by ·Comments Off on Wreck-It Ralph (2012, Rich Moore)

As a Disney-not-Pixar feature, I never expected this to live up to the promise of its trailer. Surprisingly, most of the film takes place inside kiddie racing game Sugar Rush. More surprisingly (but in true Pixar fashion), the character who seemed the most irritating in the trailer, Sarah Silverman’s Vanellope, becomes the heart of the film. Lots of good movie-star casting (Jack McBrayer’s Fix-It Felix is a bit too Kenneth-reminiscent) and classic video game shout-outs (including references to character glitches and cheat codes). Veteran Futurama director Moore is welcome to make as many sequels as he’d like.

Paperman (2012, John Kahrs)

Predictably, my coworkers are talking more about this short than the main feature, since the short, which involves a cute couple being brought together by magic paper airplanes, is meant to look like old-fashioned drawn animation with its rough pencil lines, but it’s all cutting-edge software trickery.

by ·Comments Off on Autumn Animated Shorts

The Street (1976, Caroline Leaf)

Story of the summer grandma lay dying in the back bedroom, as told by the grandson who wanted that room for himself. Brilliant animation, looks like charcoal, with erasures visible under the movement. Internet says it was paintings on glass, lovely. Leaf made a pile of animated shorts – I’ve watched her Kafka Metamorphosis one. Did not win the oscar – the movie that beat it is described by an IMDB reviewer as “eye-gougingly dull”.

Is It Always Right To Be Right? (1970, Lee Mishkin)

A 1960’s political generational-gap movie, also featuring sexual and race differences. “Everyone was right – of course – and they knew it.” Pretty below-average animation with a heavy-handed message, but still won the oscar. the director also worked on Mister Magoo shorts and a 1980’s bionic superhero show, ending up on The Simpsons.

Le Chapeau/The Hat (2000, Michele Cournoyer)

An insane morph-drawing of women, sex and hats. Internet says: “An exotic dancer recalls an incident from her childhood where she was physically abused by a male visitor,” but I was busy being impressed by the animation and missed the point.

Munro (1961, Gene Deitch)

Reminiscent of The Bear That Wasn’t. A four-year-old boy is drafted into the army. He tries to tell everyone that he’s four, but every draftee has an excuse to try avoiding the draft, and that one doesn’t fly. Won the oscar over a Czech film, a Disney short about a tiny elephant, a Sylvester cat cartoon and a Chuck Jones sheet-music sketch. Writer Jules Feiffer had a weird career, including Carnal Knowledge and Altman’s Popeye. The director worked at UPA, did some Popeye shorts and a version of Where The Wild Things Are.

Girls Night Out (1987, Joanna Quinn)

A housewife and her buddies blow off steam by partying at a male strip joint while her miserable-looking husband watches television at home, unaware. Nice Bill Plympton-looking animation, with great flickering shadows coming from the TV set.

Just a Gigolo (1932, Dave Fleischer)

Live-action singer Irene Bordoni intrudes into an unusually short Betty Boop cabaret cartoon to sing her gigolo song with follow-the-bouncing-ball onscreen lyrics.

by ·Comments Off on The Secret World of Arrietty (2010, Hiromasa Yonebayashi)

I didn’t catch the toy Totoro but made some other Ghibli connections. Arrietty stands on the boy’s shoulder like the fox-thing in Nausicaa. She’s a 13-yr-old girl making her first adventure into grown-up life (and making a mess of it) like Kiki’s. Also: too many songs with vocals. Adapted by Miyazaki from a novel that’s been filmed a bunch of times before. The title has been changed, but the miniature people, at least in the English version, are still called Borrowers.

The main rule, strictly obeyed for generations, is never to be seen by humans, but on her first night out to snatch a sugarcube with dad, Arrietty is spotted by a drowsy, sickly boy spending the summer with his aunts or whoever they are: a decent one and a horrible troll woman whose goal in life is to find and destroy the borrowers. So Arrietty’s family packs all their belongings to move away (aided by an awesome feral borrower named Spiller, while the boy tries to find Arrietty and be friends. Probably would’ve been cooler in theaters, but at home I kept finding myself wondering why I’d rented a kids’ movie and wasn’t watching Pola X instead.

by ·Comments Off on Aqua Teen Hunger Force (2007, Dave Willis & Matt Maiellaro)

Rented this and Haywire for some mindless comedy and action downtime between complex euro-art films. Haywire brought the action, but Aqua Teen sputtered on the comedy. Should I blame myself for losing my sense of humor, since I always liked the show in the first couple seasons, or did the movie’s need to cram in familiar characters and plot points and locations, concoct an origin/creation story, and yet waste enough time on total nonsense to keep from violating the who-gives-a-shit spirit of the show, what was I talking about?

Jon Benjamin played a cop.

A. Nayman at Cinema Scope compares the summer’s animated films:

“What moron would pay to see something they can see at home for free?” asks Homer early in The Simpsons Movie. Besides reflecting the affectionate disdain (or is it just disdain?) the series’ writers developed for their ever-more-obsessive fanbase, this query is funny because it’s essentially true. “Your money is now our money, and we will spend it on drugs,” shriek the nasty snacks at the beginning of Aqua Teen. Equally true, considerably funnier, and fair enough.

by ·Comments Off on The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer and february shorts

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer (1974, Chris Marker)

It’s not a short (an hour long), but I have little to say about it, so this is a short entry. The movie’s probably of more interest to fans of Yves Montand’s singing career than of Marker’s filmmaking or their shared politics. Marker focuses on Montand’s rehearsals for an upcoming concert benefitting Chilean refugees and he cuts to clips from the concert itself, and clips from Montand’s political films (Z, The Confession, The War Is Over).

Shot by the IMDB-credited Pierre Lhomme (Mr. Freedom, Army of Shadows) as well as Jacques Renard (Celine & Julie Go Boating) and Yann Le Masson. A nicely put-together little movie, but more like your standard fly-on-wall doc mixed with a celebrity personality piece than Marker’s usual style. Montand is passionate about the details, but it’s not my kind of music so I’m not sure what he’s going for. M. Legrand was involved somehow.

Some dude on the sidelines sports a Flo & Eddie shirt:

Lady Blue Shanghai (2010, David Lynch)

Plays like a total Inland Empire outtake (or Darkened Room 2). A confused Marion Cotillard calls security on an expensive handbag (the short was commissioned as a handbag advertisement) found in her room. She grabs it and half-remembers some alternate-existence romantic rooftop chase scene, featuring herself, an attractive man from Shanghai, and an expensive handbag.

My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117 (2002, Chris Morris)

An unstable Paddy Considine is left in charge of the dog, but can’t manage it. Dog dies, Paddy ends up at the pond screaming at ducks. Nice Warp-sounding music from the director. I enjoyed it.

Mermaid (1964, Osamu Tezuka)

Katy likes when I show her movies I haven’t already watched, then criticizes this one for being depressing and My Wrongs for being unfunny. None of Tezuka’s shorts have been sad before (well, Male has a murder scene), so how was I to know? A re-run of Haanstra’s Glas was better-received. This one’s a 1984/freedom-of-thought parable about a boy who catches a fish and imagines its a mermaid, until the thought police imprison him and try to brainwash away his imagination so he’ll see the fish as a fish. Naturally it ends with the boy freeing his fish and either becoming a merman or drowning himself.

The Uneasy Three (1925, Leo McCarey)

A Hal Roach short starring Charley Chase as a wannabe thief who, with his girl and her brother, pretends to be a musical trio to gain entry to a high-society party and steal a valuable brooch. That’s such a generic-sounding description that now I can’t recall if I wrote it or I copy/pasted it from somewhere. Anyway, they successfully fake being musician/entertainers and frame the real musicians for the crime.

Bull Montana, harpist:

Winston Tong en studio (1984, Olivier Assayas)

A studio recording of a silly-sounding song. I missed the vocalist’s interview in French, but enjoyed Jah Wobble’s rant against commercialism. Also liked the filmmakers’ sound mix, keeping bits of the last take in the mix over the interview, dialing up and down the backing music while Tong is singing. Besides Assayas it’s got Nicolas Klotz (La Blessure, La Question Humaine) editing.

Hokusai: An Animated Sketchbook (1978, Tony White)

Tony, an assistant on Richard Williams’ A Christmas Carol brings acclaimed Japanese woodcut artist Hokusai’s drawings wonderfully to life for a five-minute short. Not having any previous Hokusai exposure myself, I can’t tell which drawings are his and which are interpreted by White. Teshigahara had also made a short doc on Hokusai, and a few years after this Kaneto Shindo would make a feature with the great English-language title Edo Porn.

Endangered Species (2006, Tony White)

I found Tony’s other short on YouTube – a eulogy for the lost art of hand-drawn animation, made in collaboration with Roy Disney. So ol’ Walt is championed at the expense of his competitors at Warner Bros. Also parodied: Roger Rabbit, Fritz the Cat, Beavis & Butthead, artistic diversity, and corporations that would cruelly try to control independent animators and diminish their freedom. Seems weird that a pro-Disney film would be against huge companies. Seems to have mixed feelings about Pixar, and tags Hayao Miyazaki as animation’s hope for the future.

by ·Comments Off on Non-Japanuary shorts

Lost Buildings (2004, Chris Ware & Ira Glass)

The story of architectural historian Tim Samuelson and his grade-school fascination with old buildings. Glass of This American Life did the sound and Ware did illustrations in a cool vertical aspect ratio – makes sense, since it’s all about buildings. Tim meets photographer Richard Nickel, and they tour the buildings of their favorite architect together, preserving their memories as they’re torn down. Tragic ending, beautiful story.

Les Horizons Morts (1951, Jacques Demy)

Simple, romantic story. A man alone in his crumbling apartment recalls being dumped by his girl for another man, considers drinking poison but seeing the cross on his wall, decides against it. A student short, I think, with nice camera work.

Glas (1958, Bert Haanstra)

Glassmaking, first by hand then in a bottle factory, edited rhythmically with excellent music added afterwards. At least as wonderful as the other Haanstra shorts I’ve seen. Won the oscar (beating a donald duck short). I should look up his features sometime, since I’m always so impressed by the shorts.

Won in a Closet (1914, Mabel Normand)

Mabel dreams of a neighbor boy, but is pestered by two bumpkins. Somehow her dad and the boy’s mom get trapped in a closet together, Mabel thinks it’s an intruder, and since this is a Keystone production, it ends with twenty people running around and falling over. One nice split-screen shot, but I’d argue with the film preservationists who called Normand a “singular cinematic talent in the making.”

More from the film preservationists:

By the time Won in a Closet was released by Keystone, Normand had already appeared in nearly 150 movies and was a beloved screen presence around the world. As one of the founders of Keystone, the comedienne was well placed to take on new responsibilities and become one of cinema’s earliest female directors. … The story follows the Romeo-and-Juliet romance of Mabel and her beau, played by Charles Avery. As the plot careens into antics and pratfalls, Mabel’s father and Charles’s mother find themselves trapped in a large wooden closet, surrounded by spurned suitors and bumbling neighbors.

A Bashful Bigamist (1921, Allen Watt)

A slight improvement. A woman invents an ideal ex-husband so her new husband will aspire to be better, but she uses a photo of uncle Oswald, who returns from Africa the next day. Much misunderstanding ensues, accompanied by vase-smashing and pistols.

The husband was Billy Bletcher, who would later voice characters in Mickey Mouse cartoons. Cartoons in the intertitles drawn by Norman Z. McLeod, future director of Marx Bros and WC Fields comedies. No music on either of these silent shorts, so I listened to some Ennio Morricone

Area Striata (1985, Jeff Scher)

Dots, lines and patterns. Hyperkinetic geometry. Beautiful indeed but it kinda made me feel ill. Delicate music by a Bach quartet.

Trigger Happy (1997, Jeff Scher)

Negative silhouettes of objects and toys in (of course) rapid motion, set to an extremely happy song by Shay Lynch.

Scher says: “It began as an attempt to make an animated ballet, but as I was shooting the dance turned rowdy, into more of a nocturnal revel. . . . The trigger I was happy about was on the camera, but the title also fits the velocity of the imagery. Much of the animation happens by the rapid replacement of one object with another. It’s the afterimage in your eyes that animates the difference between the shapes, as one is replaced by another, and another”

Caged Birds Cannot Fly (2000, Luis Briceno)

Some very short segments showing different caged birds in would-be humorous situations… either stop-motion, 3D or some combination thereof. I liked the Stereolab song better than the film.

by ·Comments Off on The Lion King (1994, Minkoff & Allers)

About the 20th time I’ve seen The Lion King, but the second time in theaters and the first time in THREE-DEE (Katy commented that in the rainy scenes it seemed like it was raining inside the theater – otherwise the 3D didn’t add much). During the whole Hakuna Matata scene (and a few others) the Book of Mormon song “Hasa Diga Eeebowai” ran through my head, but I restrained myself from bothering Katy with it, since she was 15 again and reciting all the lyrics and dialogue along with the movie. Didn’t realize Rowan Atkinson played the king’s bird assistant Zazu. Jeez, IMDB lists 29 writers.

by ·Comments Off on South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999, Parker & Stone)

Ha, I didn’t realize that Mike Judge played the voice of Kenny.

Still one of my favorite movie musicals ever.

And I still haven’t watched any seasons of the show since this came out…

EDIT NOV 2020: Showed this to Maria because she wanted to watch all the quotable 90’s movies… she did not seem to enjoy it much, but then had “Uncle Fucka” stuck in her head afterward, so mission accomplished.

by ·Comments Off on Auteur Shorts watched mid-2011

Plastic Bag (2009, Ramin Bahrani)

An American Beauty plastic bag, dancing with me for twenty minutes. Only this bag’s journey is very well filmed and the bag has the voice of Werner Herzog – two innovations that would have greatly helped the last plastic bag movie I saw, The Green Bag. A blatant environmentalism screed, but I really enjoyed it. I thought it’d have the same ending as Children of Men, but it had the same ending as AI: Artificial Intelligence instead.

The Dirk Diggler Story (1988, PT Anderson)

An actual fake doc, but not a polished one. I thought it was rigged to look amateurish until I read online that it was actually edited on two VCRs by young Anderson. Narrated by PT’s father Ernie Anderson, a big-time TV announcer. It’s nice that he was willing to participate in his 18-year-old son’s movie about pornography, homosexuality and drug addiction. The most fun part of the movie is hearing this straightlaced announcer pronounce titles like “White Sandy Bitches” and “Bone To Be Wild”.

Dirk is explicitly bisexual in this one, but otherwise it hits some familiar plot points from Boogie Nights: Dirk’s drug addiction, his ill-advised recording career, his buddy Reed. There’s less nudity in the short, and it ends with an on-set fatal overdose for Dirk. My favorite bit that didn’t make the feature was a group prayer for God to protect us against premature ejaculation.

Horner (Burt’s character) is played by The Colonel in Boogie Nights, the only actor who returned. Well, Michael “Diggler” Stein had a cameo as “stereo customer”. He turned writer/director after that – his last film starred Andy Dick and Coolio.

Las Hurdes/Land Without Bread (1933, Luis Buñuel)

A half-hour documentary that has been discussed to death – how much of it is real? Can it be considered surrealist? Etc. Taken at face value as a portrait of an extremely poor mountain community, it’s well made, interesting, and too vibrant (and even humorous) to blend in with your average educational short. I still can’t believe they had a donkey killed by bees, and shot a mountain goat then hurled its body off a cliff, all to make points about the difficulty of life in this place. At least they didn’t kill any people on camera, although the narrator may have exaggerated (or undersold, who knows?) their conditions. Was released in ’33, had a French voiceover added in ’35 then a newsreel-toned English voiceover in ’37 – I saw the French version. I assume the bombastic music was on all three versions.

Senses of Cinema calls it “a documentary that posits the impossibility of the documentary, placing the viewer in the uneasy situation of complicity with a cruel camera probing the miseries of the urdanos for our benefit.”

The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1998, Sylvain Chomet)

This 20-minute movie gives me inexpressible joy. It’s a good antidote to the world-weary realism of The Illusionist, back way past the anything-goes surrealism of Triplets of Belleville into a pure comic cartoon world. A starving policeman dresses as a pigeon, barges into a bird-feeding old woman’s house and demands a meal, then does the same all year until she tries to eat him for Christmas dinner. Full of delightful little details (and at least one sad bird death).

The Italian Machine (1976, David Cronenberg)

“Let’s figure it out, Gestapo-style.”
A series of betrayals leading to an obsessed mechanic gaining ownership over a unique motorcycle. Made for TV, so people call each other “meathead” and “turkey”.

Beardy Lionel (Gary McKeehan of The Brood) hears that a collector’s-item motorcycle is in the hands of a collector. This will not stand, so he grabs his buddies (Frank Moore, second-billed in Rabid, and Hardee Lineham who had a cameo in The Dead Zone) and heads over posing as reporters to figure out how to free the bike from the boring rich guy (played by Guy Maddin’s buddy Louis Negin). Lionel sucks at pretending, though, so they’d be screwed if not for Ricardo, a dull cokehead hanger-on at Negin’s house who helps them out. Cronie’s fascination with automotive machinery peaked early with this and Fast Company, then came back with a brief vengeance with Crash.

Our beardy hero first meets Louis Negin:

Bottle Rocket (1992, Wes Anderson)

Cute sketch, with the Wilson brothers and Bob from the Bottle Rocket feature, plus the gun demo scene shot exactly the same way (just in black and white). They’re budding criminals, robbing Luke’s house then a book/video store, taking one guy’s wallet. No Inez, Futureman, Kumar or James Caan.

Something Happened (1987, Roy Andersson)

An AIDS lesson with didactic narration, illustrated with Andersson’s expertly composed setups of depressed-looking white people. One particular pale balding guy is seen a few times. It ends up less depressing than World of Glory, at least. Commissioned as an educational short but cancelled for being too dark

Within The Woods (1978, Sam Raimi)

Ah, the ol’ Indian burial ground. “Don’t worry about it,” says Bruce Campbell, “You’re only cursed by the evil spirits if you violate the graves of the dead. We’re just gonna be eating hot dogs.” Then he immediately violates a grave of the dead. Nice test run for The Evil Dead, with many elements already in place, like the the famous monster’s-pov long running shot, girls being attacked by trees, evil lurking in the cellar, knifing your friend as he walks in the door because you thought he was a demon, and of course, “JOIN US”. Hard to make out the finer points of the film since this was the grossest, fuzziest, lowest-ass-quality bootleg video I’ve ever seen.

Clockwork (1978, Sam Raimi)

Woman at home is stalked by jittery creeper (Scott Spiegel, director of From Dusk Till Dawn 2). He sticks his hands through her crepe-paper bedroom door, stabs her to death, but she stabs him back, also to death. It’s not much in the way of a story, but Raimi already has a good grip on the editing and camera skills for making decent horror. How did 19-year-old Raimi get his lead actress to take her clothes off in his 8mm movie?

Sonata For Hitler (1979, Aleksandr Sokurov)

Music video of stock footage from pre-WWII Germany stuck inside a ragged-edged frame surrounded by numbers and sprocket holes. Halfway through, the music mostly fades away, replaced with foreboding sound effects.

Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001, Simonsson & Nilsson)

Drummers break into an apartment, play catchy beats in the kitchen and bathroom, with a slow bedroom number in between, then a destructive romp through the living room. But just as they finish, the inhabitants return. Clever and fun, and just the thing that probably should not have been extended into a two-hour feature.