North (1994)

 

Director: Rob Reiner

Screenplay: Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman

Based on a novel by Alan Zweibel

Cast: Elijah Wood as North, Jon Lovitz as Arthur Belt, Bruce Willis as Bruce Willis, Jason Alexander as North's Father, Alan Arkin as Judge Buckle, Dan Aykroyd as Pa Tex, Kathy Bates as Alaskan Mother, Robert Costanzo as Al, Faith Ford as Donna Nelson, Graham Greene as Alaskan Father, Julia Louis-Dreyfus as North's Mother, Matthew McCurley as Winchell, Reba McEntire as Ma Tex, John Ritter as Ward Nelson, Lauren Tom as Mrs. Ho, Abe Vigoda as Alaskan Grandfather, Keone Young as Governor Ho, Alexander Godunov as Amish Father, Kelly McGillis as Amish Mother, Scarlett Johansson as Laura Nelson

Ephemeral Waves

 

Before North, a film whose reputation likely exists more than as a film people have seen, director Rob Reiner had a streak of films so highly regarded it would be seen as a golden run - This Is Spinal Tap (1984), The Sure Thing (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Princess Bride (1987), When Harry Met Sally... (1989), Misery (1990), and the film before North which was a huge box office success, A Few Good Men (1992). After North, his career still continues, but it is with much obscurer films, with North considered a film so notorious its negativity was spoken in shudders when I first heard of it.

The vivid toys of our titular lead's room, played by Elijah Wood, nods to the strange and whimsical story ahead, an adaptation of a novel by Alan Zweibel, co-writer and co-producer for the adaptation, an intentionally strange children's tale with the high concept you would expect for that audience. North is stressed out, and whilst he could be seen as an egotist, who is so good in school and life other children's parents use him as the guilt inducing symbol for asking their children why they do not floss their teeth like North does, it is clearly meant to be an exaggeration for a gag. Whether it works or not, at least Wood himself, before going on legendarily with the Lord of the Rings adaptations, showed his charisma here as a child actor, which is needed for this quirky premise. His story is still a universal one, that fear any child has where they feel their parents ignore them in their busy lives, even the smartest and most talented here finding himself so distant from them it even starts to knock his talents off course badly. He crosses path with Bruce Willis dressed as a pink Easter Bunny, and whilst it is explained he is an employee at an Easter holiday special at a local toy store, the strangeness of the meeting is certainly a set up for the whimsical tale where, when trying to let North know he should accept his parents as they are, Bruce accidentally plants the idea in the kid's head instead to divorce his parents and get new ones.

The film's reputation for being bad is overdone, with all its issues I have seen in comedies and family films, the saccharine touches and jokes not landed universal among them. The one true negative we sadly will have to get to, the stereotypes and jokes which have aged horrifically as time as past, are that bad with time passing, but most of the film is not beyond these scenes as pointless as I had always presumed it to be. This is not that hair pulling nightmare I had been told it was, and blasphemously, I would go to say the most infamous opinion, that of acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert, was melodrama with hindsight. His reaction was clearly sincere, justified in his legendary comment on North that "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it."¹. The review itself however is still spoken from a critic famous due to his published but also television film review opinions, so a person who would have made snappy one-liners to sell or dissuade his viewers and readers over films without taking too long to dissect the thing he hated hated hated. In truth, the sins of North are ones we did not dog pile as harshly as other films, and beyond those stereotypes which are awful and cannot be defended, the rest of this comes off with the earnestness of a whimsical tale.

It is telling, to spoil the plot entirely, this is all a dream of North's, that old and sometimes despised cliché in cinema, but the set up if like a milder form of Alice in Wonderland sets up that the exaggeration of a feverish mind in at hand here, naive and viewing the world with the peculiar gags as envisioned by adult men in the co-writer and director's seats, imagining the circumstances when he goes about separating himself from his parents. His father literally works testing trousers in a variety of ways, even with a rabbi in one booth bowing to see if the seams tear in a variety of different scenarios the product could be worn within, setting up this sense of colourful absurdity from the mind of a child, and thus in this world, it is set up this is not a serious or realistic take on child divorce in the slightest, but the perception of what a child would presume would be possible. S child divorce is far easier to pull off then it should be when Jon Lovitz as a sleazy lawyer suddenly drives up to him in a car out of nowhere and can get all the ticks marked for the trial to be a success, quickly as North comes up with the plan. It comes with a hitch though - North has until Labour Day to choose his parents (or go back to his biological ones) to avoid going to an orphanage, and whilst he goes off into the world to find them, Lovitz and the bright but evil kid in charge of the school newspaper take advantage of this. As the children of North's town start rebelling against their own parents in response, this pair decide that even if getting rid of North has to be done, the power they now have with Lovitz potentially up to becoming the US president is too important for North to realise he always loved his biological father and mother. The obvious cliché that North will realise he loves his parents is something we find in so many family films in structure, so I cannot dismiss this as a hoary cliché either.

The premise, as the kids back home start to mutiny against their parents for their right to freedom, definitely is based on a fun sounding young teen/children's novel, and unfortunately where the problems I have with the film begin and end are the stereotypes that make up the meat of the film, the absurd takes on all the families that make themselves known to North they would take him as their adopted son. At first, there is more a playful absurdity to Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire being so Texan as a potential new family, their limoscene is longer than some trains, and includes an abrupt musical number about everything being big in Texas to the Rawhide theme. There is definitely a children's film dream logic at play here to, welcomed, more so as, following its final punch line of North waking up and how Bruce Willis both sets this up and is the narrator, he constantly re-appears seemingly as different people with the same face in every location North ends up at trying to find new parents. It is one of the aspects which works, and sets up someone thing if as fluffy and quick to consume as candy floss, which is not a bad thing, especially if the jokes about the parents North chooses between could play to the jokes of stereotypical nuclear family dynamics.

Where the problem lies comes with the idea that, in a grimmer work, you could touch on the uncomfortable subject of how stereotypes are ingrained in kids and thus their imaginations are imbued on them, a theme that could have been tackled with sensitivity if this had been not a straightforward children's film, but a grim comedy. That is not the case however, as these are played as straight forward jokes that you are supposed to enjoy; it is the moment I do agree with Gene Siskel, who brings this up in his review with Roger Ebert on the Siskel and Ebert review, where he said the "ethnic stereotyping is appalling"², and they have aged like a fine murder. Parents from Hawaii leads to typical Hawaii imagery for a governor and wife unable to have children, if getting into the weird joke about the new promotional sign including North's butt crack being expose by an octopus for an uncomfortable gag. Worse however comes in Alaska and an Inuit couple, not called that, which involves Kathy Bates and others in brown face, which is absolutely cringe inducing when the joke could have worked. Beyond the grim one of sending grandpa out to freeze to death, which does continue into the stereotyping, there is a playful joke here of imaginary Inuit suburbia, where one needs to mow the icy lawn and the dog sledge goes into the garage of the stereotypical igloo suburban house, a production design joke I think is not offensive if it was mocking the stereotypical image of Inuit culture from their side positively. Sadly, that is clearly not the case, and more of these jokes get worse. By that point, then you get the African tribe joke about the women being topless, which fall into this type of terrible humour that we sadly still got into films decades after and other films should be found guilty of, especially as they are lazy as they are dreadful. China is reduced into the least expected reference to Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor (1988), and even the joke about the French wearing berets and Jerry Lewis films appearing on every TV channel just emphasise the lazy, toe curling tone of a film made for kids but clearly absorbing its adult creator's worse tendencies. That is the side of North which is as bad as it sounds, and is just bad comedy in general, especially as the obvious joke about an Amish family North considers just reminded me why "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody song Amish Paradise was actually funny.

This is all a shame as, whilst syrupy in the truest sense, a weird and sometimes sick humoured fantasy exists in this premise, literally the fevered dream of a young boy, which could have worked. Ebert's anger of how the film glibly plays with the idea of a child could with ease dispose of his parents¹ does ignore that the point of the film, whether it succeeds or shoots itself in the foot by not hitting the tone successfully, that this is meant as a perverse fantasy from the perspective of a nine year old. He is angry at his parents, concocts the idea, plays it out and it is as ill-conceived as you would expect from a child still yet to fully mature, and develop through his teenage and adult years the weight of the ties to his parents. The narrative arch, whilst gleefully enjoying the idea, when North's divorce succeeds, of parents kowtowing to their children's every needs in role reversal fears, is about why North's divorce is not a good idea at all, conservative as a conclusion in its final but with that obvious, saccharine realisation the thing most of us, even the cynics, would admit is the right ending. Some may argue for a more twisted conclusion, but as a family comedy, the point is the humour from its weird journey until North realises his mistake.

When his parents are shocked by his actions and end up frozen in place, positioned behind glass at the Smithsonian Institution for exhibit for the momentous event they were part of, you see how none of this is anchored in conventional reality, but a picture book for the more quirkier of humour. Tellingly, the original author and co-writer Alan Zweibel was also a writer on Saturday Night Live from when it originally began, and a consulting producer on Curb Your Enthusiasm among his long career, so the more bizarre and more adult moments of humour fit the sense this is a stranger concoction of these earnest themes of loving your parents with the eyebrow lifts at the more twisted jokes.

The production design when allowed to play with this kid's logic in the real world, exaggerating the locations, works when allowed to be, even if one moment is a pop, in the evil corporate headquarters where the evil kid and Jon Lovitz are scheming, just because you get to see then-1992/4 arcade videogame cabinets all in a row to show their true decadence, including a bizarre (but great) animated cartoon tie-in from Konami called Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa (1992). Bruce Willis, who did come from comedy originally and was once viewed as a weird choice for Die Hard (1988), fits as a phantom shape shifter who appears everywhere, as a beach comber to being a chain-smoking stand-up comedian hired for a smoke alarm manufacture's convention, one of the strangest jokes but in hindsight working for that reason it shouldn't. The Clarence Odbody/Guardian Angel role to push North to the obvious message at the heart of the film works, and when the North film itself plays to this whimsical tone, I think its reputation is not as deserved. Even when it gets really twisted, North ending up in New York City with a hit man hired to try to murder a child, the tonal shift fits as part of this era of mainstream nineties cinema which had these tonal shifts and sense of playful weirdness at their heart.

All my problems is that, at its centre, you have to suffer through jokes which are dreadful, but we can also look to films which were not failures and loved at the time, like the Ace Venture Pet Detective films I grew up with as a kid with Jim Carrey, and see that problematic and offensive jokes were everywhere. I deliberately choose an example with jokes far worse than those in North to point that out, even if I will not defend North's either. This feels like, for the most part, when a director in Rob Reiner managed to create so many films now considered iconic and beloved, and in a variety of genres in a row, eventually when made the one which falters, it gets a shock reaction from viewers who loved everything before. Were it not for the jokes which are problematic, the sin of North is that it is ill thought-out, the best version of this never coming to be when I find moments which work beautifully, but all from an idea that needed to be properly fleshed out. Maybe it needed to even offend Roger Ebert more by playing with the idea of a child gladly divorcing his parents, startling a target child audience and their parents with the fantasy even in a kid film friendly tone, before reaching that warming ending, like a perverse fantasy comedy take on when It's a Wonderful Life (1946) got to the Potter's Field version of its central town. The nineties, even in children's TV animation I grew up with, relished the more overtly adult and cynical sense of humour, and whilst North was clearly made with the theme of loving one's parents, the joke of children rebelling against their parents, and the wackier production design choices, should have been lent on.

North instead is a film we never got a DVD release of in the United Kingdom, let alone Blu Ray, a lost Rob Reiner film which was not a box office success at all even without the negative reviews, so thus quietly buried like a few of the more notorious films from the nineties which, due to coming from the VHS era, you cannot find a second hand DVD copy unlike the 2000s and 2010s equivalents of notorious pictures from major studios. Naturally it is a film tied to the Golden Raspberry Award, a contentious award ceremony for "bad films" in the sense they come from a more ironic time before, starting in the 1980 when Michael and Harry Medved's The Golden Turkey Awards was also published, but somewhat lost to how in the internet era now you can not only dig up much more "bad" cinema, but you get weirdoes like myself on blogs defending a couple of them as actually things we enjoyed. Hilariously another Bruce Willis film stole the Golden Raspberry Award from North at the 15th event in March 26th 1995. That would be the erotic thriller Color of Night (1994), which will not be elaborated upon as it would be inappropriate to in a review of a film targeted to a family audience, and because that film needs its own review to unpack.

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1) Roger Ebert's review of North, published July 22, 1994

2) Siskel and Ebert, Season 8 Episode 44, The Client/Lassie/It Could Happen to You/North/Barcelona, aired July 23rd 1994.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (1975)

 

Director: Leonardo Favio

Screenplay: Leonardo Favio and Jorge Zuhair Jury

Based on a radio programme by Juan Carlos Chiappe

Cast: Juan José Camero as Nazareno Cruz; Marina Magali as Griselda; Alfredo Alcón as The Powerful/Mandinga; Lautaro Murúa as Julián; Nora Cullen as The Lechiguana; Elcira Olivera Garcés as Damiana; Saul Jarlip as The Old Man Pancho; Juanita Lara as Fidelia; Yolanda Mayorani as The Powerful's Godmother; Marcelo Marcote as The Child

Ephemeral Waves

 

Based on folklore, Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf tells the story of the seventh son, the last surviving son, of a widowed mother who is said to be cursed by the Devil into becoming a werewolf. He managed, with the witch who warned his mother during her pregnancy as his loving godmother, to lead a happy life into his adulthood, to the point he is a popular man in the village despite the constant jokes about full moons. His love for the maiden Griselda (Marina Magali) however brings the Devil, or Mandinga (Alfredo Alcón) to him, warning him that, now with love in his life, Nazareno (Juan José Camero) will turn at the next full moon, even attempting to bribe Nazareno with wealth beyond his means to attempt to sacrifice Griselda's love. Based on the Guarani legend of the Lobizón, where the notion of the seventh son becoming a dog-like creature comes from if different here, Nazareno Cruz... is also, in Argentina, one of its most acclaimed and successful films. Alongside Argentina's official entry for the Foreign Language Oscar at the 48th Academy Awards, but this is held as a high mark from Argentinean cinema within the country,

It is also, however, a film extremely difficult to see outside of nefarious means, which is incredibly annoying. Nazareno Cruz... is not pulpy enough for a traditional genre label, closer to drama even with its fantastical story and a soundtrack by Juan José García Caffi that evokes Italian genre cinema's own, but it is startling and idiosyncratic in beautiful ways. Its director, Leonardo Favio, is a director I was lucky enough to see a few films of through with help, but his work is generally difficult to see. This disappoints as, even going by memories, his was a very diverse series of films as a filmography, many which were just as distinct as this. Also managing to be a well regarded singer-songwriter¹, as much as an acclaimed director in his homeland, Favio could go from a traditional historical film like Juan Moreira (1973), based on the titular folk hero and outlaw, to the very strange and utterly idiosyncratic El Dependiente (1969), to Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965), a realistic tale of a titular young boy and troublemaker in an entirely different aesthetic style. The only reason his career was shorten at one point at all, just after Nazarene Cross itself, was Argentina's civil-military dictatorship of 1976–1983, where he understandably became an exile and fled the country¹.

A film of its era of the seventies, it however contrasts the obvious aesthetic touches of this time in cinema with its attempt, like many from this period, of retelling a fairy tale in a grounded reality even when it is fantastic, within a rural setting possessing a tone which stands out for such a simplistic tale. One which is a tragedy which will unfold, idiosyncrasies stand out, notably a trip to Hell as represented by caves. It does avoid wearing out its premise, folktales better off as very short length works due to their concise natures unless a filmmaker can elaborate on it carefully, which is to its advantage. The film does not attempt to depict a wolf-like humanoid, but sticks to an actual wolf, something of note as, among all the idiosyncratic side characters who steal scenes, among them include an old female witch (and apparent mother-figure of Satan himself) who is a shape shifter. The tone is enough with the film to shows a clear grasp on a folklore that is lost in a lot of Northern American cinema, unless it can escape internally or set itself in a minority community or the countryside, this film set in a part of some older period but timeless in appearance.

The personality itself, when seen from a script co-written by Favio, really does add so much to an already haunting tale. The witches, seen throughout including a young girl, future heir and student of the arts as a mere child, fascinate as dominant female figures, onlookers to this story where, in terms of any villains, Griselda's father is the closest even near the Devil himself, in his ill-advised decision to keep Nazarene from her despite their love for each other, which will lead to further tragedy in the end. The simpleton, for a lack of the politically correct term, waving in the fields gets his own idiosyncratic moment where, abruptly, suddenly he has a monologue in his ramblings about war being good, clearly going off memories of a past in conflict among soldiers, which raises so much in terms of background for him and this simple tale, a tale outside this one's scope, which feels meaningful. Even Satan himself, in his crisp black hat and erudite voice, gets to be more than the tempter. It says a lot of the film's attitude when, warning Nazareno of the curse of the full moon as is found in many films, he and Satan end up laughing together until it hurts, even if doomed to transpire as the Devil still warns. That is even before, adding an abrupt bow of real emotion to the film, Satan will eventually show humanity, bored and despairing of his lot, even wising for Nazareno, in the fate before him, to ask God Himself to talk to his fallen angel in an act of reconciliation.

Even in terms of having a fairytale magic, and some surrealism such as fishermen in the caves of Hell among other background details, within this much grounded aesthetic tone the presentation really stands out and adds to the haunting nature of Leonardo Favio's film. This, if you look into it, is legitimately to Argentina like another box office smash like Titanic (1997) was to the rest of the world in what high regard it was as a popular film as much as for their cultural cinema, which does emphasise a deeply troubling amnesia to how much individual countries, and their cinema, do not get attention and need to be taken into consideration. For obvious reasons, not doing so means you cannot see films like this, something which looks and acts very different from a film decades later in tone, even in terms of its contrast in grounded nature with a cinematic style almost the equivalent of Romanticism in context. It does come from an era, especially with the Eastern European and Czechoslovakian fantasy films from this decade or earlier, where attempting to depict these worlds in practical methods lead to tones like this Argentinean film's, with its own tonal choices in its use of close ups, of its lush score including an emphasis on vocal chants which does evoke the Italian films, and its melodrama story in its centre. A romantic scene even gets strangely more erotic in what is not seen through Nazareno and Griselda, with a female friend by them talking about how she will look after their child as she overlooks the pair, kissing in an exaggerated tone on a river with water splashing over them which implies much more happened in the scene than shown.

My knowledge of the late Leonardo Favio, who passed in 2012, only with the films I was lucky enough to see had enough effect for me to keep him close to the heart with great interest, likeminded figures like me able to get these films briefly available online and leaving their impressions on me and for those across the world too. His style could alter per just memories, pure ghosts, of those viewing experiences of the films mentioned, but they stick out, and with this one, you see someone here with this kind of honesty and reverence for traditions, one that does not extend well to a mainstream mindset that has to be assessable for everyone, and has the current and the future in its mind only, but is instead something which has to be digested with contemplation, which can also be gregarious and even profane. Satan here can be human, and there is even humour of the old men related to the witch godmother who thinks he is dying but for her, (in mind to the translation I had), is being a "fucking bum" and just lazy for many years watching on. It is a folktale that is told well in less than ninety minutes or so, and is better for it, and again this has to be a review which is designed to bring more attention to a film which should have been wider reaching beyond its homeland, long before I was writing this, but I am glad to bang a drum for.

 

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1) Obituary for Leonardo Favio, written for The Telegraph and published on November 18th 2012.

The Devil's Sword (1983)

  

Director: Ratno Timoer

Screenplay: Imam Tantowi

Cast: Barry Prima as Mandala; Gudi Sintara as the Queen of the White Alligator Demon; Advent Bangun as Banyunjaga; Enny Christina as Pitaloka

Ephemeral Waves

 

You smell worse than death itself.

Synth playing over a lowering dusk sun - looking like a prog rock album from Indonesia - adds a lot of promise to a film. From a bludgeoning period of genre filmmaking behind the likes of this to horror films like Mystics in Bali (1981), a meteorite falls to the Earth and, in a fantasy version of Indonesia, a sword is thus forged from its core centre of dangerous power many desire. This sets up a film which in itself has a lot of background of note - that its producer Gope T. Samtani, through Rapi Films, has been a huge prescience in terms of Indonesian cinema, and the type of films Mondo Macabro, the British-born world cinema distributors embraced in the DVD days like The Devil's Sword, be it an executive producer on Queen of Black Magic (1981) to producer on Virgins from Hell (1987), these heightened genre films along a variety of other productions less well known.

This is an Indonesian spin into the burgeoning fantasy genre of the early eighties, between Conan the Barbarian (1982) with Arnold Schwarzenegger as a Hollywood production to many lower budgeted versions from the likes of Roger Corman's produced Deathstalker franchise. Other countries embraced this too - The Devil's Sword is eyeing Lucio Fulci's Conquest (1983) from Italy as one of the most delirious of this period of fantasy films - though noticeably The Devil's Sword is also influenced by the wave of martial arts films made between Hong Kong to South Korea that were prolific over decades. This even has the English dub that includes more swearing to emphasis this later touch. In this narrative, like Conquest being around an evil seductive witch queen, we have here the Queen of the White Alligator Demon (Gudi Sintara), a supernatural figure whose only desire is as many nubile young man as she can lust over and have in her bed, the villages having to sacrifice theirs as offerings at the lake holding her underwater lair not to anger her, all so she can have her harem of sexy men.

The lair is a spectacle in itself, a few minutes into the film introduced into the clear artificiality that is also the film's charm, between fake jewellery, costumes on people barely hiding their bodies, plastic sheeting, and sculptures from casts which evoke an old Hollywood fantasy epic from decades earlier, only in colour, than eighties cinema. (That Tokyo in Japan is noticeably in the laboratory work for the film in the opening credits shows how Rapi Films, making these films, were looking with an eye internationally as much as cribbing from clear influences around them). The Queen specifically wants one man, from a village who refused to give an offering, sending one of her best men, and a lover, to take him on his wedding day. The surreality of the film, also its finest trait, is witnessed when, villain or not, probably the best entrance anyone can have is kicking a giant bolder in the air and surfing it to the wedding reception to slaughter as many as possible in his goal's way.

Alongside that this is the kind of film where the bride herself, not pleased by any of this at all, thankfully joins in to fight the man trying to kidnap her husband, but The Devil's Sword's many quirks include how ridiculously gory it also is. The martial arts of the film, even including the sound effects, is from the seventies and eighties era of lower budgeted films I have seen, still an accomplishment but not the elaborate or spectacular work of other films especially from Hong Kong. In contrast to many of those films however, it is by only fifteen minutes or less into the production where we have already had a few decapitations and disembowelling in just this initial battle. The only real sense of disappointment in honesty in the film is that, introduced wandering into the fight after a considerable period within it and most of the village having been slaughtered by one man, is that the actual lead Mandala, as played by Barry Prima, is frankly a generic lead. Despite being played by a figure a figure famous for working on Indonesian films like this or The Warrior (1981), his character is one note, his only skin in the game being that the man after the groom is his fellow pupil under their master, who turned evil, and with said master poisoned so severely Mandala has to hastily amputate both his legs later on in bloody detail to save him. Mandala is the generic male lead whose goals is to rescue the groom, and prevent the Crocodile Queen from acquiring the titular sword, carved from a meteorite, which could have easily been passed onto the figure of the Bride herself who follows him along and can fight too.

The film's casual nature to its content is blasé. This feels like both a martial arts film and a fantasy one which is tinged with a sense of the strange. Initially, upon finding the film, I admit I was not as strongly positive on The Devil's Sword, partially because this is still a traditional martial arts genre film at heart in its beats, alongside being over an hour and forty minutes, which still feels ten minutes longer than these films normally would be in pace, feeling that length The mood, returning to the film, won me over however finally, and I now bat an eye at the details which are more entertaining now. One is the "Crocodile Men", the henchmen of the villainess who are actors in crocodile costumes, with crocodile heads, seeing how both charmingly fake the costumes are but also charming as being tangible. The mood in general, even in spite of its gore and goofier moments, is there when the leads will land upon a raft driven by a skull faced boatman, one who is neither a character nor an enemy, just a Styx-like ferryman there for atmosphere who disappears as soon as he appears. Conquest, as mentioned earlier in the review, is probably the stranger film, Lucio Fulci's fantasy film both in its own head trip, and having goofy moments of summoning dolphins to rescue someone using stock footage, and I am sure Hong Kong has provided equally strange work, even legitimate gems like Tsui Hawk's Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain (1983).  This Indonesian production has a lot still though, in comparison to admire.

Or that this will take some unexpected turns in context to the tropes it has. One is when it introduces a trio of cartoonish villains - a witch, a bald man with a guillotine hat, and a snake man who can slither underground and turns a snake into a staff - only to have them kill each over the titular sword, which far from a disappointment is actually a creative twist on this idea. The film does eventually become a series of events in the end, which as for my younger self was far less appealing than a film which fully dipped itself into more illogical tangents; but even within this context, especially for the fantasy genre The Devil's Sword leans towards, this does have the fascinating homemade quality which you wish to root for contrasted by how that, inherently, has a strange edge to it. A homemade Cyclops monster is the guardian of the titular sword, and alongside wishing to praise the people who put that costume together, it is inherently strange to witness on camera, even if you are aware an actor is in a stiff costume, shambling along. Green lasers are added in post-production for one single moment, where Barry Prima and his arch-nemesis can do so, just because. And barring the knowledge Conan the Barbarian ended with a snake cult orgy, this crocodile person orgy is contrasted by dance writhing by the extras to moody ambient music and real fire near them, which is both the most eighties take on this you can have and is compelling despite arguably taking too much screen time as a sequence. Your interest in this film is entirely is anything remotely intrigues you as a viewer, but there is as well the sense that, within this fantasy sub-genre, the film too manages to feel unique to itself, as a production from Indonesia which can stand out with its heritage even whilst being goofy fun.

Twilight of the Ice Nymphs (1997)

 

Director: Guy Maddin

Screenplay: George Toles

Inspired by the novel Pan by Knut Hamsun

Cast: Nigel Whitmey as Peter Glahn; Pascale Bussières as Juliana Kossel; Shelley Duvall as Amelia Glahn; Frank Gorshin as Cain Ball; Alice Krige as Zephyr Eccles; R.H. Thomson as Dr. Issac Solti

An Abstract Candidate

 

Returning to Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, I see where this would have been a dead end for Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin as much as I am going to say it is incredibly underrated. I am not surprised of how this came to be a frustrating production for Maddin, who was recording for the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight (1997) from this film's set looking miserable. It is the closest thing to his mainstream film, the moment in any filmmaker with an auteurist's career where, like a non-American and non-English language director making their first Hollywood, their film can either lead to them going into the Hollywood filmmaker or led to their most contentious work. This has recognisable names like Shelley Duvall and Frank Gorshin, and was shot in 35mm film, where Maddin's usually visual aesthetic was toned down. This is still a film, as we will get into, where the idea of this being his tame film is absurd, as one piece of dialogue talks of Gorshin, who famously played the Riddler in the nineteen sixties Batman television series, having had his penis torn off on a chair nail in his past. Where the film's frustrations for Maddin clearly are, and why for one film this is a fascinating gem for him, is entirely how Twilight of the Ice Nymphs tells its story, setting up iots elegant yet eerie mood with the title card among red dirt and bodies of broken statues in the ground.

This is definitely more a drama for him, where former political prisoner Peter Glahn (Nigel Whitmey) returns back to his home of Mandragora and his sister Amelia Glahn (Shelley Duvall), who is running an ostrich farm in a contentious relationship with Cain Ball (Gorshin), an older handyman promised the deeds to the farm and kicking a stink when this comes under threat. This is also another film where Maddin tackles his obsession with heterosexual desire and the folly of the male libido, caught between two women. One is Zephyr Eccles (Alice Krige), a woman baring child who devotes herself to the woodland; the other he is obsessed with Juliana Kossel (Pascale Bussières), a woman he meets on his boat trip home, the likely mistress of Dr. Issac Solti (R.H. Thomson), a figure left disabled on a walking cane as a result of a statue of the goddess Venus he has managed to uncover in the land, one which may possess actual connection to the goddess when Zephyr gives herself to Venus for Peter. The immediately thing to bear in mind is how more dialogue heavy this is, and whilst it is definitely a Maddin film in his quirks and dark sense of humour, the huge elephant in the room is that, whilst aesthetically gorgeous, this is Maddin's most restrained film aesthetically, with long dialogue scenes and none of his editing techniques to tell story, which is a drastic change of pace for him.

Onscreen, this slowly builds to the kind of whims and perversity of Guy Maddin's other work in its dialogue, still transgressive when Zephyr has a monologue of the erotic fears of seeing girl help a bull insert itself in a cow. This leads to morbid tales of two sisters, their skulls still refusing to face each other after death, whose hatred become so bad one drove a nail into the other's skull, to be reflected back again when it is used as inspiration for a spat resolver. That this has known actors neither undercuts this, merely the psychosexual content and anxieties are thankfully given to an actor like Shelley Duvall, someone who has always been underappreciated and here fits the mood. The film is one, like other Maddin work, with their complicated anxieties, where the male lead is frankly irredeemable, with a clear psychotic side, and where everyone adds to the film alongside Maddin's compelling dialogue. The plot itself - with Alice Krige as a woman who escaped her marriage with assistance of a poisonous snake filled "Bad Night Bog", a love rivalry between her Zephyr and Juliana over Peter, and Peter and his own sister's growing dark sides - fully conforms to Maddin's other work in how things get weird, escalate and (as usually happens) someone gets gravely injured.

The film also looks beautiful. After its initial mood, feeling its low budget artificiality, the film starts to take this to its advantage with an almost plastic-like dreamy tone, pagan at times with its many woodland and beach scenes. The colour aesthetic eventually becomes the hugest influencer on this film for the better, such as when the scenes take place in Dr. Issac Solti's home, here emphasising that for a director know for his silent film aesthetics, including many black and white productions, Maddin here and with films like Careful (1992) when he uses colour is exceptional alongside his collaborators in using it. You can even make the true compliment with Twilight of the Ice Nymphs that he is almost touching Raul Ruiz's best examples of extreme colour lighting in his own most delirious films.

Any film where Frank Gorshin, drunk, burps at an actual ostrich cannot be ditched into obscurity. The problem is clearly that, even if he did not have the stress of working on this film to sully it, Maddin if he had succeeded with this film could have suffocated his career. It is clear where the film feels a dead end even if one I find a great deal to admire. Here for a one-off, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs is an underrated film from his career, and it is fascinating to see his hands tied for his aesthetic tricks, showing his dialogue and storytelling skills. But it suits a one-off only - never was there a man, whilst his dialogue is proven to be quirky and memorable, who if he had his style restricted would have lost half of his talents onscreen. Whilst a virtuous film in content, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs also does emphasis his talents in his other films tenfold.

 

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Whimsical

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

 

Director: William Dieterle

Screenplay: Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis and Leonardo Bercovici

Based on the novella by Robert Nathan

Cast: Jennifer Jones as Jennie Appleton, Joseph Cotten as Eben Adams, Ethel Barrymore as Miss Spinney, Lillian Gish as Mother Mary of Mercy, Cecil Kellaway as Matthews, David Wayne as Gus O'Toole, Albert Sharpe as Moore, Henry Hull as Eke

Ephemeral Wave

 

A failing, poverty stricken painter Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) finds his muse, a young girl named Jeanne (Jennifer Jones). Every time he encounters her, however, she increasingly ages up to adulthood, with the added sense that, unaware of his world, she is a figure from the past. Already this is a distinct premise to begin with, but any film which starts with a lengthy monologue about the nature of life and love, over clouds, and manages to not only have one quotation onscreen, but two, for Euripides and Keats, is going to not be a conventional Hollywood film from the forties.

The back-story about the film adds a strange tragedy too. Its producer David O. Selznick was a wunderkind of MGM studios, given his own creative control, and was responsible for Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture Oscar, for Rebecca (1940), and Gone with the Wind (1939), a cultural monolith even if a problematic one. He also became romantically involved with actress Jennifer Jones, born Phylis Isley, Portrait of Jeannie as a result effectively a love letter to her made at the end of their relationship. Theirs is a really difficult and complicated romance which makes the film in a larger context more disquieting. Both married originally when they had their relationship, Selznick effectively destroyed himself, alongside issues like gambling addiction, trying to control and shape her image over films which did not succeed, and theirs is not a relationship in the modern day that would be seen as wholesome at all. He would die in 1965, and Jones would live to 2009, with other marriages and a life beyond, but with mental health issues throughout her career, it is not surprising after her film career she decided to devote herself to de-stigmatising mental illness with her institution the Jennifer Jones Simon Foundation for Mental Health and Education.

Even by itself, Portrait of Jennie feels like a totem to a love off-screen finally waving goodbye, even if they would live together as a couple until his death decades later. Unstuck in time, not quite a Kurt Vonnegut character, Jennie is a figure from the 1910s, already dead but appearing to Joseph Cotton's impoverished painter at various times, beginning as a young girl and eventually becoming a woman. All of them are played by Jones, the first time acting with a higher pitched voice and childlike innocence, alongside a strategic placement of Cotten and the film camera. As he grows in talent, under the watchful eye of an art seller, he encounters Jennie over and over again, replaying her as a living breathing spectre he becomes increasingly obsessed with, building to the ultimate portrait of her as an adult.

Portrait of Jennie's oddness is compounded, as in any case, by the context of when the film was made. Forties Hollywood means sumptuous monochrome unless in rare cases, such as the finale here using silent cinema colour tinting, matched by romantic melodrama and extensive use of an orchestral score to add a haunting mood. A gamut of character actors flesh out this cast immensely, such as Ethel Barrymore as the watchful eye becoming increasingly concerned by Eben's mental state as he obsesses over a figure no one else has seen, or his best friend Gus (David Wayne), who gets Eben work painting a nationalist mural at an Irish-American bar. All of them, but especially Barrymore's character, add a level of emotional weight that helps the film immensely. And of course, Joseph Cotten is a huge advantage here. It is great to see Cotten in a lead role, particularly as his inherent talent helps adds conviction to a peculiar premise. His earnestness in a film, to a nun played by Hollywood royalty Lillian Gish, about the immortality of love for an unknown figure is the sort that would collapse into kitsch were it not for a great actor like Cotten being there to speak it.

Jennifer Jones as an actress, the idolised figure, is placed in a curious place with this film. This is a case, even with a director William Dieterle an acclaimed figure behind the likes of The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941), where the producer has more auteurist influence, which leaves this with an intense level of reality as a metaphor of love for someone is if there will never be there, and is an openly self-destructive romance where Jennie due to the plot who will depart from Eben's life no matter how hard he tries to steer the course of time in another direction. 

Jones herself, performance wise, does have a challenge in having to play a character that changes from a child to an adult, and does her best. There is a sense, though, of her being a precious figure captured in the prism of the film's camera as much as the paintings in the film. Said film is entirely about the male perception of a loved one, thankfully never straying into a gross obsession but instead wistful, never patronising but pretentious in a sentimental and applaudable earnest way, a weird hybrid of fantasy and the supernatural, possibly even science fiction depending how you interpret Jennie's state. It was not a success when it was made, with Selznick's constant work on the film and the over increasing budget causing this to leave a black eye, enough to push him forth to working overseas on productions like The Third Man (1949).  Portrait of Jennie is a rewarding film for me, truly unique, but its back-story does make it as disquieting as it is compelling.

 

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1) The podcast You Must Remember This, which tackles the first century of Hollywood and classic Hollywood especially, covered this relationship in Episode 66, and it is a tumultuous narrative when read of.

Welcome to Marwen (2018)

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Director: Robert Zemeckis

Screenplay: Robert Zemeckis and Caroline Thompson

Cast: Steve Carell as Mark Hogancamp / Cap'n Hogie; Falk Hentschel as Captain Topf / Louis; Matt O'Leary as Lieutenant Benz / Carl; Nikolai Witschl as Rudolph / Rudy; Patrick Roccas as Stefan / Stevie; Alexander Lowe as Werner / Vern; Eiza González as Carlala; Leslie Zemeckis as Suzette; Merritt Wever as Roberta; Gwendoline Christie as Anna; Stefanie von Pfetten as Wendy; Janelle Monáe as GI Julie; Leslie Mann as Nicol; Neil Jackson as Kurt / Major Meyer

Obscurities, Oddities and One-Offs

In 2010, a documentary called Marwencol was made by Jeff Malmberg, one I saw many years later, taking a while to reach the UK (taking nearly the whole decade for a proper release let alone a mere DVD). It's subject Mark Hogancamp, after a violent beating by multiple men at once, lost most of his memories and found solace in creating a fake town in the midst of World War II with one male doll representing his idealised heroic self, many female dolls openly based off women in his real life the main populous of the town alongside Nazis as the villains. His tale is fascinating, and he became an acclaimed artist/photographer as his photographs of Marwencol, as the village was christened, became better known. As material for Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis though, considering the additional details of Hogancamp's life and how Zemeckis tries to convey it, makes Welcome to Marwen such an odd mainstream production to ever green light.

It's also Zemeckis after, weirdly, adapting the central material from documentary Man on Wire (2008), about Philippe Petit's legendary high wire stunt between the Twin Towers, into the fictional film The Walk with 3D scope. In general Zemeckis has had a curious history since the late nineties of pushing himself further into new technological potentials with cinema; hell, arguably Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) was too in combining two dimensional character with actors like Bob Hoskins. In-between this he's made dramas (Flight (2012), Allied (2016)) but also had his history with full motion captured characters with the likes of Beowulf (2007). In many ways this feels appropriate as, to depict the world of Marwencol (Marwen here at first), Zemeckis' first idea is to have his cast (including his real life wife and scholar Leslie Zemeckis) contrasted with versions of them with their faces digitally placed onto dolls. That's just skimming the top of what idiosyncratic (to say the least) decisions he took.

Openly, the idea of adapting Hogancamp's life into this film is problematic for myself, to condense a very difficult subject, but I came into the film with this moral standpoint on the artistic endeavour in mind, so took the decision to view this movie as a fictionalisation in its own world. As a result, the tears and awkward nagging strains of the film, under it's apparent and clichéd tale of overcoming one's burdens, makes it also one of the few legitimately interesting adaptations of a real figure I have seen. Most biopics or inspirations tales taken from real life, even those acclaimed, are usually simplistic and reduce the virtues of heroes to trivialities, hard work of creators to mere motages, or make material up. Welcome to Marwen has an issue that its subject is idiosyncratic (at least in the version depicted) that would raise questions without additional context.

He is a sympathetic figure, though there is an innate difference between the real man and his stand-in in Steve Carell which without the original source is a curious character to depict to say the least, someone who has built a WWII town where he is on man in a world of sexy dolls, figures openly based on real women even in his town that, whilst strong fighters, still wear fetishized clothes. That Hogancamp in real life, as told here, was violently beaten up (while very drunk) for confession his interest in wearing women's clothing does complicate this in a lot of ways, but this is still a character in fictional form, without the original context, that will elicit a lot of complicated reactions from viewers. He's sympathetic because he was discriminated against, because he was once an illustrator who lost most of his memories (as the real Mark Hogancamp) and reduced in this version to a disabled state, and because here he is depicted in Carell in having traumatic PTSD that is subconsciously drawn into Marwen(col), the Nazis obvious surrogates for the transgressors who hurt him. But still, this is still a curious world of fetishishtic female dolls and one man's boy's own adventures that occasionally burst through with stark death and with people in fictional Hogancamp's lives directly interacting with him outside of Marwen. It's not easy material and Zemeckis seems to obfuscate and load it to be much more difficult to digest, something as much to pin on co-writer Caroline Thompson, whose career between Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands (1990), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)) and films like Black Beauty (1994) really emphasises the schism on hand and that partially this was deliberate.

This was meant to be a big hit for Universal Pictures. Yet the sexual undercurrent, for a twelve certificate film in the UK (allowing twelve year olds to see it), is laced in so much complexity on the subject its incredibly adult, raising an obvious discrepancy between mainstream culture and art which transgresses this especially from outsiders like Mark Hogancamp. Mark Hogancamp's original work wasn't as exaggerated as this depiction, which in itself leads to a drastic change of tone as the production both adds more artificiality to the material and, with the hyper sexuality of plastic dolls, raises the undercurrent to a jarring level. Whether it's Roberta (Merritt Wever), the employee at the model store who clearly loves Hogancamp, who even comments about the absurd amount of times her doll has her shirt ripped off, or  that one of the dolls (played by Mrs. Zemeckis) is based on a porn star (allowing Leslie Zemeckis in none motion capture form to play her as a French maid bursting out the seams in a film-within-in-a-film) there's a lot of baggage about gaze and eroticism, not the stereotypical male gaze but a complicated form. That, "complicated", is an understatement in this fictionalised Hogancamp's gaze and how he has tried to cope with his trauma by interweaving women in his life through dolls but with an erotic side to it. Even without details from the original Marwencol, (no mention of catfights in the fictional version), this still means you have a muddy morality to deal with and, by accident and also deliberately prodded at in the script at the same time, any side able to be hit even in the same scene, you have to digest it whether you like it or not.

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The film thankfully doesn't try to hide this. It may seem odd how some of the women are more than happy to be figures in Marwen - something which Marwencol the documentary went out its way to deal with but interviewing them - but that entire section of the fictional Mark Hogancamp is where some of the most compelling aspects come to play, The film takes it time to depicts the steady friendly relationships of these women and how for Hogancamp now, life is merely getting by, frankly coping with buried trauma, whilst merely being able to talk to these women, completely empathetic to him and always wanting to know how their doll forms are, is as much them doing as much as they can to help him as it is part of being in a small town where everyone knows everyone, from his Russian caretaker Anna (Gwendoline Christie) to co-worker at a bar named Carlala (Eiza González).

Some aspects however will stick out with an uncomfortable jagged edge, that being the burgeoning relationship between Hogancamp and his new female neighbour Nicol (Leslie Mann) who he develops a crush on, but with a discomforting obsessive edge to it with her doll stand-in being his counterparts beloved, something which the film openly deals with. As much as this world has figures like G.I. Julie, a small role for singer Janelle Monáe, based on a former war veteran who helped Hogancamp overcome his initial physical trauma in hospital, this subplot with Nicol does actually get to the stage it feels like it's going to turn into a Todd Solondz film but suitable for twelve year olds, something utterly unexpected and jarring for this mainly light hearted film meant to be inspirational.

Knowing how and why Hogancamp's work came to be also makes Zemeckis' creative decisions with Marwencol itself even stranger but clearly deliberate. It's fascinating, actually praiseworthy, in spite of the divisiveness of his run of motion capture films how his decision to motion capture the dolls to the cast, and embrace the artificiality, is inventive and has a lot of additional weight to the various quirks on hand. Hogancamp's own world was unconventional already, not wanting to forget Deja Thoris (as played by Diane Kruger here), a blue haired witch who (in the documentary and here) eventually brings in a time machine and was the figure looming over Hogancamp's stand-in doll, here a crux to Hogancamp's anxieties and the weight pressing him down alongside the Nazis, here never actually dying truly as they are merely dolls who get up a while later. Zemeckis may sanitise some of the details, but he still stages the Nazis whipping the male doll in a fetished way, an icon photo that is recreated with as much a sick humour here, able to get away with a lot for this film because the action is entirely done with fake dolls but still containing these emotional splinters.

There are also moments which are entirely subjective in whether they are meant to be sincere or unintentionally more muddied. Hogancamp's speech of the "female essence" he finds in owning and wearing women's shoes does have an oddness to it, whilst later his comment about women being the strongest of all is undercut in an action scene involving a Delorean stand-in time machine and a doll getting a stiletto shoe to the neck.

Does Welcome to Marwen work? I'd say yes, if that I'd suggest the film only starts to slip in how hastily it tries to wrap everything up for the ending in spite of the psychological baggage making it impossible to, the story (in lieu to Hogancamp's real life alcoholism before his assault) about this version eventually having to overcome addiction. Aside from this, the tonal shifts and conflicts the viewer will have is a lot more credible in dealing with such a subject matter than trying to be morally sanitised or judgemental. It cannot hide the darkness of what Mark Hogancamp suffered through, and even the kitsch of the CGI doll village scenes, because it completely exaggerates what were a form of psychological diorama into an exaggerated boy's own adventure, has a strange effect particularly as a) the melding of real actors with these dolls is eerie if visually incredible, and b) the artificiality at hand even being part of its world is weird to say the least. What the real Mark Hogancamp created with his camera and his town was profound, whilst this is an odd work we see onscreen adding new layers even when it fucks up the tone badly at points, an expletive I feel if appropriate language to use as this film is still a mess, but a compelling and ambitious one, spoken with love rather than to offend anyone in this production (including Steve Carell who, bless him, actually gives a great performance) who tried their best.

Robert Zemeckis to his credit does his damndest in terms of high quality of Hollywood production and, if anything, to use it for a much more complex work even if sometimes unintentionally is a far better use of such production. I've found myself drawn more to these "divisive" works which usually are slaughtered critically in film publications or newspaper reviewers, though Welcome to Marwen has its defenders, as the moments which cause issue are usually the most interesting and more layered details. When a film is praised to the hilt there 's a danger, proven too many times, that it's just heading for obvious details which are copied, always evoking for myself an off-the-cuff comment made by a character in Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls about how easily manipulated viewers are when emotions and an audience's moral righteousness are exploited for drama. Here however, even if at times there are clear moments as here which do need to be questioned as creative decisions, there's a risk at hand that is so much more interesting, the moments of something tonally amiss getting an actual reaction from myself and forcing me to have to think of what exactly my opinion is. It at least offers more to talk about after a viewing.

From https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/
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Non-Abstract Review - Amethyst: Princess of Gem World (2013)

From https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/marvel_dc/images/2/24/Amethyst_Princess_
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Director: Brianne Drouhard

Screenplay: Amy Wolfram

Based on the comic book series created by Gary Cohn, Ernie Colon and Dan Mishkin

(Voice) Cast: Sophie Oda as Amethyst; Eric Bauza as  Pegacorn; Keith Ferguson as Prince Topaz; Grey Griffin as the Frog Mayor; Tara Strong as the Frog Prince; Nicole Sullivan as the Jalapeño Vendor

Synopsis: Amethyst is playing a video game, a high fantasy adventure, only to be sucked through the hand held console screen and turned into a princess of this weird little world.

Here's a work that'll be difficult to elaborate on but not by fault of its director Brianne Drouhard or any of the production staff* - the issue is that, with what they were given before this micro-series was cancelled, this DC comic property only consists of seven episodes which are only two minutes or so long each. Thus it's effectively a short film or a test project when put together; something clearly worked hard on in what creativity is still at hand, but handed an ignoble fate of a lack of length, where even micro-series from Japan of more limited animation and ridiculous premises like talking farts can at least get over twenty minutes if you combine all the episodes in a marathon.

The work was part of a series of projects called DC Nation Shorts, small shorts based on obscurer DC Comics properties which were shown between their other, more conventionally long animated work on Cartoon Network, such as DC Super Pets, inspired on the time Batman and Superman had their own animal sidekicks in the Silver Age of comics, or imagining Batman villain Riddler as voiced by "Weird Al" Yankovic. Reading up on them, including one animated by Aardman Animations of all people and a live footage version where real life professionals demonstrate the equipment of these characters in practical reality, it's an inspired idea and I want to see all of them. As much because that, whilst I got bored out of my skull by the modern Marvel Studios superhero film template, I am still fascinated and growing in fondness for these types of characters. If I could afford American comic books at a price closer to their Japanese counterparts, in terms of value for money, I'd be less inclined to read more famous creations like Spider-Man or Superman either, but delve into comic book history's strange oddities and cult figures. Some are legitimate cult icons - like Swamp Thing, the living embodiment of nature who became a greater figure in DC Comics when the legendary comic writer Alan Moore had a hand in changing him drastically. Some are misbegotten - like Man-Thing, Marvel's swamp creature now unfortunately living as the poor man's Swamp Thing. And some truly ill-advised ideas I read up upon and still want to read - like Marvel's U.S. 1, a truck driver hero with a cybernetic brain, which could pick up CB radio transmissions, and armed with a super-equipped big rig truck

Among these, Amethyst is also intriguing in a positive way - from 1983, the era of My Little Pony and He-Man, it was clearly meant to be a high fantasy story for a female audience; here, from a female director and a largely female production crew, this premise was re-tweaked for the modern era. In this version, Amethyst starts off as a bespectacled nerdy girl who, once transformed into Amethyst the heroine, finds herself increasingly baffled by what she encounters, immediately from the village of frog people proclaiming her a heroine of the realm, and yet using her smarts to succeed, including the idea that peppers in video games are really, really hot. This leads to the fact the series would've taken the piss out of high fantasy and role playing games, immediately evoking for me a Japanese straight-the-video anime series which tragically only had two episodes before it also got canned, Dragon Half (1993), which ran with its high fantasy setting into utterly ridiculous and hilarious consequences. The reference to anime isn't far off either, clearly influenced by it in aesthetic and also that the first joke is a parody of the magical girl genre, of female characters who transform into heroines like Sailor Moon, where the costume change sequence found in them takes place here in mid-air, not bad for Amethyst until the dimensional pocket said transformations always take place in disappears and one is still falling down in the sky.

Sadly, and this is a justification for typing an expletive as it perfectly sums up the situation, the creators of this production were given a shit deal in that, even without the factor that Amethyst was cancelled, they only had enough time for a tiny little plot they had to quickly resolve. Sadly, a project like DC Nation Shorts, whilst absolutely compelling as an idea, can become its own worst enemy in terms of how short the projects within it could be, as was the case here. What you get here is only a minimal plot - which Amethyst must face an evil male character named Dark Opal - and a little of the world to see including its denizens, worst as you barely get to meet characters like Prince Topaz, the last person to take on Dark Opal only to be left a living skeleton, found in a cave and suffering from chronic apathetic depression and a lack of confidence in himself. It's not a lot in all honesty to work with as a viewer.

But thankfully, there are still signs of what could've been, and Episode 3 is the best episode to show this. Whilst needing to wash, she finds herself encountering a very perverted living tree, one who is watching her bathe, as well as there being the incredibly dark humour of living flowers nearby who argue among themselves who'll be eaten by her horse and reveal in their devouring by the steed. It's a clear sign that the series, if it existed in a longer form, would've still appealed to a young audience but would've had an eccentricity that appealed to adults. The best thing is that, by all accounts, those great gags were directly inspired from the source material, an obsession in the art with even rocks having faces and therefore being alive. This is a great argument for the virtues of adapting source material, even the strangest details, as with this example you get a great idiosyncratic aspect of this fantasy world that would've been used further. The same applies as much to those pastiches which, rather than the dreadful Family Guy style referencing style of merely referencing something for a joke, it's implemented in a way that still works without getting the references.

Sadly, this is all we have, less than ten minutes. We barely see this heroine or her worlds, which was why the review was going to be originally more middling, not a criticism of the show but a wonder if there wasn't enough to get a lot out of from bad luck. However, with hindsight there was a lot still to like, even if having to intricately dissect from what little was there. It's just a shame, in this significantly more positive review, there's just that much left to actually watch.

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* Without any hesitance, this review references back to a podcast episode for the show Cancelled Too Soon, which covered this micro-series with Drouhard herself, so I'll include a link HERE.

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