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If you’re familiar with Japanese anime maestro Hayao Miyazaki’s work, you know the shorthand designation “surreal” doesn’t even begin to capture its fleeting mysteries. Having first truly discovered him with Princess Mononoke, like most other international audiences, I found his animation – with its intricately-detailed backdrops and fanciful, wide-eyed creatures (though I take issue with the way so many Japanese animators seem to have internalized Western codes of beauty and racism, the heroes/heroines sporting Caucasian features while the only markedly Asian characters – when included - tend to be evil villains) - hypnotically entrancing. Doubly so, given that I saw it while living in Japan, and in Japanese – which I don’t understand beyond basics despite having studied it in school – carried along almost solely by the willful weirdness of the visuals and a bare bones synopsis gleaned via the internet. In an age where computer animation is the rule, his hand-drawn frames are appealingly quaint; you can sense the human touch in them. While no expert on anime – Miyazaki’s “gateway” fairy tales haven’t yet inducted me into others of the genre (I still want to see both Ghost in the Shells and Akira) - I admit I’ve become enamored of his brand of creation.

Miyazaki’s latest, like his last, sweeps us (along with our female protagonist) off our feet and into an unabashedly fantastical realm almost immediately, thankfully skipping the belabored set-ups that are the bane of American animation (and mainstream movies, in general). After a few introductory shots, we know what we need to (echoing the wonderful efficiency with which Arthur Penn describes Bonnie’s ennui before she meets Clyde and promptly decides to hit the road with him): that Sophie, a milliner, is unhappy with her place in the world and that, dressed in drab clothing, her brown hair tied perennially back in a long braid, she considers herself sweet and steadfast, though homely in the Jane Eyre vein. We know, too, that she’s not the kind of girl to go out seeking adventures on her own, that her timidity and insecurity will hold her back, that the only way she’ll ever break free is if an outside force pushes her to shift trajectories and confront life head-on. Exactly such a thing occurs, and this becomes the story of Howl’s Moving Castle.

Walking alone down a cobbled lane one day, Sophie meets Howl – at first glimpse, smooth, enigmatic, like a platinum-haired rock star not unlike Anne Rice’s vampire Lestat – who comes to her aid when she’s harassed by a couple of men. Before she knows it, she’s flying through the air with him, escaping from black blobby things (there’s really no poetic way to put it) rising up from cracks in the ground. Enthralled by the experience, Sophie later pays a price for this encounter back in the hat shop. Apparently, her faceless pursuers are minions of the infamous Witch of the Waste – who looks/sounds intriguingly like a man in drag (at least in the subtitled version) – and, now embroiled in Howl’s affairs, is transformed by the witch’s spell into an old woman, with an additional caveat: She can’t tell anyone about the curse.

One of the pleasures of the film rests with this central conceit, as Sophie’s face and body morph, without much attention being called to it, from wrinkled crone back to youthful suppleness and variations in between (though she never again loses the gray), depending upon on how she’s feeling about herself at any given moment. Even more fascinating, she grows more beautiful throughout the journey, more attractive at the conclusion than when we first meet her, much like Kathleen Turner’s metamorphosis in Romancing the Stone where her sniffly frump becomes a sexy Amazon goddess by adventure’s end.

Another delightfully unexpected turnaround takes place after Sophie – having moved in with Howl into his moving castle (it walks around on metal legs) and deemed herself housekeeper - cleans the bathroom, mixing up his shampoos and dyes so that, when he next emerges from a shower, he’s back to his natural hair color of jet black. At the loss of his blondeness, he sobs self-pityingly,” You’re not worth anything if you’re not beautiful,” before, literally, transmogrifying into a pile of goo as Sophie, literally, scoops him up in her arms and helps him, literally, pull himself back together again. The scene reveals the caped, cocky one as an awkward, self-doubting teenager. Just like Sophie.

Yes, that’s right: Miyazaki has crafted an adolescent coming-of-age tale about low self-esteem and the necessity of engaging in the world, getting out of your head and shaking off solipsistic tendencies, in order to surface as a confident, substantial human being. And this conflation of the universal with the otherworldly instills an acutely inviting aura.

A few reservations: Occasionally a bit too static in its particulars, Miyazaki’s description this time feels on the verge of lapsing into shtick for those already familiar with his canon. And I didn’t love Howl’s Moving Castle like I loved Spirited Away - it lacks a certain cohesiveness, its internal dream logic confusingly over-elaborate (I couldn’t outline the plot even if I wanted to; not that that’s ever the point in a Miyazaki movie) – or My Neighbor Totoro - which feels effortlessly enchanting, while the oh-so-cutesiness of Calcifer (the talking fire) and Turnip-Head (a pogo-stick of a scarecrow who Sophie resurrects) sometimes come across as cloying. Still, next to Disney, always so narratively predetermined in its formulaic rut, I’ll take Miyazaki’s flights of fancy and imaginative lack of coherence any day.

- km

Walking down the street the other week with my visiting mom, we passed by an ad for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, upon which she ventured, “Would you ever want to see a movie like that?”

A digression: Mom’s got something of a girl-crush on Angelina Jolie (and really, who doesn’t?) and extols the myriad intricacies of her grandiose beauty every time anything even remotely related to her crops up in conversation (I believe she once even went so far as to use the term “sultry” to describe the actress, a word which does not fly trippingly off her tongue), so it goes without saying that this flick capped her list of must-sees. But since mom’s also got a tendency to pay top price to see every crap Hollywood thing that manages to wend its way into theaters, including, unfathomably, that Tommy Lee Jones release with the cheerleaders, not to mention The Pacifier, suffice to say that our cinematic tastes do not often converge. Imagine her surprise when I told her how excited I was to see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Non-cinephile friends and family tend to think that, as a peculiar strain of geek, I’m incapable of enjoying the lowbrow product. But the deep, dark secret at the heart of cinephilia is that we all have our guilty pleasures which, though they may not come out in answer to the oft-posed question about favorite features, are as important to our private worlds of cinematic consumption as canonical works. My vaguely embarrassing personal pantheon: The Mummy, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Me, Myself & Irene, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Bedazzled (seriously, the movie that convinced me of Brendan Fraser’s acting abilities), and anything starring Ben Stiller; whenever one of them pops up on TNT or TBS, I have no choice but to watch to its conclusion. Don’t ask me why; who knows by what strange alchemical processes such predilections arise? For whatever reason, Mr. and Mrs. Smith worked its mainstream voodoo magic on me. (To be fair, the film has a slightly higher pedigree than others on my list by mere dint of having been directed by Doug Liman who, with Swingers, Go, and The Bourne Identity under his belt, has proven an ability to aptly translate gung-ho indie grit and spirit into the big-budget blockbuster, so perhaps my adoration of Mr. and Mrs. Smith is not as transgressively lowbrow as I’d like to think. Nonetheless . . . )

While the movie takes awhile to warm up, running overlong on unnecessary expository development – really, what more do we need to know other than that the titular couple’s marriage is a shambles and that each is secretly a gun-for-hire now assigned to kill the other? – once it gets going, it makes for a groovy ride – fun, fast, and well-executed. In other words: the perfect summer flick.

It opens with a twist on When Harry Met Sally’s faux doc-style interviews, only here, instead of focusing on happily-married pairs and how they met, we find ourselves in therapy with the Smiths as they discuss their disintegrating marriage. This is revealing because, though cloaked in action, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is, as many critics have already noted, a screwball comedy (interestingly, many in the audience I sat with, mistaking it for the former genre, moaned in exaggerated derision every time the violence segued into lovey-doviness). But melding the chick flick (rom-com) with the dick flick (action-adventure) produces intriguing results. The uniqueness of the pair’s situation allows them to thrash out differences in what probably plays as wish-fulfillment for many married couples in the audience: with wildly passionate make-up sex interspersed with slugs to the face. One of the major set-pieces, the battle between the Mr. and Mrs. in their previously pristine (read: cold) home, is so satisfying because it’s a cathartic acting-out, merging long-buried love with years of pent-up rage and frustration, as the two progress in stages from trigger-happy desires to kill one another (especially on her part) to hand-to-hand combat to fierce lovemaking. That they continue to duke it out between kisses illustrates the continuing prickliness of their feelings for one another, expressed alternately hilariously and seductively through the most elemental of means.

Having kept so much of themselves under wraps (we know them and they know each other as John and Jane, but we can’t help wondering, given their uber-generic monikers, if even these are fake), it’s only upon learning of their shared professional proclivities that their relationship reignites. Starting from scratch again, the ensuing realization that they need to redo the important conversations of their courtship in order to detach the lies from the truth creates an engaging frisson in its conceptualization of the successful relationship as one based not just upon trust (a stock answer), but also constant and vigilant efforts to discover your partner anew every day, even after years of togetherness.

Aside from these core constructs, much of the movie’s charm lies in the visual discordances Liman crafts to great comic effect via the careful placement of Jolie and Pitt’s personas against incongruous backdrops. Seeing the two stars, made ridiculous in normal contexts by their unearthly gorgeousness, play at suburban conventionality – making small talk at a neighbor’s dinner party, apron-wearing Jolie (if there’s a bigger female badass working in movies today, none come to mind) slaving over a hot stove, Pitt (still honing his I-have-an-inner-dork-too shtick) singing along to Air Supply in an SUV, each donning post-coital uniforms (boxers and Hanes T-shirt for him, white button-down man’s shirt for her) - many of Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s jokes rely upon the familiarity of recognizable domesticity in the duo’s interactions – I loved watching them bicker like an old married couple - which always seems so far removed from the glamorous realm celebrities roam in.

Another plus is the presence of Vince Vaughn as Pitt’s associate, Eddie. Although post-Swingers - anointed the new It Boy of Hollywood - he languished for awhile in roles ill-suited to his charisma, seemingly destined to be the new humorless leading man (The Locusts, Return to Paradise, The Cell), he eventually made his way into the more subversive niche of smarmbucket sidekick by taking the quality that made him so appealing in his breakthrough performance – a flirty obnoxiousness - and exaggerating it to the nth degree (Made, Old School, Dodgeball), and I’m so glad he did (I do believe his upcoming Wedding Crashers has the potential to join the prestigious ranks of “watchables,” as I like to call them, here mentioned).

As for the question of chemistry between the headlining stars, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t interested in the movie for partly prurient interests, given the tabloid debacle surrounding the whole shebang, but what’s great about Mr. and Mrs. Smith is that it’s so canny a romp, you forget any less-than-respectable reasons for being there, swept along by the thrill that accompanies the rare blockbuster that entertains without pandering.

- km

This weekend marks the public opening of the spanking new IFC Center - on 6th Avenue and 3rd Street in Manhattan - where premiere screenings (starts Friday) of all-around artist Miranda July’s gorgeously off-kilter first feature, Me and You and Everyone We Know, will play. Along with Agnes Jaoui’s splendiferous Look at Me, this is one of my favorite movies of the year so far. Revelatory in its unassuming way, I’d even go so far as to couch it in that annoying catchphrase: a must-see. Plus, after reading July’s touchingly down-to-earth blog (is there anyone who doesn’t have one these days?), you’ll feel like you know her, like you’re simply going to see a friend’s movie.

- km