Spending as much time thinking about movies as I do, it’s really hard to answer the inevitable, “What are your favorites?” question that most people ask when they find out I’m a film student. Well, really they first ask, “What kind of movies do you make?” and I have to explain that I’m in theory, not production, but then they always ask for my favorite movies.
Anyway, now I have a handy Venn diagram (click to embiggen):
The green and blue circles could be much more full, but I tried to limit myself to films I’m particularly excited about. The red circle, on the other hand, is 100% complete (unless I’m just forgetting something). I only listed the years for those movies that share titles with other (inferior) films.
So I suppose you could call those ten movies in the center, which fit into all three circles, my Top Ten Favorite Movies. Maybe I’ll write an entry (or series of entries) focusing on them sometime.
And yes, for a grad student in film, my tastes are pretty US-centric. I do my best to expand my horizons, but my fascination with American culture is a part of who I am as a nerd and a scholar.
For this week, here’s Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, along with Billy Barty and a vast chorus, doing a classy Busby Berkeley number about fooling around in public.
I’m trying to avoid too much critic-talk on these MMM posts, but I have to take a second to mention what an interesting picture this number paints of issues relating to sexual consent at the time of its creation. It’s clear that male pleasure comes first, but the ideal seems to be that the woman will enjoy it just as much, but both partners (though especially the woman) are expected to pretend to disapprove. When the woman really is into what’s going on, the faux-resistance can be experienced as a fun game (as it seems to be between Powell and Keeler here), but obviously if a woman genuinely didn’t want to, that’s where things would get disastrous pretty quickly. I think that the issues on display here are the same as in a number of Betty Boop cartoons, as well as the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (arguing about the implications of that song has become a Holiday tradition across the feminist internet).
Let’s go back to the early days, for a really great Bimbo short.
First of all, I think it’s worth noting that the whole “raiding the chicken house” trope is inextricably tied up with blackface minstrelsy. Of course, Bimbo being a canine, he comes at it from his own angle (not unlike Mr. Fox), but in 1930 the racist minstrel tradition would have been fresh in the minds of audiences.
On the other hand, the bit where Bimbo and the chicken switch heads and clothing is pure Fleischer craziness, with their usual touch of the uncanny (particularly when the chicken has Bimbo’s head but still makes chicken noises). Even when his head’s on the right body, though, Bimbo never speaks in this cartoon, which isn’t really the norm for him. It works here, though, putting the emphasis entirely on the song.
And what a song it is! In a cartoon this fun, made by Jewish animators no less, you can’t really take the hellfire-and-damnation lyrics seriously. In fact the song has the same sort of ironic winking quality as Fats Waller’s “Devil to Pay.” It seems to be largely a vehicle to subject to Bimbo to this round of surreal frights and tortures. And honestly I’m not even sure I can parse all the levels of intersecting cultural implications at play when, amid all the Christian ghosts condemning Bimbo for stealing food, a stereotypically Jewish ghost shrugs and says, “You needed it.”
As usual in these sorts of cartoons, the weirdness escalates until it reaches a frenzy. There’s a singing scythe, a scatting chicken, booty-dancing ghosts, and a trio of creatures I can only describe as angry crotches. As Bimbo runs away at the end, the faces of the monsters who taunt him take on a surprising level of grotesque detail, reminiscent of the work of Basil Wolverton (who must surely have been watching these sorts of cartoons in his formative years as an artist).
I think I’ve previously discussed the tendency of Fleischer cartoons not to have real endings in any narrative sense. For what it’s worth, this one is an exception. The ghosts and demons come to drag Bimbo to hell, and that’s just what they do.
So yesterday, for whatever reason, I found myself in the mood to watch a cheesy cultish fantasy movie I’d never seen. Something fun, where the appeal lies more in the visual splendor than the writing or acting. After browsing the Netflix Instant options, I settled on Heavy Metal. It’s a film I remember being keenly aware of as a child in the 80′s. It was one of those rare animated films that I wasn’t allowed to see, which made it unbelievably enticing. Not only that, but I’d seen enough posters and VHS boxes to know that it involved space ships, epic battles, alien creatures, and pretty ladies in skimpy scifi outfits. In other words, it was just like my favorite movie at the time, Return of the Jedi, plus it was a cartoon, and it was forbidden. Needless to say, at the age of eight, I was convinced that Heavy Metal had to be the greatest movie of all time.
And yet, even though it became easy for me to see R-rated films somewhere around the age of 13, I never saw Heavy Metal until yesterday. Part of that might be the snags that apparently kept it from video release for several years, but separate from that, I feel like sometime in the decade or so after the film’s release, people completely stopped talking about it. Even later on, when it was on video, and I was taking an interest in psychedelic culture and underground animation, recommendations for Heavy Metal were few and far between. Now that I’ve finally watched it, I have some ideas as to why.
First of all, the animation itself hasn’t aged well (and I can’t imagine it looked that good to begin with). Some of the design (much of it inspired by the comics, of course) is gorgeous, but even in those segments the motion is stiff and awkward. It’s obvious which characters are meant to be hideous and which are meant to be beautiful (and more on them momentarily), but even the “beautiful” characters are frequently pretty ugly. You can tell the filmmakers spent a lot of time looking at the work of Moebius and others, but they clearly lack either the ability or the inclination to produce anything close to that interesting.
The bigger problem, though, is the extraordinarily overt misogyny on display in this film. I mean, obviously a 30-year-old psychedelic adventure film is bound to be male-centric, and I wasn’t expecting it to be otherwise. Still, the volume and shamelessness of the sexism left me shocked. Heavy Metal is a fantasy about men who get to do awesome, ass-kicking, groovy things, and some of those things they get to do happen to be women. From the moment any adult female character appears on screen, you can start counting the seconds until she gets totally naked, and you probably won’t make it to ten (so yeah, South Park pretty much has this film’s number). One segment does offer a female protagonist, but she has no lines, alternates between little and no clothing, and is tortured and killed by the end. No exception could better prove the rule.
This degree of misogyny in a film like this seems glaring in this post Whedon/R.D. Moore/Rowling world, because there’s so much more acknowledgment that just as many women are into scifi/fantasy as men, but I guess that still wasn’t regarded as the case at all in 1981.
I was reminded of some of Amanda Marcotte’s writing, particularly on the subjects of Playboy Magazine and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Basically, both essays make the point that there was a time when women could be openly excluded from any sort of culture of cool. Hugh Hefner presents himself as a symbol of sophistication, and Kerouac and Cassidy are presented as avatars of rebellion against the mainstream, but all three men proceed from an unquestioned assumption that women exist solely to look hot, fuck them, and make them feel good. This same assumption is at the core of Heavy Metal, which makes it a much harder film to enjoy these days. Realizing this, I’m actually glad that people stopped discussing and recommending it, because I probably would have looked at those people a little differently afterward.
I’ve always found that nothing helps start the week on a positive note quite as well as a great old fashioned upbeat musical number. Even though I’ve shared it in other venues before, I can’t think of a better clip to start with than “Jumpin’ Jive” from Stormy Weather, by Cab Calloway and his orchestra, featuring the genuinely mindboggling dancing of the Nicholas Brothers.
Yes, I finally got around to watching Antichrist. I’ve always been a von Trier hater, but there was so much talk about this film last year, and it’s Instant on Netflix, so I couldn’t stay away. At the outset, I’ll say these two things: 1) I really liked it, and I’m glad I watched it. 2) I still think Lars von Trier is a raving misogynist (even on the “male film auteur” scale, which sets the bar pretty high).
Visually, von Trier reaches a new level with this film. Every shot is gorgeous, even the ones that are terrifying and disgusting. He seems to have let go of the last vestiges of the Dogma 95 aesthetic and embraced a lush, painterly style of filmmaking that’s relatively unconcerned with realism (being anti-realism myself, I’m in favor of this). I loved the way the shots of the woods have a kind of ripple to them, hinting that reality is in flux. The surreal scenes with the animals were also great, particularly the one with the fox. I had heard about the fox plenty of times, but I still wasn’t prepared for what it was actually like. In fact, I think I exclaimed to my roommates, “That’s the best thing I’ve ever seen in a movie!” It probably can’t really contend for that honor, but it was an amazing moment.
In addressing the misogyny, I don’t want to give the impression that I think von Trier is putting forward some sort of coherent anti-woman message. The characters discuss the idea that women are inherently evil, but I don’t really think the film comes down on either side of that question. Of course, not coming down on the “of course they’re not, that’s stupid” side of that particular question implies a degree of misogyny all on its own. If I’m charitable toward von Trier, I could say that he’s trying to work out his own deeply ingrained personal issues with women, in the same way that Charles Bukowski and R. Crumb do in their work. If I’m less charitable (which I’m inclined to be, since it’s von Trier), I might suggest that he knows that a huge contingent of filmgoers think he hates women, and he’s pushing their (our) buttons on purpose. If you’ve ever seen him interviewed, or watched The Five Obstructions, you have to admit that seems like him.
I’ll also add that horror is clearly the genre von Trier was meant for, and I hope he sticks with it for a while. His storytelling style revolves around a continual escalation of misfortune for his protagonist. In a melodrama (even one in which Björk sings) this becomes unbearable, because the tragedy gets worse and worse to the point that it no longer seems even vaguely realistic. In a horror film, on the other hand, this works perfectly. You start with a couple fighting, escalate, escalate, genital mutilation, escalate, one of them strangles and burns the other one- congrats, you’ve made a successful (and very creepy) horror movie.
And yes, I realize I’ve spent this entire review talking about Lars von Trier and his past work, but I feel like he’s the kind of artist who makes it impossible not to do that. After all, he certainly wants the attention.
