The cultural programming team at the Rubin Museum of Art are brilliant. In just a few years, they've made RMA a go-to place for smart hip events, all presented with a gently sly Tibetan Buddhist smile. Take last night's free movie, Miyazaki Hayao's "Howl's Moving Castle" - free, that is, if you buy a cocktail. It was part of their "Green Tara Series," which offers a film for each of the eight fears from which Green Tara is traditionally shown to protect people: mighty winds, being trampled by elephants, banditry, false imprisonment, ghosts, drowning, fire and being mauled by lions. "Howl" sort of fit the fire slot, since a fire demon named Calcifer plays an important part in the story, and the film might be seen as demonstrating the Tantrizable wisdom that fire is a good servant but a bad master. I'm not confident that that's what this rather obscure animated film is actually about - this was my third time seeing it, and I'm ready to give up - but seeing its protagonist Sophie as in fact Green Tara makes as much sense of it as anything I can come up.There was another Buddhisty perk to seeing "Howl" in this setting. The screening was introduced by Emily Mortimer, the English actress who provides the voice for the young Sophie in the English version. (Sophie is 18 but is cursed by a witch to become a 90-year-old woman and spends the rest of the film looking now younger now older on the way to becoming ageless, free and powerful - and getting the boy.) But Mortimer was sought out, we learned, because they'd already cast Jean Simmons as the old Sophie and needed someone whose voice sounded like the young Simmons. So her casting in "Howl" was for Mortimer an analog to the experience Sophie has in the movie of confronting her own future as an old woman. If an animated film from Asia can flash out this way in the live action West, why not tangka paintings of Tara, too?
