What is there left that hasn’t been said about Avatar? First of all, yes, it’s gorgeous to look at. James Cameron really puts the emphasis on immersing you in a weirdly beautiful world of fluorescent trees, glowing dandelion pods, and flying dragons. The big blue people are beautiful (and yes, sexy) as well, moving through the jungle with preternatural grace. The fight scenes are big, but they’re not poorly edited and impossible to follow as in the style of so many action movies these days.
Second, to agree with the second point everyone else has raised, the story is mindnumbingly predictable post-colonial white guilt claptrap. The dialogue is almost George Lucas bad, and everything that’s going to happen is telegraphed ages in advance (sure, let’s spend a whole scene describing some great heroic act that only happens every few generations- you don’t suppose the hero will do that very thing before the end of the movie, do you?). I agree with the comparisons to Ferngully and Dune and Dances with Wolves (although I admit I’ve never watched Dances with Wolves, I’ve pretty much got the idea). The one comparison that sprang to mind which I haven’t heard anyone else make is to The Dark Crystal, in which the creators got so wrapped up in building a beautiful and internally consistent world from scratch that they didn’t leave any time for building an equally interesting and unique story.
I think Annalee Newitz is right that this film has a serious problem in its (metaphorical but inarguable) depiction of race, and I further think that SEK is right that we should go ahead and call that problem what it is: racism. Cameron sets out with clear intentions of respecting indigenous people, but you can’t just fall into the same old “noble naked savages with feathers in their braided hair communing with horses and being one with the Earth Mother” trope and act like that’s okay. It’s not okay, and we need to move past it.
I did think it was kind of interesting how Cameron finds a reasonably believable pseudo-scientific justification for the whole “connection to all living things” idea by giving the aliens a cluster of tendrils (like a biological USB port) that they can connect to plants and animals to communicate psychically with them. Usually, when science fiction features psychic powers, there’s a big suspension-of-disbelief pill to swallow in the idea of dualism (that our minds exist outside our brains), since real science has repeatedly found that it just doesn’t hold up, as much as we might like it to. By creating a physical, nervous connection between two discrete beings, Cameron gets around that problem. Of course, when it’s all in the service of creating an imaginary race that’s even more like we want American Indians to be than American Indians actually are, it’s hard to really appreciate this innovation.
I also have to say that I’m really, really sick of the “military asshole” archetype embodied here by Colonel Miles Quaritch. Wasn’t this exact same guy in District 9 too? The problem with a character like this (aside from the fact that he’s obnoxious for every moment he’s on screen) is that it embodies everything that’s wrong with militarism in one cartoonishly villainous character, and then the audience waits in great anticipation for the scene where he gets his, and then he does, and everyone cheers “Hooray, we’ve defeated militarism!” I’m sorry, Hollywood screenwriters and action movie fans, but you can’t kill a noxious ideology by putting arrows through some asshole’s chest. For that matter, you can’t rid the world of greed by packing Giovanni Ribisi into a spaceship and sending him away, but whatever.
In closing, I’ll say this: If you have any interest at all, even a little bit, in ever seeing Avatar, SEE IT IN THE THEATRE. The spectacle is all it has going for it, and it will be totally pointless on a TV (no matter how big, flat, and HD).
There are no Betty Boop Christmas cartoons because she’s Jewish. There are no Superman Christmas cartoons because that would just be weird. There’s a Grampy Christmas cartoon, but I really detest Grampy, and have no intention of ever featuring him on a Fleischer Friday if I can help it. However, Popeye the Sailor also celebrates Christmas in his fifth short, although of course he celebrates it in his own special way.
I’m keeping it short this week, since we all have holidays to get back to, so here’s a few quick observations:
In Popeye’s World: Earmuffs are essential. Scarfs are optional. Coats and jackets are unheard of.
On a related note, you can’t really tell if a Fleischer character is shivering, because they constantly shake in time with the music.
Olive Oyl fares much better without Mae Questel than Betty Boop does. In this instance, Bonnie Poe does her voice.
“It’s a day for peace on Earth!” is the very best thing you can say before punching someone.
Popeye and Bluto are shockingly graceful on ice skates.
I’m completely baffled that Bluto avoids cutting Olive’s head off at 03:35.
The bit where Olive crawls across her own legs (or however you define that move) is pretty unsettling.
Can’t afford tree trimmings? Just punch a guy really hard.
If you’ve learned only one thing from reading this blog, I hope it’s the name of the primary (and best) voice of Betty Boop, Mae Questel. What you may not know is that the final screen appearance of “the Betty Boop Girl” also happens to be a Christmas classic (for those of us who came of age in the 80′s and 90′s, anyway). Yes, Mae Questel, mere months before her death, played the hilariously out-of-it Aunt Bethany in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. She’s only on screen for a few minutes, but she’s hands down the funniest character in the film. Despite her age, you can still see and hear Betty Boop lurking within her, and her singing voice is surprisingly strong. If you haven’t watched the movie yet this year I realize it may be too late to get your hands on it, so I’ve done you a favor and assembled all of Aunt Bethany’s scenes into one action-packed highlights reel. So enjoy, Merry Christmas, and… Play Ball!
The new trailer for Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland is out, and it’s an improvement over the teaser, but I still can’t say I’m excited. Regardless, I thought it would be fun to look back at some previous non-animated Alices.
5. Alice (1989)
This is far from Jan Svankmajer’s best film, but it stands out as an inarguably unique take on the Wonderland story. Rather than an expansive landscape, Wonderland is depicted as a labyrinthine house of tiny rooms and cramped passageways (not unlike the Hell of Svankmajer’s Faust). The White Rabbit has been stuffed and mounted, and the Mad Hatter and March Hare trade heads rather than seats. When Alice shrinks, she transforms from a real little girl into an animated china doll. In short, this adaptation is purposely as creepy as possible in every way. It’s neither faithful nor child-friendly, but it’s definitely worth a watch.
4. Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy (1976)
What can you say about a 1970’s hardcore porn version of Alice in Wonderland? To begin with, it’s a musical, which makes for a truly strange generic blend. Like a lot of vintage porn, the hardcore sequences are the least interesting bits (containing very little that could actually be called sexy), whereas the pun-filled dialogue, the scanty costumes, and the full and flowing 1970’s hair (on their heads and everywhere else) are consistently amusing. This was produced by Bill Osco, who was also responsible for the classic Flesh Gordon.
3. Alice in Wonderland (1966)
This British production (originally broadcast on the BBC) views Carroll’s story through the lens of mid-20th Century Art Cinema. Think “Alice at Marienbad.” There was no script—the actors just improvised around the text of the novel. There are also no animal costumes—each creature is just a person, except for the Cheshire Cat, who’s just a cat. In watching the Tea Party scene, the conclusion seems inescapable that costumes were out of the question once they’d spent the entire budget on drugs. Also check out the Frog Footman, who’s easily the funniest character in the film.
2. Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass (1985)
Irwin Allen produced this big budget star-studded musical TV miniseries spectacular in the grand 1980’s tradition. Natalie Gregory stands out as a rare age-appropriate Alice, and handles the dialogue exceptionally for such a tiny child. There are a few too many winks to the cast’s other work to regard it as a faithful adaptation (Telly Salivas as a bald Cheshire Cat exclaims, “Meow, Baby!”), but it’s mostly a lot of fun, and the length allows for the inclusion of characters who make it into few adaptations, such as the Horse, the Goat, and the Newspaper-suited Man on the train. No other incarnation of the caterpillar has ever been as likable as Sammy Davis, Jr., who does a tap number to Father William. There are also some surprisingly frightening scenes, such as the encounters with the Jabberwocky and the truly disturbing bit where Carol Channing turns into a sheep.
1. Great Performances: Alice in Wonderland (1983)
The 1982 Broadway production of Alice was adapted for PBS, and it’s really something special. The costumes and sets are taken directly from the Tenniel drawings, so much so that they’re largely black and white with crosshatching. Alice is played by twentysomething Kate Burton, whose theatrical acting style doesn’t stand up to the camera’s scrutiny. Fortunately, she’s balanced out by legends like Colleen Dewhurst, Maureen Stapleton, and Donald O’Connor. I saw this as a small child, and was terrified by the Cheshire Cat’s bald, claw-sharpening human form. As an adult, my favorite scene is the tea party, in which avant garde theatre legend Andre Gregory and a strikingly handsome young Zeljko Ivanek play the Mad Hatter and the March Hare as a bitchy gay couple.
Although The Royal Tenenbaums (despite the evocative surname) is not a Christmas movie, it does prominently feature one Christmas song. Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time is Here,” originally from A Charlie Brown Christmas, serves as Margot Tenenbaum’s personal theme music. It’s first heard as she’s leaving her husband’s house early in the film, and recurs when she’s having ice cream with Royal toward the end. This choice of accompaniment always worked for me instinctively, but I never gave much thought as to why until recently.
The Peanuts (particularly Charlie Brown himself) and the Tenenbaums (particularly Margot and her brother/love interest Richie) embody a similar sort of restrained melancholy. Despite Charlie Brown’s occasional “RATS!” and Richie’s impulsive suicide attempt, these are not characters who generally express their discontent in melodramatic terms. Rather, their moods hang over them like an overcast sky. When asked how her brother’s doing, Margot says, “I don’t know. I can’t tell.” In discussing the Holiday season, Charlie Brown laments, “Christmas is coming, but I’m not happy. I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.” When rejected husband Raleigh asks if she still loves him, Margot replies, “I do, kind of. I can’t explain it right now.”
In the visual media, exceptional portrayals of depression are rare, because it tends to involve a lot of being still, quiet and inexpressive. Tony Soprano comes close, but the focus is always on his physicality: trouble breathing, panic attacks. George Bailey is a man at his wit’s end, but his desperation is portrayed as situational, and expressed overtly through yelling at his family and planning to jump off a bridge. For those of us who’ve really dealt with depression in our lives, however, nothing could ring more true than a perfectly calm person, dry-eyed and steady-voiced, staring out at a field of snow and saying, “I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to feel.”
Since tonight is the beginning of Hanukkah, I was originally going to post Betty Boop’s only Winter Holiday cartoon, Thrills and Chills. Unfortunately, that cartoon just isn’t very good. Betty doesn’t sing in it, and it’s very late in her career (1938) when she’d become much more vanilla and boring. There’s some lovely rotoscoped ice skating, and a nice little bit with Pudgy chasing a fish that’s under the ice, but that’s about it. And since I posted a lackluster cartoon last Friday, I figured I should share something that’s actually worth seeing today, or people will just give up on this feature entirely. So here, despite its lack of connection to the holidays, is Betty in Blunderland:
As you can see, this short follows the same Fleischerian adaptation formula as Snow White: abandon the narrative completely, stage a barely related musical number, and then run from a dragon. Fortunately, this is a formula that the Fleischers excel at, whereas their more faithful adaptations tend to be far less interesting. However, the animators do make some effort to pay homage to John Tenniel’s Wonderland, particularly in the appearance of characters like the Walrus and the Carpenter. I also love the way Betty takes on a more Alice-like appearance on crossing through the looking glass.
Strangely enough, the face in the jam jar is a caricature of comedian Ed Wynn, who would go on to voice the Mad Hatter seventeen years later in Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The Shrink-Ola is a nice bit of fun, particularly when the card-man’s 10 becomes a 2 as he shrinks. The cheeky moment where the dress doesn’t shrink along with Alice seems much more appropriate in a Betty Boop cartoon than in the trailer for the upcoming Tim Burton film, don’t you think?
The song Betty sings is written to the tune of the Marx Brothers number “Everyone Says I Love You,” which later became a Woody Allen film, of course. I don’t know that you could call it a parody, or even an homage, exactly, it just has the same tune for some reason. It works, though, as a fun way to introduce as many Carroll characters as possible all at once, so they can get on to doing cute little dances. The craps game between the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon is one of my favorite bits, although I also really like the grumbly sounds the Walrus makes as he dances.
Then of course the Jabberwocky (looking nothing like Tenniel’s version) shows up so the obligatory chase sequence can begin. The part where the turtles blast him with a machine gun is striking because there’s no attempt to soften the look of the gun- to somehow make it a whimsical or “turtly” sort of gun- that’s just a big machine gun, mounted on one turtle, being fired by a smaller turtle.
Everything is magically resolved when they all fall off a cliff, and Betty wakes up on her floor. Of course, this being the World of Boop, the real world has the same potential for surrealism as the dream world, as we see Betty wake up just in time to keep the White Rabbit from sneaking off again.
If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like when I write about something other than film, television, or ancient cartoons, head over to the aforementioned 300 Reviews and check out my take on cats (the creature, not the musical).
My favorite new blog, 300 Reviews, recently featured an excellent 300 word review of Zack Snyder’s 300 by Brian Oliu. Also, a colleague of mine recently wrote a 2046-word paper about Wong Kar-Wai’s 2046. Thus inspired, I thought it would be interesting to see how many films I could write about if I limit myself by titular number.
Once (John Carney, 2006)
Sweet.
Year One (Harold Ramis, 2009)
Nope.
The Postman Always Rings Twice (Tay Garnett, 1946)
Sexy, classic.
Two Weeks Notice (Marc Lawrence, 2002)
Don’t bother.
Three Amigos (John Landis, 1986)
Dumb but funny.
Three Kings (David O. Russell, 1999)
Smart. Widely underrated.
Here’s another guest spotlight, this time from Leslie Anderson. Leslie is a graduate student at the University of Ohio and an aspiring poet. She is a self proclaimed video game, comic book, Star Wars, Star Trek nerd. She also enjoys coffee and hats.
There were a few wonderful years where my brother and I were attending the same school and were also both old enough to communicate on concepts of mutual interest. Pokemon, for instance, or how stupid gym class was. It was, in fact, very stupid. Mostly these were TV shows, or video games. There is one show we still discuss; the one which found us poised at the bus door like sprinters, our house keys already in our hands, our eyes on the tiny, red, digital clock above the steering wheel. Sometimes we would blunder through the door to find our father was already watching. This was the short and ultimately doomed Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles, an early and foolhardy attempt at a fully computer animated show.
The series follows the same group as the novels and the movie, but it’s hardly the same story or even the same characters. The show has a more wide-eyed, awed view of war and camaraderie, possibly because it is told entirely from the awed, wide-eyed videographer, Higgens. The ‘hard lessons’ are still there, but they avoid the grit and gore of the original, focusing instead on a humanistic stoicism in the face of tragedy. Story lines of each episode are almost identical, which means it was my first, elementary interaction with character driven story arch.
And we loved those characters. I could have written about any of them, Razak, Higgens, Rico…. But, specifically, both my brother and I attached our hopes and dreams to Isabel Flores, also called Dizzy. In the movies Dizzy is used primarily as a foil to Carmen, Rico’s love interest. In the series as well as the movie, Carmen is a graceful, traditionally beautiful woman. She is intelligent, cold, professional, tactful, and exists mainly so Rico can grin stupidly when people mention her name. Dizzy, on the other hand, is a Trooper. She is ragged and tough, trained in practical skills. She is enthusiastically open about feelings and opinions, regardless of their affect, often to the frustration of those around her.
Her influence on me was manifold. I bought dog tags. I found lieutenant’s bars at a garage sale and wore them on my shoulder. It wasn’t the military occupation that impressed me, it was the gusto. Dizzy possessed none of the traditional worries of a female character, or even specifically a female character in a military position. She was the best shot in the group. She was equal in strength, speed, and bravery. Her relationship phobias were not based on her ability to have a relationship, given her less than traditionally feminine role. It was a simple frustration that Rico wasn’t responding the way she would like.
I was fascinated by this attitude, the brash fearlessness. Sitting in class in uniform skirt and knee socks, I did not feel like Dizzy Flores. I felt like Carmen in training. But I wanted to feel like Dizzy. I wanted to. I wanted to walk into the classroom in fatigues and demand who had something to say about it. No one? That’s what I thought. I wanted to be a basketball star and ride a motorcycle and shoot a target at 200 feet. Actually, I wanted none of those things, but I wanted to feel I could have them if I did. And I could, so long as I could get out of that bus fast enough, I could.
First of all, this is one of several Fleischer shorts with titles that have sexual connotations that I’m relatively certain are actually accidental. Secondly, nobody is sure who does Betty’s voice here, but it certainly isn’t Mae Questel. And when you hear Betty speak, you’ll realize just how essential Questel is to her popularity.
The first part is probably my favorite, where Bimbo emerges in his scary Bandit outfit and shoots his guns for the fun of it. Note that not only are his guns alive, but that there’s clearly a risk of them going flaccid if he doesn’t give them the attention they demand. I love how the animals are just so offended that he’s shot them for no reason. The worm is the best, though. I was convinced that “Oy, my operation!” had to be a Jazz Age reference I was just missing, but Google searches only seem to return discussions of this cartoon.
The sequence of Betty climbing over the train is pretty great, and apparently got animator Grim Natwick some job offers. Unfortunately, once Betty opens her mouth, things go down hill. This Betty lacks any semblance of the cutie pie voice she’s known for, and most of her charisma is missing as well. She is kind of a badass, though, when she shows up in a creepy mask and reveals herself to be a bandit as well. Of course, her main goal turns out to be to make her deadbeat husband come home and help her raise their brood, which is less groundbreaking than she seems to be at first.
This is also one of several early Fleischer shorts which ends with blatant (though off-screen) sex. When Bimbo and Betty send their underwear out on the clothesline as the train chugs rhythmically along, the meaning is not terribly subtle.
Interestingly, the name Betty uses here, “Dangerous Nan McGrew” was originally a song (entirely different from the one she performs in the cartoon) by the performer she was primarily based upon, Helen Kane. Kane’s version, as seen below, is much funnier and closer to the sort of personality we expect from Betty herself.
