Telluride Film Festival 2001 8/31-

Two weeks, a move and one horrific Tragedy later I think I might actually be ready to write reviews of movies that I saw at the Telluride Film Festival. This is just one way to help get things back to normal. Whatever that is these days. For two weeks I was in Telluride, Colorado helping to set up for and run the Telluride Film Festival. A friend of mine has been going for the past four years and, ever since that first year, he has been trying to get me to go with him. For one reason or another (school, work, sheer laziness) I haven’t been able to go.

Until this year. And it was a blast. I worked hard, met some really cool people and saw some great films.

What’s the difference in this and South By Southwest? Well, first of all, you’ve got the beautiful scenery of Telluride. It’s amazing. This small mountain town is enveloped in the Rockies. It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life. It has now been added to my list of places that I would almost be willing to live outside of Austin. (And that’s a really short list. Believe me.)

Second, there’s the absence of press. Granted, there’s not a whole lot of press at SXSW, but when compared to Telluride, the press is almost a litany. The people who run Telluride actually don’t allow very much press in. That way the celebs can feel free to run around town without being followed by lights and cameras. There is a little press (Giovanni Ribisi was interviewed for a bit for Shot In The Heart, an HBO movie that he is in.), but it’s not obtrusive. And it was great. Sundance is for businessmen. Telluride is for film geeks.

And then there’s the theatres themselves. Everyone has Dolby Surround sound. But the really amazing thing is that there are only two that are actual theatres. The rest are in a high school gym, a community center, a convention center, a park and a Mason’s Hall. But if you walked into the Max Theatre and didn’t know that it was a school gym, there’s no way you could tell.

(To all of you SXSW fans out there, I still love that film festival. And, to their defense on the theatres, they don’t HAVE to work on them too hard because most of them are already theatres.)

So, after a week and a half of digging ditches (something I never thought I would do for a film festival), getting sunburned all to hell and carting heavy equipment around, the festival finally started. And, as much as they tell you that Telluride has a higher quality of films than any other festival…well, I’m probably not supposed to say this since I was a worker bee, but they have just as much crap as everyone else. But they do get some great new films and a lot of amazing classics, as my reviews will show.

Let’s get started with those, shall we?

METROPOLIS (1927)

Gone are the cheesy songs of Georgio Moroder’s color-tinted 1984 version of Fritz Lang’s silent sci-fi classic! Back is the live music accompaniment! This is the first time I’ve seen a silent film in a theatre with a real band playing the music, and The Alloy Orchestra did an amazing job at keeping a futuristic, industrial tone while still making it sound old-fashioned enough to fit with a film made in 1927. And they managed to sound like an entire orchestra. Not bad for three guys.

The movie itself is a bit dated and naive by today’s standards (“Mediator between hand and brain must be heart!”), but it’s story of man vs. science is a timeless one and what few special effects there are are almost better than some of the digital ones we see today. It’s a future-Frankenstein story where the doctor isn’t the focus. The hero is.

You can see all of today’s sci-fi coming out of this one film. From the themes to the characters to the look of the film itself. Yeah, the acting is a little old-fashioned, but we can still feel these characters. When the robot becomes a real girl we can feel the pride of the doctor who created her and the fear of those around them.

Salman Rushdie, who chose this film to be shown at the festival, said that the vision of the future tells a lot about the time that that vision came out of. That is never more true than for this film. Fritz Lang may have ended up hating it, but screw him. This is German Expressionism at its best.

ALPHAVILLE (1965)

In 1965 Jean-Luc Godard was in dire straits. He still wanted to make films, but he had no money. So what did he do? He made a sci-fi film, of course. He grabbed up American tough-guy actor Eddie Constantine and the character he was known for playing, Lemmy Caution, and put them into a story of intrigue and death. Only it was set about 50 years in the future. And it was a parody of the hard-boiled detective story.

The story itself is rather hard to follow. In fact, I could barely tell that there was a story at all. Something about trying to find a way around the fact that the leader of the planet he is on has outlawed love and feeling. (The leader only shows up in voice-overs that sound like someone trying to say the alphabet while burping. A little disturbing, but funny in a weird way.) But he is starting to feel love (or lust) for a young female alien (Anna Karina).

The low-budget nature of this film almost saves it. If it had been full of special effects and cool costumes it wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. As it is it’s a very funny private dick movie that just happens to take place on another planet where everyone looks like Sam Spade. Just imagine a world where the hero saves the planet not by killing someone, but just by having Godardian voice-overs that really don’t make a lot of sense to the rest of the film. And yet, they almost do.

Almost everything about this film was funny. The acting, the dialogue, the cars (mostly Ford Galaxies)…even the music was a great send-up of old mystery movies.

The only complaint I have is that every once in a while (and more frequently towards the end) Godard threw in a bunch of really annoying beeps and neon lights. One of my co-workers said that this was a Brechtian device used to piss off the viewers and catch them off guard. Well, it worked. I didn’t like that.

Other than that, this was a great send-up and re-thinking of both sci-fi and the pot-boiler.

SOLARIS (1972)

You have to have a lot of patience to watch an Andrei Tarkovsky film. That’s what my buddy found out. He didn’t even make it through the opening credits of this one. Of course, those credits took up the first five minutes of the film! And they were just regular old, white on black credits. No action going on behind them at all.

Yes, Solaris is something that frightens most mortal men: a three-hour Russian sci-fi epic. But I was ready. I was prepared. My ass was ready for a long sit-down.

It helped that I had seen it before.

This is the kind of film that makes me feel stupid. It’s long, not totally exciting and has lots of meaningful shots that I just don’t really get until someone else explains them to me. I do, however, think this is a great film. Funny how that works.

On the surface, the film is about a man who is sent to a space station to find out what happened to the crew. All of them are dead (including one of his best friends) but two men. Why did they die? Well, we’re not sure.

But when our hero gets there he is assaulted by his own dreams. His wife, who died years before, starts to visit him. In the one laugh in the whole movie, one of the other survivors pulls a midget back into a room. (I almost thought I was watching a David Lynch film. Or maybe Adam Sandler had gotten ahold of this print.)

But that’s the surface story. What it’s really about is the persistence of memory and how that memory effects our present. The hero’s vision of his wife was exactly the way he remembered her, but she was different somehow. And it effected the way he did things on the station because of his confusion over the differences. Was he remembering her differently? Or was this someone else pretending to be her? Or was it just his imagination running away with him?

Now, you may ask, why did this movie have to be three hours long? Well, maybe it didn’t. It could have been cut to 1½ hours and told the same story. (Maybe cut out the five minute traffic scene where nothing happens but driving.) But it wouldn’t have been as effective. We had to feel the confusion of the characters in order for the underlying themes to really set in. And it’s ambivalent ending wouldn’t have made as much sense.

This is a deep film and one that is very hard to watch. There are no special effects, not a lot of dialogue, only the one laugh and a lot of thought going into the viewing experience. This is probably the only film where people actually broke out into individual discussion groups after it was over. I wish they had broken out DURING the film. Maybe it would have helped a little bit more.

Tarkovsky didn’t entertain on purpose. In fact, he felt that, if he entertained, he didn’t do his job right. Keep that in mind if you ever decide to watch any of his films. They’re difficult films, but well worth the time and effort.

And, if you’re already a fan of the film, watch out. First off, this is the only good print left in America, so you probably won’t see it on the big screen again. Second, James Cameron is planning a remake. Hmmm. Solaris with explosions. Can’t wait for that.

THE GOLDEN FORTRESS (1974)

In the fourth and last of Rushdie’s picks that I saw (the others were the three sci-fi classics-he also chose two other Indian films), we follow a young Indian boy who can somehow remember his past lives. He thinks that he grew up in The Golden Fortress. Unfortunately, a couple of thieves are chasing him because they take the “golden” part seriously. The boy does have a couple of helpers, though: a Sherlock Holmes type guy and his young charge.

Satyajit Ray, director of the classic Apu Trilogy, directed this family film in the early 70s. Soon after its release it was never heard from again. In fact, I believe that this is the first time it’s been seen in America since its initial release.

It’s very cool that they found this film since it is by an important director of Indian cinema. That doesn’t, however, make it a good movie. In fact, it’s a bunch of fairly interesting characters doing fairly interesting things in a VERY boring way. At two hours it was way too long for a family film and way to uninteresting for anyone else. Granted, I was pretty damn tired when I saw this one, but I fell asleep just about every other line and never felt like I missed anything. I probably didn’t since not everything was subtitled!

I have never seen any other Indian films, let alone any other Ray films. Hopefully this is not really considered one of his best. I heard that it was very commercial compared to his other films. Lots of “action” and “laughs.” It was all pretty realistic until the end when suddenly things got really cheesy. A gun being kicked directly into someone’s hand, bad one-liners (a man screams as he’s thrown from a train and the hero says, “It sounded like the end of something.”) and just sheer stupidity all around.

And what was worse was the fact that the central character, the kid, was not interesting at all. I was actually dreading every time he came on the screen. I would have rather stuck with the Sherlock dude for the whole movie. He was at least trying.

Someone said that the film almost mocked reincarnation, which is central to India’s religious beliefs. I didn’t get that out of it. The kid was never used as a joke because of his supposed ability. He wasn’t believed at first, but finally his parents decided to check it out by hiring the detective.

All in all, though, this deserves to be released in some form because of who directed it. Maybe a minor video release. But it really was not a good movie at all. And that’s a shame, because it could have been a really charming little family film.

ITALIAN FOR BEGINNERS

The new Dogma 95 film is uncharacteristically sweet natured. It’s a romantic comedy about a group of lonely people in a small Danish town who become a family and fall in love through their Italian class. It becomes to important to them, in fact, that they start to think of it as the central factor of the boring little lives.

Surprisingly the Dogma style (no artificial lighting, handheld camera, partly improvised dialogue…basically just “real”) works really well with this kind of story. I wouldn’t suggest doing it on the next Julia Roberts film or anything, but it almost makes it more believable to have it shot like this. I’m still not used to the sound editing, though. There’s just no continuity at all. No background noise in one shot, next shot has a car driving through the background. Kind of distracting.

Very sweet little film that could actually be a big hit for Dogma from director Lone Sherfig.

THE CAT’S MEOW

When I heard that Peter Bogdonovich’s new film was playing the festival I got excited. I’ve always liked ol’ Boggy no matter how dirty of an old man he is and no matter how many mediocre movies he’s made lately. Then I heard that Kirsten Dunst was in it. That REALLY got me excited. (Although I started thinking about how Boggy was probably after her through the whole damn shoot.) When I found out that it was based on a story that Orson Welles had told Peter about how Thomas Ince may have really died, I was ready to enjoy it a lot.

You see, Tom Ince (Cary Elwes) was a very important producer/director in the early days of American film. In 1924, he and a bunch of Hollywood types (including Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard who looks too old to play Charlie in 1924), Elinor Glyn (Joanna Lumley) and Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly)) were invited to spend a weekend with William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann from The Lost Boys and “Oz”) and his young mistress, Marion Davies (Kirsten). Chaplin was seen by Hearst as a threat to his relationship with Marion and he was paranoid for the entire trip. But Hearst was trying to make her a star, but he was going about it all wrong. He was putting her in costume dramas when everyone knew she was really a comedic actress. And, of course, Chaplin and Ince could help her. Try telling that to a man like Hearst. (For more of the Hearst/Davies relationship, watch Citizen Kane. It’s all laid out on the line there.)

So they all go out, party, get laid, drink, whatever. Meanwhile, Hearst is getting extremely jealous of Mr. Chaplin and his friendship with Marion. A bunch of stuff happens that I can’t go into without letting too much out of the bag (although it may not really matter), Ince ends up dead under mysterious circumstances and everyone goes home.

Now, that doesn’t sound nearly as interesting as the story really is. There’s lots of intrigue and mistaken identity and jealous rage and whatnot. Check out the biography for Thomas Ince at the IMDb.

Now, with all of that mystery this should have been a pretty exciting movie. And with all of those celebrities it should have been pretty cool. Unfortunately it wasn’t. In fact, it was rather boring. The problem wasn’t with the story. Not even really with the direction. It was mainly the performances. With all of these great actors (and all of them are at least cool at times) none of them really shine. The closest is Miss Dunst, who looks the part, but she acts a little too modern. I think she’s been in too many dumb teen comedies and has forgotten how to act in anything else. (In all fairness, she’s a little young for the part. Marion was about 27 at the time of the original incident.)

This should have been great, but it fell so short as to be a total disappointment. Oh well. Better luck next time Boggy.

AMELIE

This is the new film from Jean-Pierre Jeunet, director of the classics Delicatessen and City Of Lost Children. (Marc Caro, co-directed those two, was also named as a co-director of this one, but he’s not mentioned on the IMDb. Who knows?) This time out, though, it’s not a total weirdo-freak story set in another world. It’s a simple romantic comedy seen through the eyes of a weirdo-freak who wants it to be in another world. And, when seen that way, it is really something special.

Amelie is a girl who was brought up by her non-touching father, who she loved, after her strict mother was killed by a woman who accidentally landed on her while committing suicide. The whole first part of the movie is about Amelie’s upbringing and is told by a narrator. There is very little dialogue, but it never gets annoying.

Then, after Amelie grows up, we find out that she never really loves anyone. In fact, she’s not even sure if she can. When she finally sees someone she thinks she can love, he runs. The rest of the film is her chasing him in weird and wild ways. She tries to help out her friends in their searches for meaning to keep her mind off of her own search. In fact, she gets so caught up in their searches that she almost forgets that she needs to search for herself.

With this film Jeunet has done what all filmmakers wish they could do: take a fairly simple romantic comedy, give it a twist and some visual flair (ok, a LOT of visual flair) and turn it into greatness. He has got to be the most visually inventive director I’ve seen in a long, long time. Every shot was like a work of art. This was my favorite of the festival and my favorite of his films. (Even better than Alien Resurrection! Ok, so I’m one of the only ones who liked that one.) Of course I could identify with the character quite a bit, too.

And speaking of Amelie, Audrey Tautou was awesome. She didn’t have a lot of dialogue to work with, but she did it all with her face. She made us laugh, think and fall in love with her all in the space of about five minutes.

There was just nothing wrong with this film. I recommend it to everyone who likes, well, anyone who likes movies, basically.

DRIVE-IN MOVIE MEMORIES

Many years ago there was a thing called the Drive-In Movie. It was a place where people (especially teenagers in the 50s and 60s) met, watched movies and had fun. (A lot of times more fun than their parents really wanted to know about.)

Then something happened. The drive-in died out. Now you’re kind of hard pressed to find them.

But they’re back in this cool little documentary based on a couple of books that have been put out about the majesty that was the drive-in. A lot of celebs showed up in support of America’s second favorite pastime. Leonard Maltin, Barry Corbin, Burton Gilliam (from Blazing Saddles, which had its world premiere at a drive-in!), Sam Z. Arkoff and many others from established stars to B-movie queens. (No Annette Funicello, though. What’s up with that?)

Even though I have only been to one drive-in (a double feature of Gung-Ho and Pretty In Pink many years ago. I remember Rad being played on another screen nearby.) this made me nostalgic for the old days. It almost made me want to open one up just to keep the memory alive.

The only real problem I had with the movie was the overlapping dialogue in some parts. They would fade one person out and fade another one in right over the last one. I kept missing what the new person was saying because I was trying to hear the first one. That kinda sucked. But the rest of the movie was great. Check it out if you ever get the chance. I think it’s an HBO thing. There were a lot of those this year.

THE DEVILS (1971)

Ken Russell is an enigma in filmmaking. He’s just as exploitative as Russ Meyer and Roger Corman, if not more so, but because he’s so stylistic a lot of people take his films as real art. They actually respect him. There are those, however, who think he’s just stupid crap. He is Britain’s most controversial director and he revels in that title. All the violence and T&A you can handle.

All this from a little guy who looks like he could be your sweet, British grandfather.

To a lot of his fans this is his best film. It is a play about Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave in her strangest performance), a French, hunch-backed nun who runs a convent in the 17th Century. She is so strict on her nuns because she is sexually obsessed with Urbain Grandier (Oliver Reed, England’s best brooding over-actor), the spiritual leader and head priest of the town. He is the only thing in the way of Cardinal Richelieu taking over the town and, in effect, the whole country.

How to get rid of a priest who is very popular? Why make him the devil! The Cardinal brings in a rock star, erm, witch-hunter who makes all of the nuns think that they have been possessed by the devil because of Grandier’s wrong-doings. He actually give them permission to debauch in order to frame Grandier. (You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a bunch of naked nuns running around trying to have sex with anything that moves. The religious right hates this movie.)

Russell does a really good job of bringing the past into the 70s. Yes, everything looks very 17th Century, but there is an aura about the film that sets it directly in the early 70s. (Especially the long-haired witch hunter who acts more like an extra from Hair than a priest.) He also brings his weird sense of fun to what could be a totally depressing story. With phallic shaped hypos squirting white, creamy liquid being used to exorcise her vaginally, this is an interesting and disturbing film. We’re laughing at first and then getting suddenly very squeamish. When he chooses not to show something (which isn’t often) it’s even more disturbing. You just know that if Ken Russell won’t show it it must be REALLY bad.

Oh. Did I say fun? Well, as I said, it all goes to a very high yech! factor very quickly.

From this movie I mainly learned that Ken really hates organized religion. Between this film and Tommy (and, to some extent his later Lair Of The White Worm and Crimes Of Passion) there are so many things to offend anyone who goes to church regularly that I’m not surprised that Mr. Russell has a hard time finding people to really like his films.

Personally, I wasn’t offended, but I didn’t altogether like the film, either. It had its moments, but I just wasn’t fully interested in the characters and I got bored after a while. But the performances were great, everything was done with a lot of flair (of course) and, like it or not, the film sticks with you for a while afterwards. It’s worth it if you’re a fan of exploitive, offensive films or Ken Russell. But, then again, those goes hand in hand.

THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE

I saw this one on the same day at The Devils. It was a Satanic night for me.

This one, however, didn’t try for offensive. It tried for creepy. And, boy, did it succeed.

Guillermo del Toro (who now lives here in Austin, which I love telling people even though no one knows him…hopefully that will all change soon) brings us his new horror film. He says it’s a Spanish Civil War story with a ghost in it. But the ghost had a pretty big role.

Young Carlos is left at an orphanage after his parents are killed. Unfortunately he’s given the bed of another boy who died a little while earlier. The other boys resent him for taking the dead boy’s place.

Luckily the boy finds solace in the presence of Prof. Casares (Federico Luppi from Men With Guns in a great performance) and Carmen (Marisa Paredes from Life Is Beautiful and All About My Mother), the two teachers at the orphanage. They are lovers, but the Professor has lost his ability to, um, satisfy.

Enter (literally) Jacinth (Eduardo Noriega from Open Your Eyes). He is the bad guy of the movie. He may be with Conchita (Irene Visedo), but he fucks Carmen on the side even though she’s older and only has one leg.

Meanwhile, all of the kids are having adventures of their own. Carlos is being outcast by Jaime, an older and bigger boy who seems to be the leader. But Santi, the dead boy, is trying to get Carlos’s attention. He appears to Carlos at night and tries to tell him something. Of course, like Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense, he’s too scared to get the message.

After the success of Cronos everyone was waiting for del Toro’s next film. Then came Mimic. Everybody forgot about him real quick.

Now it’s time for him to make his comeback. This movie rocks! Guillermo has brought us something that seems to have disappeared lately, an intelligent supernatural thriller. (Although I still haven’t seen The Others. I hear that one’s great, too.) The Spanish Civil War is a great backdrop to the story of the lonely orphans and the people who care for them. And he actually uses the time period.

Of course, everything is helped along by the fact that there is nothing creepier than ghost children. Especially when they’re saying things like “Many of you will die” in a low whisper.

And, speaking of the kids, they were all great. Since there were so many I thought that a lot of them would be sub-standard. It’s hard to find good kid actors these days. But all of these kids were great. And, even though there are a lot of kids in the cast, this is not a movie for them. There were quite a few kids in the audience. My first thought was, “Did these people see Mimic or Cronos?” No, this is a very adult thriller that just happens to center around a bunch of kids. Pretty damn violent.

The only problem I almost had was the bad guy. He was almost too evil. BUT, unlike Titanic, it worked this time. He was still believable and hateable. (Hey, I’ll create words whenever I want to. Shut up, Spell Check!)

Also, maybe I’m stupid, but what did the title object have to do with anything? The Prof. showed Carlos a human fetus with an exposed backbone calling it the Devil’s Backbone. What was the significance? Science vs. superstition? Pro-choice vs. anti-abortion? The Farrelly Bros. vs. good taste? What’s up with that? But it was a great movie. The second best at the festival that I saw. I think everyone should check it out. You’ll have to read because it’s in Spanish, but fuck it. You only live once, right? It’s a great flick.

THE YOUNG AND THE DEAD

Tyler Cassity is a man with a mission. He is out to make sure that the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is the #1 cemetery in Hollywood. And, so far, he’s done it.

This is a documentary about a young man who decided that cemetery work was for him at a fairly early age. He has brought the HFC out of bankruptcy and turned it into a money-making business using technology, patience and a lot of heart. He and his crew not only bury the dead, but they make mini-documentaries about their lives so that people who visit the gravesite can see just what these people were doing in life. It’s an ingenious idea that has gotten them a lot of customers.

On the other side of things is Forest Lawn Cemetery. They are very traditional and, actually, pretty damn cheesy. There are statues all over the place that actually talk to the visitors. When you walk into one of the cathedrals on property, you can push a button to listen to the history of the cathedral. And then a replica of The Last Supper appears right before your very eyes.

That’s just too much. I would want to run away from that place.

This documentary is very Errol Morris-ish. It shows these obsessed people, but it never makes you think that they’re really crazy. In fact, you kind of start to identify with them after a while. These guys are living their lives to the fullest while they are surrounded by death. In a way it reminded me of HBO’s new show, “Six Feet Under.” They are a family doing what they need to do to survive. And that involves burying people.

By the end of this film everyone in the audience wanted to go out and LIVE. The only real problem anybody had with it was that it was too long. There were a couple of segments that could (and should) have been cut. We really didn’t need to know about one of the guy’s having an accident. It’s a good human-interest thing, but it slowed the movie down to a crawl. And there was actually a little too much of the Rudolph Valentino memorial services that happen every year. It was interesting to a point, but we all got kind of bored with it.

So check this out when it pops on HBO. It’s well worth the sit down time.

THE FORGOTTEN DISNEY

Once upon a time, Walt Disney wasn’t just a brand name. He was actually a very well respected animation kingpin. He did a lot of shorts that even such early film luminaries as Sergei Eisenstein were in awe of.

What happened? Well, besides Walt’s death, he started making feature length animated films. A lot of his shorts towards the end of the Silly Symphonies era (which only lasted from the early to mid-30s) ended up being experiments for Snow White. Then all of his attention was focused on the longer form. Some say that this was not what he wanted originally, that he actually liked his shorts better.

Leonard Maltin and a few Disney experts brought 10 of these shorts to Telluride to watch and talk about. They are, for the most part, innocent little time capsules. There is no spoken dialogue (it’s all sung if there is any dialogue) since the music is the important thing. It tells the story.

Yet for all their innocence, there is a certain amount of reflexiveness of the times (Mae West, Bing Crosby and Harpo Marx all make appearance, in bird form, in Who Killed Cock Robin?) and a dark side (in The Three Little Pigs, one of the most popular cartoons of all time, there is a picture of “Father” on the wall…he’s a link of sausage. “Uncle” is a football in the remake.)

In the early days there was no dialogue, spoken or not. Hell’s Bells, while simple as far as animation is concerned, was an anarchic, no story-line short that is just gag after gag. (These are the ones Eisenstein liked so much.)

Then they started to bring stories in. When color was brought Disney’s animators had to create new colors for shading. It had never been done before. The Old Mill also brought a new technology. It was the first to use a real close-in in animation. They used a 10 foot metal frame with glass cells that could be removed to allow the camera to move downwards towards the background. Now this is common place (and horizontally), but they were the first.

The Goddess Of Spring was actually an embarrassment for the guys, but it was the first real test of human animation for the studio. (Animals were always used before because it’s just easier. Humans are VERY difficult.) In preparation for Snow White they brought in someone who had done it before (I can’t remember his name) and sort of succeeded. It’s not all that great, but it wasn’t too bad. And it’s interesting to see their first experiments.

Musicland is a really cool one that uses jazz and classical music to show different musical instruments in a fight over a couple of Romeo & Juliet type characters. A lot of fun.

And then there’s The Three Little Pigs. The song, “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf” was never meant to be a hit, but it became a rallying cry during the Depression. The short ran for nearly 10 years. One place in New York actually drew beards on the pigs on the poster. They got longer as time went on.

This was the first time that the characters were actually different from each other. Each pig had a separate personality and you can kind of tell what they were thinking.

This is a version that hasn’t been seen in a while, too. It had a joke that was deemed offensive during the big push for political correctness. The wolf shows up in a Jewish costume trying to get the pigs to buy a brush or something. Now it’s back and all is, well, weird in the world.

This cartoon was so popular that it was actually remade during WWII as The Thrifty Pig. The smart one built his house of Canadian War Bonds and the wolf was a Nazi. Other than that the two are almost identical. Both are pretty damn funny.

Overall these are pretty cool. Not as good or funny as Warner’s later cartoons, but they were probably more groundbreaking and just as important. Disney revolutionized the art of animation and kept topping himself.

Watch for a DVD of the Silly Symphonies coming from Mr. Maltin sometime next year.

THE FAT GIRL

A couple of years ago I saw Catherine Breillat film Romance. Ok, so I saw it because I heard that it had a lot of explicit sex in it. So sue me. But I did see the Blockbuster version, so everything was cut out, dammit. But, you know, even with the sex (and there was still quite a bit of it) I was thoroughly bored. It just wasn’t a very good movie. And most said it wasn’t one of her best, so I’m not just stupid.

But I figured I would give her another try with her new one. And I’m sort of glad I did. For the most part.

This was actually a retrospective/tribute to Breillat, so it started out with a bunch of clips from her earlier films. That made me want to check out some of the older ones and even give Romance another try.

Her new one, The Fat Girl, is about a couple of teenage sisters who are very close even though they fight quite a bit. Go figure. One of them, Elena, is a very pretty, sexually active virgin who wants to lose it to just the right guy. The other, Anais, is the girl of the title. She’s not very attractive and she knows it. She’s never been with a guy at all and she has no illusions about what her first time will be like. She wants it to be someone she can just fuck and forget. Just any guy will do.

Their parents are pretty much absent. Oh, they’re there, but they may as well not be. They don’t really seem to care about their daughters too much. The family is on vacation and the girls are pretty much on their own.

Elena and Anais meet Fernando (who looks like Ewen McGregor) and Elena is instantly in love. The two of them go through some pretty explicit scenes with Anais watching in another bed right next to them. That’s gotta be disturbing.

The relationship between the two girls is very well shown. They have a real love-hate thing going on. Mostly love, but they get on each other’s nerves so easily that they can sometimes turn on the hate very quickly. And it’s not just the writing. The girls are very good actresses.

And their differing ideas of sex are explored with sensitivity and ease, just like it should be. It’s not easy on them or us, but it seems to be easy for the filmmaker to show it. As the person who introduced the film said, “Sexuality is the adventure of young girls.” We guys got off easy. We just wanted to roll around in the mud and climb trees. The girl had to find other ways to have adventures. And those were much harder.

The problem with this film was the ending. It is a nearly pointless act of violence that leaves us devastated and wanting to beat the filmmakers. They make us love these characters and then they pull the rug right out from under us. Someone explained why it worked, but that only helped a little bit. I still thought it was only there to shock and make the entire theatre jump about six inches. (And they did. It was pretty amazing.) I don’t think that Anais wanted to really HATE her first time. She just wanted to be indifferent to it.

So watch this movie with a warning. It’s very good, but the ending will kill it for you.

MULHOLLAND DRIVE

And now for the big premiere of the festival. It was a surprise to everyone when it showed up on the schedule a day or so into it. It’s David Lynch’s new film and, like all of his films lately, it is completely un-understandable to anyone outside of Lynch’s mind.

Betty (Naomi Watts from Tank Girl and Dangerous Beauty) is an all-American girl (funny since Naomi is British) who is trying to break into show business. She gets off of the airplane with her new friends, a pair of old folks who promptly creep us out with the too-wide smiles as they drive off out of the movie. (Or do they?)

She stays in her aunt’s apartment (landlorded by the semi-creepy Coco played by Lynch’s latest career resurrection, Ann Miller) but soon meets another, more un-invited guest. Rita (Laura Harring from Exit To Eden and Little Nicky) is just lying on her aunt’s bed. She makes Betty believe that she’s a friend of her aunt’s, when she is actually just getting out of a car wreck where she lost her memory.

As the truth comes out, Betty and Rita set out to find out exactly where Rita came from and who she is.

Throw in the world’s most inept hitman, weird ties to a mysterious mob boss in an empty room, a director who doesn’t want to change his cast (but he’s forced to by a very funny and menacing Dan Hedaya), a mysterious box with a key, a character switch somewhere in the middle of the movie and a couple of ¼ scale old people and you’ve got all the ingredients for a perfectly weird and inexplicable Lynch film.

The first half of the film was like Blue Velvet. So much so that I could almost equate all of the characters to characters in that film. (Betty was both Laura Dern and Kyle MacLachlan. The director dude was Kyle all the way. Rita was Isabella Rossellini.) There was even seemingly a homage to the earlier (better) film when a woman started singing Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in Spanish. VERY beautiful part of the film. Then it suddenly turned into Lost Highway, which is not really a good thing. I think everyone was with it until then.

And what was Robert Forrester doing in this one? He was in it for about one minute, but he got pretty high billing! Totally wasted.

In all fairness, this was going to be a tv series until ABC decided that it was too weird. So, about a year later, they finally got backing to finish it as a feature and filmed about half an hour more so that it had a real ending. That could explain the bizarreness of the whole thing.

On second thought, no. Dave’s just bizarre all on his own.

The movie was cool, but it’s just one big question mark. I really do wonder if David understands his own films. If you’re a fan check it out. If not avoid it because it won’t change you. BUT if you’re a fan of lesbians you might want to check it out. The two leads get pretty down and dirty for a little bit.

So that’s it for Telluride flicks. It was fun while it lasted and I hope to be able to do it again next year.