hoto Caption: Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) and Sgt. Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Photo: Francois Duhamel/ TWC 2009.

Inglourious Basterds was released in theaters nationwide on August 21, 2009, the following is a retroactive review:

In an early shot, Julie (Tina Rodriguez), one of dairy farmer Perrier LaPadite’s (Denis Minochet) daughters hangs linens on a clotheswire. The camera’s focus on the deliberately placed strokes of her hand across the sheet telegraphs obligatory replication before we even recognize that writer/director Quentin Tarantino has lifted a scene from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West—Nazis on motorcycles standing in for desperados on horseback; Mr. Minochet in the McBain role. The title card “Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France” is superfluous, but to be expected of Mr. Tarantino, who delights in regaling us with his movie store clerk mastery of insipid trivia.

Enter SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the “Jew Hunter,” so named for his cinematically-cliché prescience. Convinced that LaPadite is harboring Jews, Col. Landa breaks into a laborious soliloquy on the hiding places of hawks versus rats. I wasn’t aware hawks had much to hide from, but never mind. His foreknowledge withheld, the scene builds tension for minutes on end. Has it been done? Yes. Does it nonetheless generate white-knuckled suspense? Absolutely. Mr. Waltz has created a smug monster not unlike that of Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goethe in Schindler’s List. But there was nothing remotely comical about Goethe. Fear kept a constant level. Mr. Waltz’s dynamic performance contrasts satirical and dramatic hues, effectively charismatic and repulsive at once.

The film is a fictitious account of an assassin squad of Jewish-American soldiers handpicked by Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), nicknamed “The Basterds,” to infiltrate or ambush and kill German soldiers behind enemy lines in World War II. Unlike most of Mr. Tarantino’s films, Inglourious Basterds has a mostly linear chronology. To tell two stories and connect them without tritely rearranging the narrative, and maintain suspense for two hours and thirty-three minutes is a genuine achievement for him even if riddled with the usual jump cuts, self-aware dialogue and movie trivia—among other marks of his brand.

The second plot involves Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), an escapee from the film’s initial massacre, who inherited a movie theater. In a completely random introduction—plot machination—she is pestered for a date by a young German soldier, Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). He turns out to be a war hero and a movie star—analogue of Audie Murphy, the most decorated World War II veteran and star of his own autobiography, To Hell and Back. Private Zoller convinces Dr. Josef Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), the director of the propaganda film in which Zoller stars, his movie should be premiered at Shosanna’s theater. Seething yet from the massacre of her family, Dreyfus hatches a plan to eliminate most of the Nazi party’s high command. Complicating matters, not only does the Basterds’ operation lead them to the same conclusion, but the adept Col. Landa is always only a step behind the saboteurs. It’s rather obvious what the outcome will be, if you know Mr. Tarantino’s predilection toward female revenge stories. How it unfolds is of greater interest.

In those satirical characterizations, seemingly endless dialogues, recycled musical cues and ludicrously-stylized bloodbaths we receive our sacrament—cobbled-together adventure and mayhem from my generation’s favorite movie nerd. The movie is nothing more than that, nor need it be. Mr. Tarantino’s evolution as a film maker is such that the shot-by-shot plagiarism and film school bore has somehow morphed into his own lexicon. In his prior works, replication of technique might have existed for its own sake as in the diffusely lit sequences of Kill Bill parodying Shaw Bros. flicks, or naming a chapter after an obscure, 1968 Elke Sommer film (The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz). Here, Mr. Tarantino learns to apply those years of mimicry with purpose. Consider Col. Landa’s protracted request to converse in English with Perrier. While poking fun at American period pieces which often begin in another language only to switch to English in the first scene, the move obfuscates Landa’s intentions from the Jews hiding under the floorboards. Later, a shot continues for a beat or two, focusing on Lt. Raine’s solitary, abashed glances after repeatedly fumbling Italian pronunciation before the multi-lingual Col. Landa. The aforementioned reliance on seeming plot omniscience is used in another scene ending in a standoff. But unlike the languid ramblings of Pulp Fiction, the scene’s reams of dialogue ratchet the tension near, but not past, exasperation. The payoff arrives before you think to glance at your watch, despite a good twenty minutes having passed.

Only Private Zoller regrets killing so many. Yet the thought is abandoned just before his baser instincts return. The film is pure vengeance without nuance or intellect—moral conundrums unexamined. Mr. Tarantino has a talent for such action pieces, devoid of sophistry. As Pauline Kael spoke of directors being “Generals in the arts,” he cannot be bothered with such questions on the way to his big vision. Other than kicky violence or oddball characters including the treacherous Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) whose reputation so precedes him as to warrant his own title card, if there’s a reason Tarantino’s approach works here it is the reliably-despicable Nazis. They’re the ultimate contrivance for conscience-free killing. Could it have worked with a different antagonist? Perhaps, but it doesn’t hurt to vacate our faculties in the service of action, provided we don’t fool ourselves into believing that Quentin Tarantino aims higher than Michael Bay.

Criterion is regarded by most collectors as the gold standard for international masterpieces and classic cinema on DVD. This season, it stakes itself out as a player in contemporary international cinema with the release of two acclaimed foreign films: Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (due December 1) and, this week, Matteo Garrone’s sprawling docu-realist drama Gomorrah (Criterion). The signature image of Garrone’s adaptation of Robert Saviano’s non-fiction book, an exposé of the dominance of organized crime in Naples and Caserta, is a pair of teenage boys running around a deserted beach in their underwear while shooting off automatic weapons. (The cover of the Criterion edition transforms the image into a surreal vision of a skinny teenage boy walking through the city like a Godzilla child-man.) That’s as much glamour as you can expect from the this portrait of the mob: emotionally immature boys playing at gangster, oblivious of the reality behind their Tony Montana fantasy.

Boys with guns will be boys

Set in the poverty of coastal regions of Naples and Caserta, Gomorrah is a long and at times grueling look at five stories of people caught up in the Neapolitan Camorra, the Mafia organization that rules the region. Their hands are in everything, from selling drugs and running guns to the rag trade and, yes, contracts to haul and dump garbage and toxic waste. The sprawl makes it hard to follow and harder to connect with the characters and their stories (I was far more engaged on a second viewing), but it makes its point about the reach of the Camorra and the culture it has spawned. Garrone, who came to features from documentary, he brings a clear-eyed approach to the film and captures an atmosphere of destruction and waste in a landscape of urban blight and poverty. Criterion is releasing the film on both two-disc DVD and single-disc Blu-ray (at the same price, as is their policy), each with the hour-long documentary “Five Stories,” video interviews with Garrone, actor Toni Servillo and author Roberto Saviano, deleted scenes and more.

Before they were stars, Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow hungry stand-up comics sharing an apartment in Los Angeles. Apatow draws on both of their lives, past and present, for Funny People (Universal), a character drama in the guise of a show-biz comedy. Sandler is the former stand-up comic turned movie superstar who returns to his roots when he’s diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia and Seth Rogen is the young comedian he hires as a gag writer, assistant and on-call buddy. Sandler has always been at his best with parts that allows him to turn the comic exaggerations of his infantile comedies into not-so-cute undercurrents of real human behavior and this is no different. His character, George Simmons, is publically affable and easy-going but he’s a self-involved guy with an arrogance and sense of entitlement that peaks out in private moments. He’s able to get away with almost anything thanks to his fame and his sense of humor but even after facing his own mortality and coming out the other end, he’s never quite able to get past himself and really connect emotionally with anyone, including the ex-girlfriend (Leslie Mann) who is now married with children. Apatow thanks James L. Brooks in the credits and no wonder: this is his James L. Brooks show-box dramedy!

More interesting than this melodrama, however, is the messy culture of young comedians trying to make their name in comedy clubs, which Apatow and his cast (Rogen, Jonah Hill, Aziz Ansari, Aubrey Plaza) bring to life with an authenticity that makes both the tiny clubs and the big venue concerts completely convincing. There’s a single disc edition, a two-disc special edition and a Blu-ray release, and of them feature both the theatrical version and an extended unrated version (which runs seven minutes longer) plus commentary by director Judd Apatow and stars Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen (which is a lively and funny as you would expect from three comedians remembering their experiences in the business) and a gag reel. Apatow’s special edition supplements are always terrific and this is no exception, from the 75-minute “Funny People Diaries” (a making-of documentary as a personal journey through the film guided by director Apatow) to the deleted/alternate scenes, montages of ad-libs and other goodies.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s beautifully observed Three Monkeys (Zeitgeist) is a poetic portrait of flawed individuals facing the consequences of bad decisions. The film opens on a hit-and-run, unseen by us but signaled by the screech of brakes intruding into the hush of night on a winding country road. It’s a politician behind the wheel, but it’s his driver who takes the rap and the prison sentence. It’s just business, a private contract with a cash payoff (the family straddles middle class aspirations and working class nervousness and the money is too good to pass up), but it’s beginning of the white lies, hidden truths and bad decisions that spiral out of the father’s absence. Or perhaps out of his example. Compromises are made, but as in the opening scene, Ceylan keeps the cascade of mistakes and mishaps—the things that most films foreground as defining and dramatic events—off screen. Celan, a Turkish filmmaker whose previous films include the equally intimate “Distant” and “Climates,” has an unerring gift for camera placement. His camera lingers on the actions and reactions of his characters in the wake of the repercussions, observing the human story behind and beyond the headline events with microscopic focus. His slow, measured scenes can be as hypnotic as they are lovely, at times much so that the characters feel trapped by his poetic perfection. At others they are all too human, confused and selfish and irrational. He observes it all with a pace and a texture that communicates a cultural perspective that’s just a little different than you find in American movies. Turkish with English subtitles. No supplements except for a booklet with a printed interview with director Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

Tora-San Collector’s Set: Vol. 1 (AnimEigo) marks the stateside debut of a contemporary Japanese cultural treasure: the first four of what became a series of 48 feature films chronicling the misadventures of travelling peddler Torajirô Kuruma (Kiyoshi Atsumi), a bumbling rube with a good heart and bad judgment. Atsumi meandered through these gently sentimental comedies for 27 years (setting a record for a continuing series with the same actor) and director Yoji Yamada (who recently made his name stateside with The Twilight Samurai and The Hidden Blade) directed almost all of them. The series begins with Tora-san: Our Lovable Tramp (1969, aka “Otoko wa tsuria yo,” which translates to “It’s tough being a man”), and it front-loads the film with exposition of who he is and where he comes from, but the rest of the film is what defines the character. He’s an uneducated bumpkin with an outgoing personality and a saleman’s patter, who nonetheless puts on a show of worldly wisdom that is punctured every time he slips into street slang and bathroom humor (the subtitles on the AnimEigo release helpfully explain cultural references and verbal humor). He’s obliviously crude and inappropriate when he’s sober and aggressively rude when he’s drunk, and he has a rare gift of misreading every delicate social situation and blundering through them with grace of a drunken water buffalo. And yet, whether because of his efforts or despite them, everything turns out all right when he’s around, and the outsized personality, impulsive generosity and wide grin that Atsumi brings to the role makes it easy to forgive his faults. Chieko Baisho plays his little sister, orphaned after the death of their parents (he returns home to do right by her in the first film, and then keeps checking in between his travels). AnimEigo’s box set features the first four films in the series in fine editions with commentary on the first film by film historian Stuart Galbraith IV and program notes on each film. The collection is filled out by Tora-san’s Cherished Mother (1969), Tora-san, His Tender Love (1970) and Tora-san’s Grand Scheme (1970), each film sending him another quest between visits home to cheer his loving little sister and exasperate everyone else. And despite his tendency to trip over his own words, he manages to be quite the matchmaker for everyone but himself. He is, as the box set brands him, “Japan’s most beloved loser,” and these are charming films.

And yes, this is the week of Angels and Demons (Sony), the absurd follow-up to The Da Vinci Code (the book that was actually written before Code but reframed in the script to follow the movie). Ron Howard’s plan must have been to move the action fast enough to keep anyone in the audience from thinking about the utterly ridiculous plotting and it apparently worked well enough to make it a hit, but it’s as ridiculous a thriller as you’ll find. I wrote a review for the theatrical release, which you can read here, and details of the DVD release are here.

Blu-ray of the week – “I am Jack’s Blu-ray”: Fight Club: 10th Anniversary Edition (Fox) was actually released on November 17 but 20^th Century Fox keeps has a policy of not sending out review copies of most of their releases until street date, so I didn’t get a chance to look at this until now. David Fincher’s satire of consumerism, machismo, cultural asphyxiation and anarchy (adapted from the novel by Chuck Palahniuk’s novel) may well be the defining cultural fantasy of the nineties as well as a brilliant use of digital effects to create a surreal, alienated existence. Blu-ray is made for Fincher’s kind of dense imagery and technically complex visual manipulation; you can freeze frame those subliminal images and slow down those “flutter-cut’ sequences with even greater clarity than DVD. The new supplements are just fine: “A Hit in the Ear: Ren Klyce and the Sound Design of Fight Club,” an introduction to the art of sound design with rudimentary interactive sound board, really stymied me (maybe I don’t have the right set-up to make it work) but Mel Gibson wearing a Viking helmet and riding a horse to hand out to Fincher and company for Spike TV’s “Guy Film Hall of Fame” Awards is a sight worth seeing. But the original DVD supplements—including four audio commentary tracks, 17 thumbnail featurettes on key scenes and special effects, deleted/alternate scenes and galleries of goodies—are still more helpful and enlightening.

For TV on DVD for the week, see my wrap-up here. For the rest of the highlights (including Island Etude from Taiwan and a fine new DVD edition of the World War II classic A Walk in the Sun), visit my weekly column, which goes live every Tuesday on MSN Entertainment, or go directly to the various pages dedicated to New Releases, Special Releases, TV and Blu-ray.

Nine

Back in 1982, the Broadway musical Nine opened and won a Tony for Best Musical. An adaptation of Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film classic 8-1/2 with a book by Arthur Kopit, music by Maury Yeston, and direction by the great Tommy Tune, the show was a perfect blending of the cerebral and heart, a slightly tongue-in-cheek exploration of the creative process, and a fond but critical look at a man whose relationships with women were based either on his adoration for his mother or his pleasant encounter with a robust prostitute when he was a mere child.

Helping spur the show on to greatness were Raul Julia as Guido Contini, the solipsistic director; Karen Akers as his wife; plus Anita Morris, Camille Saviola, and the knock-‘em-dead Liliane Montevecchi as several of the women in his life. I still recall Akers singing, with her back to the audience, “My Husband Makes Movies,” a disconsolate accounting of being subservient to an egocentric spouse. Those three minutes and 53 seconds constitute one of the most powerfully moving moments in modern musical theater. As for redheaded Morris, she became the nation’s sex siren with her performance as Guido’s mistress. Attired in a skintight, see-through lace jumpsuit, she fueled the libidos of many an American male at the time, especially after repeating her number in costume on Johnny Carson’s desk one late night.

But after watching Rob Marshall’s adaptation of the show, I wondered if my memory was playing games with me. This sumptuous film version with its cornucopia of lovely stars (Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Fergie, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Loren) delivers on the glamour quotient but is lacking in both humor and pathos.

The problem possibly lies in Daniel Day-Lewis’s Guido. His take on the character lacks the unconscious, lovable self-mockery that both Julia and Marcello Mastroianni (in 8-1/2) brought to the part. Day-Lewis, at least after just one viewing, has concocted a depressed misogynist who loves women but not as much as he cherishes his own ability to agonize nonstop over the costs of his own celebrity. While you wanted to hug and slap his predecessors, you just want to slap Day-Lewis.

The addition of some horrendous new songs and the omission of some of the old ones don’t help either. Just listen to the Original Broadway Cast album’s finale where Cameron Johann as the child Guido sings “Getting Tall” to his older, less mature self, who has a gun in hand:

“Guido . . . Guido . . .

Scraping knees
Tying shoes
Starting school
Paying dues
Finding there’s no way we can spend a lifetime playing ball
Part of getting tall

Learning more, knowing less,
Simple words, tenderness, part of getting tall.

Guido, you’re not crazy, you’re all right.
Everyone wants everyone in sight …
But knowing you have no one if you try to have them all
Is part of tying shoes,
Part of starting school,
Part of scraping knees if we should fall
Part of getting tall.”

Numerous numbers such as this one are now in the scrapheap.

Additionally, Marshall’s constant cutting from Guido’s memories to show numbers stifles feelings. For example, in the “Be Italian” sequence, the lovable whore Saraghina (Fergie) agrees to show her wares to a group of boys for a handful of coins. The black-and-white footage of the group frolicking on a beach and then in the water is perfect, but the intercutting with showgirls singing on chairs garrotes the episode’s power.

Yet for all of its faults, Nine is filled with treats for the eye and ear, because in the end Marshall is no slouch in the talent department. Under his direction, Cruz has never been more gorgeous, Cotillard elicits empathy as the put-upon wife, Fergie surprisingly makes a believable singing hooker, and Dench, even with her wandering accents, is as grand as she always is. And Day-Lewis has worked out his body, Loren makes a most welcome return to the screen, and Kidman is able to play a major screen siren believably.

So on a scale of ten, Nine is an 8. Well, maybe an 8-1/2. – Brandon Judell

Mr. Judell is featured in Rosa von Praunheim’s forthcoming documentary New York Memories. In the spring, he’ll be teaching “The Image of the Jew in Post-World War II European Cinema” and “Gay and Lesbian Literature” at The City College of New York. He has written on film for The Village Voice, indieWire, Detour, and The Advocate, and is anthologized in Cynthia Fuchs’s Spike Lee Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

First, let’s be clear… Avatar is much more than a film. It’s a prescribed cinematic experience. Pure effect. The greatest sideshow on Earth.

Cameron’s aim is to take our franchise-frazzled minds and plug us back in to the mainline; to conjur the wonder of those early silent-movie audiences, aghast and alarmed as a steam-train chugged from horizon to foreground.

Like Avatar’s hero, injured marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), he wants to blast away the past and see through new eyes.

Avatar is the new benchmark for escapist entertainment; the ultimate on-screen dream. More suspension of self than suspension of disbelief.

As Jake dives in and out of his split human/alien personalities, Cameron is equally urging us to leave our burdened minds and busy bodies behind – to sink into our seats and immerse in a virtual world.

In the febrile jungle of planet Pandora, it’s a thrillingly alive world of whooping devil-monkeys, scuttling super-spiders, fluttering titan-orchids and bioluminescent air-jellyfish.

The ground is patrolled by hammerheaded, Triceratops-like behemoths and saber-toothed jaguar-giants, while immense, lizard-headed mega-birds rule the air.

But Cameron keeps us connected by not pushing the otherness into hokey, adolescent alien-sketch territory. This isn’t an open-air version of the Star Wars cantina: weird for weird’s sake.

It feels equally distant and familiar. Like an advanced version of our own world; as if Cameron has run the whole of the current ecosystem through some kind of evolution extrapolation software.

And into this wild and wonderful arena… Enter Avatar Jake, a hybrid of human and Na’vi – the blue-skinned, golden-eyed, oversized indigenous people.

“A marine in an Avatar body”, snarls Stephen Lang’s feral colonel. “That’s a potent combination…”

Jake’s mission: to blend with the locals and convince them to “relocate” – away from an area rich in precious/lucrative rock deposits. To go native…

Instead, he goes rogue – after being trusted and trained by Zoe Saldana’s fiery Neytiri. Like Human Jake, she’s a warrior, and the two bond over a spectacular battle/ambush that humbles him and ennobles her.

For Jake, it’s love at first flight. As the two soar and scamper through the shimmering treetops, he revels in swapping his broken real-world form for a faster, stronger, more athletic vessel.

But, this being Cameron, there’s forbidden love. Not love struggling to reach across time (Terminator) or class (Titanic), but something far more strange and affecting: interdimensional love.

In fumbling hands, this could have badly misfired – strange and silly instead of curious and moving.

But, unlike his last film, Cameron doesn’t over-season the sentiment. He drills straight through to the emotional core: his leading man’s wrenching inner-space odyssey – from interloper to insider to outcast.

But the success of the human/Na’vi love-story thread is mostly down to Saldana. Her subtle, spiky performance is a delicious foil to Worthington’s wide-eyed neophyte. She might have played it haughty and aloof – and annoying. Instead, she makes Neytiri untameable and irresistible, brimming with spirit and soul – and making her, and the other CG characters, feel more weighted and real.

So, yes, some of the CG is a bit floaty and videogamey. But, blended with the extraordinary, retina-frying 3D design, it soon becomes the work of a joyless cynic to spot the joins.

Cameron has taken the techniques of 3D film above and beyond the standard jabbing and jutting gimmickery. Every frame is dripping with sumptuous foreground detail – swirling ambient debris, needle-sharp textural subtleties, multi-layered character nuances…

It’s a motion picture where everything seems to move. And it’s utterly captivating. A glistening banquet for the senses.

This isn’t Cameron simply taking existing technology and tweaking the application to his standard. This is the work of a master film-maker owning and reclaiming the entire concept of 3D; pushing and challenging other film-makers to keep up.

But it’s also a long way from just some sterile technical exercise. Avatar sees Cameron revisit his favourite trick: using hardware to unearth humanity. He carves out the most ambitious screen backdrop ever conceived, then uses it as a staging ground for riffs on military morality, environmental anguish, science versus nature, spirituality versus pragmatism…

And, in his hero’s story, he presents a grand illusion – offering what seems to be a theme of internal conflict and physical reawakening before unleashing a final sucker-punch reveal that’s unexpected, devastating, moving and instantly iconic…

Oh, yeah… And there’s action, too: sinew-straining, jaw-snapping beast battles; rampaging fist-fights; arcing arrow attacks; whirring gunships peppering the canopy with incendiary fire; lumbering battle-mechs pummelling the life out of Pandora with synthetic death.

All – remember – in 3D…

So, let’s be clear… Avatar is much more than a film.

It’s an audacious, awe-inspiring work of modern art that reinvents and redesigns the whole process of sitting in a darkened room staring up at a screen.

Sure, it’s taken him ten years, but Cameron has achieved no less than a rebirth of cinema.

Jackson, Spielberg, Fincher, PTA, Del Toro… Over to you…
Andy Lowe

Verdict:

Game-changing – yes. Spectacular – absolutely. Occasional dodgy dialogue and dramatic imperfections – of course. But still – wait for it… – a titanic achievement.

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I don’t want to make outrageous claims, but my first viewing of A Town Called Panic cured my nasty hangover. My girlfriend’s first viewing cured her cold. It’s unclear just what sort of powers A Town Called Panic has, but they are mighty. And they are benevolent.

This feature length version of a Belgian kid’s show (Vincent Patar and
Stéphane Aubier produce five minute adventures which have been
repackaged and translated to air on Nicktoons in America) is an amazing
head trip, a glorious journey right inside a semi-innocent imagination.
A Town Called Panic follows the adventures of three
friends who live together: the level headed, cool as a cucumber Horse,
and two best buddies Cowboy and Indian, who are mischievous
knuckleheads whose best intentions are always causing major problems
for everyone in town, including their neighbor the always-shouting
Stephen, his wife Nadine, their animals (who attend music school),
Policeman, Postman, and Miss Longray, the beautiful redheaded horse who
teaches music and who has won Horse’s heart.

The storytelling is classic kid ‘And then’ style: ‘And then they fell
in a hole in the ground and the hole led to the center of the Earth.
And then they climbed out of the hole and they were in the North Pole.
And then they saw a giant robot penguin and then the penguin scooped
them up and then three superstrong scientists put them to work. The
scientists were using the penguin to throw giant snowballs at woodland
creatures far away,” and the resulting narrative is delightfully stream
of consciousness and free form. It all begins when Cowboy and Indian
forget Horse’s birthday and rush to get him a present. Attempting to
build him a barbecue, they order bricks online, but instead of 50, they
end up with 50 million. By the end of the film they’ve discovered and
started a war with an undersea race, traveled the globe and endangered
Horse’s burgeoning love affair by constantly keeping him from attending
piano lessons.

There’s no point in trying to get across to you the wonderful madness of A Town Called Panic.
It has to be seen to be believed, especially because the puppetoon
style is so distinctive, low tech and incredible. Most of the
characters are plastic molded figures, the sort you buy in large
plastic bags who have bases attached to their feet (think army men).
Each character’s real world analogue has little bearing on what they
are in Panic – Horse, for example, drives a little yellow car. Cowboy
and Indian carry none of the cultural baggage of their namesakes.
There’s a purity to the world in which they live, where each
character’s purpose and personality is defined only by how the creators
want them to be defined, that is exactly like a child’s game. But
there’s also a cutting subversiveness, surely unnoticed by kids, that
will delight adults.

The world in which the characters live is also extraordinarily tactile
and handmade. Blue cellophane stands in for water, while cotton puffs
are clouds (and fire extinguisher foam). Fire is represented by a
cardboard cut out of flames, and the small toys live in a world that is
partially scaled to them and partially filled with giant sized objects.
There’s a scene of Stephen eating a huge piece of toast that is
destined to be one of your favorite moments in cinema this century.
It’s a world not unlike what must have been in Michel Gondry’s head as
a child.

The best way to see A Town Called Panic is in the
original French. Usually I’m no purist for language in cartoons -
they’re all dubbed, after all – but in this case the voice work is so
unique and the French cadences so charming – ‘Mon Dieu!’ always sounds
better than ‘My God!’ – that the original is the only way to go. I
don’t know what the American release of the subtitled version will be,
but Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse will be playing it in January. The
question, of course, is whether or not little ones will enjoy a
subtitled movie as much as a dubbed one, and I think that A Town Called Panic is
so visually rich and so absorbing in its motion and energy, that
following the words won’t be as important to them. The subtitles do
come fast and furious, as many of the characters carry out hilarious
patter back and forth. But part of the hilarity of that patter is the
voice work by Patar as Horse, Aubier as Cowboy and Bruce Ellison as
Indian.

I don’t know how this movie could be any better. It’s about as perfect
a film as I’ve seen, and perhaps the only way to improve upon it would
be to create a version that never ended. A version that just kept going
with the ‘And thens.’