Eleven years ago I was very excited to go see a new non-Disney non-musical animated movie called The Iron Giant. Equal to thoughts that I had that it was going to be great, I also had a feeling that it would make no money. I was fairly confidant that it was going to be in the category of classic film not seen by many. Alas, I was correct. The Iron Giant was pretty much universally loved by every critic and movie-goer that saw it. Now if only more people had seen it. The picture cost Warner Bros $70 million to produce and made back about $23 million. The following year, Fox released another animated sci-fi epic Titan A.E. It also cost $70 million and made about $23 million in return. Hence the death bells rung at the concept for studios to attempt the art of classical animation as big screen entertainment.

Lorenzo di Bonaventura, president of Warner Bros. at the time, explained, “People always say to me, ‘Why don’t you make smarter family movies?’ The lesson is, every time you do, you get slaughtered.”

The film was directed by Brad Bird, who was coming off of a successful stint in television animation, where he helped to develop both The Simpsons and King of the Hill. Luckily, Brad Bird’s old friend and animation colleague John Lasseter was able to offer him a new gig, despite his latest effort not being box office gold. He and PIXAR went on to win Best Animated Film Oscars for both The Incredibles and Ratatouille.

Meanwhile, even the grand master of traditional animation was floundering. Disney made the somewhat shocking announcement that their 45th big screen animated movie, the 2004 cow starring feature Home on the Range, would be the the last non-CG cartoon that they would produce, and most of the animation staff was laid off.

In 2006, the Disney juggernaut acquired PIXAR. My first thought was “Oh no! Disney is going to ruin PIXAR!”. Then something great happened, a bunch of long time PIXAR staff members were given various high positions of power at Disney, and PIXAR was left alone. And what did they do when they took over the company? They said that there will be no more sub-par straight to video-store sequels of classics like Lady and the Tramp and Cinderella. They re-instigated the tradition of short animation in front of features (the first was the amazing Goofy cartoon How to Hook Up Your Home Theatre, which was in front of the not so amazing National Treasure 2). Their greatest move (and a somewhat ironic one), was when the CG geniuses at PIXAR re-hired the animation department that Disney had let go and re-opened the gates to old school cartoons at Disney.

The come-back effort took form as 2009’s The Princess and the Frog, a project from the directors of modern classics Aladdin and The Little Mermaid. An American fairy tale, featuring Broadway style songs, set in 1920’s New Orleans (I’m pretty sure the first 20th century fairy tale to be considered a Disney Classic). From a financial standpoint, the film did very well (almost $250 million worldwide). From an award standpoint , the film did very well (three Oscar nominations amongst other trophy’s). And most importantly (well…I guess to some the money part is the most important), it was good and people liked it.

So thanks to PIXAR, a genius like Brad Bird got a second chance at success. And the whole medium of classical animation on the big screen looks like it may have found a new lease on life.

Get the kids out of the house (or come without them) and catch both impressive pieces of animation as part of March Break matinees at the Mayfair.

The Princess and The Frog – March 17th and 18th at 1PM
The Iron Giant – March 19th and 20th at 1PM

In 1971 a former medical doctor who had seen a lot of carnage in the emergency room met an aspiring filmmaker at a summer school film program. They produced a short titled Violence in the Cinema, Part 1, which won a number of film festival awards. Eight years later George Miller and Byron Kennedy brought what would become the cornerstone of the post apocalyptic revenge western to the big screens of Australia.

Mad Max changed everything for Australian filmmakers, and made a career for Mel Gibson, who showed up at the audition with a friend the day after getting in a bar room brawl, never expecting to get the part. The low budget epic was filled with awesome car crashes and lots of future punk action and violence. It spawned a pair of sequels, and inspired many filmmakers and storytellers in the years to come (for another Mad Max style tale, check out The Book of Eli, which plays the following two nights, March 14th and 15th)

The film held the record for greatest profit to cost ratio for a movie for upwards of 30 years in the Guinness Book of Records, only recently beat out by Paranormal Activity.

The original adventure of cinemas most famous road warrior screens midnight on March 13th. And as an added bonus, it’s a brand new pristine 35mm print, so it’ll be like watching it fresh off the presses right when it was released in 1979.

The Muppets have always been more than your average children’s entertainment featuring puppets. Take the original television series. What they were presenting to the TV viewing public was essentially a fake documentary series investigating working life behind the scenes at a live variety program. Which would be an interesting enough show in itself, except here our central characters are a frog, a bear, a pig and all other form of strange talking creatures.

The original ‘Muppet Movie’ plays along those same lines. The Muppets are watching a movie that they have filmed in which they’re playing themselves on a quest to find fame and fortune in Hollywood. Sounds a bit confusing…but it works.

The sequel, ‘The Great Muppet Caper’, marked the first time that the Muppets played characters in a film (which they would go on to do again for ‘Christmas Carol’ and ‘Treasure Island’ films), asking us to suspend our disbelief and watch Kermit, Fozzie and Gonzo (in the same way that we would watch human actors cast in a regular movie) play investigative reporters, hot on the trail of a jewel thief .

A double dose of afternoon Mayfair Muppets, happening February 22nd & 23rd. Featuring human being appearances by the likes of Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, Charles Grodin, Peter Falk, John Cleese and Orson Welles.

PS – If Kermit singing ‘Rainbow Connection’ doesn’t pull at your heart-strings, there’s something wrong with you. You should look into it and speak to a professional…you might be dead inside.

‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ looks, well…fantastic. Hate to sound like a bad film critic looking to get his quote tagged onto the add campaign…but it does. A stop motion animation movie directed by cult indie visionary Wes Anderson (’Rushmore’, ‘Royal Tenenbaums’), based on a book by Roald Dahl, starring George Clooney and Meryl Streep, along with returning Anderson alum Bill Murray, Own Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and Willem Dafoe. Such great combination’s of talent have gone wrong before of course, but this one seems right on the mark.

The most amazing thing is how much it still looks like a Wes Anderson film. Admittedly I’m judging from the trailer alone, but he still managed to transfer his very quirky style over from the live action film-making world (the music, the title-cards, distinctive colour schemes, foreground placed characters standing looking into camera, etc…).

Originally intended as a collaboration between Anderson and Henry Selick (director of ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’). Selick ended up leaving the project to focus on ‘Coraline’, and now both films are up for Academy Awards in the Best Animated Film category.

Catch ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ from February 20 – 23, only at the Mayfair.

Whet your appetite here – then come see the films (and some of the filmmakers) in the flesh on Feb 12, starting at 9:30 pm.

(And yes, you must be 18 years of age or older to attend.)

Since we started our regular Participaction screenings of the film several months ago, audiences have grown and grown. Inexplicably, Ottawa wants more The Room! So, when Tommy offered us a couple of cases of The Room bobbleheads, we had to say, “Spoon!”

Uh, I mean, we had to say, “yes.”

The bobblheads arrived today, and they’re going on sale at the Mayfair asap.

He speaks! He nods! He’s made in China! He’s a better actor than the real Tommy Wiseau!

(See him in action here: The Room Bobblehead.)

So next time you come to the Mayfair, bring some extra cash, because starting today, for only $25, you can bring the star of The Room back to your room!

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The distributors of Street Trash (playing Friday, Feb . 5 at 11:15), however, came through with flying colours this month. We just received the vintage lobby cards below, and couldn’t wait to share them with you.

Enjoy!

Check out a bevvy of reviews, both positive and negative, at the Movie Review Query Engine.

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Spoilers, ho.

HIS SOUL’S STILL DANCING

by Ian Driscoll

In the course of making The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans, Werner Herzog seems to have discovered how to save Nicolas Cage: let him drown.

Why am I writing about Nicolas Cage again, after effectively writing him off in a previous column?

Maybe because, with his ferocious performance in TBL: POC-NO, Cage has been resurrected for me.

It’s a resurrection that happens onscreen as well as off. The film opens with the camera following a snake as it swims through what turns out to be a flooded precinct jail, where bad detectives Nic Cage and Val Kilmer are taking bets on how long it will take a man locked in one of the cells to drown. Cage eventually abandons the game, though, and jumps in to save the man, at which point the screen goes black.

We catch up with him again some months later, as he’s being promoted from bad detective to bad lieutenant, primarily for saving the man’s life. But he has emerged from the water wracked with chronic pain from the back injury he sustained jumping in – a staggering, lurching Frankenstein’s monster, constantly holding one shoulder higher than the other (a crooked man, walking a crooked mile).

The allusion to Frankenstein is deliberate, and none too subtle. Cage’s lieutenant is, like the monster, reanimated flesh. He is the walking dead.

And if there was ever a city in which to be a zombie, New Orleans is that city.

Herzog’s New Orleans is a drowned city, and even years after Katrina, the (shore)line between land and water is blurry at best. Aquatic reptiles wander everywhere: into jails, as in the film’s opening.  Onto roads, as in the sequence where Cage visits the scene of an accident both caused and watched by alligators. And, inevitably, into Cage’s mind, as in the stakeout sequence where he hallucinates lizards: “What the hell are those iguanas doing on my coffee table?”

This is a place where the dead dance. There’s a sequence – the one that people walk away from the film (or even the trailer) quoting, in which Cage tricks a group of drug dealers into shooting a group of gangsters (who are trying to extort money from Cage). When all the gangsters are down, Cage demands that the dealers shoot the lead gangster again. When asked, “What for?” he responds, punctuating his explanation with a gasping laugh: “His soul’s still dancing!”

While the dealers are deciding what to do, we get to watch as the dead man breakdances around his own corpse. It’s a mesmerizing scene, and in the film’s voodoo-inflected setting, it doesn’t even need Cage’s uninterrupted drug abuse to seem plausible.

(Side note: I really wish that scene weren’t in the trailer. It would have been great to stumble across it in the course of watching the film. It would have been a stunning discovery.)

Of course, because this is nominally a police procedural, with Cage investigating a murder, the film also places emphasis on people who speak for, and act on behalf of, the dead. And in the course of the film, acting on behalf of the dead becomes an exercise in just plain acting.

Cage’s performance in TBL: POC-NO is all about acting. That is to say, he’s playing a character who’s constantly acting, pretending, lying. He acts the part of a cop while being a crook. He acts the part of a crook while being a cop. He acts straight when high, dedicated when desperate, confident when utterly lost. He approaches everyone he encounters with a new face (if the same improbable hairline), and fools the audience enough to leave unanswered questions about where his loyalties lie. Is he undercover or under-undercover?

The point is that he never stops performing, within the film or for the camera. He does what it takes to become the bad man for Herzog’s bad world.

And make no mistake: this is a bad world. It does not reward good behaviour. It does not spare the innocent. As Herzog himself puts it in Grizzly Man: “I believe the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

Of course, like practically everything that comes out of Herzog’s mouth, that’s probably at least part exaggeration and part straight-faced joke. Truth be told, he’s not really interested in the truth.

While he works in both narrative and documentary forms, he eschews the term “documentary,” instead preferring to label his films “fiction” and “non-fiction.” They’re all stories, it’s just that some of them are made up, and others aren’t. Several of Herzog’s films straddle the line, or get to be both: take a look at how his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly relates to its narrative remake Rescue Dawn, how the polygraph-buster that is My Best Fiend writes and rewrites personal history, or how Grizzly Man treats the comforting (and sometimes deadly) narratives/lies we tell ourselves.

All of which is to say that, yes, the common character of the universe may very well be chaos, hostility, and murder. But in New Orleans, at least for Nicolas Cage, there’s life after death.

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That’s part of what Martin Scorsese had to say in his speech at the Golden Globes about the importance of preserving old. You can hear and see the rest of what he had to say here:

Scorsese at the Golden Globes

it can be very difficult to find prints of older films, but we’re constantly on the lookout for classics and forgotten treasures. What old films would you like to see at the Mayfair?

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We’d expected the regular theatrical version – that’s what we were told was available – but we got this instead. Not that we’re complaining! It just means an extra 30 minutes of Tolkien-tastic entertainment to share with you, the most discerning film fans in Ottawa.

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