In memory of Satoshi Kon, The FAM presents Katsuhiro Otomo’s Memories (1995), specifically the first episode of three entitled Metallic Rose, directed by Koji Morimoto and written by the late Mr. Kon. Metallic Rose tells the story of a space-faring salvage team who respond to a distress signal (in the form of a recording of Puccinni’s opera Madame Butterfly) emanating from a giant space station in a particularly dangerous area of the galaxy known as Area RZ-3005 or Sargasso. The ship’s two engineers, Heintz and Miguel, are deployed to investigate. Inside they find an opulent, rococo interior and a woman claiming to be an opera singer named Eva Friedal.

The true nature of Eva is something I won’t spoil, but it is safe to say that she is not exactly who she appears to be. Magnetic Rose then, in sci-fi shorthand, is a mash-up of the used, dingy, space-trucker aesthetics of Alien and the psychological mindfuckery of Solaris; and it succeeds admirably. And while it was based on a story by Otomo, it contains many of the themes that would define Kon’s work: the interest in the protagonist’s mental state and subjective reality. Two years later he would go on to write and direct his first feature film, Perfect Blue, and a brilliant career; but the seeds were sown here in the span of 40 minutes. If only that career could have lasted a little longer.

A ride through the dusty landscape of Australia’s Outback as the FAM presents 2005′s brutal Western The Proposition; directed by John Hillcoat, written by Coil Beat heartthrob Nick Cave, and starring Guy Pierce, Ray Winstone, Emily Watson, Danny Huston, and John Hurt to name a few.

The world of Hillcoat’s Australia, circa 1880, is a harsh, desolate, and unforgiving wasteland; an Abadon devoid of compassion or solace. It is this land that Ray Winstone’s Captain Stanley, having moved there with his proper, English wife Martha, attempts to tame. His immediate aim is to hunt down the Burns gang, who are wanted for the rape and murder of the Hopkins family. Having captured two of the brothers, Mikey and Charlie (Guy Pierce), he makes Charlie an offer: he and his brother will be released and excused of all crimes if Charlie kills his brother Arthur (Danny Huston), an eloquent psychopath so vicious that he is known to the Aboriginal inhabitants as “The Dog Man”.

Cave is an accomplished writer and The Proposition calls to mind many of the same themes as his first novel And the Ass Saw the Angel, a book I’ve read twice and still not decided whether I actually enjoyed. As with his novel, The Proposition comes close to merely becoming gruesome pornography of the soul. Cave constructs stories devoid of the concept of innocence — in the end all are guilty and shall be punished.

Still, the images of sun-baked emptiness and blood red skies evoke enough strange beauty to transcend, if only momentarily, the unyielding parade of violence. Winstone plays Stanley as a land-locked Ahab whose intentions, while principled, are not exactly pure in contrast to Arthur, a man with no illusions as to his place in world. The penultimate scene, taking place during an absurd staging of a traditional English Christmas dinner, is superb in its tension making for a dénouement in which no one wins.

It would, perhaps, be easy to dismiss The Proposition as a simple tale of violence begetting violence and indeed that might be a true assessment; but it is so raw in its telling, so unapologetic in its delivery that in the end such an observation is moot. It’s a film that refuses the viewer any consolation and expects no quarter in return. You may either watch or, like the Stanley’s Aboriginal servant Tobey — removing his shoes and abandoning them in the meticulously cultivated garden — you may quietly take your leave.

Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane. It’s…Superman!

Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!

Thus goes, perhaps, the most famous of all superhero tag-lines. Running from 1941 to 1943, seventeen episodes of Superman were released by Paramount Pictures. The series is commonly referred to as the Fleischer Superman cartoons though this is a bit of a misnomer as only the first nine episodes were done by the studio of brothers Max and Dave. The last eight were done by Famous Studios, after Paramount took over Fleischer Studios and ousted its founders, and would see an increased focus of WWII-era propaganda and feature some uncomfortable racial depictions.

I’ve been a fan of these cartoons since watching them on a cheap VHS collection when I was a child. The series is beautifully animated especially when one considers that most animators at Fleischer studios had little figure-drawing knowledge. While much of the series was rotoscoped (a technique that Max Fleischer invented) there was no way it could be used for, say, scenes in which Superman was flying. As such, they had their assistants who did understand figure-drawing go over their roughs to keep Superman looking like Superman. It’s also interesting to note that, not only was the cartoon responsible for the “It’s a bird! It’s a plane!” line but also for giving the Man of Steel the ability to fly, previously his ability being limited to spectacular leaps.

Fleischer Studios:
•Superman (or The Mad Scientist)
•The Mechanical Monsters
•Billion Dollar Limited
•The Arctic Giant
•The Bulleteers
•The Magnetic Telescope
•Electric Earthquake
•Volcano
•Terror on the Midway

Famous Studios:
•Japoteurs
•Showdown
•Eleventh Hour
•Destruction, Inc.
•The Mummy Strikes
•Jungle Drums
•The Underground World
•Secret Agent

For those who don’t necessarily wish to wade through all seventeen, the Fleischer episodes are unsurprisingly superior, if only for the fact that their stories are much more interesting. The sci-fi leanings of these, complete with evil scientists, robots, and death rays avoid the sour taste left by buck-toothed Japanese caricatures and African natives. An in-depth look at the series can be found here, if your interested in learning more about it.

Come with us as the FAM takes you on an extraordinary journey. Today’s offering is no doubt familiar to many, and yet bears repeated viewings. Released in Japan in 2001, Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi which translates literally to Sen and Chihiro’s Spiriting Away) remains his most popular film. By the time of its release in the US in 2002 nearly a sixth of Japan’s population had seen the film, making it the highest-grossing film in the nation’s history. It would eventually win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature becoming the first anime film and, thus far, only foreign language film to win the award.

Spirited Away, then, is the ambassador for Miyazaki’s work in the States. While his other films had seen release here, none did so much for his reputation among the general public than this film; and it’s not hard to see why. Spirited Away is a stunning piece of animation, the culmination of decades of Studio Ghibli’s work. It’s a film that upon each successive viewing reveals new details. The bathhouse scenes in particular are wonders, packed to the brim with background points of interest. For their part, when Disney localized the movie for North America they resisted the urge to fill the cast with big-name actors (something they did previously with Princess Mononoke and since with other Studio Ghibli releases). It makes the English dub much less intrusive to me.

It is easily my favorite of Miyazaki’s films, a man whose oeuvre is rife with amazing offerings. Spirited Away strikes me as the film that he let his imagination run wild while still managing to retain a cohesive narrative. It’s also a film that allows the viewer to enjoy it as merely a story and not necessarily a parable like, say, Princess Mononoke a film that, while beautiful, was bogged down by its environmentalist message. Spirited Away is a surrealist journey in the tradition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, its messages and meanings subtly woven into the fabric of the story; there for those who wish to find it, invisible for those who don’t. It’s a truly timeless piece of movie making.

A film for violin nerds on today’s FAM. Tom Slade directs 4, a film that follows four different violinists on four different continents playing one of the world’s most well known compositions, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.

4 begins in Spring in Tokyo, with violinist Sayaka Shoji, segueing into Summer in Australia and violinist Niki Vasilakis before moving on to New York in Autumn with Cho-Liang Lin and finally ending in Finland in Winter with Pekka Kuusisto. It’s a quite a journey, though I’ll admit to being partial to Autumn as there really is nothing like New York City in the fall. The show-stopper here, however, is Finland. The scenery on display in this last act is nothing short of stunning.

All of it is accompanied by a beautiful piece of music. Vivaldi was a mainstay for me growing up. My grandmother had studied the violin and graduated from Juilliard before marriage and WWII sidelined those dreams. She had inherited the love of the instrument from an uncle who was a member of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra. She had, for a time, tried to pass this love and ability down to me, an endeavor she would abandoned in despair, her oldest grandchild seemingly devoid of any musical talent. Her violin, as it is for many who play I would assume, remains her most prized possession. She has, apparently, stipulated in her will that it must never be sold as doing so will, no doubt, bring down some ancient Hungarian curse upon our family.

The musical aspect, then, was what I found most intriguing about this film for while I love The Four Seasons the musicians here are in possession of a wealth of knowledge that I am completely ignorant of. They make for a fascinating lecture on just what is going on in each movement, what events transpire and what each instrument represents, all facets of the music I was never aware of.

It’s a meditative film, made slightly ominous by each musician noting how the weather seems to be changing. But regardless of such politically charged observations it remains delightfully calming — a soothing musical travelogue. The perfect film for a Friday afternoon.

Hot, steaming pantomime on order today for the FAM as we present The Triplets of Belleville (Les Triplettes de Belleville), the surreal animated adventure from 2003, written and directed by Sylvain Chomet.

Triplets tells the story of Madame Souza who is raising her son, Champion. Noticing his sadness one day, she purchases for him a dog named Bruno and though this does cheer him up, his joy is short-lived. It is only after she realizes his interest in bicycle racing and gives him a bicycle of his own that Champion finds real happiness. Fast forward and, years later, Champion has become a world-class cyclist, competing in the Tour de France. It is during this race that a mafia boss kidnaps Champion and two other cyclists, bringing them to the town of Belleville in North America and hooking them up to a virtual-reality cycling machine, allowing patrons to gamble on the races. Madame Souza and Bruno follow, of course, attempting to rescue him from the mafia’s nefarious clutches; meeting along the way the titular triplets, a trio of retired cabaret singers.

It’s a strange arc, then. Triplets starts off easily enough, slow and methodical, but upon the kidnapping of Champion things surge into overdrive, getting progressively weirder and the two don’t quite mesh as well as they perhaps should. It’s almost like they stitched together to different films. That said, this observation does little to detract from my enjoyment of the film. Chomet has created a beautifully realized world here with his characters barely uttering a single word. The version above features no English subtitles, an omission you will hardly notice. Every emotion and thought is spoken with subtle, expressive animation. In addition, the movie features an outstanding soundtrack inspired by the jazz of the 20s and 30s (the film even goes so far as to reference both Django Reinhardt and Josephine Baker in the first few minutes.)

In animation at least, I find myself drawn to pantomime. It strikes me as a testament to an animator’s talent, this ability to abandon the spoken word. In that way it’s interesting to note that Pixar, who’s Finding Nemo beat out The Triplets of Belleville for best picture has begun incorporating this aesthetic more in their recent films, most notably Wall-E (perhaps my favorite from them). Chomet’s new film, L’Illusionniste will see a release in the States in December and I find myself just as anxious as when I first saw a trailer for The Triplets of Belleville. I just can’t see his oeuvre losing its charm.

Introspection and retrospection reign supreme on this day, the Ninth day of July in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Ten. Today the FAM presents Krapp’s Last Tape starring John Hurt and directed by Atom Egoyan for the series Beckett On Film for Irish broadcaster RTÉ, British broadcaster Channel 4, and the Irish Film Board and which began showing in 2001. The project’s aim was to film 19 of Samuel Beckett’s 20 plays; the exception being the early play Eleutheria which at the time remained unperformed and, in fact, was only staged for the first time in 2005, 58 years after Beckett wrote it. Along with Hurt and Agoyan, Beckett On Film featured an impressive stable of acting and directorial talent. Seriously, look at that list.

We, however, are here to focus on one. Krapp’s Last Tape is the story of Krapp, who is celebrating his sixty-ninth birthday and, is his habit, has hauled out his reel-to-reel tape recorder in order to review the tapes he has made upon every instance of the “awful occasion”. Those are the words used by Krapp, but the Krapp of 30 years previous and from whom we learn the majority of what we know about the man. It is this man, pompous and sneering, who narrates most of Krapp’s life and Krapp sneers along with him, laughing along condescendingly with his 39 year-old self at the idealism and naivete at the 20 year-old man he used to be. We learn from this incarnation of his mother’s death and the women he has loved.

But even Krapp at 39 cannot escape the bitterness that he hurls at his youth. At 69, there is little else left in him but bile and regret; his last book has sold next nothing, his sex life revolves around the periodic visits of an old prostitute. He has no years left for idealism. The only future for Krapp is death; and now in full light of that realization he retreats to the dim memories on those tapes. As the tape ends he can only sit frozen, the only sound the hiss of the reel as it runs down.

The most famous production of Krapp’s Last Tape, no doubt, is 1972 for the BBC, starring the late, great Patrick Magee. In fact, Beckett wrote the play specifically for McGee, it’s original title being “Magee monologue”. I must admit that, much as I love Magee’s work, Hurt seems almost as if he was born for this role. Watching him is hypnotic, every movement seems to take incredible effort and it seems as if he’s willing he joints to creak. Hurt is also in possession of an incredibly expressive face and he uses it to great effect here, betraying the sadness and despair of character with a subtlety that keeps the whole affair from becoming maudlin. It also contains the only instance in which I have laughed at the slipping-on-a-banana peel gag.

It would be hard for most to rank this as Beckett’s greatest play, especially when compared to his most famous play, the incomparable Waiting For Godot, but there is a reality present in Krapp’s Last Tape that is absent from the tale of Vladimir and Estragon that I find deeply affecting. Much of Beckett’s life is reflected in Krapp’s Last Tape and at the time he wrote it his outlook was, one could maintain, quite grim. Perhaps therein lies crux of my position. It’s effectiveness may hinge on just how much of one’s self one sees reflected here.

It’s another summer holiday weekend, here in the United States. Independence Day weekend no less, the 4th of July being the day when Americans get inebriated and spend the day basting themselves in the hot juices of meats, both various and sundry. Such is the joy we feel when we think about how we could still all be English. We at the FAM are here, however, with you pre-basting. We are unbasted, clean and virginal at least for the moment though this will no doubt soon change. For now, however, you may sit near us and enjoy today’s offering knowing you will be unsullied.

Today the Friday Afternoon Movie presents the first four episodes of Satoshi Kon’s weird and wonderful television series Paranoia Agent (Mōsō Dairinin) from 2004, which represents the entirety of the Complete Collection’s disc one, entitled Enter Lil’ Slugger. Paranoia Agent begins with a mysterious attack on Tsukiko Sagi — a character designer best known for the incredibly popular pink dog Maromi — by an assailant who will become known as Shōnen Batto (Bat Boy in the original Japanese and Lil’ Slugger in English). Soon detectives Keiichi Ikari and Mitsuhiro Maniwatwo become involved as more people report attacks by a boy on golden skates, armed with a golden baseball bat.

What follows is tried and true territory for Kon, beginning all the way back in 1997′s Perfect Blue and, some might say, culminating in 2006′s Paprika. Given it’s thirteen episode run, Paranoia Agent gives him the most room to explore it. Kon’s work is primarily concerned with the examination of the lies we tell ourselves and pop culture. It’s the symbiotic relationship between these two aspects of day-to-day life that form the crux of all his films and is firmly entrenched in the story of Paranoia Agent. Indeed, the main thread that emerges, connecting all the attacks by Lil’ Slugger is that all the victims are attacked during a time of great stress and, moreover, seem almost relieved once an attack has occurred. It is this commonality that will eventually lead the detectives to the truth, long after the case has almost completely destroyed both men’s careers and personal lives.

Kon is a masterful storyteller and he proves it here. Nothing is out of place in Paranoia Agent, each episodes fitting in neatly with the others at a measures pace; taking time here and there to focus on events happening at the periphery of the case, only to deftly weave them back in. Best of all unlike many television mysteries of this sort, anime or otherwise, Kon is aware of the importance of a satisfactory conclusion; and while there are still some smaller aspects left open for interpretation, the main plot of the series is lead to a logical, if surreal, conclusion. The rules of Kon’s world may be different from ours, but they are well defined and his tale adheres to them.

Five years out from the English release I still find new things to enjoy in Paranoia Agent. The animation is top notch, the story is of a caliber rarely seen on television, and the acting (at least the Japanese) stays away from what most people think of when they think of Japanese animation. This may be one of the few cases of FAM in which I feel I need to be outright evangelical about the piece on display. Paranoia Agent is a series worth your time. Even if you don’t like anime you should give this a shot. More so than any other director, I feel that Satoshi Kon manages to transcend the medium. The stories he tells, by and large, do not require animation but he uses it to spectacular effect. Few others choose to use it to examine the human psyche in such detail beyond having androids ponder the subtleties of being human in opaque pseudo-philosophical prose. This isn’t a story about what it is to be human; but about just how hard we make it for ourselves.