January 29-February 4, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

The Animation Show (Thu.-Sat., Jan. 29-31, Tue.-Wed., Feb. 3-4, 7:30 p.m., Fri., Jan. 30, 9:30 p.m. and Sun., Feb. 1, 5 p.m., $8.50, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700) The diligent e-mailers who bombarded this traveling animation showcase's website with requests to come to the Prince can rest easy: With 13 animators and as many radically different styles, The Animation Show ought to have something for everyone. That's lucky, since given the lack of any overall aesthetic, it's unlikely anyone will be pleased all the way through. Those who swoon for the computer-animated The Cathedral may scoff at the pencil-scribblings of Don Hertzfeldt, generously represented by the shorts Billy's Balloon and Rejected, as well as three bridging sequences. La course à l'abîme (Running to the Abyss), by Switzerland's George Schwizgebel, is a stunning display of technique, an oil painting come to life in vivid colors and expressionistic blurs, while an unspeakably gorgeous excerpt from 1957's Mars and Beyond shows the late Disney animator Ward Kimball at his finest, conjuring up alien creatures that look like airborne fried eggs, or a Martian surface studded with silicon crystals. But in general, The Animation Show's most technically impressive segments are its least fulfilling. Cathedral and 50 Percent Grey (Oscar noms both) are lifeless digital snippets, while the stop-motion Das Rad (last year's Oscar winner) is an environmental parable as redundant as it is trite.

Unlike his technically besotted recent films, Tim Burton's 1982 Vincent is amiably rudimentary, and the same goes for the collection of pencil tests and miscellaneous shorts by King of the Hill/Beavis and Butthead creator Mike Judge. But Hertzfeldt, who co-produced the collection with Judge, might be fairly considered the reigning king of sophisticated crudeness. Like Matt Feazell's Cynicalman comics, Hertzfeldt lowers your defenses with his childlike drawings, then sucker-punches your sense of complacency. Rejected, which might be Hertzfeldt's magnum opus, is an animated Blair Witch Project, charting the decline of an animator's mental health as he disintegrates under the pressure to draw commercially viable work. Purportedly collecting a series of increasingly ragged would-be commercials for non-entities like the "Family Learning Channel" and products like "bean lard mulch," the film traces a shaky downward spiral as the spots become ever more violent and unbalanced. Sweet-voiced stick figures rip away chunks of each other's flesh and bleed from unmentionable orifices, all under the auspices of moving product. Eventually the animator's disintegration extends to the film itself -- paper backgrounds crumple, holes rip through the screen and suck stick figures to their doom -- and humorous dislocation briefly gives way to existential dread. (Weekend's "fin du cinéma" wouldn't be out of place.) I'm sure Hertzfeldt would never cop to anything so highfalutin, but Rejected essentially suggests that commerce destroys not just artists but art itself. Thankfully, you'll be laughing too hard to ponder such things.

Algonquin Film Festival (Thu., Jan. 29-Sun., Feb. 1, Bucks County, www.algonquinfest.org) In its second year, this New Hope-based film festival offers a diverse array of films and an impressive lineup of special guests. Particularly noteworthy is the onstage interview with Patricia Neal, Celeste Holm and Elizabeth Wilson (Sun., 6:30 p.m.), which follows the screening of Ray Glanzmann's documentary-in-progress, Broads. Featuring interviews with Maureen Stapleton, Estelle Parsons and the late Kim Hunter, as well the festival's three guests, Broads is a heartfelt appreciation of their talents and spirit. Filmed in tchotchke-cluttered living rooms, the rambling but likable film grabs a seat on the floral-print sofa next to some of Hollywood's greatest actresses (who, these days, are unfortunately as short of good roles as any struggling newcomer). Anecdotal to a fault, the film still scoops up plenty of juicy stories (not for nothing are several sections labeled "Dish"), including a hilariously off-color gem involving Stapleton and Laurence Olivier.

Also on Algonquin's agenda: a "War Stories" chat with playwright Christopher Durang about his experiences with Hollywood (expect some very unkind words about the movie of Beyond Therapy) and Jack Cahill's Long Gone, for which the documentary filmmaker spent seven years riding the rails with train-hopping hobos. (Appropriate embellishment comes from an original Tom Waits score.)

Curator's Choice (Fri., Jan. 30, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-568-4515, ext. 4099) Secret Cinema opens the vaults for this omnium-gatherum of previously unscreened films, from amateur newsreels to a glimpse of the 1964 World's Fair.

Tanner '88 (premieres Tue., Feb. 3, 9 p.m., Sundance Channel) "By the end of the campaign," recalls 1988 presidential candidate Jack Tanner, "I'd look in the mirror and say, 'Jack who?'" If you're mouthing the same question, it's not your memory failing you: Tanner is entirely the creation of Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau, whose 1988 miniseries chronicled the candidacy of a Democratic dark horse. Conceived in the wake of the scandal that ended Gary Hart's presidential bid, the 11-episode series (airing Tuesdays through April) stars Michael Murphy (Nashville's campaign flack) as a Michigan congressman whose protean beliefs don't coalesce until well into the campaign. As a media satire, Tanner was instantly dated, with its good-cop/bad-cop reporters and telegraphed ethical debates. (Veronica Cartwright's bubbleheaded TV journo rivals the misogynist caricature in Oliver Stone's Salvador -- wonder what Jane Pauley had to say about that.) But on what was just being termed "the character issue," it's significantly more acute. Murphy's candidate is hardly a West Wing-ian paragon of virtue; he's so bland that his staffers have to surreptitiously videotape a war-room tirade in order to get red meat for a campaign spot. Though Tanner reminisces about marching for civil rights (and scoffs at a woman who asks him, "What's Selma?"), the self-appointed "political fable" is slippery about Tanner's beliefs, except insofar as it intimates he might not really have any. A hardened political professional, Tanner is used to talking about "hard choices" without making any. Though its fourth-wall-breaking touches are little more than window dressing (See Tanner shake Bob Dole's hand in New Hampshire! See him being ignored on the convention floor!), fiction collides memorably with reality in the series' eighth episode, "The Girlfriend Factor" (to air March 23), where the embattled candidate attends a meeting of Detroit families who have lost children to gun violence. When candidate Tanner tells the families (obviously not actors) to "take advantage of these cameras" and tell their stories, you realize it's not the fake TV cameras he's talking about; for half an episode, Altman practically abandons his story and looks straight in the face of the people government ought to help most, and most often fails. Suddenly, Tanner has a reason to run, and it costs him his career. Recalling the day in one of the retrospective "fireside chats" that preface each episode, Tanner (now a university professor) recalls, "It meant that, above all else, social justice was going to be our central message. … It also meant, of course, that we'd lose." The assertion that belief is the enemy of political success is not a new one, but it's delivered here with uncommon force and resonance.

More interested in how machines work than what they do, Altman's strengths have always been more social than political, which makes Tanner '88 something of a chimera, twisting between Altman's love of backroom deals and moral cloudiness and Trudeau's attempt to deconstruct the political process. (No surprise, the director wins.) Still, in a season where a crowded field of Democratic candidates are similarly struggling to define themselves (and unseat an incumbent Bush), its topicality is all too apparent. Watch for Pamela Reed's tough-as-nails campaign manager, and Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon as Tanner's idealistic (read: Amy Carter) daughter.

Open Range ($29.99 DVD) Was there ever an actor as blind to his own strengths as Kevin Costner? In this uncredited remake of Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand, Costner essentially casts himself in the Fonda role, but where Fonda's gangly androgyny posed critical questions about the myth of the West (not least what two cowboys might get up to on those long, lonely nights), Costner laughably casts himself as a hired killer running from his dark past (symbolized, apparently, by his goatee, a device so tired both South Park and Futurama have satirized it.) Thankfully, Costner is less myopic when it comes to the other roles: As his longtime trail companion, Robert Duvall exudes craggy sagacity, while Annette Bening at the door with hair in her eyes is a vision of frontier longing. (Unlike Cate Blanchett in The Missing, she fills the wide screen with her simplicity, rather than scurrying around like a ninny.) James Muro's cinematography captures a vista still filled with promise (shot in Canada, natch), though a more experienced hand might have found a way to film the climactic shootout as something other than an incoherent blur. On the commentary, Costner admits he "chased" Unforgiven for six years, and Open Range climaxes with an even more distasteful endorsement of vigilante justice. Still, less cynical than The Missing, it hardly deserved the unmarked grave it was buried in on theatrical release. (Most people seem unaware it even exists.) One good thing about the movie's failure: Maybe one day soon Costner will have to play who he is, and not who he wishes he was.

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