A handcrafted work of art evokes a real sense of wonder: look at this! Look at all the care that went into it!
In The Adventures of Mark Twain, a claymation children’s film from 1985 that combines “suicidal Mark Twain” with “steampunk adventure” and “short story adaptations,” there’s an early scene that is, for me, roughly as breathtaking as the Grand Canyon. It’s when the camera gives us an awestruck tour of Twain’s Halley’s Comet-bound airship.
Usually, when films stall their story to show off their artistry, I’m annoyed. Not so here.
To be fair, that’s partly because when the story starts, it spends a while as little more than three kids—Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher—droning leaden dialogue at each other and doing dumb, joyless kid things without any enlivening Twain spark. I don’t mind delaying that in favor to “here’s a tour of our claymation set.” (The story gets livelier as it goes, especially once we get a few more voices in the mix.)
But mostly, this works because the detail is so comprehensive and endearing. Tiny billiard balls! A little armchair! Books! An ornate clock! Clay water spilling out of an opened copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn! Before our eyes, a pocket watch melts into the shape of a turtle!
This is as much spectacle as any IMAX vista, and it’s impossible for me to divorce the experience of watching it from my admiration of the people who made it. It doesn’t look so real that I forget myself: it looks so handmade that I want to reach out and touch it. It’s unmistakably art, but it’s brought down to earth: the kind of movie that makes me marvel at how they did that and makes me want to do it too. The clay modeling here may not be perfect—aside from Twain and Eve, the people all look a bit janky, expressive or not—but it’s tactile, evocative, and lovable. When “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” ends with a frog getting turned upside down so an entire junkyard’s worth of scrap can pour out of him, the movie hits an ecstatic combination of animated inventiveness and live action tactility. It’s what this medium is for.
The story, as I implied above, doesn’t always work as well as the art, but that goes too far into damning it with faint praise. The “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” two-parter, featuring a sitcom-y Adam and Eve who gradually grow through a somewhat stale, sitcom-y relationship and into a long partnership full of real marriage, is a highlight1, and the movie also benefits from pulling in a fair number of real-life Twain quotes. One of them is on a magnet on my fridge.
The most memorable piece here leads Tom, Huck, and Becky to the Mysterious Stranger, a Satan whose eeriness—two voices blended together with a wavery seam still purposely showing; a white mask held up over empty space—is, though subtle, an uncanny mini-masterpiece of horror. The Mysterious Stranger has an icily solipsistic disconnect (“I can do no wrong, for I do not know what it is”) from both his creations and his cruelty, and while vestiges of the anti-theology in Twain’s fiction shows through here, in the movie’s own context, he feels more powerfully like a metaphor for Twain’s implied depression: “Nothing exists, save empty space and you.” No wonder Twain doesn’t join the children in that particular story. He knows it already, even better than he knows the other tales.
The framework here, after all, involves an aged Twain wanting to “go out” with Halley’s Comet, which was also in the sky when he was born. The card at the opening tells us that Twain did die the year the comet returned, so we know what to expect, but the way this old man speeds to death, and how he feels about it, still matters to us. The kids, understandably, are worried about whether he’ll take them with him; viewers can also wonder if this will feel like an exhausted, grief-stricken suicide—a widower with writer’s block and little remaining interest in the world—or a peaceful, curious embrace of whatever comes next.
The movie resolves that tension, as much as it can, with a little Star Trek-like flair, and it still makes time to thumb its nose at the irritating Tom Sawyer in its final moments. All of this feels like enough for any minor children’s classic.
The Adventures of Mark Twain is streaming on Kanopy, Tubi, and Amazon Prime.
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Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Anthologized
Just imagine "Funeral March of a Marionette" playing for this wrap-up post of a somewhat uneven season.
Anthologized
"You don't get murdered without a reason."
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Slow Horses, “Grave Danger”
Seeing the actual text of Roddy’s messages with “Kim,” his bot girlfriend (Coe finally clues him in), only makes the running joke better: “her” enthusiastically reassuring him about office snack etiquette and that he is indeed a man, as she sees he also mentioned in his profile, is great. River’s conversation with Flyte manages to give both a comedic highlight–his bitchy protestation that sure, if you say everything he’s done lately in a list like that, it’s going to sound bad–and a dramatic one, as he sees and amplifies her doubts about her new job’s practices, which helps her decide how she’s going to handle the incriminating photo.
Whelan’s devotion to transparency vanishing the second he realizes how deeply fucked they are is hilarious. I have to look up what Callis has been doing between BSG and this, because he’s so good at playing nervous, scummy, cowardly, strangely delightful weirdos.
Roddy and Moira developing a bizarre rapport was not on my bingo card for this episode, but it was amazing: she knows exactly how to handle his condescension (“And … does that strike you as a name a person would have?”) and meet it with her own in a way that leads to a more-amiable-than-you’d-think working relationship. That little arm pat! She has a good episode here, even if I still want Catherine back at Slough House.
Edmond
I thought this was going to be a surefire hit for me–written by David Mamet, directed by Stuart Gordon, and starring an incredible cast drawn from both pools of regulars (we’ve got William H. Macy, Joe Mantegna, Rebecca Pidgeon, and Jeffrey Combs!) and filling out other roles with great faces, so we have minor George Wendt and Dule Hill, for example. It’s a gritty, crime-inflected story about one man’s journey to define his soul and do that partly through violence. Sign me the fuck up, right? But this feels DOA, and as fond as I am of both men’s individual work, I’m not sure Mamet and Gordon are a good combination. Macy’s character gets a few minor but effective comedic beats and comes through to an unexpected place, but he feels deliberately underwritten–a milquetoast man who collapses at a single provocation into a spiteful, furious black hole–in a way that was interesting without being engaging. And there’s so little going on outside of his plunge into a whiny heart of darkness that all there is to carry this is Mamet’s dialogue, which, presented wall-to-wall like it is here, winds up feeling self-parodying.
Edmond is one of the few Stuart Gordon films I haven’t seen but your verdict of it just not working does seem to be the general consensus sadly. I might get there out of completism eventually! But maybe not until after I’ve also seen Space Truckers.
Damn, that sucks about Edmond. You’d think two Chicago theater vets would work well together, maybe they cancel each other out.
Justified, Season Five, Episode Seven, “Raw Deal”
“Some men lead and some men follow, and when you can’t lead but you refuse to follow, you die alone in the desert.”
“Can’t say I recall seizing a website recently.”
“I will aim to use words of one syllable, the word ‘syllable’ notwithstanding.”
This was just a really good episode – partly, of course, because Raylan has a good ol’ fashioned episodic plot for the first time in what feels like three seasons, where we get the pleasure of following a few invented crooks for a while, some of whom are violent dumbasses. The broader plot is also really good; Ava in particular is in her next step as Warlord But A Lady, as she finally simply makes rational choices to survive right now. I fully predict that when she’s in a position of comfort, she’ll start being cruel just to get revenge on the world that did this to her.
Raylan is also forced to deal with the fact that his actions have ruined his relationship with Art; I particularly like the small note that Rachel is stepping up into a position of authority that Raylan keeps flauting. She’s even developed some Art-like sarcasm when ordering him about.
Interesting that Boyd gets away with a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck. How much of that is Walton Goggins’s charisma and confidence? The thing about fashion rules is that confidence and joy can supercede any of them.
Biggest Laugh: “Don’t feel you have to knock or anything.” / “Do you want me to go back out and knock?” / “Well, you’re here now.”
Biggest Non-Art Laugh: “Technology required to post is decades away.”
Top Ownage: Boyd shooting Johnny, not out of strategy but out of rage.
Good call on that ownage, all the finality Boyd could have gotten has been taken out of it by the Crowe “screw-up.”
Elementary, “M.” – A notorious serial killer from the UK, someone Holmes chased after, someone who killed Irene Adler, has come to NYC. And Holmes wants revenge. But all is not as it seems, and M. – real name Sebastian Moran – is actually a hired killer, had no idea Holmes was in New York, and is set his orders by someone named Moriarty. The decision to do a slow build to this point pays off well and sets up an arc that will be important but never dominate the show. (This also is timed to allow Joan to decide to stay on as Holmes’s minder as much because she is worried for him as because she likes being a detective). Vinnie Jones is very good as Moran. Oh, and Holmes pays a bunch of street wise teens to help look for Moran, so we get our version of the Baker Street Irregulars.
Doctor Who, “Fury from the Deep,” first three parts – Strange goings on at a gas refinery on the coast of the North Sea, staff infighting, and weird sentient seaweed. Gripping enough that I can’t wait to see how this plays out, even if six parts is a bit long. One of the lost episodes returned to life by animation, but the work here is a bit flat next ot others I have seen. But the addition of touchscreens and of a more diverse workforce show that someone was thinking how redoing things could make it feel less stodgy. Also like the grounding of having this operating be jointly run by British and Dutch concerns.
Frasier, “Roe to Perdition” – The brothers Crane find a less expensive source of caviar, and use it to get entry to higher society. Hard to care very much about this first world problem, though kudos to Frasier for running his first successful dinner party in ages. The b plot, where Martin accidentally receives $40 too much from an ATM and cannot get the bank to take it back, is much funnier.
Mainly had a birthday dinner/drinks but I showed my friend the Twilight Zone classic “Living Doll” and this is probably in the top 5, 10 episodes? So simple and concise in plot (this must have been extremely low budget even for the show – three people and Talky Tina, one setting) but contains a world in it’s Expressionist shadow work, Herrmann’s truly malevolent oboe score, and the monstrosities this house’s simmering conflicts and resentments unleash. Telly Savalas as Erich is perfect as the ogre of a “father” archetype – I thought of my own dad sometimes here – if still human, and Talky Tina his superior, a monster the concluding narration implies has been created out of unconscious necessity.
Also now that I’m 34, I’m thinking about how the Twilight Zone was the perfect introduction as a kid to the idea of the Weird, going beyond the logical or rational into a darker, deeper place.
Fuck yeah, Talky Tina. My wife and I still do that voice sometimes.
Obligatory self-promo in that I’m going to start covering The Twilight Zone in the Anthologized column on May 7, if you want to hop on for the ride. So many great episodes for both shadowy cinematography + Herrmann scoring.
Hell yes!
Kudos to June Foray for the right combination of sing-song innocence and menace, so blackly funny. “I’m beginning to HATE you.”
Rebuilding – Josh O’Connor, sensitive cowboy. Roadmap, etc. This felt like a bit of a Kelly Reichardt / Chloe Zhao ripoff at first but it won me over with its genuine affection for all of its characters. Just a sweet, well-made movie with a strong ensemble cast (including a top-tier child performance).
Live Music – noise-rock supergroup Orcutt Shelley Miller, feat. members of Harry Pussy, Sonic Youth and Comets on Fire (in that order). Steve Shelley still looks like hitting the drums brings him the greatest joy in the world, the basslines were insistent and the guitar work was unhinged, good shit. My girlfriend’s twin-drummer band supported and they were great, now she’s shared stages with 50% of Sonic Youth which is a lot better than my 0%…
Wooo, live music and sensitive cowboys! Adding Rebuilding to my list–I’m in the mood for something sweet.
It’s got plenty of melancholy to it too but it definitely soothed my general discontent a little.
Woo, live music! Sounds fun and O’Connor really is on fire right now (not literally).
Although fire is the inciting incident for this movie!
Wooooo live music! Orcutt Shelley Miller sounds fantastic, why the hell aren’t they touring here.
You used to be a Miller, they owe you