Tuesday Minute
No. 138 | July 27, 2010

Merrie Melodies Tribute

Our theme this week
Selected shorts from Merrie Melodies

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Lady, Play Your Mandolin!” (1931)

“A Wild Hare” (1940)

Notes in brief
Happy Birthday, Bugs Bunny!  On this date 70 years ago, Bugs Bunny made his screen debut.  Though Bugs is not named in the cartoon short—he’s simply “the rabbit”—he does introduce his signature line, “What’s up, Doc?”  The look and sound of Bugs went through a number of changes before he settled into the “wascally wabbit” character most of us remember.  But this is how he first appeared.

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“A Wild Hare” (1940)
Tex Avery, director
Virgil Ross, animator
Mel Blanc (Bugs Bunny), Arthur Q. Bryan (Elmer Fudd), voices

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Quote of note
“It’s like living in a Tex Avery cartoon.”
—Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze), To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)

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Monday Minute
No. 137 | July 26, 2010

Merrie Melodies Tribute

Merrie Melodies cartoons were first produced by Leon Schlesinger, who had earlier created Looney Tunes.  The orginal idea behind Merrie Melodies was to create animated shorts that promoted music owned by Warner Bros.  It grew from there.  Schlesinger sold his production company to Warner Bros. in 1944.

Merrie Melodies had no greater invention than Bugs Bunny, as classic a character as any in the history of animation.  Bugs Bunny celebrates his 70th birthday on Tuesday.  We had a big kick attending “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony” for its show date at the Hollywood Bowl about a week ago.  Great music, great cartoons.  I recommend it if you have any kids, young or old, in your family.  Tour information is here.

Our theme this week
Selected shorts from Merrie Melodies

“Lady, Play Your Mandolin!” (1931)

Notes in brief
“Lady, Play Your Mandolin!” is the very first of the Merrie Melodies series of cartoons.  The gaucho that looks like Mickey Mouse is Foxy, who appeared in three Merrie Melodies shorts during the 1930s.  The title song was composed by Oscar Levant, with lyrics by Irving Caesar, and a version sung by Paul Lukas was a top ten hit of 1930.

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“Lady, Play Your Mandolin!” (1931)
Rudolph Ising, director

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Quote of note
“You know what I’d like to be?  A cartoon of some kind.  You know, like when they get hit in the head with a frying pan or something, and their head looks like the frying pan, with the handle and everything?  They they just go boi-ing—and their head comes back to normal?  Wouldn’t that be great?”
—Cyril (Daniel Stern), Breaking Away (1979)

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Tuesday Minute
No. 38 | February 23, 2010

Women Behind the Camera II

Our theme this week
Women directors of notable films from 2009

Featured this week
Monday         —   Anne Fontaine

Featured last week
Monday         —   Lone Scherfig
Tuesday         —   Nora Ephron
Wednesday    —   Claire Denis
Thursday        —   Anne Fletcher
Friday            —   Kathryn Bigelow

Betty Thomas

The essentials
Notable 2009 film:  Alvin and the Chipmunks:  The Squeakquel; worldwide box office (to date), $425 million

I have vague recollections of hearing the rodent trio of Alvin, Simon, and Theodore, along with their father-figure, David Seville, back in the 1960s.  I may have watched the TV show, but it’s the Christmas song (still heard every December) that stuck in my head.  That funny, squeaky sound the Chipmunks made with their voices was music to a small boy’s ears.  (The original gimmick came from speeding up the playback on a tape recorder.)  I don’t recall my mother’s reaction, but I’d bet there were moments when she wanted to scream, “Turn that damned thing off!”  (She was too nice to scream, though I like to think there were times when she wanted to.)  A few decades later, the appeal of Alvin and the gang probably hasn’t changed much.  A movie that’s made more than $200 million at the U.S. box office and more than $400 million worldwide is, safe to say, a hit with a new generation of kids.  The reaction of the critics, on the other hand, is much what I imagined my mother’s to be.  The Metacritic score is 41 (out of 100), well below the other films covered this week.  Kids, bless them, don’t read critics.

Betty Thomas, for her own sake, shouldn’t either.  Not for this film.  Thomas’s film directing career is filled with family-friendly fare, middle-of-the-road entertainments well-suited for the megaplex, not the art house.  She had worked in television previously—best known for a dramatic role (Lucy Bates on Hill Street Blues) though she had started in comedy with the Second City troupe in Chicago.  She has been nominated for ten Emmys, winning twice (once for acting, once for directing).  Thomas’s film work includes The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), which had a retro appeal for a certain audience, and Private Parts (1997), with Howard Stern starring as Howard Stern.  Both were modest hits making a decent profit.  She had a bigger budget and scored a bigger hit with the Eddie Murphy vehicle Doctor Dolittle in 1998.  I Spy (2002) again starred Murphy but was a dud.  The Alvin sequel won’t win any awards but it’s made a lot of money, setting the U.S. box office record for a film directed by a woman (second worldwide to Mamma Mia!, directed by Phyllida Lloyd).  That’s not everything, but in Hollywood it’s indeed something.

Beyond the final credits
If you had tried the FilmFest 101 puzzle in the MAD Launch Contest last month, you may remember a part about Alfred Hitchcock cameos.  Perhaps you had taken a look at this video.  In Rear Window, the famed director appears winding a clock behind the back of a songwriter playing a piano (2:14 on the video at the link).  So?  That piano player was Ross Bagdasarian—better known by his stage name, David Seville—who went on to create Alvin and the Chipmunks.

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Alvin and the Chipmunks:  The Squeakquel (2009)
Betty Thomas, director

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Interview with Betty Thomas, on I Spy and her start in Hollywood

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Famous Firsts
The first American movies featuring nudes scenes were the silent films Inspiration (1915), starring model and actress Audrey Munson, and A Daughter of the Gods (1916), with film and swimming star Annette Kellerman (she was the first woman swimmer to attempt crossing the English Channel and has been credited as the inventor of synchronized swimming).  The latter film was a Fox production and the first by a U.S. filmmaker to cost one million dollars.  No copy of either film is known to exist today.

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Tuesday Minute
No. 18 | January 26, 2010

Best of the Decade

Our theme this week
Best movies of the decade at Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes

Featured this week
Monday         —   The Hurt Locker

Ratatouille

The essentials
Metacritic:  96
Rotten Tomatoes:  96%

Pixar’s magic touch is evident in all its films, which blend great storytelling with the many wonders of new tools for animation.  Pixar hasn’t made a bad film, and made several on the short list of the very best.  Ratatouille (2007) is the one that critics favor, by a hair, as judged by Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes.  Why this film?  I suspect the critics have a soft spot for the story, which is about more than a rat in the kitchen with a passion for cooking.  It’s about art—what it takes to make art and why it’s important.  Art is something that critics think they know something about (and they should).  It’s a very good film, we all can agree, but perhaps the critics like it a shade more than everyone else.  (My four-year-old son seems to favor Cars, with WALL-E and Up close behind.  He may not know a lot about art, but he knows what he likes.)

Remy is the rat in Ratatouille.  He aspires to be a gourmet chef, an unlikely dream for a rat, but when the owner of the Parisian restaurant Gusteau’s dies, Remy’s talents in the kitchen prove indispensible to Linguini, the heir who lacks his father’s touch and for a time takes credit for Remy’s work.  The big night arrives, as food critic Anton Ego visits to review the restaurant.  The questions to be settled are whether Linguini and Remy can settle their differences to collaborate once again, who will get credit, and what will the critic do if he learns about the rat behind the ratatouille.  It’s an animated film for children—so the ending may be no surprise—but for viewers of any age it’s a fun ride to watch the action unfold.

Beyond the final credits
No other studio had as successful a run, with critics and at the box office, as Pixar this past decade.  (So successful, it was purchased by its onetime partner Disney in 2006.)  Pixar’s has the admiration, and is the envy, of the rest of the industry.  Since the motion picture academy began awarding Oscars for Best Animated Feature in 2001, Pixar has won four of eight (and Toy Story won a Special Achievement Award).  Each Pixar release has earned more than $300 million globally (more than $500 million, for films since 2001).  All ten of Pixar’s features have won their share of critical acclaim.  Since we are looking at Metacritic (MC) and Rotten Tomatoes (RT) ratings this week, here’s how Pixar has done.

Toy Story (1995)
                            MC:  92  |  RT:  100%
A Bug’s Life (1998)
                            MC:  77  |  RT:  91%
Toy Story 2 (1999)
                            MC:  88  |  RT:  100%
Monsters, Inc. (2001)
                            MC:  78  |  RT:  95%
Finding Nemo (2003)
                            MC:  89  |  RT:  98%
The Incredibles (2004)
                            MC:  90  |  RT:  97%
Cars (2006)
                            MC:  73  |  RT:  75%
Ratatouille (2007)
                            MC:  96  |  RT:  96%
WALL-E (2008)
                            MC:  93  |  RT:  96%
Up (2009)
                            MC:  88  |  RT:  98%

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Ratatouille (2007)
Voices of Patton Oswald, Brad Garrett, Lou Romano

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Famous Firsts
Tillie’s Punctured Romance:  At 73 minutes, this 1914 film was the first feature-length comedy.  Tillie was played by future Oscar winner Marie Dressler, appearing with Charlie Chaplin and Mabel Normand.  The film was directed by Mack Sennett and featured the Keystone Kops.  (W.C. Fields starred in a 1928 comedy with the same title, but the two films are unrelated.)

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