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.

YETI PERSISTED; JUDGE DREAD; FANCY FOOTWORK

Opening in the Valley this weekend:

Smallfoot--The premise of this animated musical kidflick is that Yeti exist, high in the Himalayas, and that they regard us humans just as we regard them--as legendary. These furry, not-at-all-abominable snow-people have a peaceful culture on a mountaintop above a cloudbank, based on a traditional creation story drawn on flat stones worn by the "Stonekeeper." Questioning this mythology can lead to banishment.

This is what happens to our hero Migo (voiced by Channing Tatum) after he encounters a human "smallfoot" and tells his neighbors about it. But he falls in with a secret society of other Yeti who question the literal veracity of the stones, among them Meechee (Zendaya), the daughter of the Stonekeeper (Common). Migo has an adventure below the clouds with a smallfoot named Percy (James Corden), the egocentric, publicity-hungry host of an Animal-Planet-style TV show.

I didn't expect this film do go very far beyond its clever, funny basic idea; I certainly didn't expect it to be a complex satire about skepticism and rational inquiry, and the forces that oppose it. But that's what Smallfoot rather insistently is, even as it fulfills the obligatory demands of the kid movie, complete with slapstick and the occasional flatulence joke.

This conventional stuff is maybe what keeps the movie from being quite the instant classic that it wants to be. There's one terrific rap number, performed by Common, in which the Stonekeeper explains how his orthodoxy arose, and what it does for his society. Otherwise, the songs are pleasant but not really exciting.

Overall, though, Smallfoot is a very pleasant surprise, witty and generous-hearted and expansive. Also, one of the questioning Yeti--voiced by LeBron James--is named "Gwangi," presumably in homage to the allosaurus title character of 1969's The Valley of Gwangi, my childhood favorite movie. So I'd be disposed to like Smallfoot in any case.

The Children Act--Here's another story about the negotiations between reason and faith. But this Brit drama, adapted from an Ian McEwan novel, is a little less lighthearted than Smallfoot.

Emma Thompson plays Fiona, a justice in London. Fiona is routinely charged with making godlike moral rulings on, say, whether a hospital can separate conjoined twins, at the expense of one twin's life and against the wishes of the parents. Her neglected professor husband (Stanley Tucci) announces his plan to have an affair, then leaves her.

While she's in the midst of this turmoil, she's assigned the case of a seventeen-year-old boy, Adam (Fionn Whitehead), who's dying of leukemia and refuses to accept a potentially lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with the Jehovah's Witness faith in which he's been raised. Against her usual practice, Fiona decides to visit the boy in hospital, apparently to decide about the depth and seriousness of his commitment to refusing the treatment.

She finds Adam to be an ecstatic, flamboyantly self-dramatizing fellow, and the two bond at once, in part because of a shared passion for music. But it proves difficult to retreat back to her perch of legal abstraction after her short trip to the world of real humans that her decisions effect. Her connection with Adam continues after her ruling, in unexpected but painfully plausible ways.

Those of us who worship at the altar of Emma Thompson will get a potent dose of her brilliance here. It would be unfair to say that this is in spite of the material rather than because of it, but I think it's partially true, too. Although the quality and intelligence of the production is undeniable, there's something uneasily reductive about the story's approach to its central characters. The persistent suggestion is that Fiona is haunted by her failure to reproduce, and that this is what leaves her emotionally unequipped to deal with the intensity of Adam's, or indeed of her husband's, feelings for her. This feels too thin and pat for the woman that Thompson shows us.

Richard Eyre's direction is tightly proficient, the dialogue is crisp and swift--the script is by McEwan--and the supporting players are all spot-on, especially Whitehead (the everyman soldier protagonist from Dunkirk). But the movie is built around Thompson's performance; it's one of those vehicles where a poised and self-controlled central character is set on a collision course with an Oscar-clip meltdown. Thompson's trademark arch, ironic tones that modulate into a mildly beseeching singsong at the ends of sentences bespeak a self-deprecating reserve that's ripe to be punctured, and Thompson delivers as usual, pushing her performance even past this movie's limits.

Playing Sunday afternoon only at FilmBar is La Chana, the documentary on the famed Spanish flamenco dancer. Check out my review online at Phoenix Magazine.

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):