Assorted Cheesiness

Just a couple of brief items to note, broadly related to cheese.

This week, I received a Zingerman's Catalog in the mail. For those of you who don't know, Zingerman's is a foodie's dream destination, a small-ish but always-busy deli and store in Ann Arbor, Michigan. They're the people behind Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating, a book I find myself frequently referring to when I shop. I find myself obsessing over their bread club membership, because one of the things I miss in my provincial life is artisan bread. But even more than their bread, I find myself thinking about their wide selection of cheeses.

Now, I may giggle at Kraft singles, tolerate the cubes of cheddar masquerading as appetizers at office parties, and shudder at the mere thought of Velvetta. But I adore a good cheese. I find Stilton deeply satisfying, as does my friend WannaBeMom. Gruyere takes me back to my childhood family holidays; I thought it a greater delicacy than any dessert at the table (a feeling I still hold to be true). And, much like my beloved Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame, I love Gorgonzola. And so I find myself looking at the Zingerman's catalog with something akin to lust, my private pornographic reading material. I'm not sure how I can control my urges before I ask Zingerman's to send me a little something-something in a plain brown wrapper.

Speaking of Wallace and Gromit, I did see their latest film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. As I predicted, it is a very strong film. One of the most satisfying things about the film, rated G, was hearing the audience--which consisted of more adults than children--laugh at clean and often groan-inducing humor. (I must note, though, the the film does have subtle touches of blue humor in its double-entendres complemented by visual gags, a first for these characters.) The film has all the hallmarks of the Wallace and Gromit shorts: the wacky inventions; Gromit's patient but unsentimental caregiving; Wallace's eternal optimism; and the thumbprints on the plasticine characters that remind everyone of the intensive labor of stop-motion animation.

But, like Corpse Bride, Curse of the Were-Rabbit is weakened by its attempt to adhere to a tight narrative structure. Corpse Bride feels constricted by its attempt to convey characterization; as a love story, in any of the possible configurations, the film's narrative is flimsily developed and the resolution painfully so. Really, the narrative is just an excuse to introduce a culture clash between the living and the dead. Romeo and Juliet, it ain't. As much as I enjoyed the Bonejangles sequence, which I'm practically frothy about, I'm much less enamored by the film's need to justify its length by padding the narrative. It would have been much better as a short.

The same should be said of Curse of the Were-Rabbit. It feels equally hampered by the commercial need to be a full-length film. In fact, one of the first things MPiC said upon leaving the theater was, "I enjoyed it, but I wonder if the time [spent producing one full-length Wallace and Gromit film] would have been better spent making three shorts." Like Corpse Bride, Curse uses a romance, its anarchic spoof of classic horror films alternating with a focus on Wallace's lady-love interest. Admittedly, the character of Lady Campanula Tottington is approriate to the world of Wallace and Gromit, and Helena Bonham Carter proves herself to be a fine voice actor for the role. Still Wallace's & Tottington's relationship feels overdetermined and unoriginal. (A subplot involving Gromit's interest is much more cleverly done and is in the spirit of the shorts.)

So even though I enjoyed them, both Corpse Bride and Curse of the Were-Rabbit have me lamenting the commercial imperative to make full-length films. Both films would have been much stronger if cut in half, perhaps even as short films shown before a full-length movie. I miss the double-bill. And I miss the frenetic pacing, disjointed narratives, and wacky associative humor (even the cheesy stuff which pays homage to vaudeville) that marks the short cartoons of Hollywood's golden age. The demise of the 7-minute cartoon as a commercially viable form for movie theaters--which occured for numerous reasons--has transformed animated films, but not always for the better.

Halloween and Miss Manners

Candy, candy, candy…that’s one of biggies of Halloween, so of course I want to observe it! But it’s more than that.

Now, Miss Manners has dismissed Halloween as simply an indulgent (self and otherwise) holiday. I beg to differ, there’s nothing simple about indulgence at all. I have fond memories of Halloween as a time when my imagination was allowed its wildest flights of fancy. I could be anyone or anything I wanted for that one night, and anything could happen during the wee witching hours. So, if to believe in a little bit of magic, in the potential to see your world and yourself in a new way, is something Miss Manners wishes to curtail, I may need to stop taking her advice.

Phantom of the Opera

Wow. I just got to see Phantom of the Opera as the feature of my area's Annual Silent Movie Night. The film print, which admittedly wasn’t in great shape, was accompanied by live music played on a Wurlitzer organ. The film was shown in a historic theater, to a sold-out crowd which ranged in age from around eight to eighty.

It’s really a masterpiece, still engaging as both a melodrama and a horror film. Although proficiently directed by Rupert Julian, it is Lon Chaney’s performance as the Phantom which has become so iconic. Chaney’s many faces, both physically and emotionally, kept me and the rest of the audience rapt. (Chaney, by the way, is also unforgettable as Quasimodo in the 1923 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.)

It wasn’t until I saw the film that I realized just how derivative Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pop-opera of the same name is--or, if you’re feeling generous, just how the opera is an homage to the film. I also suspect Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! might be paying tribute to the film with the song, “Come What May.”

One last note: if you’ve never seen a silent film accompanied by live music, do so! It really inflects your movie-going experience. I’ve have the privilege of seeing many films this way, including Chaplin and Keaton shorts and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. I attend such movie-going experiences whenever I get the chance, and I never regret it. Although it is not the organization I saw perform with the film, I highly recommend the work of the Alloy Orchestra and whose current tour features Phantom.

A Provincial Life 6

Living a provincial life in terms of travel means…

• October means Halloween, Halloween means corn mazes for folks in my area (as I assume it does for much of the country.) I love them. In the past, I’ve had to drive anywhere from ½ hour to an hour to reach one. Now, I only need to drive 10 minutes to get to one.
• My local airport is also convenient, another example of a 10-15 minute drive. I can park in its long-term parking lot for $5 a day, and the walk from my car to the terminal is under 5 minutes. I've been known to comment on the irony that the airport is what I love most about living here, because the airport makes getting out of town so convenient. Of course, that convenience is somewhat offset when I remember my final destinations are almost always one or two connections away rather than direct flights, and the connections add a few hours to my overall travel time.
• We have trains, we do. Not light-rail ones or commuter lines. We have one Amtrak passenger line. It passes through our provincial town in the middle of the night. (The depot’s station hours are midnight-8.00 a.m.) We also have a rather constant stream of freight trains running right through the downtown area. Very picturesque. One of the old depots is now a Senior Activities Center.
• Whoo-hoo! We continue to have bus service within my region, even though Greyhound pulled out of the state last year.
• Lots of people bike to work and other destinations. No, the reason isn’t because we’re a health-conscious community. No, it’s not because the city is well-designed for bicyclists or even pedestrians. It’s because there’s a fair amount of underpaid workers whose primary modes of transportation are the city’s limited mass transportation options, their feet, or bicycling.

I Have Food Issues

Oooooh, I could go on about the food issues and family. (I’m just a big cannoli tube of issues.)

Have you ever noticed when big groups of family (and sometimes even friends) get together to go out to eat spontaneously—like when choosing restaurants outside your hometown—everyone’s too paralyzed to make decisions? The indecisiveness isn’t explained as stemming from a group’s lack of planning or the unwillingness individuals collectively demonstrate when it comes to taking charge of social situations. It’s credited, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, to needing to consider the person with the difficult diet. Sometimes it’s the person with allergies, sometimes the one who as a child was a picky eater, sometimes the person on a diet. And much of the time, the label of difficult diet-person is a reflection of the group's perceptions and anxieties more than being grounded in any sort of reality.

For years, it’s been me who has been labeled difficult. I'm the vegetarian who makes finding a restaurant in a new city such a hardship. Me, who can pretty much eat anywhere, even at steakhouses, because I’ve never met a green salad or baked potato I didn’t like. Of course, eating salads and side dishes instead of entrees makes other folks uncomfortable--c'mon, splurge, you're eating out! And so late-night dinners or default dinner choices tend to be credited to looking for a speciality restaurant for me. Meanwhile, I keep an energy bar in my pocket and sneak bites as the inevitable debates turn into delays. [By the way, I do offer restaurant suggestions, generally ignored, before stating I am amenable to eating at the restaurant decided upon by either group consensus or majority preference. I do not share my energy bars, though.]

Lemming Thought of the Day: Apparently, our American Puritanical streak doesn't extend to moderation in dining, at least not when we're eating out and hoping to get "our money's worth" from a meal--defined by quantity over quality. No wonder we're an obese nation. I give up. Please pass the cream sauce and bring me a steak as big as my head.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

One of the things I'm loving about films right now is the competition in the animated film market. Driven partially by the onslaught of family-friendly, holiday entertainment, partially by the attempt to generate Oscar buzz, and partially by an interest in working with CGI/digital animation's potential when combined with traditional animation techniques, studios are releasing a fair number of animated films which are of interest to animation buffs and scholars alike. We may be experiencing another golden age of animation!

Now that Corpse Bride has been released to largely positive reviews, audiences can look forward to an even more promising film--Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. As much as I enjoyed Corpse Bride, I believe this film will be even more popular and well-received.

The folks behind Cartoon Brew, whose thumbs-up recommendations act as the animation world's Ebert and Roeper, has given the film high praise. I concur. After all, these are the folks behind the Wallace & Gromit shorts [A Grand Day Out (1989), the first Wallace & Gromit and a six-year effort; The Wrong Trousers (1993), a penguin-heist film with references to The Great Train Robbery and Hitchcock thrillers; and A Close Shave (1995), where a love story collides with a sheep-assisted jailbreak), the Creature Comfort series, which has just been released on DVD; and Chicken Run (2000), an animated Great Escape which features chickens. The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is Wallace and Gromit's feature-length debut.

Nick Parks, the mind and motivation behind Aardman Studios, is a bit of a perfectionist. (The film is co-directed with Steve Box, who worked as an animator on Chicken Run and other Wallace and Gromit films.) This personality quirk is a real plus for stop-motion animation (and for all animation, actually). What's more, Parks is on record, as with this NPR interview, in saying he waited for the right story and kept to the appropriate look for his trademark characters. Further, although Parks is willing to experiment with his characters, for instance adding lips to new characters, he's not afraid to resist the conventions of big-budget films and to keep the the original small-studio aesthetics. Aardman teamed with Dreamworks to produce this film, and word is that Jeffrey Katzenberg--one of the men behind The Little Mermaid (1989)--support Parks's vision and remained very hands-off. All this portends well for the film. Like with Corpse Bride, this will be a film I see opening weekend.

A side note for those who are interested: Wallace and Gromit are models made of plasticine, a soft and moldable material which allows the animators to manipulate the figurines in subtle ways.

MirrorMask

A brief tidbit: in limited release right now is a Sony production named MirrorMask. This is a film directed by Dave McKean, written by Neil Gaiman and McKean, and featuring the work of Henson's Creature Shop. I don't happen to live near any area where it is or will be playing, but it's been get some good buzz. It's probably worth a look.

For those who want more information about the film, I've copied this synopsis from About.com:
"MIRRORMASK tells the story of Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), a fifteen-year-old girl working for her family circus, who wishes-quite ironically-that she could run away from the circus and join real life. But such is not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into the Dark Lands, a fantastic landscape filled with giants, monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. On her quest to return home, Helena searches for the Mirrormask, an object of enormous power, which is her only hope of escaping the Dark Lands."

Note: About also hosts trailers and interviews.

More Corpse Bride

I saw Corpse Bride with MPiC when it opened nationally a little over a week ago. We both enjoyed it quite a bit, particularly for the creation of the underworld. MPiC has never seen Nightmare Before Christmas (or Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Ed Wood) and is relatively unaware of Burton's whimsical visuals. Me, I've seen all those films, plus some, and I'll see pretty much watch anything Burton's involved in, even with a 50/50 chance of hating/loving it. In this case, I loved the film.

First, though, the criticisms. The film isn't as wildly imaginative or as richly provocative as Nightmare. Nor is it as dark, despite the fact one of its major characters is a dead bride. It's actually a sweet and somewhat sentimental story about romantic love, with the rather predictable outcome of

*****spoilers*****


the Corpse Bride (voiced by Helena Bonham Carter, a Burton favorite) willingly relinquishing any claim to Victor (Johnny Depp, another fave) so that he may marry Victoria (Emily Watson), a more suitable bride if for no other fact than she still needs oxygen. Truth be told, though, the Corpse Bride is the far more compelling love interest and so her self-sacrifice is somewhat bittersweet. Again, this is a typical Burtonian touch.

But it is not the plot that makes Corpse Bride memorable. Part of this has to do with its length. At 76 minutes, the film is and feels a bit short. It should be noted, though, that the film thankfully doesn't feel a need to privilege narrative, let alone narrative consistency. There's a welcome absence of heavy-handed exposition scenes meant to provide psychological depth to characters; this kind of lazy shortcut to real character development marred Burton's Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (and many other summer flicks, including Batman Begins and Crash).

No, what makes the film stand out are the visuals. Co-directors Burton and Mike Johnson (who actually oversaw most of the day-to-day work) manage to create a visually compelling world that was both consistent with Burton's ouevre and paid homage to other works of animation. The film's world takes as its inspirational departure a Vincent Price-ian Victorianism for both setting and costume. And, of course, the film draws on the stop-motion animation of Harryhausen; it acknowledges that debt in a sly visual reference involving a grand piano. And that's only one of many references. Other bloggers have noted similarities to the Rankin/Bass stop-motion animation holiday cartoon Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970) in its character designs and its quick Disney references, such as a quirky version of the dress-making scene in Disney's Cinderella (1950).

And as to be expected, there has been a lot of praise for the musical number, "Remains of the Day," written and performed by Burton longtime collaborator Danny Elfman. Most bloggers not its allusion to an early Disney short, The Skeleton Dance (1929). To my knowledge, though, no one has really pointed out the film's equal indebtedness to the Fleischer Brothers films like their Betty Boop films Minnie the Moocher (1932) and Snow White (1933), both of which offer jazzy scores, guest vocalists, and surrealish underworld scenes. Elfman's portrayal as Bonejangles, backed up by the Skeletones, seems as much a knowing wink to Fleischer fans as to Disney ones.

These allusions make the film particularly enjoyable for an animation buff, but by no means detract from the originality of the film's vision. If you are a buff, would like to underwstand one, or would simply like to see something beyond the standard Disney/Pixar fare, check out Corpse Bride.

Snarky Work Comment of the Day

I received feedback from my college's Curriculum Committee on my proposal for a new film course. There were no major comments, and the committee is quite supportive of the class. But there was some confusion about the inclusion of prerequisites: English xxxx, English xxxx, or Theatre xxxx. Apparently, some members didn't understand whether students will need to take all or one of the listed courses to meet the prerequisite. I guess or doesn't mean what it used to mean.

(Side note: I'll be posting more regularly now. In addition spending the last couple of weeks meeting deadlines for a work-intensive committee I chair and working with senior on their various thesis projects, I've spent my recent free time on the new computer I bought for personal use. Now that these tasks are winding down, I will pick up on blogging more.)