The Screengrab : slacker

Phil's Film Faves, Part Two

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:00:00 GMT

STOP MAKING SENSE (1984) & SOMETHING WILD (1986)

Jonathan Demme's movies were essential to my having survived the 1980s. I had the closest thing I've ever had to a religious experience during the week when I saw Stop Making Sense five times; I've never seen another movie, including dance films and martial arts flicks, that conveyed to me so much of the pleasure of physicality, of moving your body, and there was something about seeing all those people joining their skills together and losing themselves in the shared experience of being simultaneously brainy, goofy, and hot that suggested everything I wanted to get, and never got, from college. The mixed-tape road trip of Something Wild, where the wild weekend gives way to a trial by fire that leaves the hero and heroine stronger, was everything I wanted out of the rest of life, including the handcuffs and the used-car-salesman cameo by John Waters.

RE-ANIMATOR (1985)

I've always loved horror movies, I've always loved comedy, and I've always loved the idea of comic horror midnight movies that go just far enough in the direction oftoo far. Maybe if more movies that light out in this direction got it right, it would matter less to me that Stuart Gordon got this one just right. But most of them don't.

DUCK SOUP (1933)

What I just said about midnight movies? It goes double for crackhouse-rat comedy.

SONGWRITER (1984)

This movie, starring Willie Nelson and Rip Torn, written by Bud Shrake, and directed by Alan Rudolph during those three weeks a decade when his meds are working, captures the spirit and flavor of Texas hipsterdom as it has always come across in the best of Nelson's music, Torn's acting, and Shrake's writing, and that's about as hip as things get in the South. I myself, a product of the Louisiana/Mississippi border, have spent about a month total in Texas my whole life, but am not above resorting to a contact high.

BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)

Can we talk? I don't get girls. Never have, never will. I miss signals, I misread situations, I don't know...I just don't get girls, okay? And if I may presume to speak for the losers of the world for a second, being one of those people who doesn't get anywhere with other people in that way can sometimes make it a sobering experience to sit in the dark watching a lot of movies in which couple effortlessly hook up. But if I ever saw a movie in which my own fantasy of the best way you could hook up with somebody, this is probably it. Two nice, smart people just run into each other, take a chance, and for as long as the movie is running, it pays off, only to end with a cliffhanger. The director, Richard Linklater, later resolved things with his sequel, Before Sunset, and I like it fine, but I think I may have enjoyed the nine intervening years of wondering even more.

I met Linklater once, not that he would remember. It was at a festival where he was showing his first movie, Slacker, and someone tried to introduce the two of us, and I actually, fairly elaborately snubbed him, because I'd heard about--hadn't seen--his movie and thought it sounded like a pile of shit. After snubbing him (and mortifying the person trying to make the introductions(, I walked away invisibly pinning a medal to my chest, and the last time I looked back at Linklater, he was smiling at me in a very nice way that I may only imagine seemed to say, "Gee, before I made a movie, this fellow would be one of the biggest jackasses I've ever met, but now, he wouldn't even make my personal top 500!" Maybe I don't deserve to get girls.

MAGNOLIA (1999)

I could get very personal here too, but I'll just say that I saw this movie at a moment when I very badly needed to see this movie. It is, of course, the movie that, of all P. T. Anderson's works, is the one most likely to get a shoe thrown at you if you sing its praises before a mixed audience. Both these facts probably have something to do with the fact that, while there are other movies of Anderson's that I think are better, his having made this one is the reason I'd be happy to take a bullet for him.

Not a Review of Alex Cox's "Searchers 2.0"

Scott Von Doviak — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:00:00 GMT

As you may have deduced from the title of this post, I had originally planned to bring you a review of Alex Cox’s latest film Searchers 2.0 in this space. That’s not going to happen for the very simple reason that the screening of the film I’d planned to attend last night never happened. The official reason for the cancellation was “circumstances beyond our control.” These circumstances are somewhat mysterious, yet very disappointing for any fan of the self-described “radical filmmaker” behind Repo Man and Sid and Nancy.

Cox was scheduled to appear at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin to present both Searchers 2.0 – which was actually inspired by one the Alamo’s Rolling Roadshow events, a screening of Once Upon a Time in the West in Monument Valley – as well as the 1966 spaghetti western Arizona Colt (Italian oaters being one of Cox’s passions; he appears prominently in the documentary The Spaghetti West and he authored a just-published book on the subject, 10,000 Ways to Die.) Tonight he was to introduce his cult classic Repo Man, a screening that will still go on without him. According to the Austin Chronicle blog Picture in Picture, “The word on Cox's sudden detour into Suck City comes from the Alamo's ever-reliable (and insanely hard-working) Zack Carlson, who rang us this past Wednesday with word that Cox, for whom the Alamo had already secured plane fare from his home in Los Angeles as well as local lodging -- as they do for all incoming cinema legends (yes, even the cast of Troll 2) had mysteriously balked at the layover times in his airline itinerary. Carlson emailed back to swap flights around until Cox was satisfied, but that gambit proved fruitless, netting only a final, bewildering email from one of Cox's associates which stated that, and we quote, ‘Alex feels he has been mistreated and has chosen to cancel his appearance.’”

I interviewed Cox in connection with his scheduled appearance (you can read it here), and found him good-humored and entertaining, as I always have in his talking head interviews and commentary tracks. Honestly, I’ve generally found him more interesting as a film fan than a filmmaker. Although Repo Man is one of my desert island discs, and I’m very fond of his little-seen Three Businessmen, a shaggy dog story that plays like a cross between Slacker and a Bunuel film. Most of his filmography is more fun to hear him talk about than it is to watch, but I was looking forward to Searchers 2.0, which looks to be right in my wheelhouse. Maybe there’s another side to this story that doesn’t make Cox look like a petty jerk. I sure hope he has a better reason for letting so many people down than inconvenient airport layovers. Not too radical.

Smells Like Indie Spirit: Our Favorite Sundance Films Of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 23:00:00 GMT

SLACKER (1991) & CLERKS (1994)

I was struggling to extricate myself from college and move from Boston to L.A. when Richard Linklater's Slacker premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, reminding me that filmmaking wasn't just about Hollywood, but instead happened whenever and wherever a bunch of motivated creative types could get their hands on a camera. By painting Austin, Texas as a low-rent wonderland of hipsters and weirdos, Linklater inadvertently popularized the city and its filmmaking scene to the point where the rents got too high for most of the slackers (and businesses) depicted in the film. Nevertheless, despite attracting higher budgets and Hollywood friends thanks to the unexpected cult success of his debut (and the astonishing starmaking power of his follow-up, Dazed and Confused), Linklater stayed loyal to Austin, doing his best to Keep It Weird for the city's less famous residents.

A few years later, like much of Generation X, I was toiling on my own independent feature, dreaming of my own big Sundance debut when Clerks received the Filmmaker’s Trophy (and an acquisition deal from Miramax) in 1994...and so there was more than a little envy mixed in with my original lukewarm reaction to the Kevin Smith comedy. “It’s not THAT funny,” I thought, sitting in the Sunset 5 multiplex during the film’s theatrical run. “And the production values are crap!” Yet, in retrospect, the foul-mouthed riffing between cynical wage slaves Dante (Brian O’Halloran), Randal (Jeff Anderson) and national treasure Jason Mewes is, in fact, hilarious (reminiscent of John Waters’ “good” bad taste verbiage rather than just run-of-the-mill dick jokes). Moreover, like Linklater, Smith was and remains exactly the kind of Indiewood Horatio Alger even a bitter guy like me can’t begrudge. For one thing, he’s not a trust fund kid or the scion of Hollywood royalty: he filmed his movie at night in the very New Jersey convenience store where he toiled for pittance during the day, and if not for the good fortune of Sundance Advisory Committee member Bob Hawk seeing and liking the movie at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York, Smith might still be paying off the credit cards he used to finance his labor of love. Yet even after hitting the big time, Smith never went Hollywood (give or take his post-fame fling with Joey Lauren Adams and the occasional high profile screenwriting job): though sometimes uneven, his work since Clerks has remained idiosyncratic and personal, reflecting the sensibility of a smart, admirably humble working class jamoke who never got too big for his (admittedly gigantic) britches.

BLOOD SIMPLE (1984)

Sundance wasn't even Sundance yet when Blood Simple won the Grand Jury Prize in 1985; it was still known as the US Film Festival the year the low-budget Texas noir took top honors. As part of the first wave that led to the indie boom, Blood Simple is more notable for the careers that it launched than its own merits as an offbeat thriller, yet it still holds up remarkably well. Critics like Pauline Kael disdained the "camera whoop-de-do" at the time, but by today's standard, Blood Simple is a restrained piece of classical filmmaking. The plot is a sort of chess game where all the players are missing a few pieces, as a cuckolded bar owner (Dan Hedaya at his greasiest) hires a shady private eye (M. Emmet Walsh, ditto) to dispose of his wife and her lover. The wife is played by Frances McDormand making her motion picture debut, and the film not only marked the beginning of an impressive acting career, but also a remarkably long-lasting marriage (by show biz standards) as McDormand met her soon-to-be husband on the set. That was, of course, director Joel Coen, who along with brother, co-writer and producer Ethan Coen couldn't have known that Blood Simple was only the first chapter of one of the most storied filmographies of the past quarter-century. If not for Sundance, by any other name, it might never have happened.

SHERMAN'S MARCH (1986)

Ross McElwee's film -- subtitled "A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation" -- pulled triumph from disaster and constituted a bit of a landmark in the evolution of the "personal documentary." McElwee succeeded in taking a conceit that could have just been irritating -- providing a chronicle of his flailing love life in the course of showing how he managed to not deliver on a plan to make a film tracing the path of General Sherman's march through the South -- and dressing it with enough bittersweet humor and tart social observation to turn what could have been an act of self-exposure into a real picture of the times. (Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1987 festival.)

TO SLEEP WITH ANGER (1990)

Writer-director Charles Burnett's first feature Killer of Sheep would be selected for the National Film Registry, but this film, made a dozen years later, would finally earn Burnett his first play in real theaters. A blisteringly funny application of African-American folklore to a contemporary family, it is a cornucopia of wonders, not the least of them the performance of Danny Glover's career. It helped launch the steady simmer of Burnett's career that finally resulted in the restoration and theatrical and DVD release of Killer of Sheep last year, but ironically, To Sleep with Anger itself remains unavailable on home video and basically out of circulation. Burnett won a Special Jury Recognition prize when it was shown at the 1990 festival.

RESERVOIR DOGS (1992)

Quentin Tarantino's visceral debut has been ripped off so many times in the past fifteen years or so, it's probably safe by now to forgive Reservoir Dogs for being something of a ripoff in its own right. While Tarantino may have drawn a little too heavily on the likes of City on Fire and The Killing, it was clear from the opening scene – a roundtable discussion of the subtext of Madonna's "Like a Virgin" conducted by two-bit criminals in a crappy diner – that a distinctive new voice in American cinema had been discovered. And while that voice would occasionally grate over the years, its unique blend of profane tough-guy banter and geeky pop culture chatter found its purest expression in this time-twisting tale of that old reliable standby, the heist gone awry. In Tarantino's version, we never see the heist, but we get all the awry we can handle – in fact, more than some could handle in the case of the infamous "ear-slicing" scene. An unrivaled hard-boiled cast, including Steve Buscemi, Michael Madsen, Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth and a sublime Lawrence "You're not Mr. Purple!" Tierney, expertly navigates the sharp turns from raunchy humor to shocking violence, all to the beat of your Super Seventies Favorites. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, Reservoir Dogs lost to Alexandre Rockwell's In the Soup. As Phil Nugent could tell you, the judges might have missed the boat on that one.

HOOP DREAMS (1994)

Steve James's epic documentary about the role that high school basketball, and the promise of professional sports careers, plays in the lives of two black kids and their families is a prime example of what Sundance's dedication to good liberal causes is good for. The movie itself is the kind of project that either pays off big time for the people involved or amounts to a waste of years of effort, and it wasn't a waste. (Winner of the Audience Award at the 1994 festival)

CRUMB (1994)

Terry Zwigoff's great profile of the underground comics master Robert Crumb slipped a little dynamite into the often staid documentary category. Rich, hilarious, painful and spiky, it's a wake-up call for anyone who thinks the standard documentary form is played out; all you need, Zwigoff reveals, is a subject who fascinates on a kaleidoscopic variety of levels and a determination to spend years chasing him to ground. At the 1995 festival it took both the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary, and also a prize for cinematographer Maryse Alberti.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three & Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak & Phil Nugent

Visions of Change: Cinematic Utopias & Worst Case Scenarios (Part Three)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 23:00:00 GMT

THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981)

Before he went all screwy on us (or, rather, before we discovered how screwy he’d apparently always been), Mel Gibson starred in The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), just about the purest (and best) action film ever made. By the end of 1979’s Mad Max, things are already pretty bleak for Gibson’s titular character, an ex-cop whose family and best friend have all been killed by anarchic speed demon terrorists. But things are much worse in the sequel: society has broken down completely, people are killing and dying for petrol and for some reason everyone is required to wear football shoulder pads. Our protagonist has become a leather-clad man with no name, roaming the Outback with only a dog (who, like anyone else that gets too cozy with Gibson’s character, is doomed from the start). Eventually, Max’s need for fossil fuel forces him to choose between a bunch of dirty socialists living family-style in a fortified compound and Lord Humungus’ torture-loving, not-gay-at-all free market enthusiasts, who spread democracy with cool wrist-mounted crossbows. The film’s fuel-depleted landscape is a wonderland for plucky, self-sufficient mavericks who like to shoot things from helicopters (or, more specifically, gyro-copters), but like most totally cool, under-populated places where you don’t have to think about anyone but yourself, the pedal-to-the-metal, smash-and-grab wasteland freedom of The Road Warrior eventually gives way to the pesky forces of civilization (complete with charismatic black leader) in 1985’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

LOST HORIZON (1973)

It’s a cliché to say that one man’s utopia is another man’s dystopia; the only way to make it interesting is to show us why. Lost Horizon, a 1973 remake of a 1937 classic, sets out to show us how even the best human intentions can make a Hell of Heaven, and it certainly succeeds, but not in the way it intends. Instead of illustrating its point by skillfully telling how a group of outsiders come to Shangri-La and spoil its utopian purity with their unchecked desires, it illustrates the concept of a dystopia by being a really, really shitty movie. It’s hard to know exactly what the worst thing about this stink-bomb of a musical is: is it the crappy songs, surely the worst things ever to have Burt Bacharach’s name attached? Is it the bad acting from bad actors, or the worse acting from good actors? Is it Charles Jarrott’s incompetent directing, Larry Kramer’s wildly stupid screenplay, or producer Ross Hunter’s ability to spend gobs of money on a movie that looks absolutely terrible? Yeah, those are all good candidates, but for our money, the worst part is the decision to make it a singing, dancing musical and then cast people in it – the corpselike Peter Finch, the ungulate Liv Ullman, the bombed-out-of-her-mind Sally Kellerman, and the completely lost George Kennedy – who have no apparent ability to dance or sing. Let’s not even get into Bobby Van. Long unavailable for home audiences, Lost Horizon is a so-bad-it’s-just-incredibly-bad classic that screams for a DVD release.

BLADE RUNNER (1982)

Movies have shown us a near infinite number of futuristic dystopias, but few of them have seemed as plausible as the Los Angeles of 2019 in Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece. Heavy enough is the basic plot, which is the stepping stone to all sorts of explorations on the nature of memory, the meaning of freedom, and what it is to be human: in the near future, big corporations provide humanity with perfect duplicates, android servants who do our dirty work so that we can have lives of luxury. What makes them not human, and what will happen if they decide that being human is just what they want, even if it means their own destruction? But beyond that, there are eerie convocations of class, race, and wealth that seem eerily relevant today: the future L.A. is populated with losers. Those with money and connections – save for the corporate masters who stay behind to manufacture the androids – have left earth for a cushy life in the outer space colonies, while the rabble remain behind. Scott’s masterful imagination of the futuristic city is stunningly evocative: an ethnic mélange, a collision of fashions and cultures, sex and violence around every corner, crooked cops and criminals alike speaking a curious language that is an amalgam of dozens of immigrant voices. The losers live by scrounging, while the winners sit in remote towers above them. The vision of a dystopic futuristic metropolis as imagined by Scott (and Philip K. Dick) was so compelling that Blade Runner later became a founding document of the cyberpunk movement.

SLACKER (1991)

Here's the thing about utopias: your ideal society may not look a whole hell of a lot like mine. Yours may resemble the Garden of Eden, perhaps with a chocolate river running through it, but mine probably looks a lot like Richard Linklater's no-budget 1991 debut Slacker. Here's a magical land full of interesting people, and you don't have to spend more than two minutes with any of them. It's a bohemian crazy quilt of coffee houses, bars, rock clubs and used book stores crammed with conspiracy literature, a laid-back enclave percolating with oddball creativity, where time has no meaning. When I first moved to Austin more than a dozen years ago, hardly a day went by that I didn't run into Ultimate Loser at the Continental Club or Been on the Moon Since the Fifties on the hike and bike trail, and it was almost – but not quite – as if I'd found myself living in the movie. (One of the characters nearly punched me in the eye for hitting on his girlfriend, which is a nice memory to have now, if not so much fun then.) Austin is still a cool place to live, all things considered, but it's changed so much since then that Slacker is almost a relic; you could make a drinking game out of spotting the locations that have since been supplanted by condos or Starbucks. Still, it's nice to know I can still visit that place any time I want just by cueing up the Slacker DVD.

V FOR VENDETTA (2005)

The fascist England of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, upon which the James McTeigue film was based, was a very British affair: tawdry, dirty, steeped in a very 1930s understanding of totalitarianism and suffused with an English sense of racial purity. The film did what such films always do – it took liberties. (Which is why Alan Moore refuses to have anything to do with film adaptations of his work.) Gone was a the filthy, hardscrabble Orwellian vision of a nearby dystopia, triggered by an unexplained nuclear exchange: in its place was a very modern authoritarian state, its parallels to Bush’s America as blaring and obvious as Moore’s references to Thatcher’s England were subtle and quiet. The great dictator is transformed from a hard, driven, religious man to a cartoonish supervillain appearing on giant screens as if he were a James Bond nemesis; his right-hand man is transformed from an advantage-taking careerist to a sneering Dick Cheney type; nuclear conflict becomes terrorism, blacks lose their status as the scapegoat of choice to Muslims; and, in a choice that painfully subverts the intent of the original, the state’s highest crime isn’t oppression, it’s deceit. In the absence of the fascist trappings, and the obvious references to modern society (completely with the recreation of state propaganda with talk-show blathering), the story loses much of its muscle. But the terrorist V remains a powerful symbol, and a memorable scene where police inspector Stephen Rea dispassionately explains, like a man who’s seen it happen a dozen times before, how state authority easily gets out of hand, is a compelling vision of the simple corruption of power.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak

In Other Blogs: Evil “Touch”?

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:00:00 GMT

You might think everyone would be happy now that the latest DVD release of Touch of Evil contains both the originally released theatrical cut and the version restored to the dictates of the famous Orson Welles memo a decade ago. But no! Apparently there are some aspect ratio issues to contend with. At his eponymous blog, Dave Kehr writes, “the sentiment of the group seems to be that we all want to vent about the Touch of Evil 50th anniversary edition, with its highly controversial 1.85 aspect ratio. There’s clearly no cut and dried answer here, in the absence of any documentary evidence, but my eye tells me that it’s too tight. The shot above shows some obvious trimming at the upper frame line, but for the most part the 1.85 version that Universal has released seems to give preference to head room while cutting out the less conspicuous compositional elements at the bottom of the frame. It all feels a bit tenuous and unstable to me, like a chord that hasn’t quite been allowed to resolve itself.”

At Parallax View, Sean Axmaker isn’t so sure about that. “I respect Kehr’s eye as I do his insight, but watching the revised cut in 1.85 for the first time was a revelation to me. Compositions became more dramatic, framed more tightly around Welles’ groupings. The long-takes in Sanchez’s apartment feel more claustrophobic, without so much of the expanse of the blank ceiling open above their heads.” Adding to the confusion is the fact that the two versions included on the DVD aren’t the only ones out there. “Today, no less than four cuts of the picture exist: the original 93-minute release version, the 108-minute preview version rediscovered in the Universal vaults in 1975 (and which had since supplanted the release version in all theatrical showings), a kind of unholy marriage created for video that cuts footage exclusive to the short version into the preview version, and the 1998 ‘revision’ of the film. This latter project, produced by Rick Schmidlin and edited by Walter Murch with Welles scholar Jonathan Rosenbaum serving as advisor, is being branded as a ‘restored version,’ but that’s a studio marketing move. As the project participants understand, it’s really an unprecedented and still unique attempt to retroactively honor a director by following his directions in repairing an artwork taken out of his hands. For the sake of accuracy, I will be referring the 1998 cut as the ‘revised version’ or the ‘1998 revision.’”

Another lavish new DVD release gets the business at Beyond the Multiplex. “What remains profoundly upsetting and unsettling about Salò after 33 years is that the pornographic and scatological and violent images it depicts — if you want a list of the specific outrages, find it somewhere else — emerge in a context of such rigorous formal beauty. With lavish production design by Dante Ferretti (later a collaborator with Fellini and Scorsese), costumes by Danilo Donati, music by Ennio Morricone, settings in spectacularly decaying Italian villas and the most austere, gorgeous camerawork of Pasolini’s career, Salò captures the Italian film industry at its postwar aesthetic height.”

At Hulu Blog, guest blogger Kevin Smith reminisces about the first time he saw Slacker (which you can now view there for free). “After overpaying for both parking and popcorn, we settled into what seats we could find together in the packed theater of a midnight screening. And once the trailer for Hal Hartley's Trust concluded, the Orion Classics logo lit up the screen and introduced me to my future. For the next 100 minutes or so, I was agog. My jaw literally hung open as this shaggy paean to those who follow the road not taken unspooled, offering me a glimpse into a free-associative world of ideas instead of plot, people instead of characters, and Nowheresville, Texas, instead of the usual California or New York settings most movies elected to feature (that ‘Nowheresville’ was really Austin speaks volumes on how culturally bereft I was at the time). That night, director Richard Linklater and his film not only captured my imagination, he (and it) captured my heart -- not to mention kick-started my ambition.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, Spoutblog takes a look at 10 Underrated Bill Murray Roles. For instance, “The Writer” in The Lost City. “Another movie that’s not very good and that not a lot of people have seen is Andy Garcia’s labor of love set in Havana during the Cuban revolution. And like most movies featuring a minor appearance from Murray, The Lost City is at least worth watching just for him. In fact, you could easily just fast-forward to each of his scenes and not miss anything since his role and performance is so out of place anyway.”

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 20 Animated Features Films (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 20:30:00 GMT

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER AND UNCUT (1999)

Oh, sure, The Simpsons Movie was funny...but it wasn't South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut funny. It wasn't even "Marge vs. the Monorail"-era Simpsons funny. After ten years of writing, The Simpsons Movie seemed no better or worse than an above-average episode of the show drawn out to feature length. (And, aside from the "Spider-Pig" theme, where were the musical numbers?!?!) By way of comparison, when Trey Parker and Matt Stone got a chance to bring their consistently hilarious and subversive Comedy Central cartoon to the big screen, they pulled out all the stops: a full, Broadway/Guitar Hero-quality, Oscar-nominated musical score by future Tony-winner Marc Shaiman and Metallica frontman James Hetfield (!!!), a typically topical, economy-size blockbuster of a plot, some unobtrusively awesome voice cameos, impressively stepped-up animation and, most importantly, the swearing...oh, the wonderful, wonderful swearing, some of the most (literally) musical cursing in cinema history...and “Uncle Fucker” wasn’t even the funniest part. Or the most shocking: that came later, when I actually felt a rare burst of affection for Robin Williams during his good-natured, who’d-a-thunk-it performance of “Blame Canada” at the 72 Annual Academy Awards ceremony.

WAKING LIFE (2001)

In some ways, Richard Linklater's sixth feature played like a sequel to his first, Slacker. Like that seminal low-budget indie, Waking Life is largely plotless as it prowls the streets of Austin, Texas, encountering one talkative oddball or dime-store philosopher after another. It sure doesn't look anything like Slacker, though; while the former film aimed for street-level realism, Waking Life takes place in a dream state realized through an animation process developed by Bob Sabiston (and ripped off many times since). Using computer software, animators were able to draw on top of edited video footage. With each new scene, a different artist takes the reigns, resulting in a fluid, continually evolving picture. The images ebb and flow like ocean waves, which may be problematic for viewers susceptible to sea sickness, but will prove entrancing to those on Linklater's wavelength. (Honorable mention goes to Linklater's second foray into animation, A Scanner Darkly, which uses a similar process to very different effect in its depiction of a paranoid world just on the edge of our own reality.)

THE IRON GIANT (1999)

For a film that seems so completely seamless on screen, The Iron Giant has one of the most Frankensteinian origin stories of any of the movies on this list. It’s based on a children’s story by Ted Hughes, the widower of Sylvia Plath, former poet laureate of England, and author of some of the most bloody, visceral poems of the 20th century. When it was first optioned as a film, it was meant to be a live-action musical, with music by no less than the Who’s Pete Townshend; although that never worked out, Townshend did produce a soundtrack for a stage show based on the story. Disney Studios engaged Warner Bros. in a bidding war, with Warner, on the winning side, finally handing the project off to Brad Bird – who, just a few years later, would be working with Disney anyway, on Pixar’s The Incredibles. On top of all that, it was originally envisioned as a completely traditional cel animation project, then reconceived as a film done in 3D computer animation – only to eventually arrive on screen as an amalgam of both, with the bulk of the film done in standard animation and the main character – a colossal alien machine who befriends a young boy while being sought by a paranoid government – done in CGI. The Iron Giant took years to make, and went through innumerable reconceptions, personnel changes, and battles between the filmmakers and the studio – which makes it all the more remarkable that it’s such a terrific piece of work. Charming, funny, and moving by turns, and featuring all of what would become known as director Brad Bird’s hallmarks, it’s a movie that couldn’t have been any better if it had come out of Pixar – which we mean as the highest possible compliment.
FANTASIA (1940)

With all the praise that’s been heaped on it over the last six decades, it’s easy to forget that Disney’s Fantasia could have been a disaster. Indeed, many critics predicted such a fate for it, and a few (including the notorious Irish author Flann O’Brien) held that opinion even after it was released and began piling up the accolades. Animation, then as now, was taken less than seriously as a film medium, and when Walt Disney announced that he would be releasing a film combining his studio’s unique, whimsical style of animation with some of the greatest works in the Western classical music canon, trepidation was widespread: those who loved the music feared it would be bastardized by the presence of cartoon characters, and those who loved the cartoons feared that Disney was overreaching by putting his work in the service of such highbrow affairs. And, to be truthful, the movie isn’t pure perfection; at times, it does come across as pretentious, and at other times, hopelessly middlebrow. But when it works – and the great wonder of Fantasia is that it works more than it doesn’t – it’s because the music is so perfectly matched with the material. The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment is simply the finest Mickey Mouse cartoon ever made, and Leopold Stokowski’s interpretation of the musical accompaniment does it its proper service. The “Rite of Spring” passage is simply an inspiration, a clever conceit carried off without a single hitch, and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment, which could have become an overblown gasbag of a passage, instead plays perfectly well. Coming down to earth with playful humor whenever it threatens to become too self-impressed, Fantasia overcomes the culture clash at its heart to become one of the finest animated features of all time.

Click Here for Part One, Part Three, Part Four & Part Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce

Criterion’s Shaman of Design

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

In addition to their many other virtues, Criterion Collection DVDs are justly praised for their lavish packaging. Not content to simply slap the old familiar one-sheets on their covers and stuff two-page booklets inside flimsy slipcases, Criterion often starts from scratch, creating all-new key art and design elements that lend fresh context to the treasures inside. One of the artists responsible for this shelf candy is Marc English, profiled this week in the Austin Chronicle. Once you learn that English is member of the Austin Film Society’s board of directors, it’s no surprise to learn that his first assignment for Criterion was their 2004 edition of Slacker, directed by Film Society founder Richard Linklater.

“From a corporate identity standpoint,” English explains, “the existing Slacker logo had a certain amount of equity, so I didn't want to mess with it too much. What I did was take the iconic image of Pap smear girl [Teresa Taylor], print it out on a laser printer, soak it in water to make it look beat, duct-tape it to a telephone pole, and then just hold a stencil of the title up in front of it and shoot the whole thing in camera. Which created an instant extension of the film's DIY edge.”

English is also responsible for the recent Criterion edition of Two-Lane Blacktop, which has met with director Monte Hellman’s enthusiastic approval. “His work just exemplifies Criterion's style in that it catches your eye immediately…I'm just really overwhelmed by Marc's work on the design. I think it's one of the most gorgeous packaging jobs I've ever seen. I just like everything about it.”

The artist’s latest effort will be on shelves next week, as Alex Cox’s much-maligned Walker finally makes its DVD debut. The Chronicle site features a number of cover designs English produced before arriving at the Cox-approved version below.