Functions of Genre

Only two features this week:

221. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008, directed by Guillermo del Toro) has a pretty standard storyline for an action fantasy, but that's genre for you. All genre movies are pretty predictable, and this one is no different. You know in pretty short order how this film is going to turn out. But that's only plot, and, as someone once said, plot is only an excuse. Lord knows, this movie understands that, because once you discard the plot, the individual scenes and individual moments are quite special, and the MEANING of what happens to the characters goes pretty far beyond what you can glean from just anticipating how everything turns out in the end. Sure, you know going in that in order to kill Prince Nuada, someone was going to have to kill Princess Nuala. Sure, you know that Hellboy is going to defeat the Golden Army by challenging Nuada's right to rule. You get that in the first ten minutes of the film (and if you don't, you just aren't paying attention). What you DON'T get is the relationships between the characters. These are unpredicable and largely independent of the plot. You don't anticipate the lovely dual motif of saving the life of the one you love even if it means the end of the world. You might anticipate the great tentacled monster that rises up over the city in this movie, but you don't anticipate what happens when it's killed. And you don't anticipate the film's many visual wonders, from the troll market to the elemental's fate to the Angel of Death. To a one, these are fabulous. But it's the smaller wonders that really make the film click. The sight of Hellboy and Abe Sapien drunkenly singing Barry Manilow's "Can't Smile Without You" might be worth the price of admission all by itself.

222. Depending on what I've seen lately, I usually name Miller's Crossing (1990) as my favorite among the Coen Brothers' movies. This alternates with Fargo, usually, but lately I've been drifting towards No Country for Old Men. Miller's Crossing is, of course, a reworking of Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, which itself might be my favorite of the hard boiled novels. As in Hellboy II, the plot is incidental, intricate and twisty turny though it might be. I could tell you that the movie is about Irish gangsters, but what it's really about is Gabriel Byrne chasing his hat. Early in the movie, he even comments that there's nothing stupider than a man chasing his hat. The Coens have built a formidable gallery of grotesques over the years, but none of their other movies is as packed with them as this one, whether it's Jon Polito descanting on criminal ethics or a street urching swiping the toupee off the head of a corpse. The parade of characters--none of them leading-man or leading-woman material--is endlessly fascinating. And after all these years, I still think this movie contains the Coen's best-ever sequence, in which Albert Finney defends himself against would-be assassins while "Danny Boy" plays on the soundtrack. It's contrapunctual music at its finest.

I also watched some of the third disc from the Norman McLaren Masters Edition, including:

223. Narcissus (1983)
224. Pas De Deux (1968)
225. A Chairy Tale (1957)
226. Neighbors (1952)
227. Opening Speech (1960)
228. Christmas Cracker (1962)
229. Canon (1964)
230. Ballet Adagio (1972)

These are mostly dance oriented--Narcissus is particularly lovely--and show McLaren following the lead of Maya Deren to its obvious conclusions. I should give a shout-out to Neighbors, which is a masterpiece. How this won an Oscar during the Cold War, I know not. But there it is.

Neighbors is all over YouTube. By all means, watch it:

Begone Dull Care

Just a quick round-up of last weeks movies. I didn't watch much in the way of features, but I worked my way through the second disc of Norman McLaren shorts:

166. Begone Dull Care (1949)
167. Boogie-Doodle (1940)
168. Dots (1940)
169. Fiddle-De-Dee (1947)
170. Hen Hop (1942)
171. Hoppity Pop (1946)
172. Lines Horizontal (1962)
173. Lines Vertical (1960)
174. Loops (1940)
175. Mail Early (1941)
176. Mail Early for Christmas (1959)
177. Le Merle (1958)
178. Mosaic (1965)
179. NBC Valentine Greeting (1939)
180. New York Light Board (1961)
181. New York Light Board Record (1961)
182. Serenal (1959)
183. Short and Suite (1959)
184. Stars and Stripes (1940)

I don't have much to say about this lot except to note my admiration at the experimental nature of all of it and to note, in passing that the filmmaker tends to repeat himself, I have to give a shout out to "Beyond Dull Care" (1949), which is jaw-dropping, a first-class work of genius. The entire thing was painted and drawn directly onto frameless 35mm film stock, and yet, it still manages the not inconsiderable feat of having a cinematic pulse in spite of being completely abstract. This leaps into my own personal pantheon of animated favorites. But don't take my word for it, you can watch yourself, though the quality is pretty crummy. You can still get the gist:



On the whole, these films fall into a few categories in which McLaren is varying the theme (it's not by accident that jazz plays a big role in a lot of these films). You have the animated abstractions drawn directly on the film itself with pen and ink (e. g.: "Boogie-Doodle"), animated abstractions etched onto the film (e. g.: "Blinkity Blank"), formalist experiments with an optical printer (Lines Horizontal, Mosaic), and the pair of deranged shorts painted on frameless film (the other is Fiddle-De-Dee).

It occured to me while I was watching these that my cinemania has drifted pretty far into obsession, because this stuff is way into the realm of esoterica.

Where's Donald Duck?

Mostly short films for me this week.

More Looney Tunes from The Golden Collection, Volume 5, disc 2: Fun-Filled Fairy Tales

135. Bewitched Bunny (1954, directed by Chuck Jones). Hansel? HAN-sel?
136. Paying the Piper (1949, directed by Robert McKimson). The cats of Hamelin are a little irked at Pied Piper Porky for putting them out of work. Droll, even with all the slapstick.
137. The Bear's Tale (1940, directed by Tex Avery). Fun mash-up of Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Bears.
138. Foney Fables (1942, directed by Friz Freling). A black-out cartoon featuring vignettes from Aesop.
139. Goldimouse and the Three Cats (1960, directed by Friz Freling). Pretty good late cartoon with Sylvester and Son. Sylvester's offspring was, perhaps, his best foil.
140. Holiday for Shoestrings (1946, directed by Friz Freling). Elves. Shoemaker. The potential for scathing social satire in the hands of a less conservative director. Still not bad.
141. Little Red Rodent Hood (1952, directed by Friz Freling). Another transposition. The Warners loved Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Bears almost to the exclusion of other stories. Pretty good mid-period Freling.
142. Little Red Walking Hood (1937, directed by Tex Avery). A precursor to Avery's later dabblings in sexualized fairy tale.
143. Red Riding Hoodwinked (1955, directed by Friz Freling). Sylvester and Tweety parallel the main story of Red and Grandma. Fun.
144. The Trial of Mr. Wolf (1941, directed by Friz Freling). The familiar tale told from the point of view of the wolf to a jury of his peers. Dig Grandma's sinister profession. One of Freling's best.
145. The Turn-Tale Wolf (1952, directed by Robert McKimson). Another familiar tale from the Wolf's perspective. This time it's the Three Little Pigs, and damned if they ain't a trio of evil bastards.
146. Tom Thumb in Trouble (1940, directed by Chuck Jones). Jones was still in his "cute" phase for this one.
147. Tweety and the Beanstalk (1957, directed by Friz Freling). "Fe Fi Fo Fat, I tawt I taw a putty tat."
148. A Gander at Mother Goose (1940, directed by Tex Avery). A series of short gags. Not Avery at his best.
149. Señorella and the Glass Huarache (1964, directed by Hawley Pratt). In feel, this is a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, only without Speedy. An ethnic reworking of Cinderella. Meh.

Interesting to note the relative absence of Chuck Jones on this disc (only two shorts). Conversly, Friz Freling is all over this one (and the Pratt short at the end is Freling by proxy).

Also, I waded into the Norman McClaren Masters Edition, disc one:

150. 7 til 5 (1933)
151. A Little Phantasy on a 19th-century Painting (1946)
152. A Phantasy (1952)
153. Blinkity Blank (1955)
154. Book Bargain (1937)
155. Camera Makes Whoopee (1935)
156. C'est l'aviron (1944)
157. Là-haut sur ces montagnes (1946)
158. Love on the Wing (1939)
159. Mony a Pickle (1938)
160. News for the Navy (1937)
161. The Obedient Flame (1939)
162. La Poulette grise (1947)
163. Spheres (1969)

These films are either experimental films or short documentaries commissioned by the British Postal system. The documentaries are fascinating for their detail, occasionally enhanced by animation or slow motion photography. The experimental films, on the other hand, are all over the place in terms of style. McClaren's live action films--at least the ones on this disc--recall Dziga Vertov, while there is no single defining style to the animated films. Many of these are executed with lap-dissolving pastel drawings, occasionally placed on a multi-plane apparatus through which the camera zooms. Sometimes, the the drawing is done on the film itself, without benefit of camera. Sometimes, the intent is to illustrate the folk songs of Quebec. Sometimes the intent is a kind of moving painting. The range from representation to complete non-representation is wide in these films. McLaren's branch of filmmaking is to cinema as a whole as theoretical physics is to science. Leave it to the engineers to find practical applications. It's beautiful in and of itself in the abstract. For the record, I think my favorite among this first batch--the set has 7 discs of this stuff--is probably "Blinkety Blank," which stands out like a fireworks display on the fourth of July.

Also:

164. The Dirty Dozen (1967, directed by Robert Aldrich), because after several weeks of doing foreign films and experimental shorts, I wanted something without subtitles. In fact, I wanted something that blows shit up real good. Fortunately, this is chock full of fun characters, including Lee Marvin at his most Lee Marvin-ish, John Cassavetes earning the scratch for his own experiments, Charles Bronson as a bad-ass, and a whole bunch of other interesting faces. It sure is satisfying to see Telly Savalas get his at the end of this movie. Nasty character he plays here. It's odd to see a movie about instilling discipline remain so resolutely anti-authority, but that's Robert Aldrich for you.

165. I'll probably have more to say about Iron Man (2008, directed by Jon Favreau) when I write my review for my web site (I want to see it again before then, which is in itself a compliment). For the present, though, it should suffice to say that it's a terrific popcorn movie, and I mean that as a high compliment, because so many popcorn movies are crap even as junk food. I found myself watching with a certain amount of glee, a lot like the glee the 12 year old me derived from the movies that made me a film fan (and a comic book reader) in the first place. The casting is note perfect. I doubt the movie would work at all without Robert Downey, Jr. in the lead as Tony Stark, which bodes well for the future. The Iron Man of the comics has no Moriarty of his own, no Joker or Green Goblin. His most persistent enemy is himself and, of course, the best stories are those that explore the human heart in conflict with itself. Downey is a great fit for this kind of character arc. Oddly enough, this is the funniest movie I've seen in a while. In a lot of ways, this is a romantic comedy, though not the kind you see these days. It's more akin to the screwball comedies of the 40s than the chick flicks of today. It helps that it blows shit up real good, too, but it's entertaining even when it doesn't.