2004: The Year of Fun
Anybody who cares about movies should love this January. Contrary to perennial cliché, the past week premiered films more surprising and stimulating than December's bloated and unpalatable prestige flicks. Torque and Teacher's Pet slipped in under the fence, offering imagination and pleasure with relatively little hype and absolutely no pretense. Even the somber Iranian social critique Crimson Gold exemplifies filmmaking of unusual seriousness, complementing the real-life commitment in the re-released The Battle of Algiers.
P.J. Hogan's marvelous Peter Pan also figures in my January count, having missed it during the holiday rush. (Too bad critics who saw it neglected to bring the news; they'd shot their wads at The Return of the King and were too bleary-eyed to appreciate Hogan's superior uses of enchantment.) Torque and Teacher's Pet almost feel like palate-cleansers.
An action movie deluxe and a cartoon extraordinaire, they appear as reminders of why you liked movies in the first place. Each film is a marvel of visual wit?the daily world imaginatively transformed. That's a quality often taken for granted by plot-obsessed filmgoers unaccustomed to appreciating the way movies look and feel. To dismiss Torque and Teacher's Pet because of their genres would only display self-denying pseudo-sophistication. (Calling Torque mindless is like complaining Jason Kidd isn't Bertrand Russell.) You don't get filmmaking this spectacular at Sundance?and lately not at the cineplexes, either. After lugubrious experiences like The Last Samurai and The Triplets of Belleville, I hadn't expected to like these newest adventure and fantasy films, but I beheld their insouciance with wide-eyed delight.
The chrome credits in the title sequence of Torque start the fascination. As if lifted off the gas tank of the hero's V-Twin engine Aprilia Mille RSV motorcycle (a dazzling Italian import), the gleaming credits reflect both the rider and the roadside zooming past him. Movie credits are non-diegetic, yet these infiltrate the story that unfolds. Director Joseph Kahn uses emblematic credits to visualize the real world and its dizzying stylization.
Torque is a B-movie in the Xbox era. Decades ago, films like this tended toward morality tales (Walter Hill perfected the tradition in his pulp epics The Warriors and Streets of Fire), but now the genre has been distilled to playful gestures (the challenge, the chase) and to fictional stereotypes (the loner, the badass). Torque leaves the comparative realism of 2001's sleekly-designed The Fast and the Furious in the dust. Kahn, another music video ace, has done the near improbable: In this debut film, he transitions to features?MTV vocabulary intact?but without degrading the big screen. He shows that imagery, motion and editing must be clever?not merely fast. His understanding of cinematic composition avoids the messy incoherence of Moulin Rouge or anything by Michael Bay.
Kahn outdoes McG by making a clear-cut and short McMovie. Torque's images explode before your eyes?huge!?which, aesthetically, is as good as a fresh idea expanding in your head. The action-movie motifs are not new?outlaw cyclist Cay Ford (Martin Henderson) outruns rival gangs and the FBI in pursuit of a grail-like bike?yet Kahn makes the clichés scintillating through cartoon-tv commercial-music video shorthand. Hero Ford (he's dubbed "Dawson Creek, the white boy") boasts the long-haired, light-eyed, Hollywood-Jesus look in a Ramones t-shirt. His adversary, always referred to by his nervy full name Henry James (played by Matt Schulze), wears a Motorhead t-shirt. When their women, Monet Mazur and Jaime Pressly, face off, the females shout their taunts respectively in front of gigantic Mountain Dew and Pepsi ads. We're in the poster-art world of trademarks, simply signifying pop culture's primacy. Ford struts by a graffiti-scrawl that reads "Weargasm" which is either product-placement or an edict, yet no more serious than the "Carpe Diem" inlay on his red and black leather jacket.
Only a humorless prig would be appalled by this. More interesting than the pastel Neverland of Elephant, it is, face it, definitive. Torque's emphasis on kinetics connotes an ease with capitalist perks that amounts to nonchalance. The "need for speed" that Tom Cruise serenaded in Top Gun no longer justifies militarism, but reveals today's apolitical condition. You could call it ignorant or you can admit its amazement: A shot of two bluffing bikers (Ice Cube and Fredro Starr) catches their competition in either side of a reflecting knife blade. One fight scene ends with a biker's weary head pinned against a wall blaring the slogan "YIKES!" Of Torque's several wild chases, the most astonishing is between Ford and Henry James (dig that!) motoring their bikes atop a train. This won me over. Kahn, the neo-aesthete, joins a great movie tradition, evoking its locomotive/cinematic origins (mechanical and artistic discoveries from the time of Ford and James). In this single sequence, Torque's pop references go from The Great Train Robbery to Spies, The Lady Vanishes to North by Northwest, Barocco to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to Mission: Impossible. Those Who Love it will want to ride this train again.
Throughout Torque, Kahn achieves an exhilarating combination of Pop and Art, but not like Tarantino, who has confused that modernist concept. QT doesn't have Kahn's innocence, nor that pop stylist's purity that connects to Rauschenberg and Rosenquist. Unlike QT's martial arts genocide in Kill Bill, Kahn (who is Korean-American) shows an interest in social antagonism (black and white racist subcults fight over drugs and bikes) that resolves all misunderstanding through the common cause of motor power. Speed gives the illusion of capitalist liberty?the very thing that draws multiculti teens to this kind of movie.
Pop art on this level isn't merely about character or social frustration but about the enthusiasms?and mysteries?that people hold in common. Every scene is in cultural code, as when Ice Cube jealously catches his girlfriend eyeing another biker. (Her charge "I love you!" asserts her sexual prerogative but defies his machismo with her sincerity. Very cool.)
Kahn's imagery, shot by Peter Levy, stays similarly optimistic, as iridescent as a soap bubble in sunlight. You gotta smile at it. He keeps the hard-driving action sporty: Cars swerve on the highway like pinball levers; a bike race though a palm tree grove is strangely paradisiacal. In one terrific chase, Kahn pans leftward following an FBI helicopter in the distance so that it seems to fly along the nickel-plated barrel of a gun in the foreground. Usually only other filmmakers attuned to visual wit appreciate this kind of cinema, so I'll speak for Godard on this: Kahn forges the values of militarism, technology, masculine will?and the motorcycle showroom?into big-screen ecstacy.
Spot, who wears a Jughead beanie, horn-rimmed glasses and toothy grin, wants to be human and Teacher's Pet answers his wish by parodying Disney's famous film of the puppet that longed to be a real boy.
Pinocchio was the highpoint of Disney's 1940s naturalistic animation (matched only by Fantasia and Dumbo). Here, it's deliberately redrawn as "crude." Every figure has a thick black outline. Naturalism is dropped, movement is simplified and sentiment is toughened. Spot, already a sarcastic mutt, becomes more so when, as Scott, he goes from "a dumb animal into a dumb human." I caught the significance of this iconoclastic approach in one of Teacher's Pet's fleeting background details?a Rouault portrait hanging on a wall. Baseman, director Timothy Bjorklund and writers Bill and Cheri Steinkellner subvert Disney-style illustration to reconnect with other, more adventurous art styles.
That moment of the Blue Fairy granting Pinocchio's wish?a classic redemption scene?was re-staged and elevated in Spielberg's A.I. Here it's further reinterpreted in Spot's nightmare about his transformation by the mad scientist Dr. Krank, whose previous failed experiments resulted in an alligator-boy and mosquito-girl (Pinocchio plus The Island of Dr. Moreau).
But Teacher's Pet doesn't turn poignance into grotesquerie. It is always comic?fantastic in the way Disney Studios surrendered in favor of bourgeois naturalism.
Look at Leonard's Sno-Cone-colored face, or the town's smiley-face sun with a protuberant nose, or Spot in drag, lamenting, "I ain't no Blue Fairy! What I have to go through to become a real live boy!" This antic tour de force is livelier than a Disney film has been in decades. It recalls scholar Esther Leslie's description in Hollywood Flatlands (Verso Books) that Eisenstein loved Disney animation because it "united with the fantastic, the alogical, the sensuous order." When Spot/Scott breaks into original showtunes (allowing Nathan Lane's Spot/Scott voice to be the film performance of his career), Teacher's Pet takes on another layer of metaphor and transformation. Less polite than any other Disney product, it's as vital as its rivals (and more delightful than The Triplets of Belleville or the utterly routine Finding Nemo).
With the canvas-like textures of its backgrounds and decidedly uncute caricatures, Teacher's Pet imbues professional animation with the energy of primitive, underground illustration. It achieves the promise of American Splendor's animated segments where low-life blurred into alternative humanist art?except that Baseman and Bjorklund waggishly depict human folly in the aspirations of an ironic and irreverent talking dog. The charm of Teacher's Pet comes from reviving Disney's original anarchic approach to animation. It shows human nature, as Esther Leslie puts it, "without preconception and without convention, such that nature becomes freedom rather than necessity." Fun?remember that??has returned to the cinema.