Short Order - John Korty's Lumage

Late last September one of the home video world's most direly outstanding debts was finally repaid, and it came in the form of a print-on-demand DVD from Warner Bros.  Longtime readers may recall that one of my favorite movies ever, specifically my favorite animated film after Fantasia and The Incredibles, is Twice Upon A Time, an utterly delightful and hilarious fantasy with characters like Ralph the All-Purpose Animal, Synonamess Botch and Rod Rescueman.  A fleet jaunt through the garden of spoofly whimsy, the George Lucas-executive-produced joint is the only feature-length animation by Korty Films under the leadership of John Korty, animator and TV-movie director, and its singular presence in the film world is partially due to a bungled release by its distributor, The Ladd Company, outputters of Blade Runner.  Ladd chose to give it a limited theatrical run in order to give what might be the company's great winter passion to The Right Stuff and the decision ultimately wasn't enough to keep the company from sinking into bankruptcy, and further appearances of the film on TV and home video were complicated by infighting between Korty and producer Bill Couturié.  The Warner Bros. Archive Collection release is the only legit video version since the early 90's and features two different audio tracks as a compromise to both Korty and Couturié's preferred cuts, and the cult animation gods smiled down from their seat on top of Mount Animalympus.  The film's rescuing is important not only for making a kickass kartoon available once again but also because it helps preserve Lumage, an animation technique invented by Korty and used in Twice Upon a Time for its one and only shot at feature-length glory.

"It's alright, I'm wearing rubber underwear!"

How Lumage actually works might not be apparent from the clips in the trailer (a good thing, as one isn't supposed to think about how a film is animated but rather be sucked into its world) but here's the skinny: the characters are first sketched out, then translucent plastic is cut up to form them, and the pieces are moved around on a light table, the kind used for drafting.  The positions are shot frame by frame and viola.  If this sounds time consuming rest assured that it's far more time consuming than you think, as every frame of action has to be sketched and then cut out and then filmed, making the work potentially twice as life-consuming as traditional animation.  There's a reason not many stop-motion movies are made these days (and why they're so dang expensive) and understandably Lumage never really caught on outside of Korty Films.  The real shame in losing the art isn't just that it's cutout animation, a rarely-used technique these days (seen here in John Weldon's The Lump, filmed in "Recyclomation"), but that the addition of backlighting makes the technique not only especially rare but uncommonly beautiful - remember how astonishing it was to see intense, real-life glowing in moments of The Secret of Nimh, such as Mrs. Frisby's convo with the Great Owl?  The use of light here allows the liquid textures of the plastic figures radiate and come alive in a way that paper and pen could never accomplish.  Korty and co. exploit this throughout the film by using every opportunity to change the textural makeup on the characters, such as Ralph's fur, giving them a magical, almost volatile presence.  You might be wondering how a feature-length film using such a difficult and new animation technique got greenlit, and the answer is not only simple but a fine trip in the wayback machine - Korty had used it many times before, all under the great umbrella of 70's children's television.

In the 70s and 80s Korty Films produced dozens of short bits for Sesame Street and The Electric Company, both Children's Television Workshop shows and, at least for the latter, the standard for young children's programming.  One of the big draws of Sesame Street was teaching simple concepts, such as numbers and letters, in creative and fun ways, and the quality and variety of artists they got to make these bits kept both Sesame Street and The Electric Company head and shoulders above anything similar before it, and it's the reason that Sesame Street managed to stay on the air and on top for so long that some of the kids who saw the early seasons had grandchildren who watched the show.  Korty's shorts were among the best pieces of animation to appear on the two shows, not only for their educational value but also their wit and attention to detail, such as the above bit "Q is for Quiet" wherein the letters of the word "quiet" jabber and argue.

What strikes me the most about Korty's Sesame Street work is his care and respect in depicting people, such as with "Angry Annie" here.  Think about how much work it took to cut out and shape her hair and then animate all the tiny movements as she pulls it, shakes her head around and reacts to its presence on the tip of her nose.  The most difficult task in any animated film is making the characters believable and Korty makes up for the flat appearance of Lumage with tons of detail drawn from a sharp eye as to how people think and act upon those thoughts in subconscious ways.  Also apparent is how the voice actors are allowed to flesh out their performances through ad lib and inconsistency, giving their characters a fine naturalism that Korty worked off of to great effect.  The cast of Twice Upon a Time was made up of improv comedians such as Lorenzo Music and Marshall Efron, and different cuts of the film had different dialogue, the main thing keeping the film from a proper video release for so long.  For an early example of how those guys worked with Korty, here's James Cranna, the voice of Scuzzbopper, in a Sesame Street bit:

Sesame Street was a notable change from earlier children's programming in two major ways - it's setting was decidedly urban rather than the rural or fantastic worlds before it and its cast was racially integrated, a point of contention with conservative viewers, especially in the deep South.  While praising someone for conforming to Sesame Street's values might not seem necessary it is notable that Korty's previous work was actually well-suited to the show's humanistic, pro-friendship values and concern for urban living.  Consider one of his earliest works, the anti-nuke docu-short "The Language of Faces", produced by the Peace Education Program of the American Friends Service Committe, a Quaker-run peace activist organization:

That haunting would-be omen might seem a bit much now with its Criswell-esque narration and experimental percussion music but it's far from the scariest of the nuke scare flicks, with Fail-Safe and The War Game taking all cakes known and unknown.  It doesn't take a film scholar to point out how the nightmare bombs and Big Red One doomsday button from Twice Upon a Time have more than a passing resemblance to the world's most ominous stockpile, and the horrifying realities of nuclear warfare and our need to come together as a world alliance are obvious enough truths to be self-evident to preschoolers, though Korty never got that particular message on the air.  One Electric Company short about pollution is a good substitute, though:

The most extensive work Korty did for these shows was the running Sesame Street bit "Thelma Thumb", no examples of which (in English, anyways) I was able to find, which is a shame as it featured both James Cranna and Judith Kahan, the voice of the Fairy Godmother from Twice.  There are plenty more individual shorts, though, and if anything can be said for the content on Sesame Street and The Electric Company it's that it's simple enough for small children to understand, so I don't see any reason why I shouldn't just let them all hang out.

You can get lots more info on Korty at his personal website, a nice piece of design at the very least, and hopefully more exposure of his talents will help more Sesame Street and Electric Company shorts resurface.  Lumage's serious difficulties as an art form have logically kept it from spreading its wings farther than the Korty kamp but we cna help honor its vital contribution to American animation by recirculating Korty's bits, as commenting on current political issues with shorts like "Pollution Solution" is what Facebook was made for.  To close out, here's one of Korty's most charming and humanistic shorts, a kind reminder of the how human potential can be seen only one step (or foot) at a time.

~PNK

My Cinematic Yearbook - Betrayed (1988)

Be it for misplaced self-importance, misguided metaphysical probing or just jadedness, I've made an effort to consume the art that was released in my birthyear, 1988.  Sometimes that can lead to tears but fortunately there were a lot of great movies released that year, such as Akira, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Naked Gun, Rain Man, Dead Ringers and one of my all-time favorite movies, the blogworthy Paperhouse.  '88 also featured a number of great flicks that have fallen by the wayside or were undervalued upon their release and by dang that's what home video was invented to fix, so every now and then I'll review a Crazy 88 that needs another peep, and there's a timeliness in reviewing the first one of these, Betrayed.  Actually, it's not a fortunate timeliness, as not only do I have to talk about racism but I have to talk about Trump.  

Of the many, many gaffs Donald Trump has made so far in his presidential race, taking time to carefully avoid discrediting a former KKK Grand Wizard on the air while whipping out blanket condemnations of Mexicans is pretty memorable, doubly memorable as it forces us to remember that the KKK and other White Supremacy groups are still alive and kickin'.  Hollywood has long hated groups like this, with the KKK appearing in plenty of movies like The Blues Brothers and Mississippi Burning, but less colorful terrorist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood have appeared a bit less frequently though are equally hated.  I think that infrequency is due to the AB appearing less like a cult or old-fashioned men's club than the KKK, more human, easier to see someone joining.  Groups like that don't immediately declare their political leanings but rather insinuate new members in by initially appearing as a group of friends with similar backgrounds, and the fact that they're close enough to "normal" people to pass makes them slightly more problematic targets as a whole for writers.  It's this fine line that Betrayed walks with total assurance, making it one of the most emotionally brutal political dramas of it's time.

In response to the assassination of Midwestern shock jock Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini), the FBI sends agent Cathy Weaver (Debra Winger) undercover as a combine driver to investigate a prime suspect, farmer Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger), Vietnam vet and single father.  Cathy's search for evidence is initially unfruitful, not helped by her decision to feign romantic interest in Gary, but Gary decides to take her "hunting" one night and she sees the truth - Gary and his friends are militant White Supremacists and their "hunting" trips are training sessions where they set a captured black man loose in order to shoot him down.  Cathy, distraught over how her duty to her cover kept her from saving the man, wants to bail on the mission but her bosses, among them her former lover Michael Carnes (John Heard) press her to go further in order to connect Gary to the assassination.  Things only get deeper, and more difficult to control or rectify, from there.

This formula is tried-'n'-true Hollywood logline, certainly understandable as the script was written by Joe "Showgirls" Eszterhas, a fact that surprised me after I found out, but the subject matter and execution are deeply disturbing, just as it should be.  I don't care how jaded you are, seeing little kids being taught to shoot rifles at racist cutouts in the middle of a White Supremacist training camp is upsetting on a trillion levels, not to mention when Gary's Kindergarten-aged daughter says "We're the good guys.  One day we're gonna kill all the dirty niggers and the Jews and everything's gonna be neat."  The mark of good acting in these kinds of films is if the actors can say horrifying lines like not only without flinching but with such banality as if they say it each Sunday to their town's pastor.  Winger and Berenger both pull off their not-so-dual roles expertly, Berenger's performance being especially important as he comes across both as a determined killer and a decently charming guy and good father, a concept that is impossible to fathom for most people, the film's FBI included.  Winger exudes a lot of internal strength and integrity throughout, something that makes her gradual emotional destruction hurt even more, and the excellent supporting cast, including Ted Levine, John Mahoney and David Clennon, play their tunes with timing and style.  Unlike much of Joe Eszterhas's work Betrayed has an overabundance of subtle characterization, quiet moments and raw truth, aspects that have aged considerably well in the nearly 30 years since the film's release.  The director, Costa-Gavras, might be familiar to those with an eye on international cinema as he directed the smash-hit political thriller Z as well as the smack-in-the-face gripping The Confession, and this film shows him staying true to his roots inside a Hollywood framework.  His eye is expansive and swift, the camera neither lagging behind the action or distracting with flash, and features some exceptional magic-hour photography in the Great Plains.  His patience and knack for building momentum on simple moments result in some lovely small moments, such as a scene early in the film where Cathy watches Gary chew out some other farmers.  It's the first time Gary shows his true, clear-eyed hostility and the shot is Cathy's perspective, focusing on the back of Gary's head - a no-no in traditional filmmaking but a fine detail here.  The only thing that doesn't hold up anymore is the music, synth-'n'-country-heavy and too often weakening the impact (a problem not shared by the near-contemporaneous synth score to Mississippi Burning), as well as some usual plot dubiousness that comes with any undercover operative story, but the class production more than makes up for it.  Why did the slow dissolve cut go out of style again?  For that matter, why doesn't anybody remember that the '80's had just as many great dramas as comedies and horror films?

Betrayed didn't get the best reviews when it came out, nor the most viewers, and Costa-Gavras's Hollywood career would flame out a few years later with the colossal flop that was Mad City.  It didn't really turn around on video, either, and the slew of underwhelming promotional art show that its distributor, MGM, has never had a clue as to how to market it.  I can understand why some people wouldn't like it simply for the idea that the protagonist finds herself unable to completely side against such repugnant antagonists, but that impossible situation is part of what makes great drama and it's a heart-wrenching way to confront how even the most philosophically repulsive people are still people.  We need more films that show sympathetic people who've painted themselves into philosophically and emotionally impossible corners, not only in spite of the fact that these movies aren't exactly crowd-pleasers but precisely because of their difficult provocation of thought.  Berenger went on the record years later and admitted that it's his favorite movie, a move that might come across as hideously self-important as he starred in the thing but rung true to me, especially as he defended the film by saying "It was exactly what it was meant to be."  Like it or not, you can't deny that Betrayed thrusts the viewer into the heart of the ugliest side of American identity as intelligently and empathetically as anyone could expect, and I for one appreciate the effort.

~PNK

Special Report - ANGST (1983)

Back when I first started seeking out obscure movies I read a lot of lists by fellow travelers, mostly through Amazon's defunct Listmania tool.  I'm not really sure why the site doesn't do that anymore, as it was a really convenient way to see what other people liked and see if it was for sale, and I made a few of them myself.  I also started a list of movies to see that would be constantly updated through the years, though when I started it I had a habit of putting tons of movies on the list without really absorbing what they were about and as a result.  One of those was Angst, an acutely obscure Austrian horror movie that I was extremely unlikely to see, as it dated from 1983 and had never been released on video in the US, and until very recently has nagged my mind as a missing link in my horror education.  This situation was remedied this past Saturday night when the great Grand Illusion Cinema screened the film, and as there's one more screening coming up this coming Saturday (June 20 at 9 pm) I feel the need to tell the world (of Seattle) about this unbelievable film in time for them to decide whether or not to see the film.  The screening is most likely in anticipation of the upcoming Blu-Ray and DVD release from Cult Epics, the company that did a great job resurrecting Death Bed: the Bed that Eats (yes, that's a real movie), this coming August 18th.  It will be a fully uncut and restored version of the film and the first time the movie will be available in the US in any form, and will most likely be seen as a high point in this year's home video lineup.  These options mean that it will be easier than ever before for people like you and me to see Angst, but don't say that I didn't warn you.

A young man (Erwin Leder) walks down a suburban street, comes up to a house, and shoots the old woman who answers the door, running away and into the hands of the authorities.  A psychologist narrator informs us of the man's long history of childhood disturbance, sadism and violent crimes, putting the man behind bars so much that nearly half of his life has been spent in jail.  Upon his release after the opening murder he goes to a local cafe and leers at two young women, then hails a cab driven by a different young woman.  He nearly strangles her with his shoelaces before she scares him out of her car and he runs terrified through the woods, not stopping until he reaches a stately but seemingly empty house.  He breaks in and finds that a mentally handicapped man in a wheelchair is in the house, and his sister and mother soon return from shopping.  Finally given a chance to act out his sadistic homicidal fantasies, the man throws himself at his new victims with unprecedented and horrifying results, and as he gets closer to realizing his sick dreams we realize he, and us, may never see things the same way again.

There have been many serial killer movies through the years, many of which are docudramas which reconstruct real killings in the hopes of answering some of life's toughest questions.  Most films of this type, such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Monster, Dahmer and Next Time I'll Aim for the Heart, try to put the viewer in to the head of the killers in order so they may get closer to understanding their crimes and inner souls.  While Angst isn't set up much differently the effect is so intense and terrifying that it might actually be the scariest serial killer movie I've ever seen.  The effect might be difficult to explain without seeing it, so keep in mind that while I'll do my best to describe how the film works to you you'll need to see the movie to get the real experience.  

You know how movies have a "default" camera angle?  It's usually at eye level, with the camera set up between 5 and 10 feet away from the subject which is put in the middle of the frame.  Angst has none of those.  From the first shot we know Angst is going to go a singular route in depicting the killings, as its the first shot to use the SnorriCam, a device that attaches the camera to a rig attached to the body of the person it's filming.  While the technology dates back to John Frankenheimer's Seconds and earlier, the first movie I saw it used extensively in was Darren Aronofsky's Pi, wherein the camera was fixed as to point directly at actor Sean Guillete in a straight-on angle as he walked down the street, the frame pitching and bowing with every step he took.  Angst takes this tech one step further by allowing it to swivel around the actor as if on a 360-degree metal rail and guided by the cameraman.  These shots never let actor Erwin Leder escape our gaze, his paranoia made physical as the camera can't help but circle and hound him like a wounded animal.  Almost every other shot is some kind of angled tracking shot, either from above, below or jammed into awkward corners, and never in my life have I seen tracking shots so intense, sweeping and frightening.  Imagine if you took a security camera and mounted it on a crane that could reach fifty feet in the air, then rolled it around at the speed of a coked-up RC car, and you'l get a feel for how much of this film looks.  Every shot is voyeuristic and viscerally unsettling, blowing the interiors and exteriors wide open and creating seemingly impossible shots, such as where the camera swings upside down and across in a trick that would make Amelie jealous.  Other shots drag the camera right behind people crawling up staircases, falling over while taped to doors and being thrown out of wheelchairs, each shot tied to the action so well that the audience feels every movement in their bones.  This film was made soon after the invention of Steadicam, a piece of technology used extensively by Stanley Kubrick in The Shining to create smooth, versatile tracking movements in extended time spans, but not only did Angst not have access to this tech the lack of those cameras actually makes the action even more unsettling.  The mounted tracking shots, such as those above and below people, are seemingly done with the crappiest dollies the filmmakers could find, making sure that the camera picks up every rock, piece of dirt and crack in whatever ground it's traversing, and the shuddering frame perfectly mirrors the killer's unstable perception of the world.  It's an astonishing cinematographic achievement that should be studied in film schools the world over, and that's something I don't say lightly.

 

Angst's unique SnorriCam sequences

All of that would have been amazing on its own but what really completes Angst is the central performance by Erwin Leder (his character is never named), an actor I was previously unfamiliar with but now wish he was never in any other films simply so this performance could remain a perfect, isolated artistic statement.  This is the most unstable, balls-to-the-wall serial killer performance I've ever seen, topping even Charlize Theron's stunning performance as Aileen Wuorinos in Monster in sheer catastrophic abandon.  Leder's gaunt, lanky build and over-large eyes give him the look of a skeleton dipped in latex, and never before have I been so worried someone would simply fly apart from overaction in every scene.  Not even Baird Stafford in Nightmares in a Damaged Brain was this out of control of his own actions.  The filmmakers don't shy away from the the physical taxation the man puts on himself, not only in his killings but even his attempts to relax, such as eating and stopping for breath, and he is often drenched in sweat and deathly pale.  And dear God, does he throw himself around a lot, lunging into people, doors, windows and the air itself as if breaking down the door between himself and a loved one trapped inside a burning building.  The other great performance, almost as essential as Leder's, is that of a wiener dog owned by the family he attacks.  It follows him around for the whole second half of the movie, its presence a ticking time bomb as we already know his history with animal cruelty, and each second that passes with the dog in his presence is another twist of the thumbscrew.  And finally there's the droning, minimalist synthesizer score by German electronica God Klaus Schulze, at times slightly dated but nonetheless engulfing the film in a horripilative gauze that removes any possibility of exit for the viewer, forcing them to run alongside Leder's actions, never stopping but simply observing an awful truth.

I sometimes wonder why I love horror films so much, and specifically why I would want to watch a movie like Angst, one that seems transgressive every time it is described in words.  It certainly isn't the most violent, sadistic or disturbing film I've seen, but it is one of the most brutally scary films I've seen from any genre and era.  Who was the audience supposed to be for a movie like this, and what would that audience have been expecting?  Nobody could have anticipated this, and many viewers might have found themselves running out of the theater in terror or disgust.  The answer is that the film is for everyone, because its questions go the heart of how we define ourselves as human beings and members of society.  I talked before about how we use movies about the vilest people who ever lived as an extreme comparison to our own actions, and that peering into the darkest abyss of humanity is a necessity if society wants to achieve real results in its desire for self-improvement.  We have to know why people like Angst's young man do what they do even if an exact answer is impossible to attain.  Nobody is going to try to trick you into thinking a film like Schindler's List is any less disturbing than it actually is, because the act of watching the film is one way to understand one of the most horrifying episodes in human history. 

 This kind of cinematic experience had one of its most unusual and effective realizations in Alan Clarke's Elephant, one of the most potent calls for peace ever put to film.  A short film made for Northern Irish television, the film shows a series of killings committed without explanation or commentary, all done by anonymous gunmen with seemingly no motivation or allegiance.  Each murder begins by following the assassin in a long, walking tracking shot, showing the man shoot his victim, let him walk away, and then show the dead body in a static shot that lasts several seconds.  This happens 18 times with no music and almost no dialogue.  This oppressively repetitive presentation is a brilliant illustration of what the Troubles looked like to the rest of the world - a bunch of people who are totally indistinguishable from one another but murdered each other so regularly and with such poor motivation that any kind of political message was totally squandered in the face of a mounting pile of dead bodies.  Some critics felt watching the seemingly endless parade of senseless murders so unbearable that they wanted to yell "Stop!" at their TV screens, and that effect is precisely the point.  That kind of conflict simply cannot be allowed to continue, and we feel that need for peace in our gut.  We simply can't let serial killers exist, and the fact society keeps producing them and often fails to capture them is a deeply unsettling reality that we have no solution for.  Watching Angst I realized that all horror comes from things that are unacceptable to our understanding of reality, that impossibility, or desire for impossibility, exceeding mere fright.  In that sense all horror subjects can be put into two categories: things that can't exist (the supernatural) and things that shouldn't exist (human evil).  Angst is the most intense and direct attempt to ask the unanswerable questions of serial murder, the one thing that more than any other thing shouldn't exist, throwing the viewer into the unimaginable so forcefully and completely that nothing can let them escape.  There's one more chance for my Seattle area readers to see it on the big screen, so if you dare to take this suspense masterpiece head on the door is wide open.  I'll never come to regret taking the plunge but I can't guarantee you won't.  Watch at your own risk.

~PNK

The Early Prime of Nancy Savoca, part 1 - TRUE LOVE (1989)

In my preparation for Women's History Month this blog cycle I realized that I couldn't think of too many female career movie directors.  There are a few big names, of course, most notably Kathryn Bigelow, Julie Taymor, Liliana Cavani and most hilariously Doris Wishman, but that's a pretty small list, especially considering that I can't stand to include Barbra Streisand in that list.  Other multi-film female directors have found fame but their careers have either crashed and burned (like Elaine May) or never really saw consistent fruition (like Jennifer Chambers Lynch).  In fact, there seem to be fewer women in film direction than in any other artistic field (aside from orchestral conducting, it would seem, as I could only think of one female conductor of international repute, Marin Alsop, and Wikipedia's list is only seven names long).  There's not a savory reason for this, especially considering that the rise of independent cinema in the 80's and 90's should have opened the door to a whole generation of female auteurs.  A couple of names did rise to the surface in that optimistic time, one being Allison Anders, whose Gas Food Lodging was a Sundance darling and her film Border Radio made it into the Criterion Collection.  Another, and the one I'm more familiar with, is Nancy Savoca, who won big time at Sundance in 1989 and made two more striking character dramas before fading into TV-directing obscurity.  This month V-f-t-P is going to celebrate all three of her early films, starting with the most financially successful of them, True Love.

Donna (Annabella Sciorra in her big-screen debut) and Michael (Ron Eldard in his big-screen debut) are getting married, and while they seem to be enthusiastic it's clear that the problems of modern marriage are both more present and more subtle than anything they could have imagined.  And that's pretty much it - True Love understands that the mounting frustrations and secret failings of young people hurtling into lifelong commitment is drama enough, as Donna and Michael's romance is threatened by nothing larger than themselves.  As it turns out, the hardest problems to overcome are the ones you consider essential parts of your character, and whether or not Donna and Michael are up to the challenge may be impossible to determine.

Starting out with the engagement party video (a somewhat recent invention at the time), True Love is as naturalistic and sympathetic as I've seen from a wedding movie since Rachel Getting Married.  Savoca uses the everyday problems of working-class New York Italian-Americans as a backdrop for a drama of modesty, not shying away from the combination of money problems, bad fashion choices and general crudeness (such as the side character who calls a rude driver both a "dicksuck" and a "suckhole").  Their culture, much stereotyped in movies but expertly dissected here, is as much to blame for Donna and Michael's problems as themselves, as Michael's malaise at the prospect of responsibility is both created and encouraged by the "boys will be boys" attitude prevalent amongst his circle of friends and, by extension, his male community.  Donna is no less problematic, as she is too quick to fall for gimmicky wedding concepts (like mashed potatoes dyed blue) and lets men use her as a doormat without coming up with alternatives.  The ingenious part of this is that Savoca is too smart to let either one of them be the "right" one in any given argument (aside from the ending), such as Michael turning down the idea of the ghastly dyed potatoes and Donna interpreting this as him being a backward drip, or Michael's reasonable request that Donna not meet him after the bachelor party lead to him making the colossal mistake of squealing off to Atlantic City to gamble away as much of his savings as he can get his hands on.  Their friends are no improvement - Donna's wear awful clothes and make jokes about sticking Michael's head in the oven, while Michael's are heinous enablers who seduce him into terrible decisions.  On top of this there are a number of hilarious scenes with odd side characters, like the guy who sells them the rings  and "Christ heads" wearing a bizarre v-neck sweater/t-shirt combo and a bachelor party filled with guys in their 60's falling asleep to ancient 8mm stag movies.  The writing manages a difficult feat in featuring wacky, cynical characters while still treating them with real respect, and as such True Love stays afloat where other movies would sink our hearts.

Annabella Sciorra would go on to prove herself an interesting and intelligent film presence in movies such as the dreadfully underrated What Dreams May Come; the close-examination material here requires acting of that caliber and she does a fine job for her big screen debut.  Simultaneously street-smart and woefully unprepared for life, Donna is a hard-edged modern woman with a mother's heart and over-tired eyes.  She spends the whole second half of the movie deeply embittered and is notable for movie couples in that she's the one who hits first in their fights, daring Michael to hit back.  Ron Eldard has had a bit less success but has remained versatile in small roles in movies like Super 8 and the frustrating near-success Delivered, and he's almost unrecognizable here as Michael, severely babyfaced and utterly oblivious.  Both actors take full hold of the comic and dramatic possibilities of the material, bouncing along the script and greatly aiding the flow while keeping your attention at all times.  The same can be said for every actor in the movie, featuring small-time icons like Aida Turturro and Vincent Pastore as well as a whole host of people I've never seen before but can't take my eyes off of.  This is all captured with Savoca's expansive and richly colored frame, showing a lot of confidence for her first time out and amplifying the emotional punch of every scene.  The cinematography allows colors to pop and flood the scenes and there's a lot of engaging tracking shots and fresh angles.  And the most essential win for her is the pacing, both measured and eager to follow the story wherever it may go.

I remember when The Break-Up came out and Vince Vaughan mentioned that any break-up has enough drama to carry a whole movie.  While I didn't like that movie too much I applaud the concept of really going for a seemingly simple story like that and proving that a movie can be engaging in simplicity.  True Love is a pretty simple story but it's so entertaining and wise that you couldn't care less.  It's no surprise that this was an audience and critic favorite at Sundance that year (winning the Grand Jury Prize) and it's a great movie to launch careers with - it has all the audience appeal and intelligence of a movie like High Fidelity well before the fact.  The best audience favorites are the ones that show us truths that we might not have considered but accept unhesitatingly, and True Love is wise enough to focus more on young love's hangovers than its celebrations, and the fact that, when it comes to love, we just don't know when to quit.

"You know, there's times when he does things like what he did last night and I wanna fuckin' kill him...then I see him." ~Donna

~PNK

Happiness Month Finale - PAPERHOUSE (1988)

When I first started going to college in Tacoma I knew film only by the big and biggish names, and my deep love of uncovering filmed obscurities was merely a gleam in my eye.  It was around this time that I discovered some local video stores and, finally being away from my parents' cinematic tastes, decided to widely experiment with my rental choices.  While there was a Blockbuster not far from my house my most frequent rental stop was Backstage Video on Procter St., now the only video store in Tacoma as that Blockbuster and the mighty Stadium Video have both fallen.  What's so neat about Backstage is that they have a large VHS selection not only to rent but for sale, and one of the first videos I checked out was this brooding-looking and intriguing tape:

For those who can't read it, the review at the top of the box says "Paperhouse is the thinking person's Nightmare on Elm Street."  That logline, combined with the scary eyes and flaming house, would lead most renters to think that Paperhouse was a horror movie, especially when combined with the salacious back image of a seeming madman wielding a claw hammer like John Hurt attacking a prostitute in From the Hip.  Yes, I know this is the British VHS but the American tape looked almost exactly the same, so shush.  It was certainly enough to catch my eye, so into my player it went.  I was immediately floored, not by horror but by one of the most ingenious, haunting and insightful movies ever made for children, a stunning exploration of the relationship between dreams and childhood whose power is only matched by how infuriating it is that there's no American DVD.  It's time to finally tackle this blog's namesake, and I can't think of a better time than the close of the year than to vindicate the name of arguably the best kid's psychological fantasy film ever.

Preteen Anna (Charlotte Burke) is a problem for her mother (Glenne Headly) and her school teachers.  Upset that she wasn't allowed to skip school on her birthday*, she immediately picks a fight with another student during class and, when sent out in the hall, is struck down by a fainting spell.  She uses this to get her mother to pick her up, only to admit that her illness was partially made up.  The next day she ditches school with a friend only to collapse again, finding herself more drawn into a mysterious dream landscape and stuck down with glandular fever.  Confined to her bed, Anna takes to drawing paper and draws a house - and upon entering her next dream she sees the house from her drawing on the horizon.  Her dream world expands as she continues drawing, and after drawing herself a friend in the window she returns to the world to find Marc (Elliott Spiers), a boy about her age, also traversing the dream world but without the use of his legs.  As it turns out Marc is another patient of Anna's doctor who is suffering from a far more debilitating disease, and their dreaming worlds are linked by their incapacitation and things left unexplained.  While the two of them find a kind of expansive freedom controlling their private landscape they may not realize its full power, especially when Anna's estranged father comes into the fold.

For those who don't know, my two favorite movies are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Videodrome, two astonishing films that intelligently and realistically explore unbelievable worlds of the human mind, and Paperhouse is the greatest attempt to achieve their brilliance on a young adult level.  While the actual causes of the surreal situation are never revealed, Paperhouse is concerned less with cosmology and more with relatable human reactions to being thrust into the unknown and what it reveals about ourselves.  It's plot is one of the most creative examples of the "wonderland" plot, wherein an inexperienced, usually troublesome child enters a surreal landscape and emerges a different and wiser person, and Anna's journey lets her imitate a god only to end up a better human.  Rather than saddling her with whimsical natives to guide her, Anna's counterpart in Marc is a sobering and intimidating presence, entirely sympathetic, even more mature, but a constant critic of Anna's misuse of her power.  If these performances fell flat the whole film would be little more than a 90-minute design exercise, but thankfully one-time actress Charlotte Burke and the tragically departed Elliott Spiers (dying only six years after filming this)** turn in mature and highly empathetic performances that nail every varied emotion the story calls for.  The film also wisely avoids the "idiot parent" cliche of fantastic stories wherein a child encounters the Unknown and a skeptical parent assumes lying or insanity in spite of evidence right in front of their faces - Anna's mother is completely unable to understand what her daughter might be going through but sincerely does her best to help her.  And trust me when I say when Anna's father shows up he creates an utterly unforgettable screen presence in young adult film.


The most astonishing thing about the film is the production design by Gemma Jackson (Finding Neverland, Game of Thrones), which accomplishes the seemingly impossible feat of reproducing a child's crude drawings of objects exactly in three dimensions.  The house is crooked and molded from lumpy clay, all straight lines are wobbly as if drawn with crayon, and mechanical objects barely work due to their kid design.  At one point Anna uses a black crayon to scratch out an upstairs window and when she visits it later there are huge, terrifying swaths of porous black scored into the windows, an awful amplification of her worst qualities.  All of this is captured with an extraordinary depth of field and lighting design, courtesy of the passionate vision of director Bernard Rose.  Rose is an acutely underrated director, part of a generation of filmmakers who came of age in music videos, and would go on to direct Candyman, Immortal Beloved and the highly underrated Chicago Joe and the Showgirl as well as two acclaimed Tolstoy updates, Ivans XTC and The Kreutzer Sonata (neither of which I've seen).  Paperhouse is without question his best film and its underexposure is a crime to his name, and the sad thing is that its death was strictly a business decision.


While you wouldn't really think it, the demographic range of children aged 9-12 is pretty tricky to market to, as older pre-pubescents are thirsting for darker, more complex material but have no interest in works that cater to the squirming, shrieking hormone vortexes of the few years just around the corner.  As such, filmmakers aiming for the age bracket feel compelled to increase the levels of tension and violence but find themselves facing a PG-13 rating, and in 1988 that rating was so new that consumers didn't really know what to make of it and the MPAA didn't know how to wield it.  Paperhouse has nothing particularly objectionable for 10-year-olds but was deemed to frightening for them, and the distributors must have panicked at the prospect of a kids movie unable to be freely viewed by kids and decided to market it as a horror movie - and if there's one thing horror fans hate it's a movie clearly made outside of the genre that gets passed off as a fright flick.  I should probably be thankful that the movie has a following at all, a testament to its own greatness and having nothing to do with Vestron Pictures' marketing decisions.  And once again, I tip my hat and lift my glass to the internet and its infinite capacity to celebrate the undeservingly obscure and Backstage Video for facilitating my discovery of one of my all-time favorite films.


Bernard, you're a good egg.  And all of my readers are good eggs for sticking with my digital ramblings as far as they've annoyingly stuck around.  Paperhouse is a wonder and is a fitting final gift from me to you at Eve's Eve.  Lion's Gate has finally made the film available on demand on Amazon and YouTube for those who like shelling out bucks for HD, but for the rest of us a couple different users have uploaded the movie in 10-minute chunks.  I'm giving you the start, but much like Anna's journey your film viewing experiences are entirely of your making and hopefully leave you enriched.  Paperhouse never fails to make me faithful in movies as well as supremely happy, and with my recommendation I wish everyone a Happy New Year and look forward to 2015 with many more articles on the way.

~PNK

*Certainly a better use of that setup than Meet the Deedles.


**Spiers's last film was the utterly insane-looking Taxandria, so it looks like I'll have one more Armin Meuller-Stahl film to admire before I'm through.

The Threat of Ancient Echoes - THE LOST TRIBE (1983)

New Zealand hasn't come to be a horror powerhouse in world cinema, despite the best efforts of the young Peter Jackson with Bad Taste and the priceless Dead Alive.  Aside from Petey Kiwi the only NZ horror movies I can remember while writing this are the direct-to-video demon flick The Devil's Rock (pretty dang good if you ask me) and that Dark of the Night/Mr. Wrong movie I wrote about last year.  The one's you're thinking of are probably Australian, anyways, and both countries often have their funding held at the whim of national film boards that might not be too into funding chop-'em-ups.  The only reason the similarly Commonwealthy Canada churned out so many B-movies in the 70's and 80's is that directors exploited tax loopholes, an era that went the way of the zombie dodo decades ago.  That being said one little gem did escape into the North American video market many blood moons ago, The Lost Tribe, written and directed by John Laing (whose career slid into TV soon after and held to the small screen with an iron grip).

Anthropologist Max Scarry (John Bach) mysteriously disappears while doing excavation/research of a lost New Zealand tribe on a remote island.  His wife and his twin brother Edward are clueless as to what could have happened, a situation complicated by their city's police suspecting that one of the brothers murdered a local prostitute who was found with a strange tribal charm on her body matching one found in Max's abandoned hut.  What most certainly isn't helping matters is the strange behavior of Max's daughter as she seems to have visions beyond possibility, warnings of a supernatural threat and her uncle's fate - and she's the film's narrator, to boot.  After a suspicious run-in with the cops and another prostitute, Edward decides to go to the island to find out exactly what happened, but the deeper he goes into the mystery the more perilous and unknowable his world becomes, leading towards a shocking fate that raises more questions than it answers.

While The Lost Tribe might sound a bit also-ran on paper - extinct tribe, unexplained psychic visions, identical twins - the execution is extraordinarily brooding and engrossing, burning slow and thoroughly until we can't help but be afraid.  From the very first shot - a fast approach on the water to an arriving boat, a la the cargo ship introduction from Nosferatu - The Lost Tribe is incredibly well-shot, full of rich color contrast and noir-ish shadowplay.  Faces are often deftly underlit, echoing old-school horror tricks without sacrificing the deadly serious tone.  Late in the film there is a seeming dream sequence that is one of the most unnerving I've seen in any horror movie, not least because of how strikingly different it is from everything we've seen before.  Key to this film's success is the performance of John Bach as Edward, an unsettlingly shifty, glaring man with secrets both unspoken and possibly unspeakable.  Unlike many horror protagonists who bland along in an attempt to give audiences someone to feel sorry for, Edward Scarry begs the audience to decipher him, and once the final scenes pull the rug out from everything we're left wondering just what kind of men these brothers truly were.  Tribe moves at its own pace and asks its own questions, and once everything is said and done it ultimately might not sound like a horror movie, but damned if I know what else it could be.  Sure, it's a mystery, but plenty of horror movies are structured that way and Tribe lets its unknowns hang in the air so thick they can be cut with a knife, and ultimately this fog trails behind the viewer as they shuffle back to their cars in a state of confusion and subterranean fear.


Only released theatrically in New Zealand, it's not hard to see why The Lost Tribe has flown under the radar for the past thirty years.  It's only North American video release was on the obscure Fox Hills Video label, a small-time cousin to Media Home Video via their parent company Heron Communications, and I so rarely come across any tapes from the firm that I'm not surprised the film didn't make it to too many renters' VCR's.  One can sense panic on the part of the distributors to jazz up what they probably considered DOA, as the poster and box sport the name-recognition-grabbing tagline "ALTERED STATES.  DEADLY FATES."  That's a shame, because it's one of the most interesting takes on the "ancient tribe" subset of horror movies and doesn't need any help from Altered States or any other Hollywood hit.  I can't recommend you pair it with Dark of the Night, though, but I'm sure you guys are industrious enough to think of some way to work it into one of your (hopefully) annual Halloween horror marathons.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any clips of the film on YouTube but there are some pretty cheap copies on Amazon (though none for a penny, sadly), and you can even see an embarrassingly over-the-top review I did for it some years ago when I didn't know what restraint was.  I will warn you that Tribe is paced very slowly, so if you're hoping for plenty of tentpole horror setpieces it'll leave you in the dust.  For those with patience and a taste for a dark, atmospheric horror mystery The Lost Tribe delivers in spades, and it makes me want to uncover more kiwi fright flicks to shake up All Hallow's Eve-athons.

~PNK

The Legend, the Magic, the Chickens - FURIOUS (1984)

OK, OK, I know this is an unusual choice for this blog, if anybody reading this has even heard of this flick.  Released in a pocket of extreme obscurity on VHS in the 80's, Furious has recently become a minor cult phenomenon, and not just because there are plenty of 18-34 demo fools like myself willing to give any obscure genre flick from the 70's and 80's a shot.  It's a life-changing experience, a singular cinematic entity that blows open the Martial Arts genre into stunningly bizarre new possibilities, and it was made on a budget that wouldn't even fund the afterparty of a Hollywood premiere.  The filmmakers had a small budget to start with and originally wanted to make a slasher movie, but their distributor said that he could move Kung Fu flicks by the pound.  What followed was sheer and glorious lunacy, the kind of unabashed shoestring ingenuity I can only dream about.  I'm certainly not the first person to sing its jawdroppedness: Trash Nite and Bleeding Skull have good reviews and I couldn't add any substance to them even if I tried.  For those who don't like clicking links, here's a taste: alien warlocks who can shoot chickens from their fingers.  Comedic post-punk rock band interjections during a crisis situation.  Flaming skeletons.  The most impressive helicopter photography you'd never expect in a movie this small-time.  The list goes on, but I don't want to spoil the flick for you.

The real ace up my sleeve is two-fold.  One, a story.  The film's co-director, Tim Everitt, actually lives near Seattle, and some enterprising young gentlemen connected to the great Scarecrow Video tracked him down.  I attended a packed screening of Furious (though sadly not from an original tape) in Scarecrow's event room and promptly had my pants blown off, along with everybody else in the room.  Everitt was kind enough to answer questions afterwards, and it turns out he's a pretty normal guy who made a career as a visual effects supervisor in Hollywood for some time.  I snagged a poster for the screening and got his signature, probably making me the only man alive who has a Furious poster signed by the director.  Look!

On a less cripplingly nerdy note, the second fold is much more valuable: I found the flick on YouTube.  A channel I've never heard of before uploaded the movie two months ago this very day, making him a national hero if I ever saw one.  The gab must cease, and you must watch.  Drop whatever you're doing, even if it's CPR - you've got 71 minutes to witness a great and beautiful madness.

~PNK

Jazz Vampires of the Pee-wee Punkpocalypse - POPULATION: 1 (1986)

Cult movies on DVD have become a big business these days, what with Shout! Factory raking in the cash with their 80's horror re-releases and MST3K box sets.  There's so many old crazies coming out that you'd think they could run out, though there are tons of great, cult-worthy movies that still haven't seen the light of a laser.  The trick is to create smaller subsets of cult film in order to get collectors obsessing over how many nunsploitation movies they can cram onto their shelves, and one of the most elusive and awesome subsets is the cult musical.  Borne from the phenomenal cultural attachment to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, cult musicals are few and far between, largely because most cult movies are low budget and musicals are quite difficult to make in cinema form.  A notable exception is Francis Ford Coppola's box-office disaster One from the Heart, such a tanker that it killed the New Hollywood movement for good, though through the power of video rentals and the continuing success of its composer Tom Waits the film has gained a small following.  Perhaps there simply aren't many that are good enough to watch; for example, I've known about the Canadian sci-fi spoof musical Big Meat Eater for a while now but everything I've heard about it makes me hesitant to make the plunge into its Balonium depths.  However, after hearing about Population: 1 (1986) at Arbogast on Film I had no choice but to give it a spin, and I quickly realized that my play-by-play of what transpired may be the last record of my mortal existence, as my head was about to explode from post-punk counterculture ecstasy.  Or because I was trapped in a Philip K. Dick-brand-Gnosticism Demiurge trap of post-punk counterculture ecstasy.  Actually, thinking I'm trapped in the 1st cenury AD seems a picture of sanity in comparison to Population: 1.  If I'm not back in 72 minutes tell The Ordinaires that I love them.

Scratchy-ass B&W and the results of Björk time traveling to 1986 to start a third stream/progressive punk group set the stage for a woman running around empty urban wastes and lip-syncing to the audience.  She wails, she has thick makeup, she sleeps next to backwater docks, and we get a voice-over from a man who was disturbed to find himself the sole survivor of a suicide pact.  It appears we're watching the memoirs of Tomata duPlenty, lead singer of the L.A. techno-punk group The Screamers, and he's a fan of using his impressive reel-to-reel tape setup to play Star Wars up a couple of octaves.  Then the door to his studio blows up and he hallucinates, and we know that we're in for a great party movie, the kind where he sees his mother holding the Olympic torch for no reason and falling over in a series of still shots.  Memories of flooding are accentuated by flexatone Boing!'s, and he recites a messed up variation on My Country 'Tis of Thee, because satire.


Movie or goof-assed pseudo-beat-poetry one-man-show?  Tomata poses these questions as he monologues in a top hat and wife beater to nobody.  The player piano has no idea what he's talking about, either, though as he appears to be the only person left on Earth I guess he's got the right to do whatever he wants in his Pee-wee Playhouse bunker.  His bathroom appliances fly around, and that's not nearly as odd as his talk-singing.  Actually, I think this bunker was intended for Pee-wee and this guy murdered the Right Honorable Mr. Herman while disguised as Floory.  Before he has a wavy Wayne's World memory transition a computer flashes between his picture and his picture plus an elongated Pinocchio nose, and then his presumably dead girlfriend informs us that she's a "Jazz Vampire" through song.  She pukes hand-animated blood, and Tomata takes a bath, and Renaissance paintings flash past, and-

KRAKATHOOM!!!

As I tried to flatten my ash-covered, stuck up hair and mend the rips in my blackened clothes I made the realization that no review can sum up Population: 1.  At no point is the movie normal or even comprehensible, and would you have settled for anything else that has both the giant from Twin Peaks and a 12-year-old Beck playing the accordion?  I didn't think so.  For some Population: 1 will be unrecommendable; for other essential.  Its writer-director, Rene Daalder, made this after the minor cult high school movie Massacre at Central High and a failed (?) attempt at a Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.  He was also an underling of Russ Meyer, which might explain the boobs and breakneck pacing a bit but not so much the male nudity and half-assed video effects.  Population: 1 exists outside explanation and any need of approval or even an audience - and in a way YouTube has provided the ideal platform for these kinds of movies, whatever that kind of movie is.  An earlier cousin could be 200 Motels, the Frank Zappa-conceived disaster where every kind of crude satire and member of the Turtles was thrown at the wall in the hopes something would stick, but while it's entirely apparent that nobody had any control over 200 Motels (most certainly not Zappa) Daalder and duPlenty at least had a consistent vision of Population: 1 and must have known what they were doing.  In fact, the experience is so whimsically unhinged it's almost kind of cute, like a clown mounting a balloon-animal tribute to GG Allin.  That doesn't mean that any non-Daalder/duPlenty viewers will emerged unscathed or even sober, and I might as well have become the bastardly head growth from Bruce Robinson's insufferable How to Get Ahead in Advertising for how Earthbound my brain was after the last drum machine had beat its last circuit.


How's about this: I'll post the first 10 minutes below, and you take a look to see if you can handle it.  That way I can spend that time crawling back to reality and you can start planning your next Pot-'n'-Punk Hootenanny with or without the woozy anti-normalcy of Sirs Daalder and duPlenty*.  Either way, get Beck to play the accordion, preferably as a 12-year-old, but don't invite too many Twin Peaks actors or else you'll wind up with a fish in your coffee pot.

~PNK

*Kind of sounds like a carpet installation company, don't it?  Daalder & Duplenty, Remnant Wizards!

No Wave Honeymooning - LIVING ON TOKYO TIME (1987)

"Indie" cinema is a thriving, predictable business these days, but American independent cinema had to struggle to exposure throughout the latter half of the 20th century.  That isn't to say that every new indie hit will have any staying power - in many ways the yearly cattle call of critical darlings marching towards their inevitable deaths on home video is the very definition of sic transit gloria ars.  What many people may not realize is that this cycle has been turning since before the 90's, and the current glut of twee indie fluff has only arisen since the market became The House That Clerks Built.  That one little comedy became the model for independent film in America, and the market that ballooned into Blockbusters in its wake is part of what made Sundance and Tribeca the capitalist flypaper they are today.  The roots of the current model of indie cinema actually stretch back to the late 70's, a notable early success being John Sayles's wonderful debut Return of the Secaucus 7 in 1978.  The big difference between the 90's and the 80's is the affordability of home video - believe it or not, VHS tapes used to cost up to $89.95 (in 1980's dollars!), and the handful of indie hits that made it to video had to be quite blessed in order to survive beyond their initial release.  Living on Tokyo Time (1987) is a perfect example of the early stages of the indie success cycle, becoming a modest critical darling and getting a home video release in the late 80's before slipping into oblivion.  I was a little shocked the first time I watched it after snagging a VHS copy at Goodwill, as my mother actually remembered its initial release.  While harping on how forgotten the film is may send up red flags for some, Living on Tokyo Time is far from forgettable - just good-natured and supremely deadpan.

In Japan, we make many plans...

Our main character, the young, flaky and monotone Kyoko (Minako Ohashi), narrates to the viewer in talking head form, saying that she moved to America out of boredom with her office job.  She gets a job as a cook in a Japanese restaurant in San Francisco, as one of her goals was to see the Golden Gate Bridge.  Her white boss wears a kimono at work and asks Kyoko to help her tie the back, and you'd think she'd be more aware of foreign cultures considering her apartment is littered with Mexican decor and trinkets.  Meanwhile, we see young, monotone Japanese-American would-be rocker Ken (Ken Nakagawa) eat cereal in his undies as his girlfriend walks out on him -

- and the comic tone of the film is officially set.  One can sense that these two will meet, but their Meet Cute is more of a Meet Blah*:  Kyoko's boss insists on setting her up with Ken, as she thinks that him getting married will get him to talk more.  He agrees to get married next week before he even sees Kyoko, and after a narrated letter is sent by Kyoko to her parents ("I'll get to stay in America.") the two have moved in together.  Their marriage is so unceremonious it not only happened off screen but they didn't even crack a smile at each other.  After another cereal-eating scene, we get to see Kyoko's letter to her folks about how wonderful her new husband is:

Their friends have mixed reactions to the reveal of their marriage - Ken's friends give him congrats and their lunches ("Here, have my Snowball!") while a friend of Kyoko scoffs ("Just because he's in a rock band doesn't mean he's Paul McCartney!").  Kyoko and Ken have little reaction to these quips, and their marriage initially consists of scenes of Ken shaving, Kyoko walking down the street, and lots of mid-fi synthesizer beeping on the soundtrack.  The main attribute of their relationship is the tension between Kyoko trying to fit in while maintaining a Japanese identity (and assuming that Ken wants a traditional Japanese wife) while Ken has little interest in his heritage, at times possibly resenting it.  And when I say tension, I mean simmering humor, a quirky Casio soundtrack, amusing dialogue asides and a camera stapled to the floor 90% of the time.

What Living on Tokyo Time may lack in tracking shots it more than makes up for in background detail.  The static camera allows for odd compositions to sink in, like the owner of the restaurant making a phone call in front of a Mexican cowboy boot wall decoration and Ken walking in front of a graffito that says "NUKES = MUTANTS + PUKE".  Many of the small moments are made funny by just how deadpan the direction and tone are, such as when a restaurant scene cuts to a little kid wearing an Astro Boy mask while eating.  The funniest moment is when the leader of Ken's band shows his blase bandmates the finer techniques of jumping while playing a power chord, and it wouldn't be funny at all if the other guys did anything else but stand still.  In this way, Living on Tokyo Time's biggest influence may be Jim Jarmusch, whose No Wave classic Stranger than Paradise was one of the most successful and enduring independent films of the 80's.  The humor of that film grew out of mundanity and quirky human interaction, and Living on Tokyo Time swims in that brand of awkward amusement.


Much in that Jarmuschian spirit (or Kaurismakian, whichever you prefer), the fly-on-the-wall depiction of Ken and Kyoko's marriage is so low key you'd think it would be boring, but it somehow skates above the line of tedium to make a strangely satisfying watch.  Ken and Kyoko are so, so low key that any other treatment of their lives would have rendered them deeply tedious, but their gently opposing disconnections manage to work together and they make a cute couple.  There's a kind of hope in their blank union, as if anybody can find love despite their relative flaws.  Their marriage is also a light commentary on the Japanese-American experience, focusing on cultural disconnection and the malaise of living on the fringes of society.  The writer-director, Steven Okazaki, has mostly done documentary work on socio-political issues, such as Unfinished Business (on WWII Japanese-American internment) and White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  He keeps politics to the far back in this film, as a series of scenes of Ken watching a geisha dance on his TV (complete with interlacing and a clashing frame rate for added disconnection) is about as overt things get.  What does come to the forefront is that he loves his characters no matter how they feel about their heritage, and that love and happiness are ultimately more important, especially in the concrete wasteland that is urban America.  It's a practical and forward-thinking outlook, and while Ken and Kyoko may have differences and hurdles I'll never stop rooting for them.

Living on Tokyo Time is a surprisingly funny and heartwarming movie considering it's about as dead as a pan can get, so while I recommend it don't expect any busted guts.  These kinds of comedies have a hard time getting the much-coveted "Audience Favorite" awards at festivals, as American audiences are used to their comedies operating at one-liner warp speed.  It doesn't help that the video company that released it, Charter Entertainment, didn't live long enough to see much of the 90's, and the movie has never seen a DVD release.  It may never see the light of a laser, but the old VHS copies are quite cheap on Amazon (with two copies as low as $0.05).  Jarmusch fans know who they are, and they might get the biggest kick out of it, but if you need more convincing I'll let you know that the movie ends with a quote by Captain Beefheart: "You can't escape gravity."  For weirdos like me, it's hard to think of a bigger draw than that.

~PNK

*Apologies to Roger Ebert, of course.