by ·Comments Off on Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens)

Feels like 10% doc, 90% light indie drama. There will be production noise (“cut… and that’s a wrap on Paul!”) in the blackout between scenes, puncturing the story of daughter Callie Hernandez following up on her late father’s inventions, interviewing friends/investors and other participants. But the actual documentary quantity is unknown, since people are playing version of themselves (others are played by fellow indie filmmakers), and the inventor dad was also real, playing himself in archival appearances on local TV. Courtney unpacks the precise true/false nature in a good Filmmaker interview, where they also discuss dads, “the mythology they have around themselves, and even fantasies about themselves, which as someone’s child you often enter because you’re very little, and it’s the way to be close to them and to love them.”

by ·Comments Off on Cat Soup shorts

Cat Soup (2001, Tatsuo Sato)

I don’t know Sato’s work, but I know animation producer Masaaki Yuasa, and this has got the wavy woozy quality of Yuasa’s features. A cat hits the town with his catatonic sister, whose soul was half-ripped by an evil shaman, and they experience all the major elements (desert, sea, time-freeze, soup) before landing back home. Incredible. One scene is set at the “Big Whale Circus,” making this part of the Werckmeister Harmonies universe. Sato is known for a series called Martian Successor, also did animated sequel series to both Ninja Scroll and Tokyo Tribe. There’s a separate Cat Soup series from the director of a Battle Angel Alita series.

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Little Pancho Vanilla (1938, Frank Tashlin)

Kid claims he’s a bullfighter, gets catapulted into the arena, lands on the bull and is awarded first prize. Not top-tier Tash, it passed the time.

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King-Size Canary (1947, Tex Avery)

Oh yeah, what if the cartoon had actual gags in it, wouldn’t that be better?

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The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (2011)

After a major storm, books become birdies and Morris becomes a bookseller where reading turns the enchanted town residents from b/w to color. It’s all too precious for me, but wonderfully assembled – no surprise it won the oscar (over the Brave-era short La Luna). The directors are suspiciously named Brandon and William Joyce – also suspicious that each one co-directed a different 2014 11-minute Edgar Allen Poe short.

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Seventh Master of the House (1966, Ivo Caprino)

Traveler asks a guy for a bed for the night, and gets sent to the guy’s father, and so on… then he gets the bed. It’s not much of a story, but it’s always good when our refined puppet animation devolves into increasingly bizarre characters until the final guy is shrunken to a quarter the height of his beard and resting in a horn hung on the wall. Some festival must’ve had a 12-minute minimum length so they added a framing story of a whitebeard man sitting in the snow writing this story (women do not exist in Norway).

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Three Inventors (1980, Michel Ocelot)

2D doily-paper cutout stop-motion, oooh. Family of inventors keep creating wonderful things. The town “notables,” having no vision or creativity themselves, conclude that the inventors must be criminal philistines, and a mob burns their house down, destroying everything that is beautiful.

Mouseover to operate the magic lace pipe-organ sewing-machine:
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Aftermath tells us it was only a movie:

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George and Rosemary (1987, Snowden & Fine)

Guy is obsessed with gal across the street, when he finally builds up the nerve to march over there he learns she’s been obsessed with him too. Oscar-nominated, but against two of the greats: Your Face and The Man Who Planted Trees.

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There Once Was a Dog (1982, Eduard Nazarov)

Guard dog is old and busted so he gets kicked out of the house, makes a deal with a wolf to get back into the family’s graces then repays the wolf with stolen food. Cute story and animation, and the would-be sentimental ending provided the biggest laugh of the night.

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Glens Falls Sequence (1937, Douglass Crockwell)

The kind of paint-meets-clay blending that I love in The Wolf House. In standard-def I can’t even tell the difference between the 2D and 3D layers sometimes, or maybe it’s all 2D, but it’s wonderful. Feels freeform, making up new patterns according to whim, but returning to some (sexual/creature/religious) themes, like McLaren meets Bickford. I was gonna say the music is sometimes overwhelming, but I got caught up in the visuals and forgot that it’s a silent film and I’d hit play on Matmos A Chance to Cut.

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Simple Destiny Abstractions (1938, Douglass Crockwell)

A later film, but feels like the early demos that became Glens Falls. We’ll call it the bonus tracks. An advertisement painter, Doug made crazy motion experiments at his home in eastern New York state.

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Mind the Steps! (1989, Istvan Orosz)

B/W Escher-sketch of a perspective-defying apartment building, sometimes telling little stories of residents or political oppression and sometimes just transforming things into other things. Scraps of warped sound effects and harmonica made me forget I wasn’t still playing the Matmos.

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Syrinx (1966, Ryan Larkin)

Sexy forest gods keep materializing then dissolving into abstraction. Music video for a flutey Debussy piece.

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America is Waiting (1981, Bruce Conner)

Also a music video, for a good Byrne/Eno song. Not just a montage of fun stock footage, he warps the meaning of some shots by running them in forward and reverse. Lotta fun. I should’ve read that giant Conner book in the Ross library when I had the chance. At least there’s Screen Slate:

The success of [Mongoloid] led to an invitation from Brian Eno and David Byrne to make America is Waiting, a parody of paranoia that remains depressingly relevant. Using sourced material from the 1950s, he criticized reactionary politics, Western individualism, the Reagan administration, and military violence. When MTV rejected the video as part of their early programming that same year, it proved that corporate media always sanitizes rebellion.

by ·Comments Off on The Doll (1919, Ernst Lubitsch)

Closeted heir marries an AI, relevant again 105 years later. He intends to, anyway, but the robot inventor’s assistant (a kid, the funniest character and best actor, who keeps trying to kill himself by drinking paint) busts the doll, and the inventor’s daughter covers by pretending to be the heir’s sex robot until they can repair it. Everything is gleefully artificial – the costumes and sets and acting all preposterous. I didn’t jibe with the organ soundtrack on the blu-ray, so – per the director’s original intent – I put on Nine Inch Nails Hesitation Marks as the soundtrack. I find myself playing Hesitation Marks all the time lately, Lubitsch knows why.

by ·Comments Off on Joy (2015, David O. Russell)

Joy (J. Lawrence) dreams of being an inventor, but then her life gets sidetracked with a husband (E. Ramirez), two kids, a divorce, a lazy mom (V. Madsen), an erratic dad (De Niro) and a spiteful sister. One day she hits on a new idea for a miracle mop, and sets to producing and marketing it, bringing the whole family along with dad’s rich girlfriend (I. Rossellini) and Joy’s supportive grandma (D. Ladd) and best friend. Then there are pricing and patent disputes. Then after everything has been pretty lousy and hopeless for Joy for an hour and fifty-eight minutes, she wins a major victory against a crooked business partner then becomes wildly successful in postscript.

It feels like Russell builds overcomplicated situations in American Hustle and Silver Linings Playbook, shoots the scenes with his trusted cast, and figures out how it’ll all work in the editing room, relying on energy and instinct to carry him through – and this time, he didn’t have it. The scenes and sporadic voiceover and transitions and characters often felt half-assed, and if I hadn’t known a distinguished filmmaker was behind the whole thing, I rarely would’ve guessed.

The cast gathers ’round to watch NAILED on cable:

T. Robinson:

Every character feels like a half-sketched first draft, awaiting development that never comes … The excruciatingly literal dialogue also feels like first draft material. “I feel like I’m in a prison,” Joy sighs about her house. Later, she and her supportive best friend Jackie reminisce about “all the things we used to dream about,” and Jackie introduces a flashback with “Remember the party where it all started?” Exposition inevitably comes either via Mimi’s gushing voiceover, or “As everyone here already knows…” speeches. Joy’s own emotional development consists of a recurring nightmare in which her childhood self scolds her for abandoning her ambitions.

M. Singer:

Lawrence is too good of an actress not to be watchable in the part, but she’s totally miscast as a divorced mother of two who’s been repeatedly beaten down by life’s disappointments. This part was meant for the Jennifer Lawrence of 2025, not the one of 2015.

by ·Comments Off on The Boxtrolls (2014, Laika)

Another delight from Laika. Think we both enjoyed this even more than Coraline. Insect-eating Boxtrolls live beneath the city, taking scraps and bits of shop signage from the above world and transforming them into machinery. Also they have a human boy who thinks he’s a boxtroll until, while fleeing from the town’s obsessive boxtroll exterminator Archibald Snatcher (whose reward for total extermination will be admittance to high-society cheese tastings), he bumps into a macabre little girl who helps him discover that he’s the long-lost son of a missing inventor.

I particularly liked the armatures.

Stop motion inventors with an obsession for cheese obviously brought to mind Wallace & Gromit, so we watched The Wrong Trousers a few nights later.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts watched February 2009

Torture Money (1937, Harold S. Bucquet)
Caught on TCM’s Oscar Month – this beat out Deep South and Should Wives Marry? for best two-reeler. A cop from the Bunco Squad goes undercover to investigate a ring of scammers who beat a guy up in a back room then fake a car accident complete with paid “witnesses” to fraud insurance companies. The scammers purposely run over a little girl, just in case insurance fraud wasn’t enough of a crime to get our attention. Our officer blends in successfully thanks to his knowledge of 30’s street slang and his ability to fake a hatred of cops. He’s chosen to be the “accident victim” (that’d be the titular torture), manages to contact his men, spring the trap and send the baddies to jail. I don’t recall the character names, so our cop was either George Lynn (I Was a Teenage Frankenstein) or Edwin Maxwell (The Great Moment, His Girl Friday). The director went on to better things (a Katharine Hepburn feature, the Dr. Kilgare series), as did the writer (T-Men, Robinson Crusoe On Mars).

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Three half-hour shorts from the 1997 Africa Dreaming series:

Sophia’s Homecoming (Richard Pakleppa, Namibia)
Sophia arrives in town after years in South Africa and finds that her husband, kids and sister aren’t so happy to see her. Turns out the sister and husband are in love… Soph tries to break it up, but when the sister says she’s expecting the husband’s baby, Sophia packs up her kids and returns to S. Africa. Other than a solo dish-destroying kitchen tantrum, there’s surprisingly little screaming and fighting, considering the situation.

Sabriya (Abderrahmane Sissako, Tunisia)
Hot, uninhibited, waterfall-loving foreign woman comes to town and shakes up the home life of a local chess-playing tavern dweller. He falls in love, but I think she leaves town without him at the end… I was too busy staring at the nice visuals and trying to remember scenes from Waiting For Happiness.

So Be It (Joseph Gai Ramaka, Senegal)
Doctor arrives in town (people are always arriving in town in these movies), sees a mute retarded kid who hangs around. Everyone seems to dump on the retarded kid… finally outta nowhere (actually I predicted it, but I was kidding) the townsfolk come with torches to kill the kid. Why? I dunno, but the doctor is right upset. The written description on the box calls it an African Heart of Darkness (although I would prefer an African Heart of Darkness to concern an adventurer from the Congo on a dangerous mission to England to retrieve a countryman who’d encamped in a rural British village up the Thames and established himself as a god among the locals). The box seems to know a lot that I couldn’t figure out from the movies. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention?

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Egged On (1926, Charley Bowers)

Charley invents an overly-complicated machine in his girlfriend’s parents’ barn which makes eggs unbreakable (rubbery, you open them with scissors) and aims to sell it to the egg-shipping industry. The investors are coming, but Charley has no eggs for the demonstration, so he fails to gather some in various ways. Finally gets an egg from a hen who’s been eating dynamite… test goes well until he hits the egg with a hammer to prove its indestructibility and destroys the whole barn. Worth watching for the scene shown below in which a batch of eggs, incubated by Charley’s car engine, hatch into hundreds of little cars in a massive and delightful stop-motion display.

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He Done His Best (1926, Charley Bowers)
Another one involving eggs, and complicated machinery, overall more entertaining then Egged On. Charley needs his girl’s dad’s consent for marriage, ends up working at his restaurant. Gets dad in union trouble, so invents an automatic server/cook machine (powered by stop-motion, natch). Dad is cheered immensely, girl holds wedding at the restaurant, but she’s marrying some other guy which is supposed to be a funny surprise but is instead kind of an anticlimactic ending after a great movie, a la Chaplin’s One A.M.
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Azur and Asmar (2006, Michel Ocelot)
Not supposed to be a short, but we ditched after 45 minutes because this was so bad. I can’t even think when’s the last time I walked out on a movie (though I remember itching to leave Sam Raimi’s The Gift). The critically-raved-on animation looked to me like weakly-puppeted low-detail Flash, and the story was going nowhere we couldn’t easily predict, so there seemed no point in staying. As a rule, I don’t put half-seen movies on the website, but I’m making an exception here and I don’t need a reason, nyeah.

Euro/African kids grow up with same mum/caretaker, Euro kid is sent away to become classy, African kid/mum is kicked out of house, sent back to whatever country to become super-rich merchants. Eurokid goes to africa, hides his blue eyes, runs into his mum and a hunchback liar fellow, and sets out to locate the three keys and marry some mythic fairy. Africa stuff is all Eurocentric wide-eyed wonder, and the other kid disappears for huge chunks of the movie, so the idea that we were seeing some kind of African tale faithfully told by a Frenchman went out the window.

Then we snuck into the animated shorts program and caught Varmints (Marc Craste) – wordless depresso-short with very good CGI about a bunny in a polluted Wall-E world trying to use his potted plant in order to get captured by giant floating jellyfish to live in meadowy heaven with the girl he met in the elevator – Gopher Broke (Blur Studios) – slick, commercial-looking animal comedy, unlucky gopher upsetting trucks on their way to the farmer’s market in order to get himself some food – Skhizein (Jeremy Clapin) – guy is hit by an asteroid and finds that his consciousness is some number of centimeters to the side of his body, neat premise but in the end it turns out he is just deranged – and Hot Dog and John and Karen which I’d already seen in The Animation Show 4 but played better with a crowd.

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Made in the middle of Capra’s streak of sincere, goodhearted dramas, a couple years before he ramped up for the war propaganda machine. I was excited to see this because I love Robbie Fulks’ song about loving Jean Arthur, but I didn’t end up loving the movie’s Jean Arthur more than I love the song Jean Arthur. Maybe Robbie was watching A Foreign Affair, or Shane, or a different Capra film.

A corporate-greed movie, pretty funny for a self-important serious-issues drama, but still feels a tad long and obvious. Jimmy Stewart is in love with his secretary Jean Arthur, but their parents disapprove. Jimmy’s very rich & proper dad owns the huge business of which Jimmy is vice-president, and Jean’s dad (Lionel Barrymore) is a giddy eccentric who lives in a house where everyone does whatever they please (which mostly means dancing and making fireworks). Ends up in jail, then in court, with Barrymore’s lifestyle on trial. Can the stuffy rich people learn to lighten up just a bit, and can the nutty eccentrics learn to conform just a bit, so that their star-crossed lover children can be happy? Of course!

Lionel Barrymore is swell as the good-hearted old commie, but better is Donald Meek as a formerly repressed corporate bookkeeper who goes to live in Barrymore’s house, gleefully inventing and exploding things. Also cool is Russian dance instructor Mischa Auer (seen almost twenty years later in my second-to-last screenshot in Mr. Arkadin) whose strict manner clashes comically with the rest of the Barrymore house.

Lionel Barrymore (right, of Tod Browning and Lubitsch movies, later in Duel in the Sun and Key Largo) shames Edward Arnold (left, in the movies since 1916, played Webster in The Devil and Daniel Webster)
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Donald Meek is charmed by Lionel Barrymore:
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Small-headed Mischa Auer with God’s Jean Arthur.
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