If Animation Has a Name, Then it Must Be Charles M. Jones

"I’m not particularly known throughout the world for being a conductor of oceans, but I bet I’m one of the best. "

Last week, TCM broadcast the original documentary Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood, and it was one of the more illuminating half hours of television that I've recently seen. Using a technique similar to that of the recent Oscar nominated short I Met the Walrus and The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation (the creators of the latter short made this film), the documentary animates the recollections of childhood that Jones describes, giving his stream of consciousness explanations of his life an added twinge of poignancy. Also, the cartoon figure that the film uses as a stand-in Jones as a child was drawn by Jones himself. It's a self-portrait in motion.

The film uses segments of an interview conducted with Jones before his death in 2002 to get to the core of his childhood, which helps illuminate why his characters have such universal appeal. They aren't just cartoon archetypes, they represent a portion of his psyche. This is why the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series have had such continuing impact; they aren't just strings of jokes and sight gags, the cartoons are representative of a world view that was shaped by experience.

"When I was two years old I think the event that occurred then probably had a great deal to do with my becoming an animator. Because I fell off a second story back porch on to a hunk of cement. I’m sure that it jostled my brain cells out of any hope that I would be a very logical child."

Watching Jones hand draw the Looney Tunes characters is one of the great joys of this documentary. It adds a personal touch to the characters we're all so familiar with. Jones talks about how these characters are, in essence, a part of the very fabric of his being.

"Pepe, he assumes immediately that he’s irresistible, so that’s actually the opposite of what I felt. I felt I was very resistible. People ask me about whether I’m some of the characters like Pepe. Of course I am, but I’m Daffy Duck, too."

It's this personal touch that separates Jones from the rest. Jones was so obsessive about his work that he believed that a single frame could make the difference between a good joke and a bad joke, and he would go through his films a frame at a time until they were just right. He treated his form like it was music, with every frame being a note in a comedic symphony. His films played with the synchronization of senses that Disney's Silly Symphonies had helped popularize, but I think the Warner Brothers shorts went even deeper with that core idea, because they played with that concept of image and its relation to music in unique, unexpected, and consistently hilarious ways.

The tone that runs through the documentary is one of poignant melancholy. One gets the impression that Chuck Jones was one of those people who had it all figured out, and we were lucky to get a glimpse of that understanding through his work. Many of his films stand out as the very best of the Warner Brothers cartoon catalog, which would put them among the best films ever made, and he among the great film makers. It's incidental that his understanding of humanity took the form of slap-stick one reel cartoons, that's merely the way in which he related to the world. "If I can find the quirk to something, I think I can understand a little bit about it." Perhaps Jones was a forebearer to Wes Anderson in that sense.

Being the shameless self promoter I am, I'd like to use this post as a chance to formally announce what I hope will be a recurring series for Medfly Quarantine, the Looney Tunes Project; where myself, my darling co-curator (still waiting on a contribution from her...), and anyone who feels like contributing will write up a Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies short. Be sure to check back for updates.

Cinema Overload!

I suppose the feeling of overload is something that everyone can identify with. School, work, life in general is just busy busy busy. Hell, this blog was supposed to be a team effort, but my cohort(s) have abandoned me and have left me flying solo, at least for now. So even the blog, a hobby, has become something that I'm lagging behind on and pushing aside. So now, I've started a diversionary post from the longer piece I've been working on, and blogging is in itself a diversion from lame things like obligations. Fuck that.

The point is (I think) that work can have us feeling overwhelmed, but us movie lovers know of a different kind of overload--- and that is cinematic overload. Admittedly, it's a more pleasurable form of stress than our day-to-day obligations, but it's no less daunting. Especially in our digital world, where film lovers have more access to the medium than ever before. Livin' in the future has its perks. But, again, it's also a daunting task. A friend of mine likened it a banquet which can never be depleted, no matter how much you stuff your face.

There continue to be, and always has been, a finite number of methods with which to view a film. In the olden days, films could only be seen at the theaters. Then television came about. Then home video. Now, cinephiles can watch movies in a multitude of ways; we can watch them through the constantly expanding library of available DVDs, on the computer, or even on a fucking phone.

So, allow me to count the ways that I get exposed to film. First, there's ol' faithful, the movie theaters. Movie theaters have a serious attitude problem. They try to tell me when I can or can't watch something, demanding that I fashion my schedule to THEIR convenience. Un-fuggin'-believable. The nerve of that guy.

Then, of course, there's television broadcasts. Like a movie theater's kid brother, it also demands that you arrange your life around when they're broadcasting something. Though it's attitude is less severe, as television doesn't demand that you make a special trip out of your nice, comfortable home to go see it. Though, with the exception of TCM, watching a movie on television can be a painful experience for movie lovers. Not only do we have to contend with commercials structuring a film like a television show (though it seems some movies are structured with the commercial break in mind!), but more often than not the movie is cropped to fit television's aspect ratio. In addition to that, since television knows how stupid we are it feels the need to not only remind us what channel we're watching, but also what movie we're watching and what inane, vacuous program comes on later (David Bordwell discusses the history of bugs here).

Then, of course, there's home video. This is undoubtedly where the great majority of us see most of the films we watch, which is a bit of a double edged sword. The difference between seeing a good film projected versus on a television is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it (to avoid using a more, shall we say, grotesque analogy), but home video has given us unprecedented access to the medium. Whereas in the past, film watchers had to make due with what was out in first-run, second-run, or revival; we're now all in the fortunate position of being able to decide what we watch and when we watch it. Services like Netflix and Blockbuster Online have only made it that much easier. So, if I'm so inclined, I can have a double feature of Bambi and Cannibal Holocaust.

But the concept of home video has been extended in the last few years. Home video was created out of people's desire to have things accessible at their convenience, and now technology is helping to facilitate this. Netflix, at no extra charge, offers an 'instant watch' service whereby DVD quality films can be streamed over the internet. They expanded this concept with a box from Roku, that streams films over the internet directly into your television.

I'm in no way complaining, but all these venues with which to see films can get a little overwhelming! My DVR teeters between 80 and 90 percent full virtually constantly, as I probably have about 35-40 movies recorded off TCM on it at any given time (many of which aren't available on DVD. Have I mentioned how I love these people so?). Between my postage queue and my instant queue on Netflix, I'm waiting on nearly 500 movies (and those are just the movies I've had the time to add). It feels like there's never enough time to catch something in the theater (due to the market being geared more towards home video, some film's literally get a 'blink-and-you-miss-it' theatrical release), and I'm sure we can all relate to the feeling of having a stack of unwatched DVDs. There simply aren't enough hours in the day (nor enough days in a lifetime, but that is much too depressing a thought).

So how do we prioritize? Is it even something we consciously think about? What we watch, and when we watch it, seems to be precipitated by circumstance as much as anything. Case in point: as I sat down to start this post the other day, I got caught up in Jules Dassin's Brute Force on TCM. I was familiar with the name but had never seen one of his films before, and immediately found myself turning away from and ignoring the computer all together, completely riveted by the film. I had turned on TCM because I knew Budd Boetticher's Ride Lonesome was going to be broadcast, and I wanted to catch that one again. But Brute Force was not on my immediate radar (though I see Film Forum in Manhattan has an upcoming Jules Dassin tribute, which I'll try to catch some of), but it kind of chose me, and I'm all the more enriched because of it. I guess it's something you just have to take as it comes.

31 Days of Boredom

Like hurricane season, the flu, or even the Oscars themselves; every year TCM commences with its annual 31 Days of Oscar. I'd imagine this is the time of year when their ratings are highest, playing a slew of canonized classics with hugely iconic stars. It's just about the only time of year I notice people that I wouldn't normally classify as classic film watchers seem to tune in to TCM with relative consistency.

It's also uniformly their least interesting month, schedule wise. Especially after the brilliantly inventive schedules TCM has had the last few months which included everything from Hitchcock to Abel Gance and Ford to Tourneur, as well as a slew of films unavailable on Region 1 DVD:

Nick Ray's first collaboration with Humphrey Bogart, Knock on Any Door, undoubtedly inferior to their second collaboration In a Lonely Place, but still worth a look for any fan of Ray. It's a two-fold narrative: one, a rehash of They Live By Night (a better film, I think), and the other being Bogart's relationship with the 'hood' character. Bogart plays his lawyer, which allows for lots of moralistic preaching in courtroom scenes about how his failings are really society's failings.

There was King Vidor's Show People, released the same year as the seminal The Crowd, and nearly as great a film. It has a serio-comic tour-de-force performance from Marion Davies, who will always tragically seem to live under the shadow of William Randolph Hearst. While he was undoubtedly driving for her success, what stands the test of the time is her incredible screen presence and ability to flawlessly weave comedy and drama into a rich tapestry of emotion. Plus, it has a cameo by Vidor, playing himself. A real travesty that both his masterpieces from that banner year 1928 are currently unavailable, and I know of no plans for them to be released any time soon.


There was also Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown, the first time he's ever disappointed me. Somewhat simplistic and turgid Americana that reminded me of Hawks' Sergeant York; pictorially effective but subtextually vacant. Still, the director of Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and especially Out of the Past deserves better, and any fan of those films should check this out for many of Tourneur's usual breathtaking compositions. This film is interesting for its unusual turn for Western star Joel McCrea, as this strikes me as one of the beginning of the 50s answer to the Westerns of the past, not films that focused on action so much as evoking a feeling of Americana and deriding the violence in the films that many of the Westerns of the 30s and 40s purported. High Noon, 3:10 to Yuma, and even The Searchers could be seen as examples of this different spin on a classic American construct.

Joseph Cotten gives a somewhat phoned in performance in Budd Boetticher's The Killer is Loose, an incredibly economic noir-thriller, which borrows the psycho-sexuality of Hitchcock and gives it a rough, exploitation edge (Hitchcock would of course give himself a rough, exploitation edge in Psycho a few years later). Still, it benefits from Cotten's Star power and Boetticher's brilliant staging, which always underlines the drama and establishes a lot about the mental state of the character.

I'm not saying all the aforementioned films are great, but they are noteworthy for film fans because they are hard to find elsewhe re. Someday, someone really should write a long diatribe about TCM's invaluable, jaw-dropping contribution to film history and film preservation.....

As The Criterion Collection must put out the occasional Michael Bay film, so must TCM do its 31 Days of Oscar. I'm not knocking any of these films in any way, I'm just saying the schedule by its very nature is going to be more confined to a certain pool of films; many of which your average cinephiles saw a great majority of the March schedule by the time they were twelve. TCM is great for its variety; not everything they play is a highly regarded, prestige classic, and that makes their treasure chest of an archive all the more alluring. They're so all-encompassing that, like the Criterion Collection, you get spoiled and demand that they stick to the same consistency of quality and variety. Still, there are plenty of things to look out for this month:

King Vidor's Comrade X and The Citadel
Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka
Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933
Vincente Minnelli's Designing Woman and Madame Bovary
Paul Musurzky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice
Zoltan Korda's The Four Feathers, The Jungle Book and Sahara (the last of which with the always agreeable Humphrey Bogart)
Michael Curtiz's Mildred Pierce
Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life
Hal Ashby's Bound for Glory and The Last Detail
George Cukor's David Copperfield and Pat & Mike
Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol
John Huston's Moulin Rouge
Louis Malle's Pretty Baby
Istvan Szabo's Mephisto
Jean Renoir's The Southerner
Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan
Frank Borzage's Three Comrades

Do these films make up for selections like Moonstruck, Sophie's Choice, Hannah and Her Sisters, and Awakenings? Almost. Still, I'll be looking forward to March, which looks like it's going to hit the ground running.

My memory doesn't recall if they've had themes in the past; I always thought that TCM arranged them by the categories the Academy Awards did. This year they've decided to a simultaneously lame and hilarious College-theme, with films organized by 'Department'. Film-square extraordinaire Robert Osborne is the so called "Dean of Ceremonies". Somehow, I think TCM may have found the perfect shoe to fit Osborne's tweed personality.


Like college itself, I'll attend enthusiastically, but perhaps finding myself day-dreaming during some of the 'required' courses.

TCM's full schedule can be found here .