THREE FANTASTIC JOURNEYS BY KAREL ZELMAN - #s 1015-1017

It doesn’t take long into Journey to the Beginning of Time, the first movie in Criterion’s excellent Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman collection, to have cause to wonder why the pioneering director isn’t more famous. Released in 1955, the same year It Came from Beneath the Sea showcased the artistry of Ray Harryhausen, Journey to the Beginning of Time’s special effects are just as impressive, just as innovative, with Zeman proving himself a worthy successor to George Melies. Is it because his movies were aimed at children? That doesn’t stop us from liking Wes Anderson’s animated movies or Zazi dans le Metro [review]. It’s puzzling.

Karel Zeman is a Czech filmmaker who began his career in the 1940s, working on short films for the leading animation company in Czechoslovakia. Four of those early efforts are included here as bonus features, and the chosen entries already showcase a level of experimentation that is impressive, including 1949’s Inspiration--a fanciful cartoon featuring glass objects come to life. A glass blower imagines a whole world contained within a raindrop, and it invigorates his art. 1945’s A Christmas Dream similarly shows a young girl dreaming of a discarded toy dancing for her favor in a bid not to be discarded for her newer presents. Those films have live action elements, but 1946’s A Horseshoe for Luck is entirely stop motion. It was the debut of Zeman’s popular creation Mr. Prokouk (Mr. Puppet), a little man with a penchant for slapstick, and this particular short was made to encourage people to recycle their scrap for the greater good. A post-war PSA!

These extras are rounded out by the longest piece, the half-hour King Lavra from 1950. This full-color stop-motion fairy tale is based on a satirical poem--but is constructed as a silent film? Something is being lost in translation somewhere. Exquisite vintage animation, stylish puppets, but the story of a king, his unruly beard, and his rabbit ears (?!?) falls flat.

The main body of the boxed set kicks off with the aforementioned Journey to the Beginning of Time, Zeman’s second feature-length film, and it’s comparable to a Disney adventure picture or even a drive-in B-movie. Journey stars a quartet of young boys who, inspired by Jules Verne’s novel Journey to the Center of the Earth, decide to find their own pathway to the past. This is something they do easily, the way adventures begin in a lot of children’s literature, from A.A. Milne on up. Once you start out, you are there. In this case, after finding a trilobite fossil near a cave on the river, they follow the clue and sail the water into the cavernous depths, coming out the other side in the Ice Age, and traveling further back in time the closer this river takes them to the ocean. Along the way, they spot a number of prehistoric creatures fighting and eating and generally just living their lives along the banks of the water.

Zeman’s main composite trick here is to show the children in the river, with the dinosaurs in either the foreground or the background, letting distance aid in the illusion of present and past combining. In other shots, he builds larger models and puppets so the children can get closer. There is not much story here, nor much that surprises, but that simplicity aids in the suspension of disbelief. Zeman’s greatest tool is a childlike imagination, and the young actors in Journey to the Beginning of Time go a long way to selling the reality via their acceptance of their surroundings. This story is real because they believe it to be so.

In essence, Journey to the Beginning of Time is both a travelogue and a museum exhibit come to life. Each turn of the river takes us to a new diorama of the past. It’s a perfect showcase for Zeman to show off his skills, but also an educational adventure that I am sure inspired awe back in its original time, as it still remains impressive today. Younger children will still likely get wrapped up in its sense of exploration, while older viewers like me can appreciate the technique on display.

There is a definite maturation from Journey to the Beginning of Time to 1958’s Invention for Destruction. The plotting may still be simple, but the presentation is anything but, as Zeman takes his style to the next level and then to the next level after that.

Based once again on the writings of Jules Verne, Invention for Destruction tells the story of a young scientist caught up in a plot to steal benign energy technology and turn it into a terrible weapon. The narrative Zeman concocts is nothing progressive--a mentor figure is clueless to his failings, a naïve girl falls for the villain yet ends up with the hero--but the film is nevertheless something astounding to behold. I imagine this is the kind of thing that Kerry Conran intended with Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a dazzling visual pulp; luckily, Zeman doesn’t get so lost in his own construction that he abandons story and character completely a la Conran. There’s just enough here to ensure Invention for Destruction is more than simply pretty pictures.

Oh, but what pictures they are! Invention for Destruction is not just a combination of live actors and cool stop-motion effects. There are submarines and dirigibles and the giant lair of an evil mad scientist. Zeman’s sets are all made to look like storybook illustrations, as if the entire world has been drawn around his actors. It’s a surprisingly seamless illusion that lends to the authenticity of the impossibilities the movie portrays. Zeman’s vision is clear, and yet, he’s only just getting warmed up.

Four more years passed between Invention for Destruction and The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, time well-spent not just building the movie, but advancing Zeman’s considerable craft. The picture starts on the moon, combining practical effects with animation to create a world of pure cinematic myth, a manifestation of the titular Baron’s tall tales. Then the adventure takes us to Earth, through the palace of a sultan and onto the high seas and even into the belly of a giant fish. All the while, Zelman’s composite animation grows more seamless. There is also an added experimentation with color and sound, scenes tinted with one hue and dialogue turned to garbled brass (think the adults in Peanuts cartoons) with both restored to full clarity as story demands, that makes The Fabulous Baron Munchausen all the more dazzling.

The story is also more fun and a bit more high energy than Invention, though not nearly as high-octane as Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Even if Gilliam and Zeman were not fiddling with the same source material, it would be impossible not to compare them, as Zeman is a clear influence. It’s not just the cut-out animation style that Zeman sometimes uses, or the irreverent sense of humor, but storytelling devices. His Munchausen has a tagalong witness that gets involved in the narrative expedition, just as most of Gilliam’s heroes do, right up through his most recent The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I’d say the later filmmaker could use some of his predecessor’s restraint, but honestly, I can’t say I wish Zeman had Gilliam’s resources, because it would kill some of his resourcefulness.

It feels so rare to be charmed by movies the way I was by the ones contained in Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman. With other “fantastic journeys” seemingly just a mouse click away these days, it’s easy to forget just how imaginative and special cinema can be. Using only the physical objects at his disposal, be they paper, paint, or even flesh, Karel Zeman managed to turn the simple into the remarkable, and translate his own sense of wonder to the screen without losing an ounce of its energy. His aim was to entertain children, but he ended up striking a much broader audience...

...especially now that this collection is readily available. Getting in the spirit of their subject, Criterion have really outdone themselves with the creative packaging for Three Fantastic Journeys by Karel Zeman. Do yourself a favor and get your copy now, because the first printing comes in a fold-out cardboard case, with special die-cut pop-up designs for each movie. You’ll be sorry if you don’t.

These discs provided by the Criterion Collection for the purposes of review.

JABBERWOCKY - #903

Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” is considered the greatest nonsense poem of all time, inventing its own language and creating a picture of a monster that it is both fearsome and silly. Knowing that, and watching Terry Gilliam’s first feature-length film as a solo artist, 1977’s Carroll-inspired Jabberwocky, gives some context to where the filmmaker is coming from.

But I’m not convinced that all of the above is a good thing.

I don’t quite get what to make of Jabberwocky. I decided to watch it after viewing Gilliam’s latest, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a cursed production about a cursed production and how art can drive one to madness. It’s a dull mess. The cosmos did everything it could to warn Gilliam away from this folly, but the auteur identified with the dizzy Don a little too much, it seems. You’d think after a couple of decades that Gilliam would have figured out The Man Who Killed Don Quixote; my guess is that instead the maestro shed no ideas gathered across all those years, landing this beast with all the brambles and barnacles of various development hells intact.

Too bad then that I don’t see much clearer thinking behind Jabberwocky. I don’t understand what this film is supposed to be. The obvious answer would be a satirical fantasy, mining similar comedic veins as The Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but without the talented Python ensemble to back their American partner up.

Jabberwocky is lit like it’s Barry Lyndon, but its set decorators are more obsessed with grit and grime and making everything oily and dirty. And the director himself with scatological humor. We see more than one person defecate, and the hero of the piece, Michael Palin’s typically clueless Dennis, is urinated on twice. Dennis is every Terry Gilliam protagonist: a befuddled doofus buffeted about by society, trapped in a quagmire of red tape, bad faith, and inexplicable social mores, obsessed with love that is beyond his reach, but ultimately stumbling into some semblance of a resolution.

Palin gives it a good try. This is totally his wheelhouse, after all. Any appeal that Dennis has comes from Michael Palin’s genuine and undeniable likability. The character has no traits worth rooting for--he’s single-minded, self-absorbed, and lacking in finesse or taste--yet one can’t look at Michael Palin’s innocent, open face and wish him to fail.

Ostensibly, Jabberwocky is a quest story. The titular Jabberwocky is terrorizing villages in the kingdom, and our expectation is that once Dennis leaves his small hamlet for the royal city, he will somehow be put in position to slay the beast, and thus be the hero he didn’t know he could be. And we do get there, but not before a lot of detours into undercooked sketches where Gilliam satirizes medieval culture and takes the piss out of more romantic views of the period. You fancy being a knight of the Round Table? Well, be prepared to live in filth and squalor amongst unenlightened people with no real moral compass. The level of humor here is maybe best illustrated by Dennis and the rich merchant of his village, Mr. Fishfinger (Warren Mitchell), laughing about a man who got so scared his teeth turned “snowflake white.” Get it? They are all gross and are too stupid to know it!

Gilliam plays a lot of these moments as an afterthought. In the city, we see other merchants racing their litters, pushing the men carrying them to the limit, just to arrive at court first. It’s a nice way to show how these greedy nobles behave, but there is little payoff. Gilliam is off to the next idea, ill concerned with the connective tissue. Which might be fine if these gags were just funnier. The witticisms aren’t as sharp as the ones we got in Holy Grail, nor does the film have anything to say, a la Life of Brian.

And yes, I know, this is supposed to be nonsense, and I am probably taking my comedy way too seriously. Except, when you’re not laughing, what else do you have to think about but why?

I’d also suggest that if Jabberwocky is intended as nonsense, then its conforming to our narrative expectations in the final 30 minutes of the movie violates its own mission. As predicted, Dennis ends up in service to the knight who goes after the Jabberwocky, and it takes expected deviations from there. Amazingly, with the plot getting more straightforward, Jabberwocky somehow becomes even more flat. I didn’t think it was possible. The monster reveal, however, is fantastic, with Gilliam using extreme angles and an obstructed view to slowly ratchet up the feelings of dread and fear. Plus, the monster is really cool, an appropriately odd-looking practical construction.

Let’s be honest, Gilliam is at his best when he has someone keeping him in check. While Jabberwocky could arguably be forgiven as an effort by a filmmaker finding his own way, it has that overloaded feeling that permeates a lot (if not all) of the director’s work. His best films, like Brazil [review] and The Fisher King, succeed because they are tightened up (I can’t imagine what the studio execs who hated the ending of Brazil would think of Jabberwocky’s finale), and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is the example that proves the rule, its volume and excess making it exciting. At his worst, no one appears to be watching--either behind the scenes or in front of the screen (Tideland and The Zero Theorem come to mind). Jabberwocky feels like a filmmaker unleashed...but almost like he still has to crawl before he can really run.

SELECTED SHORTS IV: ANIMATION EDITION - CRITERION CHANNEL

The Criterion Channel, in addition to hosting a plethora of feature films, also has a varied collection of short films--live action, animated, fiction, documentary; comedy and drama; silent and talkies.

Since this will post while I am attending this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, I decided to select this month’s films according to an appropriate theme. Namely, all of these shorts are animated.

Old Man (2012; United States; 6 minutes): Director Leah Shore takes a recorded phone call between author Marlin Marynick and an imprisoned Charles Manson and brings it to life via a mish-mash of animation styles. The technique is impressive, but the intent is questionable. These morphing images defang the malice and sick ideas inherent in Manson’s rant, which may be the point, but it doesn’t sit well with me to see his ramblings treated as if they were a piece of innocuous found audio or an internet meme. The lack of editorialization more or less suggests that he’s a harmless old coot and his stream of consciousness is at best humorous and at worst normal. Which may be overthinking it, but that’s my impression nonetheless. 

The short is accompanied by a 5-minute introduction by the director, which failed to change my mind. While Shore does give some insight into her own creative process and explains how she stitched this six minutes together from hours of interviews, it also reveals a lack of insight into the source material and a strange divorcement from everything loaded into the Manson persona. Art for art’s sake is fine, but callous kitsch is just lazy.

Call of Cuteness (2017; Germany; 4 minutes): Brenda Lien uses a tiled animation style to spotlight our obsession with cats and the memes their opportunistic owners spawn before moving into more grotesque areas that call into question just what the hell we are doing to these animals. Both alluring and unsettling, it’s just the right kind of media consumption indictment, not entirely what it critiques, but just enough that, when it’s all said and done, we feel like a pile of garbage for so easily being drawn in.

Pussy (2016; Poland; 9 minutes): This one is not about cats. But it does have a vagina that detaches itself from its owner and becomes sentient. I was disturbed by it, but I don’t think director Renata Gasiorowska intended me to be. Which probably says enough and maybe I should just stop right here....

Begone Dull Care (1949; Canada; 8 minutes): Set to the jazz of the Oscar Peterson Trio, this abstract animated film from Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart is a joyous explosion of sound and color. Bending lines, morphing shapes, the texture and groove of film itself dances to the rhythm, bringing improvisational modern art together with two of the most popular art forms of the time--film and music. A delightful confectionary.

Asparagus (1979; USA; 18 minutes): Suzan Pitt’s animated experiment was often paired with David Lynch’s Eraserhead in its early years, the two playing art houses together as a dual course for adventurous filmgoers.

The colorful visuals perfectly bring to life late 1970s psychedelia, looking like an underground comic strip animated by a Monty Python-era Terry Gilliam. Pictorially stream of conscious, Pitt’s narrative is made up of images melting and transforming into the next thing. It is both mind-bending and sexual, with the image of the asparagus plant itself serving as a proxy for both male and female sex organs.

Edmond Was a Donkey (2012; Croatia; 15 minutes): An office prank inspires an outsider to reject the conformity of his co-workers and embrace what makes him different; in this case, his desire to have the simple, contemplative life of a donkey. Franck Dion’s 3D modeling has the feel of a modern storybook, making the surreal seem solid. Edmond’s journey is one of perception. Is he sick? Is he crazy? Or does he just know more than everyone else. The ending is appropriately ambiguous in some ways, but also allows the viewer to feel a sense of satisfaction by leaning in favor of Edmond getting his wish.

BRAZIL (Blu-Ray) - #51

"Everything is connected all along the line. Cause and effect. That's the beauty of it."

In between finishing re-watching Brazil and starting this review, I tweeted, "One day I'm going to program a triple-bill of Blade Runner, Brazil, and Soderbergh's Kafka." It strikes me that all movies are of a similar piece: strange visions of an alternate world with shades of 1940s noir style, all three misunderstood, a trio of troubled productions where the film is regularly overshadowed by the respective failures and battles for creative freedom. That they all also involve a singular hero lost in bureaucratic nightmares of varying complexities, terrorist organizations, and, in the case of the B-movies, a woman who is going to be strangled in red tape, also doesn't hurt in terms of the grouping. (It's been a while since I've seen Kafka. I forget how exactly Theresa Russell's character figures in the plot.)

Brazil is Terry Gilliam's vision of a George Orwellian future, released a year after the author's 1984 predictions failed to come to pass. The film stars Jonathan Pryce (Glengarry GlenRoss) as Sam Lowry, a low-level clerk in the Ministry Of Information (moi?) with no aspirations to rise higher, despite strings being pulled on his behalf. Sam's dreams are of a different nature. He imagines himself as a winged warrior, soaring through the cloudy sky, challenging shadowy hordes of deformed creatures and a giant samurai made out of technological bits and bobs. Such dreams are not very lucrative, however; in this future, information is a top commodity, and when the government requires it from you, you are also required to cover the cost. So begins a plot where an accidental typo causes a man named Buttle to be wrongfully detained. When he dies in custody, Sam tries to make amends by delivering Buttle's refund check to the man's widow.

As many Kafka-esque heroes have found before him (as well, as Kafka's own; see also Joseph K. in Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial), attempting to untangle a disorganized filing system only causes further complications and likely get your own personal file dropped down a round bin. Sam is suddenly on the other side of the line that divides his official, privileged world and the common man. There are organizations that resent the interfering government and terrorists who lash out at tyranny and mass consumption alike. One such agent of chaos is Harry Tuttle (Robert De Niro), a freelance repairman who circumvents official channels to fix Sam's heating system. He may also have been the man that was supposed to be on the arrest warrant instead of Buttle. Another new acquaintance of Sam's is Jill Layton (Kim Greist), Buttle's neighbor, a truck driver, and a dead ringer for the girl of Sam's dreams. Jill's been trying to clear Buttle's name, and now she's possibly marked for future arrest herself. If Sam can keep her out of the system, he can save her in real life the way he does in his fantasies.

Gilliam rebuilds society from the ground up. His sci-fi imaginings are more in line with how futurists envisioned the oncoming world back in the 1940s, full of pneumatic tubes and criss-crossing wires. Computers are a hybrid of what systems were really like in the mid-'80s and classic typewriters. Men dress in suits, while art deco buildings scrape the sky. Women's fashion has grown outlandish, though even now we will recognize the quest for beauty through fad diets and cosmetic surgery as a wholly accurate identification of social trends. Sam's mother Ida (the excellent Katherine Helmond) allows her surgeon (Jim Broadbent) to push and pull at her face to smooth out the wrinkles, while her best friend submits to acid treatments that burn her flesh. Theirs is a world disconnected from the working man. It's a dichotomy we also see in living conditions. The poor live in rundown slums resembling disused factories. Beyond the city lines, life is more functional, less aesthetically pleasing.

Brazil's labyrinthine constructs are matched by the twists and turns of the screenplay, which Gilliam co-wrote with his regular script partner Charles McKeown (Plunkett & Macleane) and master playwright Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Shakespeare in Love [review]). Sam must navigate the back streets and dark alleys along with the corporate structure of the Ministry of Information. The further he travels, the more the illusions fall away, even as the system tightens around him. As with the best Gilliam, Brazil is desultory and loud and often overwhelming. It's easy to overload on any one entry from the director's oeuvre. Yet, there is a purity to Brazil, a go-for-broke overabundance of design that smacks of ambition and naïveté. This is Gilliam before the system broke him, before the studio thugs gutted his dreams the way M.O.I. ultimately lobotomizes Sam. Most of the supplements on the Criterion editions of Brazil have been about the different permutations and the fight for the film, and the Blu-Ray is no different. It also includes the studio's version, which is considerably shorter than the approved director's cut. It's known as the "Love Conquers All" version, and lacks the visual bravado that concludes Gilliam's original, when Sam's romantic fantasies take over. The last section of Brazil is a surreal run through all that came before, like a mini remake of the entire film, a mad dash through Sam's psyche.

It's also a love letter to the creative spirit. Sam loves old movies, he surrounds himself in imagery from classic Hollywood. In a different version of his fantasies, he maybe fancies himself a celluloid hero. This is Gilliam's most realized irony: Sam actually is a celluloid hero. He is a noir detective, he is Hitchcock's wronged man, a pulp-fiction pugilist. He's not Humphrey Bogart, but maybe Dick Powell. Likewise, Brazil, with all its trials and tribulations, is a vibrant capsulization of cinema history, of Terry Gilliam's own bid for a star in the hall of fame, and all the heartbreak that comes with dreaming big. Brazil is its own self-fulfilling prophecy, audacious and mesmerizing and as fascinating today as it was nearly 30 years ago.

Criterion's new edition of Brazil features the expected high-definition transfer, presumably updated even from their single disc release of the film, struck from a 35mm source. The picture is shown at its original 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio, MPEG-4 encoded at 1080p. Overseen by Gilliam, the presentation here is exquisite, with an exceptional level of detail and beautifully varied colors. The film still shows its age at times, with minor instances of surface noise and a few scenes where the edges of the frame grow a bit warped, but the overall look of the transfer is strong. Shadows and gray fog alike look excellent, skin tones have a natural sun-deprived pallor, and the fantasy material really shines. In other cases, with other films, high-definition sometimes exposes the seams, spit, and glue used to hold old special effects together and removes some of the illusion. This is not a problem with Brazil. On the contrary, you can enjoy the remarkable art direction as never before.

This Blu-Ray release comes as a two-disc set, packaged in a standard-sized plastic case with a staggered tray. The accompanying booklet has pictures, credits, and a critical essay. The main disc features the full-length, 142-minute director cut along with the exceptionally candid and detailed audio commentary with Terry Gilliam. This is the same commentary from Criterion's original boxed set, issued in the mid-1990s, and indeed, the overall package here replicates that phenomenal collection.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk. Images here were taken from promotional materials and were not taken from the Blu-Ray under review.

LA JETEE/SANS SOLEIL (Blu-Ray) - #387

Chris Marker is, undisputedly, a unique and gifted filmmaker. His point of view is unlike any of his contemporaries, and over the years, he has continued to work at his own pace and pursuing his own interests. I am sure there was a time when he could have chucked it all and pursued some big deals, but at this juncture, he has so far resisted. Marker is still alive, and the 90-year-old artist is still working, his last published credit being the updated version of his CD-ROM Immemory in 2008.

La Jetée, Marker's most famous film, like so much art, was conceived under seemingly unsurpassable restrictions. Marker could not afford a movie camera, so he made do with the materials available to him. La Jetée is a short film put together with still photographs and audio narration recorded by the writer/director on a tape recorder. The fact that the 27-minute visual narrative that emerged is so complex and daring is something akin to a miracle.

The story of La Jetée begins with an unforgettable incident in one boy's life. He witnessed a man die at the airport when just a child, and he was never able to shake the image from his mind. As an adult, he survived World War III only to end up the guinea pig in a time-travel experiment. The man (Davos Hanich) is an ideal candidate because his fixation on that one moment gives him a focal point for his journey. During his first forays into the past, he finds a woman (Hélène Chatelain) who was also at the airport during the death scene, and they develop a relationship. It's only when the man goes forward into the future that he realizes his captors have different ideas for how they plan to use him and the technology he is helping develop.

Plot-spotters might recognize this tale as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. As much as I like that later film, there is something more elegant about La Jetée. It is far simpler and yet far more emotional. The scenes of the man and the woman enjoying their dates are understated and direct, reminiscent of Luchino Visconti's Le notti bianche. Marker avoids the usual goopy sentimentality of love stories by allowing for the romance to be an unexpressed tension interpreted by the audience. What exactly is the man doing in pursuit of this love he can never have? What does it mean for his greater mission?

Despite the lack of movement or dialogue, La Jetée is never stagnant. It is like a living comic book. The images of Paris post-devastation are awe-inspiring, and the art direction for all the future scenes makes use of cramped framing to work around the limited budget. Yet, it never feels as if Marker is cheating. The ingeniousness of the solution is that the future is a time of burial; the open skies of the past are just that, a thing of the past. All of our tomorrows are distant and shrinking as mankind destroys itself.

The movie has a variety of interpretations. It ruminates on war, madness, and mortality. Which facet you choose is important will dictate how you relate to it. You may choose to explore all at once, even. It's all there.

Marker released Sans Soleil twenty years after La Jetée, following a period of primarily focusing on politically motivated filmmaking. Thematically, Sans Soleil is similar to La Jetée in that it deals with memory, time, and the consequence of history. Its title, which translates as Sunless, refers to an interlude in the film when, after looking at some footage of Iceland, Marker imagines a science-fiction movie he might one day make. It is one where a distant traveler will come to Earth and be surprised by the inconceivable injustice that exists within an otherwise blessed society. The director immediately dismisses the movie as one he will never get off the ground, but it's a tangent worth exploring nonetheless.

I say that the director dismisses the idea of Sunless, but in reality, the narration in the film is amorphous. It folds letters from world traveler Sandor Krasna into Marker's visual collage. The narration is actually read by women--Alexandra Stewart in English, Florence Daly in French--effectively abstracting the point of view, which is then further obscured by the fact that Krasna is really Marker himself, hiding behind the guise of a fictitious cameraman. It's a playful conceit for a film that embraces the elasticity of experience. Sans Soleil isn't about any one thing. It is a global journey where the route is dictated by human caprice and random encounters.

Most of what we see takes place in Japan. While shooting AK, his portrait of Akira Kurosawa, Marker filmed street scenes and spiritual rituals and grappled with the incongruities of Japanese culture. In many ways, the old traditions still exist, but in many other aspects of life, new ideas, invigorated by advertising and technology, are taking shape. For Marker, most activities reveal a search for a sense of self, of trying to find a place of belonging in the grander scheme of things. What he sees in Tokyo brings to mind the revolution in the West African nation of Bissau, as well as the memory games of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo [review]. He visits both through archival footage, but he also travels to San Francisco to tour the real locations from Hitchcock's mind-bending thriller. There are also the aforementioned detours to Iceland and brief stops in France.

The sum of all these parts is one that can be a little elusive in calculation. Sans Soleil is a bit like one of those see-sawing paperweights that pushes brightly colored water back and forth inside its plastic casing, creating the illusion of a rolling tide. Marker purposely wants to the movie to slip through the viewer's grasp, to force us to adapt to the changes. His movie is about how experience can't really be recorded, halted, or held. Life is ever changing, and that is why our search for self never truly ends. At the same time, memory can be abstracted and preserved and reevaluated. Marker illustrates this by showing documentary footage run through an electronic synthesizer. People are turned into blobs and shapes, yet their meaning isn't removed. They are no longer solid objects, but they still exist.

The end product here is more essay than documentary, a collection of impressions rather than an overly sculpted narrative. Marker rarely imposes meaning on his footage, instead choosing to juxtapose words and images in a way that draws the watcher into the cinematic flow. He does this with an impressively light touch. Despite the seriousness of much of the topics explored, Sans Soleil remains entertaining throughout, creating a sense of mystery that leaves us wondering where it will all go next.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVD Talk.

Please Note: The screengrabs used here are from the standard-definition DVD released in 2007, not from the Blu-Ray.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (Blu-Ray) - #175

"Ignore the nightmare in the bathroom." - Raoul Duke (surely, if not an old proverb already, it will be eventually).

True story: half an hour after watching Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas this morning, I was walking down my street. As I passed a house where some contractors were working on a remodel, I overheard one of the contractors explaining to the other about the "Paul is Dead" conspiracy surrounding the Abbey Road album cover. "George was dressed as a gravedigger," he said, "and Paul wasn't wearing any shoes."

Clearly something is in the ether today. The Beatles released Abbey Road, the last album they recorded, in late 1969. Within a year, they were no more, arguably closing the door on 1960s pop culture, following the zeitgeist of the decade right down the tubes. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is set in 1971. The peace-and-love generation is long gone, and chaos only exists in its place. Hunter S. Thompson's story of tumbling into a drug-fueled rabbit hole of decadence and danger was a harbinger of the decade that was to follow. Like the dust cloud at the motorcycle race he is sent to Sin City to cover, the 1970s would be a brown maelstrom of disappointment and disaster. Political activism would give way to complacency post-Nixon, and music and fashion was becoming bloated and boring. Let's face it, if it weren't for its cinema, the 1970s would be a decade best left forgotten. Torch the records, send it away!

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was long considered an "unfilmmable" book. Like William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, it was a tome revered for the irreverent prose style and the author's willingness to engage with all things taboo, and without the quality of the former the latter was rather difficult to capture. Conventional narratives these are not, and it would take equally unconventional filmmakers to make a movie out of them. Luckily, David Cronenberg got his mitts on Naked Lunch [review], and Terry Gilliam, the former Python turned surreal fantasist, tackled Fear and Loathing.

Johnny Depp stars as Hunter S. Thompson, who went to Las Vegas as a journalist, covering an epic motorcycle race in the desert under the guise of Raoul Duke. He would also stick around to report on a convention for law enforcement officers. Ironically, their chosen subject was stopping narcotics. Thompson is a notorious druggy, and he spends the entirety of this movie hopped up on some chemical concoction or another. Along for the ride is his "attorney," the larger-than-life Dr. Gonzo, played with pure animalistic chutzpah by Benicio Del Toro. The actor gives a purely physical performance, ditching actorly mannerisms for phlegm and sweat. He is perpetually clearing himself of some sort of bodily substance, and his character has a sinister bend that is truly disturbing. By juxtaposition, Thompson is a cartoon character, and Depp plays him as such. As a performance, it is definitely one extended impression of the real deal, but Depp approaches Thompson's contrived personage with the same honest intensity as, say, Robert Downey Jr. taking on Charlie Chaplin [review]. It's less an act than it is sculpture: the karate chops and whistles chip away at the artifice until it turns into something absolutely authentic.

Plot seems irrelevant in a discussion of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The movie's script went through various permutations, including a pass by Repo Man-director Alex Cox, who is one of four credited screenwriters (Gilliam is also on the list). Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas doesn't really have a narrative arc, it's more like a narrative descent. The thrust of the story is ever downward, as each over indulgence alienates Gonzo and Thompson further from real life, to a point where things get so paranoid and weird, not even the criminal underbelly of Vegas will have anything to do with them. There is a tremendous scene here in a back-alley diner, featuring a memorable cameo by Ellen Barkin. She plays a waitress who ends up on the wrong side of Gonzo's anger, and Del Toro's beastly delivery of the threats is so convincing, it's hard to tell if Barkin is acting or if she's really scared.

It's an interesting view of Las Vegas, taking us down its glitzy ladder rung by rung, going from its most surreal heights (a version of the kiddy casino Circus Circus) to this rundown, all-too-earthly greasy spoon. It seems to me that the key to the material is in understanding that the city itself is a trippy place, that the drugs are almost a tool for comprehending its garishness. No matter how weird the hallucinations get, Vegas can match the nightmare horror for horror. Visually, Gilliam and his team make tremendous use of the city's neon landscape. A driving montage down the strip uses rear projection and cutaways to melt and bend the surrounding signs and advertisements. Overdone hotel wallpaper and carpets come alive and swallow the patrons. Cinematographer Nicola Pecorini (The Order, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus [review]) often sets the camera at an angle, so that the image leans to one-side, upsetting the equilibrium of the frame. It's almost as if the movie is trying to spill its protagonists out of the other side of the screen the way you or I might try to kick away a dog humping our leg.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is nearly formless in its construction, though it solidifies over each selective viewing. To carry the drug metaphor, you build a kind of tolerance, gaining an ability to maintain the more you partake. Though I wouldn't have said so when it was first released, I'd hazard to call it Terry Gilliam's most together movie. Not necessarily his best, but possibly the one where he is most in command of the elements. For all the bedlam depicted onscreen, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is meticulously choreographed. Many of the scenes of Gonzo and Thompson wandering through the casinos while going off their heads play for extended lengths without much cutting. In these, they are each performing independent actions, including interacting with crowds of extras. Sometimes it's super complicated, like the hotel bar when they first get to town, just before all the other drinkers turn into lizards; other times, it's more simple. When Gonzo argues their way into a Debbie Reynolds concert, Thompson stays by himself, doing more drugs on the sly. Gilliam keeps the shot wide and lets the actors move around the frame. You could watch either of them do their thing, they are both doing something interesting, and yet it also works perfectly in tandem.

Naturally, with an experience like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there is no real exit, no grand conclusion to be had. The trip ends--in both senses of the word. The vacation is over, the vacationers have to come down off of the high. Yet, Gilliam gives us a satisfying wrap-up anyway. In his way, he has contained the chaos, and so there is a relief in making our way back out of it. Rubber hits the road, and Hunter S. Thompson heads back to Los Angeles, a smile on his face, remembering all the devils in the preceding details, having survived to return to some kind of perceived normalcy. And yet, that grin also says it's never going to be completely over: the craziest diamonds always shine on.

For a complete rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

Screen captures are from the DVD, not the Blu-Ray.