by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched Sept 2024

Revenger (1958, Dusan Vukotic)

Scarf Guy catches his wife cheating, goes to the gun store and imagines every possible scenario, none of them especially good, so he buys a butterfly net. That part must’ve made more sense in the original Chekhov story. Getting around to watching more by Vukotic after enjoying Cow on the Moon and Cowboy Jimmy.

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The Playful Robot (1956, Dusan Vukotic)

A nutty one with excellent music. Scientist in a sort of Wallace-automated Jetsons laboratory creates a sentient humanoid robot then tells it to clean the lab while he naps. Instead it creates two smaller child robots so it can also nap, but they focus more on messing with each other. Not sure why a flying saucer bird hatches from an egg at the end, but the scientist wakes up and isn’t at all displeased by this messy racket.

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The Struggle (1977, Marcell Jankovics)

Very good and short, feels like Bill Plympton turned classical. A muscley sculptor chisels away at a block while it chisels away at him, until the block has become a muscley human figure and the sculptor is old and busted. I still remember Marcell’s Sisyphus animation 15 years later. Won the (short) palme d’or.

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Eyetoon (1968, Jerry Abrams)

Blobby abstract art flickers, fast-motion driving demo, geometric and psychedelic patterns, sex drugs and rock & roll – for the first half it can’t decide what it wants to be, then it settles on being an avant-porno for the second half.

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Cab Calloway’s Hi-De-Ho (1934, Fred Waller)

Cab, even more of a goofball than expected and making the most of his floppy hair, rehearses with his pajama-wearing band in the sleeper car of a train, then they perform at the Cotton Club. Train Porter Sam buys a radio to keep his Chicago hotwife entertained while he’s away, Cab finds out the hotwife is alone and entertains her in person. Corny and hardly technically perfect, but there aren’t a lotta opportunities to see Cab dancing to his own songs.

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Senor Droopy (1949, Tex Avery)

Wolf the star bullfighter is trouncing the bull, who then turns the tables. Nobody takes Droopy seriously, then the bull disrespects his dream girl and he gets mad. It’s Tex Avery, it’s Droopy, it’s good.

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Chumlum (1964, Ron Rice)

A parade of double-and-more-exposures. Ron got Jack Smith and the Warholites to dress up and act freaky with percussive music by an ex-Velvet. It’s only 20 minutes and at least five of that is a girl swinging in a hammock chair. I’m sure it’s very transgressive but nobody appears to be having much fun except maybe Ron in the editing room.

Chuck Stephens in Cinema Scope:

A hallucinatory micro-epic filmed during lulls in production of Smith’s Normal Love … a movie so sumptuously and serenely psychedelic it appears to have been printed entirely on gauze … a thousand and one Lower East Side nights melting together in a cosmic slop of languid poses and limp half-dances, a smoke-fragile erotica that climaxes and dissolves the moment it hits your eye … it was only in the crazy crucible of Chumlum that Smith’s frittering, flailing “play” out in front of the camera seemed to find a mostly-in-focus chemical twin behind the lens.

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Los Angeles Plays New York (2016, John Wilson)

John Wilson shot and edited a piece for a fashion guy who refuses to pay, so… he sues his friend Clark, standing in for the MIA fashion guy, after filming a fake fashion short with Clark as the supposed client, and they get booked on a boring new Judge Judy-affiliated court show and bring in a hidden camera. John then worries whether this short film violates his agreement with the TV studio and they’ll sue him over it, so he claims it can’t be released… then how am I watching it?

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Mr. Hayashi (1961, Bruce Baillie)

A great idea to make three-minute sun-bathed interview/portraits, there should be a thousand more of these. This one’s with Mr. Hayashi, part-time gardener – that’s about all we learn about him.

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To Parsifal (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Bruce’s Leviathan – he rides a fishing boat and watches water and birds. After the halfway point he moves to land, exploring the railroad and its surrounding vegetation and insect life, all while listening to Wagner.

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Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963, Bruce Baillie)

Death/applause intro, then a hazy drift of city superimpositions. Long take tailing a motorcycle in San Francisco (not a known habitat of the Dakota Sioux) over the titles with church music. He does play with focus in a purposeful way (the ol’ rack from a distant American flag to nearby barbed wire) but sometimes the picture is so soft and blurry that you wonder if he remembered to focus at all. Parades, war, advertisements filmed off a TV with shaky reception. Repeated applause, motor vehicles, and bananas. Shots from X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes! The city pays little mind as a dead man is removed from the sidewalk to an ambulance, and the sea and the motorcycle roll on.

Horizon at the bottom of frame? That’s interesting:

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q3/2024

The Sympathizer (2024)

Park Chan-wook lit-adaptation miniseries, take two. Everything looks extremely slick until CG helicopters start falling from the sky. Hoa Xuande is good as the lead, but each Robert Downey Jr. is worse than the last one. The highlight comes halfway through when our guy is advising on a Vietnam War movie with John Cho and David Duchovny, attempting to inject hidden messages by coaching the extras’ dialogue. After he gets blown up on-set, timelines start bleeding.

Co-created by Don McKellar, who brings along Last Night star Sandra Oh. Park directs for a while then the City of God guy takes over, then the guy who made the Steve Buscemi episode of Electric Dreams.

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Random Acts of Flyness season 2 (2022)

Not a sketch show anymore, a psychic spiritual sci-fi therapy gaming narrative.
Extremely ambitious blend of history, myth, realism, and virtual worlds.
Intriguing yes, but does it work… is it fully successful? Also yes.
Najja is now Alicia Pilgrim of last year’s A Thousand and One.
Most of the directors are from the music video world, and Nuotama Bodomo made Afronauts.

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Painting With John season 3 (2023)

Potatoes!
Flea goes to jail.
Kenny Wollesen and the rest of the band hit the studio.
Sometimes there’s still some painting.
Great show (and soundtrack).

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Smiling Friends season 1 (2022)

101. I think I missed the pilot where it’s explained that the main characters are cheery helpers for hire… anyway, here they succeed in rehabilitating the career/reputation of an evil racist frog.
102. A gaming-addicted shrimp misses his ex.
103. Pim gets lost in the spooky woods and chased by a forest demon while gathering firewood on Halloween.
104. They solve the case of a fast food manager murdered by one of his mascots.
105. They’re sent to cheer up the Princess of the Enchanted Forest, led by a stalker hobbit.
106. Frowning Friends move in across the street and turn the whole block pessimistic.
107. Charlie goes to hell at Christmas, feat. cameo by Gilbert Gottfried as God.

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Smiling Friends season 2 (2024)

201. They help a 16-bit 3D video game character find a new job.
202. Managing a presidential election vs. Mr. Frog.
203. Red office guy Allan on a quest for paperclips.
207. Journey to colorful capital-punishment town, the boss’s son becomes a malevolent butterfly.
208. Garbage snowman fears death.

I know I’m missing some but these are very short episodes and if I ever need to know which one had the boss marrying an evil demon I can just google it. Creators/voices Pim and Charlie come from, respectively, a Rick & Morty parody called Bushworld and hit youtube series Hellbenders.

by ·Comments Off on Concorso Shorts 2019

Some shorts I could find online that played Locarno in 2019

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Carne (Camila Kater)

I figured watching an animated short unsubtitled would be fine, turns out it’s wall-to-wall narration in Portuguese. From what I can follow, five women’s stories about their bodies, chronologically through the life cycle, each in different animation styles (stop-mo, watercolor, flash, clay, Breer).

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In Vitro (Lind & Sansour)

Dry, serious sci-fi displayed in wide split-screen. Older woman in hospital bed is confronted by younger clone who questions her implanted memories and her purpose in the purgatorial present-day while the survivors of a global plague are kept indoors and underground.

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Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream? (Diana Vidrascu)

A movie about islands and earthquakes with distorted colors and cool sound design is for sure gonna remind me of Rock Bottom Riser. Gets caught up a little too hard in video effects wilderness but still my favorite of this bunch.

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Our Territory (Mathieu Volpe)

Italian narrator (speaking French) is weird and sad about encountering a neighborhood of poor African immigrants.

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White Afro (Akosua Adoma Owusu)

Adapted from a salon worker interview and a promotional film about giving white people afros, interspersed with Toni Morrison quotes, the picture highly distressed with film junk.

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Swinguerra (Benjamin de Burca & Barbara Wagner)

Ninety percent of this is sexy Brazilians dancing, what is not to love?

by ·Comments Off on Criterion Channel shorts watched July 2024

Watched some shorts on CC. I only mention the source because we know how I love to lean on the screenshot button, but streaming restricts my personal freedom to steal images. And also because they deserve to be mocked for still using the Baby’s First Streaming Platform template, which says “season one” under the titles of short films.

She and Her Cat (1999, Makoto Shinkai)

Talky, narrated by a cat who is sexually attracted to his female human owner, passing the seasons together. Limited animation, mostly gently panning across stills. Not too exciting, but I suppose its success got Shinkai (who also narrated) the budget for Voices of a Distant Star. When Your Name blew up, this got a sequel/remake, and Shinkai returned to narrate.

Voice of a Distant Star (2002, Makoto Shinkai)

The UN Space Force naturally needs morose teens to pilot giant space robots, preferably while wearing their school uniforms. Star pilot Mikako likes a boy called Noboru (same voice actors as the cat movie), and though she’s stationed on Jupiter’s moons they still text using 2002-model flip phones. When she’s sent further away to fight evil aliens, it gets harder to communicate since each message takes years to arrive.

Chuu Chuu (2021, Mackie Mallison)

Medium takes, then quick edits… digital stability with low-gauge colors… focusing on an aging Japanese grandma. Then a section discussing touchy family relationships and identity from the perspective of a doorbell cam. Not as many birds as I was hoping for, but there is a birdwatching section towards the end, then a projector throwing fast-cut home movies over a kid’s face.

Fly, Fly Sadness (2015, Miryam Charles)

Story of an explosion that affected everyone in the country, so now they all have the same girlish speaking voice, coincidentally the voice of the director, who narrates over short clips and loops. CC didn’t care to correct the subtitles.

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 3 & 4 (2012/2021, Hideaki Anno)

Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo (2012)

Where we left off, the movies were following the series pretty closely, except for one new character. That’s all out the window now, as Shinji awakens from a 14-year nap (but he’s the same age and temperament). He discovers all his friends are dead because he caused a mass extinction that destroyed most the world. But at least he rescued Rei – nope, this Rei is a soulless clone. But at leaast his coworkers are still supporting him – nope, they’ve formed an alliance to try to destroy him. But at least he makes an enthusiastic new friend – nope, a bomb collar blows that guy’s head off.

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Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time (2021)

Shinji is in one of his dark quiet moods, but at least Fake Rei (a clone of Shinji’s mom) is learning how to be human – nope, she spontaneously combusts. The characters and situations are making less sense than ever (“the cores that form the eva infinities are the materialization of souls”), but this is the best the show has ever looked. Shinji finally fights vs. his dad in identical evas in the anti-universe, then rewrites the world as a new place (“neon genesis”) where he won’t have to pilot no more giant robots.

by ·Comments Off on Perfect Blue (1997, Satoshi Kon)

I’ve been biased against this movie since it first came out on video. At Georgia Tech anime kids would follow you around talking about anime, even if you don’t care about anime, as I did not, and Perfect Blue was their idea of a movie which would instantly convince the doubters. Nowadays I like anime just fine, including Satoshi Kon, whose Millennium Actress was good, and Paranoia Agent was incredible, so I finally gave this a chance. If anyone from Tech is reading… I’m sorry… I’m glad y’all have got your own Anime Fight Club, with its multiple-multiple personalities and identity twists and breakbeat soundtrack, but it’s not for me.

The words every girl wants to hear:

I can relate:

by ·Comments Off on Ghost in the Shell (1995, Mamoru Oshii)

OK, boobs, I get it, we all love boobs. The most 1995 thing I’ve ever seen. The only thing I remembered from the VHS is that shot where the cyborg supersoldier pulls something so hard her arms come off, and it’s still the coolest thing here by far (the invisibility-suit effects also nice).

Android moral quandaries ripped from Robocop. It’s so talky in a self-important sci-fi cop-show way, but all this chatter is background noise to the actual plot (reminisce: Nemesis), which leads to a Lawnmower Man ending. The writer worked on Pistol Opera, which needs to come out on blu-ray.

This is who comes for you if you haven’t turned on multifactor authentication:

Jake Cole:

This really isn’t a thriller because the sporadic action merely punctuates a story that uses nearly every plot element as a macguffin to ruminate on the nature of identity and how technology alters our perception of self. The finale, in which a cyborg evolves to propagate itself, recasts the internet and global networking as the next stage of reproduction.

Adding this line to my resume:

by ·Comments Off on Cartoons watched April 2024

The Emperor’s New Clothes (1953, Ted Parmelee)

Everyone pretends they can see the emp’s “invisible clothes” until a kid gives the game away. The writing and dialogue is odd, Emp’s face-symmetry oval is visible, UPA maybe not firing on all cylinders here.

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The Unicorn in the Garden (1953, William Hurtz)

A pleasant man finds a unicorn eating his flowers one morning, wakes up his shrew wife to show her. She calls the cops instead to have him committed, but when they arrive he acts cool and she’s hopping around talking unicorns so they nab her instead.

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Steamboat Willie (1928, Walt Disney)

My favorite out-of-copyright Disney short… but wait, why did I not know that this movie is a cavalcade of animal cruelty? Mickey throws things at a parrot, a cow is force-fed, A goose and a goat and pigs are turned into musical instruments, a cat is swung by its tail, a baby pig is kicked. On top of this the ship captain aggressively chews tobacco and Minnie gets lifted by her undies. On the plus side, Mickey invents the Anvil Orchestra.

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A Corny Concerto (1943, Robert Clampett)

Two mini-musicals as Elmer conducts Strauss.
McKimson, Tashlin, and Stalling – all the boys turned out for this one.

1. Porky and his dog hunt Bugs in time to the music.

2. A quacking swan rejects the grey duck until he violently rescues her babies from a vulture.

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Felix in the Ghost Breaker (1923, Otto Mesmer)

Why does the Felix DVD open with a text crawl telling us that after Mickey Mouse stole Felix’s merchandise sales, producer Pat Sullivan’s wife “fell or jumped from a hotel window?” Why not add that Pat had a history of incompetence, was a convicted child rapist, and drank himself to death the following year? Anyway, we’ve all decided to give New Jersey’s own Otto Mesmer the credit for Felix and these films, and Otto continued the Felix legacy for another sixty years.

A ghost is tormenting a farmer and his animals, Felix leads it away with a bottle of rum (which ghosts love) then holds it at gunpoint (future note: Felix is armed) until the farmer arrives for the scooby doo ending. When did ghost breaking become busting… there were Ghost Breaker films through 1940, and Ghost Busters and Chasers in the early 1950s, then busting became the default after the famously unprofitable 1984 film.

In the 1920s Felix looked like a snaggletoothed black cat – I’m more familiar with his 1930s character model.

Useful meme for later this election year:

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Felix in Hollywood (1923, Otto Mesmer)

That’s more like it – now Felix is pranking people. He makes his wannabe-actor owner rich through shoe sales, then the owner is off to Hollywood to find a job in the movies. Felix does get another gun… his magic bag of tricks wasn’t invented until the 1950s but he disguises himself as a black bag to stow-away to Hollywood, where he meets caricatures of nobody I recognized (reportedly Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin, Tom Mix, and Cecil De Mille) and poses with Chaplin. These are mildly meta, then, since he’s already in a movie, and in the previous one the ghost came towards camera and threatened the viewers.

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Face Like a Frog (1988, Sally Cruikshank)

Absolutely wild all-things-possible animation at a frantic pace, like a PG-rated 1980s Superjail. I guess a frog gets seduced into entering a spooky house, then escapes through the basement. I was gonna say this has insane music for a short, turns out it’s by Danny Elfman, same year as Beetlejuice.

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Quasi at the Quackadero (1976, Sally Cruikshank)

Quasi (pronounced KWAH-zee) lives a decadent life in bed watching TV programs of other people doing work. Anita and Rollo take him to a psychic carnival, plotting to lose him there, and succeed in knocking him down a “time hole” into the dinosaur age. All the best animators come from New Jersey. The score composers wrote a book called “The Couch Potato Guide to Life” which is also about getting warped from watching too much TV.

After Quasi’s disappearance, Chairy found a new home in Pee Wee’s Playhouse:

The roll-back-time mirror also rolls back your clothing:

And with that I’ve seen all of Jerry Beck’s 50 Greatest Cartoons, and written up all but nine in the book – five of those being Tex Avery shorts. Now to rewatch those nine, and find the sixty-ish runners-up. A man’s life work (watching cartoons on the couch) is never finished.

by ·Comments Off on Quantum Cowboys (2022, Geoff Marslett)

Live and/or animated actors and props over distressed rotoed backgrounds, all talking philosophy and quantum physics, like Waking Life: The Western. The infinite universes concept ties into the animation/visual style changing from scene to scene, shot to shot – it doesn’t always work but it’s a big swing. Funny unintentionally as often as on purpose, which was often enough to keep me watching. Announces itself as Part One of The Arizona Antilogy (def: “a contradiction in terms or ideas”).

Our guys are Frank and Bruno, and I can’t prove that writers Marslett and Howe Gelb meant this as a Franklin Bruno reference but I’m gonna assume so. Frank is caught in a time-loop, robbing a store which leads to the death of singer Blackie (Gelb), and his buddy (doing a silly accent) is trying to save him from fate at the hands of killers-from-the-future (who go around the Old West claiming to have written Led Zeppelin songs), then Lily Gladstone helps them sort it all out. There’s an interdimensional camera crew which includes Gary Farmer, plus scenes with Neko Case (the reason I’m watching) and veterans of other surreal westerns. There’s a Timecrimes-ish bit, an it-was-all-a-dream bit, ends on a Schrödinger’s cat joke.