In one of the hugely popular God of War video games, Kratos, the protagonist out to avenge the death of his wife at the hand of Ares, encounters Perseus, one of the better-known characters of Greek mythology, and the hero of the 1981 Ray Harryhausen effects spectacle Clash of the Titans.  Since you are playing Kratos, it is your job to win this “boss battle” by killing Perseus.  The only way to kill Perseus in this game is to eviscerate him, in a particularly gory and gruesome effect.  In the modern tradition of video game celebrity voiceovers, Perseus is voiced by Harry Hamlin – who played the character in Clash of the Titans.  When I was a kid, Clash of the Titans ranked up there with Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark as one of my favorite films.  I would watch it endlessly on videotape.  Playing this God of War game, which went to great lengths to evoke nostalgia for Greek mythology in general and Clash of the Titans in particular, it was only slightly traumatic to realize that the game required me to savage my hero into bloody pulp.  I had to.  Otherwise I lose the game.

Watching the new remake of Clash of the Titans, I realize that Kratos has won.  Sure, Perseus is once again the hero of the film, but his body is animated by Kratos, and once again he’s spitting on the gods and out to kill one of them – Hades, this time, not Ares.  The story of the original film – not to mention the original myth - has been torn to red shreds just as Perseus’ pixelated body had been; it has been replaced, upgraded, toughened-up, and CG-enhanced, but the soul is no longer there.  Perseus is no longer a hero on a quest to save a beautiful princess.  That’s a bit too 1981.  Now Perseus despises the gods, and he sets out on his quest ostensibly to save Andromeda (whom, in this version, he has barely met) but really to earn a chance to strike a mortal blow against the god of the Underworld.  Because, as his immortal companion Io tells him, to kill the Kraken (whom Hades is unleashing upon Argos) would mean weakening Hades – possibly giving Perseus a chance to kill him.  Can you kill a god?  Isn’t this a question we asked in the first three God of War games?  Indeed, the film unfolds not as a coherent tale but as a series of boss battles.  That’s less a tribute to Ray Harryhausen (who would indeed stop a story in its place to deliver up a really cool stop-motion creation), but to video games, where stories progress stutteringly, and there’s a beastie even bigger than the last to end each chapter.  Anyone of my generation or younger, watch the climactic moment in the film, when the Kraken has been conquered but Hades is rising up to face Perseus, and see if you don’t expect an icon to appear on the screen: click X now!  The timing has to be just right as you lob your Sword of Zeus, or you’ll have to watch this whole scene all over again!

It doesn’t help that the story by now is more than a few steps removed from the original source material(s).  We get not so much the myth of Perseus, Danae, and Andromeda, but rather a Mountain Dew-fueled, twitchy, angsty “reimagining” built upon XBox cut scenes, hazy memories of the 1981 film, and the films Gladiator and 300.  This is all very “cool” only if you’ve never picked up a book in your life, or seen a film made before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings.  But Peter Jackson had Tolkien on his side.  At the center of his story were likeable, fragile, recognizably human characters.  The Perseus director Louis Letterier (The Incredible Hulk) gives us, as played by Sam Worthington (Avatar) with a marine’s buzz cut, is a god-hating, arrogant fool, who refuses to even use the gifts which the gods have leant him – rendering moot the whole point of the original myth.  In most myths, the mortals are nothing without the gods; hell, nothing in the Iliad would have even occurred if not for the gods’ guiding hands.  This is obviously an attempt to modernize the material and exhibit a more steel-fisted, we-are-our-own-destiny, and very American kind of attitude.  Instead, the result is to make the audience despise the thick-headed Perseus from the get-go.  We don’t have a reason to hate the gods.  We just got here.  (Yes, Perseus blames Hades for killing his father in this version of the story, but the death was pretty much an accident, and the rage feels rather arbitrary.)  Last night I started reading Doctor Who producer and scriptwriter Russell T. Davies’ essays on the storytelling process, Doctor Who: The Writer’s Tale; he writes: “…Doctor Who is designed to incorporate likeable characters, because so much else is going on.  You’re creating monsters, plots, worlds, environments, so even fairly complicated characters like Rose are sketches, in a sense, to be filled in by good acting.  A likeable character is shorthand, to get you into the story, fast.”  He goes on to say that if the new character he’s writing for the show were unlikeable, “…you’d spend a lot more time trying to get to know her and engage with her, but that isn’t actually the point of [the episode].  There are stronger voices saying, ‘Get on with it!  Where are the monsters?’”  This is essentially the problem with Perseus as presented in the new Clash of the Titans.  But Davies also points out that “the key with characters is to be honest.  If the character’s actions are believable, then that character will work.”  Again, another failing point for our hero.  Very little of what Perseus does in this film is believable, from going on his quest to save Argos (he is literally refusing to go in one scene and then expressing his anxiousness for the quest in the next), to every moment in which he refuses to pick up the sword Zeus gave him just because that would be, I don’t know, compromising some ridiculous principle the screenwriters thought should be important to him.  The one believable moment in the entire film comes at the very end.  Should I spoil it for you?  Will you see it?  I guess it doesn’t really matter; this is Clash of the Titans, not The Crying Game.  After rescuing the princess, he immediately ditches her for a chance to fly off on his really cool flying horse.  Exactly.  He doesn’t love Andromeda at all – they exchanged about one line of dialogue.  Furthermore, the film then rewards him with the only female with which he’s actually formed a relationship, Io.  Very good.  Too late, but very good.

This film has giant scorpions, it has djinn (here, CG-faced Arabian magicians); it’s got harpies, Medusa, the Kraken, and the three witches who share a single eye among them.  A little of it works.  I enjoyed the Medusa scene, although, like everything in the film, it’s a bit too video gamey, a bit too much in general – why do directors of blockbusters these days make their films as though they’re desperately worried that another film might come along which shows them up?  Why must everything be cranked to 11?  You can practically see shadows of sweat-flop on the projector’s lens.  The battle with Medusa does not top the original’s, namely because that encounter was one of Ray Harryhausen’s finest moments.  Here, there are some nice touches – Medusa’s face is beautiful, just like in the original myth, and for a while the only thing we can hear of her is delighted laughter followed by the rattling of her tail, which is effectively creepy.  But they fight her on a cliff face suspended over flowing lava.  Come on.  We’ve seen all this, we’ve played these levels.  In the final battle, Perseus has to fly his Pegasus through the streets of Argos while harpies are flying about and men riding giant scorpions battle them, and then the Kraken shows his face, and he’s all Balrog-y and roaring at the camera (because every CG film since Fellowship of the Ring has that moment).  Well…

It’s all very exhausting and dull at the same time.  There are very few moments in this film which could constitute as being “clever” in the slightest.  Actually, I think I’ve named them all already.  When Perseus is holding the eye of the three witches in his hand, dangling it over the cliffs to threaten it, why must he just toss it back along the floor?  Why not drop it over the side of the mountain, so that we can see the witches experience the vertigo of it, perhaps falling on their backs and screaming – and then we could see them obsessively crawling down over the side of the cliff as Perseus and his men depart?  No, he tosses it back.  This film has nothing to offer us, that’s my point.  It doesn’t allow us to savor any moment, it doesn’t show us things we haven’t seen before.  Even those damn witches are designed to look like the blind ghoul in Pan’s Labyrinth.  Curiously, the film does try to deepen the relationships of the characters by twisting them up a bit: now Calibos, the Caliban-inspired invention of Harryhausen, is revealed to be the King whose wife Zeus impregnated.  This is mildly interesting as it essentially gives Perseus three fathers: Zeus, his true father, plus his adopted father (played by Pete Postlethwaite) who raised him, plus this would-be father, named Acrisius but transformed into Calibos for reasons that are a bit vague.  (Wasn’t he just struck by lightning?  Why is he a powerful monster now?  Maybe Hades helped him, maybe I drifted off at one point.)  Here is where a glance at a family tree in the back of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology raises eyebrows.  Acrisius is actually Perseus’ grandfather (he’s the father of Perseus’ mother Danae).  It was Acrisius who locked up his wife underground, where Zeus visited her and impregnated her.  But Io, the immortal who assists Perseus, and is ultimately romanced by him?  She’s actually his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great-grandmother. 

Ambrosia for thought.

I still haven’t read H. Rider Haggard’s She, but I’m on to my next film telling of the pulp semi-classic after thoroughly enjoying the 1935 Merian C. Cooper version: the 1965 Hammer Films adaptation produced by Michael Carreras and directed by Robert Day.  If that last name seems unfamiliar, that’s because Day spent most of his time directing for TV, and certainly She could stand to be a little more cinematic.  (The film would have been much better served, and better remembered, if Hammer’s best director, Terence Fisher, were at the helm.)  Still, with a bigger budget than most Hammer films, location shooting in southern Israel, one big star (Ursula Andress), and Hammer’s two best principal icons (Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee), the film seems to be required viewing for genre buffs.  Which is why it’s so very strange that ten years after the DVD revolution, when it seems that almost every film with a modicum of interest has been pressed on digital versatile disc, She arrives in Region 1 only via the Warner Archives series, the WB effort which releases films on a slightly-better-than-DVD-R format at a premium price exclusively through their website (or for cheaper if you wish to just download).  Consider that this “essential” Hammer film is being released in the inferior format only after every single Dracula and Frankenstein film has been issued by WB and Anchor Bay, plus some excellent box sets from Universal and Sony which boast dazzling restorations.  (The latter studio is releasing their latest Hammer box set, Icons of Suspense, on April 6.)  Meanwhile, Hammer’s stock has risen in recent years: go to your local Borders and you might find Hammer Glamour on the shelf, a book entirely about Hammer’s actresses, and soon enough you’ll be able to see new Hammer films on the screen, including the upcoming remake of Let the Right One In. 

But even the DVD for the forgotten sequel, Vengeance of She, had passed out of print by the time Warner decided to half-heartedly release the 1965 She.  Unfortunately, now that I’ve had a chance to view the Ursula Andress version, I begin to understand the tepid treatment by WB.  While She might be iconic for Hammer’s history, it’s rather forgettable by any other standard.  The plot is old-fashioned in a way which was winning in 1935, but sadly regressive thirty years later.  Two archaeologist/explorers, played by John Richardson and Peter Cushing, along with their comic-relief “valet” (Bernard Cribbins), are lured across the vast Desert of Lost Souls on the promise of discovering a lost city, along with wealth and power.  Richardson has been seduced by Ayesha (Andress), the blond, rather shockingly Nordic woman who claims to be immortal, and believes Richardson is the reincarnation of her long-dead Egyptian lover.  The novel is set in the African interior, which explains the presence of so many incongruous Africans in Hammer’s version, but I haven’t even mentioned all the white Romans Ayesha rules, or the rival for Richardson’s lust, the very beautiful Rosenda Monteros, an actress who is Mexican(!); her character’s father, living among the African natives, is clearly Caucasian (but with a bit of a suntan).  Amidst all this racial confusion, the potentially very offensive (but typically Colonialist) text is rendered harmless camp.  Particularly amusing is the film’s lead, Richardson’s dim-witted Leo, who makes out with Monteros and Andress almost reflexively, and only seems mildly disturbed when a flashback reveals he was killed in his past life by Ayesha, jealous because he was seen kissing another woman.  Nevertheless, he kissy-faces his way to the (blue) fiery climax, where Ayesha, stepping into the immortality-granting fire a second time, now turns to old age and dust, and Leo, left bereft of both his women, slouches down by the flame vowing to spend all his remaining years never moving from that spot, until the fires turn blue again.  And Cushing and Cribbins just leave him there.  It’s a nice ending, at least recognizing what a complete ass he was all this time – that’s what my wife was calling him, at least.  Cushing, of course, is wonderful throughout, and we should be thankful he was cast as the professor archetype and not as the romantic dullard; Lee, meanwhile, gets one of his thankless roles as the generic villain, and he only shares one major scene with Cushing.  The real star of the film, I believe, is one of James Bernard’s best scores, as exotic and powerful as the story requires.  But Ursula Andress, dubbed again, is from the start wholly uninteresting, a blank slate toward which Richardson can lob his lust.  You will be wondering why he crosses a desert to find her, when he could simply grab the long-suffering Monteros soon as he has a chance and be off.  But then again, Andress was never my favorite Bond girl, either.  I was more into Luciana Paluzzi, who drove a motorcycle that fired rockets and with a purr delivered lines like, “Do you like wild things Mr. Bond James Bond?”  What did Andress ever do but stand around in a bikini?  Yet I’m sure that’s exactly what Hammer’s prolific producer Michael Carreras wanted.  Since bikinis would be even more out of place in this determinedly anachronistic film, in She we are treated instead to numerous shots of Andress in a diaphanous gown, with arms extended, beckoning, toward the viewer.  (In a scene in which the camera discovers Andress sleeping on her back in bed, my wife griped, “Who sleeps like that?  With a sheet perfectly balanced over her breasts?”)  One of the most fascinating aspects of Marcus Hearn’s Hammer Glamour book is the through-line which ties together all its many actress bios, and which Hearn explicitly states in the introduction: Hammer had such a commercial win pushing Andress in She, followed by the even-more-successful marketing come-on of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini for the poster of One Million Years B.C., that they could never give up the ghost, as it were, and would continue to oversell its voluptuous starlets to decreasing returns over the next several years.  You’re going to be starring in a vampire picture?  For the publicity photo let’s put you in a cavegirl costume.  In She, Andress gets not just the lace-thin gown to wear, but a very elaborate “regal” costume that covers her with feathers from foot to golden helmet.  She looks less like She Who Must Be Obeyed than Spider-Man’s villain, The Vulture.  Anyway, even with this striking (or alarming) touch she can’t make anywhere near the impression of the star of the 1935 film, Helen Gahagan, bathing in the black-and-white fire on an Expressionist-influenced set with her arms above her head, cackling with her lust for power.  Andress just can’t pull off the femme fatale role.

Now about the DVD.  I recently started sampling the Warner Archives, taking advantage of a sale, and ordered two films: this one, and Otto Preminger’s The Moon is Blue, which I had missed when the restoration was being screened at the UW Cinematheque a few years back.  The Moon is Blue DVD apparently did not use the restoration as its source (or so claims someone on the Criterion forums, although my own eyes also indicate that if this is a restoration, it’s a poor one).  Still, the quality of The Moon is Blue itself forgives the flaws of the presentation, and I was happy with it, and also happy that Warner released it at all.  I was disappointed with how Warner has treated She.  There is no doubt in my mind that this film can look superb, as evidenced by other Hammer films from the period and their superior representations on disc – I mean, this was one of Hammer’s prestige pictures; if their low-budget pirate films can look great, I’m sure She can look that much better.  Sadly, the print used is washed-out and dull, with a slight tinting toward the pink, as one might see on other aged prints.  At least the film is in otherwise fine shape – that is, no rough reel changes from which The Moon is Blue suffers.  So it’s unrestored, slapped on DVD with no extras, there you go.  It’s out there, you can watch it.  Unfortunately, with a film like this, its virtues are its beauty.  You want to see the yellow sands of the desert below a bright blue sky.  James Bernard’s strident score just tells you that the images are there.  Here, you have to use your imagination; and frankly, my imagination during this exercise was overstrained enough, thank you.

Working a long work week, week after week, exhausted and stressed out and having a hard time cordoning off that part of the brain, struggling with insomnia, I find myself time and again taking in comfort foods – films and TV shows that activate my escapism valves.

Watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, particularly the early Joel Hodgson/Comedy Channel ones, brings me back to junior high and high school. Living in Brookfield, Wisconsin, my local cable service was one of the few in the country to carry The Comedy Channel – back when it was competing with HA! (The Comedy Channel eventually won that battle, and a few name changes later became Comedy Central). I took pleasure from watching those early, almost public access-quality shows, experimental, loose, protean. The Higgins Boys and Gruber. The Allan Havey late night talk show. Short Attention Span Theater, which exposed me to Monty Python, as well as the alternative comedy movement of Janeane Garofalo, David Cross, and Jon Stewart (who hosted, for a while). Rich Hall’s Onion World, a show which I watched regularly but the basic concept of which I still cannot explain. And, most beloved, MST3K, which I first caught while babysitting the neighbor kid: Jungle Goddess, a 1940’s jungle programmer, was the first “experiment” to which I was exposed. So yes, I’ve been watching MST3K again, after seeing for the first time – and immediately loving – the goofy B-movie The Beatniks, which Shout Factory recently released as part of MST3K Vol. XVII.

I’ve also been taking refuge in novels, in Kate Bush music (which brings me back to my high school years, the last time I listed to her), and in films in general, although on this last point there are strange rules which I find myself subconsciously obeying. Friday night I often will find myself in front of the TV with a glass of brandy in my hand, and it’s my wild card night, whatever works best with brandy and my mood of the moment. (Often I’ll just watch the movie I’ve been waiting to watch all week long.) Saturday night I love monster movies. Maybe this comes from a local channel (again, a Brookfield/Milwaukee affiliate) which showed a horror movie every Saturday night when I was young. I remember watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Mole Men, among others. Now, too often, I’ll spend a Saturday night with something from Hammer Studios or a more modern horror film. It seems to be a requirement. And Sunday evenings, perhaps exhausted of escapism, I’ll watch an art house or foreign film.

I just finished watching Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy (Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, Testament of Orpheus) this way, each on a Sunday, one a month. And curiously this weekend seemed to form a circle, closing out with Testament of Orpheus and beginning, on Friday night, with the Polish film The Hourglass Sanatorium. Both involve waking dreamers, who drift through a stream-of-consciousness narrative while the camera follows them non-judgmentally. They are almost non-narrative stories. Sanatorium was directed by Wojciech Has, the director of one of my favorite films, The Saragossa Manuscript. This, made some years later (1973), is another literary adaptation, here visualizing a novel by Bruno Schulz. I wish I could describe to you what happens in its 120-minute running time, but the film is like spying upon the dream of another dreamer: the dreamer can follow the symbolism that we can only wonder at. I would like to read the novel to better decode the work (Schulz has been compared to another master of illogic, Kafka), but it looks like it hasn’t been in print in a while. The film does succeed, although almost inscrutably. It’s a haunting film, with long tracking shots across eerie landscapes a la Andrei Tarkovsky. And the sets are utterly fantastic, dressed to present overlapping versions of reality: the sanatorium in question has been permanently receded into the past, on the advice of its sole doctor, so that the patients sit forever on the precipice of death, suspended by revisiting memories of their youth.

Testament of Orpheus features director Jean Cocteau in the lead role, playing himself, drifting through “a fold in time” and meeting characters from his own poetry and cinema (namely his film Orpheus). It’s a strangely moving final work, and self-consciously final, filled with a balance of his poetic fantastique (including his trademark reversed-film shots) and trademark humor. No modern director approaches what Has and Cocteau do with these films, except, of course, the grand exception David Lynch, whose Inland Empire (of which I had mixed feelings when I first saw it) would fit neatly as a capper in any film festival for insomniacs in need of dreaming. Which I have been, of late, and film has served as my artificial dreaming, popped like some Philip K. Dick pill. Adventurous film buffs, seek these two out. The Orphic Trilogy just went out of print, but can still be found online. The Hourglass Sanatorium is available on DVD from Amazon.co.uk.

Criterion has just announced the release of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert on Blu-Ray (and DVD) in June. Now I get to cross this exquisite film off my 10 Most Wanted on Blu-Ray list. My others? Hmmm…

1. Jason and the Argonauts

Not that it will look all that spectacular in Blu-Ray (Harryhausen’s films rely heavily on process shots, and are thus much grainier than other films from their era), but given that it’s my favorite film of all time, having it in my collection in the best possible presentation will somehow make my life a little more complete. Bring on the grain, I say.

2. Black Narcissus

One of Powell and Pressburger’s most visually ravishing color films seems to exist outside of time, and is indeed one of the finest films ever made. It simply must be released in high definition. Speaking of P&P…

3. A Matter of Life and Death
…do this one too.

4. Yellow Submarine
Although I would also love to see the Beatles’ other films released in Blu-Ray – in particular Let it Be, which has been out of home video circulation since an early-days-of-VHS release – Yellow Submarine would likely look the most spectacular in high-def format. The DVD release was nice, but, alas, non-anamorphic. Chances are that a Blu-Ray is already on the way, as Sir Paul hinted recently at the Golden Globes.

5. Le Notti Bianche
Luchino Visconti’s film of Dostoevsky’s White Nights remains one of my favorite films, a gorgeous Cinema Italiano fairy tale. Criterion released an excellent DVD, but a Blu-Ray would be even more welcome. And speaking of Marcello Mastroianni…

6. La Dolce Vita
…do this one too.

7. The Darjeeling Limited
I held off on purchasing this wonderful Wes Anderson film, expecting a high-def release to follow. Unfortunately, it was released just prior to Blu-Ray “winning” the high-def wars, and before studios began a standard practice of releasing each of their major new releases on Blu-Ray. I’m still waiting for my Darjeeling, released on DVD a mite too soon.

8. Conan the Barbarian
Although fundamentally flawed (John Milius was intent on casting based on physical type, not acting skill, which is why the real actors of the film – James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow – seem to tower over the film’s leads – a bodybuilder, dancer, and surfer), this is an impressive fantasy film, inspired by Frank Frazetta pulp illustrations and Japanese period pictures such as The Seventh Samurai and Kwaidan, coupled with one of the best film scores ever composed.

9. Supervixens
If I had to pick just one Russ Meyer film, it would be this one, a live action Looney Toon which can’t be taken seriously for either its sex or its violence, though the tone varies wildly from scene to scene. The bathroom standoff, featuring deranged cop Charles Napier tearing down a bathroom door before beating and electrocuting a woman in a tub, even drew the admiration of Alfred Hitchcock for its over-the-top intensity. Don’t count on this one anytime soon, since RM Films is notoriously stingy with its catalogue.

10. Juliet of the Spirits
A female–and very, very COLOR–take on 8 1/2, and one of my favorite Fellinis.

It’s a little Bakshi kick I’m on to revisit American Pop after watching Blue Underground’s spectacular Blu-Ray of Fire & Ice (and anticipating the BD release of his Lord of the Rings [1978] in April). A couple years ago I wrote a career survey of Bakshi’s films, which you can read here; I did not, however, rewatch more than a scene or two of American Pop when writing that essay, since I felt I knew the film pretty well. That was a mistake, as seeing it again has brought its flaws more into focus. But first let’s put it out there that this is one of the most unusual, and one of the most ambitious, animated films ever made, and that has to be understood before any criticisms are levied. It is still a significant point that Bakshi was a pioneer of the form, believing that animation should not belong exclusively to children; and to this day, long after he’s retired, the majority of animated films made for adults are not American, but Japanese. Therefore, the list of films he produced during the 70’s and early 80’s remain utterly unique, and still pack a strangely disorienting punch.

I was aware of Bakshi from a young age because of The Lord of the Rings: I have a vivid memory of standing outside of some storefront in a mall, with televisions stacked in the window on display, all of them showing Bakshi’s Tolkien adaptation, and becoming mesmerized and frightened by the Black Riders (rotoscoped–actually, literally Xeroxed–from live action, to creepy effect). I also remember Lord of the Rings merchandise still being sold years after the film had come and gone (flopping)–Frodo and Sam buttons, and such. And my mother would tell me in a low voice that she knew he’d done Fritz the Cat, “an X-rated cartoon,” which, as you’d expect, inflamed my imagination with all sorts of ideas that were well beyond anything that film actually contained. The only other film of his I was really familiar with as a child was Wizards, which disturbed my undeveloped brain with its swearing, violence, and hints of sex. Into my adolescent and teen years, I still didn’t get Wizards (I’ve come around a bit), but enjoyed Fire & Ice when I was just the right age for it and, when I was a bit older, deeply admired his angry and semi-autobiographical film Heavy Traffic. Somewhere around that time I noticed, in TV Guide, that Cinemax was running a late-night showing of a rare Bakshi film, one I’d never heard of before. Two stars, it said, and it was called American Pop. I set the VCR. I suspected the film might be similar to Heavy Traffic or Wizards–anarchic, stylish, cartoonish–but the last thing I thought it would be was a semi-classy animated epic, rotoscoped in the “realistic” style of Lord of the Rings and Fire & Ice. (In fact, this seems to form the second installment of Bakshi’s trilogy of realistically-rotoscoped films.) I was surprised at the scope of the film–flowing through multiple generations of fathers and sons to cover almost a century of history, ostensibly also telling the story of how popular music has evolved, from George M. Cohan tunes to Sex Pistols punk. As the film rushes from one brief setpiece to another, cultural touchstones are checked off (WWI and WWII, beatniks, hippies, and so on), characters grow older or die unexpectedly, and a harmonica is passed down as an unintended heirloom, representing a geneological connection to music, just as each of the four central male characters seek out a career in popular music, yearnings usually aborted by reality, or otherwise leading to disaster.

In college I would show my battered tape to friends and they would usually be astonished that the film existed–and then, at a certain point, bored to tears as it dragged on. I did not believe the film was perfect by any means, but I held to it as some rare artifact, a forgotten piece of cult movie trivia. “Hey, look at this weird cartoon! It has a hippie addicted to smack, and The Doors are playing!” After Heavy Metal–another adolescent favorite of mine–was released on VHS, and then DVD, in the late 90’s, American Pop shortly followed, in similar silvery packaging and also boasting about its rock and roll soundtrack. They might both be R-rated animated movies held back from video release due to music rights issues, but that’s about all they have in common. Heavy Metal is an ideal midnight movie, both juvenile and trippy, with an emphasis on over-the-top sex and violence. American Pop, on the other hand, could not be more serious in its intentions. Really, it is Bakshi’s stab at the Great American Novel. He would never extend himself as far again.

“If you love movies…pop in American Pop!” says Gene Shalit on the box of the 1999 DVD release, so I did as his moustache asked and inserted it into my Sony Blu-Ray player, upconverting the image via HDMI to my new 50″ plasma TV. Now this, I thought, should be interesting. And then I realized that this was, after all, just a DVD from 1999 – the cover image shows one of the American Pop characters standing astride a photo of a DVD, so new and nifty was the technology back then. The back of the box did not specify it was anamorphic. I couldn’t really expect much from the picture, could I? Luckily, the widescreen side of this flipper disc (full screen on the other side, something rarely done anymore) was indeed anamorphic, and the image was quite good. At least this film, which probably won’t get an upgrade of any sort anytime soon, looks just fine as it is; certainly better than any VHS tape from an old late-night cable showing, which is probably what most Bakshi fans relied upon prior to this DVD release. The film itself, on the other hand, remains an interesting oddity while aging a bit poorly.

The story structure, hopping as it does from one scene to another while spanning a century, has two curious effects. One is to make the film seem much longer than it actually is (it’s about 90 minutes, but feels to be at least two hours long). The other is to distance the viewer from the characters emotionally. It doesn’t help that the dialogue is often cliched, sometimes deliberately so (I suspect) to give an impression of the era into which we’ve just been dropped, in lieu of actually telling us what year it is. One scene, in which two shy newlyweds step into their new, ridiculously oversized home–purchased by mob-connected parents–would be rather sweet if their dialogue weren’t pared down so severely. They speak the basics, the scene ends. That scene, as with so many others, is reduced to a type of moment rather than a specific moment. American Pop wants to be a grand epic, but it needs to be built from recognizable and precise characters to succeed. From time to time, it comes close to achieving this. I really like a scene in which an older brother, high on beat-poetry and inflated righteousness, berates his younger siblings for watching TV. There’s a nice balance between his self-infatuation and the resigned tolerance of the children, who somehow come off as more mature than he is. It’s a real moment. (It benefits from Bakshi’s canny use of voice actors; the film, typical of his style, leans frequently upon improvised dialogue, lending an authenticity to his animation.) There are also some fine character details in the early scenes, where we see life backstage at a vaudeville show, although the real high point of American Pop comes just under halfway through, with a dance montage, set to Glenn Miller, which turns the rotoscoping movements into a fine art, before dissolving into an unusually moving scene set during WWII, where an American soldier and a Nazi share a brief bond over music before death ensues. For that stretch, American Pop really works, and you can see what Bakshi was aiming to achieve. In the back half of the film, we get the usual 60’s rock bio cliches, as a Janis Joplin/Grace Slick-style singer and her songwriter fall in love, and struggle with drug addiction. As tired as this storyline is, it’s actually handled fairly well and the animation is nicely rendered. Plus, we finally get a chance to spend a sustained amount of film time with a single character – which helps. But there’s a strange hiccupping quality, even to these scenes, as if too much has been cut from the story. We ought to know these characters better. In animation terms, we need more fluidity, more in-betweens.

Oddly, if we do view LOTR, Pop, and Fire & Ice as a trilogy, it’s the last one, the least narratively ambitious, which is the most successful. Fire & Ice has smoother animation, and with its almost crudely simplistic storyline and minimal cast, it can achieve exactly what it sets out to do. American Pop ought to be the greater film. But, as with Lord of the Rings, Bakshi strains against his means–one genuinely feels he blew most of his budget on getting a great soundtrack, as so many scenes feature static backgrounds and only one or two characters moving at a time. It’s easier for me to take pleasure out of watching LOTR as well, since Tolkien cares for the storytelling duties. Of the three, American Pop is the most purely Bakshi. That extends, alas, to its glaring flaws.