Thor (2011)

Director: Kenneth Branagh
Stars: Chris Hemsworth and Anthony Hopkins

It didn't take a lot to realise that I'm hardly the intended audience for this film. I asked a question of everyone who saw it early on that nobody understood, even those who were paid to review it. I simply wanted to know how Tadanobu Asano did in his first English language film. Having now seen Thor, I can understand the blank faces I got in response. He is utterly wasted in this film, far beyond anything I could have imagined. If viewers didn't know who he was, which is pretty likely for anyone not up on modern Japanese cinema, this certainly wouldn't have helped. He's almost not in the film at all and when he is, he's doing precisely nothing. Given that his next English language film is a screen adaptation of the game of Battleships (no, I'm not kidding), I can hardly be hopeful for a new international career, let alone my dream of seeing him playing opposite Johnny Depp in a quirky and artful drama. What a heartbreaking waste of talent.

The biggest problem Thor has, and it has many, is that Tadanobu Asano is not alone. I spent the near two hour running time being mildly disappointed, even though I came in with precisely no expectations, not having any background with the Marvel character at all. Yet when the ride was over and my brain reengaged, mild disappointment gradually built to the level of bewilderment. The more I thought about Thor, the less there was to think about. It reached the point where I'm not sure that there's anything at all in this film of any substance, leaving it as a two hour trailer for The Avengers. It isn't just Tadanobu Asano, it's everything else. Everyone and everything in this film is a heartbreaking waste of talent. I'm a long-standing fan of B-movie exploitation and yet I can't think of a single film that wasted my time more. I've seen worse films, to be sure, but I enjoyed the majority far more than this. This was literally two hours of my life I won't get back.

The story begins in Puente Antigua, as a continuation from the end of Iron Man 2, a capable if predictable Marvel blockbuster, as Thor arrives on the planet Earth to encounter a strange breed of human: field astrophysicists. Then we hop back to 965 AD so Anthony Hopkins can provide a primer on Norse mythology: frost giants, Asgard, aliens, Mjolnir, the whole thing. Yeah, aliens. These Norse gods are aliens who just hop down to Earth once in a while from Asgard to play at being gods. Earth is one of the nine realms, each accessible through some sort of Stargate. It's all very dark, very CGI and very Star Trek. Kenneth Branagh, a surprising choice of director to shoot a Marvel blockbuster, doesn't have the epic flair that Peter Jackson demonstrated in Lord of the Rings or the ability to focus on detail like Zack Snyder in 300. A few shots suggest we're in a spaceship but it's just the camera movements.

Anthony Hopkins looks like Anthony Hopkins in an Odin suit. Sometimes being a star can only be an obstacle to a performance. He does what you expect Hopkins to do, but by the end of this film I found that I hadn't disliked one of his performances this much since Red Dragon. In this version of Norse mythology, Odin, the king of Asgard, is the mighty warrior you might expect, but one who has fallen back into being a soft spoken peacemaker of a Norse god. I was waiting for him to cry havoc and let loose the berserkers, only to materialise a table to sit round and compromise. In comparison, his son Thor, about to take over as king, struts to the throne as if he was a WWE wrestler approaching the ring. Chris Hemsworth plays him rather like Brad Pitt would play Iron Man, only a little less flippant. I expected the We Will Rock You chant from A Knight's Tale. His brother Loki is jealous, scheming and ultimately forgettable. He may be the least villain ever.

The setup, within this shiny but obviously entirely CGI environment, is predictable. Loki invites the frost giants to show up and interrupt the ceremony, all on the sly of course. Odin forbids any reaction but Thor takes the Stargate to Jotunheim to piss them off anyway and his father has to calm things down. This action is enough to shift Thor in his esteem from his imminent heir to an undesirable element who he promptly strips of his powers and hurls down to Earth for the field astrophysicists to hit with their van. He does throw his mighty hammer Mjolnir after him, with an accompanying oath that its power will only manifest when his son is once more worthy. Even as this CGI action unfolds, I couldn't help but wonder that if it was this easy to outmanoeuver Thor, just why Loki hadn't got rid of him years before. However thinking about plot holes in this film is a dangerous business: there are more holes than plot.

The story from here is pretty obvious. Thor goes to get his hammer but SHIELD gets there first. Loki plots and schemes. Odin is removed from the field of play. Thor's buddies go to help him. Cue the battle. Cue the redemption scene. Cue the comeback. Cue the credits. It's all acutely disappointing, all the more so because there's no attempt to build any substance around it. Just as Asgard is a shiny bundle of CGI that never contains anyone without a direct purpose for being in a scene, Earth is apparently a single street in a single town entirely surrounded by desert, in which only the main characters have any function and then only very specific ones. Jane Foster, the lead astrophysicist, is there only as a token love interest. Her mentor, Dr Erik Selvig, is there because he knows Norse mythology. Her assistant, Darcy Lewis, is there for comic relief, which, unbelievably, amounts to one poor joke repeated twice. SHIELD are there to look impressive.

To be fair, the actors were capable, however dumb their parts were. Natalie Portman is solid as the love interest, but casting Natalie Portman as merely a love interest is like taking Mjolnir to crack a nut. She is painfully wasted in a throwaway role that feels all the more so because she does everything she can to embue it with meaning. Her acting chops merely highlight how the many other talented actors in this film didn't do the same, through their own fault or not. Rene Russo, Stellan Skarsgård and Tadanobu Asano are massive talents who get varying degrees of not a heck of a lot to do. Kat Dennings brings a weak periodic laugh but she's worth more than that. In this film only Thor really gets more to do than the extras who run around Puente Antigua looking scared, and they are only a hair's breadth above the frost giants, who are suitably sinister, but like everything in Jotunheim nothing more than shiny and meaningless CGI.

That leaves Hemsworth, Hopkins and Hiddleston, a triple H if you will, someone who would have looked a little less Hollywood than Hemsworth. Fortunately he does a decent job, once he wakes up in the hospital on Earth. Before that he's acutely annoying, but as a stranger in a strange land he's less cocky and more arrogant in a good sense, simply aware of how powerful he is. Depth arrives when he can't pick up Mjolnir, as that awareness falls away and he becomes fragile and unsure, obviously alien emotions to him. As the film revolves entirely around him, his showing is an anchor for the threadbare storyline. Without it, this would have been even more lacking than it is. Certainly Odin and Loki are nothing to focus on. Hopkins is unable to do anything with a bad part except make it worse and Tom Hiddleston, as Loki, is stuck playing a weak villain who gets weak scenes to be weak in. It's hardly surprising to find that he's weak and utterly forgettable.

Bizarrely the only character I can praise is that of Heimdall, guardian of the Bifrost, the Stargate that serves as the public transit system between worlds. This is bizarre because while actors like Ray Stevenson may look like Norse gods, only Heimdall feels like one, yet he's played by a black English actor, Idris Elba. It's a strange casting choice that is wrong on every level there is, except the actual performance that Elba delivers. He provides the only epicness that the film can boast. He epitomises timeless power, something sadly lacking in a film rooted in Norse mythology and shot by Kenneth Branagh who guided many of the actors through references to Shakespeare. It's amazing how empty this film is given that its character inspirations come from archetypes like Falstaff, Cassius and Edmund from King Lear, along with Peter O'Toole and Errol Flynn. Most took their roles because of Branagh's presence, some before there was a script. That speaks volumes.

Perhaps most surprising was that for a summer blockbuster, especially one based on a Marvel comic book character, there's not a lot of actual action, and when it arrives it's embarrassing. In the early scenes, everything is CGI and hard to see. Towards the end, when the film equivalent of a boss arrives to devastate the town, like a '50s sci fi monster, the battle is quick and lacking. Of the five warriors there, only three get shots in. The victory makes no sense. Even the moment in which Thor proves himself inevitably worthy was played badly. It read to me far more that the superhero in this film really isn't Thor at all, it's his hammer Mjolnir. It's at once Superman's cape and Batman's gadgets, but I never got the impression that Clark Kent or Bruce Wayne would die without those artefacts. Without Mjolnir, Thor is less than nothing. There's a final battle with Loki which shows off more CGI and relies on a deus ex machina. It's all embarrassing.

What surprises me is how much success Thor has managed to achieve, namely a gross of almost $450m and apparent critical acclaim from numerous fronts, including many who I'd expected would have hated it. Last time a superhero movie was made by a director pulled from the world of international art cinema rather than that of Hollywood blockbusters, the fans rebelled. Many good things have been said about Ang Lee's Hulk, but I haven't heard any from comic book fans. Here, those comic book fans seem to like it, if not outright love it and ache for the inevitable sequel. Roger Ebert was one of a few detracting critics, claiming that it failed as a movie but succeeded as marketing. Other critics were far more favourable, Richard Roeper even describing it as 'the most entertaining superhero debut since the original Spider-Man'. Adding my small voice to such esteemed company, I hated it with a passion that I haven't felt in a long time.

The Last of Mrs Cheyney (1929)

Director: Sidney Franklin
Stars: Norma Shearer, Basil Rathbone, Herbert Bunston and George Barraud

It's been a while since I've seen the 1937 version of this story, a golden age production featuring an all star cast including Joan Crawford, William Powell, Robert Montgomery, Frank Morgan and Nigel Bruce, among others. This predated it by eight years and an entire era, given that this is a precode, albeit one somewhat unique in its timing. The precodes got away with much that the production era simply couldn't, but they built up to their heyday: it's the pictures from 1932 to 1934 that are usually so notable, not the ones from the end of the twenties. This one, from 1929, closer to the silent era than the glory days of Warren William, opens with plenty of sparkling innuendo, much of it sexual. Verbal banter was an art long before this but it was a highlight of the early precodes because of how hard it was to move microphones, a key reason why so many were adapted from plays. Yet it's rare to see one quite so forward quite this early.

Otherwise it feels very late twenties. The early actors are very carefully enunciated, as befits a very early sound film. Only Hedda Hopper sounds remotely natural until Basil Rathbone wanders out of Mrs Cheyney's charity concert and promptly dominates the scene, not only with his clever and deliberate wit but with his effortless voice. He looks scarily young, somehow much younger than he appeared in films made only a year later, though he is buried under a good deal of makeup. He is excellent, matched only by Norma Shearer in the lead role. These two shine in a succession of glorious scenes, both as individual actors full of subtle nuance and as an engaging and charismatic pair. It's a shame that Rathbone's star hadn't yet risen to allow his name to join Shearer's above the title. Their interplay is an enticing to and fro affair, as Mrs Cheyney has Lord Arthur Dilling notably on the hop for a while, only for it to shift back and forth between them.

I can't help but see the film as a collection of these scenes, because they and the two characters they contain are so full of life, while the rest of the film is so sadly lacking. Only George Barraud comes close to the lead couple, as Charles, Cheyney's intriguing butler. Everyone else in the cast is either far too good at being intensely annoying, such as Herbert Bunston and Cyril Chadwick, or too inconsequential to have much presence. Both these actors do their jobs well, as do the various ladies in the cast, but that doesn't make them enjoyable to watch. Late in the film is a breakfast scene, with almost the entire supporting cast bouncing off each other. It's perhaps the only scene in which they any offer any entertainment and then as an ensemble rather than as individuals; yet they're still overshadowed by Basil Rathbone sitting quietly at the end of the table and the underlying attempt to keep the most outrageous events impeccably polite.

The term for such stories was 'comedy of manners' and that's notably more accurate here than usual. It's particularly fascinating to watch the reactions in this story. Certain actions naturally deserve contempt while others warrant forgiveness, though it takes impeccable manners and breeding to appropriately distinguish between the two. Larceny is far less heinous a crime than the abuse of hospitality, it seems, and early dishonesty can be outranked by later honesty, as long as the circumstances are appropriate. In other hands, this would be a crime drama with the MacGuffin the £50,000 string of pearls that Mrs Webley keeps by her bedside at night. Yet this is a comedy of manners with the MacGuffin the true moral character of the thief caught in the act. That's a quaint and fascinating concept, as much so as the bizarre facial acting that goes on between two people who don't look at each other very much. That happens a lot here.

What all this quaintness leaves is a strange anomaly. From one angle it's a notable precode, full of moral ambiguity, with a strong leading lady and plenty of very forward dialogue. Yet instead of the usual modernity of the late precode pictures, full of reaction to the social situations of the time, this looks backward to a past age. So from another angle, it's a stagebound and talkative early sound picture that feels antiquated in its focus on manners, titles and reputations. I don't think I've ever seen such a quintessential mix of both ends of the precode era in a single film before. I'm far more used to seeing the past and future in late twenties movies for a different reason, one that's very apparent here: most of these actors were on their way out, while a few were on their way in. As with many early talkies, it's impossible not to realise which actors would thrive in the sound era, not because we recognise them but because it's just that obvious.

I've been a Rathbone fan for years, but it's been tough to work backwards from his heyday in the code era to his earlier work. While movies like The Bishop Murder Case, The Lady of Scandal and Sin Takes a Holiday were decent and interesting films, for some reason I recall them less than A Notorious Affair, a much worse picture that epitomised the stodgy play-sourced early talkies. It's refreshing to see a dynamic Rathbone here: whether he's in command, attacking with his wit and romancing more emphatically than we might expect, or whether he's forced onto the defensive, battled back by the wit of Mrs Cheyney. It's a great performance, the earliest of his I've seen yet and presumably his sound debut, given that his previous film was three years earlier: a silent Ben Lyon picture called The Great Deception in 1926. The Last of Mrs Cheyney shows us a demonstrative Rathbone six years before stardom and a full decade before Sherlock Holmes.

On the other hand, it took a long while for me to appreciate Norma Shearer. It's easy to see her as important only as the wife of MGM's wunderkind, Irving Thalberg, but that's unfair. She was the female lead in MGM's first production, the Lon Chaney film He Who Gets Slapped, three years before marrying Thalberg, and her precodes demonstrate just how important she was as a strong woman who showed a young female audience how to escape the morals of the previous generation. Never mind overblown late thirties fare like The Women, watch her in precodes, as a succession of sexually active unmarried women, not pretty young things cast adrift in a man's world but sophisticated and experienced divorcées. Hollywood forgot her not for what she could do, but because, as with Warren William, for what she couldn't do any more under the code. This may be the best I've ever seen her, full of nuance and play, especially in the first half of the film.

Now I should go back to the 1937 version, not only to compare the quality of the two films and to see how they treat the same material differently, but to examine how far my understanding of such things has come in the intervening time. I saw the 1937 version early into my exploration of classic Hollywood and remember being impressed, but I can't help but wonder now whether I was really being impressed by the film or my early experiences of people like William Powell and Robert Montgomery. Like many modern viewers, I found that golden age films opened a glorious voyage of discovery, but after seven or eight intensive years of travelling through filmographies, both backwards and sideways, I realise that much of that gold was really gilt and the real magic is often harder to find. I have a feeling that this is going to be a great example, the 1929 version not as slick, not as polished, not as star studded, but a much better film for all that.

The Coward (1915)

Director: Reginald Barker & Thomas H Ince
Stars: Frank Keenan and Charles Ray

Charles Ray had a long career for Thomas Ince, but it was this film that made him a star, which he remained for the rest of the teens and into the twenties. It's easy to see why because, even as Frank Winslow, the coward of the title, he still manages to elicit some of our sympathy, ably demonstrating the torment he suddenly finds himself in as the American Civil War begins. He's pressured from many sides to sign up for the Confederacy, not least that he's the son of stern old Col Jefferson Beverly Winslow. Yet, 'Mother, I am afraid... afraid!' he wails, unable to enlist at the recruiting station. He's wracked with emotion, exhibiting an enticing combination of strength and weakness, and there's plenty of opportunity for Ray to demonstrate his dramatic range. He comes over as a strange cross between Henry Fonda and William Haines. In the end he signs up only because his dad is going to shoot him if he doesn't. How's that for incentive?

Such depth of character is only one reason why The Coward proved eye opening to me. I'm used to movies from the teens faring much better visually than with characterisation. They often had grand sets shot with capable camerawork, but rarely much to populate into them beyond simple generic storylines. Thomas Ince, famed for 1916's Civilization, sits high on the rankings of early American directors, behind only D W Griffith and Cecil B De Mille, but this is the first time I've seen one of his pictures and it certainly stands up far better than I expected. The other surprise is that the film's promise to be 'a dramatic episode of the American Civil War' is achieved not only through drama but through a surprisingly sparing use of intertitles. For the longest time, they serve only to introduce characters or to allow us to read a letter that progresses the story. It takes a long while before we read any dialogue and that's kept to a bare minimum throughout.

Charles Ray shares top billing with Frank Keenan, who plays his father. It's hard to say who gets most screen time, but if it's Keenan it's mostly through the inflexibility of his character casting a shadow over the entire film, as if he were a statue or a ghost perpetually in the background. Col Winslow has all the strength that his son doesn't have, so much so that he only has to stand up to easily dominate a scene. His toughest moments are very subtle ones, such as the one where he waits in his study for his son's decision to enlist, his power demonstrated more through a slow movement of his gun than through any choice of words. Even when his son deserts and he takes his place to keep the family honour intact, the character is too inflexible for Keenan to do much more than allow his eyes to shine in the night or to seethe quietly in the emotional scenes. He plays him well but simply has less chances to emote because of how his character is written.

Meanwhile, Frank gets opportunity after opportunity to build a character, though his story arc is more of a simple fall/rise than a more traditional and complex rise/fall/rise. He gets only a brief few moments before he's exposed as a coward, albeit one with some ambiguity, and what little sympathy he wrings out of us is soon lost as he quickly and surely sinks even lower. Yet there wouldn't be much of a plot if he wasn't given a chance for redemption and that comes through the Yankee command arriving in Cotton Creek, VA and taking up residence in Winslow Hall. He hides in the attic, where he fortuitously overhears massively important enemy secrets that he finally discovers the courage to take action over. There's more to the plot than that, but it gives you a good idea of the story arc that Frank Winslow is carried through. Ray impresses here, both as a coward and something of an action hero, albeit a frantic one.

With the success of this film, Charles Ray found fame, after a few years playing innocent country boys for Ince. He stayed with Ince and did well, but rarely strayed outside the same type of role, formula being even more important in the teens than it is today. Once you found a formula, you stayed with it and milked it as long as you could. Whether it was a growing desire on Ray's part to do something different or a growing egotism, he eventually reached the point of founding his own production company and sinking his entire fortune into a version of The Courtship of Myles Standish in 1923. After it flopped badly, his career never recovered and when he died in 1943 at the age of 52, he had deteriorated through smaller roles to bit parts and eventually extra work on Poverty Row. If he had survived to 1950, he could have been a good choice for one of Norma Desmond's silent bridge partners in Sunset Boulevard.

Frank Keenan didn't find the fame that Ray did, even though he was officially this movie's star. If he's remembered today, it's probably for being Keenan Wynn's grandfather, rather than for his long stage career or for a decade and a half of film work. After a few roles in 1909, he became serious about the movies in 1914, meaning that this was still pretty early for him, even though at 57 he was already older than Charles Ray would ever get. He would make many more pictures, though he didn't survive the silent era and it's doubtful any were particularly different from this. The inflexibility of Col Winslow fit him well, given that he was known as a 'furniture actor', one who was usually so drunk that it was only the furniture that kept him upright. With that in mind, his casting here seems even more appropriate, but the few outdoor scenes more surprising, as he gets at least a few dynamic moments. Maybe those were his sober days.

Nobody else gets a remote opportunity to shine, at least through their own merits. The officers on both sides look the part, but credit is more due to the costume and makeup departments than the actors. The negro servants at Winslow Hall are white actors in blackface, albeit done rather better than usual. The chase scene is impressive for 1914, as are the battle scenes which prove that explosions were as big business almost a century ago as they are today. Yet all this is visual as there's little structure given to the grandeur. We see the South rush into battle but we don't know any more than that they're hitting the North's weakest point. It's about explosions, flags and clouds of smoke, not anything logistical. Yet putting all this together helps to highlight to me yet again that there were filmmakers working before 1920 who could make a picture that stands up to viewing today. Each one I see makes me wonder all the more about what has been lost.

The Black Scorpion (1957)

Director: Edward Ludwig
Stars: Richard Denning, Mara Corday, Carlos Rivas and Mario Navarro

Celebrating the 50's Monster Mash blogathon organised by Nathanael Hood at Forgotten Classics of Yesteryear.

Mara Corday made two very different monster movies in 1957: The Giant Claw for Columbia and The Black Scorpion for Warner Brothers. The former saw her take on what has often been called the most ludicrous monster ever to disgrace a creature feature, La Carcagne, something like a zombie chicken version of Big Bird with a mohawk. Imagine how bad that description could look like at battleship size and then take my word that the actual creature looks worse. On the other hand, the latter saw her face off instead against effects supervised by Willis O'Brien, the original master of stop motion animation, though he wasn't working with apes or dinosaurs for a change. To assist him is Pete Peterson, who had cut his teeth on Mighty Joe Young, O'Brien's previous film. He would work with him again on Behemoth, the Sea Monster. When we see the the creature's ugly drooling face head on it's truly awful, but the animation is enjoyable throughout.

The film starts as it means to go on with the destruction of wide swathes of Mexico through a volcanic eruption and a subsequent earthquake. Driving to the remote village of San Lorenzo to take a look are Dr Henry 'Hank' Scott and Dr Artur Ramos. Scott is a geologist played by Richard Denning, a couple of years after Creature with the Atom Brain and three since Creature from the Black Lagoon. Ramos is Carlos Rivas, Texan born but of Mexican heritage and so believable as Dr Scott's local equivalent, a professor of geology from Mexico City. He's certainly much better here than in The Madmen of Mandoras, which later became They Saved Hitler's Brain. What the pair find, a couple of miles south of the village, is weird damage, certainly not natural. A police car that preceded them in by a couple of hours is mangled and its occupants gone. They find a baby in its crib. They find the corpse of Sgt Baker, propped up in a corner with an empty gun.

The padre in San Lorenzo talks of a demon bull that the townsfolk are afraid of. People are dying all over, steers too. He doesn't believe it, or at least so he says, but his congregation do. Heading up towards the crater, against the will of the army, Scott and Ramos find Teresa Alvarez, thrown from her horse and in need of rescue, but who otherwise seems to be capable enough. She's played by Mara Corday, who obviously relishes a role she can get her teeth into. Teresa is a real go getter, especially when compared to her equivalent part in Tarantula. She's run a ranch up on the hills ever since her father died and she has enough firm leadership and respect from her men to call them back to work during such a time of chaos. She does switch into a stereotypical naysayer mode on occasion but it means an intriguing character balance: half of her is as tough as her father; the other half is a sappy romantic lead. The two halves fight it out throughout.

Surely Corday's best genre role, Teresa Alvarez isn't everything she should be but she's much more dynamic than usual. Corday does a solid job in good company. Denning was a capable and experienced leading man, close to the end of a prolific career with 85 movies behind him in only two decades and only five more to come. He doesn't dominate here, because the scorpions lead the way but he keeps our attention on the side of humanity. Carlos Rivas is a decent sidekick but while he plays well off Denning he gets little opportunity to shine otherwise. Carlos Múzquiz gets little screen time but still impresses as the very matter of fact Dr Velazco. Unfortunately there's also a child actor in the film, the powerfully sincere Mario Navarro as Juanito, who latches onto Hank at the Alvarez ranch and proves a capable stowaway who's impossible to shake loose. He's seven and a half but he can ride and shoot and who knows what else. He's annoying.

The first scorpion we see is at the Alvarez ranch too, broken out of obsidian by Dr Ramos. It's only a little thing but amazingly it comes out alive. After this, it doesn't take long for us to see his giant kin, as the title promises. There's much to praise. The creatures aren't man made here like in Tarantula or of mysterious alien origin like The Giant Claw; instead they escape from vast underground tunnels opened to the surface by the volcano. There are many of them, not just one, though the Black Scorpion of the title is bigger and more dominant than the rest. Willis O'Brien and his assistant give them a great finishing move too, a powerful stab downward with the stinger, which can't help but elicit a positive reaction from the audience. 'Scorpion! Finish him! Fatality!' The disasters keep on adding up too, these rural Mexicans having a tough time of it: first a volcano, then an earthquake, ensuing giant scorpions, even a cattle stampede. Then to finish the scorpions off Dr Velazco in Mexico City wants to take them down with poison gas.

The story is better than many of its competitors and I don't just mean The Giant Claw. It's hardly groundbreaking stuff, let me be clear, but scriptwriters David Duncan and Robert Blees, working from Paul Yawitz's story, know what they're doing and they do it capably enough. I can certainly see myself coming back to this one a lot more often than most of these creature features, but to be fair the biggest reason would be Willis O'Brien's animation work, which really dominates the film. Not all the effects are solid: the scorpions look awful in facial close ups and the budget ran out before everything could be completed, so a few scenes have the giant scorpions appear in silhouette form because only the backing had been completed at that time. Fortunately much of the work had been done and there are two setpieces in particular to praise, plus a shorter scene in which an army of scorpions take on a toy train.

The first is a very traditional one, staged underground inside a huge cave in the volcano, into which Drs Scott and Ramos descend to investigate. They find old school stop motion animation, scenes that could easily have been shot thirty years earlier for more classic movies. There's that army of scorpions again, plus a giant tick and a thirty foot worm that I thought was a caterpillar. The critters fight each other too in odd prehistoric battles, one on one, two on one, whatever. These scenes are awesome fun, though the rear projection is far from pristine and there's Juanito to deal with as a stowaway, an annoying distraction from a gloriously retro war of the monsters. The second comes at the finalé, inside a large stadium in Mexico City. It's a gladiatorial orgy of monster violence with the black scorpion taking on all comers, including a helicopter. This stop motion work is joyous and it makes me smile just to remember it. It's what this genre was about.

Alfred (or the Story of a Wonder Fish) (2011)

Directors: Aaron Hobson, Jean-Charles Lehuby and Mathieu Rigot
Stars: Sarah Marie Curtis, Aaron Hobson and Michael Sullivan

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

The only live action fiction in Selection 2011, Alfred rambles along like a beat poem but leaves us thoroughly engaged in a quirky story. It begins with a burp and gets cruder, foul language being punctuation in this short, but the mumbling narrative means we don't quite catch it all anyway. This was annoying for a while but gradually I realised how appropriate it was. It feels like a story told to you by a drunkard late one night in a noisy bar. You don't catch every word, not that every word was probably even spoken, but you always catch enough to get the gist. The fast pace and editing helps this impression too, as does the surreal nature of the story which is never fully explained. Quite why Jack wanders around with his fish in a bowl we don't really know but it doesn't matter. The whole thing is just as gloriously absurd, but it's consistent enough that we grin throughout rather than wonder what the director was smoking.

Jack's fish is named Alfred, as you might imagine from the title, and the story explains how he saved Jack's life. I won't spoil how, but it's just a punchline to a joke detailed enough to become its own story. The other players are Jenna, a young runaway, and her twisted but unnamed dad who is chasing her to bring her home. She meets Jack, who whisks her away and the rest of the story writes itself, if you happen to have the mind of a Terry Gilliam. Fortunately the imagination isn't just in the situation comedy but in the way it's shot too. We don't merely see our barefoot runaway dance around Alfred's fishbowl in the forecourt of a gas station to the accompaniment of a banjo picking attendant, we see it from the fish's perspective too, a wonderful touch indeed. I'd love to see Alfred again, though only a teaser seems to be online. While it began flawed and abrasive, it grew in magnetism and it remains fondly in my memory a couple of weeks on.

Millhaven (2010)

Director: Bartek Kulas

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

I'm well acquainted with The Curse of Millhaven, a song by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from their 1995 album Murder Ballads, which follows nine tracks about murder and mayhem in myriad forms with a cover of Bob Dylan's Death is Not the End. I once gave a copy to my stepdaughter for Christmas in a subtle attempt to transition her from the fake alternative music ClearChannel radio fed her to real alternative music that was even more subversive. I wrote a poem based on one of the other songs on the album too, fashioning my own story around its tempo and title. Obviously the material inspires creativity, as this Polish animated short takes one of the songs and brings it to vivid life, as much through an amazing cover version as the glorious animation that accompanies it. Director Bartek Kulas knew the song from Kinga Preis's version, only for it to return to him in another by Katarzyna Groniec, which contains far more nuance and playfulness.

The story concerns a girl called Lottie who has been presiding over a reign of terror in the town of Millhaven. She's the curse of the song's title, though she's only fourteen, and she's eventually hoisted by her own petard, only to remain unapologetic in an asylum. Cave's song is a galloping narrative ballad, but Groniec's version is acutely sinister, not only in the way she builds a superb performance along with the story she sings, going from deceptive sweetness to outright lunacy through pitch and depth, but through Roman Kołakowski's translation, not direct but more of an interpretation. It misses out entire verses of the original song but adds freakish descriptive colour, swapping lines like 'twenty cops burst through my door without even phoning' for 'I was just brushing the blood out of my hair when in barged a bunch of cops'. No wonder hearing Groniec's cover drew Kulas to animate the material. It invited such a treatment.

Kulas's animation is as filled with haunting textures as the music and it grows with the story as well as Groniec's voice and the deep piano that stalks her. His Lottie is an ethereal marionette whose hair is almost as long as she is and almost as much of a character, but the way she moves depends on the point in the lyrics. He combines Christ poses with hypnotic stares to accompany the religious hints Kołakowski introduced in his translation. She plays to the camera like her dark work is a performance piece of art, like she's a Flamenco dancer, a guitar strummer or a kung fu fighter. The flies and spiders that crawl over the inside of the screen ensure the piece seethes. Kulas shot everything in halftone monochromes for which he'd been seeking a use for years and he overlaid a texture that suggests only a subtle barrier between Lottie and us. By far the best piece in Selection 2011, this is a masterpiece of a song and an animation. My wife plays it often.

Millhaven can be viewed at the director's website.

The Grandma's Village (2007)

Director: Dragana Zarevska

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

Unfortunately the longest piece in Selection 2011 was the least interesting to me, not because of it the story it told but because it didn't seem able to find a focus. The title refers to the village of Babino in Macedonia (Yugoslav Macedonia not Greek Macedonia), which is populated entirely by grandmas, fifteen of them, who live in relative solitude. The only descriptions that I've managed to find online suggest that filmmaker Dragana Zarevska aimed at a cinematic poem in honour of these women, but if so, it's in free verse. She did capture some character, both of the grandmas and the town itself, but a generous eighteen minutes of running time didn't leave me with either a consistent message or tone. For a while it seemed to be a sinister piece, with talk of witches and curses, footage of a stalking black cat and sped up reenactments of stories. Yet the women seem normal and characterful. Why the suggestion otherwise?

There are some good scenes. I enjoyed the ones where Zarevska sat down on a wall with a trio of grannies who simply talked, not about anything in particular but just to talk. What we get out of this is a good deal of character and humour, these old women in their isolated village able to make the young filmmaker laugh. Unfortunately this is as inconsistent within the film as a whole as anything else within it, some scenes engaging, others apparently superfluous. What I found most engrossing were the textures of an old village, from the architecture, which is worn, to the techniques these grannies use in their everyday lives. It was interesting to watch people in this modern day creating and dying fabric and dusting a mule. It was also fascinating to see the culture clash evident as they discover what a modern video camera can do. These scenes of different worlds connecting could easily have been the focus of the film. Sadly they weren't.

111° Longitude (2009)

Directors: Yuri Makino and Cindy Stilwell

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

From a technical perspective, 111° Longitude is an interesting piece. Made by two female friends and filmmakers who met at film school in New York City, they each tell about themselves while the stills and footage they shot is combined through split screen to highlight the similarities and the differences in their lives at different points on the 111th meridian: Cindy Stilwell in Montana and Yuri Makino in Arizona. There's complexity that I'd like to explore through further viewings but one time through was still enough to highlight a few things, not least that the comparisons being drawn aren't between snow and tumbleweeds but between transience and permanence. What I got out of the film was a surprising conclusion: namely how much transience is easy and consistent, while permanence is so different that it becomes difficult how to decide on it. That's a grand challenge to explore in a nine minute short.

For a while, Makino and Stilwell talk about movement and the visuals we see highlight how much consistency transience really has. We see trains, overpasses and hotels, which look precisely the same regardless where they are, something neatly highlighted by a clever illusion of motion between the two halves of the split screen. Was it Stevie Wonder who always stayed in the same hotel chain, as the layout of the rooms is identical? The message seems to be that transience is comfortable because you don't have to commit. Permanence is another matter. Makino suggests that Tucson is a place where people go to hide or heal or start over. It's somewhere to settle and while there are many similarities drawn between the two locations, there's a major gap between them that highlights how serious permanence is. Beautifully shot, well composed and compared, I feel like there's more depth here to discover. I'd like a second run through to find out.

So Who am I Anyway? (2011)

Director: Lisa Wegner

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

While the theme of Selection 2011 turned out to be self, it did so predominantly through factual filmmaking, five of the seven shorts selected this year being documentaries. Of those five, this one was the most obviously oriented around self because the only person we see is director Lisa Wegner, over and over again, in a very personal experiment that aims to capture on film who she really is. Apparently made in response to negative comments people had made about her, she chose to examine the truth behind them and did so by positioning a camera to capture her as she entered or left a room, presumably in her own house. It's an intriguing visual experiment, especially for a visual artist, because of the levels of meaning that it opens up. I was fascinated more by how I reacted to the finished piece than in the conclusions it drew. At the end of the day it was hardly surprising to find that Wegner is everything we see, not just one anything.

What was surprising is how much complexity came out of such a simple setup. Initially she looks into the camera, emotes into it in apparently unscripted ways. We see individual moments, good and bad. She doesn't speak but there's commentary both in the text overlay and in the choice of music that plays in the background, backing up her mood swings amazingly well. We see growth, reinvention and change, yet those were always going to be transient. What fascinated me was the relationship between Wegner, a filmmaker, and her camera. For a while it seems blisteringly honest as she lets the camera peel away the layers that protect her from the world. As it runs on, we wonder how much the camera captures her and how much it shapes her, as well as how she uses it. She's an artist, after all. Do filmmakers need a script to get a point across? It says plenty that I'm still thinking about what these ten rivetting minutes really meant two weeks later.

So Who am I Anyway? can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Louis Lee (2006)

Director: Steve Weiss

My favourite No Festival Required screening of the year is always the selection of short films shown at the Phoenix Art Museum. Here's Selection 2011.

At Selection 2011, film programmer Steve Weiss suggested that the theme of this year's films was self. He doesn't consciously pick a theme, it just emerges gradually from his choices, but having programmed these wonderful selections of shorts at the Phoenix Art Museum for many years, it's only appropriate that this year's eventual theme would allow him to include one of his own shorts, the first of his films I've ever seen. It's a short documentary, almost entirely visual, put together as a tribute to the work of Phoenix native Louis Lee in creating a rock garden which looks unlike any rock garden you've seen. The work took decades, probably because there was no end goal, just a creativity let loose to do what it would that ended only with Lee's death in 2006. While the camerawork is inconsistent, possibly shot at different times and with different equipment, it ably provides us with a vision of why this rock garden is worthy of capture on film.

I can certainly see why it has captured so much interest. It's insanely ornate but very organic, reminding in many ways of an outsider artist's take on Antoni Gaudí. Watching the camera roll through the garden reminded me of walking through the streets and parks of Barcelona, seeing art everywhere, occasionally structured but more often somehow grown. There's no common structural design here, just rocks arranged in different ways to meet different locational needs, combined with pots, trinkets and statues. Nothing is consistent except the overriding vision of taking all this stuff and creating something artistic with it. The film feels much the same way, with the roaming camerawork mixed with ethnic music and some clips from interviews Steve Gompf made with Lee in 1994. The last one worked particularly well, bringing a sense of humour to the piece that the audience reacted to. So what else haven't you shown us yet, Steve?

Louis Lee can be viewed at YouTube.