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percy-10
Reviews
Strangers in Good Company (1990)
Tea for eight.
This film will ring true to those of us who spent childhood afternoons with batty maiden aunts. Though batty maiden aunts vary in personality, temperament, and social skills you're sure to find one that is familiar because you have a whole busload to choose from. This beautifully shot and laconically paced film is sort of a rambling walk through the pasts of a group of older women from various backgrounds who get temporarily stranded in an isolated spot in Canada. Though the personalities of the characters are a little as-to-be-expected, the acting is guileless and the dialogue completely natural. Prepare to have your curiosity peaked about medicinal herbs, pornographic boot jacks, and the hunting habits of Cissy's cat. The only device I found a little annoying was the stopping of the action to show off old photos from the women's lives. It bothered me at the time, but looking back I understand what they were trying to do and even feel a little nostalgic about it; which, of course, is utterly appropriate. It's definitely off the beaten track, not either as flamboyant or banal as art films are want to be. But, In Good Company is definitely a well made piece worthy of a larger audience.
The Mouse and His Child (1977)
Dark, surrealist, postmodernist...children's movie?
This movie has the distinction of being the first film I ever saw on the big screen. This may also have something to do with why I am, to this day, partial to David Lynch, Peter Greenway, and the more isoteric of Akira Kurasawa's stuff. Having viewed this film two or three times since that first viewing in 1977, I am sorry to say that I have not been able to grasp much more of the plot than I did at age three. This piece is extremely dark and somehow seems more suited to an offbeat university metaphysics class than the family section of the video store. The storyline follows the quest of a clockwork mouse and his child, who happen to be attached to each other at the hands, on the trail of their adopted mother (even Papa mouse calls her Mother), a clockwork Pink Elephant who has either left or been kidnapped from the toystore. Are you beginning to see what I mean? On the way they meet a morbid shaman-type frog in red long johns who reads bones, a "fallen woman" clockwork seal, a sadistic muskrat who has the ability to make the pair self-winding, and an entire dollhouse full of, to a three-year-old, really terrifying drunken rats.
I'm not sure I would want to show this to my kids unless I really was trying to cultivate a pint-sized Lynch fan. It's an interesting piece though. The characters'drunkeness, morbidity, grief, neurosis, small hopes, opportunistic instincts, and self-hatred are pleasantly world's away from Disney. In some ways this, what turns out to be almost portrait of loss, seems to hit home a little harder if only because it's a cartoon and you're not expecting it.
Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988)
Warning: not for the amphibicaly faint of heart
Woah, population explosion of giant poison toads invades Austrailia! No, it's not a late-night 70's B sci-fi, it's real life eco-bizarrity complete with mad scientist wielding a v.w. bus. This is perhaps the funniest piece of celluloid ever to give you the shivers about the seemingly limitless expanse of human stupidity. It traces the history of the cane toad in Australia from the seemingly innocent introduction of forty individuals into an eastern pond to the hopping copulating frenzy that now covers something like a third of the country. This movie gives you the works; their life cycle complete with in depth look at their, shall we say, unique sex lives, a magnetically grotesque interview involving doll clothes, and charming soundtrack integrating late-night 70's B movie effects with bouncy bluegrass. (An extra treat for all you Crowed House fans will be Neil and Tim Finn's piece sung from the point of view of the great cane toad himself.) Some people keep them as pets, put out bowls of catfood, and toad-watch for pleasure, others hate them with a white hot rage. Hear the facts, see the toads, and decide which side of the fence is for you. Either way, nicely paced, scientifically interesting, and well shot; Cane Toads is a feindishly hilarious black comedy of documentary, sure to please.