SHORT AND TO THE POINT

Wednesday evening’s offering from No Festival Required, The 19^th Annual Animation Show of Shows, is a startlingly diverse collection of short films. Much like the Rural Route touring show presented by the redoubtable not-a-festival this past August, this Show of Shows features shorts from North America and Europe. Inevitably, some of the selections on the bill, assembled by L.A.-based animation production company Acme Filmworks, are stronger than others. But far more are interesting than not.

Highlights include the graphically beautiful music video, by Quentin Baillieux of France, for the Charles X song Can You Do It, and the British sci-fi domestic comedy The Alan Dimension. From Switzerland comes George Schwitzgebel’s The Battle of San Romano, a riff on Uccello’s vision of the 15^th-Century scrap. There’s also The Burden (Min Borda) a deeply bizarre musical from Sweden featuring anthropomorphic fish, telemarketing monkeys, grocery-shopping dogs and dancing custodial hairless rats.

From the U.S. comes Dear Basketball, an ode to hoops created and narrated by Kobe Bryant and directed by Glen Keane (son of Arizona’s Bill Keane, of The Family Circus).

Also from the U.S., and worth the price of admission all by itself, is a revival of The Hangman, a 1964 project from Looney Tunes background artist Paul Julian which stunningly (and chillingly) brings to life the Maurice Ogden poem, here spoken by the late Herschel Bernardi, and as relevant as ever.

In short, this Show of Shows features subjects ranging from the dizzyingly cosmic to the mundane. Then comes the finale, Everything, a strange and lovely visualization of an engaging lecture on consciousness and cosmology by Alan Watts, carrying the lofty suggestion that the cosmic and the mundane are interconnected.

SAM HE WAS

Happy August everybody! The great Alice Cooper adorns the cover of...

...the August edition of Phoenix Magazine, on the stands now, but can he truly be the star of the issue when it also features my "Four Corners" column on Mediterranean restaurants around the Valley? It's also the 2017 "Best of the Valley" issue, and a bunch of these opinionated picks were penned by Your Humble Narrator as well (as in previous years, no prizes for guessing which).

A couple of RIPs: To voice acting giant June Foray, passed on two months shy of her hundredth birthday. She was the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Natasha, Granny and Witch Hazel and Cindy Lou Who, among countless others. Any one of these would gain her admittance to the pantheon.

RIP also to Sam Shepard, passed on too young at 73. I saw his play The Unseen Hand performed outside in Ohio in 1984; one of my great theatrical experiences as an audience member. His work was so charged with beautiful language and hard but not ungenerous truths about America that it didn't matter when it was uneven or jaggedly constructed. He was a wonderful movie actor, too; I love him as Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff,  and he didn't get enough credit for his commanding turn as the Ghost in Michael Almereyda's modern-dress Hamlet (2000).

In Shepard's honor...

Monster-of-the-Week:  ...this week let's acknowledge the Bog Beast from his play Back Bog Beast Bait, first staged at the American Place Theatre in 1971. Here's the Beast, as depicted in a poster for a later regional production...

...but perhaps we'd do better to let Shepard's stage directions paint his picture: "He is just as Maria described him. Two heads like a pig, he snorts and spits, lights come from his eyes. His skin is covered with slimy green moss." Alas, he's as hapless as any Shepard character: when the other characters prove "oblivious of the beast's presence" he "...crosses downstage center and faces the audience. The action happens around him. Somehow the beast seems helpless and alone in the situation. He exits."

CLEANUP ON ISLE 2

The sequel to 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D is titled Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. The pun built into the title is the whole of the movie’s verbal cleverness—it’s been a while since you’ve seen a movie, even a kids’ movie, with dialogue this corny & insipid. Fortunately, there are visual pleasures to make up for it.

Big, beefy Brendan Fraser being unavailable this time, the big beefy duties went to Dwayne Johnson, here the stepfather of the sullen kid (Josh Hutcherson), from the first film. The two of them end up stranded, along with a comic-relief helicopter pilot (Luis Guzman) & his cute daughter (Vanessa Hudgens), on an island of wonders somewhere near Palau, hidden behind a permanent waterspout. The boy’s adventurous grandfather is already there, played by Michael Caine—or, to put it more accurately, Michael Caine was paid to smile good-naturedly & speak the role’s lines.

The island was an inspiration, we are told, not only for Verne’s The Mysterious Island but also for Stevenson’s Treasure Island & apparently both Lilliput & Brobdingnag in Gulliver’s Travels—its residents include elephants the size of terriers & bees the size of ponies. Dumb as all this is, Journey 2 is perfectly watchable.

The CGI effects have a garish appeal, the 3D flourishes better than usual, the action all but nonstop. About the only time things slow down is for Johnson to sing “What a Wonderful World,” pleasantly enough, accompanying himself on the ukulele. There’s also a dreamy slow-motion shot of Hudgens falling through the air toward the jungle that verges on real, as opposed to kitschy, beauty.

So sure, take your kids, but also do them a favor: Before or after, show them (& yourself) the 1961 movie adaptation of Mysterious Island, with added Ray Harryhausen monsters. Beside it, this new film is punier than a Lilliputian elephant.

In theaters, by the way, Journey 2 is preceded by a Warner cartoon, Daffy’s Rhapsody, in which the manic-depressive waterfowl sings to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, all while dodging Elmer Fudd’s bloodlust. Classical music has been good to the Looney Tunes—three of the best Bugs Bunny shorts, The Rabbit of Seville (1949), What’s Opera, Doc? (1957) & Long-Haired Hare (1948), are operatic send-ups—& this new film is probably the best of Warner’s post-Mel Blanc efforts, in no small part because…Blanc actually provides Daffy’s voice! The animation is a setting of a ‘50s-era children’s record by the peerless voice actor, & it’s quite wonderful to hear his irreplaceable tones filling the multiplexes.