Tag Archives: The creative process

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CAPSULE: PIECE BY PIECE (2024)

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DIRECTED BY: Morgan Neville

FEATURING: Voice of Pharrell Williams

PLOT: An autobiographical documentary about hip-hop producer/musician Pharrell Williams, with all interviews and dramatizations recreated in Lego animation.

Still from Piece by Piece (2024)

COMMENTS: Pharrel Williams, of course, is well-known as the composer and producer of such hits as… um… well, I confess I can’t actually remember any of the titles. With his band/production unit the Neptunes, Pharrel has worked with a lot of other performers whose names I’ve heard but whose tunes I can’t hum: Kendrick Lamar, Gwen Stefani and No Doubt, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake. He primarily produces and sells “beats” (as an old fogey, I still haven’t adjusted to the fact that “beats” have replaced “songs” as the primary unit of pop music). All of them have the quality of being “catchy”: i.e., unique enough to tickle your ear, but generic enough to feel familiar and comfortable.

I write the above not to praise my own snobbishness or to disparage Williams’ art. He’s clearly an accomplished pop craftsman, but his musical style just isn’t my thing. But the remarkable thing is that, by telling what otherwise would be a self-serving, by-the-book musical biodoc about a subject I don’t care about through the unexpected format of Lego animation, Williams captured my attention. It’s a gimmick, but it works: not only is it visually (and even synesthesially) interesting, but there is just enough resonance between Lego blocks and the modularity of the creative process to make for an apt metaphor.

It is, of course, amusing to see scenes like Lego Pharrell Williams meeting Lego Snoop Dogg. A plastic box labeled “PG Spray” puts a smile on everyone’s face during their audience, which embodies the carefree, child-friendly approach to Williams’ story. The film never loses its optimism that everything will always work out for Pharrell (and, it suggests, for anyone else who adopts his gee-whiz, gung-ho workaholism. But, in between the cute cubist celebrity cameos lie more ambitiously animated sequences. The Lego visuals, supplemented by digitally-applied neon, demonstrate more grandeur than expected. The tone is set in an early dream scene where a blocky yellow Triton knights young Pharrell in his undersea kingdom. It’s best exemplified by a bravura sequence where the musician explains his childhood synesthasia: he sits before speakers blaring a Stevie Wonder LP, which draw him into a trippy world where sound becomes “beautiful cubes of light cascading” over his blissed out Lego features. Pharrell’s commercial beats are depicted throughout as bouncing blocks arranged in novel geometric patterns with blinking lights attached. There also are singing whales, and a trip into space where Carl Sagan delivers cosmic wisdom. Piece by Piece may not be completely accurate, or provide much practical insight into the creative process, but it accurately conveys the ecstasy of inspiration that keeps artists slaving away at their craft. Like any mega-celebrity, Williams is primarily a marketer, devoting more care to the sizzle than to the steak. And this is great sizzle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a film that is boisterously childlike, surreal and eager to please, but also (I couldn’t help thinking) a strangely wrongheaded attempt to use Lego graphics to tell the remarkable, complex story of a brilliant musician and producer…  The Lego Pharrell is an intriguing, absurdist high concept, but not nearly as interesting as the real thing.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Anonymous,” who correctly noted “most of the weirdness is solely in the visuals, in a Fantasia sort of sense.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Piece by Piece - Blu-ray + Digital

Piece by Piece - Blu-ray + Digital
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CAPSULE: WAITING FOR DALI (2023)

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Waiting for Dali is currently available for rental or purchase on-demand.

DIRECTED BY: David Pujol

FEATURING: , José Garcia, Clara Ponsot

PLOT: A restaurateur in Salvador Dalí ‘s hometown of Cadaqués in the 70s dreams of luring the artist to visit his Dalí -themed “El Surreal” bistro, and catches a break when a master chef on the lam shows up in need of work (and a cover story).

Waiting for Dali (2023)

COMMENTS: Movie about Dalí (at least the ones we’ve covered) all seem to be rooted in realism: Little Ashes focused on Federico García Lorca’s crush on the young Dalí, while ‘s Daliland largely contended itself with depicting the extravagance of the painter’s lavish celebrity lifestyle. Perhaps Dalí himself would appreciate the irony; no director dares attempt to even approximate his hallucinatory genius. (We suspect surrealist will end this trend soon when he releases his “real fake biopic” starring multiple actors as Dalí later this year.) When Jules decorates his El Surreal bistro with plastic clocks melting in the trees, a lobster glued to the telephone, and mannequins seated at the tables, it seems like a cheesy Vegas-style tribute to the surrealist icon rather than anything legitimately surreal.

The surrealist cuisine crafted by master chef Fernando, however, does show originality: an airy mountain of carrot mouse modeled off a local landmark, “hot-and-cold pea soup,” various oddly shaped mini-loafs painstakingly decorated with tiny springs of herbs, and an array savory lollipops served on a bed of mud. The artistic journey in the film belongs to Fernando, who learns to incorporate controlled chaos into his craft, which had previously been ruled by strict order and proper French culinary procedures. Fernando’s gastronomical reinventions suggest the way Dalí mastered the basic techniques of painting before warping them to his own imaginary landscapes. Restaurateur Jules (who looks uncannily like a young Spanish Robert Downey Jr.), on the other hand, essentially serves as dapper comic relief: he is a Dalí fanboy who invents with multiple unsuccessful schemes to lure the object of his obsession to his dining establishment. In the end, it is only Fernando’s audacious menu that offers any chance of attracting the master.

Dalí himself is only an aspirational figure in the tale; if you are waiting for him to appear, you may be disappointed. You will also not learn a lot about the artist; the film, made for a Spanish audience, assumes you have a baseline of knowledge about the time, place, and players. A single introductory sentence explains that the story takes place at the end of the Franco dictatorship, and from there you’re on your own. The film expects you to know who Gala is when she appears, and to recognize the various Dalían tributes Jules has set up in El Surreal. Franco’s police play a role in motivating the plot, but they are hardly a serious threat; they are almost comic foils, and not even important enough to bother tying up the loose threads they leave at the end. The film is instead surprisingly light and frothy, like carrot mousse, and sunny like the Catalonian shore, a celebration of creativity that shines even in the darkest days.

Director David Pujol’s had directed two previous documentaries about Dalí, and also a television miniseries documentary about avant-garde chef Ferran Adrià, so he obviously knows his subjects well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the cast’s willingness to do all the heavy lifting elevates the otherwise puzzling yet predictable film that wants to use a turbulent era for the setting of a feel-good, romantic film but ends up feeling random, inconsistent, and scattered.”–Sarah J. Vincent, Boston Movie News (contemporaneous)

 

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CAPSULE: STOPMOTION (2023)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Aisling Franciosi, Caoilinn Springall, Tom York, Stella Gonet, Therica Wilson-Read

PLOT: Ella struggles to complete her famous stop-motion animator mother’s final work after the woman is hospitalized; she abandons that story and starts another when she meets a creepy little girl who invents a fairy tale about a mysterious man “no one wants to meet.”

Still from STOPMOTION (2023)

COMMENTS: The painstaking nature of stop-motion animation—move a puppet a fraction of a millimeter, snap a picture, repeat for an hour until you’ve animated a full second—means that the form is usually relegated to short films. Just ask or what it takes to animate a full-length feature without a million-dollar team of animators backing you. So it comes as little surprise that celebrated short film stop-animator Robert Morgan decided to craft his debut feature as a hybrid film, a mostly live-action story enveloping small snippets of his animated passion. The subject is, naturally, the making of a stop motion movie, and the focus is on the madness inherent in this most laborious and solitary of artistic pursuits.

The film begins in hybridized fashion, with protagonist Ella (a deranged-looking Franciosi) seen in the flicker of a multicolored party strobe—her facial expressions chopped up into stop-motiony frames. Ella is working on an animated feature about a cute fuzzy cyclops (who foresees his own death) for her ailing (and domineering) mother—the daughter supplies the hands, the mom the imagination. Mom, indeed, calls Ella “puppet” (not “poppet”). When Mom leaves the picture, though, Ella flounders, searching for inspiration, until the arrival of a brunette moppet who might be the spitting image of Ella at eleven. Nightmares and hallucinations ensue as Ella abandons the cyclops story and pursues a new one, with new materials and a growing unhealthy obsessiveness.

Morgan’s animations are obviously the highlight, and they disappoint only in their limited screen time. The girl morbidly encourages Ella to use meat, bone, and mortician’s wax to fashion new puppets, which look like the distressed, putrescent protagonists we’re familiar with from shorts like “Bobby Yeah.” The main puppet’s face is decorated with red blotches, like excema scratched raw, and the boogeyman is covered in bleeding sores and patchy hair. The sound design is oppressive, full of screeches, clanks, thumps, and heavy footsteps. A black, egglike blob and icky procreative imagery feature prominently in the second half. The animated segments, delivered via a fairy tale structure that requires increasingly dreadful visits over the course of three nights, scores a spooky vibe. The violent, gory finale highlights some squirmy visuals, but represents quite the tonal shift away from the dread-based horror of the earlier segments.

In his director’s statement Morgan describes Stopmotion as a “psychological piece in the vein of classic Lynch, or Cronenberg,” and the specific films he cites make it appear like he studied this site’s canon for inspiration: Naked Lunch, Barton Fink, Black Swan, Santa Sangre, Mulholland Drive, INLAND EMPIRE. All of that places the film firmly in our circle of interest. But as a psychological horror, Stopmotion delivers on horror, while coming up a bit short on the psychology. It’s about the madness of creativity, and traffics in concepts like self-doubt, the mystery of inspiration, Eros overcome by Thanatos, and obsession. But, powerful as these themes are, they ultimately don’t synergize in an enticing way. Stopmotion doesn’t add anything new to the portrait of the artist traumatized by their own work; there is no meaty psychological hook for Ella to dangle from. It’s admittedly style over substance, but the surplus of style makes up for a shortfall in substance. Morgan still has room to grow, and if he puts it all together someday, he’s shown the promise to create a masterpiece.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a disappointing path, more than a bit dimestore Freud, hardly managing to reveal Ella’s fracturing psyche to us in convincing terms, and instead succeeding only in having us assume most of what we’re watching is simply Ella’s confused imagination. In the process, though, you do get a tantalizing primer in how modern stop-motion animation works, and how Morgan’s own physical process musters his greasy weirdness out of everyday substances.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

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CAPSULE: THE NOWHERE INN (2021)

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DIRECTED BY: Bill Benz

FEATURING: Annie Clark (St. Vincent), Carrie Brownstein

PLOT: Annie Clark (who performs as “St. Vincent”) commissions her friend Carrie Brownstein to make a documentary about her; but when Annie’s real personality proves too boring for film, she spices things up acting more like her alter-ego, losing sight of reality in the process.

Syill from The Nowhere Inn (2021)

COMMENTS: About midway through The Nowhere Inn, it occurred to me that I hadn’t really learned anything about Annie Clark that I didn’t know before I hit “play.” Looking up her bio in Wikipedia after watching this fictionalized documentary, I found the following quote from : “Despite having toured with her for almost a year, I don’t think I know her much better, at least not on a personal level.”

This made me feel better. Clark uses this faux-confesisonal mockumentary to hide in plain sight. Her alter-ego, St. Vincent, is brash, aggressive, and sexy onstage, shredding her guitar in a skintight red vinyl minidress while an image of her vomiting turquoise paint streams on a giant video board above her. Backstage, though, her friend Brownstein (the real-life riot grrl musician turned “Portlandia” comedienne) finds it hard to assemble meaningful footage for her behind-the-scenes documentary, since all the musician wants to do in her downtime is play Scrabble or video games or sample the local radishes. Even her bandmates and roadies can’t find anything interesting to say about Clark. So, abandoning her original plan capture the artist just being herself, Brownstein prods her subject to project her personality and start acting more like St. Vincent—a challenge the singer-songwriter meets too fervently, turning herself into an insufferable cliche of an image-obsessed rock diva. The pendulum having swung too far, Brownstein falls into an artistic crisis as Clark disappears into her new persona. The movie’s last act takes a hard turn into psychological thriller territory.

So what begins as a sort-of avant garde variation on This Is Spinal Tap segues into a sort-of riff on Mulholland Drive by way of Pink Floyd: the Wall, with hints of 8 1/2 sort-of lingering around the edges.  Please observe the deliberate “sort-of”s in that formulation; I don’t mean to oversell The Nowhere Inn. The movie is far more modest and humble than those big comparisons would suggest, and even when it gets existential and meta it always remains grounded in a friendly, pleasant, and lightly satirical comedy. From Clark’s initial encounter with a limo driver who doesn’t recognize her, to a bass player who decides he’ll be Australian on camera, to a hilarious bit part by Dakota Johnson as the tabloid-friendly love interest, The Nowhere Inn undercuts charges of pretentiousness by putting funny first. Even when it’s trending towards its darkest and most unhinged moments, the movie breaks the tension with its most elaborate comic set-piece, a very obviously staged trip to meet Annie’s family in Texas. Brownstein actually carries the film with a sunny confidence that yields to awkwardness, uncertainty, and embarrassment as she realizes that the insightful documentary she has planned is not salvageable. Clark is also very good in her feature debut, essentially playing two characters, neither of whom, we suspect, is all that close to her real personality (whatever that might be). The movie’s themes of artistic integrity and the duality of performers’ public and private personae are not exactly groundbreaking, but they’re handled cleverly and with enough unpredictability and humor to keep even non-fans watching to the end. Presuming, that is, that you have a taste for unconventional presentations. As Clark tells her limo driver, “I’m not for everyone.”

Director Bill Benz is mostly known for his work on “Portlandia” and other TV comedies, which explains why, although it frequently slips into psychedelic music video mode—especially, but not exclusively, during the rock concert numbers—the movie maintains its consistent comic tone.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Early on, the self-deprecating stuff takes on a studied air, and in the final stretch, the filmmakers seem to think they can shock-cut and rug-pull their way into something resembling psychological horror. The weirdness isn’t really weird enough to pull this off; it’s all the self-indulgence without much oddball pleasure.”–Jesse Hassenger, Paste (contemporaneous)