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.

COOL CAT & ROCK STARS

Good stuff this weekend:

Black Panther--Dreamed up by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Black Panther was the first black superhero of any significance, debuting in Fantastic Four in 1966, and gradually taking over the pages of Marvel's Jungle Action in the '70s. He made his movie debut in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, played, as he is here, by Chadwick Boseman.

The roll that Marvel movies have been on continues, and maybe reaches a high point, with this extravagant, stirring saga. The title character is T'Challa, a royal in Wakanda, a tiny, isolated African nation. He's a rare (maybe singular?) specimen of both the Superman-Captain Marvel type of superhero, in that he has psuedo-scientifically and/or mystically bestowed superhuman powers, and the Doc Savage-Batman-James Bond school, in that he's a rich kid with unlimited technological resources and official sanction.

Wakanda, you see, has a secret: to the outside world it looks like a bucolic third-world backwater, but the big mountains in its center are a projection masking a futuristic, technocratic civilization far in advance of the rest of the world. It's powered by the deposits of an element called "vibranium" on which the country sits and which, along with training and traditional rituals, are also what give our hero his abilities. The Wakandas keep their real nature secret to keep the vibranium from falling into the wrong hands, and to protect themselves and others from the corruption of interfering in other people's affairs. They're like Switzerland, or Star Trek's Federation with its annoying "Prime Directive."

Near the beginning of the film, we see a Wakandan airship cruise into the skyline of this utopia. At the screening, I was sitting next to an African-American friend who leaned over and whispered in my ear "Thanks for the help during slavery." I must admit that, in all my readings of the comic, this potential for resentment of the Wakandans by other people of African descent, and by disadvantaged people in general, had simply never occurred to me. But it turns out to be the center of the movie's conflict.

The story here involves two villains. Klaue (a version of "Klaw" from the comics), a tatted-up South African weapons peddler with a vibranium-powered mechanical arm and a grudge against T'Challa, is played by Andy Serkis, out from behind the CGI for a change, and grinning with jolly murderousness. But in the course of the story he's overtaken as antagonist by Killmonger, a veteran of the U.S. military with an even deeper and more complicated grudge against our hero. Killmonger is played by Michael B. Jordan, who played the leads in director Ryan Coogler's previous films, the enjoyable Creed and the terrifyingly direct Fruitvale Station.

Coogler, who co-wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, nails nearly every element in Black Panther.  The narrative unfolds conventionally, but with a precision and a steady pace that makes it feel mythic. The movie is unhurried, yet I can't remember a boring moment, and the strength of the emotional payoff in the final minutes may sneak up on you. The costumes, sets and cinematography have a lush visual whimsicality--an affectionate hint of an old-Hollywood idea of Africa--that borders on the tongue-in-cheek but avoids kitsch.

Better than any of this, however, is the cast. Boseman plays iconic figures--Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall--so often that it's easy to miss that he plays them as human beings. His princely bearing as T'Challa is used, often and wisely, to comic effect. He's a frequent straight man to the ridiculously glamorous women in the cast: Lupita Nyong'o as his spy love interest, Letitia Wright as his tech-genius little sister--equivalent to Q in the Bond flicks--Angela Basset as his mom, and Danai Gurira as the leader of Wakanda's corps of shaven-headed warrior women.

Jordan, on the other hand, brings a touch of the tragic to his performance without milking it. Other cast members, like Forest Whittaker, Daniel Kaluuya of Get Out, Winston Duke and Martin Freeman as a CIA man, something like Felix Leiter in the Bond stories, bring warmth and individuality to what are, essentially, stock characters.

This movie perpetuates the Star Wars/Lion King idea of royal bloodlines and birthrights being central to society. And it shares the same limitation as most superhero stories: Boiling its conflict down to a climactic fistfight. But within the context of these obligatory elements, this Black Panther is about as good as big-budget blockbuster moviemaking can be.

Early Man--There are armored rhinos in Black Panther, by the way. Did I neglect to mention that?  Yeah, there are armored rhinos in Black Panther, and there are armored mammoths in Early Man, Nick Park's stop-motion animated caveman travesty. This is my kind of weekend at the movies.

It wasn't clear from the initial American TV ads, but Early Man, directed by Park of Wallace and Gromit fame from a script by Mark Burton and James Higginson, is a sports movie--specifically, a soccer movie. Set "near Manchester" (hence its very title is a pun) during the transition from the Stone Age to the Bronze Age, it offers an origin story for the "Beautiful Game."

It's about a tribe of Stone Agers who are dispossessed from their homeland by technically advanced Bronze Agers who want to mine it. The Bronze folk worship football, so Stone Ager Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) challenges them to a match for the right to return to their Valley or, if they lose, to work "down the mine" for the rest of their lives. A young Bronze Age woman, Goona (Maisie Williams), joins the Stone Agers and coaches them, because girls aren't allowed to play back home. Dug's warthog pal Hognob would like to play too, but everybody ignores this. At first.

I'd guess there are lots of soccer-related jokes and references in this movie that are lost on us Yanks, as it both follows and spoofs the template of the underdog sports tale. But at another level, it's a parody of old-school caveman flicks like One Million Years B.C. or When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, and thus it offers us such showpieces as a towering, fanged duck, the ultimate proof of the dinosaur ancestry of birds.

I'm so in sympathy with this movie's nuttiness that I'm reluctant to admit that it's probably not quite on the level of some of Aardman's other feature efforts, like 2015's Shaun the Sheep Movie, or 2012's The Pirates! Band of Misfits. Besides, so what? Second-tier Aardman is still better than ten regular movies.

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.

KONG OF THE ROAD

With War for the Planet of the Apes opening this weekend...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...an ape-oriented honoree seems in order, so how about...

...this version of King Kong, superbly realized by masterly stop-motion animator David Allen for a 1972 Volkswagen commercial.

HUGE DEAL

With The BFG, which stands for Big Friendly Giant, opening tomorrow…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week let’s give the nod to the big not-so friendly giant…

…from the 1970 shocker Equinox. Though that movie, an expansion of a 1967 student film by future multi-Oscar-winning special effects master Dennis Muren, is full of spectacular stop motion effects, this big fellow (Jim Duron) was generated through low-tech forced perspective.

By the way, wouldn’t “The FG” be less redundant?

SHOW ME THE MONKEY

Happy New Year next Monday everybody! Chinese New Year, that is. This time we ring in the Year of the Monkey, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod goes to the hideous (but wonderfully stop-motion-animated) “Sumatran Rat Monkey” who gets the zombie plague rolling in Peter Jackson’s 1992 shocker Dead Alive (aka Braindead)...

 
The creature also got a nice sort-of-cameo in Jackson’s version of King Kong.

MEN IN THE WILDERNESS

Opening in the Valley today:

Anomalisa—A middle-aged man from L.A. flies into Cincinnati for a speaking gig. He’s the author of a popular tome on customer service, and people murmur his name when he walks into his hotel lobby. He checks into his room, tips the bellhop, orders some room service, calls an ex-girlfriend who lives in town. The setting is mundane and his behavior is entirely unremarkable, though a deep sadness and loneliness suffuses the atmosphere.

All of this, by the way, is depicted in painstakingly detailed stop-motion animation. For a while, I thought that this was the object of the cinematic experiment—could stop-motion lend its sense of stylized wonder even to this sort of naturalistic, slice-of-life drama?

But eventually [spoilers coming, by the way], the tension at the heart of this strange story becomes clear, as we realize that everybody in the movie except our hero, Michael, speaks in the same voice. Michael speaks in the gentle British-accented tones of David Thewlis, but his wife and young son on the phone, the ex-girlfriend, the cabbie, the desk clerk, people on TV, and everybody else speaks in the unnerving adult male voice of Tom Noonan.

It’s clear that this is how Michael’s been hearing the world for a long time, because he springs into action when he suddenly hears an unfamiliar voice passing in the hall. He tracks it down to a young woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who’s staying in the hotel. Lisa’s a sweet, slightly dowdy woman with poor self-esteem. Lisa—who is an anomaly, get it?—and a girlfriend (with the usual voice) have come from Akron to hear Michael speak, so she’s starstruck when he begs her to spend time with him.

Written by Charlie Kaufman (based on his own radio play), who co-directed with animator Duke Johnson, this solipsistic fantasy grows even more bizarre from there on, in the manner of Kaufman’s earlier pop-absurdist weirdness like Being John Malkovich or Synecdoche, New York. It’s also sexually graphic, with results that are both touching and surprisingly erotic.

This won’t be everybody’s cup of tea, obviously, but on its own terms it’s among the strongest and most emotionally charged pictures of the year. Kaufman takes his time, letting the freaky conceits establish themselves gradually, and also allowing Michael’s terrible sense of isolation to become overpowering.

Lisa is the movie’s greatest success. She’s tremendously likable, and in the face of Michael’s rather predatory neediness, Kaufman, Johnson and Leigh make us feel urgently protective of her.

The Revenant—Probably because there’s a part of me that still thinks of him as that little kid from the sitcom, the adult Leonardo DiCaprio is an ongoing amazement to me. In this adaptation of Michael Punke’s 2002 novel DiCaprio is entirely credible as Hugh Glass, the frontiersman who, on an ill-fated pelt-hunting expedition in South Dakota in 1823, was savaged to the point of death by a bear, then abandoned by the men charged with staying with him. Horrifically wounded, he nonetheless dragged himself across hundreds of miles of wilderness, for the sake of survival and revenge.

This historical incident (it was also the basis for 1971’s memorable Man in the Wilderness, with Richard Harris) has been embellished, giving Glass an even more spaghetti-western-ish motive for his vengeance. Director Alejandro G. Innaritu stages scene after scene of gruesome and grueling violence—Indian attacks, the bear mauling, murders, scalpings, disemboweling animals to sleep in their carcasses—with undeniable primal force.

The final clash between Glass and his chief enemy (Tom Hardy, who’s superb) is a standard action-movie grapple, and somehow banal. But on balance, The Revenant is potent stuff, and vividly acted by DiCaprio, Hardy and Will Poulter as the young Jim Bridger.

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that Inarittu’s previous film, the rhapsodically received Birdman, was about a movie star prepared to end his own life because his acting career wasn’t going quite as well as he’d hoped. This time Inarittu gives us a hero who literally crawls out of his own grave, eats raw meat and cauterizes his own wounds with gunpowder just to keep breathing. It’s kind of hard to pin down Inarittu’s philosophy.

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.

IT'S ALWAYS SONNY

Time to get Monster-of-the-Week started up again, and with Dawn of the Planet of the Apes now in theatres, something ape-ish and sequel-ish seems in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …how about the sweet-natured underachieving (if ultimately nobly martyred) title character of 1933’s Son of Kong…

This hastily-cranked-out movie isn’t one of the more beloved of classic monster flicks, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it. “Baby Kong” is endearing, and while she’s no Fay Wray, leading lady Helen Mack is cute, too, and she sings a Betty Boop-ish song called “Runaway Blues” that gets agreeably stuck in my head for days every time I see the film.

THE NORMAN HEART

Out on DVD today: The excellent little stop-motion-animated kiddie-spooker ParaNorman.

It starts with the same premise as The Sixth Sense—a little boy who sees dead people. It’s up to Norman to figure out the secret that raises six rotted corpses from their graves and sends them shambling through the streets of the small town where he lives. The movie is imaginative, generous-hearted and funny, though with a surprisingly dramatic and poignant revelation at its core. Best of all, it avoids the sterility that haunts so many contemporary animated movies—Norman’s home town has a grubby, hardscrabble look, like a shop town down on its luck, that’s very refreshing.

A STITCH IN TIME SAVES CANINE

Tim Burton gives the boy-and-his-dog movie a macabre but touching spin in Frankenweenie, a remake, from Disney, of his 1984 live-action short. Suburban boy-genius Victor Frankenstein’s beloved dog Sparky gets run over, but Victor, a science whiz, robs his grave and zaps him back to life in a makeshift lab in the attic, in the manner of James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein.

Other kids get wise to Victor’s revivifying technique and, dreams of science-fair glory in their eyes, try it on a dead turtle, rat, Sea Monkeys and other creatures. A “Weird Girl” even manages, inadvertently, to create a hybrid of her equally weird cat Mr. Whiskers with a bat. The results of all this weird science wreak riotous havoc on the town’s festival, and it raises an angry mob that chases Sparky toward the windmill on the hill…

Rendered in stop-motion and ravishing black-and-white, with a voice ensemble that includes Catherine O‘Hara, Martin Short, Martin Landau and Winona Ryder, all propelled by a splendid Danny Elfman score, this striking piece of movie craft is an homage, principally, to the Universal monster pictures, though it also carries references to everything from Gamera to The Birds to the Hammer films. Indeed, if the film has a fault it’s that it’s too dense and overstuffed with references, witty though they are, for its brief running time.

But the characterizations compensate for the feverish tone of Frankenweenie's parody. Victor has a beautifully long, gloomy face—a bit like a boy version of Burton, perhaps; he’s a junior filmmaker as well as a scientist—and his grief isn’t just a plot point. His parents are a bit generic, maybe by design, but the kids, the science teacher, Weird Girl and Mr. Whiskers, the monsters, the neighbor poodle with whom Sparky has a connection—all of them are vividly real beings.

As for the title pooch, he’s classic; one of the all-time great achievements in stop-motion characterization. Sparky is so deeply endearing that he ensures an authentic emotional response to Frankenweenie. Both visually and as a piece of sustained narrative, this may be Burton’s most satisfying movie since Ed Wood. It’s one of the better films so far this year.

STING LOW

According to this AP story, a woman here in the Valley was stung by a scorpion, went to Chandler Regional Medical Center, then found that her part of the bill was about $25,000—her insurer having paid about $57,000. The hospital charges $40,000 per dose for the anti-venom, but the woman says she was never told this in the ER. So…

Monster-of-the-Week: ..this week’s honoree is the title character of 1957’s The Black Scorpion…

…the largest and most badass of the many giant scorpions, creations of stop-motion great Willis O’Brien, in that film. Scary though the huge arachnid is, he’s probably less terrifying than the prospect of a trip to the hospital for a minor injury.

HOLLOW VICTORY

RIP to the very beautiful Patricia Medina, departed at 92.

In her honor...

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the title character of one of her less celebrated vehicles, The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)…

You can see the jerkily-animated but rather wonderful finale of this otherwise boring movie here.