by ·Comments Off on A Looney Tunes Thanksgiving

After a Thanksgiving feast I brought out a bunch of Looney Tunes in shiny HD. “Who doesn’t love Looney Tunes,” I thought. Turns out it’s everyone but me. That’s who doesn’t love Looney Tunes.

Book Revue (1964, Robert Clampett)

Bunch of book puns, most of which flew over our heads, then Daffy Duck shows up as “Danny Boy”. He saves Red Riding Hood from the wolf. Everyone is impressed with Frank Sinatra. It’s quite confusing. Love the use of random newspaper articles as backgrounds.

Devil May Hare (1954, Robert McKimson)

Introduction of the Tazmanian Devil character, whom Bugs torments then finally defeats by hooking him up with a lady devil.

Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (1953, Chuck Jones)

Great one, full of disintegration-ray jokes. Daffy is Duck Dodgers, Porky his trusty assistant, and they fight Marvin for control over Planet X.

Feed the Kitty (1952, Chuck Jones)

One of my faves. Wasn’t appreciated by my menagerie.
Dog enamored with cute kitten, takes him home, thinks his owner has baked the kitten into a batch of cookies, cries, is reunited with kitten.

Rabbit Hood (1949, Chuck Jones)

Bugs is caught stealing the king’s carrots by the sheriff of Nottingham, messes with him relentlessly, occasionally interrupted by a dim-witted Little John. There’s no actual Robin Hood until the very end when Errol Flynn appears via a clip from The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Rabbit of Seville (1950, Chuck Jones)

On a theater stage by accident, Bugs torments Elmer while pretending to enact the Barber of Seville. Quite excellent, but only a prelude to the even greater What’s Opera, Doc.

And a couple I’ve written up before:

One Froggy Evening (1955, Chuck Jones)

Influenced by a Cary Grant movie called Once Upon a Time, according to wikipedia.

What’s Opera, Doc (1956, Chuck Jones)

Voted the greatest cartoon of all time, a more stylized opera rendition than Seville, Elmer with his spear and magic hellllmet.

by ·Comments Off on Dogs & Cows (Bill Plympton)

The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger (2010)

Because the advertising billboard looks cool. Then he finds out the horrible truth and with his mom’s help, rebels against the burger factory. Has a different look, Bill says he drew with sharpie on small sheets of paper, and I believe he said painter Kandisky was his coloring inspiration.

Gary Guitar (2007)

Gary invites Vera Violin out. Obstacles threaten to derail their picnic, but Gary is prepared for almost anything, and friend/annoyance Danny Drum helps out with the rest. Was meant to be a pilot.

Gary makes the mother of all sandwiches, which will later be used as a weapon against a fire-breathing robot:

Waiting For Her Sailor (2012)

One minute, one gag, but a good one.

Summer Bummer (2012)

Colored-pencil illistration of unrealistic fears of sharks in swimming pools.

The Flying House (1921, Winsor McCay)

Kickstarter-fueled restoration of McCay’s final film (a predecessor to Up), using McCay’s newspaper cartoons for color reference. I had Mr. Show flashbacks when they blew up the moon.

Tiffany The Whale (2012)

Rivalry between two top runway models, a woman with huge blonde hair, and a whale. Long and talky – I’m surprised Bill meant this to be a pilot as well, since I’m not sure where else you can take a whale-as-model story.

Drunker than a Skunk (2013)

Cool poem by Walt Curtis (subject of Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche and of an hour-long doc by Plympton). The poem’s partly lost under music and effects so I watched this twice, but the animation is wonderful – my favorite on the disc.

Horn Dog (2009)

Finally I get to see the fourth dog film. The dog finds love in the park. Tries to give her gifts, but imagines terrible repercussions a la Guard Dog. Finally settles on a violin serenade but accidentally kills her owner.

Guard Dog Global Jam (2011)

Based on a Marv Newland concept called Anijam, Plympton coordinated online to get animators to recreate Guard Dog, one shot each. The best bit: the guy with the laughing-girl shot subcontracted each frame to different illustrators. Good story on the commentary about this film’s near-failure – submissions were open and they thought nobody was signing up, but really it was so many people the server crashed.

and from the Cheatin’ blu-ray:

The Gastronomic Shark (Bill Plympton)

A very silly, very short, bad-taste piece on human meal options for sharks.

There’s more on the Dogs & Cows disc, commissioned shorts and extras, which I haven’t explored yet.

by ·Comments Off on November 2015 Shorts

The Benaki Museum (2013, Athina Tsangari)

Lovely seven-minute advertisement for a Greek museum narrated by Willem Dafoe, children acting as curators, interacting with ancient artworks.

The Boy Who Saw the Iceberg (2000, Paul Driessen)

Crazy… split-screen with a boy’s ordinary day on the left and his imagination (which usually involves being captured and making a daring escape on the right. Then he and his family die when travelling on a boat that hits an iceberg. The imagination side takes another minute to adjust to this ending. Animation is fluid, doodly and wonderful. Driessen is Dutch, has a long career of award-winning shorts.

The Lost Thing (2010, Tan & Ruhemann)

Dude is collecting bottlecaps when he finds a Lost Thing (sort of an armored contraption with mechanical parts, jingle bells and tentacles), seeks its origins, finally returns it to a secret area in the city where crazy mecha-organic beasts all live. Won the oscar, same year as Day & Night. Tan created the source book, Ruhemann lately produced something called Chuck Norris vs. Communism.

Zerox and Mylar (1995, Joel Brinkerhoff)

Wicked one-minute claymation thing. Cat wants to lure mouse, paints his hand like a lady mouse, but mouse traps the lady-mouse-hand and has his way with it/her. Brinkerhoff is obviously a madman, apparently worked on Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension, which is on one of the Looney Tunes blu-rays.

The Temptation of Mr. Prokouk (1947, Karel Zeman)

Mr. Prokouk is building his own house when he’s tempted by the evils of alcohol. After going on a massive bender and literally losing his head, he recovers, murders the ghostly barrel-shaped liquor salesman who got Prokouk hooked on the stuff, and continues with the house building. I dig the little birds who build a nest on his sign.

Mr. Schwarzwald’s and Mr. Edgar’s Last Trick (1964, Jan Svankmajer)

Svankmajer’s first short! Stop-motion, live actors, painting and puppetry, all very well blended, with extreme close-ups, frequent zooms and super fast edits. So JS was accomplished at making great-looking, creepy films from the very start. Two wooden-mask-faced magicians take turns performing elabotate tricks, aggressively shaking hands after each one, until the handshake turns lethal and they tear each other apart.

Your Acquaintance aka The Journalist (1927, Lev Kuleshov)

A 15-minute excerpt from a feature. Possibly Kuleshov’s follow-up to the great Dura Lex – IMDB isn’t so clear on Russian cinema. Aleksandra Khokhlova (Kuleshov’s wife, crazy Edith from Dura Lex) is a newspaper columnist who gets fired for turning in an article late while she was distracted by a handsome rich man. That’s about all I got from this fragment, plot-wise.

Edition Filmmuseum:

She is a modern woman, in-your-face and interesting in both the way she dresses and the way she handles the men who surround her in her everyday working life: she writes almost all of them off as wimps but the one she loves, a functionary, proves to be a conformist: disappointment ensues … The mise-en-scène is unique, with razor-sharp contours and extreme lighting provided on the one hand by Aleksandr Rodchenko with his constructivist design of the materialistic world, and on the other hand by cameraman Konstantin Kuznecov with his “svetotvorchestvo” (light-making) already known from [Dura Lex].

The Tony Longo Trilogy (2014, Thom Andersen)

A found-footage piece, Andersen taking three films and isolating only the scenes with imposing character actor Tony Longo in them. Tony is an ineffective doorman in The Takeover, is seeking Justin Theroux in Mulholland Dr., and fights with Rob Lowe before being murdered by Jim Belushi in Living in Peril. Why was Thom Andersen watching Tony Longo movies? Tony died soon after this came out, unrelated to the fact that IMDB says he was once struck in the mouth by lightning.

Cinema Scope:

What makes the videos in The Tony Longo Trilogy both exciting and frivolous is that it’s not terribly difficult to imagine Andersen repeating the operation for Tony Longo’s other hundred-odd screen credits, or, to push the idea to its limit, for anyone who’s ever appeared in a motion picture.

Riot (2015, Nathan Silver)

Home movies of 9-year-old Nathan reenacting the LA riots in his back yard wearing a Ren & Stimpy shirt

Uncle (1959, Jaromil Jires)

Kid in crib makes friends with the thief breaking into his house. Jires’s second short, still in film school. Uncle Vlastimil Brodsky was already an established actor, would later star in many Jiri Menzel films and Autumn Spring.

Tramwaj (1966, Krzysztof Kieslowski)
Silent… guy is miserable at a party, so leaves and gets on a dismal night train where he tries to impress a sleepy girl. One of Kieslowski’s first shorts, made in film school.

Logorama (2009, Alaux & Houplain & de Crecy)

Fantastic concept, a world made only of corporate logos. The writing and voice acting could’ve been better though. After creating this graphic-design logo monstrosity, they fill it with some sub-Tarantino cops-and-robbers shootout stuff, Michelin cops fighting a rogue Ronald McDonald. Logorama beat A Matter of Loaf and Death at the oscars, also won awards at Cannes and the Cesars. Two of the directors went on to make a tie-in short to a Tom Clancy video game series. David Fincher did a voice, along with the writer of Se7en and a guy with small roles in half of Fincher’s movies.

Sniffer (2006, Bobbie Peers)

Sniffer works as a deodorant tester in a world where people wear metal boots to keep from floating off. One day after seeing a pigeon crash into a window, Sniffer decides it’d be nice to float off, and unstraps his boots. Norwegian, I think.

The Foundry (2007, Aki Kaurismaki)

Seen this before in an anthology but now it’s available in HD so I watched again.

by ·Comments Off on My Winnipeg Redux

I rewatched My Winnipeg in glorious (glorious!) high definition. Great extras on the blu-ray: shorts and an hour-long interview with Maddin. “I liked the idea of leaping from one subject to another with that paranoiac certainty that the two are connected.”

Spanky to the Pier and Back (2008)

In which Spanky walks to the pier and back. I’ve watched this one before. Inspired by From Munich to Berlin by Oskar Fischinger, edited in-camera. “Spanky was my best friend at the time.”

Sinclair (2010)

Camera slowly spins around a plain white room with wide angle lens, Sinclair passed out in a wheelchair to one side, tuneless doom music on the soundtrack. The second half (at least) is a single take, unusual for fast-cut freak Maddin. Guy says it’s a protest film about the death of a native paraplegic in an emergency room, shot in the style of La Region Centrale.

Only Dream Things (2012)

Mesmerising. Low-framerate, Begotten-processed home movie footage overlaid with dream images, pop songs and swimmy sound effects. The home movies were shot by his older brothers, from “the summers of our lives before anything went wrong.”

The Hall Runner (2014)

“When you’re gone I have no memory.”
Extension on the My Winnipeg bit about rugs that can never be adequately straightened.

Louis Riel for Dinner (2014, Drew Christie)

A girl is alarmed that the duck her dad has cooked for dinner has the head of Winnipeg hero Louis Riel. Animated!

Winnipegiana (2014, Evan Johnson)

“The city blighted by these sickly trees is a city that dreams too much and lives too little.”

A series of wonderful “educational” shorts with a verbose narrator whose scripts only barely make sense. Johnson is Maddin’s codirector of The Forbidden Room.

Since that still wasn’t enough Maddin-on-Winnipeg, I also read the book of the film, with the script, another interview, deleted scenes, rough drafts, photos, scans, collaborator essays and more.

Now, back to worrying over the eleven minutes supposedly cut from The Forbidden Room since its Sundance premiere, and whether they’ll be on the Kino blu-ray out in March.

by ·Comments Off on Dog Days and more (1991-2008, Bill Plympton)

Bill Plympton came to town! I prepped by rewatching his Dog Days DVD, various shorts from other sources, and the feature Idiots & Angels.

Guard Dog (2004)

One of the first films he made without a film camera: colored pencil on paper, scanned into computer.

Guide Dog (2006)

Inspired by Charles Addams, a cartoonist who focused on death and violence. The DVD commentaries seem straightforward, but then he says he assumes he didn’t get complaints from blind people about Guide Dog because they didn’t see the film.

Hot Dog (2008)

Don’t know why I was harsh to some of these shorts in past posts, since the Plympton dog is one of my favorite animated characters. Think I overdosed on Plympton shorts a few years back and had to decompress.

Shut-Eye Hotel (2007)

Cops check in to Shut-Eye Hotel to figure out why clients who stay on the top floor wake up without heads. The culprit: a pillow with teeth. Bill says this was his first use of computer animation, but it didn’t work out financially, and he was testing out a color scheme he’d use in Idiots & Angels.

Spiral (2005)

“You think it’s easy bein’ abstract?” A circle, square and triangle are performing a repetitive abstract dance until the audience starts shooting at them. Inspired by an exasperating (and state-funded) screening of a Paul Glabicki short twenty years prior.

Santa, The Fascist Years (2008)

“They called it blitzenkrieg.” Narrated, animated newsreel of when Santa turned to weapon manufacture, invading neighboring countries to obtain raw materials. Nice Great Dictator reference.

The Fan and the Flower (2005)

Great love story from sitcom writer Dan O’Shannon.

How to Make Love to a Woman (1995)

First, finding the right woman. Then body parts, kissing, hugging, etc, all calmly explained by a narrator, always ending in grievous harm to the man onscreen.

Push Comes To Shove (1991)

Two guys hurt each other in ever more inventive ways.
Didn’t this used to run on MTV?
One of my favorites.

The Exciting Life of a Tree (2000)

Tree’s-eye-view of dangerous forest life.

Luv Race (2008)

Live event combining a dating game with a track race. Where’d this come from? Apparently a commissioned film, no credits. Chrome tried to translate the page at gauguins.com, came up with “Bill Plympton (Bill Plympton). This is the American NY resident, but is not Bill Clinton, you can find those.”

Also watched a couple musical segments from The Tune (1992) including No Nose Blues (“Talk is cheap, oh but so are you”) and Flooby Nooby (all puns, with a huckster singer who hilariously can’t handle the song’s whistling chorus) … a 2001 TV special for Cartoon Network called 12 Tiny Christmas Tales … and a great Weird Al video.

Don’t Download This Song:

by ·Comments Off on Cinétracts and other Chris Marker shorts

Cinétracts (1968)

I watched a collection containing roughly half of the Cinetracts, an anonymously-directed series of two-to-five-minute shorts. The first few seemed to be protest-photo montages, and I thought watching a bunch of these in a row would be tiresome so I spaced it out over a few weeks. Some are very different though, telling stories/poems with intertitles or scrawling words directly onto the photos, using different forms of movement and speeds of editing. Some use zooms and dissolves, bringing the photos to life, others are simply long takes of photos interspersed with titles, wordplay, pages from books.

Contributors supposedly included Godard, Marker, Resnais, Gorin, Philippe Garrel (same year he made Le Révélateur), Jackie Raynal (editor on half the Six Moral Tales), Jean-Denis Bonan (Jean Rollin’s editor at the time), Gerard Fromanger and Jacques Loiseleux (later cinematographer for Ivens, Pialat and Yves Boisset). Marker was busy – this project overlapped his SLON collective and Groupe Medvedkine.

Gary Elshaw has by far the most useful work on the Cinetracts online, even if it’s only about Godard’s contributions.

The purpose of the Ciné-Tracts, as with most of Godard’s 1968 film projects, was to offer a critically alternative source of ‘news’ or information in contrast to the commercially offered mediums available. … The state censorship of the media throughout the events of May necessitated communication along different lines than had existed before.

Other online writing on these tends to focus on determining which ones Godard made (and they can’t seem to agree).

–
Casque Bleu (1995)

Info dump by a cynical Frenchman who acted as a UN peacekeeper during one of the Yugoslav wars. He speaks rapidly in close-up, with occasional title cards for different topics and cutaways to a photo album.

“When you’re in a country at war, armed, and you have orders not to use weapons, in actual fact you are on the side of the aggressor, the one who’s trying to conquer the land.”

–
Description of a Struggle (1960)

Watched this again with much improved picture quality and English voiceover. Had been burning to see it again since watching Dan Geva’s Description of a Memory. Still great, but I think I prefer Sunday in Peking. Noticed this time when the voiceover said “bar kokhba,” which is apparently not only the name of a John Zorn music project.

by ·Comments Off on Summer Shorts 2015

La Luxure (1962, Jacques Demy)

Demy’s segment on lechery from The Seven Capital Sins anthology. Nice long takes, light musical feel, made right after Lola. Unshaven Jean-Louis Trintignant (My Night at Maud’s) tells his relentless ladies-man buddy Laurent Terzieff (La Prisonnière) about his early misunderstandings of the word lechery, feat. flashbacks and hell-sequences. Jean Desailly (The Soft Skin) and Micheline Presle (The Nun, A Lady Without Camelias) play flashback-Trintingnant’s parents. Quite a bit of rhyming and wordplay that’s probably not coming through in the subtitles.

Terzieff:

Puppy Love (2003, Michael Colton)

Watched some clips from the Illegal Art comp, similar to the shorts that Craig Baldwin showed in Atlanta. In this one, a dog is in love with a pikachu.

Black Thunder (2001, Brian Spinks, Bill Wasik & Eugene Mirman)

Short series of campaign ads for animals running for office.
I’m voting for the bear.

Incident by a Bank (2009, Ruben Ostlund)

Single take recreation of a comically failed bank robbery.

O Velho do Restelo (2014, Manoel de Oliveira)

Actors playing Don Quixote, author Camilo Castelo Branco and two others discuss Portuguese culture, with flashbacks to Oliveira films such as Doomed Love and Non.

Stardust (2013, Mischa Rozema)

Some beautiful celestial effects.

Haiku (2009, Frederick Wiseman)

Lion / Waiting / Legs

Haiku (2009, Naomi Kawase)

Cicada / Sunrise / Flower

Haiku (2009, Alain Cavalier)

Train / Poster of bearded man / Bearded Man
Nicely done, in one take.

Idem Paris (2013, David Lynch)

While art prints of a Lynch painting are being pressed, Lynch stalks the press, enamored with the clanking gears and spinning wheels.

by ·Comments Off on Béla Tarr Roundup

Tarr Bela, I Used To Be a Filmmaker (2013, Jean-Marc Lamoure)

A making-of-The Turin Horse. Crazy the amount of work, the lighting and helicopters and camera rehearsals and actor-torturing that went into this. Tarr’s movies tend to look primitive and masterfully complicated at once (see: opening shot of the horse and cart) and it seems like a behind-the-scenes documentary could demystify it to death, but I’d already seen set-building stills and couldn’t help myself from wanting to know more. Even when they show the scene construction then immediately play the scene, it’s still just as powerful.

Also watched part of The Turin Horse again with Jonathan Rosenbaum’s audio commentary. Can’t recall if this is a direct quote or not, but he calls it possibly the only Bela Tarr film that’s not a comedy. Writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai has a terrific paragraph on their collaboration quoted in the commentary about 42 minutes in, which I played back a bunch of times, also written here. “Making films isn’t a matter of fairness.”

–
Damnation (2013, Janice Lee)

“This is no weather for men to live in.”

Been looking forward to this book for a long time, but it turns out it wasn’t for me. Maybe the endless anticipation and delay didn’t help – after all, I read Susan Howe’s Chris Marker book the same day I first heard about it, and the surprise of its existence added to the enjoyment, but this one had already gone from pleasure to chore by the time I began. The ebook was sent to me by the publisher before it came out (thank you! apologies for this “review” and the two-year delay). I prepped by watching the Bela Tarr film, then discovered that I hate reading books on my laptop, so kept pushing it aside after trying to start a few times.

Opens as a biblical Pontypool–Flame Alphabet apocalypse, and heads into variations on Tarr/Krasznahorkai worlds: guys compared to dogs, sleeping with neighbors’ wives, watching the endless rain. Ruined towns, howling wind, blank pages like the blackouts between scenes. Some more specific characters, like a drunken Satantango doctor, a disturbed girl in the barn with a scared cat, a lingering accordion player. Speaking of Pontypool (the book, not the movie), there are too many points of view, and much language repetition that felt like it was building a poetic flow which I couldn’t follow at all.

–
Hotel Magnezit (1978, Bela Tarr)

Belligerent Uncle Tibi is getting kicked out of hostel, has money problems with his roommates. This was Béla Tarr’s graduation film, and is my first exposure to his earlier verite-style.

From the uncredited film description: “First he offends and attacks all of his roommates, then he starts to cry and tells them that he was a pilot in WWII and he’s left his soul there. An interesting portrait of human reactions and changing emotions.”

by ·Comments Off on White (1994, Krzysztof Kieslowski)

Still my least favorite of the trilogy, though it’s less mean-spirited than I remember it (final image of Julie Delpy seeking reconciliation after her ex has her falsely imprisoned is mostly what I’ve remembered). Delpy’s in the movie for about five minutes – it’s mostly about her ex-husband Karol trying to get back on his feet after their divorce. She (maliciously) leaves him homeless and unemployed, but he befriends a fellow Pole while begging in the Paris metro, gets back to Poland, earns a fortune in a realty scheme, starts a shady import business, then frames Delpy for his own faked murder. The plot description sounds worse than the film itself, and the character described in paragraph form sounds like a total dick, while Karol seems more cuddly in person.

Karol is Zbigniew Zamachowski, who starred with his hairdresser brother Jerzy Stuhr in the final Decalogue segment, in which they also played brothers. Karol’s Gabriel Byrne-looking Polish friend is Janusz Gajos, a lead in the fourth Decalogue. This won best director in Berlin (vs. Philadelphia and Smoking/No Smoking)

K.K.: “The subject of the film is humiliation – men are not, and do not want to be, equal. The film is also about equality.” His cowriter Piesiewicz: “I knew very well that people in fact didn’t want to be free. All consumerism and advertising is based on us not being equal. Equality of opportunity, yes. But what does that mean? What’s needed most is empathy…”

Also watched the great Talking Heads short again, and…

Seven Women of Different Ages (1979, Kieslowski)

Dancers at different stages. First: young girls being pulled into position by a patient teacher, then older girls being screamed at by an abusive teacher. Rehearsal, then on stage, then a terrified-looking woman doing a routine. An understudy, watching closely but not actually practicing the moves. Finally an instructor of young girls the age of the first segment – I wondered if it’s the actual teacher from that segment, but it’s not. Fits in well with Talking Heads, obviously.