Stan & Ollie

Year 11, Day 236 - 8/24/19 - Movie #3,334

BEFORE: My review might be held up a bit today, because I'm supposed to go out to a craft beer festival this afternoon with my friend Victoria, and I haven't been to one in quite a while.  They're fun, but indulging means that after I get home (assuming I get home) there may be a recovery period, like a late afternoon nap. This is part of the reason why I watch my movies very late at night - or perhaps I should say very early in the morning - so they don't interfere with work or other activities.  I'll still try to get my review posted today and not tomorrow.

John C. Reilly carries over again from "The Little Hours".

THE PLOT: Laurel and Hardy, the world's most famous comedy duo, attempt to reignite their film careers as they embark on what becomes their swan song - a grueling theatre tour of post-war Britain.

AFTER: Well, the beer festival was a bit of a bust, there weren't as many breweries there as I thought there would be, and then some of them had cider, or mead, or moonshine, so the focus wasn't really on beer.  I had a great polish sausage sandwich (it's important to eat food at these things, to absorb the beer) but the pierogies were completely without flavor.  Authentic perhaps, because Polish food is based on sad peasant food, but I still expect to be able to taste and enjoy what I eat, silly me.  There were also a lot of "scam" booths, offering giveaways or prizes if you just give up all your personal data or agree to get annoying e-mails and texts for the rest of your life.  Nice try, but I wasn't THAT drunk.  Thankfully we'd bought discount tickets from one of those Groupon-like sites, so I couldn't really complain - if I'd paid full price I might have been pissed.

Before getting into this film about Laurel & Hardy, I think I have to admit that I've (probably) never seen any of their films.  I have managed to cover most of the Marx Brothers films during this almost 11-year project, and a few of the Abbott & Costello films I didn't see when I was growing up, but I never took the time to seek out Laurel & Hardy films.  But that's part of my process, by watching certain films I'm making choices, and by default then there are other films that I'm NOT watching - like I was reminded this year that I've never seen an Ingmar Bergman film, so now I'm on the lookout for them.  TCM ran some of them a few weeks ago and I recorded two of them, so maybe by next year I can put together a chain of those.  Same goes for Laurel & Hardy - I'll be looking out for them now.

Unfortunately, this film was little help in clueing me on who Stan and Ollie were during their heyday, because except for the opening sequence and a few flashbacks, the film takes place in 1953, when they hadn't worked together in years, other comedians had taken over in the public eye, and they went on a "revival" tour in Britain, hoping it would lead to setting up a movie deal there.  The flashbacks also don't show many of their famous routines, so it makes me wonder if that was a copyright issue.  I mean, nobody wants to just see other actors re-making a Laurel & Hardy film, that would be a bit pointless, but they could still give us something other than one dance number.

Fortunately, though, there's a ton of drama in their personal lives, without just re-hashing the work they did together on screen.  The flashbacks depict them talking about their wives and ex-wives, and then it's the famous moment when Laurel wanted to demand more money from Hal Roach, and Hardy didn't back him up.  Laurel got fired, and had to wait for Hardy's contract to run out so they could start making more films together.  Good thing Laurel wasn't bitter about that for decades - oh, wait, he was.  I didn't really get the point of the way they introduced Hardy's new partner, like was I supposed to recognize him?  I'd never heard of Harry Langdon before, or was the joke that he looked so similar to Stan Laurel?  It's like they paused here for a joke with no payoff.

In the later years, the two had to reunite to go on this tour of the U.K., and though they're shown working well together, perhaps there was also a reason why they hadn't seen each other in years, and whatever that was, they were reminded of it by coming back into contact.  More drama - then there was Hardy's failing health, and that became a concern when so much of their humor was based on physical comedy, even the stunts on stage were becoming an effort for him.  Such is the downside of being the "fat guy" in the comedy pair, and maintaining that image.  During the tour, they were writing the script for a planned "Robin Hood" movie, and Hardy seemed like a natural for the Little John role, only the story involved him falling off of a log after battling Robin, and according to this film, that was a constant concern, whether Hardy would be healthy enough to fall off a log - which apparently is not as easy as the famous metaphor suggests.

This concern kicks into high gear when the comedians' wives show up in London - the tour at this point had become a great success, because they'd agreed to do a number of promotional stunts around the country which appeared in newsreels and magazines and generated more interest in their shows.  Back in the days before Facebook and Instagram, promoting yourself was a lot of hard work.  Oliver Hardy's wife is portrayed as a negative worrier hear, and Stan Laurel's wife as a Russian ex-dancer who can't stop reliving that one film she made for Preston Sturges years ago.

But I think the point of the film is that the world of entertainment is always changing, and if you're lucky enough to be part of it, the ride is going to come to an end one day, no matter what you do.  Either you'll age out of the program, gracefully or not, or perhaps the whole game will change and leave you behind.  It's happened to the best of them - even the greatest composers like Mozart and Beethoven had their time, but eventually the whole music scene changed and what we now call "classical" music got relegated to one small corner of the industry.  This will happen to rock and rap someday too, once enough new genres come along to replace them.  There wasn't much of a market for vaudeville performers in the 1950's, and though we'll always have them on film, it's probably not coming back anytime soon.  And though I work for people who still animate with pencil on paper, I realize it's a dying medium - but the real trick is knowing whether there might still be some life in an old style, or if not, that it's time to get off the stage.

I was going to nit-pick about Laurel being depicted with a British accent, but I just checked, he was born in England, so that's perfectly fine, I think.  Hardy was born in Georgia, U.S., BTW.

Also starring Steve Coogan (last seen in "The Dinner"), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "Tale of Tales"), Danny Huston (last seen in "Game Night"), Nina Arianda (last seen in "Florence Foster Jenkins"), Rufus Jones, Joseph Balderrama (last seen in "Spectre"), John Henshaw, Keith MacPherson, Stewart Alexander, Toby Sedgwick, Richard Cant (last seen in "Mary Queen of Scots"), Susy Kane, Rebecca Yeo, Danny Scheinmann.

RATING: 6 out of 10 hard-boiled eggs

The Little Hours

Year 11, Day 235 - 8/23/19 - Movie #3,333    

BEFORE: John C. Reilly carries over from "Tale of Tales", which he was just in for about 5 minutes - let's hope he's got a larger role in today's film.

THE PLOT: In the Middle ages, a young servant fleeing from his master takes refuge at a convent full of emotionally unstable nuns.  Posing as a deaf-mute man, he must fight to hold his cover as the nuns try to resist temptation.

AFTER: Ever since "Filmworker", this has been a challenging week, with films that are real head-scratchers, if you know what I mean.  It's been frustrating to not even be able to tell what some filmmakers were even GOING for with films like "Dogville" and "Beatriz at Dinner".  I think I get the point of the fairy tales in "Tale of Tales", but still, it feels like any point being made is rather obtruse.  And so I arrive at today's film, which is about nuns in a convent during medieval times, but since they talk and react almost exactly like modern women, I'm just wondering what the point of this little exercise was.

Sure, there's a style of comedy that just puts modern-speaking people into past situations, for comic effect - all of the Mel Brooks movies like "Blazing Saddles" and "History of the World: Part 1", there's no attempt made to have the actors talk and think like people in the Old West or in ancient Rome, and that's usually funny.  But is that what's really going on here?  This is not really a laugh-out-loud kind of spoof comedy, it's more subtle than that, but what, exactly was the intent here?  It seems like somebody just wanted to see a bunch of women dressed as nuns using the F-word repeatedly, and then breaking their vows of chastity, fooling around and dancing naked in the woods - and that represents a very specific sort of fetish.  I'd keep an eye on whoever enjoys watching that sort of thing if I were you.

I mean, is there a larger point to be made here, something about how impossible it is for religious people to keep their vows of chastity?  I believe there's something unnatural about denying human sexual impulse, plus there's no logical or physical link between not having sex and being "holy", whatever that means, so why on earth would anyone do it?  Just to say that they can be "closer to God" (more B.S.) or so they can feel superior to all the other humans who can't keep their pants on.  But we've seen in the news, and the police reports, how this twists and transforms very religious people, if they deny these impulses within them, they'll only manifest in another way, and that can lead to duplicity, pedophilia and so on.  All because they took a vow to a corrupt institution, in the name of an imaginary being that lives in the sky and sees all, loves everyone, but also wants to punish the unworthy in an eternal lake of hellfire.  Umm, no thanks, I'll pass.

I can MAYBE allow the comedy here if that's the point, to showcase how ridiculous religion was back then (and by extension, still is today).  But again, it's tough to say if that was really the intent here, or if somebody just wanted to make a slightly goofy comedy about nuns getting crazy on wine, drugs and dancing naked.

Ah, a little research tells me that this story is loosely based on "The Decamaron", specifically two of the stories from the third "day", but honestly I know very little about "The Decamaron", written by Giovanni Boccaccio - but that's two films based on Italian authors' work in a row, I guess I had a hunch when I programmed the two films next to each other.

But I feel there are so many in-jokes here that never really got explained well - are those references to "The Decameron", which hardly any non-literature majors have ever read?  Like, why did Ginevra keep asking Marta, over and over, if she was really from Garfagnana?  She already answered that question, like three or four times, so why keep asking?  Who even cares where she's from, and why would she lie about that?  Dumb it down - at least that part of it.

Filmed on location in Tuscany - so there's a very real possibility that this film was made just so a director and some actors could get a free vacation in Italy on the movie studio's dime.  But it also occurs to me that this movie feels, in some ways, like the opposite of "Dogville", which featured a woman on the run who hides out in a town where all the men want to have sex with her, and this film features a man on the run who hides out in a convent, where all the women want to have sex with him.

Also starring Dave Franco (last seen in "Nerve"), Alison Brie (last heard in "The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part"), Nick Offerman (ditto), Kate Micucci (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Aubrey Plaza (last seen in "A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Molly Shannon (last seen in "Casa de mi Padre"), Fred Armisen (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Jemima Kirke, Lauren Weedman (last seen in "Wilson"), Adam Pally (last seen in "Shimmer Lake"), Jon Gabrus, Paul Reiser (last seen in "Concussion"), Paul Weitz.

RATING: 4 out of 10 "Our Fathers" said as penance

Tale of Tales

Year 11, Day 234 - 8/22/19 - Movie #3,332

BEFORE: Salma Hayek carries over from "Beatriz at Dinner", capping off just two films, but she's been in four films this year so far, so she's made it to my year-end round-up for sure.  Tonight starts a 4-film chain with John C. Reilly (it would be 6 films, but I need to save 2 of them for December), to be followed by three with Joaquin Phoenix, which will take me almost to the end of August - and in September I'll have similar chains with Adam Driver, Tracy Morgan, Melissa McCarthy and Dwayne Johnson.  But I'm afraid I couldn't get to the back-to-school films until mid-September, so I'll just be running a little late this year.

THE PLOT: From the bitter quest of the Queen of Longtrellis, to two mysterious sisters who provoke the passion of a king, to the King of Highhills obsessed with a giant flea, these tales are inspired by the fairytales of Giambattista Basile.

AFTER: I wasn't familiar with the name of Giambattista Basile, but the three stories that make up this film come from one of his story collections, which also contained the earliest known versions of "Cinderella", "Rapunzel" and "Sleeping Beauty".  This was the guy that the Brothers Grimm sort of, shall we say, borrowed from quite liberally.  Of course, that's what happens all the time, stories are based on other stories and they change over time - for example, we all know now that the "glass slipper" in Cinderella came from a translation error, it was originally a fur slipper, which makes a lot more sense, and sounds less dangerous.  (In French, the word for fur would be "VAIR" and the word for glass is "VERRE" - so in that language the words are homonyms, easy to mistake for each other.)

But the main thing that changed about fairy tales over the years is that they used to be much darker - at some point, happy endings proved to be more popular.  In the old days, they served as moral lessons, or perhaps warnings for kids on how to behave, because the greedy characters always got something they didn't expect, but probably deserved.  In the old versions of "Cinderella", those evil stepsisters wanted the slipper to fit on their feet, so why not chop off a couple of toes to make it fit?  It's worth it if you get to marry the Prince and live in his castle, right?  Umm, does anyone know how to get blood stains off of a fur slipper?

That's kind of where these three stories come from, too, I think - in each story, somebody WANTS something, and their desire extends beyond their reach, so the question then becomes, what are they willing to do, or to give up, in order to get it?  (And by extension, the readers/audience are taught to be happy with what they already have.)  First is the Queen of Longtrellis, who wants a child, but has been unable to conceive.  A mysterious stranger tells her to hunt a sea monster, cut out its heart, and have a virgin cook it for her to eat.  (Or, I don't know, maybe have sex with the king, but what the hell  do I know?  Let's assume for a moment that she already tried that.)  The unspoken cost of this monster hunt is very dear, but she goes ahead with it anyway.  The main characters of the other two stories are seen during this - well, let's call it a prologue - but they won't be important until later.  The point is that the Queen (and the virgin who cooked the heart) end up having sons, who look a lot alike, practically twins.

Fast forward a few years, and the two very similar-looking boys are young men, one is in line to become king, and the other's just a peasant boy, and the Queen disapproves of them hanging out together.  As we all know, there's only ONE reason in a story for two characters to be able to pass for each other, right?  It's a bit like "The Prince and the Pauper", so maybe Mark Twain stole - sorry, borrowed - from this author too.

Now, once the other two stories get rolling here, they sort of liberally jump between all three - even though the stories aren't necessarily advancing at the same rate.  Yep, they "Dunkirk"ed these stories together, even though the plots aren't important to each other, and the characters don't come back together until the very end.  They could have just as easily told one complete story, then the second, then the third, but it's really a matter of choice.  It's not TOO hard to juggle all three stories in your head when presented this way.  I'm guessing this was done just to create some narrative tension, so we'll all wonder when they're going to cut back to the other storyline.

The second story concerns the King of Strongcliff, who's bedded just about every young woman in his kingdom, so there seem to be no new worlds to conquer.  But one day he hears a woman, Dora, singing in the distance, only when he calls to her, she ducks inside her hut.  The thrill of the chase takes over, and he's intrigued by the woman he's never seen before - now WE know that this is really an old woman who lives with her even older sister, Imma, but HE doesn't know that, so he decides he has to have her.  Dora agrees to sleep with the king, but only in complete darkness.  But the king can't resist lighting a candle, and when he sees the old lady he slept with, he has his guards throw her out the window.  But she's found in the forest by a passing witch, who turns her into a young maiden again.  The king then sees her again and falls in love, but Dora then leaves Imma behind to marry the King.  This sets up Imma to want to be young and beautiful again, too, and she'll pay any cost to make that happen.

The third story is about the King of Highhills, who keeps a pet flea that somehow grows to enormous size.  His daughter wants to be married and explore the world, but the King wants to keep his daughter around, so when the flea dies, he skins it and offers his daughter's hand to any man that can identify this weird giant flea skin.  (Ewww.)  Because letting his daughter pick her husband just wasn't a thing back then - so let's just say she gets married, but it doesn't turn out well.  She requires the help of a traveling circus to escape her marriage, and that goes even wronger.  So again, the running theme seems to be, once you've identified what you want out of life, what are you willing to do to get it?  And then when things go horribly wrong, what are you willing to do to FIX it?

Back to those twins to wrap up - the peasant twin is forced to leave the kingdom, but he leaves behind a way for the prince twin to know if he's in danger.  Eventually the prince twin leaves to find the peasant twin, and the Queen realizes her mistake in keeping the two boys apart.  Once again, there's a way to fix everything with some magic, but once again, it comes at a high cost.  Put another way, the director is quoted as saying that all three stories are about how desire can lead to obsession, and, collectively, they're about three different stages of a woman's life - a young girl who wants to be married, a wife who wants to be a mother, and an older woman who wants to be young and desired again.

NITPICK POINT: The king in the first story battles the sea monster in something that looks like a cross between a suit of armor and a late 19th century diving suit.  Only, where's the air tank?  Where's the air hose?  Oh, right, they didn't have those back then.  So, how did he breathe underwater, then?

Also starring Vincent Cassel (last seen in "Eastern Promises"), Toby Jones (last seen in "Christopher Robin"), John C. Reilly (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Shirley Henderson (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Hayley Carmichael, Bebe Cave, Stacy Martin (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Christian Lees, Jonah Lees, Laura Pizzirani, Franco Pistoni, Jessie Cave (last seen in "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2"), Michael Martini, Alessandro Campagna, Davide Campagna, Lorenzo Bernardi, Kathryn Hunter, Renato Scarpa, Guillaume Delaunay (last seen in "Victor Frankenstein"), Massimo Ceccherini, Alba Rohrwacher.

RATING: 5 out of 10 knife jugglers

Beatriz at Dinner

Year 11, Day 233 - 8/21/19 - Movie #3,331

BEFORE: Well, the film "Manderlay" doesn't seem to be available on Netflix, or Hulu, or even iTunes.  Nope, not on Amazon Prime or YouTube, either - that's a bit strange. It might have something to do with the topic of slavery, and possibly the use of blackface, too, I can't be sure.  But I'd have to buy the DVD on Amazon to see it, and I don't have that kind of time.  I'll just have to make a mental note about it, and maybe try to circle back next year - but it sure seems like a film that's either unpopular, or someone actively does not want me to see it.  Instead I can proceed with my schedule, and I don't have to drop another film this way.  I do need to make a decision in about a week between two films, but I'll explain that at the proper time.

Chloe Sevigny carries over from "Dogville".

THE PLOT: A holistic medicine practitioner attends a wealthy client's dinner party after her car breaks down.

AFTER: Well, this is another weird one tonight - maybe not as weird as "Dogville", but there are parts where what we're shown on the screen isn't really taking place, as we get to see Beatriz's dreams and in one instance, her wild fantasy, before and during this dinner party that she finds herself at.  Also, I think there are some things that she says that are not meant to be taken literally, but I'll get to that in a bit.

From the quotes on the film's poster, critics referred to this film as a "squirm-inducing dark comedy", a "relevant satire" and also "the first great film of the Trump era".  I'm not sure about that last one, but a better reason to bring Trump into this conversation is the divisive nature of politics, which goes back decades of course, but has really been brought to light since the 2016 election.  If you've noticed, everything in American society has become a black or white issue, and I'm not just referring to racism.  We've become incredibly polarized, so on any topic, like abortion, there's the extreme argument for it and the extreme argument against it - it should either be free and available to all, or banned outright.  Guns?  Same thing - people are either for complete availability of assault weapons and armor-piercing bullets at the corner store, or they should be all be banned, taken away and destroyed.  One argument for immigration calls for building a wall and putting kids in cages, and the other calls for open borders for all, as guaranteed by our forefathers and that poem on the Statue of Liberty.  NO other answers seem possible, neither side is willing to yield an inch, so naturally no progress gets made.  And we all then tend to see these things as simple issues with opposing solutions, when they are in fact complex issues with potential for compromise.

So we often find ourselves saying, "You know, there are two kinds of people in the world..." for many things, whether we want to draw a line between rich and poor, liberal or conservative, religious or non-, smoking and non-, meat-eating and vegetarian, or whatever.  I was reminded of this the other day, when I realized there are two kinds of people in the world, those that talk to strangers in line at the post office, and those that don't.  I'm in the latter camp, but this guy ahead of me with bright orange hair and a cheap suit was one of the "let's talk to strangers" type, and tried to make a connection with me over my Meat Loaf concert t-shirt.  "Hey, that's a nice shirt!" he said, "It reminds me of better times.  Remember rock concerts?"  But I'd already tuned him out by this point, because I thought he was a complete ass, so I was forced to give him the death stare until he decided that our conversation was a dead-end.  (To be polite, I should have pointed to my ears and shook my head, which he would have interpreted as a sign for deafness, but which really would have meant, "I don't want to listen to your B.S.")  Minutes later, he was bothering someone else in line who was wearing Sam Ash Music t-shirt - "Hey, that's a nice shirt!  It reminds me of better times..."  What, are we supposed to be friends now, because you read my t-shirt?  Shut the hell up, weird dude.

I bring this up because this film seemed designed to put Beatriz in conflict with someone who is her polar opposite in every way.  She's a struggling physical therapist and holistic medicine woman, he's a wealthy real estate executive.  She's an immigrant from Mexico (ah, that's why the references to Trump in the reviews) and he's built a few hotels there, but still curious about whether she came into the U.S. legally.  She cares deeply about animals, and is mourning the loss of her pet goat, while he goes to Africa and hunts wild game.  They end up at the same dinner party because Beatriz's car won't start, and so the woman who she gave a massage to invites her to stay.  (They know Beatriz because she was part of their daughter's cancer wellness program, but that's sort of a tangential issue.)

The goal of the film is to get these two very different people in the same room, and watch the sparks fly.  You may even be reminded of a family party that you've attended in the last couple of years, when you realized that your uncle or cousin is now a Trump supporter (or if you're a Trump supporter yourself, when you realized your aunt or cousin was supporting Hillary, or Bernie, or Jill Stein...).  And now we've cut those people out of our lives, but it didn't help, because we've all got to go through this again, or find more excuses to avoid family functions.

Beatriz can't help but think that she knows this real estate mogul from somewhere - she remembers protesting a hotel being built in Mexico, which ended up destroying her hometown, but was this the same guy?  Memory can be unreliable, though, so it's possible that she's conflating some of her memories because she wants to hate this man so very much, and she might be looking for more reasons to do so.  When she finally determines "This is the man who killed my goat..." I don't think she means this literally - I think perhaps it's more of a "This is the SORT of man who killed my goat." or "This man has the same lack of respect for animals as the man who killed my goat."  Because if she really believed this, then she's either crazy, mis-remembering, or she lives in a much, much nicer neighborhood than we were lead to believe.

I don't want to reveal what happens at the dinner party, partially because it's left sort of open-ended, anyway.  Several different interpretations may be possible.  But the important take-away is that while we all might acknowledge that our planet is dying, bees are dying, we're all dying, even so there are two types of people in the world - those that are trying to do something about it and effect change, and those that want to give up and use that as an excuse to have a good time.  Still, I think that all seems very polarizing, and I maintain that there should be a middle ground.  Why can't we make smarter choices, try to save the planet, and still enjoy the time we have left?

Also starring Salma Hayek (last seen in "Filmworker"), Connie Britton (last seen in "American Ultra"), John Lithgow (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 3"), Jay Duplass, Amy Landecker (last seen in "The Meddler"), David Warshofsky (last seen in "Wilson"), John Early (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Enrique Castillo, Soledad St. Hilaire, Amelia Borella, Natalia Abelleyra.

RATING: 4 out of 10 possible titles for Doug's memoir

Dogville

Year 11, Day 232 - 8/20/19 - Movie #3,330

BEFORE: Yesterday's film was a documentary, but I have not started another chain of docs.  That was a one-off, because there were some documentaries that didn't seem to connect with the pack, and I'm watching them now in places where they can be most handy to me, to keep my chain going.  I sort of did that with "I Am Big Bird" and "Being Elmo" earlier in the year - though I later found out that there were so many uncredited appearances in those films (not mentioned on the IMDB, that is) that I probably COULD have fit them in with the larger grouping of docs, if only I'd known.  Same goes for "Fieldworker" - if the IMDB had properly listed all of the actors appearing in archive footage, it would have been a lot easier to link to it - it could have slipped in right between "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind" and "Jane Fonda in Five Acts", for example.

Ah, but then I wouldn't have been able to use it as the outro from "Revengeance", and then it wouldn't have been available for me to use as a link to "Dogville", so perhaps it's all for the best.  These things do have a funny way of working out, don't they?  I've got two more documentaries on the schedule for September, and again, they're providing important links to keep the chain alive.  All other docs have been tabled until next year, at least.

Stellan Skarsgard carries over from "Filmworker" (so does Nicole Kidman, but she gets enough attention around here already - anyway, I didn't know until yesterday she appeared in "Filmworker" via archive footage, so this was always planned as a Skarsgard link.)

THE PLOT: A woman on the run from the mob is reluctantly accepted in a small Colorado town.  In exchange, she agrees to work for them.  As a search visits the town, she finds out that their support has a price - yet her dangerous secret is never far away.

AFTER: OK, first thought on this movie is - WTF is this?  This is three hours long, to start with, and then it turns out to be three hours of actors on a STAGE, pretending that they're in a town, though we can't see any of the houses, like the walls and the doors are all see-through, there are just floor plan outlines and the name of the street to tell us where the street is.  The gooseberry bushes are just chalk circles on the stage, the dog is drawn on the floor (though we can hear him bark, and he's a major story element).  There's furniture and props, but this is like some minimalist theater production, so WTF?  I'm not familiar with the films of Lars von Trier, so are they all like this or is this just a one-off?

There is a story, of course, but even though I think I understand it, I'm hard-pressed to say what it all means, or why the story is being told in this very specific way.  But before I go researching why it is the way it is, I want to take a stab at it, then I'll take a break, look it up on IMDB and Wikipedia, and then I'll come back here to determine if I was right or wrong.  I think this is some kind of moral fable, a look at what humanity is really all about, using the residents of this small Depression-era (?) town as some kind of allegory for, umm, something.  I think the point is that we're all a bunch of hypocrites (Americans, obviously, but all humans by extension) because we claim to be upright, moral people but I'm thinking that 99% of people are anything but.  So there's the face that we put out to the world, where we pretend to be decent and Christian and god-fearing, but then when nobody's looking we're all a bunch of sinners.  And that would be OK, everybody's a little selfish, a little gluttonous, a little horny or randy, but why can't we just admit it, and own up to it?

There's a stranger who wanders into town, naturally she's beautiful (that's important later on) and her arrival is prefaced by some gunshots in town, so even though she won't say what her backstory is, one can assume that it's nothing good.  Some gangster-looking guys in a car are asking questions of the townspeople, to see if anyone has seen her - so if bad men are looking for her, we can assume that she's a good person, right?  Actually, it's very annoying that she won't say anything about who she is or why she's hiding out - wouldn't that be exactly what everyone in town would ask her first?

But the male lead, Tom Edison Jr., appeals to the better nature of the townspeople (all 15 of them) and they agree to let her stay for two weeks, while they think on the matter further.  Tom and Grace (the stranger) then set out to win the people over, by having Grace do odd jobs for them.  This works, but perhaps a bit too well, because before long people are relying on Grace to take care of everything, and she's doing this for no pay, no compensation, just the promise that she could be accepted into the town, MAYBE.

This soon starts to feel like a form of slavery, or at least indentured servitude - and to make matters worse, we slowly learn that some of the men are taking further advantage of her, so she's like a de facto sex slave, but meanwhile Tom, who's enamored of her, can't seem to connect with her on a sexual level (she's probably tired from all the hard labor and sexual favors being performed all day long).  Every so often, a law officer comes up the mountain to post a new reward poster for Grace, and even suggests that she might be a criminal on the loose.  This creates another moral dilemma for the townspeople, if they're hiding a fugitive that's the wrong thing to do, but they're also benefiting from having her in town, plus they don't believe she's a criminal, so it also feels like the RIGHT thing to do.

OK, before I give away any significant spoilers, I'm going to break here and check out the deal about this film on the internet, to see what it all really means.  Back in a sec....

So, what I've learned so far is that this bare-bones staging format is to keep the audience from getting distracted by the set pieces, so we can focus more on the acting and the storytelling.  Well, that's a big fail, because I think I would be able to ignore the houses and the walls and the doors more if they were actually THERE, and the fact that they are NOT there, but the townspeople are all pretending that they are, is fairly distracting on its own.  It's the first thing I noticed, the absence of the walls, the fact that people knock on where the door ISN'T but should be, and we still here a knocking sound.  So if this is that distracting, overall, why do it?

The meaning of the film, according to Wikipedia, comes from director Lars von Trier, who said, "Evil can arise anywhere, as long as the situation is right."  Geez, that sounds like the theme of "Billionaire Boys Club", where those douchey rich twenty-somethings were speculating about how much money they would accept to kill someone - obviously everyone has their price, or if there were a situation where you saw someone raping your mother, for example, you might be inclined to kill that person.  But yeah, even in Dogville, small-town America, there's the potential for evil, that's sort of what I said before.  People tend to lie about themselves, or turn a blind eye to their own faults, and then when they're in a position to help someone in need, they may turn that situation to their own advantage, and that's a slippery slope down to the Valley of Evil.  Umm, I think?

Critics called this (among other things "A challenging piece of experimental filmmaking." (challenging is shorthand for "I didn't get it.") and "a potent parable of human suffering."  Right, the human condition, which I said before, and it's all about suffering.  This feels like the kind of film that actors all jump at the chance to appear in, and then audiences end up not understanding it.  Dumb it down, OK?  Stop being so damn "arty".  Another critic called it "three hours of tedious experimentation."  I feel your pain, anonymous critic, because I fell asleep after two hours and I had to finish it this morning before going to work.  That's the kind of thing that will just make you late all day long in a sort of domino effect, trust me on this point.

It turns out there's a sequel, called "Manderlay", which is not three hours long, and it doesn't have Nicole Kidman in it, but another actress takes over her role.  It does share some of the same actors as "Dogville", but apparently they play other roles in a different town.  Great, now I have to stop and check to see if that film is available on demand or on Netflix or Hulu before I can move on with my chain.  And if I decide to squeeze it in next, that means I'll have to drop something else....

Also starring Nicole Kidman (also carrying over from "Filmworker"), Paul Bettany (last seen in "Spider-Man: Far From Home"), Lauren Bacall (last heard in "Ernest & Celestine"), Chloe Sevigny (last seen in "The Snowman"), Udo Kier (last seen in "Downsizing"), Ben Gazzara (last seen in "Summer of Sam"), James Caan (last heard in "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2"), Patricia Clarkson (last seen in "Far From Heaven"), Shauna Shim, Jeremy Davies (last seen in "Secretary"), Philip Baker Hall (last seen in "People Like Us"), Blair Brown (last seen in "Altered States"), Zeljko Ivanek (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Harriet Andersson (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "Holes"), Cleo King (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), Miles Purinton, with the voice of John Hurt (last seen in "Owning Mahogany"), and a quick appearance by Richard Nixon (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts") in the closing credits.

RATING: 4 out of 10 polished glasses

Filmworker

Year 11, Day 231 - 8/19/19 - Movie #3,329

BEFORE: This one's a bit of an inside joke, because I found out about it through my friends James and Adam, who are two producers that I've worked with, and they both saw it.  Adam is the producing partner of Matthew Modine, who appears in it, and he also supplied some archival material from Modine's "Full Metal Jacket Diary".  During a podcast we were recording, they drew an analogy between my relationship to Bill Plympton and Leon Vitali's relationship to Kubrick, and said if they were casting "Filmworker 2", they would make it about me.

So of course I had to check this one out, eventually.  See, I say that I don't take recommendations for films to watch, but obviously I do, I file everything in my brain in case it becomes important to keep my project going.

Matthew Modine carries over again from "Revengeance".

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Room 237" (Movie #2,724)

THE PLOT: A documentary about English actor Leon Vitali, who came to work as an assistant to filmmaker Stanley Kubrick for over 30 years.

AFTER: Hmm, this becomes a difficult question for me to answer - do I identify with Leon Vitali?  While it might appear at first that we followed similar career paths, with Vitali pledging himself to aiding Kubrick for 30 years, and me working for animator Bill Plympton for over 25 years now, I think there are some key differences.  Vitali was an actor before finding work behind the camera, for example, and working for an animator has given me acting credits, rather than taking them away - and that's just one example.  If I hadn't been working for Bill, I probably wouldn't have any voice-acting roles in his films - plus I wouldn't have been in the right place, right time to be interviewed for that documentary "The People vs. George Lucas".  Bill recommended me to the camera crew that wanted to interview him, saying I probably knew more about "Star Wars" than he did himself, which is true.  I might not have ever gotten a chance to meet some of my idols, like "Weird Al" Yankovic, or many "Star Wars" actors, if I hadn't been working for Bill.

But I can feel Vitali's pain, at least on some level.  Often it feels like I've been working very hard behind the scenes on an animated feature film, for little recognition and for a salary that barely meets my expenses, and often makes me feel like it's costing me money to keep this job in the long run.  But here's how I feel when I learn about Vitali's career - last week we had a bad incident where someone dented the door of my wife's car so that it wouldn't close, and we had to wait a couple hours for a tow truck.  Later that day, I walked by a car in Brooklyn that had its whole front end smashed in, and I took a picture of it to text to my wife, with the words, "Well, it could have been much, much worse!"  And you can say that about almost anything, whatever bad things come your way, just remind yourself that it could always be much worse.  Vitali gave up his original career, had relationships that fell apart and suffered bad health because of all the stress involved with working for Kubrick.  Getting into animation GAVE me a career, at a time when music videos were falling out of vogue and I didn't know which way to go.  I've managed to balance jobs running TWO animation studios with a relationship, and I still have my health.  Well, most of it anyway, some parts are starting to wear out, but just my eyes, ears, back and knees.  I haven't had a kidney stone in over 5 years, so that's something - twice I had health problems on the first day of Comic-Con, so I think stress definitely plays a role.

Not everyone is cut out for a life in filmmaking - I remember that the biggest lesson I learned from film school at NYU is that I didn't really want to be a director, it's much too stressful and it takes a fair amount of ego, in addition to the creativity needed to come up with ideas.  Who needs that kind of pressure?  Just the Type A people, I think, and I'm just not one of them.  So before my junior year (which became my senior year, I graduated as soon as I had enough credits) I did something of a pivot and I took courses in producing, animation, and comedy writing.  (The comedy class is where I met my first wife, but that's a whole other story...)  And I started to see that there wasn't just one road to working in film, there were many.  An internship at a small production company gained me a look at the business side of things, and I learned how to do basic accounting, payroll withholding, basic video editing, and 100 other things, setting myself up as sort of a jack-of-all-trades for both production and office work.  And all these years later, that's still what I am - I'm not really a producer, but I do a lot of the same jobs.  I'm not an editor, animator or director, but I'd like to think I'm a good person to have around.

But I see the wisdom in Vitali's plan - approach the biggest, most famous creative person you can find, and work for them, volunteer at first if you have to, and then keep volunteering for more and more things.  With time, and luck, that person will come to depend on you, and eventually you can get paid for that, and become someone they rely on, their secret weapon, their lucky charm.  Plus, the more things you volunteer for, the more things you can get good at, and then it's a snowball effect that just makes you more and more useful as time goes on.  Besides my reputation for planning Comic-Con appearances, I've become a whiz at booking airfares, shipping packages, writing tweets and blog posts in someone else's "voice", etc. etc.

Vitali took my plan (before I did, obviously) and ran with it - he learned about the editing process, then about color timing (this was in the pre-digital age, obviously) and set lighting, then all of the things that have to be done once the film is completed, like marketing in other countries, subtitling the film in other languages, the logistics of getting all the prints shipped to the theaters, and so on.
Vitali served multiple roles on the production of "Eyes Wide Shut", not only as Kubrick's assistant but also as his liaison with the lighting, camera and continuity departments, AND he had an acting role in the film in-between all that.  Most people would need to work a 30-hour day to accomplish what this guy had to do for a 12-hour shoot day.

And then even after Kubrick's death, because of his extensive experience his services were still needed to properly archive all the materials from Kubrick's films, and supervise whenever there was a conversion to BluRay or 4K or whatever new format the industry came up with.  I recently went through some of this myself because of that deal with Shout! Factory that I mentioned yesterday - to make digital copies of some of Bill Plympton's features that never got converted before, we had to release the negs of three features from the Academy, where we established an archive back in 2012 to properly preserve and restore negs (which had been stored improperly for five years in Bill's apartment).  Also, there was one negative from 2004, a feature called "Hair High", that was mysteriously missing from the archive - it turned out that we didn't double-check the list for omissions, and it never came out of Technicolor New York's lab in 2012, when that lab closed down and released all its material to its clients.

One last "Hail Mary" play, and I was instructed to call out to Technicolor's vault in California, where all the material that wasn't picked up from the NYC lab was shipped for storage.  Success, the missing negative was found, and coincidentally it was just a few hours' drive from the lab used by the company we signed the deal with.  Sometimes, with enough persistence and luck, you can pull off what looks like a magic trick from afar.  Once we proved copyright and ownership of that re-located negative, it was fairly easy to arrange shipping down to Los Angeles for a transfer to digital - we could have probably made a new transfer from another source, but going back to the original negative was the option that most likely could yield the best result.

Today I was tasked with finding photos of Bill with animator Richard Williams, who recently passed away.  Bill wanted to write a tribute on his blog, and that sends me into detective mode - I've got all the photos from Bill's many trips, and they're organized, but only up to a point.  But if Bill can remembers WHERE he might have been photographed with another person, that's a big help.  Bill remembered running into him at the Annecy Festival (which takes place every June) and the Telluride Festival (a September event).  Also, Bill's wife remembered meeting him in 2018, so it didn't take too long to find the photos on my computer from June 2018 and September 2013 that were needed.  The better you can organize yourself at the start, the more efficient you can be going forward, that's true for any job.

But I also think that if you stay too long at any job, that job sort of stops being "what you do" and turns into "what you are".  And maybe you find you don't want to be that thing any more, or you don't want to be JUST that thing, so then it becomes this dilemma that you face weekly, or monthly - do I stay and keep doing the things that I've become good at, or do I pack it in and try something else, before I get too old to re-train myself?  Obviously I don't have a helpful cohesive answer for this, but I've found that it helps to go out with friends and enjoy yourself, it helps to go home and relax and spend time with your family and not work 13-hour days if you can help it, and it also helps to go on a vacation from time to time.

And if you can't get away for a week, you can always take a long weekend here and there and go on a road trip, those are fun too.  Because the down side of making yourself useful is that you might find that it's impossible to break away or take any time off, because you've made yourself indispensable.

Also starring Leon Vitali (last seen in "Barry Lyndon), Ryan O'Neal (last seen in "The Main Event"), Danny Lloyd (last seen in "The Shining"), R. Lee Ermey (last seen in "Saving Silverman"), Pernilla August (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "King Arthur"), Brian Capron, Tim Colceri, Treva Etienne, Brian Jamieson, Lisa Leone, Warren Lieberfarb, Ned Price, Nick Redman, Marie Richardson, Philip Rosenthal, Julian Senior, Steve Southgate, with archive footage of Stanley Kubrick, Adam Baldwin (last seen in "Serenity"), David Bowie (last seen in "We Are Twisted Fucking Sister"), Scatman Crothers (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Tom Cruise (last seen in "Going Clear: Scientology & The Prison of Belief"), Nicole Kidman (ditto), Vincent D'Onofrio (last seen in "The Magnificent Seven"), Kirk Douglas (last seen in "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast"), Keir Dullea (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Shelley Duvall (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), Salma Hayek (ditto), Steven Spielberg (ditto), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Jane Fonda in Five Acts"), Michael Gambon (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Tom Hanks (last seen in "Quincy"), Paul McCartney (ditto), George Harrison (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Arliss Howard (last seen in "Concussion"), Mick Jagger (last seen in "Rush: Time Stand Still"), John Lennon (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), James Mason (last seen in "Julius Caesar"), Malcolm McDowell (last seen in "Blue Thunder"), Jack Nicholson (last seen in "Richard Pryor: Omit the Logic"), Robert Pattinson (last seen in "The Lost City of Z"), Slim Pickens, Gordon Ramsay, Peter Sellers (last seen in "What's New Pussycat"), Martin Sheen (last seen in "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping"), Shelley Winters (last seen in "Alfie"), Rita Wilson (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2")

RATING: 6 out of 10 studio executives

Revengeance

Year 11, Day 230 - 8/18/19 - Movie #3,328

BEFORE: Some days I'm really pressed for what to say about a film - tonight's just the opposite, I've probably got too much to say, which comes from having too much information about it.  I was involved in the production of this film at nearly every stage, because I'm the office manager for the studio that made it, so I did many tasks on this film, from typing up the script (which was the last step in the process, oddly, but I'll explain this later) to dealing with film festivals, doing publicity and social media for the film, and working on the Kickstarter campaign that partially financed it, both at the pledging and the reward fulfillment stages (we finished earlier this year, only a year or so later than planned - more on that to follow, too).  See what I mean?  I could probably write a whole book about the three-year production of this film, and who knows, maybe someday I will.  But for tonight I'll try to keep it short.

I also voiced one of the characters, but I wouldn't be so bold as to use myself as a link (I also don't have enough material for that.).  Matthew Modine carries over from "Sicario: The Day of the Soldado" to voice a biker named Sid.  Since this was an independent film made with a low production budget, there are only a couple well-known actors involved, so that made it tough to link to, I had to wait for two Modine films and sandwich it in between them.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Cheatin'" (Movie #1,650)

THE PLOT: A low-rent bounty hunter named Rod Rosse, the One-Man posse, gets entangled in a web of danger when he takes on a job from an ex-biker/ex-wrestler turned U.S. Senator named "Deathface".

AFTER: OK, so first off, this film had its origins at the San Diego Comic-Con, where I worked a booth for Bill Plympton for about 15 years, and one thing that happens at Comic-Con is you meet a lot of people, that's what the event is for - or, perhaps more to the point, it's where fans often get to meet the people they admire.  I built up quite an impressive collection of autographs from "Star Wars" actors in my travels there, because that's who I admire, and I saw the opportunity to turn all those random encounters into something.   But one year (I don't remember exactly which one), Bill met this animator named Jim Lujan, who was making his own independent animated shorts, just like Bill's been doing forever.  Jim gave Bill some DVDs of his shorts, they struck up a friendship, and eventually that led to making this movie together as co-directors.  It's a bit unusual because most films only have one director, and Bill never shared director credit with anyone before, plus Jim wrote the script and designed the characters, with Bill then animating another person's characters in something like his style.  Only from an artistic standpoint, it's a bit rougher and cruder than Bill's usual work, but at the end of the day, it's a melding of their art styles.

But the resulting art style works for the story, which is set in the sleazy underworld of the L.A. area, which is filled with convenience stores and tattoo parlors, nightclubs where anything goes, and sleazy hotels where people are hiding out.  Other films that have explored this same territory include "Pulp Fiction" and "The Big Lebowski", which have almost as many crazy characters.  Throw in a little bit of "Sons of Anarchy", too, because out in the desert (in a region called the Inland Empire, which is a real thing) there are biker clubs and rock festivals and maybe even a cultist compound, who the hell knows what's going on there, am I right?  But let's focus on the biker club, called the Inland Emperors.

Lana, the daughter of the club's founders has taken something valuable from the bikers (aha, another heist film!) and Senator Deathface (an ex-member of the club) wants to get it back, whatever it is.  (Unlike "Pulp Fiction", though, we do eventually get to find out exactly what's in the briefcase, so to speak.)  So he hires four bounty hunters to track her down and get the item back - it's a bit like when Darth Vader hired Boba Fett and five others to track down the Millennium Falcon, only there are no droids or Mandalorians in this bunch.  The unassuming, accountant-like Rod Rosse is the important one here, assuming he can get his mother to stop talking to her cats and fiddling with her wrist-tasers long enough to give him a lead.  The others are the Foxy-Brown-like Odell Braxton, a large Japanese man named Jose Tanaka, and the shabby but sneaky Ace of Spades.

The bikers of the Inland Emperors Club are also looking for Lana, because she stole the item from their club, and they were holding it for the Senator, who frequently used the bikers as security guards.  The clock is ticking, because Deathface has a big charity rock concert planned, and whatever the item is, he needs it back before then.  The bounty hunters and the bikers try track her down through her weed dealer, her stepbrother (who DJ's at a transvestite or transgender nightclub) and her attempt to connect with Big Poppa Booyah, another ex-wrestler who was wronged by Deathface, and might want a little revengeance of his own.  One bounty hunter accidentally finds himself in Mexico, and Rod Rosse gets lost in the desert (another accidental connection to yesterday's "Sicario" sequel!) but he's rescued by some of those crazy cult members, who want to sacrifice him to the great god Zorna.

A couple of last-minute rescues later, and all the players find themselves at the big charity rock concert featuring fictional bands like Night Rattler and Snatch-Dragon (where several prominent Kickstarter backers can be spotted, drawn into the crowd scenes) and finally the big reveal of what got stolen from the biker's club in the first place.  I must admit that even though I typed up the script, I was quite suprised by the reveal and how funny it turned out to be.  But as I mentioned before, sometimes Bill Plympton doesn't stick to the script, he prefers to jump from storyboards to animation, and scenes from his films develop sort of organically over time.  This effect was heightened when making "Revengeance", because Jim Lujan voiced about half of the characters, and I think he did a fair amount of improv along the way.  So, typing the final script was the LAST step in production for us (for most studios, it would be the first step, or close to it) and we only did that because the film got released in France first, and our distributor there needed the final script in order to translate it into French subtitles.

Once this film was completed, we sort of encountered the same problem we've had for years, in that there's not much of a market in the U.S. for animated features aimed at adults.  "Sausage Party" really broke through in 2016, but it turned out to be more of an exception than any kind of new rule - in the U.S., most animated films are made for and marketed toward children only, which is a shame, even though that's proven to be quite successful over time. (Sure, it works, but why not make films for 100% of people, instead of just young ones?). I pity all the parents who have to suffer through terrible kids movies like "Trolls" and "Angry Birds" just because their kids want to see them.  Plympton's films have always been aimed at the college and adult markets, which has been limiting, to say the least - in other countries, especially France, and his films are more widely seen, because it's not so unusual there for adults to go see an animated film that has more adult humor.

Side note - when the film opened in France, in late 2016, a couple of newspapers there hailed the "Senator Deathface" character as a Trump-like character, because Trump had some loose connection with the WWE, and people were still trying to make sense of the recent election.  It's not possible, of course, because an animated feature takes at least three years to make (even when you work quickly, like we do) and nobody saw Trump coming in 2013 or 2014.  If anything, Deathface bears more of a resemblance to Jesse Ventura, because Trump never wore a wrestling costume or had long hair or was an ex-biker, plus he was never a Senator before getting elected President.  So there are too many differences for him to be any kind of Trump analogy, but that didn't stop the French press from making the connection, and then at that point you just sort of enjoy whatever publicity might put more eyeballs on the film.

But the distribution of this film has been slow - after playing in international festivals and getting a French theatrical release in 2016, we started entering it in U.S. festivals (where Bill's films tend to do well) and it won a couple of awards, like Best Animated Feature in the Portland International Film Festival and also the Nashville Film Festival.  Before playing it in a few theaters, we took it to San Diego Comic-Con in 2017, and that was a bit of a disaster.  We were thrilled at first to screen the film there (Bill had done panels and screened short films, but had never had an official screening of an animated feature film there) but they gave this film a terrible time-slot - Friday night, when most everyone wants to go out and party in the Gaslamp District.  Then, to make matters worse, they printed the wrong DAY in the official program, so some fans might have showed up on Saturday, only to find that they missed the Friday night screening.  (I had them print a correction as soon as I spotted the error, but I feared that the damage was already done, because who the hell reads the daily corrections to the schedule?).

We had a good crowd show up on that Friday night, but the room wasn't exactly packed. This was one reason (there were several others) that my Comic-Con spirit sort of broke in 2017, and I haven't been back there since.  The rising costs of maintaining a booth there, shipping merchandise back and forth and travel costs for personnel was another reason to get off the crazy carousel that is SDCC.  But finally in 2018 we were able to get the film self-released on DVD and BluRay, mainly because we'd promised physical autographed copies to many of the film's Kickstarter backers, but after those were shipped out, we've been selling the extra copies on Bill's Plymptoons web-site, and at the moment, this is the only way to view the film.

Times have changed, we realize that, and fewer people want to buy DVDs these days, and people would rather stream movies right to their TVs and computers without waiting for a disc to arrive by mail.  We did have Bill's previous feature "Cheatin'" on Netflix for a while, but it was only a 2-year deal, and the rights eventually did come back to him (once he got them back from the aggregator).  Other than a few shorts on iTunes, we haven't been able to break into the streaming market - but that might be about to change.  A distributor called Shout! Factory recently made a deal to acquire the streaming rights for his whole library, so there's a chance that all of his features and shorts, including "Revengeance", could be available soon on one of the existing streaming services, or maybe a new one that hasn't launched yet.  Here's hoping, because I'd love for his films to finally get the same sort of attention in the U.S. that they enjoy in other countries.

It's tough for me to rate this film, because I'm too close to it to have an unbiased opinion - it's the same dilemma I had with "Cheatin'" several years ago, in that it's a little weird for me to review and rate this, but it's also kind of weird if I avoid doing that.  Tonight I tried to watch it with fresh eyes, and I don't think I've watched it all the way through before, without stopping because I was typing up the dialogue or something.  There's maybe a bit of an odd narrative shift because the movie starts out with Rod as the central character (more or less) but by the end of the film, it feels more like Lana is the center of the story.  But I feel there are so many other crazy characters that this point doesn't matter all that much.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that Bill tends to rely on car chase scenes in his features, most notably the 1997 film "I Married a Strange Person", where the gag-filled car chase scene takes up about the last 20 minutes of a 75-minute film.  Subsequent features like "Mutant Aliens" and "Hair High" also had car chases at the end, but the trend was for them to get shorter and shorter, and by the time he directed "Cheatin'", released in 2013, the only car chase near the end took place on bumper cars at a carnival.  My personal opinion is that the narratives in his films have gotten better as the car chases have gotten smaller, but this is just a working theory.  There are some chase scenes in "Revengeance" (what would a film set in L.A. be without a couple car scenes on highways?) but they've been drastically reduced in size from the early days, so I don't think it really represents any back-sliding.  Anyway, it's a little odd that in an animated film nearly anything can be depicted (as long as someone can draw it), but yet drawing an animated car doing an impossible stunt seems somehow less impressive than the practical live-action stunts in "Baby Driver".  Does that make sense?

Still, in many ways making any film, especially an independent one, is like fighting a war on many fronts.  So it doesn't matter if I'm thrilled with the end result, or overly critical of it - either way, the team that made this are the people that I fought beside for three or four years, and it's inevitable that you form friendships in the trenches, that's how you survive, when people know that you've got their backs and they've got yours.

Also starring the voices of Jim Lujan, Sara Ulloa, Kaya Rogue, Dave Foley (last heard in "Monsters University"), Lalo Alcaraz, Ruby Modine, Keith Knight, Ken Mora, Jose Tanaka, Geo Brawn, Deacon Burns, Charley Rossman, Robert Lujan, Mike Perez, Jose Cabrera and me (last seen in "The People vs. George Lucas")

RATING: 6 out of 10 cartons of Black Lung cigarettes.