by ·Comments Off on Vogel 17: The Joke and shorts

The Joke (1969, Jaromil Jires)

The joke was a cynical line he wrote to a girl he liked in a piece of intercepted mail which got him sent to a tribunal and kicked out of college – I didn’t mean to program a monthly theme of getting kicked out of school along with Education and Downhill. The flashbacks are wonderful, nobody plays the lead character as a young man, the camera is his stand-in, and his memories overlap the present, so the words of his expulsion tribunal are dubbed into a church ceremony he’s wandered into.

In present day our guy (Josef Somr of Morgiana) meets up with Helena (of the 1984 AI horror-comedy Grandmothers Recharge Well!) with a revenge scheme, meaning to seduce the wife of one of his accusers. All goes smoothly, except that the married couple are separated so the husband is happy that she’s found a new man, and Helena’s assistant is in love with her, and when our guy tries to ditch her she attempts suicide (Canby found this part “very funny”).

when your girl Marketa says she will stand by you:

when your revenge plot has fallen apart:

It was banned for decades, of course… based on a novel from the writer of The Unbearable Lightness of Being… Jires’s followup would be Valeria and Her WOW.

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Zid / The Wall (1966, Ante Zaninovic)

Decent little animation with hot music. Man in bowler hat sits patiently by a giant wall, until aggrieved naked man comes along and tries everything in his power to get through it, finally headbutting it and himself to death. Bowler man walks calmly through the new hole and waits at the next wall.

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The Fly (1967, Marks & Jutrisa)

Yugoslavian animation. Impassive guy tries to squish a fly but it escapes and doubles in size every quarter minute until it’s large enough to annihilate the man’s world and send him hurtling through space. Aware of their power over each other, they decide to be friends? Someone had fun with the all-buzzing sound design. Not to be confused with The Fly or The Fly.

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Be Sure to Behave (1968, Peter Solan)

Girl in prison solitary washes up, pees, paces, watched always by an eye in the door. She imagines scenes suggested by crack patterns in the wall. Then she’s dressed up all nice, blindfolded, escorted to a park and released. She narrates all this too – unsubtitled, whoops, but it’s a soviet psychodrama of some kind. Czech, Vogel had the subtitles:

In this film a woman prisoner, harshly incarcerated, is suddenly released as unpredictably as she had been imprisoned; “Stalin is dead,” she is told, and then, significantly, “Be sure to behave.”

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Jan 69 (1969, Stanislav Milota)

Czech funeral doc, aka Funeral of Jan Palach. Jan has died young, burning himself in protest of Soviet occupation, and the people are all turning out. Silent, set to doomy choir music.

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Don Kihot (1961, Vlado Kristl)

Not what I was expecting given the title. Confusing flying machines, a cross between WWII planes and faces with bristly mustaches, bustle about. This tall robot must be the Don, taking on all the mustache pilots at once, going rogue in a police state. Big showdown arrives and the Don pauses to make out with a magazine, then either wins or loses, I couldn’t follow the abstract character design. Some pointedly handdrawn backgrounds (no straight lines) and inventive prop stuff. Unreleased in its native Yugoslavia, Vogel: “Don Quixote has become mechanized and is threatened by a technological society bent on destroying his individuality. He defeats it by exposing it to the power of art and poetry; but the art work is itself ironically distorted, raising a question mark.”

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Among Men (1960, Wladyslaw Slesicki)

Stray dog draws the attention of some kids playing war and they attack it. It’s sold to a medical research place but escapes. Rounded up and leashed by animal control, rescued and taken to a friendly animal farm, but flees again, hungry on the streets. This city is portrayed as a shithole, with nice photography at least. This predates Balthazar and some other stories of innocent animals in a selfish human world. Vogel: “The most important of the famed Polish Black Series documentaries which dared to touch on negative aspects of socialist society.”

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell 2 (2004, Mamoru Oshii)

Very CG movie, but that feels appropriate for the content. Some idiot corporation has produced a bulletproof kung-fu sexbot, and the cybercops have to stop the killing while negotiating different levels of reality, like a boring eXistenZ.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q1/2025

Travel Man season 2 (2016)

– Vienna with Chris O’Dowd (they eat sausage and break a snow globe)
– Paris with British Bake Off host Mel Giedroyc (on snails: “the color of this is something I need to ignore”)
– Copenhagen with Noel Fielding (the first guest to out-joke Ayoade)
– Moscow with BBC star Greg Davies

W/ Bob & David (2015)

Haven’t seen this in a decade… wrote nothing last time… let’s rewatch it.

1. The guys travel through time… Bob becomes a work-from-home Pope… filmmaker David redefines slavery as “helperism” and lets Jay pretend to whip a Black man, which he must have enjoyed.

2. Not-great opening sketch about appeasing the Islamic heads of the network, but its final payoff mocking their own fans is worth it. B+D’s good/bad cop routine gets out of hand while Jay is a criminal (this part I believe). David plays Einstein in a biopic. Ennis has a bad experience at a dry cleaners and ends up cowriting a hit musical.

3. Bob flails on a cooking show, David flails as a consumer rights streamer at a traffic stop (Jay plays a violent authority-abuser), and David has the ability to summon people by insulting them.

4. Bob is the world’s worst bible salesman, and his one-man show mashing-up Seinfeld and Star Wars is a hit. A kid who looks upsettingly like me describes the murderers he met in heaven. Jay plays a klansman, I’m not making this up.

Since the show, director Jason Woliner did some Last Man on Earth and the second Borat movie. Scott Aukerman did Between Two Ferns. The composer worked with Mel Brooks and Bobcat Goldthwait.

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The Show About The Show season 1 (2015-2017)

Caveh (KAH-vay) pitches a show where BPB and Alex Karpovsky do drugs with him, but it doesn’t fly, so he pitches a show about pitching that show, then the next episode will be about making the first episode, and so on. It’s documentary, then re-enactments, then the making-of the re-enactments, sometimes with people playing themselves and sometimes with actors, so you’re never sure what layer of reality you’re on. Caveh is neurotic and annoying and cruel, and the show is twisted and brilliant – he must have inspired Nathan Fielder. For some reason I crack up whenever Dustin Guy Defa (writer of The Mountain) is onscreen, playing Caveh’s studio boss (and rarely Terence Nance appears playing Dustin’s boss).

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Uzumaki (2024)

Doomed animation miniseries from the same graphic novel as the beloved (by me alone) live-action film. The first couple episodes are more-or-less the movie’s story, with young couple Kirie and her more manic friend Shuichi. This time his dad spirals himself with no help from the washing machine, the Boy Who Likes Surprises comes back from his car crash as a zombie jack-in-the-box, and the news crew doesn’t arrive in spiral town until typhoons have driven the whole town into a massive spiral rowhouse.

The second half mostly introduces craziness that was too large-scale or wildly gruesome for the film. Kirie’s friend black-holes herself with her own spiral forehead. Mosquito swarms turn hospital patients into blood-draining zombies, while newborns are growing placenta-mushrooms. Kirie gets stalked by a whispering typhoon, and also by a neighbor transformed into a rat-eating spike monster, and the boy destroys a pottery kiln that has trapped his parents’ souls. Finally the town is leveled and our couple discovers the ancient subterranean spiral structures fueling the overground apocalypse.

One of the many credited directors worked on Ergo Proxy, which I just found out about. Music by a guy I saw play at Big Ears.

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Archer season 10 (2019)

The outer space Firefly season. They meet interdimensional beings and doppelgangers, rescue various creatures, get into gladiator fights, and fight Robot Barry.

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Space Ghost Coast to Coast season 1 (1994)

Really holds up.
RIP George and Clay.

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Hari Kondabolu – Vacation Baby (2023)

Good, with surprisingly few gross baby jokes considering he became a dad during the pandemic.

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Melomaniac (2023, Katlin Schneider)

Guy who enjoys live music becomes obsessed with recording it.
Sadly, I cannot relate.

by ·Comments Off on Supershorts Sunday: Cartoons

Street Musique (1972 Ryan Larkin)

Intro of street musicians, then a set of short songs illustrated in fluidtoons style, from pens to watercolors, absolutely gonzo and excellent.

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Symphony Hour (1942 Riley Thomson)

Mickey predating the opera-conducting Bugs. Their sponsor Mr. Macaroni puts their orchestra on live radio but Goofy has trashed all the instruments on the way over, so they sound like a cartoon (or PDQ Bach) and to the sponsor’s surprise it’s a huge hit. Newly restored in HD to bring you the only known scene of Mickey threatening Donald with a gun.

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Moving Day (1936)

While the Mickey disc is out, let’s play some from Jerry Beck’s list. Mickey and Donald are deadbeat roommates being evicted by the sheriff and Goofy is an ice delivery man enlisted into helping them. Someone rings their doorbell till it falls off, which I just saw happen to Laurel & Hardy. Largely this one’s about how Goofy should not be hired to help you move, or even deliver your ice, as he duels with a piano possessed by trickster spirits, but also a fair bit of time devoted to Donald getting things stuck on his ass. A Ben Sharpsteen joint, a couple years after his Two-Gun Mickey.

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Thru the Mirror (1936)

Mickey falls asleep reading Lewis Carroll and dreams himself into a sort of Pee Wee’s Playhouse version of Wonderland, bearing no resemblance to the version Disney would make fifteen years later. There is a battalion of playing cards, which is all in good fun until Mickey gets cheeky with the queen. David Hand directed, the year between Who Killed Cock Robin and Snow White.

Why don’t you pass the time by playing a little solitaire?

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Mickey’s Trailer (1938)

Mickey and buddies ride their House of Leaves fully-automated trailer across the country. An early warning against self-driving vehicles. Ben Sharpsteen directed, between Clock Cleaners and Dumbo.

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Lonesome Ghosts (1937)

Mickey shorts weren’t really on TV in the 80s, but I know their Ghostbusters story well because we had the talking-pages storybook. The fully produced version is much less scary for some reason, though it does have Mickey waving guns around again, and more Donald ass-trauma. The ghosts telephone our guys themselves just to mess with them. Burt Gillett directed, the year before Brave Little Tailor.

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Bad Luck Blackie (1949 Tex Avery)

Mean dog torments little kitty until kitty hires the titular Blackie, who crosses the dog’s path causing objects to fall on his head. An exoeriment in all the shapes a dog can be bent into while still being recognizably the dog. Sorry, this is many times better than any of the Disneys. Weird Kitty Foyle reference.

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Porky’s Spring Planting (1938 Frank Tashlin)

We’re planning our own spring planting, let’s see if this is instructive… (1) get a hat with eyeball window wipers, (2) get dog to do the work for you, (3) neighborhood birds end up eating everything. Weird social security joke, and Porky pronounces asparagus “ass-pah-RAH-gus.”

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Hen Hop (1942 Norman McLaren)

Short hand-drawn cameraless chicken dance synched to music – McLaren was the commercial Stan Brakhage.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 14: Sharits/Breer/Kubelka Part 2

I got hung up on the “Straining Towards the Limits” chapter, also covered in posts 12 and 13, where Vogel discusses the elimination of: reality, the image, the screen, the camera, the artist.

Paul Sharits:

N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968)

Color fields flicker and fade. Would be a different experience in the front row of a screening, swallowing the colors with your eyes, but if you can see the whole frame on TV your lasting impression is Square, like a flipbook of colored post-it notes. Our only figures among the fields were titles and lightbulb, and I figured this was silent so I put on the new Animal Collective live album, but a chair appeared halfway through with a buzzer noise that was pretty much absorbed by the music.

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T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969)

A guy having his face clawed off in two-frame flicker-motion, the soundtrack repeating the word “destroy” – then he’s cutting off his tongue with scissors Ichi-style. The flicker motion changes speed and intensity, reds and purples prevail, and the single letters appearing on occasion spell out the title. Pretty annoying! I’m missing the point as usual by watching a good video of this at home in 2025 with an IPA instead of at an underground film screening in 1969 out of my mind on hallucinogens.

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Peter Kubelka:

Arnulf Rainer (1960)

Simply square black-or-white flicker patterns with stuttering static noise. I would have proposed swapping the titles of the flicker-film (Arnulf Rainer) with the mini-doc of Arnulf Rainer (Pause!) but that’s why Kubelka had a significant influence on the European and American avant-garde and I did not. Vogel: “This is the first frame-by-frame abstraction that entirely dispenses with the image and consists solely of carefully orchestrated alternations of blank black or white frames.”

Unsere Afrikareise (1966)

Germans on safari, blasting every wild creature they see and staring at nude women, a travel doc with sound, re-edited into more interesting structure than these things usually are, but not interesting enough to make it worth watching these dudes shoot zebras and elephants.

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Robert Breer:

Inner and Outer Space (1960)

I think he’s animating airplanes (over Germany) in a very abstract way, all dots and lines, bombers and skywriting. Explodes into new subjects: red ball in obstacle course, brief sketch of people on the subway. Cool one.

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Horse Over Tea Kettle (1962)

Opens with a frog then introduces a whole range of objects and creatures (no horses or tea kettles that I noticed). These things will eventually fall down on the scene like rain, then fly back up into the sky. In between, everything transforms into something else, because why even work in animation unless you’re gonna transform things into something else?

Sitney:

he directly attacked the conventions of the cartoon while working within it … he transforms and moves these conventional figures within an intricate orchestration of expectations and surprises involving changes of scale, direction, virtual depth, and above all movement off the screen at all four edges

PBL 2 (1968)

The year 1968 got to Breer, who turned away from abstraction to make a one-minute two-part social issues parable, craving the oscar nomination that Windy Day got instead.

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Rubber Cement (1976)

Captioned scenes of the dog playing in the yard, animated in different styles, becoming more complex and intense, with periods of strobing. Focus turns to the means of production (xerox machine and rubber cement), aircraft are introduced, the whole scene melts into pure shape and color.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched December 2024

L’emission a deja commence (2023, Bertrand Mandico)

Puppet people talk about truth in media and introduce a series of pissing-fruit cartoons. How do you explain this sort of thing to potential investors?

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The Last Cartoon (2022, Bertrand Mandico)

Kind of partly a cartoon – some abstract brightly-colored patterns – but the performance-art people take over, narrating in French and English about conflicting futures of cinema.

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Four Unloved Women Adrift… (2023, David Cronenberg)

The autopsy mannequins make heated moaning sounds.
Mostly close-ups, only showing the full scene at the end.

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The Menacing Eye (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

If my first short had been a stylish silent 2-minute backstage knife-throwing drama, I would also have grown up to become Jerzy Skolimowski.

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Little Hamlet (1960, Jerzy Skolimowski)

A small group hanging around a half-demolished building plays out a silent slapstick story with musical narration which is sort-of a loose version of Hamlet.

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The Miu Miu Affair (2024, Laura Citarella)

Meant to be another fashion ad like the Luca and the Lynch, but LC makes a Trenque Lauquen spinoff, a mystery about a missing fashion model that gets increasingly hazy and vague. it’s not great exactly, but it’s great for one of these.

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Let Your Heart Be Light (2016, Romvari & Campbell)

She trims the tree while half-watching Meet Me in St. Louis on a laptop and drinking from her Chantal Akerman mug, then switches to a mix of trad-xmas songs before Sophy comes over to hang out.

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I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (1984, Chantal Akerman)

The one who looks familiar is Maria de Medeiros (The Saddest Music in the World), the less hungry one is Pascale Salkin of Gang of Four. The most charming and fast-paced Akerman movie since Saute me ville?

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and some auteur music videos…

PJ Harvey – I Inside The Old I Dying (Cocina & Leon)

The Wolf House team creates the illusion of a days-long journey within a single room, so cool. Man gets chomped to death by a beast, man’s dog grabs one of his bones and buries it, it grows into a tree.

New Order – Blue Monday (Breer & Wegman)

The main things happening here are (1) Breer animation, (2) a dog balancing on furniture, (3) the band members being bothered by floating tennis balls. These things get integrated in fun ways (e.g. the band members watch a flipbook of Breer’s drawings of the dog).

The Breeders – Divine Hammer (Richard Kern)

The focus is on Kim pulling poses indoors, and the other three have a minor thread going on a tour of strip clubs. They should’ve cut out the shots of Kim as the Flying Nun.

The Roches – Hammond Song (Lewis Klahr)

Lewis does his clip-art mashup thing. Lucky me to find this right after discovering the group – I’ve been playing their debut album this week. He made this forty years after the song came out.

Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder (Martha Colburn)

Instrumental guitar rock by Sean Lennon and Greg Saunier, the only song here I didn’t already know. More clip-art, the religious and planetary icons giving flashbacks to the Harry Smith shorts. Faster cut than Klahr and with added digital glitch edits (or else my copy was defective).

by ·Comments Off on The Wild Robot (2024, Chris Sanders)

Iron Giant and Wall-E-inspired, starts out full of thrilling possibility and ends up more of a talking-animals movie for children. But along the way there’s some wildly great animation. I love their approach to fur, bucking against the “billion individual hairs” approach in vogue since Monsters Inc., and the action scenes are the best.