The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2020: Monkeybone (2001), directed by Henry Selick

 

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Monkey Gone To Heaven" by Pixies

      It’s unfortunate sometimes that when someone gets popular, they overshadow their peers so completely. Take for example the case of Tim Burton and Henry Selick. Both men had similar starts as animators in Disney pictures like Pete’s Dragon and The Black Cauldron, both men ended up digging on a weird neo-gothic expressionist aesthetic, but because Tim Burton was first past the filmmaking post, it is forever ‘his’ style. Every film that Selick has directed, it is Burton’s name that is the first on people’s lips. Nightmare Before Christmas? Burton. James and the Giant Peach? Burton. Coraline? Burton. It’s enough to drive a man crazy, if he actually cared about any of that, which I doubt he does. So to honor the name of Henry Selick, the man behind some of the most treasured films of my childhood, let’s talk a bit about the least beloved film he’s ever made. A little film called Monkeybone.

      Released back in 2001, a year full of surprises, Monkeybone was directed by Henry Selick and written by Sam Hamm, based on the indie comic Dark Town by Kaja Blackley (never knew that until I decided to do this review). Everyone’s favorite actor Brendan Fraser plays Stu Miley, a cartoonist whose creation Monkeybone is on the verge of full-on franchising; Shitty toys, shitty fast food deals, shitty cartoons, the works. Stu doesn’t care about any of that though, all he’s interested in proposing to his girlfriend Julie (Bridget Fonda) and enjoying their lives together. Which he totally would have done, if Stu didn’t immediately get into a car accident and get thrown into a coma. Rather than just, you know, being in a coma however, Stu is instead transported to Downtown, a sort of limbo where those stuck in dreamland hang out alongside figments of the imagination. Figments like Monkeybone, who turns out to be just as annoying in person as he is in cartoon form. Not an ideal situation for poor ol’ Stu, so Hypnos, god of sleep, proposes a little plan: Sneak into the land of Death and grab one of her golden exit passes that ensures a return to the land of the living. Stu accepts, but what he doesn’t know is that this whole situation is a lot more complicated than he realizes. Not to mention scarier.

      When discussing this film, Brendan Fraser described it as ‘the most expensive arthouse film he’d ever been in’, or something to that effect. That isn’t apparent at first, but as soon as the movie hits Downtown and the nightmare sequences you see that Selick pulled out all the stops. Costumes, puppets, animatronics, CGI, claymation, it’s everything about Nightmare Before Christmas and Beetlejuice cranked up to eleven. Which I love, having grown up on that Hot Topic shit, and it’s easily the highlight of the film. Probably why it feels like you barely get any of it too, because we’re not allowed to have nice things.

      Casting wise it’s also a pretty strong film. Of course there’s Brendan Fraser, who is always fun to see whenever he’s on screen, but you’ve also got Briget Fonda as Julie, John Tuturro as the titular Monkeybone, Dave Foley, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Kattan, and a couple of other names that would be familiar if you watched Comedy Central back in the day. A bit like a Christopher Guest movie; Not a lot of famous faces, but a lot of faces you’ll recognize. I was pleasantly surprised, I have to admit.

      It’s certainly not a perfect movie though. The best parts of the film take place near the end of the film, and it doesn’t really start moving until 30-45 minutes in. Not to mention the whole conceit of Downtown, that it’s this place that everyone in a coma goes to and yet no one in the real world has ever corroborated what must be thousands of reports at this point, and there’s never any indication that people lose their memory of it when they wake up either. The relationship between Monkeybone and Stu also feels like the writer taking pages out of the Roger Rabbit playbook, only not as good. Roger was annoying to some degree too but you could understand why he was popular in the context of the film. Monkeybone the character is annoying but never establishes himself as an interesting character beyond that, so he’s just a chore to sit through. Also if the idea is that he’s meant to be an annoying mascot character, a proto-Spongebob if you will, Selick and the writers don’t do that great a job of building the reason WHY he’s so popular. At the beginning of the film when they show the pilot for the potential Monkeybone cartoon, titled Monkeybone, Monkeybone isn’t even in the damn thing, it’s Stu, so where the hell does the monkey even come in? This movie is an hour and 45 minutes long and yet it feels like they left an hour or so on the cutting room floor.

      I’ve done a lot of defending of dark fantasy movies over the years on this blog. Return to Oz, Drop Dead Fred, City of Lost Children, and so on and on. Of that particular subgenre, Monkeybone seems the most ambitious but at the same time the most cautious. The ‘darkness’ that we get feels very superficial at times, and by the end we’ve landed into broad, slapstick territory in terms of comedy. I’ve brought up Beetlejuice and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but the most apt comparison is probably The Mask: Both starting life as indie comics before getting put through the Hollywood machine, retaining a piece of what made them great while smoothing things out for mass consumption (certainly the case for the originally hyper-violent Mask). If you had problems with that movie, chances are it’s not going to be all different when it comes to Monkeybone. So it gets the recommendation, but even with that sweet sweet Brendan Fraser action Monkeybone probably isn’t a film you’re going to keep coming back to every Halloween.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2014: Mulholland Drive (2001), directed by David Lynch

     

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Hollywood Nights", by Bob Seger

     Way back in the Time Bandits section, I mentioned that a lot of directors try to be quirky and weird, but very few prove it in their work. Terry Gilliam is one such fellow, and David Lynch is definitely another. Painter, musician, practitioner of transcendental meditation, David Lynch has blazed a trail of success in spite of the often strange, surrealistic quality of his films. From cult nightmare Eraserhead to science-fiction epic Dune and the wildly popular crime thriller TV series Twin Peaks, there is no mistaking the unique look and feel of a David Lynch project, that persistent tension that hangs in every scene, the sense of discomfort. What better way to spend the scariest day of the year than by being really uncomfortable.

      Trying to explain the story of Mulholland Drive is like explain the plot of every other David Lynch movie: pointless. The cause and effect in Lynch movies are muddled, scenes and characters arrive, disappear and change form constantly, and plot points are often unresolved. Like a dream, really. What I will say is that the film opens with a beautiful woman (Laura Harring) who is involved in a mysterious car crash on Mulholland Drive in Hollywood, California. Miraculously she survives, but now suffers from...amnesia! (#futuramareference) Ms. Amnesia decides to hide out in an apartment, which just so happens to be the new home of Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who has arrived in Hollywood to become famous actress. Becoming fast friends, the two women decide to investigate Ms. Amnesia (now known as Rita) and her accident, to attain some clues as to her identity. Throw in some sex, murder, lies, revenge, and mysteries, cover it up with a bit of sand and take a lot of cough syrup and you got yourself.

      So yeah, David Lynch films, like those of Godzilla, are very hit-or-miss kinds of affairs. You either ride along with along with the weirdness or get consumed by it. If you’re a fan of surrealism, or if you’ve seen a Lynch film before, then you’ll know what to expect, and there’s plenty of things about Mulholland Drive to like (people who have seen it before know what parts I’m talking about). For the uninitiated, this is often considered one of his better films, so if you’re going to start anywhere it might as well be here. If you’re looking to take a trip through your psyche this Halloween, consider taking a ride down to Mulholland Drive.

The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2018: Amélie (2001), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

The Trailer

and

The Appropriate Tune: "Les Jours Tristes", by Yann Tiersen

       Destiny. Fate. Kismet. None of these ideas are ones that I ascribe to, personally, but it does seem like returning to the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet was an inevitability. After all, with the way I talked up The City of Lost Children last year, and the way I’ve name dropped Jeunet in countless conversations that may or may not be recorded on this blog, and the fact that we’re digging into return guests this year, the stars seemed to align for this exact moment. Because this wasn’t just a chance to fill my quota, you see; it was the perfect opportunity to relieve myself of a movie-sized weight off my back. A film that has lingered in my to-watch queue for years now like a restless ghost, never quite getting its shoe in the door even as other passovers like Trollhunter and Nightcrawler eventually got their golden tickets and their chances to shine. Always a bridesmaid and never a bride as they say, and the fact that this was due to my own inability to commit was an endless source of annoyance. Well no more. Fuck that, we’re covering Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and we’re doing Amelie, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it! So there!

       Smoothest. Paragraph. Ever.

       Released in 2001, four years after his work on the infamous trainwreck known as Alien Resurrection, Amelie is arguably Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s most famous work, which I base off of the fact that it’s the only one of his films that I’ve actually seen people besides me talk about. At the very least it is his most successful film since his debut, Delicatessen, receiving not only the Cèsar (France’s national film award) for Best Film and Best Director but also his only Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and Best Foreign Language Film, and pulling in 174 million dollars on a 10 million dollar budget. It is also the first Jeunet film to not feature the talents of fellow Frenchman Marc Caro, the collaboration which produced Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and which was eventually brought to an end by Alien Resurrection (according to wikipedia). Instead we have Monsieur Guillaume Laurant, who co-wrote this film and would later co-write Jeunet’s latest film, 2013’s The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. It’s not an unnoticeable difference as I’ll touch upon later, and while it is a shame a partnership that created such interesting films fell apart it also happened over two decades ago so it seems silly to be upset about it now. It’s also possible that Amelie wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the Jeunet/Caro dissolution, and as this is a review (more or less) of Amelie I feel a sense of obligation to support its existence so that I can justify writing about it. As I would for any movie that isn’t Dr. Fugazzi. So let’s get to it.

       On September 3rd 1973 in near Montmartre in Paris, Amelie Poulain is born. A neglected child, split between an aloof father and a neurotic mother, is forced to retreat into dreams and fantasies as a series of unfortunate events pushes her through a painfully isolated adolescence. Five years after the death of her mother in a darkly comedic accident, Amelie’s life is not quite as her dreams might have lead her to believe. She has an apartment, a job as a waitress in a bar/cafe known as The Two Windmills, and she has a handful of odd folks that she might call friends, but none of of it can compare to her daydreams. Then again, what life could?

       Then one day, the same day that Princess Diana had her fatal accident in fact, Amelie discovers a box of trinkets in her apartment, hidden by a boy named Dominique Bretodeau over 40 years ago. Amelie, still chomping at the bit for a change of pace, decides to track down the now senior Bretodeau and return the box to him, and when she sees the look of happiness on his face she is filled with an enormous sense of accomplishment and well-being. So much so in fact that she decides she wants to help more people, and so turns her attention to her friends and neighbors, each with their own set of neuroses and problems that she needs to travail. However, when she happens to meet a young, handsome man named Nino, who just so happens to have the same kind of weird hobbies as her, it soon becomes clear that Amelie is going to need some help of her own.

       Amelie sees the return of many familiar faces for Jeunet fans; Dominique Pinon, Rufus, Ticky Holgado, but the obvious stand out performer is newcomer Audrey Tautou in the titular role of Amelie Poulain. Looking at her in 2018, it honestly feels like the she was the blueprint for what would eventually become known as the ‘hipster girl’. Short hair, unflashy fashion sense, interest in weird things, not traditionally ‘sexy’ but attractive in a slightly androgynous David Bowie kind of way, that exudes a kind of mischievous energy and social awkwardness that brings all the introverts to the yard. Give her a latte and a vinyl record and you’ve probably seen about a dozen Amelies around your local college campus. It works though, because Audrey works. The way she looks and moves, the way she smiles, it meshes perfectly with the character, without any need for dialogue (although that area is okay as well). Seeing her on screen you can tell how she managed to pull several Best Actress awards off of her debut film, Tonie Marshall’s Venus Beauty Institute, and why Jeunet would bring her back for his next film, A Very Long Engagement. When she’s on screen you want to see more of her, and when she’s not you’re waiting for her to come back. That’s what you call stage presence.

       Now because I promised it earlier, the big difference between Amelie and the early Jeunet-Caro films is one of whimsy vs. caprice. All three films carry this feeling of heightened reality, where magic feels like it could exist even if it doesn’t, but if you’ll recall from The City of Lost Children write up I mentioned that it and Delicatessen were intentionally made as tributes to Terry Gilliam, and Gilliam is a capricious director. Yes his films take place in strange magical worlds, but they’re not exactly very nice worlds either. In the first ever Gilliam film we ever covered on this blog for example, Jabberwocky, Michael Palin plays an utter dunce who is constantly abused by the people around him, Time Bandits has a child traveling through time with a band of surly dwarvish thieves (and that ending…), Baron Munchausen is a pompous ass throughout the entire film (although you warm up to him), and the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has a murderous child organ thief in a major role. These are not fairy tales that Gilliam is telling us folks, these are bawdy pub stories, full of grimy, bizarre places and the sad and mean people who live in them. That’s the essence of Gilliam’s films, that sudden, blatant intrusion of reality into fantasy, that Jeunet & Caro attempted to replicate in their own films. Quite well, in my opinion, although it’s been a while since I saw Delicatessen.

       Amelie, on the other hand, is whimsical. There’s no grime in this world, just lovely architecture that houses precisely designed rooms, where our quirky protagonist and their eccentric friends have quirky, eccentric fun together. Sure, sometimes bad things happen, but everything is so explosively colorful and hey man life is like that sometimes so whatever. Rather than Terry Gilliam, it would probably be more appropriate to compare it to the works of Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, or Bryan Fuller’s cult comedy series Pushing Up Daisies, which in retrospect apes so much of the Amelie style you’d think it was some kind of weird fanfiction. Pretty people and upbeat gallows humor, you get the idea.

       That’s where the enjoyment of the film is going to hinge for you, I suppose. If the idea of quirky characters being quirky around each other and falling in love sounds like something you’d be into, then this is definitely the movie for you. If not, then it’s two hours of that thing I just said, so be warned. Personally I ended up liking it, despite not generally being a romance movie kind of guy. I found Amelie and the cast likable enough, the writing generally witty, and the romance being at the very least more believable than The Shape of Water. The 2 hour runtime is a bit of an issue, I feel like they drag the build up a bit too long and that the payoff is smaller than it should have been, but overall I think it manages to entertain fairly consistently the whole way through. In spite of its obvious lack of Ron Perlman, that is.

       Well cross Amelie off of the bucket list, finally, and while you’re at it mark it down for a recommendation. It might not be what you might expect from a movie on Halloween, and how many times have I said that on these lists, but it is a fun movie, and potentially capable of filling the cockles of your heart with a warm, fuzzy feeling (as a person without a heart I can only speculate). Grab a bowl of popcorn and a significant other and enjoy. You might not get spooked, but at least you’ll be happy.

The American Astronaut (2001), directed by Cory McAbee

      What was to be, now is. A blog post I mean.

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "Sandman", by The Billy Nayer Show

    I use netflix a lot. It’s a convenient website, chock full of TV shows that everyone I know loves to talk about, like Arrested Development and Breaking Bad and Arthur (15 seasons, man!), which I still need to catch up on at some point. There are also movies on it, which happens to be relevant in this case. Perhaps too many movies. Oftentimes when it comes to deciding on a film to view, not necessarily to write about, just to view, I become paralyzed by indecision. The fear of having too many options is what I imagine is the quintessential First World problem, but it’s happened to be a few times. You can’t let fear rule your life though, especially not on some movie shit, so I throw caution to the wind, strap my ass in, and just watch a fucking film.

     Here’s what I ended up with.

     The American Astronaut begins with our hero, astronaut and space adventurer Samuel Curtis (Cory McAbee), landing his space-train outside the Ceres Crossroads bar. Humanity, in this strange future or maybe past, has spread out amongst the solar system, building strange new societies in the process. Venus has become a planet of all women (and the only time you actually see women in the film) for example, while Saturn has transformed into an all male slave planet, and never the twain shall meet. Ceres Crossroads is located on a rock on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It’s just a bar.

     After delivering a cat to the bar owner, getting a picture of him taking a shit, and winning a dance contest with his friend the Blueberry Pirate, Samuel Curtis is roped into series of incredibly creepy interplanetary trades. Johnny R, the only man on Venus, has recently passed away, and his relatives want his remains returned to Earth. The Venusians, being a bunch of horny bitches, won’t part with Johnny’s body until they get a hot young replacement. Saturn happens to have such a replacement, The Boy Who Saw the Breast, but they won’t part with him unless they get a real life girl for their bizarre sexual bullshit. So Sam has to trade a real life girl he got from the bar owner in exchange for the cat to the Saturnians to get The Boy Who Saw the Breast to trade to the Venusians in order to get Johnny R’s body so he can get it back to Earth. This is all explained to you at the beginning of the movie, in case you were wondering exactly how the movie is supposed to play out I guess.

     Everything’s not coming up roses, however, as Sam is being pursued by the villainous Professor Hess (Rocco Sisto), who may or may not actually be a professor. He’s the Joker to Sam’s Batman, with a double helping of that subtly implied sexual tension they’ve got going on. Armed with a good old fashioned disintegrator pistol, he only kills people that he has no reason to kill, so don’t mess with him. Or do mess with him, because then he’d have a reason to kill you, and thus wouldn’t kill you. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

     The American Astronaut is also a bit of a musical as well, because B-movie style space western wasn’t good enough. The music is done by the Billy Nayer Show, fronted by lead actor and director Cory McAbee, because having your names in the credits twice isn’t enough for some people. I enjoy the the score, it sounds exactly like a crazy space western should sound like, a bit of Butthole Surfers maybe, perhaps some Primus style, nice to listen to. The musical numbers are interesting as well (who doesn’t love songs about girls with glass vaginas?), but they feel short to the point that I wonder why they included them at all.

     The main positive this movie’s got going for it are the visuals. I mentioned B-movie style previously, and that’s definitely true, specifically the golden age sci-fi and film serials from the 50s, perhaps mixed with bit of the ol’ steampunk for good measure. I love the way that McAbee show space travels by using still photographs of Sam’s space train interacting with objects in the solar system, a small thing that stuck with me for some reason. McAbee uses shadow real well too in my opinion, especially in the space barn scene (to clarify, it’s a barn in space. Not to insult the writer, but you could turn the volume all the way down, and I could enjoy it all the same.

     Surreal is the right term for this movie. ‘Lynchian’ was being bounced around at the beginning, but I’ve trotted out the David Lynch comparison for ‘strange dreamlike films’ too often for my tastes. About 7/10 times it hits the mark and you’re transported into this bizarre world of space trains and also space barns, and then something comes along that fucks it up. For example, there’s a scene near the beginning of the film at the Ceres Crossroads where a bar patron is warming up the fellas for the upcoming dance contest. Having previously been shown as a joke teller, he launches into a ‘Hertz Donut’ bit: a man performing cruel acts throughout his life, with the punchline being “Hertz Donut?” each time. I can see what they were trying to do, trying to build up that sense of unease with this guy’s monotone delivery of a rambling joke while the audience flips from brooding silence to side-splitting laughter a few times, and that it could have worked. But it doesn’t, at least for me. Even if it was meant to be an overly long and pointless, which it might’ve been, for the purpose of building atmosphere, that does not suddenly make it a good scene. My reaction isn’t so much “Wow, this is one wacky joke this guy’s tellin’, have I somehow gone beyond the looking glass?” as it is “Ugh, time to check if TBFP have uploaded any new videos”.

     I feel like this movie is very light, which might be the surrealism talking. Once it gets started this movie seems to fly by, places and characters are explained but not really explored in too much depth. Which might be good or bad, depending on your preferences. For my (lack of) money, it wasn’t a bad way to spend some time. Nice design, nice tunes and average everything else.

Result: Recommended if you like space western musicals, 50’s super-science, and Eraserhead.

 Not Recommended if hate movies where guys dance together, things that don’t make sense, or space barns