If Nicolas Cages’ battered, displaced ennui in Vampire’s Kiss implied anything about Cage’s messianic ability to incarnate an entire city’s mortal fever in his very body, it’s that he really should have starred in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours instead (the previous film from the same screenwriter). Ten years after Kiss, Bringing Out the Dead fulfills the prophecy. Etching moral quandary and personal quagmire, as well as mythic grime, out of the streets of New York City, Bringing Out the Dead finds Scorsese returning to his home turf, with his home turf writer Paul Schrader, in a film that feels like an extension and perversion of their galvanic 1976 social screed Taxi Driver. Continue reading →

You wouldn’t know it from the film’s iron-clad second-life reputation these days as the butt-end of a joke in internet compilations of Nicolas Cage losing himself to convulsions of life-panic, but there were, in fact, other people in the room when Vampire’s Kiss was being made. At the same time, the black hole of Cage’s performance sucks in any and all vitality from the production elsewhere, energy no one else seems to have exerted in the first place. But if this is Cage’s Vegas one man show (much more than Honeymoon in Vegas, or Leaving Las Vegas even), the birthing pool of the film remains writer Joseph Minion. That’s a name you probably don’t cotton to immediately, but he’s famous in screenwriter and cult object circles for writing After Hours, a film picked almost at random by Martin Scorsese when the production of The Last Temptation of Christ screeched to a grinding halt. Continue reading →

Disney Animation’s package films from the ‘40s, as a corpus, are sometimes considered the bane of the company’s existence, mercenary workaday productions inspired by a need to salvage the tatters of the company by producing anything that would make a buck, theoretically leaving their artistic inhibitions at the door. The ghetto these films have been sequestered into isn’t without purpose; compared to the brazen murderer’s row of artistic masterpieces released between 1940 and ’42 – Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Bambi – one can see why no one is eager to pull, say, Saludos Amigos from 1942 out of the dustbin of history.

Nonetheless, the humbling failure of the corporation’s artistic endeavors (at least commercially) managed to sand down Walt Disney’s sometimes offputting enormity, freeing up some space for a few free-wheeling slivers of silliness and laying bare the lie that Disney’s lack of money during this era actually hindered their ambulatory creativity. While none of these films measure up to, say, Pinocchio or Fantasia (but what does?), the lesser efforts from the ‘40s are often reservoirs of loosened-up, slackened vigor owing largely to the more rambunctious, less ossified nature of the short stories that make up these tales. Little bursts of candy-coated joy rather than euphoric self-conscious masterpieces, many of the segments are ultimately ephemeral. But in ephemera, they locate an expedient, in-and-out mirthfulness woefully absent in many nominally larger motion pictures. Continue reading →

In this ostensibly superficial, altogether dazzling production about three birds in Central and South America, Disney’s near-commercial implosion arises like an avian on fire in arguably the company’s most surrealistic insurrection.  Trapped in the perdition of nonexistent budgets, Disney Animation went vagabond and took a trip to, and a cue or two from, the superstars at Termite Terrace (read: Looney Tunes) with a deliberately unfussy, anarchic production for which out-of-control effusions of rhapsodic color was the only reasonable aesthetic partner. Pointless though it seems, The Three Caballeros is in fact a vanguard of the company’s continued artistic experimentation and their hunger for something a little more allegro. Continue reading →

Released at the onset of Disney’s so-called Silver Age, where the money began to flow again (incrementally) in the ‘50s after the box office disasters of the early ‘40s subjected Disney to a handful of no-budget package films throughout the war and post-war years, Alice in Wonderland was a fitting rekindling spirit. None other than Walt Disney’s own childhood love and his original plan for a first feature film before things got sidetracked (as they do in animation), Alice was ironically whisked away from a fell purgatory without Uncle Walt’s own influence (perhaps he’d grown weary over trying to produce it again and again over the years), and perhaps for the better. The patchy, maniacal disarray to the look of the film and the semi-unwholesome, deliberately non-moralizing grotesquerie of the structure weren’t exactly Walt’s specialties, but one wonders what countenance his version of the tale might have born. Maybe Alice would have been a young Margaret Thatcher, and the Mad Hatter a starched-suit Joseph McCarthy and the impromptu hero. Alas, I do not suspect even Walt could have any sensible use for the bundle-of-id that is the Cheshire Cat. Continue reading →

The Emperor’s New Groove

Ironically born out of the near-implosion of the epic musical it was originally conceived as, the zippy, manic Looney Tunes-indebted The Emperor’s New Groove – rehashed into this state on the quick – was a refreshing burst of bellowing, ricocheting blood into a then-corpse of an animation studio. Especially coming after a series of increasingly calcified attempts to rechristen Beauty and the Beast/The Little Mermaid enormity, the 2000-released Emperor’s induces a brazen, feverish snap, crackle, and pop sorely missing in most of Disney Animation’s mid-‘90s efforts. What was glorious in 1989’s The Little Mermaid had petrified into stifling routine by Pochahantas, Mulan and the like, and The Emperor’s New Groove purifies the experiment began with Aladdin and continued with the lesser Hercules of mining the company’s old enemy, Warner Bros, for a shot of Tex Avery infused whiplash comedy. 1999 is the de facto end of the so-called “Disney Renaissance”, but there’s a spunk in Groove’s step, a pizzaz in its razzamatazz, an electron-charged energy that marks it as the most beautifully blissful Disney film since, arguably, Beauty itself. Continue reading →

Limned with atomic-age zest and riddled with nervous rays of icy energy, Night and the City is singular in director Jules Dassin’s oeuvre, not to mention a kind of apotheosis of the noir form, in its unmitigated diagnosis of human society as a rogues’ gallery and a murderers’ row. Scouring the self-mutilated streets of London with a spectral sense of allusion and spare poetry that stimulates a positively magnetic charge, it doesn’t take any mental gymnastics to discover how Dassin’s personal turmoil around the time of filming Night and the City inscribes itself in the singed chiaroscuro and the barbed, irregular editing mechanics of Night and City, shaking the frame into submission. This English wild cat of a film is the platonic ideal of its genre’s unremitting reconnaissance of urban scrawl, a vision of a world useful primarily, even exclusively, for nighttime, even night-terror, skulking and nothing more. Continue reading →

More or less, “film noir” doesn’t immediately conjure images of the fruit markets and roadside truckers adorning Thieves’ Highway, but any cognitive dissonance about the disconnect is allayed almost immediately in Jules Dassin’s wonderfully rotted-out picture, his final American film before an intercontinental exodus prompted by the dastardly House Un-American Activities Committee. Dassin’s communist sympathies inscribe themselves elegantly in the noir world where capitalist rot reigns supreme and disillusionment is the only, albeit temporary, salve against the Western lie of individual morality and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps. In the noir world, one person’s success is exclusively an agitated avenue for unsettling the possibilities of other humans for whom hope is an albatross and the American Dream is little more than a poisoned apple. Continue reading →

The name “acid western” doesn’t quite do justice to Monte Hellman’s duo of sadly fatalistic fugues released in 1966, soon to become cult icons when their casts went on to fame and infamy, in some order. These two films have the bracing mystique of unidentified film-like objects without precedent or successor; even the most famous film in the acid sub-genre, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s four-years-later release El Topo, suggests the toxicity of these 1966 progenitors but not their distressed, cloudy desolation. If El Topo was a disobedient, hallucinatory nonsense-poem that eroded society’s expectations for the Western, The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind are already themselves eroded. Continue reading →

A pair of surrealistic modern animations this week on Midnight Screenings.

A Town Called Panic

Gifting galvanic motion to the Art Brut movement – literally “raw art”, or “rough art” – the Belgian film A Town Called Panic is nearly outsider art, or at least, it bears the casual fibers of a work that dismisses rationality with an outsider spirit. The film is gifted a name that lovingly reintroduces old Western tropes (who couldn’t imagine Clint Eastwood sauntering into A Town Called Panic, eyes frazzled and mouth as closed and parsimonious as ever) but also suggests the ethos of the film: panic, pandemonium, bedlam, and beauty all rolled up into one terrifyingly tactile witch’s brew that applies not only logic but physical objects in the most fascinatingly tenuous of ways imaginable. A lose flash-bang grenade of a story about two minimalist plastic-base action figures – “Cowboy” and “Indian” – who react in a flurry of rushed stream-of-consciousness thought when a birthday present for their friend “Horse” goes horribly awry, A Town Called Panic is stop-motion with an emphasis on stop – stopping to renounce the rationalist norms of cinema – and motion – gallantly flying past any such notions, or any breaks at all, on the back of its own demented whimsy. Continue reading →