by ·Comments Off on Fantastic Planet (1973, René Laloux)

In the back of my mind I figured I’ve seen this years ago and just forgotten most of it, but nope, I couldn’t have forgotten this – a jaw-dropping sci-fi story (with funky music). Humans are pests and pets, the planet controlled by blue gill-eared giants. A highly-placed alien child calls his pet human Terr, which grows up and starts playing pranks and spying, eventually defecting to lead the tiny human revolution. Truce is called after the humans build miniature rockets, travel to the Wild Planet and laser down the alien sex statues.

Michael Brooke for Criterion:

Over four decades after its May 1973 premiere, it remains more or less unique. Its peculiar universe, designed by Roland Topor and realized by a team of Czechoslovak animators in Prague, is instantly recognizable from virtually any freeze-frame, and the film as a whole is so rich, strange, and sui generis that nothing has emerged since to retrospectively blunt its impact … [Topor] cofounded the Panic Movement with Fernando Arrabal and Alejandro Jodorowsky, named after the god Pan and intended to make surrealism as shocking as it had been in the 1920s, before its imagery and ideas were co-opted and diluted by the mainstream … he wrote the 1964 source novel for Roman Polanski’s disquietingly paranoid The Tenant (1976), appeared in DuÅ¡an Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979, as the lunatic Renfield).

–
Les Temps Morts (1965)

I’ve seen Laloux’s earlier Monkey Teeth short, but this is when he teamed up with Topor. A grim little anthropological study of man’s propensity for murder. I think their sensibility worked better when applied to a fictional scenario – and the animation is in very rough form here, illustrations cross-faded in sequence, drawings shuffling Gilliam-style, but mostly the camera panning around stills. Some sharp stills, though – if you cut the live-action atrocity footage it’d make a good picture-book of horrors.

–
Les Escargots (1966)

A different kind of apocalyptic movie, this one really takes a turn. Farmer realizes his crops will only grow if he cries on them, so he walks around the field holding cut onions, reading sad books, and wearing an ass-kicking machine. The giant plants attract snails, which also grow giant, slide over to the nearest major city and utterly destroy it. Little Shop of Horrors may have been an influence.

by ·Comments Off on The Spine of Night (2021, Gelatt & King)

Watched on the exercise bike after Duel. Ultraviolent mythological epic, recalling Metalocalypse but with more rotoscoping. Swamp Witch and Ancient Guardian and Local Lord and Chief Librarian all struggle to obtain or protect or misuse a magic blue leaf that gives healing or destructive powers. I’m all in favor of this sort of thing.

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q4/2021

Atlanta season 1 (2016)

Paper Boi experiences the weirdness of semi-fame while Earn pretends to be his manager. Darius gets kicked out of a shooting range. Highlights: “Black people don’t know who Steve McQueen is,” Glover’s fake Bieber song, Jane Adams’ mistaken identity plot turning weird, white guy who loves black people at the rich party – so, pretty much all the racial-clashing material – plus every word LaKeith Stanfield says. Locations: the L5P Zesto (which just announced it’s closing). Earn tries to go on a cheap date in Kirkwood on the same block as Le Petit Marche. The Cameli’s where Blogger Zan works apparently isn’t a real location. Wonder if their calzones are still incredibly good. Van is fired from her teaching job at KIPP Vision Primary, a few blocks from the Starlight Drive-in. I can’t find whether the Primal nightclub was filmed in a real club or a set.

–
Rick & Morty season 5 (2021)

501: Morty’s girlfriend Jessica is a Time God, Rick has an archrival, they destroy another civilization. Was that a Matter of Life and Death reference?
502: “Someone just killed the decoy family”
503: Morty falls for female Captain Planet, Rick and Summer go on a planetary apocalypse tour
505: Hellraiser/Ferris Bueller/Transformers mashup
506: National Treasure x Thanksgiving
507: Voltron x Casino, very great
509: Morty gets into mortal combat with psycho portal boy Nick, Rick becomes obsessed with two crows. Was that a two-parter? I thought I’d remember these better than I do.

This ep wasn’t even called A Morty of Life and Death:

–
Nathan For You season 2 (2014)

Lately his thing is embarrassing himself about personal issues in front of clients. After defrauding people into buying souvenirs on camera using a fake Johnny Depp, Nathan has to prove to a judge that he was making a real movie with these people as actors, so he starts a film festival to win it an award and gain credibility, and hopefully cast a love interest who will agree to be his girlfriend. Nathan hires a focus group to make him more likable, sells liquor to minors, uses fear to make people lose weight, hires 40 maids to clean a house in six minutes. Towards the end of the season his business ideas start failing harder: a pregnant woman refuses to give birth in a cab to promote a taxi company, then Nathan gets kicked out of a hot dog place and ambushes the customer who messed up his plan. MVPs Fake Johnny Depp and Dumb Starbucks.

–
Ultra City Smiths (2021)

Watched after Tom Waits Mode since he narrates. Mostly a bust, despite it being doll-head stop-motion crime/conspiracy plot with many good actors – those star names on the opening titles are mostly for minor characters who get a few lines, and the whole thing feels like a setup for future seasons, which I’m not watching unless there are new writers. An odd repetitive rhythm to the overtalky dialogue which I wasn’t feeling. Nice to see something unique though, and Bobby Bare Jr. sings the theme song.

–
Sampled the first episode of a few shows… Breeders with Martin Freeman is really unpleasant, A Black Lady Sketch Show uneven, and I’m undecided on I Think You Should Leave – got some chuckles, but it’s pretty poop-centric humor. The big winners are Devilman Crybaby (my favorite anime director made a pornographic satanic hellraising series, I am psyched)… Detroiters (thought this would be sketch comedy but I guess it’s about guys who run an ad agency, less cringey than Nathan For You)… Only Murders in the Building… and Mythic Quest.

Got 10 minutes into When I Come Home, which was too loose and fuzzy for my mood that night. But I hit play by accident and it actually played even though my laptop was connected to the external monitor. Between this and the new wifi extender, it could be a new era of streaming, we will see.

–
Other Things Unfinished this year:
Daniel Barnett’s Science Without Substance
Spielberg’s Duel
The Chaplin Revue
The Terror
Bo Burnam: Inside (features editing humor, my favorite kind)
The Beatles: Get Back

by ·Comments Off on The Day of Destruction and Tell-Tale shorts

The Day of Destruction (2020, Toshiaki Toyoda)

A movie shot quickly in 2020, in which a masked woman screams that we’re all dying and can’t even hold funerals. A man pays his way into a closed mine, walks for a very long time, music only appearing as periodic blasts of static, looks at the epidemic-causing monster for ten seconds then turns around. We hear unconfirmed rumors of a Masque situation, the rich waiting out the plague together in an estate. But it’s an arthouse punk movie, and instead of going anyplace narrative it stays slow and philosophical. Issey Ogata (emperor of The Sun) appears, and I recognized the professor from Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Some good percussion on the soundtrack almost saves the movie, not quite.

–
The Tell-Tale Heart (1941, Jules Dassin)

Sorry to say I prefer the 1950’s animated version, the 2005 animated version, and the expressionist version all over this one. Dassin’s film debut is pretty good, with some cool lighting and camera moves, but the cinema is rich with Tell-Tale Hearts, and the 1940’s were the least frightening decade in the movies, unless you count the newsreels. Joseph Schildkraut (an oscar winner a few years before) isn’t even tormented by the evil vulture eye of the old man (Roman Bohnen, later Ingrid Bergman’s uncle in Joan of Arc), he’s just unstable and tired of being told what to do by such a miserable geezer, and he’s a terrible liar when the cops come around.

–
Metrograph ran a series of very average old-timey holiday shorts…

The Cuckoo Murder Case (1930, Ub Iwerks)

One of those cartoons where every single object is anthropomorphized, all swaying to the rhythm of the score. Detective Flip The Frog is on the case of a murdered cuckoo. I think Flip escapes into hell at the end but I’ll have to watch the sequel to be sure.

–
KoKo’s Haunted House (1928, Dave Fleischer)

KoKo sends his dog into the haunted house, too chicken to go himself. Primitive silent animation, with plenty of ghosts – some frantic out-of-the-inkwell stop-motion saves it at the end.

–
Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party (1933, Dave Fleischer)

Oh, I last watched this short from Clay’s collection at the Plaza. Those were good times.

–
The Haunted Ship (1930, Bailey & Davis & Foster)

A couple of dumbasses flying a tiny plane tempt fate until fate sinks them, so they explore a haunted ship on the sea floor. Hard to return to something this primitive after the Boop. I thought the sync sound would be limited to sound effects until a barbershop quartet of drunken turtles sang Sweet Adeline

–
Pete’s Haunted House (1926, Walter Lantz)

Cheeseball animator who puts on a suit to work from home keeps a cartoon dog in a model house in his office, sadistically torments the dog every chance he gets. The dog discovers the plot and blows the man to bits, good ending at least.

–
The Cobweb Hotel (1936, Dave Fleischer)

A fly hotel run by a spider, uh oh. Champion fighter fly and his equally strong wife bust it up and free the fly-prisoners. Pretty inventive. Our print was pink.

–
Felix the Cat Switches Witches (1927, Otto Mesmer)

After being a total dick and pranking everyone around, Felix gets his fortune told and learns he’ll marry and have a bunch of kids, but his bride is a horrible witch. Naw, it’s a hot girl cat in a witch costume.

–
Bold King Cole (1936, Burt Gillett)

Felix is just trying to get inside from a thunderstorm, ends up at Old King Cole’s castle. The King is a loudmouth braggart, and the castle ghosts have chosen this night to torment him for it. Felix harnesses the lightning to rescue the king. I was rooting for the ghosts.

–
The Garden (2019, Patrick Müller)

Real 60’s 8mm-looking film of Savannah trees (reminded me of Charleston, which we’ve visited more recently) with a spoken Lovecraft poem. A nice breather after the cartoons.

–
The Pit and the Pendulum (1964, Alexandre Astruc)

Back to the classics – this is our third Pendulum on the blog, sticking closer to the original Poe story since the Stuart Gordon and the Roger Corman added whole plots to expand out to feature length. This is the mid-60’s version of arthouse slow cinema, entranced narrator speaking the story we see playing out with Maurice Ronet (star of The Fire Within) alone in the torture chamber. His great idea with minutes left to live is to have the rats chew through his ropes – I’d think that would take longer, but it works. The walls close in to force him into the pit, then they stop short, because just then, at that moment, the 350-year reign of the Spanish Inquisition ends. So it’s pretty much just as narratively suspect as the Stuart Gordon, but nice and short. Astruc was a pre-Cahiers auteurist known for his blandly-titled feature Une Vie.

by ·Comments Off on Luca (2021, Pixar)

After Cars 3 and Onward, we nearly skipped another Pixar movie, but Luca was rescued by our needing to find something light to watch with family after Eurovision. Sea monsters can appear/act convincingly human when dry, and while their adults warn of brutal fishermen above the waves the kids dream of earthly wonders (book-learnin’, Vespas). The Call Me By Your Name joke similarities fell away pretty quickly, and it eventually becomes an uplifting story of universal acceptance without any of the hard parts in between, when local kids are exposed as sea monsters in the middle of a town with a generations-old fear of sea monsters, and everyone shrugs and celebrates a minute later. Sponsored by Vespa. Casarosa was last seen on the short before Brave with another story of sailors doing magical things.

by ·Comments Off on Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone (2007, Hideaki Anno)

Is it already five years since I watched the series? Afterwards I didn’t want to launch into the movie remakes until there was some evidence that the series would ever be completed, and now that part four has premiered, I’m diving in. It’s been long enough that I’m getting reacquainted with the characters and had forgotten some of the early plotting and the monster battle particulars, but not so long that the whole thing doesn’t feel somewhat redundant despite my poor memory. I guess I’d pictured more of a reimagining, a different style, instead of a minor tweaking of character art and background textures.

Same ol’ story: emo kid saves the world, again and again, becoming increasingly emo. The show is pretty good at mortifying Shinji – the only people who are ever nice to him for saving the world are a couple classmates, and that’s only after they beat him up.

by ·Comments Off on Films by Harry Smith 1939-1962

Not part of my slow delve into Film as a Subversive Art – my copy has no index, so I don’t yet know if Smith is covered within – rather a holdover from when I read Visionary Film. Quotes below are by Smith, as printed in the latter book.

–
Film No. 1 (1939)

Fast, blobby, hand-drawn animation morphs along a speckled screen. I likened the characters to amoebas, then blew my own mind thinking about the similarities between actions on a microscope slide and on a film frame. “The history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length.”

–
Film No. 2 (1941)

Full moon circles pendulum and pac-man across the screen, a 2×2 grid of squares joining them center screen.

–
Film No. 3 (1946)

Hashtag: The Movie… rectangles form the number sign, then more complicated grids and block patterns, some diamonds thrown into the mix, a lot more complex than the last couple films. The rapid-fire circles of the second movie broke up in compression artifacts on my video copy, but the brilliant colors of this one made up for that. “The most complex hand-drawn film imaginable.”

–
Film No. 4 (1947)

Short, using an actual camera I think. Familiar circle and grid shapes, as lights, smearing across the screen in multiple exposure blends. “Made in a single night.”

–
Film No. 5: Circular Tensions (1949)

The technique of the previous piece, refined and improved, with more colors coming in.

–
Film No. 7 (1951)

Long and great, a huge leap forward. Looks like someone got a proper animation rig (courtesy of the Guggenheim Foundation) and applied all his favorite colors, shapes and patterns to it – brings to mind Oskar Fischinger (I wrote this before discovering that Film No. 5 was aka Homage to Oskar Fischinger).

–
Film No. 10 (1956)

Another big change – instead of just shapes, we’ve got character-objects. They seem to be based on foreign historical/religious icons, dancing around and forming miniature pantomimes. “An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballa in the form of a collage.”

Snake made of eyeballs:

–
Film No. 11 (1956)

Some of the same religious icons/patterns as the previous movie, nicely synched to a Thelonious Monk piece. Possibly the previous films had also been synched, since per the literature, “Smith spoke of his films in terms of synesthesia, the search for correspondences between color and sound,” but the earliest films had no synched soundtracks, and Smith kept changing the music – including at one point awkwardly overlaying Meet The Beatles over the whole collection, as in my copy.

–
Film No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1962)

Small man with a hammer reconfigures objects, animals and women from/into pieces. Narrativish with sound effects, no music. Fully Gilliamesque, cut-out characters, always with something else hiding behind/beneath them. A house grows feet and walks off, machines with multi-hinged arms, umbrellas, syringes, eggs and watermelons, dripping liquid. One scene reminds me I haven’t seen Guy Maddin’s Odilon Redon in a while.

“8 shots for a quarter, win a kewpie doll,” funny to hear the carnival barker on the soundtrack the day after watching Gun Crazy. I don’t know if I can recommend watching 70 straight minutes of Harry Smith cutout animation. About the 20th time the magician brings out the hammer to reconfigure all nearby objects into new forms, I wondered if this wouldn’t be better served as an installation. And it might be appropriate to the depicted characters, but the sounds of crying babies and yowling cats never improve a movie.

“The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.”

by ·Comments Off on TV/Q2/2021

Search Party season 4 (2021)

Dory has been kidnapped by Chip (Cole Escola of Difficult People), spends the whole season trying to escape with no help from meddling neighbor Ann Dowd (Tater Channing’s mom in Side Effects) who also gets kidnapped then quickly murdered, and no help from Chip’s aunt Susan Sarandon, sent by the family to burn down the house as damage control. Before that Chip tries to Overboard Dory into thinking she’s had a trauma and they’re a happy couple. Meanwhile in the world, Portia is portraying Dory in a movie, Elliott’s right-wing TV co-host is killed by Chantal, Drew tries to escape it all and dates theme park princess Rebecca Robles. A proper search party ensues, things kinda work out – it’s probably a step up from season 3.

–
Archer season 8 (2017)

Dreamland season: comatose Archer dreams himself and his friends into a noirish period piece in which he’s avenging his dead partner (the actually dead Woodhouse). Feat. Jeffrey Tambor as the gangster-type who hires Detective Figgis, Eugene Mirman as a clueless rich guy, and Maggie Wheeler as New Yawk Trinette. Highlights: Pam’s houseful of secretly rescued women, Krieger’s pack of nazi robot dogs, robot Barry with a halberd. Proud of my former coworkers for working on a good show with a JG Thirlwell score.

–
The Thick of It season 3 (2009)

Picking up an entire decade after I watched season two, afraid I’d have no idea what’s happening due to both my ignorance about British politics and having forgotten the first two seasons. But of course the show is just a constant stream of inventive insults, which turned out to be precisely what I needed to destress after a work day. This season was elevated by Rebecca Front as the new Minister of Whatever, and a doubling-down on Malcolm’s character, who now takes over every episode until he’s sacked at the end of the season.

Capaldi getting sacked:

–
Solar Opposites season 1 (2020)

Another wicked Justin Roiland animated show full of refracted cultural references (Green Room callout in second episode). Grown-up aliens played by Roiland (brainy scientist typecast) and Thomas Middleditch (Silicon Valley) with two kids (one of whom keeps desperate shunken humans in the wall like an ant farm) and “the pupa” form a parody of a sitcom family, trying to fit in and eventually conquer (they kill a ton of humans every episode). Made me laugh, passed the time – late to the party, a third season is in the works. Andy Daly plays Tim, underdog hero of the people trapped in the wall, Alfred Molina his overlord rival, regular appearances by the usual gang of comedians and voice actors.

Terry, Corvo, Nanobots:

–
Moonbase 8 season 1 (2020)

How did I not hear from all corners that there was a comedy starring Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker and John C. Reilly as would-be astronauts? Maybe because it’s just pretty good and aired on Showtime.

Reilly with Atlanta’s own Ted Parker:

Armisen in mission mode:

–
Tales from the Tour Bus season 2 (2018)

Just as great as season one, with more interconnections between episodes since the funk scene was close-knit, until the standalone Betty Davis finale. George Clinton, Bootsy, James Brown and Morris Day (and indirectly Prince) are covered, and if the stories aren’t all better than the country season, the music and performance footage are. Katy will attest that I had to put the show on hold for a few months to recover after getting hit hard by the Rick James story.

Still the best story: