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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SHINBONE ALLEY (1970)

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DIRECTED BY: John David Wilson

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: , Eddie Bracken, Alan Reed, John Carradine

PLOT: A poet/newspaper man resurrected as a cockroach tells a  number of stories about his friend, a cat with loose morals and a knack for picking the wrong mates, and the many times he tries to pull her out of trouble.

Still from shinbone Alley (1970)

COMMENTS: Animation, frustrated aficionados will tell you, is not a genre, it’s a medium. Just because the twin monoliths of Walt Disney and Saturday morning television built their empire on a commitment to entertaining grade schoolers with moving drawings, we should not assume that cartoons are only for kids. But parents and studio executives never seem to get the message. There’s plenty of of evidence of this blindness — just count up the number of traumatized children who were exposed to the original Watership Down — and a leading piece of evidence should be the tagline that marketing wizards devised for Shinbone Alley: “It’s sophisticated enough for kids, simple enough for adults!” Because if anything cries out to be seen by all audiences, it’s the story of a sexually promiscuous cat who takes up with a series of abusive partners, as told by the suicidal cockroach who loves her.

The idea of a creating musical based on the “archy and mehitabel” stories of Don Marquis was unusually persistent. The tales were enormously popular in their day (the titular cockroach and cat are among the literary figures immortalized on the bronze screen that fronts the monumental Brooklyn Public Library), but they didn’t get paired up with song-and-dance until a concept album in 1954, penned by Joe Darion (who would gain acclaim as the book writer for Man of La Mancha) and composer George Kleinsinger (whose best known composition is probably Tubby the Tuba) and starring Bracken and Channing in the title roles. The script would get a punch-up from Mel Brooks before making its way to Broadway for a six-week run in 1957, now starring Bracken alongside the dangerously seductive Eartha Kitt as Mehitabel. (So now you know: Andrew Lloyd Webber did not provide the first dancing cats on the Great White Way.) Undaunted by the flop, a shortened version of the show found its way to television in 1960 (featuring Bracken and Tammy Grimes as the titular feline) before arising once more a decade later as an animated feature with the original stars in tow. So with all that effort, there must be something in the adaptation that was demanding to be seen.

I’m still trying to figure out what that is. Shinbone Alley is a collection of scenes in which our heroes go through a sad and troubling cycle: Mehitabel searches for fame, free love, and good times, ignoring Archy’s pleas to clean up her act; her latest beau turns out to be apathetic at best, cruel at worst; Archy has to bail her out of her latest predicament; Mehitabel becomes furious with Archy for trying to kill her buzz; Archy becomes deeply depressed; Mehitabel realizes that Archy is probably the best friend she has; the pair celebrates their friendship, and we go around again. It’s possible that this dysfunction once played for laughs and has just aged poorly, but it’s hard to see who might have enjoyed seeing one of the lead characters getting threatened by a big bully, stolen from by a charlatan actor, and ultimately knocked up by both and then saddled with a litter that she promptly abandons to be nearly drowned in a storm. Is that the part that’s sophisticated enough for kids, or is it the other lead character constantly threatening to kill himself?

Shinbone Alley is actually a well-animated film, and director Wilson has fun shifting from the ugliness of the alley to colorful flights of fancy like pop art representations of Archy’s free-verse musings, or especially the extended scene in which Archy plots revolution in the distinctive style of George Herriman, the “Krazy Kat” creator who illustrated many of Marquis’ stories. But the other elements are a drag. The score is utterly unmemorable; the most notable song is the pals-forever number “Flotsam and Jetsam,” which at least relates to the characters. Other tunes barely connect to anything in the story at all, such as Big Bill’s ode to the alley and his own violent nature (sung by Reed in the same voice he used for Fred Flintstone), or the reminiscence of Tyrone T. Tattersall (“sung” by Carradine) of his early days in the theater. At one point, we even get Shakespeare delivered in the style of beat poetry. It’s as though Darion and Brooks, both of them Tony-winning book writers, can’t think of a single reason for their characters to break into song, so no reason becomes reason enough.

Ultimately, the film seems to take its inspiration from Mehitabel herself. She never seems to learn from her setbacks, bouncing back with the repeated watchcry, “Toujours gai!” So it goes with Shinbone Alley. What worked in Marquis’ newspaper columns never translated to stage or screen, but here we are, giving it another go. The peculiar mix of perky animation and grim subject matter is is certainly weird, but not half as weird as the certainty its creators held that this was a story that must be told.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shinbone Alley, you see, is a singular strange animated movie, trapped in the film marketplace of the early 1970s with absolutely nowhere to go, certainly no naturally-occurring audience… Weird stuff for a kids’ movie (I am, if nothing else, 100% confident that this was the first American animated feature in which one of the main characters has sex, gets pregnant, and gives birth, all out of wedlock, during the overall course of the narrative), and there’s something irresistibly jarring in that mismatch between the dopey simplicity of the film’s comedy and the thorny, mean streets filthiness of its plot, not to mention the sullen existentialism of archy’s overall arc, and the generally moody songs…”– Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

(This movie was nominated for review by Brad. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

Shinbone Alley

Shinbone Alley
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FANTASIA 2024: APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: CHAINSAWS WERE SINGING (2024)

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Mootorsaed laulsid

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Chainsaws Were Singing is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: Sander Maran

FEATURING: Karl Ilves, Laura Niils, Martin Ruus, Janno Puusepp,
Rita Rätsepp

PLOT: Tom and Maria meet and fall in love after each has had the worst day of their lives, not knowing events are going to turn for the even worse when they cross paths with a chainsaw-wielding cannibal.

Still from The Chainsaws Were Singing (2024)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Oof, feeling lazy here, so from this wide menu I’ll proffer, “refrigerator-bound bukkake god” and “throat-piercing lesbo-hedgehog.”

COMMENTS: One-hundred and eighty hours of footage, then a three-hour first draft, and then landing just shy of the two-hour mark: Sander Maran obviously has a song to sing, inspired by his love of pleasantly idiotic comedy musicals. This story of two lost souls coming together is more than reminiscent of Cannibal! the Musical, but is also very much its own thing. At its Fantasia screening, the hoots, hollers, and theater-wide laughs in response to the odd touches and permeating sense of eccentric madcap made its qualities as entertainment clear.

I would like to start by telling you about Jaan, a gaunt goof who meets the hero whilst passing by in his car. Stopping for this hitchhiker, he laments that his love of the act (of hitchhiking, of course) is thwarted by his being too ugly to be picked up by passersby. Jaan has something to say at every situation, rambling from one topic to another at times with a speed matched only by his ever changing costume. This quirk is on decreasingly subtle display, as somewhere around the mid-way point the audience can delight in his “dextrous” changing of the duds mid-conversation with other characters. He has a string of bad luck, too: just about every vehicle he exits during Chainsaws Were Singing ends up exploding violently, always hucking a flaming tire at his feet. Supernatural, or not, Jaan’s presence on camera guarantees something silly, strange, and usually both.

Chainsaws Were Singing also manages a number of unexpected tonal shifts. When the heroine is trapped in the basement of a sinister family, Maran shifts the film’s gears on a dime, and for some fifteen minutes showcases some real, menacing, straight-up horror when introducing the evil matriarch. Horror lampoonery veers into broader lampoonery, such as when Maran introduces the mysterious man, Cobra, whose absurd tale about the wartime death of his fifteen year old brother (in some conflict between Portugal and Sweden) could pass for a monologue.

Returning to my earlier laziness, I’ll wrap up here with a, “C’mon, everyone” coda. There is gore galore, silly comedy, ill-fated lovers, Quixotic questing, finger-food, dark pasts, gore galore, your friendly Wandering Gun Man, breezy musical numbers (“Tapa Tapa Tapa!”), tension, massacres, more gore galore, and, as I’ve already mentioned, a very helpful lesbo-hedgehog. In his cross between The Sound of Music and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Maran offers everything you could want in a wacky and weird genre frolick.

[Cue Orchestra.]

Wait, stop.

Down your instruments; I forgot to mention the bukkake.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“While there will be an audience for this type of exaggerated surrealism, the film’s quirky scenarios, parody-type approach to storytelling, and crude humor won’t be for everyone.” – Emma Vine, Loud and Clear Reviews (festival screening)

 

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: EEGA (2012)

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AKA Naan Ee (Tamil), Eecha (Malayalam), Makkhi (Hindi), The Fly (English)

DIRECTED BY: S. S. Rajamouli

FEATURING: Kiccha Sudeepa,  Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Nani

PLOT: Nani pursues the beautiful Bindu, but the jealous Sudeep murders his rival; reincarnated as a housefly, Nani sets about exacting revenge.

Still from Eega (2012)

COMMENTS: Tone is a tricky thing. A film can have a consistent, unwavering emotional level, but can end up feeling bland or boring. On the flipside, a movie that lurches from wildly comic to intensely emotive can feel disjointed, even schizophrenic. It’s the mark of a special film that can find just the right mix of comedy and drama, of action and dialogue, of widescreen spectacle and closeup character study.

This is a long walk to tell you that Eega shouldn’t work. A musical romance that lurches into a revenge blockbuster, a goofy comedy laced with scenes of intense violence… the cavalier way in which the film regularly jumps tracks surely presages viewer whiplash. It’s a measure of the supreme confidence that director S. S. Rajamouli—years away from the global success of his epic RRR—has in his story that he doesn’t hesitate to vary the tone wherever he feels it appropriate. The strangest thing about Eega may very well be that a housefly is an action hero and a romantic lead, but the full commitment of the film to the bit ensures that it’s the most normal thing of all.

Because once Nani (the human character, not the actor) is murdered, he is not coming back, and we’re relying upon a CGI, nonverbal, lightly cartoon-ized Musca domestica to carry the movie, and I daresay he does. We get all the hallmarks of this kind of story: the training montage in which he devises his revenge plan and builds himself into a warrior, the confrontation scene in which he promises his opponent that he will prevail, the moment where all seems lost until the hero finds an inner reserve of strength and cleverness to win the day. And the plucky little guy at the center of all this is the very same creature you’ve probably thwacked with a swatter a time or two.

Some of the mental disconnect surely comes from its framing device: an unseen daughter pleads with her father to tell a new bedtime story, and this is the result. This might prime you to expect a jolly romp for the kids. However, the tale the father unspools kicks off with a scene set at a gun range in which villain Sudeep (the character, not the actor) shows off his skill with both his rifle and his gun, if you catch my meaning. That dichotomy is present throughout; at its heart, the story feels like it should be a Disney fairy tale, with songs and a cute anthropomorphized creature, but it’s balanced with intensely realized violence and adult situations not normally encountered in the genre. It’s the kind of movie where, after our hero housefly has used the liquid from his beloved’s tears to spell out his identity and to tell her who was responsible for his demise, her response is an immediate and definitive, “How do we kill him?”

There’s probably something to the fact that this is a product of the Tollywood system, and not cinema as it’s produced in the West or even in Mumbai. Think of the American approach to this idea. In a movie like, say, Home Alone, the villains are unquestionably bad guys, but their evil is leavened with a goofiness that sands off the edges. We have to believe that they are dangerous, but if they were too mean, too amoral, then their face-off with an adolescent boy would be intensely uncomfortable. In Eega, this is (and yes, I do truly regret saying this) a feature, not a bug. There is a part of Sudeep that is clearly masquerading as a man of power. When he absent-mindedly sets his own safe full of money on fire, or when he shows up to an important business meeting in a motorcycle helmet to keep his ears insect-free, he is appropriately ridiculous. But we have watched this same Sudeep brutally beat and murder Nani, and we will see him cold-heartedly slice open the throat of a close associate. He’s over-the-top silly and over-the-top nasty. Eega sees no contradiction.

A special note should be offered for one of the most intriguing aspects of the film’s production: the producers essentially shot two films at the same time, replicating every scene in both the Tegulu and Tamil languages with slight differences here and there. (Readers should be advised that I most decidedly did not go the extra mile for them, watching only the Tegulu edition with English subtitles. So, no cameo by brilliantly named screenwriter Crazy Mohan for me.) This isn’t unheard of; the 1931 production of Dracula utilized the same sets to film the classic during the day and a Spanish-language version at night. But it does show an unusually strong commitment to reaching a local audience.

At its most basic level, Eega is a pretty typical David-and-Goliath story. It doesn’t really advance the form significantly, except for the fact that it makes a little hero out of the damned housefly, to the point where he gets his own Indian-cinema style dance number to end the film. That exception is nothing to sniff at, though. Anytime a bug can make you put down the Raid and pick up the popcorn, it’s doing something special.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film is completely insane, endlessly enjoyable, and absolutely unique. Eega is the best film about a man reincarnated as a housefly avenging his own murder that you will ever see… Every time I thought I had a handle on Eega, it threw me for a loop in the best possible way.”–J Hurtado, Screen Anarchy (contemporary)

(This movie, in its Hindi dub as Makkhi, was nominated for review by Elaine Little. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE TUNE (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

FEATURING: Voices of Daniel Neiden, , Marty Nelson, Emily Bindiger, Chris Hoffman

PLOT: A tunesmith on a tight deadline races to make a meeting with an impatient music producer, but gets lost in the wacky town of Flooby Nooby en route.

Still from The Tune (1992)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: In Flooby Nooby you can enjoy love-struck food pairings, consult with a macrocephalic metamorphing wise man (named “Gus”), check into a heartsick hotel staffed by a bell-boy-cum-suicide-assistant, ride with a cabbie suffering the “No Nose Blues,” and learn a jig or two from eternally dancing surfers. Is that enough?

COMMENTS: From nothing, comes the great hand of the Creator. It rises through the beigeful void and crashes toward us, blackening the screen. And then,

.

.

.

*THUNK*. We are grounded by a discordant slam of notes, and who do you think we see? Whose mighty hand have we witnessed? Why, it’s none other than Del, a love-smitten schlub trying to noodle out the final line of his number-one hit tune. So begins the eccentric, caricaturist charm of The Tune, as Bill Plympton bangs out an oddball voyage for his oh-so-mild-mannered protagonist.

What little narrative there is in The Tune exists to permit Plympton to dig deeply into his bag of tricks. After Del travels the crazy nested loops of highway on his way to his boss, the few nods to mundane reality are cast aside in favor of eccentric characters, daffy tunes, and the awe-inspiring power of an animator’s pencil.

Del’s surreal encounters never let up upon arrival in the unlikely town of Flooby Nooby, where he is greeted by the mayor with a zingy song expounding the virtues of this small town (accompanied by some horrible whistling, no less). Del meets a wary dog—doesn’t trust out of town folk, you see, with their heartless ways—who eventually morphs into a crooning Elvis canine belting out a stomping rock number about his improbably tall hairdo. Perspective comes and goes as trees shrink along a path, or as Del climbs a set of stairs and encounters a gentleman traveling downwards, walking along the steps’ rise. Heads (so many heads) morph to the point of breaking, but seamlessly pop back into form. “Gus” the Wise One suffers more than most—trains travel in and around it, burgers fly forth from his mouth, a fish is drawn from a forehead drawer, and so on—when his idiotic truisms go a step too far: “Just as a slice into a loaf of bread makes two pieces, you must multiply your wisdom.”

The ramble toward the climax is appropriately relaxed, and at one point Del inquires to the camera, “Why am I watching this?” The context is an extended (and gloriously masturbatory) sequence between two randos who obliterate each other’s faces through increasingly elaborate methods. Plympton more than hints at the pointlessness, but the pointlessness is the point. This is a cheery cartoon, stuffed to the gills with cheery airs, and its unceasing frivolousness underscores the sophistication of the craft. It’s a film where the line “Mr Mayor! How could you eat that adorable—and talented—hamburger?” is a sensible question. It’s got surf rock pathos and soulful noselessness. It has a Fat, Falling Pig hotel death suite and a Bad Joke Tango. The Tune is a Kantian ding an sich, hatching from nothingness and forging a wiggly world of absurdist tomfoolery.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Plympton’s first feature is a surreal surety, chock full of brilliant gags, decent tunes, and lots of unobtrusive heart: it’s 78 minutes of unrelenting fun.”–Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

The Tune [Blu-ray]

The Tune [Blu-ray]
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