Descendants, by Heiko Van der Scherm and Holger Shoenberger, is a 14-minute animated short; filmed as part of a diploma project for the Institute of Animation and Filmakademie Baden-Werttemberg.
It is a charming little tale about two solemn flowers that inhabit the edge of a clearing and live in a changeless reality from one day to the next. One is young, inquisitive, and full of life while the other is ancient, cryptic and bitter. Then one day, by a twist of fate, a stranger appears who will change their lives forever.
With exquisitely crafted CGI, direction, dialogue (with the voices of Whoopi Goldberg and Christi Scott-Cashman), and story structure this little masterpiece is both pleasing to the eye and warming to the heart.
Breaking up is never easy to do! Directed by Chris Milk with music by Gnarls Barkley (2008), this is the second video collaboration from Gnarles Barkely’s album The Odd Couple. It is a poignant look into the dynamics of a break-up, and the often unheard words we say to ourselves in the heat of the moment. This is a lovely clip with some serious heart crooning to boot. Enjoy!
After unwittingly offending a strange concrete entity, at a train station, that follows him on his way to work, a businessman finds himself in a strange situation. No one else seems to see this monstrosity following him, except others with the same problem. Is he going crazy, why is this happening to him, how can he shake the entity off and live a normal life? For answers to those questions and more take a look here…
A group of youngsters shuffle in front of a 1950s Cleveland house, anticipating their Halloween candy. The lady of the house leans over as she counts off the little superheroes before her: Batman and Robin, the Green Lantern, Superman… and one ill-tempered tiny 10-year-old clad in identical clothes he dons to school each day.
“And who are you supposed to be?” the lady of the house enquires.
“I’m Harvey Pekar,” he pronounces matter-of-factly. “From the neighborhood.”
The gag is that Harvey — absolute in his skanky jacket, terminal frown, and ferocious pride — would metamorphose into an unusual addition to that bland four-color get up. As the creator and champion of the partisan comic American Splendor, he furnished his personal life as a misanthropic reflection on modern society. He also helped introduce the concept of comics for grownups, moving up the ranks to join such notables as Jim Woodring and Robert Crumb as innovators in their discipline. The film adaptation of his work, from documentary filmmakers Robert Pulcini and Sheri Springer Berman, cleverly conveys Harvey’s autobiographical panache to comic, earnest life.
Acted both by Paul Giamatti (during the majority of the film) and himself (in an ingenious sequence of voice-overs and interviews), “our man” is relentlessly underwhelmed by the platitudes beleaguering him. Bright though not educated, exhibiting refined tastes but a repulsion for elitism, he works a depressing job as a filing clerk for a Cleveland hospital. His flat is colourless and drab, his life a succession of “reliable disappointments” crowned by two broken marriages and a slowly dying voice. However he experiences a few delights as well, fueled along by neurotic obsessions and a fervent mind. He loves aged jazz 78s, scouring yard sales for buried treasures, and then allowing them to pile up in his flat. His pastime shortly puts him into contact with Crumb (James Urbaniak), a gumptious artist with a few unusual penchants of his own. Harvey wins over his new friend to help illustrate an original comic that he’s writing, focused on his daily existence. The final result grants his brilliance a natural outlet… and its success attracts the attention of a tough-minded fan, Joyce (Hope Davis), who at length becomes an strangely perfect soulmate.
The magnetism of a person like Harvey stems both from his banal environment, and the method in which he observes so much splendid poetry within them. Berman and Pulcini absorb us into his adorable cynicism not by ridiculing it, but by exhibiting the placid dignity it bestows upon him. Their formula conveys no prejudices, and they take pains to introduce the man as objectively as achievable, as suits their fly-on-the-wall backdrop. We interpret him by what he unveils, not what they narrate to us. Giamatti’s extraordinary performance shifts smoothly into the real Harvey’s oscillating appearances and extracts from the comic (melded into the film employing subtle special effects), resulting in an engaging portrayal as unforgettable as it is bittersweet.
American Splendor also stands out as a meditation about fame and how it can alter an individual. Here once again, their selection of subject is uncanny. Like any effective documentarian, Harvey realises how the act of observance alters the physical object being observed — and in his case, he occupies both faces of the equation. His flourishing success, paired with his neurotic need to translate his personal experience for public ingestion ironically endangers that experience, twisting his life into a blue-collar, Hollywood imposter. Against that dark destiny, he reacts by clutching to his thorny personality and preserving the reliable wretchednesses that afforded him his voice to begin with. He never leaves his job or alters his life-style even though he’s finally able to. The money and celebrity status mean zero to him, trickling off his back with the same ill-natured dismissal as a traffic fine.
It is the platitudes that define his life, and which he comes to enjoy all the more because of the fashion in which they show him the things that really matter. That saline wisdom smashes through the counterfeit luster that’s been broadcast across our post-millennial civilisation, reminding us of the tangible world that we’ve strained to conceal behind the pages of glossy magazines. American Splendor is avant-garde in the muted way it never drags attention to itself, a unique wake-up call that starts and finishes with Harvey Pekar. Without him, there’s no film; with him, there’s a film you can’t refuse.
Directors: Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman
Writers: Harvey Pekar (Comic: American Splendor)
Joyce Brabner (Comic: Our Cancer Year)
Release Date: 21 July 2004 (Australia)
Genre: Biography | Drama | Comedy |
Cast: Paul Giamatti, Harvey Pekar, Judah Friedlander, James Urbaniak, Hope Davis, Toby Radloff, Joyce Brabner.
If there were ever an Ode to Phillip K Dick – A Scanner Darkly would be it. Beginning with the classic film ‘Blade Runner’, his far reaching and prophetic series of science fiction novels have in recent years made it onto the big screen in growing numbers and a Scanner Darkly is certainly the best adaptation so far.
This is a film which will work not only for fans of Dick’s work but also for anyone who has ever experimented with stimulants or hallucinogens. The film heavily evolves around this theme and reflects a drug induced period in his own life. As such it was such a personal work for the author, and the closing credits retain his personal dedication to all the friends he lost during an equivalent drug induced period in his own life.
The films complex storyline can be difficult to follow at times however; It’s difficult to imagine any fan of Dick’s failing to adore and be engrossed by this film. Its elaborate rotoscope animation, far from being a nickel-and-dime gimmick, provides the viewer with an edge of your seat mania and a strange vision of a post traumatic drug-saturated near future world.
The film opens with a mind bending, neurotic young man franticly trying to cleanse himself amid an infestation of bugs – an appropriate synopsis for the entire breadth of the film.
It builds up slowly, yet there is enough humour woven into the dialogue, especially from Robert Downey Jr.’s deceitful yet susceptible Barris. Keanu Reeves’ play’s the hero, a slightly stand-offish man whose undercover work has forced him to assume a dual identity which his drug-addled brain can no longer untangle. He is an everyman with whom the audience can identify, a man desperately trying to hold onto his sanity in an insane world.
Each of the junkie characters in the film provide the audience with well honed performances, jam packed with well placed dialogue, and bring the audience a certain sense that these are people we could all easily care about, even while they squabble over petty things and back stab each other. They are more than just incurable drug addicts but characters that are deserving of redemption – humans upon a personal struggle that seems altogether hopeless. The hero’s personal struggle however, is paralleled by his unwitting investigation into the conspiracy behind it, and it is in this thread of the plot that events take a really sinister turn.
Chaotic but riveting, witty and potently emotional, A Scanner Darkly is a fascinating piece of film-making. With strange visions to remind us of the histroical past and warn us about the possibilites of a totalitarian future, we are shown reality through the prism of a darker window, bringing us face to face with the starkness of the world.
Movies that could be considered similar: Waking Life, Vanilla Sky, Walz with Bashir
Director:
Richard Linklater Writers (WGA):
Philip K. Dick (novel)
Richard Linklater (screenplay) Release Date:
August 2006 (UK) Genre:
Animation | Crime | Drama | Mystery | Sci-Fi | Thriller
![Tulum Mexico in Late Afternoon Light [Explore #1, THANK YOU]](http://static.flickr.com/5470/7235972310_8c25258da5_m.jpg "Tulum Mexico in Late Afternoon Light [Explore #1, THANK YOU]")
Stumble It!
