The eagle-eyed among you might remember that I made a blog a while ago praising the genius of Canadian animator Richard Williams, and I fear I'll be repeating myself in that respect over the course of this play-by-play. Williams was the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a sly, skilful melding of film noir and cartoon slapstick. If you want to see what makes Williams's work here and elsewhere so breathtaking, I recommend watching the video linked in the blog post I referenced earlier, or even seek out the Recobbled fan cut of his never-finished magnum opus The Thief and the Cobbler. But if pressed to describe his work in one word, it'd be fluid. For all the movie magic employed to create a seamless live-action/cartoon world, the fluidity of the animation is the linchpin. But the animated half of the film is just, well, half the story. The other half belongs to Robert Zemeckis.

Robert Zemeckis is cursed with the gift of gimmickry. Few directors are as adept at using special effects as storytelling devices as he is, but his sturdy, Spielberg-esque directing chops are often held hostage by the whims of the effects he employs. This has sometimes led to catastrophic results, most notably his late-period uncanny valley hat trick of The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. But here, he directs with a unique kind of precision; he manages to make incomplete frames feel full. Zemeckis strikes a delicate balance between leaving just enough room for the toons to exist in and making the blocking overly lax. To the credits of both Zemeckis and Williams, the illusion is maintained throughout, and 30 years on still stands as the apex of this branch of mixed-media filmmaking.

Credit must also be given to the actors, the conduit through which an audience experiences the work, and thus the most liable to wreck the illusion. The voice cast is anchored the legendary Mel Blanc, rounded out by a murderer's row of cartoon lifers, and bolstered by the smart stunt-casting of Kathleen Turner as Jessica Rabbit. The live-action cast had it rougher. They had to act against puppets and props and disembodied voices, and no actor had to do it more than the late, great Bob Hoskins. But the legendary English actor was no one's first choice to play Eddie Valiant, the alcoholic private dick with a distaste for toons. In fact, he wasn't even in the top 10. According to Wikipedia (a dubious source, I know, but bear with me), Harrison Ford was Zemeckis' first-round pick, followed by Bill Murray and Eddie Murphy. And then Chevy Chase, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Sylvester Stallone, Wallace Shawn, Ed Harris, Charles Grodin, and Don Lane. A few of those might have worked, but there's a lot of cultural baggage that comes with casting, say, Nicholson in a movie that riffs heavily on Chinatown. Harris may have worked as well; go back and watch Knightriders for a clinic on portraying rumpled masculinity as both earnest and silly. But casting Hoskins was a coup: his blunt features, raspy voice, and boxy build make him credible as a tough noir-era gumshoe, and him standing 5-foot-4 makes the 6-foot-1 Christopher Lloyd's Judge Doom look even more like a towering, ominous force than he already is.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is part of the cycle of late 80s-early 90s kids' movies with the power to traumatize. I say the following without exaggeration: Christopher Lloyd should have been on every Academy ballot for Best Supporting Actor for his work on here, and nearly everything he does in the film is nightmare fuel of the highest order. He murders an adorable cartoon shoe in cold blood in his first scene. The climax of the film, which I won't spoil here because I'd like for you to get the full effect if and when you do see it, is fucked up. I rewatched this movie shortly after my 30th birthday and I still think it's fucked up as a grown man.

Dear America was fucked up too, but in a more subtle, insidious way. The film's structure is simple: celebrities read letters home from soldiers in Vietnam over amateur video footage, presumably shot by those same soldiers. This isn't new territory for the war documentary; it isn't even new territory for writer/director/producer Bill Couturié. In 1982, Couturié co-directed Vietnam Requiem, a TV documentary made for ABC News's Closeup about the post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam vets that netted the Alphabet Network a Peabody Award.

Couturié's resume is full of similarly socially-conscious work, both as director and producer; he won an Oscar in 1990 as the producer of Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, which was about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. He has continued to chronicle the effects on war on soldiers. The one major outlier in his filmography is the Matt LeBlanc-starring baseball-playing chimp movie Ed, which he directed and produced. It was a massive bomb, no one liked it, and Couturié hasn't made a fiction film since, in Hollywood or otherwise.

As with WFRR, Dear America's beating heart is its form. Having people read letters over footage they or someone like them shot is a dirt-simple and highly effective way of telling this particular story. The beginning of the film is all smiles and surf music, a parade of fresh faces blissfully unaware of the horrors awaiting them in Southeast Asia. And I do mean fresh; I knew that the average age of touring soldiers in Vietnam skewed young, but I didn't know that it averaged out at 19. As the film goes on, and as the conflict keeps metastasizing, the plight of these young men grows more dire, the tone becomes more grim. The speed with which the switch flips from “patriotic naivete” to “existential hell” is whiplash-inducing.

The great Francois Truffaut once said that there's no such thing as an anti-war film. Now I'm just some dude on the internet, and who the hell am I to disagree with one of the great humanists of French cinema, but I believe the opposite to be true. War is such an abhorrent concept that any depiction of it will make it look terrible. Telegeny doesn't negate evil. Often it even amplifies it. The brief scenes of combat in Dear America are harrowing, and the cumulative effect of the footage and narration is decidedly anti-war. The final pivot, a flash forward that concludes the film, is the perfect emotional crescendo, until Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the USA” starts playing over the end credits. Now the fact that this song, along with the also-used-herein “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, has become a kind of lazy anti-war shorthand is not this film's fault. But time hasn't been kind to on-the-nose music cues, even if they were fresh and bold once upon a time. But this is a minor gripe regarding what is overall a solid piece of work.

There's something uniquely perverse about this tournament pairing, a documentary about the horrors of war and a movie where a cartoon rabbit does pratfalls. As with the previous round, tournament namesake Roger Ebert gave both of these movies the full four stars, citing both as exemplary in the respective idioms. And as powerful and moving as Dear America is, the level of technical mastery and boundless creativity of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is what puts it over the top.

The winner: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

#movies #ebertcup1988

Alright, I'm a little late, but that okay. Let's get this party started.

Wings of Desire was the first movie I ever close-read. It was my first week of college, and in one of my film classes, students were tasked with breaking down the first few minutes of Wim Wenders' urban fantasia into its smallest moving parts. In hindsight, this may have been a form of culling: are you here to watch movies or are you here to really watch movies? Our notes were exhaustive but did nothing to dull the magic of that opening. I had seen Wings of Desire again between that exercise and my rewatch for this project, but the little details of that opening never left me. The shot of an opening eye fading into a flapping ivory wing, the sweeping helicopter shots of 80s Berlin, the subtle droning organ on the soundtrack, the overlapping internal monologues. And weaving through it all is the great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz, all warm eyes, pronounce widow's peak, and ill-advised ponytail.

Ganz plays Damiel, an angel who watches over all Berliners, privy to even the most mundane of thoughts, joyful or otherwise. Their job, as per fellow angel Cassiel (the late German actor Otto Sander) is to “assemble, testify, [and] preserve” the goings-on of the humans, which they've been doing since time immemorial. Interfering, and thus experiencing, is forbidden. But Damiel wants to feel, dammit! There's an entire two-hander where Ganz and Sander are sitting in a convertible, most of which consists of Ganz waxing rhapsodic about the tiniest of gestures, like wriggling your toes under the table or feeding the cat “like Philip Marlowe.” Human love shoots to the top of the list after he becomes infatuated with Marion (the late Solveig Dommartin), a trapeze artist whose circus company has shuttered its doors.

Visually, thematically, formally, Wings of Desire is the kind of movie a layperson would probably conjure if asked to describe a poetic European art film. The use of black-and-white, the musings about Life, the oblique storytelling, the melancholy, world-weary tone. But the film is great because of this, not in spite of it. Wenders managed to wrest these individual components from the grips of chiche by turning them into an oneiric layercake, and placing the whole metaphyiscal fantasia inside a city symphony about Berlin. Hell, even Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show up, because why the hell not? It's a great movie to see in a film class at 17, because it's so deliberate and enrapturing in the way it moves, and since you're 17, you're the most attuned to how the sensory and the melancholic are inextricably linked. Being able to feel joy means risking feeling pain.

There's a decidedly more grounded pain permeating Running on Empty, Sidney Lumet's family drama about a couple (Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch) on the run from the FBI after a protest bombing gone awry in the 1970s, and their son (River Phoenix) who yearns for a little more stability. This viewing was the first time I had seen this movie, in part because it's so easy for a movie like this—that is to say mid-budget “adult” dramas—to fall through the cracks because of their unassuming nature. In that way, Lumet is the perfect director for the job. He's not a flashy director, but that doesn't keep him from sitting at the big boys' table. Even in the quietest moments, his films brim with energy and power. He came up in the Golden Age of Television, and his unfussy sense of pace and rhythm reflect that. Running on Empty is a simple story told expertly; there are no extraneous moving parts. The movie's wildest choice occurs in the last 30 seconds of the film, and it's not even that wild a choice. It just puts a neat, melancholy bow on the story. No, this isn't that kind of movie. If Wings of Desire's melancholy drew from its mise-en-scene, its more “filmic” aspects, then Running on Empty's came from its actors. Lumet was a magnificent director of actors. Just look at this list: Henry Fonda, Katharine Hepbern, Albert Finney, Ingrid Bergman, Al Pacino. And this was before stuff like Network and The Verdict and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

So of course the actors shine here. It's a film that brims with warmth and empathy. Lahti and Hirsch are great as the ex-radical hippies trying to stay one step ahead of the law, and Phoenix, only 18 here and already a disarming cinematic presence, shines as a young piano prodigy who's sick of the nomadic lifestyle that's been forced upon him. He broods, he plays piano, he falls in love with Martha Plimpton (who also is only 18 here and already a disarming cinematic presence). There's an effortlessness on display that never ceases to be enthralling, as if Phoenix were some kind of emotion elemental. Look at him play piano. Look at him contort at his desk when he gets called on to answer a question in music class. Look at his eyes, his hands. Well, Hollywood brass certainly did, as he got a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his trouble, as did Naomi Foner's solid, moving screenplay.

I can see why tournament namesake Roger Ebert gave the full four stars to both of these movies. They're both top-tier examples of their respective cinematic idioms. As I mentioned earlier, I feel like the deck is stacked against small, naturalistic dramas like Running on Empty by dint of the fact that they're not showy. But I'm of the opinion that there are more perfect films in this idiom, that are just as warm and simple but more idiosyncratic, and at least one of which starts River Phoenix (1991's sorely slept-on Dogfight, for example). Lumet has a deep catalogue of gems to explore, but barring any kind of prior familiarity with his work and his style, a neophyte might watch a sweet, unobtrusive film like Running on Empty and wonder what the hubbub is all about (I will use this admittedly tenuous link to plug Lumet's 1996 book Making Movies, by all accounts one of the great books about movies out there). But Wings of Desire is an immediately thrilling piece of filmmaking. Wenders has a sense of romance that endears him to budding cinephile, and Wings of Desire, a movie tailor-made to amke you fall in love with what great movies can offer, deserves to be rewarded here.

The winner: Wings of Desire

#ebertcup1988 #movies

Before I get to the meat of this, two things.

I. Roger Ebert passed away five years ago this coming April. He was a titanic figure in the world of film criticism, and like many others, was my gateway into the world of active cinephilia (as opposed to passive cinephilia , which mostly happens when you're a kid and you're more into the familiarity of the images than what they mean or are trying to convey). I have become a fan of many different writers since then, some more rigorous and analytical, some more playful and bizarre. But Ebert's voice, sharp, warm, knowledgeable, still stands out for me. There's a mix of approachability and expertise in his prose that I strive for in my own work. His reviews lean generous, which I appreciate; more people seeing more things more often is something I can get behind. It also partly dismantles the idea of the critic as objective arbiter. What someone thinks of a movie, of any work of art, really, can't inherently be right or wrong. Taste isn't a virtue. How you talk about something is the interesting part.

II. I'm turning 30 in a week and a half. I don't know how to feel about this. Sure, it's just another birthday, an arbitrary milestone on another trip around the Sun. But somehow, I feel like I should have more to show for it. More what? Who knows?! But despite my mixed feeling on closing the book on my third decade of life, I love March. Not because it's my birthday, or because the calendar flips that much closer to spring, but because it means for 31 glorious days, the wider world shares my enthusiasm for brackets. I love brackets. I love them as a conflict resolution device or a means by which to crown something champion. The NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament (aka March Madness) gets all the glory, but many outlets use it as an excuse to pitch cultural objects against one another. Maybe it's because I'm a sportsman at heart, maybe it's because I read and reread a similar bracketological gauntlet involving progressive rock albums at a formative age, or maybe I just like to flex that dormant comp-lit muscle of mine. In any case, I thought this year I would do a little something in that vein.

So to honour the man who helped set me on the path I'm on today and, you know, get my bracket on in celebration of my 30th birthday, I'm going to be holding a small, 10-team single-elimination tournament where the participants are Roger Ebert's top 10 movies of 1988.

Here are the participants and seeds for the 1988 Ebert Cup.

1. Mississippi Burning (Alan Parker, USA)
2. The Accidental Tourist (Lawrence Kasdan, USA)
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Philip Kaufman, USA)
4. Shy People (Andrei Konchalovsky, USA)
5. Salaam Bombay! (Mira Nair, India)
6. A Fish Called Wanda (Charles Crichton, UK/USA)
7. Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders, West Germany/France)
8. Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, USA)
9. Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam (Bob Couterie, USA)
10. Running on Empty (Sidney Lumet, USA)

To start with, there will be two play-in games (7v10, 8v9) before we get going with the quarterfinals. I'll be watching each movie before their first match, taking a day for each to collect my thoughts. With that in mind, the first write up should be on March 3rd, where I'll be running down the play-by-play of Wings of Desire vs. Running on Empty.

How many of these movies have you seen? Which is your favourite? Who will get to drink from the mighty chalics that is the Ebert Cup? Stay tuned to find out.

#movies #ebertcup1988 #brackets