While they are now lifelong, inveterate expats, the Quay Brothers — identical twins, Stephen and Timothy, now 68 — should probably be seen as American national treasures. Experimental, avant-garde stop motion animators with a surrealist, Mitteleuropa and Kafka-esque aesthetic that recalls the make-believe scenario where David Lynch, obscurant Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, German Expressionists, silent era auteurs like Carl Dryer and Terry Gilliam had a dinner party and dreamt up twisted scenarios where handmade, but decayed and discarded marionettes are trapped in esoteric, entrancing netherworlds of dark imagination. In mainstream culture, you may have seen their eccentric, beautifully creepy work here and there; music videos for His Name Is Alive and Michael Penn, an animated segment within the Oscar-nominated “Frida” film, some contributions to Peter Gabriel’s iconic “Sledgehammer” video (that they've since disavowed), but much like their marginalized and damaged...
- 8/20/2015
- by Rodrigo Perez
- The Playlist
Director of Mysterious Skin and Kaboom is keeping indie pop alive by featuring new music and remixes by his favourite bands
This week sees the DVD release of two films from the singular talent of Gregg Araki: 1993's Totally Fucked Up and Kaboom, his most recent. It's always tempting to look for patterns and themes in a director's work, but in Araki's case, there's little that connects them all. The disenfranchised gay teens of Totally Fucked Up don't share much common ground with the silly stoners of his later comedy Smiley Face; and it's hard to reconcile the serious, subtle Mysterious Skin with the knockabout thrills of Splendor and Kaboom.
But for all the hallucinatory imagery, ambisexual cavorting, drug taking, violence and other shocking facets of Araki's work, there's one element that runs through them all: the music. When he says that "Kaboom is my most autobiographical and personal...
This week sees the DVD release of two films from the singular talent of Gregg Araki: 1993's Totally Fucked Up and Kaboom, his most recent. It's always tempting to look for patterns and themes in a director's work, but in Araki's case, there's little that connects them all. The disenfranchised gay teens of Totally Fucked Up don't share much common ground with the silly stoners of his later comedy Smiley Face; and it's hard to reconcile the serious, subtle Mysterious Skin with the knockabout thrills of Splendor and Kaboom.
But for all the hallucinatory imagery, ambisexual cavorting, drug taking, violence and other shocking facets of Araki's work, there's one element that runs through them all: the music. When he says that "Kaboom is my most autobiographical and personal...
- 8/5/2011
- by Phelim O'Neill
- The Guardian - Film News
The eccentric stop-motion geniuses (and identical twins) the Quay Brothers, aka Stephen and Timothy Quay and/or the Brothers Quay, create mesmerizing and wonderfully creepy stop-motion films since their first films in the '70s. With a wild assortment of esoteric influences from Polish animators, Kafka and Bruno Schulz (whose book The Street of Crocodiles inspired their short film by the same name), and an assortment of Eastern European composers and puppeteers, the Quay Brothers could be (and have been) studied in great detail by film scholars -- or just enjoyed by viewers who love their dark and uncanny worlds of broken dolls, over-loved stuffed animals, and clockwork creatures.
One of my favorite short films of theirs is a video they did for the song "Are We Still Married?" by the haunting Michigan group His Name is Alive. The two groups of artists mesh perfectly, and in fact did collaborate on another video as well,...
One of my favorite short films of theirs is a video they did for the song "Are We Still Married?" by the haunting Michigan group His Name is Alive. The two groups of artists mesh perfectly, and in fact did collaborate on another video as well,...
- 10/17/2009
- by Jenni Miller
- Cinematical
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