12/14: Six Looney Tunes cartoons

Bob Clampett's Draftee Daffy starts off as just another World War II patriotic cartoon, with Daffy reading the newspaper and cheerfully recounting the latest American military victories, launching into an elaborate song and dance routine extolling the virtues of the US. Watching it today, this segment can probably only elicit a groan, though Daffy gets some good lines in, because even the best-made propaganda is ultimately a little boring. But then Daffy gets a call from the draft board, and a man comes to deliver his draft notice, and there ensues a wild and frenetic chase as Daffy does anything possible (and quite a few impossible things too) to escape service. Somewhere in there, inevitably, a sneaky little thought occurs: Daffy's a hypocrite! In its unobtrusive way, this short mocks the hypocrisy and faux-patriotism of those who are all for war just as long as it's an abstract concept happening somewhere far away, and in that sense it remains startlingly relevant now.

More importantly, once the action gets moving, it's a dazzlingly fun cartoon, and a perfect showcase for Clampett's tremendous animation skills. The chase scene was a dependable standby of all the Warner animators, and Clampett hits all the usual points here, as always riffing on some basic plotlines and gags. The delayed reaction, the chaser who follows his prey through even the most elaborate traps and escape routes, the bomb that gets casually handed back to the one who lit it: these constantly recycled plot elements serve as the skeletal basis for Clampett's rubbery, fluid motion animation, in which Daffy stretches and contorts himself into pretzels with every movement. Daffy, with his wackiness and exaggerated character, is a perfect fit for Clampett's rubberized sense of movement, and a chase film is exactly the right form for this union of the director with his perfect character.

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I Haven't Got a Hat, directed by WB mainstay Isadore "Fritz" Freleng, is mainly notable for being the first cartoon to feature Porky Pig, who would shortly after become the studio's major star (following on after more generic earlier characters like Bosko and Buddy). At this early point, though, Porky doesn't look much like he would later on, and he doesn't have much to do either, although his characteristic stutter was already in place. The film is basically a showcase for the introduction of a whole cast of new characters, of whom only Porky would ultimately stick around for very long. Among this crew was also the mischievous cat Beans, the stuck-up Oliver Owl, a pair of playful dogs named Ham and Ex, and a shy girl kitten. All these characters are in a school, supervised by a cow schoolmarm, and putting on a series of performances for the benefit of their classmates. It's a setup that gives each character the opportunity to step up and introduce themselves, ostensibly to the class, but actually to cartoon audiences of the time, by giving a performance. The Looney Tunes cartoons of the time didn't have much in the way of memorable recurring characters, and these new creations each get their moment in the spotlight here for a try at enduring fame.

The problem is that the short is very light on gags. Ironically, though Porky would be the only one of these characters to last beyond a few cartoons, his part here is by far the weakest. Porky's introduction is just one lengthy joke about his stuttering, which goes on for so long that eventually the class chases him offstage by summoning a pack of dogs to attack him — presumably the audience would've been ready to kick him off much earlier. Later, the WB cartoonists would realize that Porky's stutter, though it defines his personality and to some extent endears him to audiences, is best when it's not the focus of the jokes but a simple accepted fact of the character's being. In later Porky shorts, his stuttering could be funny — especially when it resulted in fun streams of fractured wordplay — but it was rarely placed at center stage in the narrative the way it is here. Little Kitty fares just a little better, shyly reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with exasperated prompting from her teacher on the sidelines — still basically a one-gag show, but at least it's a mildly funnier gag. Finally, there's some interplay between the piano-playing owl and Beans, who's set up here as a trickster character much like Bugs would later become. This is the short's best sequence, a small taste of the madcap insanity that would soon mostly push aside the song-and-dance routines and dominate the Warner cartoons for the next 30 years. Otherwise, this is a relatively undistinguished early effort from the studio, more notable as a historical landmark than a good cartoon in its own right.

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Porky Pig's Feat is an absolute work of genius, there's simply no denying it. A pure comic masterpiece, it's packed with so many jokes and wonderful small moments that it's almost impossible to grasp everything that's going on without watching it several times. Porky and Daffy's expensive stay at a plush hotel that they can't pay for triggers a lunatic barrage of rapid-fire gags as the duo attempts to flee from the nigh-unstoppable hotel manager. There's a joke every second, and director Frank Tashlin has the visual panache to milk every one of these jokes for all they're worth. In one scene, Porky and Daffy send the manager tumbling down a massive spiral staircase, and his yells of pain come echoing up to them (at one point, the voice actor hilariously mixes in a recitation of the vowels with the yelps). When the pair looks over the edge, Tashlin shows each of their faces in turn, with a reflection of the falling hotel manager visible in their eyes, and immediately after he inserts another visual joke, a shot of the staircase as a spiral heading down seemingly to infinity — but when Daffy insults him, the manager is back at the top of the stairs like a rocket. Tashlin also plays with mirroring in another scene, when a defiant Daffy is glimpsed sticking out his tongue in a reflection from the manager's monocle.

The cartoon is crammed with these kinds of surprising moments, displaying a keen attention to detail and a way of thinking about scenes, even in cartoons, in terms of the camera's eye. When the manager, insulted by Daffy, prepares to slap the duck, Tashlin pans away to Porky, who's looking on in fascinated fear, and only when the offscreen slap is over, panning back to show Daffy with a white hand print across his face. This kind of moment stands out because of its innovative use of self-consciously "cinematic" techniques in cartoons, but Tashlin's images could be equally striking in terms of pure visual humor. When Daffy accosts the manager, he squashes their faces together and burrows in until the man's face is twisted in on itself, whereupon Daffy turns to the camera and points, telling everyone to look at the new Dick Tracy character, Pruneface (who, indeed, had been introduced in Chester Gould's strip the year before). Towards the end of the film, in an even more metatextual moment, Porky and Daffy discuss Bugs Bunny, saying that they once saw him make a very daring and tricky escape in "a Leon Schlesinger cartoon."

This short is packed with these kinds of multi-layered gags, enhanced by the fluid visuals of Tashlin's expressive animation style. His Daffy, in particular, is brilliantly realized and acted here, as in the opening scene where he loses a dice game and slinks away, every inch of his body telegraphing his depression. His stooped shoulders, dragging feet, and head drooped practically to the ground give his walk exactly the feel it should have, and he's equally expressive when jolted into action for the rest of the cartoon. This is a real joy of a film — I've watched it over and over again tonight, probably five times already, and it's a riot every time.

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Plane Daffy is another WW2 short, and director Frank Tashlin makes it one the classics of the era, opening it with a tribute to the Hollywood flying pictures, especially Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings. The opening shot is a fog-shrouded view of the flyers' airbase that evokes Hawks' lonely aviation outpost in the South American jungle, although in this case it's a birdhouse, and the flyers are all pigeons. And, of course, one duck too. That would be Daffy, who takes on a dangerous mission when all the other "pilots" are seduced and waylaid by the Nazi spy Hatta Mari, who's so dangerously sexy that even a poster of her, shown to the troops, sways and sashays seductively so that her hips shake from side to side. Daffy can resist, he says, because he's "a woman-hater, she won't get to first base, this Hatta Mari tomater!" Of course, it doesn't work out that way, and the film gives way to one of those manic and logic-defying chase sequences that so define Looney Tunes cartoons.

Tashlin structures the film in an interesting way, though, so that the crazed release of this chase serves as a counterpoint to the comparatively staid and serious first half of the film. For the first few minutes, the cartoon is set up like a conventional flying ace film (excepting the replacement of the pilots with pigeons, of course), with the birds worrying about their missing friend and chain-smoking until mounds of cigarette butts pile up in the headquarters. A narrator provides a grim voiceover, the seriousness of his narration only undercut by the fact that he's speaking in rhyme, combining a fairy tale sensibility with the macho attitude of the flying picture genre. Once Daffy enters the scene, the mood is shattered, and the foggy ambiance of the birdhouse headquarters gives way to a wacky and surrealist chase as Hatta Mari attempts to extract military secrets from the unwilling Daffy. The chase itself is a masterpiece of warping space: the space seems to entirely change from one shot to the next, with Daffy's motion keying the transition from one space to the next. He opens a door, finds Matta Hari right behind it, darts towards the bottom of the frame and suddenly there's a staircase right there for him to leap down (and of course Matta Hari will somehow be waiting at the bottom as soon as he gets there). And there's an immortal line when the sexy spy chases Daffy into a refrigerator, and he pops his head back out to exclaim, "What do you know? The little light stays on!" This kind of absurdist digression isn't just a fun aside, but the very essence of the cartoon's method, although the equally absurd treatment of spatial logistics in the chase is perhaps a more subtle touch. In fact, the film's whole second half might be thought of as an absurdist detour from the genre pastiche of the beginning, going from the moody Only Angels Have Wings to the wackiness of a screwball comedy (hey, much like Hawks himself). Wackiness is built into the film's DNA, its very structure, which is what makes it such a classic of insanity.

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I Got Plenty of Mutton is a Frank Tashlin-directed one-shot, featuring a starving Depression-era wolf who's so desperate for food that he attempts to trick a deadly ram who's guarding a flock of sheep. This wolf, like so many of the supposedly predatory animals in these cartoons, is a dumb and hapless creature, not unlike the later Wile E. Coyote, who was based on this kind of one-shot wolf character. Like Wile, this wolf is a sad and sympathetic character, driven by sheer desperation and starvation, an outgrowth of the Depression and wartime rationing and shortages. He's introduced with a classic Depression-era gag, the "meal" that consists of just a single pea, eaten with a knife and fork in small pieces to prolong the pleasure of eating it.

His attempts to outwit the sheep's guardian ram are similarly pathetic, and he quickly turns to that tried-and-true Warner device, dressing in drag. It's interesting how often various characters resort to this trick in these cartoons, and not only Bugs Bunny. On one level, it's an indication of a fatal weakness in the male personality: again and again in these cartoons, otherwise stolid and powerful male characters are undone by the temptations of women (or other men disguised as women). The ram who's so fearsome when the wolf first shows up is transformed into a lecherous Romeo, steadfastly pursuing his new love. It's a typical irony, though, that his romantic pursuit is so single-minded that the wolf is just as thoroughly kept away from the sheep, unable to escape the advances of the ram, who woos his love with a whispery French accent, punctuated by a loud "BAHHHH!" The ending adds a new and bizarre twist to this loving chase: when the frustrated wolf finally reveals himself, the ram simply shrugs and takes up the chase anew. The ram, apparently, has decided that he just wants some love, and it doesn't matter what species or sex the object of his affection might be.

In the handful of Tashlin cartoons I've watched so far, it seems typical that the narrative structure ranges far and wide and is structured around these kinds of surprising pivot points, which periodically swing the story into totally unexpected places. The sad and hungry wolf of the cartoon's first few minutes is quickly forgotten after his first encounter with the ram, and the story then becomes a question of how he'll manage to outwit his adversary. Then the story shifts gears again, becoming a chase between an amorous character and the unwitting object of his desire; the unexpected ending provides yet another narrative shift, towards a new story that couldn't have been guessed from anything that preceded it. And all this in a cartoon that lasts less than 8 minutes. Tashlin never provides a solid narrative ground, allowing the characters and their interactions to drive the storytelling. The result is a kind of mini-epic that feels a lot longer than it is, even as its pace remains perfectly calibrated. It simply packs in so much detail and so many different ideas into its compact running time, and it's endlessly fun to take this kind of roller-coaster ride with a master director like Tashlin.

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The Stupid Cupid, in comparison to the aforementioned cartoons, is a mild-mannered effort from Frank Tashlin, though it's still charming and fun in its own quieter way. The short stars Elmer Fudd as a wayward Cupid, who's spurned by Daffy because the duck is already (unhappily) married with a line of kids so long that the pictures of them fill up a photo album with an extra accordion fold tailing off with still more Daffy Juniors. Once again, we're back to women as the undoing of men in a Looney Tunes cartoon, and Daffy, having learned his lesson the first time, wants no more arrows. But Cupid Fudd takes this rejection to heart, and skewers the unlucky duck with a mega-arrow that makes him fall in love, inappropriately but hilariously, with a chicken. He consequently falls afoul (you thought I was going to make a fowl joke, didn't you?) of a rooster, and the requisite chase ensues, punctuated with alternating violence and romance.

This cartoon lacks some of the flair of other Tash-helmed 'toons, which means that its jokes, while funny as ever, lack some of the extra pop of the camera-play in Porky Pig's Feat or the radical spatial restructuring of Plane Daffy. It's indicative of the extraordinarily high level of quality in the Warner shorts, and the amount of structural and formal play in their construction, that a hilarious and enjoyable cartoon like this can fall into the mid-level of their output simply for lacking those additional levels of meaning and sophistication. Still, the scene towards the end, where Daffy worms his way into the middle of a kiss between the rooster and the hen, has to be one of the most uproarious ménage a trios scenes in cartoon history. Saying this is only an average Warner cartoon isn't too much of an insult; saying it's an only an average Tashlin cartoon is even less of one.

12/13: The Brood

David Cronenberg has made a great number of disturbing films in his career, but perhaps none more viscerally affecting than The Brood, a horror film that aims not so much to scare you as to turn you inside-out, to make you squirm and recoil in disgust. In most of Cronenberg's films, he aims to take internal mental and emotional processes and give them an external physicality, a presence in the world to match their invisible importance in shaping the individual's psyche. The Brood is a film of tremendous physical impact. Its climactic horror scenes elicit none of the jumpy, jittery scares that most horror films resort to in order to provoke reactions, but Cronenberg's horror is no less physical, no less manipulative. It's a creeping, crawling psychological horror, enhanced by the fact that he keeps his little beasties off-screen for so much of the film, and when they finally appear, their awkwardness only accentuates their basic wrongness.

The monsters in question are the mentally generated spawn of Nola, who's played by Samantha Eggar, in a jaw-dropping performance that vacillates from vulnerability to utter creepiness, with a third act transformation that reminds me of Ashley Judd's recent turn in Bug. Nola is being counseled by the controversial psychologist Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), who believes that negative emotions can be channeled out of the body and manifest themselves in physical form. As it turns out, he's right, and Nola's anger grows into a brood of vicious "children" who respond to the vagaries of her mood by turning on the people she's angry with and killing them. So, basically, it's a horror film about PMS. And in some ways, it's also a viciously misogynistic portrait of motherhood and the parasitic relationship between mother and child. The film reflects a man's fear and distrust of feminine bodily processes and the uniquely privileged mother/child relationship, which is here warped into a nightmarish mockery. The horrors of childbirth, in particular, are explored in brutal detail in the final sequence, which I won't "spoil" for anyone who hasn't seen the film yet — suffice to say, it's one of the most bracing and stomach-turning scenes in cinema. In fact, Cronenberg admits that the film was directly inspired by a rather nasty divorce battle with his ex-wife, and consequently it's a film about the scars, mental and physical, imparted on us by our families and loved ones. Nola was physically beaten by her own mother as a child, and now that she's a mother herself, the suppressed rage bubbles over into her own new family.

It's a fascinating film, precisely because it couches Cronenberg's usual obsession with bodily transformation and the externalization of emotions in a much more straightforward horror context that he would create in his later films. Of course, all of Cronenberg's films might, to one degree or another, be called horror films, but few of them are rigorously scary. Most of his films are too pensive, too withdrawn from the horror of the situations or the characters involved, to really generate the frisson of sympathetic fear that good horror demands from its viewers. Perhaps because this film is so personal, and Cronenberg presumably identifies more closely than usual with its everyman hero, The Brood truly lives up to its billing as a horror flick. The film builds up a slow-burning terror that, strangely, has little to do with the monsters themselves or their actual violent actions. The creatures, though creepy in an alien sort of way, are small and child-like, and can also look faintly ridiculous bundled up in bulky children's coats with thick mittens, waddling around like overstuffed little penguins with hideous faces. So they're not scary in the way that, say, Freddy Krueger is scary. That is, they're not scary just because they're physically intimidating, or because they pose such a horrible threat — though they do rack up quite the body count for such little beasts. The terror in the film arises more from the very idea of these creatures, the knowledge that they are the external representation of ugly human feelings, that they are essentially birthed from the mind. They evoke a squirmy, almost metaphysical dread, the sense that they're somehow filthy, like thoughts that should never be aired so publicly.

This kind of uncomfortable feeling is a typical component in virtually all of Cronenberg's work. His films are not only images of people in the process of externalizing their inner worlds; he wants his audiences to question and think about their own inner worlds. His images are so provocative and over the top precisely in order to spark these examinations, to draw powerful associations between the visceral disgust he's eliciting and the primal human emotions and ideas that are linked to this disgust. In this case: motherhood, childbirth, sex, familial bonds. The film's complex psychological subtext is intimately interwoven with its images of transgressive birthing and warped motherhood, with the frightening idea that children are just the amalgamation of their parents' neuroses and anguish. In that regard, it's telling that the film ends with an image of Nola's daughter (her real one) as her father drives her home. Maybe the film's real horror is the idea subtly buried at its core, that Nola's monstrous "children" are just physically deformed variations on the internal warping of Nola's real child, who is being shaped and hurt by her parents in the same way that Nola was by her own.

12/11: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs; Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven

One of the best outcomes of the recent Short Film blog-a-thon is that it's reawakened my interest in classic Warner Brothers animation, so I'll be watching a lot more of it from now on. These cartoons work especially well the way they were originally intended to be seen, as bonuses preceding a feature. In that regard, the 1943 Robert Clampett-directed Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs may not be the most logical choice for a light pre-feature diversion, but it's still a blast to watch. That is, if (and it's an admittedly big "if") one can get past the short's baldly racist caricatures and the consequent dated feeling of the humor. As the title implies, this is a parody of competitor Disney's Snow White, with all black clichés (they're hardly fully-formed characters) in the usual roles. The lead herself has morphed into So White, with her "coal black hair," short skirt showing off her endless legs, and wide eyes, a hyper-sexualized Dorothy Dandridge type (and why not, after all, since Dandridge's mother and sister provide the voice acting). The rest of the characters are even broader black stereotypes of the time: gigantic lips, even bigger feet, and a mouth full of gold teeth for Prince Chawmin' (capped off, hilariously, with dice for his two front teeth).

The stereotyping is outrageous, but I'll admit it barely distracted from my pure enjoyment of the cartoon, which in any case at least isn't mean-spirited in its caricaturing. Clampett intended to glorify black culture, not denigrate it, and even if his iconography is inextricably tied to the racist imagery of his day, there's no denying the sheer pleasure this film provides in its music and sense of rhythm and motion. There's just so much energy here that it's almost impossible to resist, and no amount of racial guilt can dull the impact of Clampett's frenetic pacing and rubbery character designs. The whole thing is set to a vibrant, jazzy score, and the characters half-sing, half-speak their words in rhyming couplets, while the action moves along at a breakneck pace that makes even the wildest of other Looney Tunes shorts seem turtle-like in comparison. And why not? After all, Clampett was essentially compressing the hour and a half of Snow White into less than 8 minutes, so it's natural that things get a bit frantic. The cartoon jumps, shimmies, and jives with such intensity and speed that the characters can barely sit still even to deliver their lines or get through the necessary scenes. When the evil witch comes to give So White the famous poison apple (riding up on a bicycle-propelled fruit cart), neither character can stop bouncing and dancing in place as they exchange dialogue, and they bring all their surroundings into harmony with their groove. The whole frame seems to be jittering in rhythm with the motion of their bodies, and even the sun can't help but dance in time to the music as it rises in the morning. No plot necessities are going to slow these characters down.

And they never do slow down, even for the obligatory kiss scene at the end, which instead of romance becomes downright kinky — people always have wondered about Snow White and those dwarfs. Clampett signals the film's overt sexuality almost right away, when the queen's first lines are not the familiar "who's the fairest one of all?" but: "Magic mirror, on the wall, send me a prince 'bout six feet tall." I dare you not to laugh. There are plenty more great lines here, and an overall mood of exuberance that propels the film through its ridiculous and sexualized parody of Disney's squeaky-clean masterpiece. Its blatant racism is hard to ignore, at least in the abstract, but at the same time it's so much fun — and such a brilliant example of Clampett's skill for high-energy animation — that it should be seen far and wide anyway. For now, you can only watch it at places like here, in a lousy n-th generation VHS dub, until Warner finally gets the guts to release it on DVD — and this mouth-watering blog post shows just how good this film could look.

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Mother Küsters Goes To Heaven pretty much picks right up from where Rainer Werner Fassbinder's earlier Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? left off. The earlier film ends with the titular office worker, slowly ground down by work and domestic life, casually killing his wife and neighbor before killing himself. This film starts from a similar place, as the factory worker Hermann kills his boss and then himself before the film starts. Hermann's rampage happens off-screen, and his family hears about it on the radio, with no name attached, before a man arrives at their door to inform them about what happened. What ensues is a darkly comic chronicle of the titular Emma Küsters (Brigitte Mira), who is surrounded on all sides by cruelty, manipulation, and abandonment in the wake of her husband's death.

It should be no surprise that Fassbinder is here, as always, concerned with manipulation and people taking advantage of the misfortunes of others, but this may just be his darkest and most unflinching portrayal of these kinds of behavior. The film is exaggerated to the point of caricature, especially in the beginning sequences where reporters immediately descend upon the Küsters home, haranguing the family and asking leading questions that are clearly meant to bolster the inevitable sensationalist stories. There's also a photo session where the reporter Niemeyer (Gottfried John) photographs the weeping widow just days after her husband's death, asking her to pose with the dead man's photograph, and directing her on how to pose through her tears. Fassbinder keeps accumulating details in this way, not afraid to go well over the top to satirize the ways in which people trivialize and take advantage of tragedy. Later, Frau Küsters falls in with a group of Communists who tell her that her husband's deed was a "revolutionary" act, that he was unconsciously tapping into the workers' righteous anger at the capitalist system. The widow, desperate for company as her selfish children abandon her, joins the Party and makes speeches for them, but is disappointed that they seem to have no solutions for her or her husband's posthumous reputation — they're just using her for their own political aims.

This is a remarkably bitter satire, even for the always astringent Fassbinder, although flashes of dark wit and absurdist humor (like the drag ballerina dancing in the background of one scene) lighten the mood occasionally. The film again and again holds out hope to the widow that her life will improve, and then methodically, one by one, reveals the ways in which all these hopes will fail her: business, the journalists with their pretensions to "objective" truth, political movements, family. None of these outlets provide any real hope for this woman. Interestingly, there is a glimmer of hope in at least one of the film's endings, since the film had entirely opposite final scenes for the European and American markets. In the European version, the film ends when Emma becomes involved with an anarchist group who take over a newspaper office and threaten to kill hostages if their demands are not met. It's a masterfully executed scene, with Emma lurking silently in the background, realizing that she has once again been used by people who have no real interest in her. As the anarchist leader enumerates his demands to the police over the phone, the camera pans past his shoulder to reveal Emma's shocked and drained face, and the shot freezes as a lengthy on-screen text explains the violent bloodbath that follows, in which Mother Küsters fulfills the title's prediction. In the American release, though, the title is given a somewhat different and more hopeful meaning, as after a peaceful but unsuccessful sit-in at the newspaper, Emma meets an old and equally lonely janitor who offers to bring her back to his house for a dish he calls "heaven and earth."

These two endings provide two possible alternate realities for Frau Küsters' tortured life. Obviously, the European version is more in keeping with the rest of the film, and its objective textual recounting of the bloody final events reflects back on the journalistic satire earlier in the film. This resolution brings the film full circle, from one journalistic account of violent action (the radio report of Hermann's murder/suicide) to another. The American version, in holding out a genuine sliver of hope to Emma, breaks the film's cycle of negativity and cynicism, but it's somehow unbelievable, so totally out of keeping with the rest of the film (and the rest of Fassbinder's oeuvre) that one wonders why Fassbinder ever filmed it at all. The European version of the film is a minor masterpiece of manipulation and the isolation of the individual, harrowing in its single-minded devotion to a cycle of hope and disappointment that ends only in death. Thus, death for Mother Küsters is heaven not because of any Judeo-Christian religious underpinnings in the film, but because it represents a final end to the cruelty of worldly existence.

12/9: Alice; Mo' Better Blues

Alice was Woody Allen's first film of the 90s, and he seems to have entered the decade already floundering and stumbling a bit, after a long string of worthwhile films all through the 80s. This story of a wealthy, insulated upper-class woman who's given up her earlier dreams and is only beginning to re-examine her life, is very familiar ground for Allen. He's recycling material here from many of his earlier dramas, especially September and Another Woman, albeit doing so in a magical realist comedy rather than a drama. Even so, the film feels like a somewhat slapdash retread. Another Woman wove dreams, fantasies, and internal thought processes into the visual fabric of its protagonist's life, and this film takes on much the same structure, with the twist being that instead of dreams, the fantastical interludes are meant to be real manifestations of magic and the supernatural in this otherwise believable world.

Woody has flirted with the supernatural before, especially in the ending of the lightweight but fun Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, and much more successfully with the straight-faced fantasy of Purple Rose of Cairo. The intrusion of magic into the life of Alice (Mia Farrow) is handled in a similar deadpan manner, with a casual acceptance of even the most absurd events, but the film nevertheless feels like an awkward pastiche that never quite comes together. Alice is the stereotypical rich man's wife, married to successful businessman Doug Tate (William Hurt), with two children who she loves, but in the midst of her busy life she feels strangely unfulfilled. The accumulation of material goods, the shopping, the gossipy women around her, endlessly chattering about each other's affairs, the dull parties and society functions: it begins to strike her that this wasn't the life she wanted. Alice also yearns to express herself creatively, or at least to do something with her life more substantial than her current high-society blandness allows. It's familiar ground for Woody, to say the least, and for anyone who's followed his films as well. I'm just not sure that the film has much to add on these familiar subjects. Gena Rowland's slow awakening to the banality of her life (and her own role in causing it) in Another Woman was genuinely moving and enthralling, making for Allen's best foray into drama yet. Farrow's also a fine actress, but this film seems insubstantial by comparison, with not as much investment in the characters or attempt to differentiate them from past Allen types.

Still, it's not without some charm and appeal, especially in a few of the more magical sequences, representing Alice's escapes from her humdrum routine. The magic enters the film through somewhat questionable means: the Chinese acupuncturist Dr. Yang (Keye Luke), an Orientalist caricature with a disquieting resemblance to Yoda in his verbal rhythms (raising the question of whether or not Lucas' creation was a racial caricature in the first place, but that's another topic). Despite this distracting outburst of racism, Woody makes good use of the film's magical contrivances. When Alice, under the influence of an herb Dr. Yang gave her to boost her confidence, begins verbally seducing Joe (Joe Mantegna), a man she met at her kids' school, it's a hilarious scene, mainly because Farrow gives such a convincing performance as the stiff woman finally breaking out of her shell. Her whispery, husky mutterings about jazz and music (Joe's a saxophonist) hide thinly veiled sexual references, and the scene is both sexy and funny; in other words, Woody at his best. In another scene, the new couple takes advantage of the invisibility potion that Yang gave to her in order to walk around the city unseen, and spy on friends, and again the scene's magic completely works. Less successful is the Peter Pan parody in which one of Alice's old (and now deceased) lovers takes her on a flight across Manhattan to one of their old haunts.

Alice ultimately falls flat as a problematic and flawed revisiting of old themes and recycled characters, a serious decline from the high level that Allen maintained all through the 80s. I realize that in my chronological journey through his films, I now have the whole much-maligned stretch of his 90s films ahead of me, and I've really been hoping that I'd feel differently about these films than other critics have. Alice, as the first misstep in Allen's output in quite a long while, subdues those hopes a little, though by no means stifles them. Even despite the film's problems, there are flashes of the wit and insight and charm that have always made Allen's work so compulsively watchable.

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Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues is a masterfully executed drama about the self-obsessed jazz musician Bleek Gilliam (Denzel Washington, in a great and carefully controlled performance) and his struggles with both creative expression and his relationships with lovers and friends. It's as stylistically overblown and in-your-face as most of Lee's other films, though it contrasts this boisterousness against an uncharacteristically quiet and unassuming central narrative. Visually, the film is never less than dazzling, with particularly nice use of colored lighting, especially in the jazz scenes. This conceit is introduced right in the opening credits, which feature images drenched in singular color schemes, all bright reds, deep blues, purples, and blinding yellows. Periodically throughout the film these color fields return, signaling a flight from the accurate depiction of reality into a stylized fantasy. Significantly, the device is utilized almost exclusively for the jazz performances and the brief but potent sex scenes. In this film, creative expression and romantic love are set up as essential opposite poles, or better yet, two sides of the same coin. Creativity and sex are established as the two options for escaping from drab everyday reality into a higher plane of pleasure and meaning.

When the film starts, after a short introduction set in Bleek's childhood, the adult Bleek has conclusively chosen music, although it doesn't stop him from carrying on ardent but ultimately casual affairs with both Indigo (Joie Lee) and Clarke (Cynda Williams). Music is the most important thing in his life, and his frequent affairs with women are at best secondary matters in his life. For him, jazz music is not just a way to make a living or a diversionary entertainment, but a deep creative form and, most importantly, an essentially black form of music that links him to his people. He only laments that nowadays, "his people" don't seem to care anymore, and his audiences are primarily white. His bandmate, Shadow (Wesley Snipes), attributes this to the type of music that Bleek chooses to play, which he says is too egocentric and not in touch with what black people want to hear. But later in the film, when Shadow finally gets his own band like he'd wanted, his own audience is primarily white as well.

This issue of music's racial identity and the possibility of music to speak to a people sits on the periphery of Mo' Better Blues, but it's one of the film's more interesting subtexts. Lee never addresses the issue directly, except in the brief conversation between Bleek and Shadow, but the somewhat surprising conclusion that one might draw from this exchange, and from the audience at Shadow's later performance, is that it's futile to believe that art is anything more than a moment's entertainment. Shadow incorporates a much more authentically "black" vibe into his music, through the vocals of Clarke, singing about life in Harlem, but these gestures towards greater relevance to "his people" don't improve the proportion of black faces in the crowd listening. In this sense, Shadow might be thought of as a Spike Lee stand-in, making socially relevant commentary aimed at blacks, but increasingly watched by whites who often ignore or misunderstand the films' messages (as in Do the Right Thing, possibly the most misunderstood film of all time). Then again, it may just be a question of finding the proper medium. Bleek, in one of his routines, viciously mocks rap music, but it's undeniable that in 1990 or today, if one wanted to craft a socially relevant song aimed at black audiences, it would have a much greater chance of reaching its target as a rap rather than a jazz number. It may be that Lee is not questioning the efficacy of art as social message in general, but simply bemoaning the loss of his beloved jazz as a way of communicating with black audiences.

Faced with this declining relevance (and his own inability to play anymore thanks to an accident), Bleek is forced to reconsider what he might best do with his life to fill the central place that music held in it. The film's denouement is a heartfelt and deeply moving tribute to the pleasures of domestic life and raising a traditional family. The final minutes of the film condense many years into a brief span in a rapidly edited montage in which Bleek is seen marrying Indigo, accompanying her to the hospital for the birth of their son, and raising the boy to be the same age that Bleek himself was in the film's opening scene. The two scenes mirror each other almost exactly: the boy is practicing the trumpet when his friends come calling, his mother demands that the boys leave them alone, and the boy begs to be allowed to go play outside. The difference is that in the final scene, Bleek allows his son to go outside instead of keeping him in for more lessons, suggesting that he's realized that there's more to life than art. This final montage is also implicitly linked with an earlier tirade by Bleek's father, who decries his son's womanizing ways, warning him not to make the problem of black unwed mothers any worse. The film's ultimate message of family values is extraordinarily positive, but it could be argued that Lee stacks the deck here — his montage pointedly omits any reference to what job Bleek might take with his musical career in tatters, focusing instead on a thoroughly idealized depiction of a happy domestic life.

More troubling problems arise from the film's occasional engagement with race, which in places lacks the sensitivity or depth of Do the Right Thing. Most notably, John Turturro and his brother Nicholas are given perfunctory roles as sleazy white club owners, caricatures of greedy white economic domination with no trace of the depth given to the film's black characters. Also problematic is the depiction of the white girlfriend of one of the black musicians, who's continually taunted and given a paper-thin mockery of a role: shrewish, demanding, and vacuous in contrast to the earthy sensuality and intelligence of the film's black women. Lee seems to be wholly on the side of the other musicians, who cruelly make fun of their bandmate by hanging photo cutouts of naked black women on his dressing room table. Lee's own negative opinion of interracial dating is well-known, and in his films he often allows himself to slip into broad caricaturing to make his points about whites' treatment of blacks. The result, in the few places in this film in which white characters figure, is simply racism.

On the whole, though, Mo' Better Blues avoids such pitfalls, and the result is a fine and emotionally powerful film, both a poetic ode to the beauty of jazz, and an examination of the alternate routes of family and creativity in black life. Not as incendiary or message-oriented as its predecessor Do the Right Thing, this film is concerned with more intimate and internal concerns, questions of the individual's path in life and the creative outlets available to him.