Four classics or near-classics into his career, the commercial bottom fell out of the Sergio Leone’s style, a salivating roux of lyrical, iconographic imagery and blistering aural sorcery that elevated the Wild West to the woolliest of opera halls. Released to choruses of conundrum and popular disinterest, audiences in 1972 brandished their confusion toward Duck, You Sucker! like a weapon and proceeded to fell Leone’s savage beast, banishing it to the cesspool of cinema. Which was a sure-fire come-down for a man who “did” more with the structures and iconography of the Western genre than anyone else during the ‘60s. Mere years beforehand, he’d released four indomitable works that channeled the Western into both John Ford’s rhapsodic register and Anthony Mann’s hoarse, wiry, more brutal variant of the genre. Leone’s films were alchemic, concoctions of classical A-pictures (in tone, length) and B-style hip-shooters (in mood, feel, texture, purpose even), and they were unstoppable. Continue reading →

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 →