Holding Hands, my favorite thrift shop in Oxford, home of the $1 dvd, was overdue for a visit. For $19, I walked out with:
THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMEDLAURA
GILDA
NOW, VOYAGER
THE BIG SLEEP
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS
THE PINK PANTHER
CABARET
HARD TIMES
ANNIE HALL
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT
A MIGHTY WIND
THE ANIMATRIX
THE KING'S SPEECH
THE CLONE WARS:A GALAXY DIVIDED
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS
I started into this stack by satisfying my curiosity and my geek need with viewings of The Adventures of Prince Achmed, The Clone Wars: A Galaxy Divided, and The Animatrix. A late one for me, but well worth a groggy Wednesday morning.
The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the world's first-ever animated feature film, released 13 years prior to Disney's Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs, ought to be something I'd heard of, yet today marks my first encounter with a truly remarkable, groundbreaking film. German director Lotte Reiniger spent three years creating and shooting Prince Achmed, using a silhouette animation style in which cardboard cutouts mounted on thin sheets of lead could be manipulated against a background. The overall effect reminds me of shadowplay or, weirdly, those sand-animations that ran on Sesame Street in the '70s - the movement of the cardboard figures has a similar fluidity in the way they change form, many morphing between animal and human.
The story riffs on Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, but not being up on my 1001 Nights I'm not entirely clear how much originates in the original text and how much in the minds of the filmmakers. Before you ask, there's a character in Disney's Aladdin called Prince Achmed meant as an homage to Reiniger's film.
Any great silent film should be able to communicate itself entirely in images, without interstitial narrative cards, and Prince Achmed does, or would, if they weren't here. This is not a tough story to understand, but the way Reiniger captures emotional nuance and creates character in this seemingly crude artistic experiment is something to see. Prince Achmed is a filmmaking achievement.
It's also not something most will watch often. It IS a silent film. There's characterizations, but no true characters without more distinct faces and voices with which to identify. It's a fascinating thing to look at, and it tells its story well, but not in a way I'll want to revisit in the way I do Dumbo. It's a curio I'm glad to own, but a curio regardless.
Each successive Disney/JJ Abrams Star Wars movie helped propel my immersion in the now non-canon LucasVerse, George Lucas's original conception of his unnamed galaxy. I like the immense tapestry Lucas allowed others to embroider within his template. It's rich in lore and offbeat characters and obscure Jedi and Sith and nooks and crannies and layer after layer. The DisneyVerse, so far, feels a little empty. In time, its streaming series and other, new properties may create an equally rich universe, but I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile, there's all the LucasFilm material with which to reckon. Clone Wars: A Galaxy Divided marks my first dip.
Four episodes, primarily from the first two seasons, make up Galaxy Divided. I found them rewarding in pretty much every way. They add so much more texture and backstory to the Prequels. The sheer scale of the Jedi's betrayal and downfall comes across well. Even as they're winning, as Yoda appears to be in control, it's all a trap and they're already doomed. That knowledge gives all the proceedings a bittersweet quality. It's strange watching a likable version of Good Annikin serving the Jedi, not the Chancellor. It makes all their optimism and ebullience when they win so much more piquant.
At the same time, all the episodes reinforce what continues to be central to Star Wars mythos - we can win because we have friendship and love. They have only loyalty and fear. It's a nice nessage for kid viewers and probably doesn't harm adults. The way they slide the wholesome messaging in without slowing the story impressed this adult.
Quick, anyone. What's The Matrix about?
No, stop that, you don't know. I don't know. No one fuckin' knows. It was originally about a war between humans and AI, taking place in this digital construct called The Matrix. But it was a hit. A huge one. So when the studio asked for a sequel, the writer-director Wachowskis handed them a two-for-one deal, a trilogy, its last two legs shot at once then edited into two films and released back to back, a strategy Lord of the Rings was about to employ to massive success. Problem was, the Wachowskis didn't have Tolkien's thousand-plus page source material and mythology. In fact, they had no real mythology and promptly invented it over the course of two of the most incomprehensible and interminable movies I've ever seen.
Quick, anyone. What's The Matrix about?
No, stop that, you don't know. I don't know. No one fuckin' knows. It was originally about a war between humans and AI, taking place in this digital construct called The Matrix. But it was a hit. A huge one. So when the studio asked for a sequel, the writer-director Wachowskis handed them a two-for-one deal, a trilogy, its last two legs shot at once then edited into two films and released back to back, a strategy Lord of the Rings was about to employ to massive success. Problem was, the Wachowskis didn't have Tolkien's thousand-plus page source material and mythology. In fact, they had no real mythology and promptly invented it over the course of two of the most incomprehensible and interminable movies I've ever seen.
A big fan of the Wachowskis' earlier film, Bound, and of The Matrix, its sequels angered me. They were such a gobbledygook of bullshit. Oracles and Architects and False Prophets and Trainmen and Programs meditating on the difference between words and states of being and two albinos with dreadlocks and Monica Bellucci in latex, all cuisinarted into a Richard Bach-ian mess of Eastern-Judeo profundo-babble. Everything promising about The Matrix reduced to incoherent gibberish and ill will.
So. If you've never seen the sequels, take this advice. Don't. See The Animatrix, 9 short anime films telling stories related to the Matrix's world, including a two-part history of the machine uprising that actually gives all three films some body. The Animatrix is everything the sequels are not: stylish, imaginative, exciting, sensible. It's kind of a split between then-recent Fantasia 2000, with the animators given rein to create some real art, and Ivan Reitman's cult classic, Heavy Metal, in terms of the storytelling. I don't think of myself as an anime guy, but these 9 shorts made me rethink that stance. That's a sign of a good movie. Animatrix is not only a good movie, it might be the best movie with "The Matrix" in its title.
THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED. Dir. Lotte Reiniger, Milestone, 1926
THE CLONE WARS: A GALAXY DIVIDED
Dee Bradley Baker, James Arnold Taylor. Dir. Dave Filoni, LucasFilm, 2008
THE ANIMATRIX
James Arnold Taylor, Keanu Reeves, Carrie Moss. Dir. Kojo Morimoto, et al, Warner Home Video, 2003
So. If you've never seen the sequels, take this advice. Don't. See The Animatrix, 9 short anime films telling stories related to the Matrix's world, including a two-part history of the machine uprising that actually gives all three films some body. The Animatrix is everything the sequels are not: stylish, imaginative, exciting, sensible. It's kind of a split between then-recent Fantasia 2000, with the animators given rein to create some real art, and Ivan Reitman's cult classic, Heavy Metal, in terms of the storytelling. I don't think of myself as an anime guy, but these 9 shorts made me rethink that stance. That's a sign of a good movie. Animatrix is not only a good movie, it might be the best movie with "The Matrix" in its title.
THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED. Dir. Lotte Reiniger, Milestone, 1926
THE CLONE WARS: A GALAXY DIVIDED
Dee Bradley Baker, James Arnold Taylor. Dir. Dave Filoni, LucasFilm, 2008
THE ANIMATRIX
James Arnold Taylor, Keanu Reeves, Carrie Moss. Dir. Kojo Morimoto, et al, Warner Home Video, 2003
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