Kennelco Film Diary

(1926) dir. Lotte Reiniger
viewed: 07/13/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

My final film of the Silent Film Festival is the classic, brilliant, wonderful animated film by Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed.  It is truly an amazing film, something I doubt that most people have seen the likes of.

Reiniger used an unusual format for her animations.  She cut out cardboard figures of great detail, jointed them, and pixilated their movement by shooting the film frame by frame (the latter part is the definition of animation, frame by frame manipulation/image creation).  So, the film is a shadow puppet show, a visual form of storytelling steeped in history throughout many cultures, but not something many modern audiences would be familiar with, I would expect.  The animation is sublime, moving the figures and the narrative along in a strange ever-morphing pace, while the backgrounds, designed in color, contrast with the figures and landscape.  It’s indescribable.

Reiniger was friendly with other artists working in non-representational animation like Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, and her style and designs show this.  The film is far more close to their avant-garde works than it is to the films the Walt Disney would become famous for.

This film is the oldest known surviving feature-length animated film and it’s one of the most beautiful and amazing films that I have ever seen.  It was tremendous to see it on the big screen.  The kids, my son and his friend, Samantha, both enjoyed it, though Felix seemed to lag part of the way through.  This might have been due to his tiredness.  But since seeing it, they have both expressed having liked it very well.  It’s not an easy film for kids who are used to more traditional “cartoon” animation, but if they can, it is well worth their time.  It is well worth anyone’s time.  It’s totally amazing.

(2008) dir. Eric Brevig
viewed: 07/12/08 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA

A significant contrast for me this week or two is going to see the Hollywood of today’s current output in contrast to the films shown at the Silent Film Festival going on this weekend at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco.  For me, taking my son to see this film, shot and marketed as  Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D, I thought that the contrast to going to the showing tomorrow (today) of Lotte Reiniger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) which I am taking him and his friend to tomorrow, would be an interesting thing, for me, for them.

It was kinda fun.

Felix, my son, got a headache from the glasses/experience and didn’t enjoy it one iota (so he told me, though I think he liked it a bit).  My daughter, 4 year-old Clara, sat on my lap, trying to grab raindrops, flying incandescent birds, mist, steam, all sorts of stuff.  For me, within the context of this film and in general, 3-D is much more “thrill ride”-like, than important to a cohesive narrative experience.  I mean, the yo-yo has little narrative importance, but it gets thrust in our faces because it’s a convenient protusion rather than a convenient plot point.

Basically though, I enjoyed the film in the moment.  It’s stupid, it’s got Brendan Fraser (who has made his career in these types of films) and it’s full of entertaining if yet totally obviously unbelievable digital animation in giant carnivorous plants, flying phirraha fish, giant sea monsters, dinosaurs, bad science….. but it’s not worth complaining on those fronts.  It’s simply a thrill ride.  How is this film as a thrill ride?

It’s satisfactory on that experience.  As a film on its own, it’s much less satisfying.  For today, it’s better and more fun than it will be in years and technological experiences yet to come.

The only sad point is that Jules Verne deserves much better, in today’s times, even when contextualizing him in Victorian aesthetics and scientific knowledge.  Verne was very inventive, forward thinking, and a good story-teller.  This film tries to acknowledge that, but more on the side of saying that his cockamamie sci-fi of 100 years ago was actual knowledge, actual reality. 

Okay.  Not so cool.

But it was a decent little trip downtown. 

(1925) dir. Charles Chaplin
viewed: 07/11/08

For those 1 or 2 of you that actually read this blog on a regular basis, you know that I am showing both my children and some friends of theirs silent film comedy classics.  It’s been one of the most worthwhile experiments of my life.  Showing the kids the films is one thing, but I read the intertitles to them, explain certain historical or cultural anachronisms, and occasionally help explain the narrative.  The kids have loved it.  Sitting on the couch, talking them through it, hearing their roars of laughter at great, wonderful films made a distance in time that is closing in on a century, I can’t really fully express how amazing the experience of watching these films has been for me.  I enjoy it more than I would on my own, more than I would in an audience of anonymous film fans, more, in some ways,…than anything.

Mostly, we’ve watched Buster Keaton films (The General (1927) and Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)), which I think I prefer.  But I thought it would be worthwhile to expand to the other masters of silent film comedy, going with Charlie Chaplin, the perhaps more iconic master and going with one of his best-known, best-appreciated films.  Initially, the kids thought that they would prefer Buster Keaton, but as soon as the film got going, it went beautifully.

For me, The Gold Rush is deeply iconic, with the scene of Chaplin eating his shoe for Thanksgiving dinner, the wonderful dance he performs with the forks in the dinner rolls, the scene of the cabin teetering on the brink of disaster.

I also remember my first introduction to this film.  It was in fourth grade, for reasons that I cannot remember, a kid’s father who was a film professor at UF came in and showed us this film…again, I don’t recall the circumstances exactly.  It made an immediate impression.  It’s great stuff.  It is cinema.  It’s the most impressive stuff that you can show anyone.

Frankly, I am still more impressed with Keaton than Chaplin, but that may be a sort of film school prejudice.  But of my recent experience and you can look back through this blog for my Chaplin experiences (Modern Times (1936) and City Lights (1931)…okay I helped you with hyperlinks there).  But the bottom line for me is that I am totally fucking into silent film.  It’s a beautiful and diminishingly cultural significance that retains a wonder in experience that has a value beyond anything one can imagine.

I tell you, if you have a chance to expose young people, children, to these films, it could be one of the most wonderful experiences of your life.  For you with the film, for you with the kids, for the kids with these films that are so amazing and significant, so far removed from today.  I hope that these things embed themselves in a meaningfulness for their future lives.  I can’t imagine that they will fail to have an effect in their ultimate knowledge and appreciation of things.

I was saying to someone that I feel almost smug about showing the kids these films.  I say that just because I enjoy it so much, I think it’s cool, I think it will develop and influence them in subtle, yet telling ways, so different from the average child of this era. 

You can think I am a stupid jerk for saying this, but I love watching these films with my kids.  I love watching these films on my own, but with them it’s so much better.

Hey, if you haven’t seen Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, it’s your missing piece.  Fill it in if you can, on your own, with a kid, an adult, a retiree.  It emanates from a time that is diminishing in our cultural history.  Yet, it is an art as profound as anything.  See it.

(2008) dir. Andrew Stanton
viewed: 06/28/08 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA

The latest from Pixar (Ratatouille (2007), Cars (2006), Monsters, Inc. (2001)), the cream of the American digital feature animation crop, WALL-E, is an attempt at the higher eschelons of art and movie magic.  And it almost gets there.  It comes close.

Directed by Andrew Stanton whose previous directing effort was Finding Nemo (2003), WALL-E is a dystopic vision of the future of Earth and humanity.  It’s so dystopic that humans have become fat, boneless, actionless entities, and it’s the robots that have developed “humanity”.  In fact, it takes robots to teach humans how to be human again.

It’s hundreds of years in the future.  Earth has been abandoned by humans because it’s so full of trash that it’s become totally uninhabitable.  The last of a line of clean-up robots, a mobile trash compactor, WALL-E himself, is the last “man” on Earth, friends with an unkillable, unsquishable faceless cockroach.  But he’s lonely.  He longs for a culture of humanity and communion that he only knows through more cultural effluvia, the the flotsam and jetsam in which he toils.

Human beings, meanwhile, have become portly and indolent, hovering on chairs and using no muscle, attached to video screens so that they no longer see the world at all, nor one another.  They float in space in a ship that was cultivated by commerce.  Beyond all this, WALL-E is a critique of consumer culture (though ironic if you want to get down to it because though the whole “consumerism” that it critiques is vague while much of the cultural items that it adores like the Rubik’s Cube and Pong are actual artifacts of consumerism). 

It must be said that any movie produced by Disney, a corporate and cultural powerhouse of consumerism, for it to try to critique consumerism is highly at odds with itself.

The film is also an odd love-hate with modern design and an appreciation for pre-digitalized design.  WALL-E himself is something that looks expressly like the robot of Short Circuit (1986), though was apparently inspired simply by a pair of binoculars.  The film has a distinct appreciation with animating the inanimate, or perhaps robots or constructs that don’t reek of anthropormorphism.  The film excels at the animation and personality given to less readily character-like creations.  It’s part of its aesthetic.  The animate (humans) have become inanimate while the machines, the inanimate, the non-beings, have become beings.  And they are.  And they inspire the humans to become human again.

Largely wordless, though not entirely, WALL-E is also an attempt at a non-verbal narrative largely.  This, along with its simplistic themes of love, humanity, and hope, packed in with a score that pretty much tells the audience how to feel pushes hard for the sensation of movie magic.

Movie magic.  The ultimate of cultural alchemies.  I guess, if you come down to it, the film’s biggest weakness is its belief that it is achieving magic.  It’s certainly been marketed that way.  The scene in which WALL-E, clinging to a rocketship, lifts his hand to “touch” the stars as they pass them and they move and sparkle as he utters a sound of awe…  Genuine magic is not so self-aware, I would think.  I would hope.

WALL-E is very good, very enjoyable, very well-produced.  It’s just not as simple and remarkable as it would like to come off. 

(2002) dir. Chris Columbus
viewed: 06/27/08

There’s been a lot of discussion in our house about the PG vs. PG-13 ratings.  My son is a bit obsessed with films that are PG-13, partially due to the fact that he wasn’t allowed to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008).  He fantasizes about developing his own films that are all rated PG-13 and is also quite excited about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, wanting to read it even though he’s never read the other books.  We are actually reading the first Harry Potter book right now, and partially because he already got a chance to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) because we have his uncle’s copy on DVD at the house, I decided to sit through it with my daughter and him.  I’d seen it in the theater at the time of its release and had thought it was decent.

Frankly, the Harry Potter film series blurs a lot in my mind, with few exceptions, though I more or less remember them all.  My practice is to read ahead enough to have read the book before the movie comes out, simply to stay a tiny tidbit ahead of the game.  I’ve been enjoying them on my own thusfar, so this is in many ways my first experience seeing them through my children’s perspective at all.

The first two Harry Potter films were both directed by Chris Columbus, to whom we owe Home Alone (1990) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993), among other things.  The big thing about the series of films is that the casting has been good as has the art design.  I’ve got no beefs with J.K. Rowling or the whole thing, really.  I watch them.  I largely enjoy them.

This run through with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets surprised me only in a small way in simply that I did enjoy it.  I hate Dobby the house elf, though Felix enjoyed him.  It’s all pretty complicated for the kids, definitely over my daughter’s head largely.  Lots of narrative, lots of plot points, lots of details.  It’s almost baroque in a sense.

But hey.  It’s not bad.  My favorite of the books and movies so far has been part 3, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004).  It’s been impressive how they’ve kept this film franchise rolling, keeping the main actors in place, watching them age and develop along with the narrative.  An interesting experiment if nothing else.

(2007) dir. Jon Turteltaub
viewed: 06/22/08

Not exactly at the top of my list of films to see, I may have even made comment somewhere that I probably wouldn’t ever see these films even in my Nicolas Cage slumming that I like to do.  But I think, influenced by some reviews stating that these movies were made to be like the Indiana Jones films but rated PG, I guess somewhere I opened myself up to this.  So, on a cold and tired Sunday afternoon, I put the DVD box in front of Felix at the video store and he bit.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets is a sequel to National Treasue (2004), which is pretty much a watered down history-focused Indiana Jones filtered through The Da Vinci Code (2006) but with no blood, no serious scares, just a bit of relatively clean action and globe-trotting.  And it’s all-American.

The films, as their titles suggest, focus on the secrets and Illuminati types that have populated American history, differing from The Da Vinci Code in that their not so focused on the Catholic church or out-and-out European history.  It’s America, dammit!  And the heroes, Nicolas Cage, his dad (played by Jon Voight), and his pal and his girlfriend are all proud Americans.  Why, even the president is a history buff and a non-idiot (which goes to suggest this is not meant to represent the current administration, I guess).  The motive of the story that gets the heroes involved with the ultimate adventure is triggered when they want to clear a great-grandfather of having played a role in the assassination of president Lincoln.

The funny thing is that my son couldn’t figure out why they should care if someone who was long-dead was worth clearing the name of.  And though Cage is given a speech in which he means to clarify this important thing and what it means to being an American, I wasn’t going to try to argue the point.  When you come down to it, the motivation for the villains is also very odd and dodgy.  This guy wants to make an important archeological discovery in his own name, his family name again, but has to do it through dastardly schemes, blackmail, physical threats and intimidation and in the end…why?  Just for his name?  He could have collaborated on this whole thing on the up and up and probably have come out better.

The film is entertaining enough, though barely.  The big set-piece action a la Indiana Jones doesn’t really show up until the last half hour.  Felix liked the film well enough.  He told me that he thought that the first one, National Treasure, would probably be better.  I don’t know why he wanted to see the second one first.  I didn’t protest.

(1925) dir. Buster Keaton
viewed: 06/14/08

Back by popular demand, Buster Keaton.

Actually, I watched this film with my son and the girl upstairs, who is about 6 months older than him.  I am sure that even in San Francisco, I had the unique reaction from a 6 and a 7 year old when I told them: “Guess what I brought?  Buster Keaton” received by hoopla and hoorays as if I’d just said “ice cream”.

It’s been a particular joy to discover these films for myself with them.  I read the subtitles and occasionally explain some historical anachronisms and narrative points, but Felix and Samantha spend the film just dying with laughter.

Go West is very funny, though not Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928) funny, it’s as inventive and surprising and clever as anything really.  A down-on-his-luck fellow named “Friendless” departs the East Coast for the West, inspired by Horace Greeley’s notable recommendation, “Go West, young man.”  Friendless’s adventures via rail car to the dessert and the world of cowboys plays quite a bit on some of the conventions of the genre, but also gets some of its most humorous moments from simple gags that Keaton poses, sitting waiting for a cow to make itself milk.  There are some big stunts and lots of hilarious gags, but the big ending results in Keaton leading a cattle drive through downtown Los Angeles, ultimately in a devil suit (so the cattle will chase him clad in the color red).  It’s good stuff.

I tell you, if you are even thinking you might, you should see these films.  You will not regret it.  And if you have kids of about this age…well, the world is your oyster.

(2008) dir. Mark Osborne, John Stevenson
viewed: 06/07/08 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA

Kung Fu Panda, the kids have been excited about it for a while, maybe simply because of the kung fu or maybe because the name is easy to remember or maybe because there’s been an utter dearth of kid-friendly fare of late being released in the cinemas.  Any which way, I was glad to tote them down there and get excited to see the film.

By no stretch of the imagination is this film a great one.  It’s entertaining, just enough to hover above the mediocre mark.  The best thing about the film is the aesthetics and execution of the animation.  You see so many of these animated films (or at least I do) and you start to get accustomed to the styles and qualities that you kind of forget how amazing and rich some of this design and aesthetic really is.  But Kung Fu Panda, indeed, has some rich visual texture, good character animation, and details that feel from a wholly “design” point of view, something definitely above the crowd.

But design and aesthetics do not make a movie.  At least feature animation has evolved away from the (non)requisite musical approach that beleagured the feature animation of the 20th century, modeled on the Disney approach.  But narratively, it’s no great shakes, not terrible, just uninspired.  A review I read of this film said that “the title says it all”.  It’s all you need to know, really.

As for kid-friendliness, my son totally loved it.  My daughter was not so hot on the fight sequences, which were stylish and nicely executed, but not uber kid-friendly if you’re steering your kids away from violence.  Then again, what do you expect from Kung Fu Panda?  Yoga?

(1958) dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr., Russell S. Doughten, Jr.
viewed: 05/23/08

Originally, movie night with the kids this week was meant to feature Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965), another personal childhood favorite long since not seen.  But when the disc of that film failed to play in the DVD player, I had to resort to a film that I had been talking to the kids about, one that actually resides in my very small personal library of DVD’s (despite the fact that I watch a lot of films, there are not many that I collect), the 1958 science fiction horror classic, The Blob.

I always liked The Blob.  I don’t know that I would call it a childhood favorite, but it always stood out from so much of what I had watched, and that was before I really even knew who Steve McQueen was.  The film is notable for being one of his first starring roles and that it features a hipster theme song penned by the notable Burt Bacharach.  And also the cool effects of the giant, faceless, gelatinous blob that has come to terrorize small town America.

I categorize The Blob in a proud tradition of excellent horror films that were created independently in the more central parts of the U.S. by commercial filmmakers, ones who wanted to get a toehold into narrative film production and release, films as notable as George A. Romero’s brilliant Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Herk Harvey’s brilliant Carnival of Souls (1962).  It’s struck me as interesting that these amazing films came from outside of the primary Hollywood machinery.  The list could no doubt go on.

But The Blob is quite wonderful.  Its “teenager issue” themes draped upon the horror film invasion and that the amazingly “alive” blob is in action, full color, devouring people left and right, a “thing”, almost an abstract concept come to life.  What does it embody?  It is out and out out there.  And yet poppy almost in its kitsch and color.

The kids were cool with watching this.  They were pretty scared at times, bored at others.  But their recollection today was that “it was pretty scary”.  Realizing that this film is 50 years old struck me notably, too.  That’s a concept that they cannot fathom fully.  Actually, I don’t know if I fully fathom it myself, though I try.

(1974) dir. Gordon Hessler
viewed: 05/09/08

Furthering my watching of my favorite films of my childhood with my kids, we watched The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the second of the Sinbad films featuring the work of stop-motion animator and special effects legend Ray Harryhausen.  My daughter is actually the one who asked to queue this one up, but mainly Felix and I watched it.  He found it “scarier” than The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958).  I found it somewhat unsurprisingly less satisfying than the earlier film (as I had remembered), though certainly not without merit or charm.

The monsters in this film, Harryhausen’s specialties, are two brought-to-life statues, the first the wooden figurehead of Sinbad’s ship and then the six-armed metalic Kali statue in the oddly pan-pagan/pan-Asian tribal islanders (unusually green-skinned).  The other beasts are a one-eyed centaur and a griffin and a cute little bat-like Ymir-ish creature.

But it takes a long time for the action to build up and the film’s main characteristic other than Harryhausen’s brilliant animation is the excellent performance of a pre-Dr. Who Tom Baker as the villainous magician (channeling Christopher Lee). 

My recollections from childhood were that this was the 2nd best of the Sinbad films, not as good as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad but better than its follower, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).  I always still enjoyed it.  I didn’t have a problem with it.  But it’s not the film that The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.  I have no doubt that soon we will watch the third of the series.

It’s an amazing thing, watching these films with my kids.  It does fulfill something within oneself that is hard to specify.  Oddly enough, Felix had been looking forward to the just released Speed Racer (2008) film (which has gotten critically panned).  And I am wondering if that is something I should take him to or not, especially when I know that he is much more looking forward to seeing Kung Fu Panda (2008) and WALL-E (2008) more than anything.

Who knows?