r_harveyO Brother, Where Art Thou? | Moulin Rouge | Amélie | Chicken Run | Monsters Inc. | Frida | Citizen Kane | Python's Holy Grail | Rocky & Bullwinkle | Big Fish | Triplets of Belleville | Postscript | About | Home
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Seen Any Good DVDs Lately?
Do you mean movies made in the last few years? Since the professional actors stopped working? Umm, that's tough.
I prefer fantasy to realism (if I wanted reality, I'd have a life of my own). If you're a fan of action/adventure, or you prefer the Three Stooges to A Thousand Clowns, you probably won't like those I like, anyway.
It's a cross between Forrest Gump, The Grapes of Wrath and The Grand 'Ol Opry, set in a sepia-toned, dream-like 1937 South. The director says it's like a hillbilly Lawrence of Arabia. It's cheerfully- The DVD was released through the Touchstone/Disney folks, which means you have to click-past several trailers hawking lesser fare, before you get to the good stuff. It's worth it just so you can watch the gorgeous, muted-hues of the Siren seduction scene, time and again; imagine the car wash scene in Cool Hand Luke super-sized and served on a river bank, with hauntingly-beautiful music featuring Emmylou Harris.
The only reason I can see for it not doing well in theatrical sales or Academy Awards is the name, which is frankly pretentious and a bit dopey; if they had called it "O Brother," it would probably have done better.
Rating: Everybody keeps their clothes on. There's a plenitude of cussin' by politicos and paterfamilias. A middling amount of violence: now and again somebody gets smacked across the back of the head with a board.
Second Feature: Meet John Doe (1941).
You say you're hankering for a Franco-Australian disco-fantasy? How about Moulin Rouge, which wraps some of today's most annoyingly self-congratulatory music with truly exciting and inventive photography and animation, and close- Ewan McGregor's singing is haunting, but not in a good way; one remembers it as a monotone feedback loop. I kept hoping that one of the hundreds of extras standing around all the time, would've stepped- It's too tightly edited—an extra couple of frames in many scenes would have made it easier to follow. Watching it requires a fixed, trance-like stare, for fear of missing something critical when blinking. While there's not a wasted frame anywhere else, the Carmen-like ending hangs- Rating: No violence, nudity or profanity, but an abundance of debauchery.
Second Feature: Rustler's Rhapsody (1985).
In much the same way Forrest Gump is a scrapbook of the late-20th century for this country, Amélie is France's warm memento.
You'll have to watch it at least three times: In addition to being eternally grateful to see any French movie that doesn't look like a cigarette commercial, I stand gape- Set in the summer of 1997, yet the streets are full of new bright blue Volkswagen Beetles. Still, Améile is the antithesis of Hollywood's recent summer titles. O Hollywood, where art thy head?
Note to Jean-Pierre Jenet, Améile's director: the garden gnome joke was done on David Letterman's show ten years earlier. Fly wings surely beat more than seventy times per minute.
Jean-Pierre Jenet's previous independent film was The City of Lost Children, which was beautiful but insane. (He later directed Alien IV, which I am unlikely to ever see.) He grows with everything he does; I'm looking forward to his next adventure.
Rating: While there's no violence or questionable language (other than the French language, itself), there is some sex and nudity.
Second Feature: Spirited Away, a 2001 animated film that espouses magic, demons and an orderly- I suppose they hired the voice of Mel Gibson so that Chicken Run could get financing, and so distributors would even consider trying to convince theater owners to screen a film about Plasticine poultry.
The Aardman craftsmen (the same clever gang who do the Chevron Gasoline television commericals) offer an ensemble cast of real- The film is wonderfully creative and endlessly fascinating, but not laugh- The Plasticine players dragged much more from Mel's inflection- Rating: Some violence may not be suitable for young children.
Second Feature: The Great Escape.
Keep telling yourself: "They're just the distributors, they're just the distributors...," since today's Disney has little more to do with Monsters Inc. than making disc boxes, booking television advertisements, and filling the disc with trailers for Disney's own generic-mation. Just to be clear: Monsters Inc. is a 100- Randy Newman's musical score is simple, pleasant and agreeable, which is preferable to an overwrought John Williams score. My theory is that the Academy Award™ for Pretty Good Best Song was given to apologize for giving the Best Animated Feature award to Shrek (which, other than having more bodily function jokes, is outgunned by Monsters Inc.).
It is of course better looking than most Japanese Anime and as well directed as Chuck Jones' best films, but this isn't really a review of Monsters Inc... Let's celebrate the evolution of the Pixar Studio.
Every Pixar film builds on what was learned from making its predecessor. In Toy Story they learned how to do long- Realistic- Pixar's 6-movie distribution contract with Disney is coming to a close. Left in the Disney/Pixar channel are The Incredibles, (about an aging super-hero) followed by Cars. Sequels, like Toy Story II, don't count, and Disney owns the rights to Pixar's animated characters, so Disney may make their own direct-to-video sequels. If there are any more sequels, they will likely be made by Disney, not Pixar. Along with the two Toy Story movies (remember: sequels don't count), A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., it's a great run—it'll only get better.
Rating: No profanity, but some simulated scaring and lots and lots of screaming.
Second Feature: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). This was the end of the line for domestic hand- The first act of so many movies drags in exposition, talking about the main character's childhood friends, hardships and angst. Frida's director, Julie Taymor, sprints to the point, probably because the character's childhood is as interesting as some whole lives. It is the story of a fragile but determined artist named Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek), and her husband, the much more successful painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina), as they explore life in a blue house. Called a marriage between an elephant and a dove, it's about their separate pains, and the pains they shape together.
We see the Mexican culture of the 1920s through the '50s, un-glorified Comunistic idealism, and sensuality. It's sharp, well- Rating: Nudity, profanity, sexuality, drinking, drugs, smoking, Comunistic politics.
Second feature: Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen's autobiographical essay about his rocky relationship with Diane Keaton.
This is a dramatic comic book (okay, Graphic Novel) of a movie, with dark shadows and darker heroes. None of that warm, friendly, cooperative attitude here. This is of the genre that relies on writing, acting and intelligence, instead of big- You need to see Citizen Kane on its own, without factoring the baggage that's been hung on it over the last 60 years. On its own, it's the saga of a damaged man who spends a lifetime grabbing at the wrong brass ring. Like many movies that follow—from Sunset Boulevard to Pulp Fiction—the main character has died before the opening credits roll. Two hours worth of flashbacks later, we understand the arc of his life.
Visual and audio treats abound. Long, sweeping camera pans flow through rooms and over furniture; only after they cut to another scene do we realize that we just witnessed an impossible 4-minute scene, done without any edits. Angles, lighting and set design, are wonderfully drawn with an economical palette, though a tad too shiny and new.
Now the baggage: Mostly ignored for a decade because of egoes and war, and living in the shadow of Orson Welles himself, who is alternately called a boy- Film reviewer Roger Ebert loves this movie; he's probably explored it a hundred times. In one of the alternate audio tracks, Mr. Ebert struggles to explain the mythical "Deep Focus" effects without using the word "Magic." It's clear that, while he has lead several groups and classes exploring this movie, nobody has ever confronted him with what Deep Focus really means. To paraphrase: Well, you see, if you take pictures, you know that the farther away from the camera the subject is, the more light it needs. And they used these giant lamps that were designed for Technicolor, along with some special lens and coating. I can feel my understanding of depth-of- Rating: No profanity or sexuality, but some intensity. It's kind of a downer, so don't expect to go skipping out of the screening room while humming the theme song.
Second Feature: Sixty years later, in The Cat's Meow (2001), Peter Bogdanovich gives William Randolph Hearst another thrashing. Much of this film was shot in the same studio with the same crew as Amélie, in a staging and camera style reminiscent of Kane.
I so very much wanted to ignore this movie. It's vulgar, low- The 1970s gave us some fine comedies; Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Peter Sellers and Monty Python were in their prime. This 1974 release is perhaps the best of the era—at least in its price range.
Mostly retelling King Arthur legends, Holy Grail is on the one hand outrageous and silly, while on the other hand, silly and outrageous. Basically, a half- Funniness aside, it's an important movie that defines a new way to look at how to do a fully- Rating: A little bit of profanity. Lots of supposedly- Second Feature: Excalibur (1981), with some memorably original acting by Nicol Williamson, tells the Arthur legends from a different point of view: reality (other than the magic swords and watery tarts). Gabriel Byrne is listed eighth in the closing credits; Liam Neeson is 11th, and Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard) is 14th.
Introduced in 1959, at times called The Rocky Show, Bullwinkle, Rocky & Friends, this first season introduces the characters (even though Bullwinkle had been a hand-puppet in a previous life). Features include Mr. Peabody (and his famous Wayback machine), Fractured Fairy Tales, Dudly Doright of the Mounties, and more. Each episode continues the multi-part Rocky & Bullwinkle cliffhangers, as they accidentally outwit the notorious Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.
By Bullwinkle standards, the image quality, color, and sound are outstanding. By anybody else's standards, it's grainy, scratchy, and jumpy, with glaring errors in animation. And charming. This collection is 26 episodes, nearly ten hours of cold war politics, puns, and fun.
Executive Producer Ponsonby Britt was invented by Jay Ward and Bill Scott because the studio told them to get an executive producer. The middle initial of many of today's cartoon characters is J., as a tribute to Jay Ward.
Rating: Risqué in 1959. Sweet and gentle, compared to today's culture.
Second Feature: Futurama began forty years after Rocky&Bullwinkle; it's probably the best looking TV cartoon ever, with the best music and acting... and the most profanity. And forty years after Rocky ended, Sunday, August 10, 2003, Futurama ended. Set a thousand years in the future, it's a treat for those who love science fiction, and sweet revenge for those who don't. See Futurama fan site.
"It doesn't always make sense, and most of it never happened," the voice-over hints. By the time they finally remember to tell us the title of the movie, we know that it's about Edward Bloom, from Ashton Alabama, a determined, affable man, who told and lived fantastic stories.
Big Fish is directed by Tim Burton, a clever and visual guy, known for surrealistic, comic book-like movies. Burton has many commercial successes, including Batman (with Danny DeVito as The Penguin), Beatlejuice, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands, and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. Big Fish is perhaps Tim Burton's best film—with another "Ed" in it, and another suburbia.
Burton's worlds have dark sides; here it's the relationship of a father and son. I see it as the story of the Big Fish (the father), as seen by the son—after all, movies all have to see things through somebody's eyes. Some say that Big Fish appeals more to men than to women, though it's hardly a movie for jocks.
Edward: Dying is the worst thing that's ever happened to me. It's charming and inventive, with great art direction and good photography. Even the wallpaper is charming and clever. Music, by Danny Elfman, who also works on The Simpsons, is always just right. The film is less ambitious than I had expected. Fantastical events are few, and their fantasticality often overstated—or over-anticipated. It's not an epic journey, of the scale of Forrest Gump, but a personal movie.
There's little order to it. Short-stories, vignettes and asides, induce flashbacks to relive Edward's travels, while folksy narration keeps us on track. Big spans are left for us to imagine, and details are missing— Albert Finney and Ewan McGregor play Edward Bloom at different ages; fortunately, neither one tries to sing. In his youth, Edward is gregarious and wants to be liked; later, some see him as a blustery blowhard— Poet: I've been working on this poem for 12 years. Today, special effects are replacing car chases and explosions; many effects are ordered by lazy directors and created on computers by enthusiastic animators. Special effects in Big Fish are mechanical. Real people behind the scenes pull wires and push levers, making it familiar, yet more fantastic, at the same time. It's as visual as this visual medium gets, without animating the lot. When you see a fish in a river, it's really there—though it may be made of rubber. Some perspective-cheats, to make things big or small, do show.
DVD video and audio quality are excellent. I'm so happy to have the world of Big Fish in my life. When you see it, watch for the banjo player from Deliverance, and the high-diving circus cat—both are the real thing.
Rating: Just a handful of swear words, and a naked woman who's way, way far away, at night, with her back to us, and Danny DeVito's bare backside, too (unfortunately, he's not way-way far away).
Second Feature: Airplane!, a send-up of every '70s-style all-star catastrophe epic, with every old movie cliché dry-roasted. I attended a sneak preview of Airplane! in a full house. From the Jaws-like opening on, every joke—and every sight-gag in the background—worked. I have never heard such laughter from a movie audience. When the plane knocked-over the disco radio tower, a hundred people stood and cheered. Compare the hero's war efforts to Edward Bloom's, in Big Fish.
This feature-length cartoon is a treat for classic animation devotees and Francophiles, or a confusing, slightly uncomfortable dream, if you're not. This is a gritty, surrealistic, eccentric fantasy; how it looks to you, depends on your mood going in. And it's not all that bumptious or affected; feel free to watch it at home, instead of while sipping chardonnay in an art house.
The opening sequence is sepia, scratchy, and ageified, to look like the 1930s of the title characters' youth. As time passes in the story, technology improves, along with the look of the film; eventually, it becomes a computer-aided watercolor painting, bursting with 3D effects. Animator Sylvain Chomet offers a self-aware cartoon of exaggerated forms, 1930s and '60s animation style, and fanciful design. It's not the crisp alternate reality of Japanese Anime, or smoother artificial reality of Pixar; it might be the style of Toulouse-Lautrec, with a Macintosh.
Belleville, the setting for part of the film, is a suburb of Paris; it's also a city in New Jersey and another in Ontario, Canada. There is some confusion about exactly where and when Belleville is, since it's nowhere near Paris. It's full of busy, but very fat people (even its Statue of Liberty is fat), '50s American and French cars, B&W TVs, and new jet planes. And sirens. And smoking—maybe it is in France, after all.
The Triplets, a haggard family, living on the edge of show business for ninty years or so, can make music by folding a newspaper, and make a three-course dinner from a bucket of frogs. Regardless of the title, there's no hero or star; the cast, including a very fat dog, a nobby-legged bicyclist, and an energetic little lady with a club foot, cooperate to outmatch the bad guys. You can tell that main characters are nice—they do not smoke. I don't know if we identify with the characters; maybe we admire how they adapt to their lot.
The Triplets of Belleville is musical, but it's not a musical. The jazzy score is light and fun, as if it had been arranged sixty years ago by Carl Stalling, the conductor and arranger of hundreds of classic Warner Bros. cartoons.
The story is not nightmarish, where you'd wake in a cold sweat. It's dreamlike, still, but the kind where you wake thinking "That was odd." There are bad guys—the French Wine Mafia—with an evil scheme that defies explanation, and plot twists that make even less sense. Nobody does French clichés like the French: Tour de France, smoking, wine, waiter who bends over backward to pretend to be helpful, quirky little cars, frogs, pride, very fat/thin people; they're all there. Surely some in the audience won't admit that they don't understand many of the cultural references—I understood every one of 'em.
At 81-minutes, it's shorter than most animated features, but some moviegoers, especially young, pop-culture-sated folks, may still think it's a little slow-moving. It seems rather leisurely, but if you watch it a second time, you'll see that not a frame or idea is wasted—and it'll make more sense the second time through. Most of the half-dozen lines of dialog are translated into English. DVD quality is excellent.
So, in closing, if you don't like old cartoons or French people, you won't like this movie, either.
Rating: No profanity, unless they're mumbling, or it's in French—it's hard to tell. A little cartoon nudity (Josephine Baker dancing)! Lots of French smoking, violence, and a surprising amount of killing. This is not a cartoon for very young children.
Second Feature: The kids have already tuned-out, so pick something R-rated; you can have that glass of chardonnay, now.
It's often said that a great movie has three great scenes and no bad ones. For example, All That Jazz has disconcerting images of open heart surgery; The Legend of 1900 ends an otherwise beautiful scene by destroying an irreplaceable Victorian glass wall by crashing a piano through it (only to have the wall magically restored ten minutes later); in Life Is Beautiful a character is ceremoniously shot with a burst of machine gun fire, while a single, echoed, rifle round (or have him just not show- Ninety years ago you could get away with nailing the tripod to the floor, opening the skylight, and depending on charismatic actors and a few sight gags. Everything was new.
Art and science depend and build on the inventions and discoveries of previous generations. Yet some keep making the same movies again- It's rare that all the conditions align to allow for one great movie; it's even less common to see artists able to commit enough of their lives to do it more than once. Pictures by Thomas Gainsborough and Ansel Adams are often a little too dark, to me; still, better that than no pictures at all.
How about movies that are pretty good, but too hard to find, obviously good choices (we've mentioned several in passing, like Forrest Gump), or they have some issues? Here are some more very good movies that are available on DVD: Top | Notice | Home | | © Copyright 2007 R. E. Harvey, All rights reserved.Moulin Rouge (2001)
Amélie (2001)
Take the color sensibility of O Brother plus Moulin Rouge's frenzied camera, with a lifetime's-
Chicken Run (2000)
Monsters Inc. (2001)
Eddie: "I don't work for toons."
Angelo: "So what's his problem?"
Doloris: "Toon killed his brother... Dropped a piano on his head."
Frida (2002)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974)
Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends Complete Season 1 (1959)
Why does a list of movies include a 45-year old TV cartoon show? We're looking at milestones; this one defines how TV cartoons are to look for generations.
Big Fish (2003)
Son: I thought you said you weren't dying.
Edward: I said this isn't how I go. The last part is much more unusual. Trust me on that.
Edward: Really?
Poet: There's a lot of expectation. I don't wanna disappoint my fans.
Edward: May I?
"The grass so green | Skies so blue | Spectre is really great!"
Edward: It's only three lines long.
Poet: This is why you should never show a work in progress.
The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
Postscript
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