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 →

With Cutthroat Island as the never-off-the-ground bottom leg and Waterworld as the high-flying upright obelisk standing up on 175 million, the right triangle of box office halitosis spewing out from weird genre adventures in 1995 was completed with the dismal performance of Sam Raimi’s Sharon Stone-vehicle The Quick and the Dead. Which, in this metaphor, is the gnarly hypotenuse, the connective leg between Waterworld’s hyper-production-designed, outré weirdness and Cutthroat’s illogical idiocy. Continue reading →

So Rod Serling, Charles Dickens, and Alfred Hitchcock walked into a bar…

And out comes David Fincher, with everything in the world to prove after his gangbusters Seven swerved him from “that guy who ruined Alien” (which he didn’t, but that’s for another time and place) to “among the hottest new talents in Hollywood”. In the aforementioned triangulation, Hitchcock undeniably wins out unsurprisingly: Fincher, a director who exercises a totalizing jurisprudence over his contraptions and machines, making a film about a man who is a version of himself is almost impossible to not carry with it a distant whiff of Hitchcockian baggage. Continue reading →

Trespass

The often forgotten action poet Walter Hill stages kinetic, breathless pulp fiction with this modern-day Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a mixture of action-movie magnetization and post-industrial enervation. It’s a near horror-movie visualization of urban strife punched-up with vigorous conviction, if not depth, by Hill’s customary style – halfway between knuckle-dusting barn-burner and morality play where the near-amorality of the play is bracing without ever shuttle-cocking into sadistic. Continue reading →

Southern Comfort

Betwixt his only-now-a-classic neo-pulp comic book New York odyssey, The Warriors, and the even-then-classic trip out West to bad-tempered San Francisco with the anarchic buddy cop picture 48 Hrs., director Walter Hill’s bracing modernist thriller filmmaking took an intentional excursion down South into the fetid swamps of Louisiana. The resulting film, the mostly unknown Southern Comfort, lets itself be engulfed by the jaundiced spirit of the malarial bayou, resulting in a protoplasmic blast of downtuned terror in which awareness of one’s own impotency in a foreign land clings to you like molasses.

Released in 1981, only the most unawares viewer could possibly miss the Vietnam parable at heart in Comfort, an inverse of The Warriors, Hill’s masterpiece and a film more-or-less about the tentative, tenuous connections within groups just waiting for a chance to dissolve into entropy. In The Warriors, death isn’t catalyzed by some inadvertent journey to hostile, unknown territory but from thrashing about in lands one mistakenly assumed to be one’s own. In Comfort, in contrast, it is pitilessly apparent that America’s mental safeguard isn’t the assumption that America is always at home, but that America is innately better than the outside world. Continue reading →