Laputa (Japan, 1986)
Like all of Miyazaki's films, Disney tried to pass this one off as a childrens' comedy - with their standard, terrible English dub (watch the Japanese version, please) - rather than the stunning anti-capitalist/anti-modernist fable it (and all of Miyazaki's other films) truly is. Taking the titular setting from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Miyazaki was unlikely unaware that "la puta" is Spanish for "the whore", a sophomoric prank on the part of Swift that didn't escape the notice of Disney, which distributed the film as "Castle in the Sky". In the fictional world of the film, Swift's account of an island floating in the sky, powered by advanced technology, and governed by technocratic intellectuals, was based on legend - and chivalrous adolescent coal-miner Pazu's aviator father was the one who snapped one of the few photographs of the legendary sky-castle. One day, Pazu discovers an unconscious girl his age falling gently from the sky, as if a feather. Pazu learns she is a yak-farmer from the North named Sheeta (like many of Miyazaki's films, Laputa is set in a fantastic, geographically generalized, aesthetically romanticized Europe during dawn of industrialism) who is being dogged by both a gang of matriarchal pirates and an (unspecified) imperialist military - both seeking a necklace she inherited from her mother which grants her the magical power to float safely from any height. Pazu and Sheeta quickly form a deep, meaningful, and loyal friendship (seemingly Platonic, illustrating Miyzaki's blatant superiority to hack Hollywood writers) The pirates, whose aged but lively matriarch, Mama, turns out to be a powerful female role-model for Sheeta, end up helping the kids in evading government capture and locating Laputa. Laputa, however, is unpopulated, except for the loyal robot servants of the former inhabitants, who now care for the sky-island's plant and animal inhabitants, including a giant tree at the core of the island. The final act of the film features a profound struggle between a government agent who wants to use the destructive capabilities of Laputa (which he refers to as "the fires that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah" and "Indra's arrow" due to the weapons of mass-death built into the massive mechanical city) to enslave the Earth's population, and Sheeta, who argues that Laputan civilization collapsed and the Laptuans died off because they thought they could separate themselves from and dominate nature.
First Blood (US, 1982)
First Blood (not "Rambo: First Blood") is an inspirational and heart-warming film about what happens when an individual is used by the system and tossed away like tissue. Forced to watch his friends die in a pointless war of imperialist aggression, spit on by petit-bourgeois Leftist protesters, and crushed to discover that the only surviving member of his unit had died from cancer caused by Agent Orange, ex-Green Beret John Rambo finally cracks when harassed by local police for having long hair, wearing military fatigues, and committing the alleged crime of "vagrancy". But when he's taken back to the station to be beaten and tortured, Rambo is one would-be victim of police brutality who doesn't "turn the other cheek". What ensues is a brutal war between state troopers, local cops, and the army reserve on one side - and on the other, a single man, prepared to use every dirty trick from the guerrilla warfare playbook; learned - of course- from his anti-imperialist adversaries in Vietnam. A genuinely emotionally evocative story about a brave proletariat who decides to "bring the war home"!
Gojira (Japan, 1954)
Gojira, (improperly Anglicized as "Godzilla") like First Blood and Star Wars, is a brilliant film that inspired a startling array of insipid sequels. Unlike the family-friendly tokusatsu romps that this black-and-white 1954 horror film inspired, so-called "Godzilla" does not appear as a goofy green superhero, but a jet-black leviathan tragic and ominous humanoid marine mammal ("Gojira" is a portmanteau of the word "gorilla" and the Japanese word for "whale"; 鯨 or "kujira") enraged at humanity for disrupting its sleep with atomic testing, a vengeful Okinawan nature-spirit. The few defenders that this overlooked Japanese contribution to film noir are usually quick to reduce the film's political message to "Godzilla is an allegory for Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Gojira, like all excellent politically conscious fantasy, is not an allegory. It's a meditation on humanity's wounded relationship to the Earth, the obvious perils of industrial mass-warfare, and most importantly, one of the few and finest cinematic records of post-war Japanese psychological trauma.
Taxi Driver (US, 1976)
Taxi Driver so intensely and vividly captures the manic insomnia of wage-labor in the metropolis. New York taxi-driver and Vietnam vet Travis Bickle (De Niro) is driven to depths of misanthropy and desperation by the emotional and physical stress of his job. Bickle's story of social isolation, fear, and violent desperation is the story of the urban experience. Bickle is forced to deal with the inhuman cruelty of the society he lives in on a daily basis - cleaning the blood and semen off of his seats, having stones thrown at his cab by aimless youth, and lapsing into prescription pill, alcohol, junk food, and pornography addiction. However, unlike his racist, homophobic co-workers, he directs his loathing on humanity as a whole. The only ones he can relate to are women, and even then, he's not good at it, as an attempt that's doomed from the start to rescue a child prostitute (Foster) that he has paternalistic feelings towards from her exploiters illustrates. The spirit of the film is summed up in Bickle's conversation with a reformist politician running for senator riding in the back-seat of his taxi. Paying lip-service to the masses, the senator asks Bickle what political issues are important to him. What follows is a stilted verbal tirade, choked with barely-contained rage, pouring out his hopeless disgust with the unavoidable social ills of metropolitan existence. Despite the obvious emotional intensity of Bickle's rant, the senator struggles to relate. A vast chasm exists between the two men - the chasm of socio-economic class.
Cidade de Deus (Brazil, 2002)
This is essentially the film that the vastly overrated Slumdog Millionaire is a cookie-cutter imitation of. Except Slumdog Millionare has a hokey romantic subplot and an intolerably smug optimism towards the important social issues both films raise. Both films take place in slums, (Slumdog Millionaire, in Mumbai, and City of God in Rio De Jeneiro) but City of God doesn't portray corrupt cops as the "good bad guys", doesn't pull any punches in the heart-wrenching portrayal of how the dehumanizing presence poverty, drug-addiction, and organized crime colonizes even the lives of young children, doesn't portray all women as helpless and in need of rescue, and doesn't show the "good" gangsters as infallible, romantic characters but rather easily corruptible. Based on the autobiography of Afro-Brazilian photo-journalist Paulo Lins, all Netflix users must add City of God to their queues - and remove Slumdog Millionaire
The Wicker Man (UK, 1973)
Unlike the Nicholas Cage remake, which is so bad its good - this film is so good, it's transcendent. Both Cage and Woodward play cops sent to an isolated island-colony to investigate a child-murder. However, Cage's character is an earnest, good-hearted man who drives miles in his police motorcycle to return a teddy bear lost out a car-window by a young child, Woodward's character is (adroitly captured by the actor's sublime performance as) a nosy, self-satisfied bigot whose knee-jerk response to cultural norms is to harass, belittle, disrupt, invade the privacy of others. Woodward's character, a devout Catholic, is disgusted with the island inhabitants' bawdy, musical holiday revelry, practice of herbal medicine, openness towards sexuality, belief in reincarnation, utmost respect for animals and nature, and reverence for the old gods of European Paganism. Having his stodgy approach towards life mocked and undermined at every turn (most memorably by the islanders' charismatic benefactor, an eccentric anarchistic aristocrat played wonderfully by Christopher Lee, in a performance that shows he was born to play Gandalf, not Saruman) in his struggle to uncover anything to validate his warped suspicions of the perverse atrocities that must exist in the lives of modern-day heathens, and to enforce the Christian political order on an island of bemused, uncooperative sun-worshipers, it soon dawns on Woodward's character that he is about to learn an important lesson about what happens to those who attempt to undermine the autonomy of a free people.
Modern Times (US, 1936)
Chaplin was accused throughout his life of being a communist sympathizer, and with good reason given the content of films like Modern Times - which features Chaplin's "tramp" waving the red flag of worker's revolt with an army of angry demonstrators behind him. The personal is not neglected in this sublimely funny film which predates Orwell's 1984 in portraying a dystopian near-future where bosses verbally harass their workers from the comfort and safety of wall-sized video-phone screens - Chaplin's character soon meets up with a female counterpart, another vagabond, whom he soon forms a profound and lasting friendship with when they encounter each other while both on the lam from the law. Although the "modern times" of the film were 70-some years ago, Chaplin truly captures the experiences of modern times - be they those of 1936 or 2009 - what it's like to be a ruffian, a vagabond, picked on by law enforcement, forced to scrounge for food, taking joy in the simple pranksterism of breaking into a toystore at night.
El Espinazo del Diablo (2001)
Like its spiritual sequel el Laberinto del Fauno, Del Toro's el Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil's Backbone) glorifies the blessing's of a child's imagination and instinct, exposes brutality of capitalist counter-revolution using stories set in post-Civil War Spain, mocks the cynicism and materialism of revolutionary intellectuals, and shows the spiritual roots of our suffering and oppression. However, unlike in Laberinto, the primary villains in Espinazo are not the greedy, ruthless totalitarians of Francoist Spain, but a gang of petty criminals. The protagonists, orphans of Leftist militants martyred in the war, housed in aboarding school run by Red sympathizers. Without giving away too much of the plot, I will say that Espinazo paints a fabulous portrait of what experiences are required to develop the will to stand up to oppression - in addition to being a priceless portrayal of a fascinating but neglected facet of 20st century history and a thoroughly gripping and intriguing ghost story. Del Toro churns out a lot of banal, mediocre films, such as the Hellboy series, presumably so he can afford to make beauties such as this and Laberinto. Let's just hope he doesn't phone in the upcoming adaptations of Tolkien and Lovecraft, and stays true to his sharp artistic vision.
Giu la Testa (Italy, 1971)
This is a good example of what does and does not become popular culture. Sergio Leone's films are beloved by three generations of American film aficionados, but Giù la testa ("Jump, You Sucker") one of his sharpest, most thought-provoking Westerns, wallows in almost-total obscurity. Giù la testa at first follows the antics of a macho mestizo peasant-turned-bandito (Rod Steiger) who leads a small army numerous sons and elderly father to appropriate the wealth of the bourgeoisie. Set during the Mexican Revolution, the film introduces a grey-haired, possibly-bisexual political fugitive connected with the IRA (James Coburn) who drives a moped and is an expert demolitionist. Steiger's character forms an unlikely friendship with Coburn's - the latter teaching the former that there is more to life than self-motivated, nihilistic banditry, and the former helping the latter to accept and embrace his total disillusionment with centralized revolutionary parties that seek to limit and control when its members stand up to state oppression, and ultimately only accomplish the installation of the revolutionary intelligentsia as the new bourgeoisie. As the two comrades' dreams of retiring victorious from the Mexican Revolution to live as bandit kings in the US become more and more distant - the tragic, but inspiring ending of this film captures the true spirit of the frontier era far better than any of Leone's films starring Eastwood. Written in the 1960s, at the height of the popularity of "Zapata westerns", westerns with a Marxist spirit, this is a truly brilliant piece of anarchist western cinema, following in the tradition of the Zapata western but also deftly debunking the ideology of Leone's contemporaries.
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade (UK, 1967)
This film is a faithful adaptation of a wonderful play written in East Germany during the 1960s, so it perfectly captures the feeling of libertarian frustration with decades of Bolshevik rule - while also offering a precise, articulate critique of universally applicable conditions under capitalism. Set in the Bonaparist regime in France, notorious libertine and political prisoner Marquis De Sade honors his martyred comrade, proto-anarchist Jean-Paul Marat, by directing fellow-patients to perform his life story, under the reluctant supervision of bourgeois hospital-director Abbé de Coulmier. What results is a brilliant musical homage to the opera of Brecht, in which the resentful asylum inmates use the historical class-conflict they attempt to reenact as an outlet to vent their frustration with Robespierre's betrayal and Napoleon's regime. One inmate, portraying French revolutionary Jacques Roux, has his anti-bourgeois, anti-Christian and anti-Robespierran rants constantly interrupted by an outraged Coulmier. The insane asylum setting is an obvious sly reference to development of bio-politics brought around by both the French and Russian revolutions - and the ongoing dialogue between De Sade (portraying himself in the play-within-a-play) and Marat captures the social anarchist vs. individualist egoist debate, while wisely leaving the conclusion of the debate ambiguous and up to the audience to decide. The film, written in the so-called "sexual revolution", teaches us that revolution is not worthwhile if revolutionaries can't enjoy "mere copulation", but the consequences of following through with that philosophy are left ambiguous, as it is Marat's succumbing to the seduction of Corday that leads to his grizzly death. The inmate-actress portraying Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday, is a narcoleptic, and amuses herself by foiling the advances of fellow actor - a compulsive rapist, giving the narrative an obvious feminist bent - however, unfortunately, the film adaptation chooses, in its blocking and direction, in my opinion, to glorify sexual assault, especially at the end where (in both the play and the film) the riotous outbursts of the inmates reaches its crescendo and (in the film, but not the play) male inmates begin raping both aristocratic female audience members and nurses working for the hospital. Despite this disgusting indiscretion in the production of the film adaptation, it, overall, has a fun, British avant garde feel, with a catchy, brassy mod soundtrack. Rent it - but only if you can't see the play performed live.
Laputa (Japan, 1986)
Like all of Miyazaki's films, Disney tried to pass this one off as a childrens' comedy - with their standard, terrible English dub (watch the Japanese version, please) - rather than the stunning anti-capitalist/anti-modernist fable it (and all of Miyazaki's other films) truly is. Taking the titular setting from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Miyazaki was unlikely unaware that "la puta" is Spanish for "the whore", a sophomoric prank on the part of Swift that didn't escape the notice of Disney, which distributed the film as "Castle in the Sky". In the fictional world of the film, Swift's account of an island floating in the sky, powered by advanced technology, and governed by technocratic intellectuals, was based on legend - and chivalrous adolescent coal-miner Pazu's aviator father was the one who snapped one of the few photographs of the legendary sky-castle. One day, Pazu discovers an unconscious girl his age falling gently from the sky, as if a feather. Pazu learns she is a yak-farmer from the North named Sheeta (like many of Miyazaki's films, Laputa is set in a fantastic, geographically generalized, aesthetically romanticized Europe during dawn of industrialism) who is being dogged by both a gang of matriarchal pirates and an (unspecified) imperialist military - both seeking a necklace she inherited from her mother which grants her the magical power to float safely from any height. Pazu and Sheeta quickly form a deep, meaningful, and loyal friendship (seemingly Platonic, illustrating Miyzaki's blatant superiority to hack Hollywood writers) The pirates, whose aged but lively matriarch, Mama, turns out to be a powerful female role-model for Sheeta, end up helping the kids in evading government capture and locating Laputa. Laputa, however, is unpopulated, except for the loyal robot servants of the former inhabitants, who now care for the sky-island's plant and animal inhabitants, including a giant tree at the core of the island. The final act of the film features a profound struggle between a government agent who wants to use the destructive capabilities of Laputa (which he refers to as "the fires that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah" and "Indra's arrow" due to the weapons of mass-death built into the massive mechanical city) to enslave the Earth's population, and Sheeta, who argues that Laputan civilization collapsed and the Laptuans died off because they thought they could separate themselves from and dominate nature.