Michael Sporn Animation – Splog

- The past week saw little Academy action. We’d seen the Documentary features last week. (Five films within six days.) I found none of them earth shattering. Two were very good:
Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory by directors Joe Beringer and Bruce Sinfosky was one I’d expected to be a drag. I wasn’t interested in the subject. However, I found it absorbing and quick moving. The story of three men who’d been sent to prison for murder. This film, the last of a trio of films, proved the innocence of the three and ultimately got them released from prison after 17 years.
Pina is a 3D film about the work of the dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch by filmmaker Wim Wenders. I found it exciting and exhilarating.

This week, the Foreign films are screening. They started Thursday night, but that was Heidi’s birthday, and we weren’t about to take in a movie. I started viewing the films last night and will continue this afternoon with another. They’ll continue through Tuesday.

Heidi and I did go to see the play, Look Back in Anger. It was absolutely great. The best play I’d seen in the past couple of years. The director, Sam Gold, limited the stage. The actors have the length of the stage to move, but there’s a black wall cutting the width of the stage to about four feet. It really drives home the claustrophobic apartment the characters inhabit. The lead actors, Sarah Goldberg and Matthew Rhys are decidedly stars in the making. The show was just brilliant. I found the mostly negative reviews a bit puzzling. Michael Feingold, in the Village Voice, seems to explain the reasoning behind that mystery. He writes about the British scene coming upon this play back in 1956 and how it broke through their class system and marked the changes that they were facing in heir Country. The US had gone through something similar earlier marked by shows like Streetcar Named Desire. (“Stella!”)

Just the same, I got what this version of the show was doing and felt that Sam Gold had pulled John Osborne‘s play into the 21st Century taking the Kitchen-sink drama and dragging it through Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd. Great stuff and very inspiring. Just a bunch of actors and not much more. But very moving.

- I love that the dimwitted Rick Santorum won the Republican caucuses/primary on Tuesday. (Boy is this guy a turkey; he’s still living in the 18th century.) The Republicans are just showing that they’re completely at odds with all of the candidates available to them. The clown show will continue until their convention this Summer, and, by then, we’ll all be exhausted with the incessant lies and vitriol these guys throw at each other.

Sorry, I’ll get back to writing about animation.

- The Oscar nominated shorts are being shown at the IFC Center – as of now. They make for three good programs. (Actually, I think the animated shorts program is the best of the three.) Here’s a review from the Village Voice.
Info on the screenings:
Documentary Shorts
Live Action shorts
Animated Shorts

- Bill Peckmann has been contributing artwork to other blogs. On Joakim Gunnarsson‘s great site Sekvenskonst there is a great piece featuring many self-caricatures of a lot of cartoon and comic strip artists. We used one of these self caricatures on our Thursday piece about Rowland B. Wilson. Everyone from Roy Doty to Chester Gould to Basil Wolverton to Mort Walker to Tom Morrison to Ernie Bushmiller is represented and plenty more.

- Here is a well written paragraph from AO Scott‘s NYTimes generally positive review of Chico and Rita, which opened yesterday at the Angelika Film Center. (Directors Fernando Trueba & Javier Mariscal will be doing Q&A’s following the 7:40 PM shows Sat & Sun, Feb 11-12. )

“Chico & Rita,” nominated for an Academy Award as the best animated feature, is a reminder not only of the aesthetic vitality of hand-drawn, two-dimensional animation, but also of the form’s ability to provide entertainment and enlightenment for adults. A costume drama or a documentary would not have been as charming or as surprising. It would be hard to get cameo appearances from Charlie Parker or Marlon Brando, and the dutiful literalism of historical filmmaking would have dampened the vitality and killed the magic.

and here’s a couple of lines from Lou Leminick‘s NYPost review:

Complain all you want about the Oscars (I certainly do), but give the academy major props for bypassing a clunker like “Cars 2” and handing a Best Animated Feature Film nomination to something as wonderful as “Chico & Rita.”

“Chico and Rita’’ beguiles first and foremost as a bebop romance that evokes a bygone era as well as, or maybe even better than, “The Artist.”

Finally, I wanted to write a couple of notes about the Annie Awards ceremony.

For years I’d read about the awards, without having attended, and have only been able to think about it in comparison to the ASIFA East awards, which are a small celebration of animation by the local members of the NY chapter of ASIFA. Ours is almost clublike in its ceremony. Very non-formal people dressed in street clothes, which means predominantly jeans and dress-down wear. The shaggy student awards. The idea that ASIFA Hollywood dressed up for their event made me immediately put it on a higher pedestal. I hadn’t attended one of the Hollywood ceremonies, and only by seeing the streamed version of the awards could I get an inkling of what it was.

Having Patton Oswald host the event was only a positive in my mind. He’s such a quick-minded comic who would do well at the podium. A real professional. However, hearing no feed back of audience laughs (there obviously was no audience mike for the program), made it seem like all his jokes were falling flat. There were also plenty of flubs on the stage as presenters were presented with the wrong envelopes, and winners learned of their wins a full category before their turns.

From the home audience it seemed like a train wreck had been occurring in front of our noses. I honestly couldn’t imagine how tedious this must have seemed to the live viewers. But then they had a bar and drinks and friends to laugh with in the nearby seats. Very different than watching a show on a computer at midnight. Rooting for something like Phineas and Ferb over something else like Prep and Landing 2 at midnight on a Saturday night, just doesn’t quite make it.

The awards went to deserving people, I’m sure. I recognized many of the names, and it was nice to finally put some of the faces to those names I’d only known from credit rolls. And I congratulate them for their well-deserved awards. However, to most of the world these are unknown people. There was a limited audience for this program. Me and a couple hundred others who’d sit out the slow slog.

I suspect that until I can see the Hollywood awards live, I’ll sit out future streaming telecasts. But then, I’ll probably change my mind at the last minute next year and watch it again.

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