Camille 2000 (1969)

Camille 2000 (1969)
Article 5594 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-9-2018
Directed by Radley Metzger
Featuring Daniele Gaubert, Nino Castelnuovo, Eleanora Rosso Drago
Country: Italy
What it is: Sexed-up classic

A young man falls in love with the courtesan of a rich nobleman.

For the record, the Lentz guide lists this movie as genre, but the Walt Lee guide consigns it to the “Exclusions” list for movies lacking fantastic content. A viewing of the movie makes me give the point to Walt Lee, but I can’t really blame Lentz; we have a right to expect any movie made before the millennium change that ends with “2000” to be science fiction. And maybe it does take place in the year 2000; that might explain why some of the costume and set design choices are so bizarre (though my own belief is that some set and costume designers just like it that way). But there’s nothing in the script that specifies that it takes place in the future, and really, is there any reason to set this Dumas tale in the future when the present could work just as well? As for the movie itself, it’s an update of “Camille” that takes advantage of the new permissiveness in the cinema to add a bunch of softcore sex scenes to the mix. For all that, the movie is a straightforward telling of the story; it’s pretty to look at, but nothing special. And as for all of the sex scenes, I will fall back on my belief that one man’s erotic fantasy is another’s consummate silliness, and after the S&M D&S party scene, I found it hard to take the movie seriously anymore.

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Les escargots (1966)

Les escargots (1966)
aka The Snails
Article 5593 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-6-2018
Directed by Rene Laloux
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Animated short

A farmer discovers the only way his crop will flourish is to water them with human tears. He does so, but the crop attracts snails, who eat them and grow to tremendous size…

There are comic touches in the other works of Rene Laloux, but they tend to be muted by the general tone of darkness that pervades his works. This one is the reverse; the darkness is here, but the comic sense predominates, especially in its final twist. But then, I’d expect it to be a bit comic; it is, after all, a marauding giant monster movie, though it is less concerned with how humanity defeats the monsters than with what happens once the snails have laid waste to the world. At any rate, this is easily the most enjoyable of the three Laloux shorts I’ve seen recently.

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Dead Times (1965)

Dead Times (1965)
aka Les temps morts
Article 5592 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-4-2018
Directed by Rene Laloux
Featuring Roland Dubillard
Country: France
What it is: Not encouraging

A narrator tells us about the violent nature of man.

It looks like the DVD I have has a few Laloux shorts, so it looks like I’m undergoing something of a Lalouxathon here. This disturbing and depressing short was his second directorial effort; there is a short animated sequence with some truly surreal images (which accounts for its fantastic content), but it’s mostly live footage and still shots, all putting forth the argument that man is an inveterate killer. No, it’s not a fun short, and it is rather preachy, but he does have a point and it’s not easy to shake off. At least it’s only ten minutes long, but you may emerge from this one feeling rather cynical about mankind.

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The Monkey’s Teeth (1961)

The Monkey’s Teeth (1961)
aka Les dents du singe
Article 5591 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-3-2018
Directed by Rene Laloux
No cast
Country: France
What it is: Therapeutic oddity

A dentist steals his patient’s teeth to give to a rich person. Will the patient find justice?

This short popped up unexpectedly as an extra on my copy of FANTASTIC PLANET. It has a very interesting backstory; Rene Laloux took part in an experiment where he made an animated film in which the story and characters were developed by people in a mental health home. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the resulting short would be more than a little strange; parts of the story are vague and some of it doesn’t make much sense, but it nevertheless makes for a fascinating viewing. The very premise has a strong element of horror, and the story also involves a “monkey magician” as a character (I’m glad I was told that’s what it was, because I wasn’t really sure). This one is very interesting and unusual.

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The Invincible Masked Rider (1963)

The Invincible Masked Rider (1963)
aka L’invincible cavaliere mascherato
Article 5590 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 12-2-2018
Directed by Umberto Lenzi
Featuring Pierre Brice, Daniele Vargas, Helene Chanel
Country: Italy / France
What it is: Buckled swashes

A corrupt lord in Spain hatches a scheme to get a rival’s fortune by killing him and forcing the rival’s daughter to marry his own son. However, a heroic masked rider stands in his way…

Despite the constant references to “Robin Hood” in the movie, the obvious model for this one is Zorro; our hero even has a signature sign he carves on his foes. This being the case, I was expecting that this title would turn out to be one of those false alarms; the Zorro story (as well as the Robin Hood story) really doesn’t have much in the way of fantastic content, and I was expecting that someone would mistakenly classify it as such due to the world “invincible” in the title. However, there are some touches to this movie that increase the fantastic content a bit; in one scene, the hero seems to disappear, reappear and teleport, and though that may be the imagination of the man he’s fighting, it nonetheless gives a supernatural twinge to the action. Furthermore, the hero is dressed head to toe in black, and in the fight scenes it almost looks like his opponents are fighting a shadow. Yet for me, the most striking element of the movie is that, if my imagination hasn’t gotten the best of me, it might be a strange adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”; consider the otherwise odd subplot involving the plague and the fact that it ends with a costume ball. This brings up the question as to whether the hero is, in fact, an ordinary human; when he refers to his homeland as his place where your troubles will go away, I find myself wondering if this place exists on Earth. Granted, this may all be my imagination going wild, but I will say this much; these touches of the fantastic are far more interesting than the humdrum story.

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Abstronic (1952)

Abstronic (1952)
Article 5589 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-29-2018
Directed by Mary Ellen Bute and Ted Nemeth
No cast
Country: USA
What it is: Abstract animation

Animation is displayed to pieces by Aaron Copland and Don Gillis.

I’ve just done one short; I might as well do another, only this time I’m returning to the realm of abstract animation. This one is fairly energetic, at least partially because the two musical pieces (both of which sound quite a bit like “Turkey in the Straw”) are lively and fun. As usual with this type of short, I don’t really have much to say about it other than it held my attention for its six-minute running time, and maybe that’s all we can expect from an abstract short.

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The Abominable Snow Rabbit (1961)

The Abominable Snow Rabbit (1961)
Article 5588 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-28-2018
Directed by Chuck Jones and Maurice Noble
Featuring the voice of Mel Blanc
Country: USA
What it is: Looney Tunes

Bugs and Daffy get lost on their vacation and end up in the Himalayas, where they encounter an abominable snowman seeking a pet.

Warner Brothers’ cartoons were in their waning days in the early sixties, and though this cartoon is one of those from the era that is more fondly remembered, one can notice that the gags and the timing aren’t quite as sharp as they used to be, and the absence of Carl Stalling is very noticeable. Still, the reason this one is fondly remembered is that it is the most famous use of a gag they used several times over the years, in that one of the characters is modeled off of Lenny from “In Mice and Men”; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if more people are familiar with this cartoon than with the Steinbeck story. The presence of the snowman is a catalyst for another battle of wits between Bugs and Daffy, with the usual results. Initially, the snowman was a one-off character, but would be brought back in a few attempted revivals of Looney Tunes cartoons during the seventies and eighties.

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Aan (1952)

Aan (1952)
Article 5587 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-24-2018
Directed by Mehboob Khan
Featuring Dilip Kumar, Nimmi, Prem Nath
Country: India
What it is: Epic romance

When an ambitious and tyrannical prince usurps the throne, he is opposed by a heroic peasant who has fallen in love with the princess.

For those who’ve noticed that I’m watching a lot of movies that began with AA, that’s because right now I’m going through Walt Lee’s Reference Guide to Fantastic Films in alphabetical order and watching any movie I can find on the internet listed there. As it turns out, there’s a heavy dose of films from India near the beginning of the book, and it seems they’re easy to find on YouTube.

Still, that doesn’t mean that they’re easy to find with English subtitles (even though I know prints do exist with them), and so I had to watch it in Hindi without subtitles. Fortunately, I had some plot descriptions to help work out the general story. It’s something of a cross between your typical palace intrigue story crossed with “The Taming of the Shrew”; the fantastic content (according to the Lee guide) is a dream sequence which includes some magic in it. Still, I have to say that the dream sequence (which is, of course, a long musical number) is only slightly weirder than some of the other musical numbers in this ambitious but bizarre drama. It was the first Indian film shot in Technicolor, and it makes as much use of the color as it can. Even with the plot descriptions, this one gets confusing at times, but it is loaded with spectacle, some of it quite jaw-dropping. Still, the most memorable thing I found in this one was the acting of female star Nadira as the princess, whose ability to overact with her eyes (and I do mean overact) is almost beyond human comprehension. Still, at least I didn’t need English subtitles to know how she was feeling.

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Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Article 5586 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-23-2018
Directed by Rich Moore
Featuring the voices of John C. Reilly, Jack McBrayer, Jane Lynch
Country: USA
What it is: Animated comedy

A massive video-game villain, hurting for the lack of acclaim he’s gotten for the role he played in a successful video game, vows to win a medal in the hopes of getting the respect of his fellow video-game characters. Unfortunately, this requires him to invade other video games and runs the risk of causing his own game to be shut down.

My experience with animated features during the last few decades has been almost exclusively with the mostly excellent entries from Pixar, but this one (from Disney’s other animation arm) attracted my attention due to its subject matter; I spent my early adult years during the video arcade craze, and this one hit a key of nostalgia in me, especially with the inclusion of several classic era video game characters (including Q*Bert, a personal favorite). No, it doesn’t live up to the best of the Pixar features (though it sometimes comes across as Pixar Lite), but overall I found it quite enjoyable. The first half-hour is only so-so, but once the action switches to the shenanigans in a hilariously cutesy video racing game called SUGAR RUSH, it starts working very well. In some ways, the movie can be compared with Pixar’s INSIDE OUT, though this movie lacks the emotional depth of that one. Outside of the references to other video games, the movie references a few other movies, including ALIENS and THE WIZARD OF OZ; the march of the witch’s guards from that movie is parodied to good effect. Still, one overall impression the movie left me with is that their is a group of basic plot mechanisms that are constantly being recycled in some of these animated films; though it didn’t really hurt my enjoyment of this one, I can see a time where this type of movie can start being very predictable.

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Aadmi (1968)

Aadmi (1968)
aka The Man
Article 5585 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 11-18-2018
Directed by A. Bhimsingh
Featuring Dilip Kumar, Waheeda Rehman, Manoj Kumar
Country: India
What it is: Drama

A rich young man falls in love with a woman, but the relationship is threatened due to a secret from his past.

I originally started watching this in a version without English subtitles, so I decided to go hunting around for a plot description to help me. When I found a fairly elaborate one to help me, I couldn’t help notice that the screen shots seemed to indicate that there was a version of the movie that bore English subtitles, so I looked a little further and managed to find it. It’s a good thing, too; had I not had the subtitles, the movie would have been impenetrable to me. It’s primarily a drama (in soap opera mode) rather than a genre movie, but it has a few fantastic touches; there is a miraculous occurrence near the end of the movie, and throughout certain characters seem to be taunted by disembodied voices; this is as described in the Walt Lee guide. However, the most impressive moment of fantastic content has the hatred of the protagonist manifesting itself as a giant doppelganger who tries to talk his real self into committing murder; it’s an impressive effect. As a whole, the movie is fairly good, but I didn’t really care much for the musical sequences, and its length (two and three quarter hours) becomes a bit oppressive.

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