Recently Seen Movies

Contemporary American movies:

One great one, the other drek-

Richard Linklater's A Scanner, Darkly (8/10)

Linklater uses rotoscoping animation for the second time (after Waking Life) to adapt Philip Dick's scifi novel Through a Scanner, Darkly. Linklater creates an appropriately paranoid, existential (overused, yet actually appropriate here) crisis of a movie. More about A Scanner, Darkly soon.

M. Night Shyamalan's Lady in the Water (2/10)

Truly horrific nonsense. In yesterday's matinee performance, there were precisely two people - one of them left about halfway through. I wish I hadn't been the one who stayed. My brain wouldn't have been assaulted by one of the laziest story-lines I've seen in my life, along with a collection of cardboard characters, infantile philosophizing, token stereotyped Asians and the director as the saviour of mankind. Except for the fact that the female lead wears no pants in the movie, pretty near unbelievably bad.

Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, Jim Trainor Animation

Animation is particularly susceptible to being co-opted by multimedia conglomerates - as Edward Jay Epstein correctly argues in his Big Picture, Disney is the model upon which the current conglomerates model themselves afterwards. So, when you have the opportunity to go beyond the carefully-limited boundaries of our corporate overlords, it's both a treat and an enlightenment.

Other Cinema has collected a number of items from some of America's best experimental animators into a single DVD, Anxious Animation.

While the quality of the shorts within do vary, the DVD lets the interested experience the work of Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, Jim Trainor and others for themselves - work that was nearly unobtainable previously. I fervently suggest you check Anxious Animation out.