D. Tim Delingpole
Colour
A hot cross bun is a spiced sweet bun made with currants or raisins and marked with a cross on the top, it’s traditionally eaten on Good Friday in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada. A bunny is basically a rabbit, with a twitchy little nose, four paws and loping ears. It doesn’t usually come with sunglasses, firearms and a really bad attitude; but let’s just pretend – for sake of argument here – that a bunny is all of those things. As although the pun of the title might indicate that this is somewhat connected with seasonal pastries, the fact is that what we have here is an utterly bizarre Australian horror comedy about an anthropomorphic rabbit with an incredible mean streak, a lust for violence and a nice line in floppy eared puns.
Here we are in downtown Sydney and bullied Oliver Smyth – a more snot nosed little boy it would be difficult to find – makes a wish. He is having a tough time at school and feels friendless and powerless. Rather than burying his nose in his books though and saying he’ll show them one day, he wants revenge. So in his silly and childish thirteen year old boy, he makes a wish – and because of some odd combination of a drop of his blood, the time of year, some magical Easter nonsense, the kind of made up voodoo bullshit you always get in movies like this – he wins himself a friend, and not just any friend. Here is the actual Easter bunny, Rocky is his name and he is armed and sneering and just the rabbit to sort out young Oliver’s problems.
Without a doubt Rocky is a fantastic creation, he is smart, profane and has a line in wisecracks that suggests the screenwriters were looking to graduate to James Bond one day. He is also remorselessly violent, so much so that everyone who has been rude to Oliver – or sneers at his new three foot tall very furry friend – is going to get his. Voiced by a pre-Crocodile Dundee Paul Hogan, there is a lot of charm to this rabbit, a lot of spunk and likeable antihero vigour to this bunny. However the thing that people are more likely to remember about the creation is how remarkably low-tech he is. You see, Rocky may be a tough rabbit, but he’s realised with what is basically a glove puppet. It makes for a really odd film, with Rocky talked up as big and tough and yet in reality being a hand puppet in a leather jacket shot really close to the camera so it seems roughly in proportion to his human co-stars.
I said this was a horror comedy; well its charms lie distinctly more in the latter than the former.
That said when the violence gets going, the gore content is quite high. Fellow pupils, sneering girls and even one teacher (British comedian Mel Smith in a sweating cameo) are all dispatched in ways gruesome and horrible (as long as you forget that what’s causing these outrages is basically an expletive happy version of Sooty). It’s a ridiculous set up but one which comes with oodles of charm. And since thousands of miles away at the same time, such a high-tech maestro as George Lucas was making a duck his hero with no charm whatsoever, then one has to say that if you are going to make a film with a homicidal rabbit – this is probably the way to go.
Showing posts with label puppets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label puppets. Show all posts
Wednesday, 16 April 2014
Sunday, 24 November 2013
Jarndyce vs Jarndyce (2002)
D.
Emil Bron
Colour/B&W
Sheets of white paper with indistinguishable, but official looking, writing tumble out of a large industrial printer. Swiftly ink-stained hands move in to attach stickers to them, some have red stickers, some have blue, some have yellow. Some of these papers are left unadorned and there’s a sense that these are the most important documents. They are the ones we follow anyway. They’re placed on a rackety old conveyer belt and make their way through a warren of dingy, poky offices. These documents do not remain unadorned for long, they are stamped and counter stamped. Some of them clearly have problems (although since what’s on them remains a total mystery, so do their problems) and stern, hard faced men send them back with an expression that doesn’t offer even a glimmer of hope that the problem will be fixed. The unmistakable deadness in these men’s eyes says that they know the document will come back exactly the same way again and again for the rest of their lives. Still these documents wind on and on, making their way through the system, presumably to some end point but the longer the film continues, the less sure the viewer is that this is some kind of circle. Perhaps this process doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, an end; maybe it’s just one endless odyssey and these papers will always stay in the system and their import will never be known or recognised.
It seems appropriate that it’s the country of Kafka which produced this love letter to administration, this ode to bureaucracy. As the papers move through the system, followed by the film beyond the point where surely sanity ends, then this stops being a mindless (government?) machine and becomes something oddly alive and wonderful. Watching papers flutter by, watching these sheets be sent back and forth, becoming more crumpled and stained by their passage through the system, becomes an almost compulsive sight. I mean that, this is a film about paperwork which is not infuriatingly tedious but is in fact pretty engrossing. And that’s an incredible feat, particularly as the human characters we meet are fleeting and only important in as far as they are dealing with the papers.
How is that done? How with no Joseph K figure, how with no heirs of Jarndyce, is it possible to create a functional and interesting film just out of paperwork alone? The answer is to throw the kitchen sink, the taps and all the fittings at it. This is a film with segments in colour and black and white; there are scenes which are animated – not only in a harsh Eastern European all angles and black lines way, but also in a cutesy Disney style and one segment in Manga. There is even more than one puppet sequence, with the film suggesting that at least one room in every large bureaucracy is staffed entirely by excited socks with swivel eyes. It takes a dull subject matter, purposefully makes it harder for itself by banning any real human characters, and then attacks it with huge amounts of vim and brio. It’s an extraordinary film and well worth seeking out. Although I can’t guarantee it will make you any less angry the next time your borough loses your council tax form.
Colour/B&W
Sheets of white paper with indistinguishable, but official looking, writing tumble out of a large industrial printer. Swiftly ink-stained hands move in to attach stickers to them, some have red stickers, some have blue, some have yellow. Some of these papers are left unadorned and there’s a sense that these are the most important documents. They are the ones we follow anyway. They’re placed on a rackety old conveyer belt and make their way through a warren of dingy, poky offices. These documents do not remain unadorned for long, they are stamped and counter stamped. Some of them clearly have problems (although since what’s on them remains a total mystery, so do their problems) and stern, hard faced men send them back with an expression that doesn’t offer even a glimmer of hope that the problem will be fixed. The unmistakable deadness in these men’s eyes says that they know the document will come back exactly the same way again and again for the rest of their lives. Still these documents wind on and on, making their way through the system, presumably to some end point but the longer the film continues, the less sure the viewer is that this is some kind of circle. Perhaps this process doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, an end; maybe it’s just one endless odyssey and these papers will always stay in the system and their import will never be known or recognised.
It seems appropriate that it’s the country of Kafka which produced this love letter to administration, this ode to bureaucracy. As the papers move through the system, followed by the film beyond the point where surely sanity ends, then this stops being a mindless (government?) machine and becomes something oddly alive and wonderful. Watching papers flutter by, watching these sheets be sent back and forth, becoming more crumpled and stained by their passage through the system, becomes an almost compulsive sight. I mean that, this is a film about paperwork which is not infuriatingly tedious but is in fact pretty engrossing. And that’s an incredible feat, particularly as the human characters we meet are fleeting and only important in as far as they are dealing with the papers.
How is that done? How with no Joseph K figure, how with no heirs of Jarndyce, is it possible to create a functional and interesting film just out of paperwork alone? The answer is to throw the kitchen sink, the taps and all the fittings at it. This is a film with segments in colour and black and white; there are scenes which are animated – not only in a harsh Eastern European all angles and black lines way, but also in a cutesy Disney style and one segment in Manga. There is even more than one puppet sequence, with the film suggesting that at least one room in every large bureaucracy is staffed entirely by excited socks with swivel eyes. It takes a dull subject matter, purposefully makes it harder for itself by banning any real human characters, and then attacks it with huge amounts of vim and brio. It’s an extraordinary film and well worth seeking out. Although I can’t guarantee it will make you any less angry the next time your borough loses your council tax form.
Wednesday, 13 November 2013
The Stainless Steel Rat (1970)
D.
Gerry Anderson
Colour
In many ways it should have been the perfect coming together. The first ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ book is great fiction for kids, it moves along at a fine clip, doesn’t aim for too much depth and isn’t concerned about painting the planets it visits in anything other than the broadest strokes. World building and complex plots are not what ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ is about, what it’s about is colourful adventure. Therefore Gerry Anderson must have seemed the ideal choice to film the adaptation. He had after all spent most of the 1960s making uncomplex and undemanding adventure series. If anything he created more depth for the worlds he encountered and so should have been great at filling in the blanks. His metier – as it was seen at this point by the general public and the industry itself – was puppets. And if anything was created to be filmed in Supermarionation, it was ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’.
This feature length pilot for a proposed series should have been a success then. Unfortunately, by 1970, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Gerry Anderson really fucking hated puppets.
It’s odd that the man most associated with Supermarionation, who coined the word even, was the man who became the biggest critic of it. Anderson wanted to work with real actors, he wanted to make films (he was involved in the development of ‘Moonraker’) and felt that puppets were a cul de sac. Unfortunately, as his later ‘UFO’, ‘The Protectors’, ‘Space 1999’ career proved, he wasn’t good at working with live actors. Indeed he had an odd habit of making actual actors give performances reminiscent of puppets. That was all in the future though, at this time he was still the man with the puppets, but the fact he was so desperate not to be the man with the puppets explains why ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ fails so badly.
‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz is a rogue, a crook in a world where crime has largely been abolished. He is a high-tech, futuristic gentleman thief, like a Raffles with a ray-gun. We open as he successfully carries out a heist, before moving confidently onto his next crime. Unfortunately the next crime brings him into contact with Inskipp, a thief even more legendary than himself, but one who is now working as an investigator for the state. (Inskipp is a glorious puppet by the way, so squat and rotund and sweaty. It looks as if he’s been left in front of the radiator for a couple of days). He recruits Slippery Jim, much against his will, but soon our stainless steel rat gets the righteous scent of the hunt in his nostrils. He finds himself in pursuit of Angelina, the great femme fatale of the galaxy.
Firstly, the things this adaptation does right. The puppets are excellent, a far improvement on what Anderson had been working with at the start of the decade. One wouldn’t go as far as to say lifelike, as they’re still puppets after all, but these puppets are clearly at the more expressive end of puppet performers. The story is well paced, with the script placing exciting set-piece after exciting set-piece. And it corrects the biggest problem of the book, which is that the relationship between Jim and Angelina is so ill defined. Here Anderson aims for chemistry between his puppets, giving them witty dialogue that makes them sizzle like Bogart and Bacall with strings. Indeed it appears at points as if Anderson doesn’t want to restrain himself to just kisses. No doubt when he watched the sex scene in ‘Team America: World Police’ he saw realised a load of images which had flooded through his mind when making this film.
But where it doesn’t work is that Anderson is clearly straining with all his might against the form he did so much to develop. He clearly fucking hates puppets, and that has bad consequences for this film. Even when it’s puppets in brave new worlds, he still directs it in the most pedestrian way, with none of the verve of his earlier work. As such the exciting set pieces following exciting set pieces are not really that exciting at all.
What’s more, no matter how expressive the puppet, they’re clearly not enough for him anymore. When it comes to one of his characters giving a real serious emotion, then the vague features of a real person are superimposed onto their faces (superimposition on top of supermarionation). No doubt it was supposed to add depth, but it comes across looking weird, spooky even. Here we have a man who is working with puppets and wants to work with actors and so decides to do both, but doing so adds zero of the qualities you generally get from live actors and just ends up making his puppets look even more fake and stranger than before.
Such is his contempt for the materials he’s working with, that the viewer begins to imagine that he might truly shatter the illusion by running onto screen before the final shot and snipping all the strings while cackling manically into the camera. No doubt he was delighted that this wasn’t picked up as series. Even though ‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz was a more nuanced and interesting character than Anderson had had before (maybe even the most nuanced and interesting character Anderson ever had) he was still – in this form – a fucking puppet. Underwhelming live action would follow for Anderson now, as for diGriz his wait for a proper film goes on – but I can’t help thinking that his puppet self is staking somewhere out right now.
Colour
In many ways it should have been the perfect coming together. The first ‘Stainless Steel Rat’ book is great fiction for kids, it moves along at a fine clip, doesn’t aim for too much depth and isn’t concerned about painting the planets it visits in anything other than the broadest strokes. World building and complex plots are not what ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ is about, what it’s about is colourful adventure. Therefore Gerry Anderson must have seemed the ideal choice to film the adaptation. He had after all spent most of the 1960s making uncomplex and undemanding adventure series. If anything he created more depth for the worlds he encountered and so should have been great at filling in the blanks. His metier – as it was seen at this point by the general public and the industry itself – was puppets. And if anything was created to be filmed in Supermarionation, it was ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’.
This feature length pilot for a proposed series should have been a success then. Unfortunately, by 1970, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Gerry Anderson really fucking hated puppets.
It’s odd that the man most associated with Supermarionation, who coined the word even, was the man who became the biggest critic of it. Anderson wanted to work with real actors, he wanted to make films (he was involved in the development of ‘Moonraker’) and felt that puppets were a cul de sac. Unfortunately, as his later ‘UFO’, ‘The Protectors’, ‘Space 1999’ career proved, he wasn’t good at working with live actors. Indeed he had an odd habit of making actual actors give performances reminiscent of puppets. That was all in the future though, at this time he was still the man with the puppets, but the fact he was so desperate not to be the man with the puppets explains why ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ fails so badly.
‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz is a rogue, a crook in a world where crime has largely been abolished. He is a high-tech, futuristic gentleman thief, like a Raffles with a ray-gun. We open as he successfully carries out a heist, before moving confidently onto his next crime. Unfortunately the next crime brings him into contact with Inskipp, a thief even more legendary than himself, but one who is now working as an investigator for the state. (Inskipp is a glorious puppet by the way, so squat and rotund and sweaty. It looks as if he’s been left in front of the radiator for a couple of days). He recruits Slippery Jim, much against his will, but soon our stainless steel rat gets the righteous scent of the hunt in his nostrils. He finds himself in pursuit of Angelina, the great femme fatale of the galaxy.
Firstly, the things this adaptation does right. The puppets are excellent, a far improvement on what Anderson had been working with at the start of the decade. One wouldn’t go as far as to say lifelike, as they’re still puppets after all, but these puppets are clearly at the more expressive end of puppet performers. The story is well paced, with the script placing exciting set-piece after exciting set-piece. And it corrects the biggest problem of the book, which is that the relationship between Jim and Angelina is so ill defined. Here Anderson aims for chemistry between his puppets, giving them witty dialogue that makes them sizzle like Bogart and Bacall with strings. Indeed it appears at points as if Anderson doesn’t want to restrain himself to just kisses. No doubt when he watched the sex scene in ‘Team America: World Police’ he saw realised a load of images which had flooded through his mind when making this film.
But where it doesn’t work is that Anderson is clearly straining with all his might against the form he did so much to develop. He clearly fucking hates puppets, and that has bad consequences for this film. Even when it’s puppets in brave new worlds, he still directs it in the most pedestrian way, with none of the verve of his earlier work. As such the exciting set pieces following exciting set pieces are not really that exciting at all.
What’s more, no matter how expressive the puppet, they’re clearly not enough for him anymore. When it comes to one of his characters giving a real serious emotion, then the vague features of a real person are superimposed onto their faces (superimposition on top of supermarionation). No doubt it was supposed to add depth, but it comes across looking weird, spooky even. Here we have a man who is working with puppets and wants to work with actors and so decides to do both, but doing so adds zero of the qualities you generally get from live actors and just ends up making his puppets look even more fake and stranger than before.
Such is his contempt for the materials he’s working with, that the viewer begins to imagine that he might truly shatter the illusion by running onto screen before the final shot and snipping all the strings while cackling manically into the camera. No doubt he was delighted that this wasn’t picked up as series. Even though ‘Slippery’ Jim Bolivar diGriz was a more nuanced and interesting character than Anderson had had before (maybe even the most nuanced and interesting character Anderson ever had) he was still – in this form – a fucking puppet. Underwhelming live action would follow for Anderson now, as for diGriz his wait for a proper film goes on – but I can’t help thinking that his puppet self is staking somewhere out right now.
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