By Joe Bendel. At its best, animation creates a stylized world to express the truth of the very real world around us. Several of the award-winning animated shorts recently collected by The World According to Shorts do exactly that. Titled Nine Nation Animation, the mostly very strong animated shorts program (see showreel above) now traveling to art house theaters nationwide.
Starting strong, Nine kicks off with Kajsa Naess’s Deconstruction Workers from Norway. Employing actual photos of actors animated against a chaotic construction site, Deconstruction certainly has a distinctive look. Yet had screenwriter Kjartan Helleve’s caustic dialogue about life and relationships been produced in a live action film, it would still be quite funny – which is, indeed, the ultimate test of an animated film. It is followed by Burkay Dorgan’s Average 40 Matchsticks, representing Turkey. Its stop motion animation would be impressive in a show-reel, but it is rather a trifle within the overall program.
Easily the richest, most substantial work in Nine is French animator Patrick Pleutin’s Bâmiyân (available below, in French only). Told through multiple narrators, Bâmiyân first follows a Chinese monk on his 632 AD pilgrimage to view the great Buddha statues of Bamyan. Eventually, the first child storyteller is interrupted by a second who glorifies the statues’ destruction centuries later at the hands of the Taliban. It is a chilling illustration of Islamist intolerance learned at an early age. Bâmiyân’s visual style is also quite dramatic, evoking not just traditional Tibetan, Chinese, and Indian art forms, but even hinting at the ancient cave paintings of Lascaux. Indeed, Nine is worth seeing for Bâmiyân alone, but it is followed by two more quite rewarding films.
From Patrick Pleutin’s "Bâmiyân."
If Philip K. Dick had rewritten Adam Sandler’s Click with the Hello Kitty characters and set it in the world of Tron, it might resemble David O’Reilly’s Berlinale Golden Bear winning Please Say Something. Obviously, that is worth seeing. It is a bit of a surprise Belgian Jonas Geirnaert’s Flatlife won the Cannes Jury Prize, because this cross-section view of life in four contiguous apartments is very funny, but not the least bit political. Though easily the most sentimental, Robert Bradbrook’s Home Road Movies might be the most innovative, manipulating images of British actor Bill Paterson (recognizable from Comfort and Joy, Smiley’s People, and a host of other credits), appearing as the filmmaker’s late father, to create a tangible sense of pathos.
There are the occasional misfires. Veljko Popoviç’s She Who Measures is an ugly-looking, predictable, didactic screed against commercialism. The South African Blackheart Group’s dodo bird fable The Tale of How is impressively baroque, but the operatic narration makes it nearly impossible to follow. A collection in itself, the concluding Never Like the First Time dramatizes three Swedes relating their first sexual experience. Though uneven, it has its moments, including the harrowing middle story of a young woman that serves as a cautionary tale and something of a corrective to the Maxim-esque episode that preceded it.
Happily, this is not an assemblage of Benetton’s commercials or UNICEF infomercials. Nine simply collects some of the best animated shorts around the world as determined by World According to Shorts’ rather eccentric aesthetic judgment. Indeed, their overall record here is quite good, picking one film of true distinction, three high passes, and two mixed bags that are still rather good on balance. That is a far better batting average than you get with most festival short programming blocks. Well worth seeing, Nine just ended its week long run in New York at the IFC Center and now travels to art house theaters across the country.
By David Ross. In preparation for my film course (see here), I watched Godard’s A Woman is a Woman (1961) for the first time in years. [See the first 10 minutes of the film above.] I remembered the film as a wearisome deconstructive exercise brought to life only by Anna Karina in the lead role. The film was as tedious as ever, and La Karina as irresistibly kittenish. She poses, pouts, and purrs, in what may be the single greatest act of seduction – seduction of the camera, seduction of the audience – ever filmed. Of course, Karina manages to seduce none of the characters onscreen despite dogged effort. This is Godard’s little joke, or maybe part of his point.
Anna Karina.
What a cold and aloof ass Godard must have been to persist in his ironic games instead of allowing himself to be seduced, as Degas allowed himself to be seduced over and over again. Godard’s camera is busy making political and aesthetic points when it should be, as it were, making love. Karina and Godard married during the shooting of A Woman is a Woman. I suppose a man can be excused a certain sobriety with respect to the woman he sleeps with every night, but he cannot be excused an imperturbable irony. Godard’s clinical distance is an embarrassment to the male imagination and a travesty of what’s owed to a woman on her honeymoon. What a shame that at the height of her beauty and charm Karina wound up in a string of pretentious, sporadically brilliant Godard films and not in a string of delightful romantic comedies directed by someone like George Cukor or Billy Wilder. She might have been another Audrey Hepburn.
Oddly enough, A Woman is a Woman put me in mind of Mark Steyn. Karina’s character Angela desperately wants a baby, but she can find nobody willing to impregnate her. I couldn’t help construing or misconstruing this as an allegory of Europe’s plunging birthrates and demographic death spiral, of which Steyn is the poet laureate. Here’s a typical exchange between Angela and Émile Récamier as Brialy:
Angela: I want a baby Brialy: You’re being unreasonable. Angela: I want a baby Brialy: Stop this madness Angela: You’re being mean. Brialy: I don’t like that tartan skirt on you. Angela: Good. I’m not trying to please anybody. I want a baby. Brialy: Stop this madness. Angela: I’m going to the Zodiac [a strip club] Brialy: Go and strip then. You disgust me. Angela: Jerk. We can’t live off your lousy income. You’re such a coward. Brialy: I’d rather be a coward than fool Angela [sadly]: Why am I a fool for wanting a baby? Brialy: Shut up or I’ll leave. Angela: Where would you go? Brialy: I don’t know. Mexico. Angela: You’re crazy, Brialy: No, you’re crazy. Angela: I want a baby.
The camera then cuts to a Paris boulevard, where a man-in-the-street reporter type accosts a young man:
Reporter: Excuse me, could you sleep with this young lady so she can have a baby? Pedestrian: It’s not a good time. I’m a bit busy today.
Procreation, as Steyn argues constantly, is an affirmation of continuity with both the past and the future (see here for a typical riff). It is a matter of believing in a narrative of history and choosing to participate. Modern Europe – where the non-immigrant birthrate is far below replacement level – seems to construe the future as somebody else’s problem, as something for state bureaucrats to work out while one holidays in Ibiza. Does Godard’s comedy pick up on something then latent – now patent – in the European zeitgeist? Perhaps not – perhaps so.
By Jason Apuzzo. I saw The Social Network yesterday – and found it for the most part uninteresting. Despite some stand-out performances by Jesse Eisenberg, Justin Timberlake and Andrew Garfield the film failed to really grab me emotionally in any way. Part of the problem is that there doesn’t seem to have been anything particularly dramatic behind the rise of Facebook as a corporation. You could basically make the same movie about the rise of, say, Dunkin’ Donuts, to about the same effect.
[I hear Dunkin’ Donuts does over $5 billion in business per year, by the way. So don’t laugh.]
And so in lieu of spending hours writing a review about a film that didn’t grab me, on any level, I thought I’d post this video above that illustrates how David Fincher’s directorial style could quickly and efficiently be brought to bear in depicting the rise of other famous Silicon Valley ventures. Judge for yourself.
By the way, my understanding is that Mark Zuckerberg won’t be suing Sony, or any of the other people behind the making of The Social Network. They’re lucky, frankly. The people making the Google movie might not have the same good fortune.
By Jason Apuzzo. • The big news today is Lucasfilm’s announcement that the entire, 6-film Star Wars saga is going to be retrofit into 3D, and that the films will be released in series order (i.e., Episode I-VI) starting in 2012. This is fabulous news in my opinion, albeit not surprising. 2012 will mark the 35th anniversary of the original film, and George Lucas has been hinting for years that something like this was in the works.
This announcement will, of course, occasion a lot of uniformed pontificating about some of the bad 3D retrofits that have been released in the wake of Avatar. Two obvious factors mitigate such concerns here: 1) Lucas and his team have about 18 months until the first film is released, giving them a great deal more time than usual to do a high-quality retrofit – as opposed to the rush-jobs we’ve become accustomed to from this past summer; 2) Lucasfilm boasts the best technical staff in the industry, so we can assume the presentation will be state-of-the-art.
The Death Star trench run - soon in 3D.
Just for fun, I’ve put up a Star Wars student fan short (see above) I caught recently that was done in 3D. It was the winner of the “Best Animation” award from the recent Star Wars Fan Film Movie Challenge, sponsored by Lucasfilm. You’ll need your anaglyphic red/blue glasses for this one. [Make sure to get those, by the way, because I’d like to start showing more 3D stuff here at Libertas in the future.] Enjoy!
Incidentally, this means that the forthcoming Star Wars Blu-rays will subsequently need to be re-issued in 3D. They don’t call George a genius for nothing.
• In related 3D news, there’s a rumor circulating that Warner Brothers is pressuring Christopher Nolan to shoot the next Batman film in 3D – and also that Inception may get a 3D retrofit after all. Take that rumor for what it’s worth. Personally I doubt this story, because Nolan is currently The Man over at Warner Brothers, in the wake of Inception and his supervision of the Superman reboot. I would add that the vibe of the Batman series is more old-school retro/noir (largely contrary to the spirit of 3D) – although Nolan did shoot parts of The Dark Knight in IMAX, and he’s obviously fascinated with new technologies. As for Inception, there’s no point in doing a retrofit now anyway because it’s too soon for a re-release and there are too few home systems out there set up for 3D viewing.
For all the Wall Street excess that Stone’s new film depicts, the movie (spoiler alert — skip ahead to the next paragraph if you’d rather not know) in many ways offers a benign, even uplifting message about the Street. Sure, the fevered speculation drives one old-timer to take his life. But the movie ultimately tells the story of a young idealist — and one who gets the money and the girl to boot.
Even one of moviedom’s all-time unrepentant characters, the Wall Street sharpie Gordon Gekko, seeks, and (after a lapse) gains, redemption. Compared to the original, which sees said sharpie sent off to jail, this chapter of his story is almost.. heartwarming. Big business and the financial industry may have a deep skepticism for the current Democratic administration. But there’s little for them to dislike in a movie about them from the most outspoken of left-wing filmmakers.
This is why you need to read Libertas folks – we’re prescient here. What’s funny is that later in the article Zeitchik darkly intimates that Stone made such a “benign, even uplifting” film for crass commercial purposes – i.e., to sell out and make a buck! Unreal. Not even Oliver Stone can get his films cleared these days by the People’s Truth Commissions over at the NY and LA Times.
The bold designs of the new "Tron."
• Brett Ratner has just taken on Charles Robert Jenkins’ memoir The Reluctant Communist as his next project. This is great news, because this book is apparently one of the most harrowing accounts of life in communist North Korea that’s ever been written. The book deals with Charles Jenkins’ booze-driven defection as a U.S. Army sergeant to North Korea in 1965, a nation he would later refer to as “a giant, demented prison.” Jenkins would remain in North Korea for the next four decades – used by the communist regime as a propaganda prop – until the Japanese eventually arranged for his release. I think it’s very encouraging that Ratner is taking on this complex and interesting project, and we’ll keep an eye on how it develops.
• Do you recall Jessica Alba’s pseudo-nude shower scene in Machete? Of course you don’t, because you didn’t bother to see that film. Well, we learn today that Alba wasn’t actually nude in the scene when they shot it – she was apparently ‘digitally undressed’ in post! Forget 3D, this is the most promising development in digital technology yet! Imagine the possibilities. By the way, if you click over to this news piece – which 90% of our male readers will – you’ll notice that Alba also lost a little weight once the digital artists were through. So we have the perfect situation here: you ladies don’t need to take your clothes off on set, plus you get to lose a few pounds in the process. And everybody’s happy!
By Jason Apuzzo. A special hat-tip goes today to my LFM colleague Joe Bendel for covering an interesting new web series called Pioneer One that just appeared on Vimeo and YouTube, and is also showing right now at the New York Television Festival. Pioneer One is essentially a crowd-funded webseries that went from concept to finished pilot in three months, on a budget of about $6000.
The premise of Pioneer One is this: a mysterious object falls from the sky, spreading radiation over North America. Fearing terrorism, Homeland Security Agents are dispatched to investigate and contain the damage. Without giving too much away, let’s just say that what they find there involves elements of sci-fi, contemporary anxieties associated with terrorism, and the political history of the Cold War. And while the politics of the series seem a bit murky, based on what I’ve seen thus far it’s safe to say that the series’ creators take a dim view of Soviet communism.
All summer long here at Libertas we were covering a variety of subjects – sci-fi alien invasions (see here), a return of Cold War/anti-communist themes (Salt, Mao’s Last Dancer, Farewell, etc.), and crowd-funded indie sci-fi projects (Iron Sky, The 3rd Letter, Mercury Men) – all of which categories, interestingly, Pioneer One fits into.
Having watched the full pilot episode, my feeling is that the team behind Pioneer One has a great premise they’re working from – one that only becomes clear by the end of the episode. Writer Josh Bernhard and director Bracey Smith are doing a very nice job, cleverly providing a sense of scale and suspense to the story, even if the pacing of this first episode is perhaps a bit relaxed. I hope this series takes off (it already has, to a great extent – the pilot has been downloaded and streamed over 2 million times) because if it goes where I think it’s going … it should be a great deal of fun. Bravo to the whole team behind Pioneer One.
