Andrew chronicles some of the varied anthology films that have been released.
When we consider anthologies, we imagine a compendium of
several talents coming together in consensus to produce a collection of varied
works. Often it's a commission based
project helmed by a wealthy producer or curator of sorts, or sometimes the
directors themselves enact the project.
As an individual film, it's difficult to judge it as a whole because of
the varying quality of each segment depending on who was involved with it or
what the circumstances were at the time.
To say any one of the following entries is a good, solid movie would be
unfair because of how different the outlook and execution of each short
contained therein are from one another.
And yet, these kinds of movies are more common than not, especially in
the horror genre. This article will
attempt to purvey some of the more noteworthy attempts at the anthological film
and their varying degrees of artistic success.
Twilight Zone:
The Movie
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| "Donnie Darko doesn't know evil rabbits!" |
Simultaneously
a cult item and tragic chapter in Hollywood history, Steven Spielberg and John
Landis co-produced this cinematic reimagining of the beloved science fiction
television show The Twilight Zone. The idea would be to remake three notable televised
episodes with the first being an original piece written and directed by
Landis.
Due to a technical misfire while
Landis was filming his segment, a special effects explosion struck the tail
rotor of a hovering helicopter for a combat sequence, sending it spinning out
of control and crashing directly onto its lead actor Vic Morrow and two child
actors, killing all three instantly. The
disaster nearly ended the project there and then, as Spielberg and Landis
friendship dissolved over responsibility for the accident.
Spielberg’s newborn apathy for the project
resulted in a half-hearted segment you can’t entirely blame Spielberg for. Would you want to continue on a project that
needlessly claimed the lives of three people?
Though opening sadly on something of a somber note, the film abruptly
springs to life with Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes nightmare (Gremlins) and Mad Max director
George Miller’s terrifying reimaging of one of the show’s most beloved
episodes, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. For some viewers, the ideal would be to hit
the fast forward button and go straight to Miller's segment, but I also
recommend giving Joe Dante a fair watch, as he and George Miller tread a fine
line between Bugs Bunny goofiness and Ridley Scott Alien terror. Overall, this
is an uneven cult picture fraught with tragedy and two really solid segments
which begin halfway into the picture. It
manages to do its roots justice.
Tokyo!
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| "Is this where they put the drugs?" |
In one of
the more colorful, offbeat and strangely hilarious compilation pieces is the
2008 anthology film Tokyo!. The film is a Japanese production hiring
three non-Japanese directors to offer their unique and visually exciting takes
on the Tokyo region and its inhabitants.
The movie opens on a light romantic comedy about a Japanese couple
searching for an apartment, envisioned by Michel Gondry with his trademark
brand of playful visual effects ala Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
While
cute, it’s a mildly successful yarn that passes by with little notice. Enter French director Leos Carax with Merde and Denis Lavant’s introduction to
one of the director-actor duo’s greatest creations and best assets of Carax’s
eventual film, Holy Motors. For anyone who knows Holy Motors, they will recall the ‘sewer dweller’, a bizarre,
hostile creature who randomly pops out of the sewers to terrorize local
passerby. With one eye glazed over,
overgrown and unkempt facial hair, fingernails and toenails, dressed in a green
suit, he careens the streets of Tokyo grabbing cash and flowers to eat,
cigarettes to smoke while frightening Tokyo’s citizens. Carax’ offering is nothing short of absurdist
glee, with the chameleonic Lavant simply having a field day with the bizarre,
unearthly character. Is Merde a critique of the lunatic
spectacle of Japanese television (particularly game shows like Takeshi’s Castle), or are Carax and
Lavant up to something else entirely? Lastly
is Korean director Bong Joon-Ho (The
Host; Snowpiercer) with Shaking
Tokyo, an eclectic balance of quiet minimalism and the brazenly
bombastic. The one segment shot in
2.35:1 panorama, Shaking Tokyo zeroes
in on a hikikomori, or Tokyo-shut in, who has not left his apartment or shared
human contact in well over a decade.
Shaking
Tokyo could be read as the most Japanese of the segments, with its
elliptical, precise editing and symmetrical vistas of pizza boxes and books
neatly stacked together inside the protagonist’s perfect sanctuary. But then it shifts gears when earthquakes
crank the bass levels high to a deafening roar and the screen shakes
violently. With Shaking Toyko, Bong Joon-Ho seems to suggest compartmentalized,
self-imposed loneliness is an epidemic of Japanese culture and only a natural
disaster is capable of breaking the vicious cycle.
All in all,
Tokyo! is at once looney, goofy,
nonsensical, and strangely wise to the ways of Japanese life. It’s an outsider’s take on the rigid
lifestyles, behavioral patterns and worldview of a Japanese person, whether in
search of a place to reside, how to deal with the unexpected arrival of
complete and total disaster, or coming out of a self-imposed shell. Although Gondry’s segment feels too light at
times, Carax and Joon-Ho excel with their insight into Japanese fears and the
absurdity of said fears once they’re confronted. If nothing else, Carax’s segment sports both Tokyo! and Holy Motors’ finest moments of unbridled lunatic creativity. You can’t help but laugh at and, at times,
with the sewer dweller.
New York
Stories
New York Stories consists of three short
films chronicling life in New York City, in particular focusing on individuals
who are specifically of the area with sensibilities derived from their
whereabouts. In this unique, rarely seen
pairing of three of cinema's most celebrated masters, Martin Scorsese finds himself
at home in what some die-hard fans have proclaimed to be his most controlled,
technically astute and uncompromising work, Life
Lessons. With visually stunning
cinematography by Nestor Almendros, slow motion tracking shots, fast zooms and
crane shots, the camera is simply alive with movement. Nick Nolte as the smitten artist Lionel Dobie
gives a fantastic performance, conveying a wealth of angst, desperation, and
desire, all worn with a smug two-face.
Equally strong is Patricia Arquette as his assistant and former lover who
admires Lionel’s prowess while being disgusted by his suffocating
dominance. Scorsese has always been one
to know precisely which songs to program into his soundtrack, and with Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol Harum
seemingly on repeat, he has found the perfect aural metaphor for Lionel’s
tortured soul. With two more shorts
ahead, Life Lessons is the only one
you need to see.
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| "I. Am. So. Wasted. Right now." |
Things
unfortunately start to go downhill with the arrival of Francis Ford Coppola’s
nonsensical, infantile yarn Life without
Zoe. Loosely based on Eloise, Coppola’s segment follows Zoe, a
rich, over-privileged 12 year old girl living in a luxurious hotel with her
mother (Talia Shire from Rocky), a
fashion mogul and her father (Giancarlo Giannini), a world famous
flautist. Zoe mingles with her rich
friends, freely wandering the streets of New York without fear of harm, hangs
out at lush parties, and talks well beyond her age and maturity, making one
wonder if the makers of Baby Geniuses and
The Good Son looked here for
inspiration. Co-written by Coppola and his daughter
Sofia, Life without Zoe is like a bad
omen for those who didn’t see Jack
coming. Despite its glorious
cinematography by Vittorio Storaro and fantastical set pieces, this is a
completely bizarre and irritating fall from grace for the once great director
of The Godfather, The Conversation, and
Apocalypse Now. Intended to be charming and cute, it is as
staggeringly wrongheaded as it is pointless.
Lastly is
Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks about an
attorney (Allen himself) who cannot seem to shake the reigns of his overbearing
mother (Mae Questal from National
Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation). Overall
this is an amusing short with some rather uncanny twists (which I won’t reveal
here) and classic Woody Allen comedy. I
suppose therein lies the problem, that Allen is resting on his laurels and
gives us precisely what we expect of him.
Though lensed by Ingmar Bergman’s cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the
images consist of standard Woody Allen in that there isn’t much in the way of a
unique visual schema.
In
hindsight, I recommend New York Stories solely
on the basis of the Scorsese segment Life
Lessons. I hated Francis Ford
Coppola’s annoying infantile behavior, but sort of enjoyed Woody Allen’s comedy
of errors. All three segments are lensed
by great cinematographers, but beyond Almendros, their talents are
under-utilized, if not wasted. I’m
giving a strong rating to New York Stories
simply because Scorsese’s effort really is that great!
Eros
Released by
Warner Independent Pictures (largely produced by Michelangelo Antonioni), Eros is a flowery triptych attempting
again to respond to the notion of an erotic picture. What makes a film erotic as opposed to merely
pornographic or another nude romp? Each
director is allowed his own stylistic approach to respond to the question, with
varying results in quality depending on one's point of view. Inarguably the most praiseworthy segment is
its first, Wong Kar Wai's The Hand
(the order of shorts alternates in some territories), which depicts a 1960s
call girl and a unique bond she forms with her tailor. Much like Luis Bunuel's Belle De Jour, it purports eroticism isn't about the payoff but the
lead in to a sexual encounter. Rather
than diving headlong into carnality, it teases through implication, innuendo,
and the connection between the two characters.
The Hand notably sports Wai's
usual cornucopia of dark visual splendor with lighting and colors that seem at
once alive and highly artificial. Moving
on to Steven Soderbergh's Equilibrium,
Robert Downey, Jr. is an advertising executive who pours out his frustration to
a psychiatrist about a recurring erotic dream he can't quite grasp.
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| "This is not carry out. You call wrong number." |
Shot in black and white with splashes of
color for the dream sequences, Equilibrium
echoes the earlier art-house pretensions of Soderbergh's Kafka with Jeremy Irons, which was
entirely in archaic black and white save for a fantastical climax shot in full technicolor. Driven largely by conversation and musing
rather than any kind of genuine erotic journey or experience, it’s an
interesting, understated student effort from an otherwise experienced and
prolific filmmaker. Concluding with the
late, mute-stricken Michelangelo Antonioni's The Dangerous Thread of Things, we're treated to the film's first
real exposure of voluptuous nudity and fairly graphic sexuality onscreen
involving a married vacationing couple who encounter a sexy young woman they
soon ingratiate into their love lives. While
pleasurable to see Antonioni still directing his usual obsessions of ennui with
people wander amid sculptures and cityscapes with crusty buildings, you would
be hard pressed to find any of the brilliance found in Blow-Up, L'Avventura or La Notte. While attempting to purport real eroticism on
camera, we're left with an empty piece made by a really great artist at a point
in his career where he was clearly fading.
A shame Antonioni's legacy would be damaged by the appearance of this
final effort. Overall, if one were to
investigate Eros, the most curious
segment to satiate one's interest would no doubt be the Wong Kar Wai
effort. Then you can leave the remainder
of the film unwatched.
Four Rooms
In one of the more popular but
uneven anthological entries here is the 1995 Tarantino produced Four Rooms about a series of bizarre,
comic encounters a bellboy (played by Tim Roth) has in an elite Los Angeles
hotel on New Year’s Eve. Coming off of
the success of Pulp Fiction,
Tarantino enlisted the help of his friend Robert Rodriguez and fellow directors
Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell.
While this should promise to be a subversive, impish romp featuring
Tarantino’s one short feature film in his illustrious career, unfortunately Four Rooms only really begins to work
halfway into its running time. The film
opens with Allison Anders’ segment, The
Missing Ingredient, about a coven of witches trying to reverse a spell cast
on their goddess. Madonna and Lili
Taylor do what they can in a terrible segment that falls flat on its face and
nearly manages to sink the film before it even begins.
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| "Tim Roth. I know it was you that leaked the Hateful Eight script." |
The film’s second segment, Alexandre
Rockwell’s The Wrong Man, doesn’t
help elevate things much.
The segment never comes alive and most watching the film in theaters or
renting the tape wouldn’t think twice about abandoning it there and then.
Only when Robert Rodriguez takes the reigns
with The Misbehavers does the
subversive promise of Tarantino’s affiliation with Four Rooms become a reality. It’s a classical, slapstick comedy of errors that ends on a deliciously
dark comic note, and really the only reason to bother with Four Rooms, frankly.
Finally
we come upon Tarantino’s The Man from
Hollywood, about a film director (played by Tarantino of course) and a
group of friends who persuade the bellboy to participate in a strange bet. Let it be said that for those of you out
there who were disappointed in Death
Proof for its abundant dialogue and slow buildup, you’ve yet to be
disappointed by The Man from Hollywood,
i.e., Tarantino’s real “limp dick” of a movie.
All in all, Four Rooms will
entertain Tarantino completists but unfortunately, the general critical consensus
will agree only Rodriguez’s The
Misbehavers is worth a damn.
Destricted –
UK Version 2006
Is there an
art to pornography or explicit sexual content in modern cinema? An endless debate and can of worms reopened
again and again, the directors behind the commission based Destricted attempt to answer that question with their own unique
takes on artistic pornography.
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| "Is that the lead singer of Oasis? His breath is really bad!" |
Released
in the UK and US with different lineups and overlapping segments, it consists
of several short films of varying length depicting either a lecture on sex in
culture or abstract portraits of sexual activity. While a fabulous endeavor on paper purporting
a dose of freedom for some of cinema's most colorful provocateurs, this
anthological experiment is unfortunately a failure. Of the artists with real ideas behind their
porn shorts, it's the first three directors who leave a genuine mark: Larry
Clark, Gaspar Noe, and Matthew Barney.
Larry Clark's Impaled is part
interview project, part porno shoot with Clark interviewing each potential
actor for the shoot, finding out their comfort zones before the impending
payoff. It's an intriguing conversation
piece that provides actual empathy to the otherwise soulless copulation on
display.
Gaspar Noe's We Fuck Alone is a 30 minute strobe fest
concerning a man and woman masturbating with their respective sex toys. Noe's camera floats about the room with a
repetitive echo chamber of ambient sound and faintly heard cries of
passion. While Noe is always interesting
to behold viscerally, We Fuck Alone is
a nihilistic, redundant and overlong segment.
Lastly, Matthew Barney's frankly, perversely bizarre Hoist depicts a costumed man hoisted in
the air on some sort of harness as he rubs his member on a lubricated spinning
machine. To see it unfold firsthand is
as mind blowing as it is to simply read about it. Whatever the Cremasters director intended with Hoist is anyone's guess, but it isn’t something you can admit to
ever having seen before. Sadly, the rest
consist of either intellectual lectures that are positively unerotic and dull.
Marco Brambilla's Sync, for instance, consists of nothing more than jump cuts taken
from various pornos, edited to the sound of abstract drumming. Others like Sam-Taylor Wood's Death Valley, with a man frustrated
attempts to masturbate in an open desert, or Marina Abramovic's Balkan Erotic Epic, consisting of
various tales of people dry humping the ground or standing in line holding
their breasts or genitalia, simply reek of the dreaded philistine overgeneralization
often known as art house pretension. Shameful that all the press this anthology received
and its pseudo-intellectual de-eroticizing of porn into higher art only amounted
to two watchable segments that feel like they’re saying something.
Aria
An aria in
music is described as ‘any expressive melody usually, but not always, performed
by a singer’. Uniting 10 directors
together, Aria is a sumptuous love
letter to the grand opera, an eclectic mixture of the sublime, sexy and
cerebral. All in all, this is one of the
most ‘theatrical’ films I’ve come across, with the grandeur and spectacle of an
elaborate stage production. Each
director is allowed to interpret each given aria however they please with
varied length, intercut with a stage performer (John Hurt) strolling through an
ornate opera house, working his way towards a grand finale.
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| "Someone give me donuts!!!!" |
Most of the shorts come and pass
with little notice, though Jean-Luc Godard’s bodybuilding segment is completely
irritating. Rigoletto by Julien Temple, a colorful romp concerning a hapless
couple (Buck Henry and Beverly D’Angelo) unaware they are mutually cheating on
one another, is the highlight of the film.
It even manages to sneak in an Elvis Presley impersonator signing opera,
a surreal sight that can’t help but inspire chuckles. Things get genuinely sexy with Elizabeth Hurley and Bridget Fonda making their film debuts disrobing
before the camera, although their scenes contain loveliness as opposed to carnality
or salaciousness.
Scenes of Fonda making
love were used to
advertise the film’s poster art, giving uninitiated viewers the promise of porn
as opposed to opera. A shame such a
painterly segment within a sumptuous film was reduced to illicit tantalizing. One of the film’s most visually exciting
offerings is Puccini’s Turandot as realized by Ken Russell. Those familiar with The Devils will recall
the opening scene with a scantily clad Louis XIII being crowned before dancing
about the stage.
Overall, Aria is not a piece of linear or conventional storytelling by
any means. It’s a musical revue
showcasing some of the highlights of the grand opera as seen through the eyes
of its commissioned auteurs. While it
might be too artsy for some viewers, it’s also filled with splendid segments
about the follies of love that will certainly delight others. I’ll probably be sharing Julien Temple’s
hilarious segment with the Elvis impersonator lip synching Rigoletto for quite
some time.
Boccaccio
Spanning 3
½ hours, Boccaccio '70 is a whimsical
1962 anthology of love stories by four of Italy's most celebrated
filmmakers. Intended as a comic romp of
female empowerment, the film takes its name from Giovanni Boccaccio and loosely
traverses the framework of his epic The
Decameron, chronicling a series of love stories ranging from delightful to
downtrodden.
The first act, Renzo & Luciana, directed by Mario
Monicelli, is a light yarn about a newlywed couple who do their best to shield
the news from their mutual employer as their sleazy boss flirts grotesquely
with Luciana. Cut previously from
domestic release, the segment showcases a time capsule of modern Italy unseen
by many, including a wonderful aside where the couple attends crowded movie theater
showing a vampire flick. The sold out
screening forces spectators to stand in the aisles, something which rarely ever
happens in modern movie theaters.
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| "Why, yes. I was looking at her wondrous breasts." |
Federico Fellini then takes the reigns with inarguably his greatest
achievement to date, The Temptation of
Doctor Antonio. An uptight, God-fearing
type-A prude of a middle-aged man spends his existence raiding couples making
love in their cars, overthrowing porn shops and finally waging war on a milk
billboard featuring Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg. Soon, however, the billboard begins to truly
drive him mad as he imagines Ekberg coming to life as a giantess (think Attack of the 50 Foot Woman) chasing him
through a miniature Italy, replete with oversized set pieces and special
effects. Ekberg's impish temptation of
the little man is as hilarious as it is magical, and even manages to prove one
of the puritan's theories about double-entendre to be correct. No stranger to Fellini (Ekberg famously strutted
about Fellini's La Dolce Vita),
Ekberg brings to vibrant life all the anxieties and fears men have about the
opposite sex and questions whether or not purification really is living.
Then the film segues into a more serious,
sober tone with Luchino Visconti's The
Job, which tells the tale of a woman (Romy Schneider) who is forced to come
to grips with her husband's public infidelities with prostitutes and tries to
prove her independence while testing the remnants of her husband’s
commitment. Made just before completing
his masterwork The Leopard, it’s a
sober piece driven entirely by dialogue as husband and wife meander through the
ornate interiors of their mansion as servants assist the woman with her cats
and bath. Of all the segments in Boccaccio ’70, Visconti’s is the most
matter of fact and, in its own way, the most damning.
Reverting back to the bawdy whimsy of
Fellini’s segment is the last entry by Vittorio De Sica, The Raffle. Starring Sophia
Loren at the height of her big screen glamour, The Raffle tells the story of a woman working a circus shooter who
inadvertently arouses the passions of a growing mob of horny old men when she
offers favors to the winners of a raffle.
The Raffle recalls the same
degree of playful sexual humor such as when the wild bull doesn’t take kindly
to Loren’s bright red dress, forcing her to disrobe before a crowd of
onlookers. It’s a fitting and upbeat end
to a long journey through Italian architecture, culture and some of the
cinema’s most electrifying sex symbols of the time, as told by four of Italy’s
finest directors. Of the anthologies
listed here, Boccaccio’70 is this
writer’s personal favorite.
-Andrew Kotwicki