MEAT PUPPETS

In theaters this weekend:

Stopmotion--The peculiar low-tech magic of stop-motion animation has always been one of the special delights of cinema for me; it's one of the reasons I became a movie lover as a child. Because of the work of masters like Willis O'Brien, Jim Danforth, Karel Zeman and the great Ray Harryhasuen, the labor-intensive, expensive technique is often associated with whimsical fantasy or science fiction. But it can be used for nightmarish horror as well, and this nasty, self-referential British chiller, directed by Robert Morgan from a script he wrote with Robin King, takes us to that dark side.

Ella (Aisling Franciosi) is the daughter of famous stop-motion animator Suzanne (Stella Gonet), and an animator herself.  Because she no longer has the use of her hands, Suzanne directs Ella in painstakingly manipulating her puppets; she refers to Ella herself by the affectionate--or maybe not so affectionate--nickname of "puppet," and she's quietly, passive-aggressively tyrannical toward her, constantly unsatisfied with her work, constantly demanding retakes. Ella would like to contribute her own ideas to her mother's work, yet when asked what these ideas are she's stymied, daunted by Suzanne's greatness. 

But when Suzanne falls into a coma, Ella meets a nervy little girl (Caoilinn Springall) in her building who talks her into abandoning Suzanne's project--a traditional tale involving a cyclops--and starting a new stop-motion film based on a storyline she suggests. It involves a terrified girl fleeing through the forest and taking refuge in a cabin, stalked by a hideous figure called the Ashman. She also insists Ella start using actual dead animal parts, and worse, over her armatures. Before long Ella is haunted by visions, some of them pretty hair-raising, of the gruesome characters in her film.

The live action side of Stopmotion has a strong streak of Cronenberg-esque "body horror," while the stop-motion sequences show the influence of Jan Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers. It's a potent one-two punch of creepiness. This is one of those movies where the line between dreams and reality isn't always certain, but Morgan keeps enough of a coherent narrative that this doesn't become tiresome, and there are freaky erotic touches, as when Ella is having sex, and fingers her lover's back as she would a stop-motion puppet.

Like many films of this sort, when Stopmotion shifts to overtly murderous, gory grapples in its last half-hour or so, it loses some of its macabre potency. But Franciosi, who played the stowaway in The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is a compelling presence, and on the whole, this is one of the more memorable horror pictures in a while. The only real complaint is the same one that applies to most films that showcase stop-motion: there isn't enough stop-motion.

145 MILLION + 50 YEARS OLD

Since this year’s 50^th anniversaries include the Moon Landing, Woodstock and The Brady Bunch, I suppose I shouldn’t expect much hoopla around a silly sci-fi fantasy film hitting the half-century mark. Nonetheless, this month also sees the 50^th anniversary of the release of The Valley of Gwangi...

...that special effects spectacle in which cowboys find a hidden valley in Mexico full of leftover dinosaurs.

At the age of 6 or 7, I would surely have told you it was the finest movie ever made. I still love it; I watched it just a week or so ago on Turner Classic Movies, where it’s shown fairly often. My fondness for the film, in part, stems from the fascination I’ve always had for dinosaurs, and for movies of the “creature feature” variety. But in the case of Gwangi, I’m sure it’s also connected to the circumstances in which I saw the film, at a drive-in, with a bunch of relations stuffed into a car on a flawless early-fall Saturday evening in Pennsylvania. While we all gobbled popcorn, the little kids, especially me, sat thunderstruck by the tale, and my older sisters cracked wise about it, while nonetheless admiring Uruguayan actor Gustavo Rojo, one of the handsomer cast members. Even allowing for the refinements of nostalgia, it seems like one of those perfect childhood memories.

Based on an idea by Willis O’Brien, the animator of the original King Kong, Gwangi’s plot follows the Kong template: Sometime around the turn of the century, a group of cowboys from a Wild West show finds its way into a mysterious valley inhabited by surviving prehistoric beasts. They run afoul of a purplish allosaurus, the Valley’s apex predator, known as “Gwangi” to the local gypsies. The cowboys capture Gwangi and bring him to civilization as an attraction; he escapes, and heartache ensues.

The cinematic appeal in all this is that Gwangi and several other monsters are brought to life by the special effects master Ray Harryhausen, the greatest of the stop-motion animators, that Quixotic specialty class of film artists who tortuously shoot one frame at a time of articulated puppets, changing their position the slightest bit between frames to create a skittish, jerky and irresistible sense of motion. As an attempt at a realistic illusion of life, CGI has long since made stop-motion animation obsolete, but for some of us--I suppose it's a cinematic equivalent to being a "vinylhead" among record enthusiasts--stop-motion has a human charm and a low-tech vibrancy that even the finest CGI can’t claim.

The Valley of Gwangi is an example of this. Gwangi was a typical, irritable Harryhausen brute, loaded with loutish personality. At the end [spoiler alert!], the poor creature, dragged against his will to a civilization he wanted no part of, comes to a grim demise in a burning cathedral. The final scene pans across the faces of a crowd watching the church burn with Gwangi trapped inside, then comes to rest on the face of the little boy who went on the expedition, now with tears streaming down his cheeks. That kid stood in for at least one little kid out in the audience.

TRENCH MOB

In theaters this weekend:

Journey's End--Samuel Johnson famously said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. That guilty sentiment (which now probably extends to a lot of women as well) negates the intentions of a lot of supposedly "anti-war" movies.

The makers of such movies may even genuinely intend them to be anti-war, but the nature of the western narrative tradition being what it is, what often ends up onscreen is an action-adventure story with some inserted piety about the horrors of war. They may leave young viewers in the audience even more eager to rush off to battle, and older viewers reproaching themselves, Johnson-style, for never having done so.

There are exceptions, though. Probably because World War One is now historically regarded as such a colossally wasteful, sordid mess, that conflict has produced several pretty effective cautionary war dramas. All Quiet on the Western Front, both the novel and Lewis Milestone's 1930 movie, truly seem to get across something of both the terror and the futility of trench warfare in WWI. So, from the other side, does R. C. Sherriff's 1928 English play Journey's End, about desperate, shell-shocked, boozing British officers at the end of their rope in the trenches in France in spring of 1918.

Not long ago I saw the 1930 film version of Journey's End, the feature debut of director James Whale, and was impressed with how potently and poignantly it holds up. Going into this new, but surprisingly faithful, British version, directed by Saul Dibb, I feared that the claustrophobic quality of the original might be sacrificed for a more epic scale, and I'm happy say that this isn't the case. This new Journey's End is "opened out" just enough to keep it from feeling stagey, but not enough to lose its atmosphere of crushing dread.

The focus is on the veteran Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), a shattered alcoholic barely held together by his older Lieutenant, the avuncular schoolmaster Osborne (Paul Bettany). There's a reason that Stanhope isn't happy to see the eager new Lieutenant, Raleigh (Asa Butterfield), an old school friend who hero-worships him. Also under Stanhope's command are the chuckling, equable Trotter (Stephen Graham), the terrified Hibbert (Tom Sturridge) and the deadpan cook Mason (Toby Jones). This ensemble is terrific top to bottom, with Claflin subtly getting across the same bitter, jittery fury that Colin Clive did as Stanhope back in 1930. Butterfield is touchingly callow, and Bettany is heartbreakingly dignified as the "Uncle" Osborne.

The drama arises from the tensions and clashes, and the kindnesses, between these men. There's little in the way of battlefield action, and what there is lacks romance; it's hectic and frightening, with no sense of accomplishment. The heroism in the film, such as it is, comes from the stoicism with which these men try to face their useless deaths. By the end, you may admire them for their courage, but you're unlikely to reproach yourself for declining to share their fate.

Ready Player One--Human society is run down and slummy, but most people don't care that much because they spend most of their time in virtual reality anyway.

But enough about present-day America. Steven Spielberg's latest, based on a 2011 novel by Ernest Cline, takes this state of affairs further, into a bleak and distressingly plausible version of 2045. The teenage hero Wade (Tye Sheridan) resides in a stack of mobile homes in Columbus, Ohio. But he, like most of his neighbors, spends as much time as possible in an immersive online universe called The Oasis, in which people assume the roles of "avatars," many of them based on favorite pop-culture characters ranging from the Mutant Ninja Turtles to Harryhausen's Cyclops, as well as many original creations: Wade's avatar Parzival resembles an anime hero.

The departed creator of the The Oasis, a socially awkward genius named Halliday (Mark Rylance), has left behind a series of "Easter Eggs," three keys that, if found, will make the player the heir to The Oasis. Tye, of course, is determined to find them. It's a bit like The Matrix meets Willy Wonka, with Ben Mendelssohn as an evil corporate Slugworth. There's a dash of The Searchers, too.

Wade/Parzival falls in with various allies, and wild fights and chases ensue, both in The Oasis and the real world. The movie starts slow, and is a bit of a mess; long stretches of it, like a nutty passage set in the Overlook Hotel from Kubrick's The Shining, are absorbing and funny, while other stretches, especially the real-world stuff, recall the heavy-handed, obsequiously crowd-pleasing Spielberg of the later '80s. It's a bit perplexing to see, after the effortless command Spielberg demonstrated a couple of months ago in The Post.

The real fun is in the juxtaposition of pop icons: Where else can we get King Kong and Chucky and The Iron Giant all in the same movie, along with countless characters from video games and cartoons and toy series? Even Mechagodzilla turns up, accompanied by a whisper of Akira Ifukube's unforgettable Godzilla theme.

Ready Player One seems to be an allegorical plea for, on the commercial and political end, net neutrality, and on the personal end, a bit of moderation where online life is concerned. Neither of these positions is particularly radical, but the movie seems to have its middle-of-the-road heart in more or less the right place.

SEVERAL STEPS BEYOND

If you haven't been getting enough Vitamin MVM in your diet these days, there's a pretty big dose of Your Humble Narrator available online right now: My feature on the New Times blog about the remarkable Amanda Lipitz documentary STEP...

...opening this weekend in the Valley, and my short interview on Phoenix Magazine's "Desert Digest" blog with area food blogger Joanie Simon about her upcoming appearance on the Food Network show with the alliterative but troubling title Guy's Grocery Games.

RIP to the great Glen Campbell, passed on at 81. The Wife and I were lucky enough to see him perform a few songs some years ago at the Orpheum Theatre, as part of Alice Cooper's "Christmas Pudding" show. But I also vividly remember how ubiquitous he was in his heyday in the early '70s, when his beautiful, subtle, dramatic voice seemed to issue nonstop from every radio and TV, all day long.

With The Nut Job 2: Nutty By Nature opening tomorrow...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...this week let's give the nod to the Brobdingnagian squirrel...

...that briefly menaces our hero and heroine in 1960's The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, one of the more mundane monsters ever stop-motion animated by Ray Harryhausen.

EYE ALONE

Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq, which opens tomorrow, features a character, played by Wesley Snipes, called Cyclops.

So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a Cyclops would seem to be in order, but as we’ve already repeatedly honored the greatest movie Cyclops of all time—Ray Harryhausen’s thuggish stop-motion specimen from The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad—this week let’s give the nod to Johann Tischbein’s 1802 version:

DOUBLE DOG DARE

This Saturday Turner Classic Movies, the greatest TV channel of all time, presents 1981’s Clash of the Titans, the last of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion spectacles (check the TCM schedule for local airtimes). So…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to “Dioskilos,” a variation on Cerberus with two heads instead of three…

…with whom Perseus and pals clash in the course of their adventure. I wonder if a spray bottle of water—or maybe two spray bottles, one in each hand—would have helped the poor creature’s behavior?

As for why Harryhausen decided that two heads were better three, it was probably for the same reason that his “It” in It Came From Beneath the Sea...

...was a “hexapus” rather than an octopus—fewer appendages, faster animation.

SHELL IS FOR HEROES

With Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tearing up the box office this past weekend (Friday, June 3, 2016 has already been announced as the opening day for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2) a chelonian creature seems in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …here's the gigantic Archelon (“Ruler Turtle”) animated by Ray Harryhausen in 1966’s One Million Years B.C.:

Many years ago I read an anarchist comic with an uncharacteristic streak of self-deprecating wit in which the old professor had a tiny pet turtle, complete with dish and little plastic palm tree, named “Anarchelon.”

ROC STAR

Obviously this week…

Monster-of-the-Week: …a Ray Harryhausen monster was in order. But which, out of all his wondrous fauna, ought to get the nod? Then it occurred to me—this weekend is also Mother’s Day. The choice is clear: The Roc, the awe-inspiring two-headed bird from my personal favorite Harryhausen movie, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

 

The Roc comes flapping back to her lofty nest, to the accompaniment of vertigo-inducing Bernard Herrmann music, to find that a couple of scurvy sea-dogs of Sinbad’s crew have cracked open one of her eggs and are enjoying a drumstick of the sweet two-headed chick that emerged. Bad luck for those guys.

A very Happy Mother’s Day to all Moms everywhere.

RAY

One of my best friends just called me from Back East, seriously in tears, to tell me that Ray Harryhausen has passed on, at 92. I’d already heard, from another friend, but I was glad he called just the same—we talked about Harryhausen’s movies for more than an hour.

It’s hard for me to know quite where to begin with regard to Harryhausen. Anyone who’s read my writing for any length of time may already know that the special-effects sorcerer, along with his great mentor Willis O’Brien (of King Kong) before him, was responsible for a really high percentage of the images that turned me into a movie lover.

Harryhausen was the greatest of the stop-motion animators, that small class of movie artists who photograph articulated puppets one frame at a time, then painstakingly move them the tiniest bit before shooting the next frame, to create the illusion of motion when the film is run at full speed. He hadn’t made one of his fantasy spectacles, made up of various set-piece sequences of monsters and other fanciful beings strung along an episodic plot, in over thirty years, since Clash of the Titans in 1981. He’d spent his long retirement sculpting—he designed this…

…dramatic statue of David Livingstone, his wife’s great-great-grandfather, in Blantyre, Scotland—doing interviews and DVD commentaries, playing small roles in John Landis movies, accepting awards and generally soaking up much-deserved adulation.

Computer-generated imagery had made him technically obsolete, but he never became aesthetically obsolete. Computer effects, even at their formidable best, have never had the warmth or soul of Harryhausen’s creations. In recent years stop-motion has been used almost exclusively for stylized, cartoony stories, like The Nightmare Before Christmas or the recent Frankenweenie and ParaNorman.

But the skittish, haywire, obsessive flavor of old-school stop-motion—the familiar “jerkiness” that resulted from each frame being a still image rather than a picture of a body in motion—meant that it had an air of whimsical stylization even when it was used in a supposedly realistic setting. I think that as kids, we loved stop-motion creatures not because they were so real but because they so obviously and enchantingly were not.

Harryhausen claimed that the director Eugene Lourie once told him that he always made his monsters die “like the tenor in an opera,” piteously rising and re-collapsing. I can attest that the death of the “Rhedosaur” at the end of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms always put a lump in my throat when I was a kid. Here, perhaps, is a clue to what made Harryhausen special: I think he was, in a sense, an actor, channeling carefully-wrought performances into the faces and limbs of his models.

I defy anyone to watch several of his films together and not see distinctive personality types emerge from the “acting” of his creatures. He specialized in rampaging comic thugs, like the Cyclops in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth, Talos in Jason and the Argonauts, the Kraken in Clash, or the Troglodyte in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger—slow-thinking, with loutish, irritable faces (subconscious parodies of the bullies who pick on the kind of little kid who grows up to be an animator, maybe?). He could also create manic, demonic characters, like his animate, sword-wielding skeletons, and animals, like the Rhedosaur, the title allosaurus in The Valley of Gwangi, or the Dragon in 7th Voyage, with its oddly canine manner—when I showed my kid that movie, she was furiously indignant at Sinbad for shooting this guileless beast with a giant arrow.

But that’s the point. All of these creatures, benign or menacing, were endearing, touched as they were both by the hands and the spirit of the unassuming California boy who gave them life. RIP to him—he may have come to a stop, but his creations will long remain in motion.

GWANGI-SPOT

With Jurassic Park 3-D opening tomorrow…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to Gwangi, awe-inspiring allosaurus and title character of the 1969 Ray Harryhausen spectacle The Valley of Gwangi…

…in which cowboys find a hidden valley full of leftover dinosaurs, and which at 6 or 7 I would surely have told you was the finest movie ever made. I still love it.

I also love the Italian posters for it, in which it’s titled La Vendetta di Gwangi (“The Revenge of Gwangi,” presumably):

WHY ASK YMIR

A couple of RIPs this week: To songwriter Robert Sherman, best known for “It’s A Small World,” passed on at 86, and to actress and screenwriter Joan Taylor, passed on at 82. In honor of the latter…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let's once again honor one of Taylor’s most memorable leading men: The Ymir, the scaly ogre from 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957). Filched as an egg by astronauts visiting Venus & hatched in Italy after they crash-land into the Mediterranean, the Ymir, animated by the great Ray Harryhausen, grows huge & runs amok in the streets of Rome...

...before eventually facing his Waterloo in the Colosseum. He's quite symapthetic, poor fellow; you can see him in action here.

WHAT A CRAB

Yesterday was Jules Verne’s birthday, & tomorrow is opening day of Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to this cranky crustacean...

...from the splendid 1961 version of Mysterious Island—a real crab shell, articulated & animated by the great Ray Harryhausen, to a wonderful, halting musical accompaniment by the at least equally great Bernard Herrmann. Melt some butter!

CLICK & DRAGON

Happy Chinese New Year next Monday!

You may have noticed that all the Monsters-of-the-Week so far this month have been dragons, so to continue our welcome to the Year of the Dragon...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to one of my favorite movie dragons, this beauty...

...animated by Ray Harryhausen from one of my favorite movies, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. This beast, who guards the lair of the wizard Sokura, always struck me as having a sweetly canine manner; check the climactic scene here (spoilers!) & see if you agree.