KoKo's Earth Control (1928): An Apocalyptic Hall of Famer

"Koko's Earth Control", a charming but dark Fleischer animated short, joins 24 other films in the Library of Congress Film Registry.  It truly gives one pause to imagine what can happen with a clown at the helm of potential disaster, beset with a troublesome and uncomprehending dog. 

Is it analogous to anything I can think of right now? 

O! Gosh! I don't know. Only, this little film was from before nuclear holocaust was a possibility, but the idea that man had the levers in his control was nonetheless quite real. 

There's some other personal faves getting inducted here--Angels with Dirty Faces, a Jimmy Cagney movie that, like Yankee Doodle Dandy and White Heat I watched with my dad as a kid with real delight because he was showing me his favorites, Up in Smoke because I listened to Cheech and Chong comedy records when I was probably too young to get all the jokes but they were still the funniest guys, and of course, iconic movies Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and No Country for Old Men (2007) . 

Anyway, I just wanted to share Koko because I think old-timey cartoons are great. 

And I don't know--is there Koko DNA somewhere in Art the Clown? (There's a warped family resemblance, but Koko is harmless, and....sheesh.) 

The New Westerns--2 Guns and Last Stand

I had a long weekend coming, so I took off a couple days and saw a few movies, which always centers me, a little. I like movies. I like tv, or comics, or books, for that matter, but movies are like a treat. TV can be good or bad, at times--a show can have an episode that sucks in an otherwise worthy run. Books can suck with redeeming qualities, or be awesome, with reservations. Comics are comics, and I just enjoy them for what they are--a complicated medium.

But movies? To my mind, movies are a finished artwork. When a movie is committed to film, there it is. It tells its story well or poorly. The actors do a job, or they don't. The director makes the story real, or it doesn't come off well. If a movie isn't doing it for me after like, twenty minutes,  I guess it isn't good.  It should give me something to make me bother with it. It should give me a reason to want to see it. This weekend, I saw two movies I rather liked and which I think had something similar going for them--

I think they are New Westerns. They aren't about the Old West. They are about that terrain, but a new reality. The first I caught was a Netflix find: The Last Stand, with Arnold Schwarzenegger. 

I don't have to care for Arnold's politics to like action movies in general, or with him in them. And damn it, I do. This is kind of the story of the honest lawman who sees bringing bad guys to justice as his job, whatever the cost. He assembles a posse, which includes the western trope of a drunk sharp shooter in jail and has certain other touches that kind of feel borrowed from westerns. It is not without comedy. The way of the gun is of course, fetishized, but not unrealistically. A young gun is martyred. There is a kind of mythic unreality about parts of it (a race car that does not seem to need fuel--a bad guy who does not seem to understand his 160 lb ass will be pounded by one someone like A Schwarzenegger, old enough to be his daddy or not.) I don't recall how this one did in the theatres, but since it's a 2013 movie I already got on Netflix, I kind of want to recommend it to see it get a new post-theatre life, because it was a good action flick.  

I also want to give a little prop for 2 Guns. 

This is a more intentionally comedic action film, but it also takes place in the American SW and has elements of the Western genre. Both the Denzel Washington and the Mark Wahlberg characters are isolated from their "tribes" and find an uneasy association with one another. Their mutual language is the Way of the Gun, a cowboy Bushido. Their code is, ultimately, independent and outlaw, because they find that the the arbiters of the codes by which they had lived was false. So they make their own way.  And of course, I love the fuck out of both these actors, seriously. 

In both, there are false women and violence is seen as a solution. They aren't great feminist works, if you know what I mean? But they are excellent action movies, and entertaining--although 2 Guns has this scene with chickens I thought was a bit intense. I like chickens. I like eating them, too, but I don't like them, like, being hurt. So, what I'm saying is, there is a scene if you like chickens you won't like, but if you are okay with violence against humans, this is your kind of movie, for sure!

Also, this weekend I saw Red2. I think this is the only non-stupid movie out of three that have featured Bruce Willis this year. It isn't really a New Western, though. But I sure as hell liked it better than freaking Die Harder than A Very Hard Thing.   But based on a Warren Ellis character, so duh--redeeming fun features. Yay, if you like spy sorts of things. I do. Little bit gratuitously violent, but if you haven't noticed I like action flicks with violence by now, I can't help sort you out any. It has violence. 

James Gandolfini, Dead at age 51

I'm fairly shocked at the sudden death of Gandolfini, best known for his role as Tony Soprano in HBO's award-winning series The Sopranos. As an actor, Gandolfini had a great talent for conveying the inner motivations of the characters he portrayed--a kind of presence where the viewer could imagine wheels turning, perceiving the complexity of the characters through the nuances and gestures his "read" lent them. This was probably best shown through the six seasons of his run on The Sopranos, where his Tony Soprano was a character of almost Shakespearean depth--in some ways amoral, and others, too aware of the unrighteousness of his criminal enterprise, a character as conflicted as a mafioso Hamlet. To make viewers sympathize with Tony, a monster who becomes aware of himself, took an actor who could make the horrible all-too-human. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention that one of my favorite movies that he was in was The Last Castle, which, if you haven't seen it, by all means, do. His Col. Winter is another character that is difficult to like (and you shouldn't, he's a weak man). But Gandolfini made him compelling to watch.


It's a damn shame--he died far too soon.