by ·Comments Off on Venezia 70 Future Reloaded (2013), part 2

The Venice Film Festival posted 70-ish short films online to commemorate their 70th anniversary. I watched them gradually over the past year. These are the ones I did not care for. Favorites are here and the rest here.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Visual: driving straight road in the rain through wipers
Audio: ocean with seagulls

Jean-Marie Straub

Single silent shot of pages relaying some quotes about death in a couple of French films.

Lluís Galter

Fuzzy slow-mo long shots of people near water.

Karim Aïnouz

Search party? Man in orange vest with flashlight helmet vanishes into mist.

Bernardo Bertolucci – Red Shoes

Electric Wheelchair drives over rough street.

Amos Gitai

Still photos of a man on beach crossfade while Jeanne Moreau speaks of a poem (or perhaps not literally a poem).

Lav Diaz

Handheld shot through an upper-floor window as an elderly person slowly walks down the street, then a poetic voiceover kicks in.

Todd Solondz

Ridiculous course catalog of a Chinese film history program 1000 years in the future, using an early-80’s-looking screen with early-90’s-sounding text-to-speech.

Marlen Khutsiev – In Perpetuum Infinituum

Chekhov and Tolstoy are having a motion-picture portrait taken. Then: champagne, war footage, a brass band and a giant Viva Cinema intertitle.

Tobis Lindholm – The Hit

Two camoflaged jeeps are driving. Bomb!

Claire Denis

Overheard conversation gives way to a noisy Tindersticks song. Is it that she can’t be bothered to find new music, or does she truly love Tindersticks that much? Camera seems to be inside a bag or under a scarf – I’m not convinced this short was even made on purpose.

Rama Burshtein

Man is told to open his mouth. Finally he does. A dance song plays. Hunh?

Semih Kaplanoglu – Devran

Static shot of – what’s that, a tree? – with audio of thunderstorm and constant firefly flicker.

Franco Piavoli

Fire and yelling, then children and sunsets.

Amiel Courtin-Wilson

Rough-looking man plays a prolonged Amazing Grace on harmonica in close-up.

Tusi Tamasese

Stills of some leaves, then of two people doing… I don’t know what, since it’s over already.

Michele Placido – Yorick’s Speech

Old guy says the youth of today are the future of filmmaking while a banal pop song plays.

Julio Bressane

Silent 16mm clips, then clips from 1960’s period epics, something like that.

by ·Comments Off on Venezia 70 Future Reloaded (2013), part 1

The Venice Film Festival posted 70-ish short films online to commemorate their 70th anniversary. I watched them gradually over the past year. These are the ones I especially liked. Least favorites are here and the rest here.

Shinya Tsukamoto – Abandoned Monster

A giant robot vs giant monster film that handily beats Pacific Rim, co-directed by a kid (his son?)

Athina Rachel Tsangari – 24 Frames Per Century

Two film projectors on an island aim picture over the ocean, running only a frame per few seconds, and as the reel runs out a woman appears to insert the new one and switch over.

Paul Schrader

Paul wears a harness of cameras pointing at himself, walks the city giving a monologue about cinema which is worth transcribing in full.

Paul Schrader on the High Line, May 29th, 2013. When I first came into the film business it was a time of crisis. Society was in upheaval. There was a drug revolution, sex revolution, gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, anti-establishment, and the times required new heroes, new themes for movies, and we had about fifteen years of interesting film. Motion pictures are again in a time of crisis – only today it is a crisis of form, not a crisis of content. We don’t know quite what movies are. We don’t know how long they are. We don’t know how you see them, where you see them, how you pay for them. Feels more like 1913 than 2013. Everything is being made up on the fly. The idea of filmed entertainment is undergoing a systematic change. Every week brings another change. No one knows for sure what it’ll be like. It won’t be a projected image in a dark room in front of an audience – that’s 20th century. I also know that content is character, story, theme. Form is delivery systems. Content is the wine and form is the bottle. There is no content without form. There is no wine without the bottle. When the form is changing, content can’t stabilize. You can’t make a revolutionary film in the middle of a revolution. My concern is that this period of transition we’re going through may not in fact be a transition at all, but a new status of permanent technological change, which never stabilizes, will never resolve itself to the point where content can again reign supreme.

Yorgos Lanthimos

A proper drama with full credits. Two girls have a pistol duel.

Yonfan

Costume dance!

Salvatore Mereu

Young goat herder is watching movie on his phone that starred older goat herder many years ago – presumably something by Vittorio De Seta, since the short was dedicated to him.

Catherine Breillat

Hilariously self-deprecating – a café monologue about cinema’s ties to money and power is interrupted by some kids on their way to see a movie, but not the new Breillat because “I want something light, not to have to think.”

Walter Salles

Two photographs taken minutes before new popes were announced, while a woman tells a story of her absent mother who sent her a letter. “I keep you inside of me, like a film I watch and watch without ever tiring.”

Abbas Kiarostami

Laughing kid directs a remake of The Sprinkler Sprinkled.

Samuel Maoz

Hilarious digital representation of “the death of cinema”

Milcho Manchevski

Ironic piece about people engrossed in their portable devices – one girl watches a video about people on the street failing to notice some tragedy, ponders the video while walking right past another tragedy everyone is failing to notice.

Franco Maresco – The Last Lion

Hammy gangster type sings happy birthday to the festival in front of a giant cake and two silent twins, then devours the golden lion cake topper.

Aleksei Fedorchenko

Close-up split-screen faces of people dreaming movies (with sfx)

Ulrich Seidl – Hakuna Matata

Three guys say “Hakuna Matata” mantra-like, four times. Then three guys in a different setting, standing together in the same way, same action. Finally two of the original guys sweeping the floor. I have no idea what it means but I liked it.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched 2014 in Atlanta

The Signalman (1976 Lawrence Gordon Clark)

A fellow with too much time on his hands stops to visit a train signalman (Denholm Elliott of Brimstone & Treacle), whose apparent job is to live in a little house next to a train tunnel signaling whether another train is approaching or not, never leaving his post. The signalman tells of a ghostly visitor, who appears next to the tunnel apparently warning him of something, always shortly before a train accident. The final time he sees the spectre, he runs out to confront it and is killed by a train. Based on a Charles Dickens story, a good little movie.

Anger Sees Red (2004 Kenneth Anger)

Guy in red hat visits Rudolph Valentino’s grave, lays down, walks about.
Looks like this was shot by just anyone with a camera, not by a sixty-year filmmaking veteran.

Edgar Allen Poe (1909 DW Griffith)

Woman (played by Linda Arvidson, Griffith’s wife) awakens and stumbles around a room before collapsing into bed. Poe (Barry O’Moore, who’d later find fame as Octavius, the Amateur Detective), dressed like Jeffrey Combs in The Black Cat, gesticulates wildly towards a Melies-trick raven, dashes off a quick poem and runs to the newspaper, where he’s roundly dismissed, gesticulating wildly. But he argues his way into the editor’s office, sells the poem, runs home with blankets and food, but his wife has just died. He responds by gesticulating wildly.

Jabberwocky (1971 Jan Svankmajer)

A stop-mo masterpiece from the ass-slapping percussive opening credits on. A girl reads the poem on the soundtrack for the first couple minutes, then Jan runs out of poem and just riffs for the next ten. Love how objects appear and grow using replacements of progressively larger objects. As usual, he obsesses over dolls and food. Funny that two very different stop-motion animators would make Jabberwocky movies in the 1970’s.

Herzog and the Monsters (2007 Lesley Barnes)

Motion graphics, 3D camera moves, typography and a groovy song tell the story of Herzog, living in his grandmother’s house full of books but not allowed to touch them.

Johnny Express (2014 Kyungmin Woo)

Overrated delivery man has a scale problem when attempting to deliver a microscopic package to a tiny planet, wrecks planet, kills everyone. But it’s very funny.

The Dover Boys at Pimento University (1942 Chuck Jones)

Gag-filled parody of stories where square college boys save damsels from drunkard villains.

Sculpting Sound: The Art of Vinyl Mastering (2014 The Vinyl Factory)

Only six minutes – I wouldn’t have started watching it if it’d been three times longer, but now that I’ve watched, and half its runtime was stock footage of archaic gear and focus-pulls on the modern engineers’ dials and knobs, I want to know more specifics, for instance to follow a song through the recording, engineering, mastering and pressing process, hear exactly how the nature of the sound changes at each step. Can somebody do this please? Music in the doc by James “UNKLE” Lavelle

Also: saw more making-of footage of The Day The Clown Cried online, now with an on-set Pierre Etaix interview (in french).

by ·Comments Off on Atlanta Film Festival 2014 Animated Shorts

The Scarecrow (Limbert Fabian & Brandon Oldenburg)

Seen this before online, because it is an ad for Chipotle. It’s a great ad, but still, ads do not count as movies. Checked out the codirectors’ follow-up, a Dolby ad called Silent, on Vimeo when I got home, a cute piece to show alongside that Mickey Mouse Get a Horse movie. The directors previously worked together on Spy Kids 2.

Strange Wonderful (Stephanie Swart)

Inside the psyche of the school monster, whose fishbowl helmet goes unappreciated in the recess yard.

Confusion Through Sand (Danny Madden)

Daaaaamn, drawn and photographed on differently textured recycled paper, wild perspective-jumping desert battle scene.

The Magnificent Lion Boy (Ana Caro)

Explorer finds feral boy, brings back to London, tries to make feral boy comb his hair and sit still for church while a freak show operator hopes to capture him. Tragedy ensues. If you need a stuffy british guy you get Hugh Bonneville and if you need a guy who acts like an animal you get Andy Serkis, so they did. Animation looks like they erase part of the frame and redraw, fascinating. Funny to watch this right after having seen Feral.

Crime (Alix Lambert & Sam Chou)

Episode of an animated series in which a Hartford CT resident has trouble with car thieves and then bigger trouble with the police.

Fingers Tale (Luca Schenato & Sinem Vardarli)

Time stops at noon and people’s fingers and toes detach and go on adventures, alongside other objects like knives and spiral-cut coke-can monsters. Tragedy ensues. From Turkey!

Dji Death Fails (Dmitri Voloshin)

Grim Reaper accidentally resuscitates the guy whose soul he was coming to take. Fun from Moldova, wherever that is.

Snowdysseus (Evan Curtis)

Stop-motion must be difficult in the snow. I didn’t totally get it, but it involved an astronaut and skeletons.

The Wanderer of Saint-Marcel (Rony Hotin)

Subway bum goes inside the gigantic colorful posters at night, cavorts with babes, swims, finds food, all while trying to avoid a giant black beast, which catches him in the end.

Monkey Rag (Joanna Davidovich)

Girl meets top-hatted tree, bottom-pinching ensues. Looked great all finished and up on the big screen.

Olive (Harriet Ngo)

The second movie in a row in which a girl meets a tree. In this one she falls into hole and the tree helps her find her way home.

Rabbit and Deer (Péter Vácz)

Rabbit and Deer are best friends, but after an obsessive search, Deer finds his way into the third dimension, and now the two are having trouble interacting. This is the one I most want to show Katy, but there’s only a trailer online so far.

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Get a Horse! (Lauren MacMullan)

Like the premise of Tezuka’s Broken Down Film with the pacing of Pixar’s Presto and revised into a self-consciously old-meets-new Micky Mouse cartoon. The director has worked on Wreck-It Ralph and some quality television.

Mr. Hublot (Laurent Witz & Alexandre Espigares)

Great steampunk 3D – nervous shut-in manages to leave the house to rescue a neglected dog, which eventually outgrows his apartment. Based on the artwork of Stéphane Halleux, who goes uncredited on IMDB. One of the directors worked on the feature version of 9.

Feral (Daniel Sousa)

Wild child is “rescued” and brought to civilization, doesn’t adapt well. Black and white, faces are all toothy mouths, with eyes hidden. Some cool expressionist bits.

Possessions (Shuhei Morita)

A lost traveling repairman seeking shelter gets imprisoned by a house full of vengeful discarded artifacts – broken umbrellas, torn clothing and the like. He convinces the objects they still have worth, thanks them for their more productive years. Not as formally exciting as the previous three nor as cute as the next one.

Room on the Broom (Jon Lachauer & Max Lang)

Clearly based on a children’s book: a witch gradually gains new friends while looking for lost things. Her broom gets more and more weighed down, which is a problem with a witch-eating dragon on their trail. All animal grunts were voiced by famous people, but famous voices are lost on me since I thought Simon Pegg’s narrator was actually Rob Brydon. Cartoony 3D style, like if those animated shorts we used to see on HBO had been made with today’s software.

A la francaise (Boyer & Hazebroucq & Hsu & Leleu & Lorton)

Versailles 1700 with the king’s court portrayed as chickens. Loved it.

The Missing Scarf (Eoin Duffy)

The second short in the program about someone asking woodland creatures for help finding a lost article of clothing. Belatedly, I’m going to declare that the major trend in cinema last year. This definitely wins best performance of the bunch, for the voiceover by George Takei. Conversations with neurotic animals turn philosophical, then metacosmic, with infographic-style animation. This and the previous one were not nominated, but they’re the two I most want to watch again. Aha, the chickens are on vimeo!

The Blue Umbrella (Saschka Unseld)

Seen this before. A good closer.

These were stitched together with not-great ostrich/giraffe vignettes voiced by a guy from Thomas and Friends and a guy from Nightbreed who also appeared in the amazingly titled The Glam Metal Detectives. We saw the traveling theatrical presentation – all screenshots are from online trailers.

by ·Comments Off on Insiang and shorts from the Philippines

After the storm devastation in the Philippines, I thought back on Independencia, the only Filipino movie that I can remember having seen, an excitingly stylized though thematically depressing attack on colonialism, and thought maybe I should watch some more – a Filipino film fest! Only made it through one feature and a bunch of shorts so far.

Long Live Philippine Cinema! (2009, Raya Martin)

How do you not open your Filipino film fest with a movie entitled Long Live Philippine Cinema!? I think Martin is perhaps being ironic, though. Woman working in a cinema back room is killed by some guys, who then burn the evidence. A film can is filled with dirt, and the title spirals onto it. Apparently the woman represents Mother Lily, a producer who is thought to have control over the Manila Film Festival.

Track Projections (2007, Raya Martin)

Silent, camera on its side shoots a partly sunny sky while futzing with the aperture. Gets kinda good around the 3-minute mark. Nice how the sideways camera combined with motion results in a filmstrip look.

Insiang (1976, Lino Brocka)

The Philippines’ all-time most beloved movie is a grimly realistic drama about a young woman whose mom takes in a younger man who starts raping the daughter. So much for escapism. Everyone is poor and hungry and has a bunch of kids they can’t afford, and young Insiang spends the movie bouncing from one pole of desperation to another.

Her mom Tonya is shitty to everyone. Possibly it’s a survival mechanism – can’t tell if the movie is judging her or not. Insiang has a fully pathetic puff-haired boyfriend called Bebot who finally gets her to sleep with him on the pretense of taking her away from rapist uncle Dado, a sleazy mustache-man with his own name tattooed in a heart on his chest.

“Maybe [your father] left because he couldn’t stand your mother” – these are meant as encouraging words in this movie – and “As soon as I get a better job we’re going to leave this place” is its mantra.

Finally Insiang gets her revenge on everyone at once. She cuddles up to Dado and asks a favor: for him to beat the living hell out of Bebot, which he does, knocking all his teeth out down by the river. Then Insiang (exaggerating) tells her mom that Dado just used the mom to get to the daughter, hates the mom and plans to leave her. Result: mom kills Dado and goes to jail. You’d think this is the movie’s idea of a happy ending, but just in case we saw a glimmer of hope in Insiang’s revenge and independence, she visits mom and says she feels no better.

At least there’s a character named Nan Ding. Nice Slint reference.

Our Daily Bread (2006, Khavn)

A woman digs through the trash, sells junk to buy baby food, returns to the trash and feeds the rest of her family with chicken scraps she finds. Gross.

Can and Slippers (2005, Khavn)

Two things at once here: first, it’s a fast-cut, handheld high-action percussively-scored short of a kid kicking a coke can through town and out to the makeshift goal, where he shoots/scores. One the other hand, the kid is revealed to have one leg, he doesn’t have a real ball, the town is infested with garbage and the goal is on a trash heap.

Rugby Boyz (2006, Khavn)

Group of boyz play ball (with a real ball this time), tell jokes, dance to karaoke, huff something in plastic bags, then go swimming.

by ·Comments Off on Live-Action Shorts watched Nov-Dec 2013

Castello Cavalcanti (2013, Wes Anderson)

Cute – Schwartzmann is a racecar driver who happens to crash in his ancestral village then decides to slow down and hang out for a while.

Aningaaq (2013, Jonas Cuaron)

The other side of a radio conversation Sandra Bullock has in Gravity, with a man in the icy wilderness who doesn’t understand her. It’s fun as a companion short but gets all its emotional weight from the Gravity recall.

Stephane Mallarme (1968, Eric Rohmer)

A visit with a typical pretentious french poet. Or I can’t tell if he’s pretentious since the spoken interview is translated but his written poetry excerpts are not. It’s all starting to seem odd, when the “documentary” short ends and the credits tell me Jean-Marie Robain (of Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer) played the poet, who died in 1898.

“In a society without cohesion, without stability, it’s impossible to create stable, definitive art.”

Weed (1996, Fatih Akin)

A corny-assed comedy starring Akin with Counting Crows hair, who tries to impress his new dance-club friends by claiming he has amazing weed at home, which he does not. So in order not to get killed once the lie has spun out of control, he brings them weeds from the garden, which they smoke and find to be amazing, because potheads have no standards I guess.

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Ruka/The Hand (1965, Jiri Trnka)

Potter just wants to make pots and keep his little plant alive, but a fascist hand keeps intruding wanting him to sculpt fascist hands instead. Potter is kidnapped by the hand and forced to create hand progaganda but escapes only to die back at home. Banned in his home country of Czechoslovakia, naturally. Trnka’s final film – I will have to find more.

Johann Mouse (1952, Hanna & Barbera)

Jerry is a mouse in Strauss’s house who waltzes uncontrollably when the master is playing. The cat learns to play in order to set a trap, but the two are discovered and are invited to perform for the king. Cute enough, but I don’t know about oscar-winning. It beat a not-too-great Tex Avery, two from UPA and one from Canada, the same year McLaren’s Neighbours won best documentary (!?) short. Hans Conreid narrated.

Magoo’s Puddle Jumper (1956, Pete Burness)

Blind Magoo buys an electric car (!) and drives it into the ocean. Somehow his idiot son Waldo survived the bear short and tags along. People must’ve thought Jim Backus was hilarious. All three oscar nominees were UPA productions, so producer Stephen Bosustow could not have lost.

The Nightmare of Melies (1988, Pierre Etaix)

A fun Melies tribute incorporating the earliest cinema techniques, scenes from King Kong, an alka-seltzer commercial and late-80’s computer animation.

D. Cairns for The Forgotten:

Etaix additions to the source script make Méliès a prophet of the whole history of film, from the greatest special effects film of golden age Hollywood, up to the computerized visions of the present day (1988), and taking in the true nightmare of the television commercial. I love how the ad breaks in, hideously colorful and cheery, disrupting what is already a rather stylistically disparate piece .. almost to the point of disintegration.

Bimbo’s Initiation (1931, Dave Fleischer)

Bimbo is kidnapped by a cult that keeps attacking him with sharp things and spanking instruments then asking if he wants to be a member. He always answers no until confronted with dog-eared Betty Boop who dribbles her ass like a basketball. Maltin called it Fleischer’s darkest work, and Jim Woodring reveres it, naturally.

Tord and Tord (2010, Niki Lindroth Von Bahr)

“I felt my need for coffee becoming more and more apparent.”

Clearly somebody watched Fantastic Mr. Fox and David Lynch’s Rabbits then imagined a meeting of these two worlds. Sort of a less-violent stop-motion Fight Club, as a fox named Tord finds out his next-door neighbor is also named Tord, so they start hanging out and exchanging coded messages, until rabbit-Tord disappears and may not have ever existed.

The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005, Anthony Lucas)

Cool silhouette animation, watched with Katy. Narrator/Jasper (Joel Edgerton, villain of Gatsby) is a disgraced navigator in an airship-steampunk future, whose ship stumbles across deadly creatures whose blood can cure the plague affecting Jasper’s home planet (and more specifically, his wife). Sort of an Alien meets Little Shop of Horrors, with an unresolved ending.

Director Lucas followed this up with a 3-minute rabbit short and worked on new anthology film The Turning. Writer Mark Shirrefs does lots of Australian sci-fi television. The Australians gave this a best-short award, but Oscars picked The Moon and the Son and Baftas the great Fallen Art.

Bobby Yeah (2011, Robert Morgan)

The story of a murderous kidnapper with a predilection for pushing red buttons. Possibly the most grotesque stop-motion movie ever – kudos to Morgan! Reminds of Symbol at times, with a confused-looking guy in a room pushing mysterious buttons with varying consequences, but this one also has elements of murder-spree crime drama, with much sexual imagery.

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Robin Hoodlum (1949, John Hubley)

“I rob from the rich and I give to the poor. I never give a thing to the middle class.”

I guess the UPA revolution started late – this seems like a typical WB/Disney-style character cartoon full of decent jokes (the newly-appointed sheriff Crow and prince john always haggling over payment and due dates) and tired ones (the English sure enjoy teatime). Interesting that Robin is portrayed as a fox, some 25 years before the Disney feature. He’s also kind of terrible with a bow and arrow, another unusual choice. The first UPA short to be oscar-nominated, beaten by Hanna-Barbera’s The Little Orphan.

Nobody helping Robin because it is teatime:

The Magic Fluke (1949, John Hubley)

Good one, story of a a conductor Fox who dumps his one-man-band Crow partner for the big time, until crow gets well-intentioned revenge by getting his ex-buddy a magic wand as conductor’s baton.

Exceptional-looking, and they saved time and effort by having the crow narrate via thoughts sans lipsync. Predates Tex Avery’s great Magical Maestro by a couple years.

Horn section becomes rabbits:

Ragtime Bear (1949, John Hubley)

This one introduced the world to the blind, gruesome-looking Mr. Magoo and his accident-prone son Waldo, who dies early in a hiking accident. A bluegrass-fan bear masquerades as the son (we learn that banjos basically play themselves) while one-joke Magoo quickly wears out the blindness gimmick. Characters talk over each other Popeye-style. But wait, Waldo lives, only to get immediately shotgun-blasted by his father, who attempts revival via vase-of-water in the face. Weird movie.

Bearskin rug in the line of fire:

Punchy de Leon (1950, John Hubley)

Another rival Fox/Crow cartoon, voyaging to Florida in 1503 seeking the (coin-operated) fountain of youth for a vain king of Spain. I enjoy the rivalry thing, and it’s a step up from Ragtime Bear no matter how you look at it, but no real good gags in this one. I’m starting to notice the abstract backdrops that Leonard Maltin told me to look out for.

Flash as the fountain water restores the king:

The Miner’s Daughter (1950, Robert Cannon)

Ol’ prospector and homely daughter have no luck mining gold, then Harvard man turns up next door with fancy modern techniques and strikes it rich. Miner’s daughter lures him over with the smell of Boston baked beans, and they get happily, wealthily married. Dialogue is sung but their mouths don’t move. The instrumental variations on My Darling Clementine are nice, but no decent gags except for Harvard man’s fully-furnished inflatable house and its umbrella-punctured demise.

Harvard man refusing to save the distressed maiden:

Giddyap (1950, Art Babbitt)

Sad horse-drawn ice delivery cart is getting beaten by modern motorized ice delivery cars. Flashback: their horse Jack “the Hoofer” used to be a famous dancer before the movies came along and ruined showbusiness. Cart driver’s daughter gets an idea: put the horse on television (which recently came along and ruined the movies). Happy ending: ice delivery guy now uses a helicopter to beat the car. Implications: embrace changing technology to help your business succeed, and one day we’ll all drive helicopters.

Tapdancing horse vs. period picture:

The Popcorn Story (1950, Art Babbitt)

Nebraska-set story of Wilbur Shucks, who invented popcorn but instead of eating it tried to harness its explosive power to fuel a rube goldberg shoeshine machine, narrated by the town fancypants as he dedicates a statue in Wilbur’s honor.

The Family Circus (1951, Art Babbitt)

Patsy is jealous that the new baby gets all daddy’s attention, so she destroys daddy’s stuff, injures him and torments the cat. Finally daddy gets a clue and decides love is the answer. Dream sequence saved a few bucks using childlike drawings and 2fps animation.

Gerald McBoing Boing (1951, Robert Cannon)

Seen this a few times before, a great one.

Georgie and the Dragon (1951, Robert Cannon)

More actioney than the others. Georgie brings home a baby dragon which grows huge in a matter of minutes while he tries to hide it from his strict father. Meanwhile the movie beats its Scottish setting over the viewer’s head constantly.

The Wonder Gloves (1951, Robert Cannon)

Good one – no dialogue except in the framing story of a guy telling his nephew about the time he discovered magic boxing gloves and accidentally went from boxing gym janitor to world champion.

The Oompahs (1952, Robert Cannon)

Generation-gap music story, big band vs. jazz, as personified by a family of horns.

Rooty Toot Toot (1952, John Hubley)

Musical courtroom drama based on the classic song Frankie and Johnny. J has been shot to death in a bar – the bartender and another girl testify they were nearby and that his girlfriend F killed him in a jealous rage. Defense lawyer tells a tale of poor lovely innocent F, and J’s accidental suicide. Jury acquits, F sees her suitor/lawyer dancing with the girl from the bar and shoots him dead in court. Wow.