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Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: Bug Vaudeville (1921)
virtuoso performance by an animation pioneer
So, for those who haven't seen it, let me tell you about "Bug
Vaudeville." It is framed as a dream. This indigent character goes
to sleep under a tree and dreams a series of vaudeville acts
played by bugs -- roaches, a daddy long-legs, butterflies, and
others. During these acts we see the head and shoulders of the
dreamer at the bottom of the screen, rather small, so you don't
notice them much. The last act is presented as involving a spider
and a fly. The scene is lush vegetation. A spider drops down from
the top and hangs from a single thread of silk. The spider does
various things and goes on and on until you begin to wonder:
Where's the fly? And then the spider reaches down to the bottom
of the screen and grabs the small black silhouette, pulls it up -- it
is not a fly, of course, it's a man, struggling against the spider -- and quickly devours it.
End of dream.
Traffic (2000)
disingenuous virtuosity, tediously deployed
As a film, I found "Traffic" a bit tedious and too long. As a comprehensive treatment of the so-called "war on drugs" I found it disingenuous at best.
Drug use is, of course, a complicated matter. And much of that complication is not well-suited to dramatic presentation. However, with its elaborate inter-weaving of three stories, "Traffic" pretends to be comprehensive. My problems with this movie center around the teenaged drug abusing daughter of the newly appointed drug czar.
What bothers me is the preachiness about how teen drug use is clearly a manifestation of family pathology, neatly balanced against daddy's scotch drinking. Well, certainly, family pathology can lead to various things, including drug use. But surely an awful lot of drug use starts as simple curiosity and continues on the strength of the various pleasures afforded by drugs. That was completely missing from this movie, which seems to take the view that drug use is simply and unambiguously wrong.
The film was enlightened only in that it comes down on the side of love, peace, understanding and therapy as the proper way to deal with teen drug use. That's certainly better than jailing teens, but it is not a very useful way of thinking about drug use. By linking drug use unambiguously to family pathology it underlines the assumption that drug use is itself pathological. I don't think things are so simple.
Given that assumption, of course, there is no way the film could even hint at the numbing facts about drug-related incarceration. It's nice that it shows us that official Washington doesn't have a clue about interdiction, but I regard that as an example of Marcusian repressive desublimation (yeah, I know, the term is awful). Soderberg goes liberal on that angle to distract us from the fact that, at the core, this is a moralistic tract against drug evils and in favor of old-fashioned family values.
Bamboozled (2000)
We're the cultural children of minstrelsy
Lee talks of this as a show about the media, citing A Face in the Crowd and Network. Yet it doesn't come off that way. Yes, the movie is about a TV show and most of the characters in the movie are connected with that show--the Mau Mau's being the main exception. But, despite the intrusion of TV commercials, a few seconds of a sad little protest, and all the documentary footage, it doesn't have the feel of a movie about media. It's really a movie, more or less, about culture, with TV being a means to separate culture, as such, from the encultured populace. TV is Lee's device to hand our culture to us on a platter: "See, here it is. This is what you all've been eating. And you know what they say, You are what you eat." And...there's a documentary side to this film that's extraordinary.
Jui kuen II (1994)
an extraordinary blend of action and comedy
The physical virtuosity in this film is extraordinary. What is particularly impressive is Chen's blend of fighting and comedy.
Chen is clearly one of a group of artists and athletes who are creating new physical styles from existing materials -- e.g. the Flying Karamazov Brothers, David Moshon (?), various skaters, divers, gymnasts, etc.