Mickey Mouse Mondays: Week 9: Mickey's Choo-Choo

The best moment of Mickey's Choo-Choo comes at the very beginning. We see a train chugging along down the track, happily making its own percussive soundtrack as it goes. Like the monkey drummer in The Karnival Kid, the music the locomotive generates is surprisingly contemporary. It calls to mind the rhythm bed that makes up German electronic pioneers Kraftwerk's landmark "Trans-Europe Express". The rest of the short is comprised of Mickey and Minnie making music once again with whatever objects they find before they are trapped on a calamitous runaway train car.

A lot of the gags here are recycled from previous shorts. Mickey plays the belly of a howling dog in the same gleeful, slightly sadistic fashion that he did the menagerie of Steamboat Willie. Later he checks his watch which is fastened underneath his skin, requiring him to "roll up his sleeve" in a fashion similar to the many casual mutilations of The Karnival Kid. A fantastic piece of animation in Mickey's Choo-Choo comes when the anthropomorphised locomotive slowly starts moving down the track. The animation clearly recalls the movements of a figure skater on the rink, pushing one foot back while leaning forward.

Running cow - Plane Crazy

Running cow - Mickey's Choo-Choo

Mickey's Choo-Choo is the first short to blatantly recycle animation from a previous film. This is not entirely unexpected considering the insane work schedule the small studio was undertaking. In 1929 alone Walt Disney released a dozen films. Keeping up with that work load must have been daunting. In Mickey's Choo-Choo we see a return of the beleagured bovine that previously attempted escape from Mickey and Minnie's wayward airplane in Plane Crazy. Here the cowering cow is besieged by the runaway train. The vehicle may be different but the motion and facial expressions are the same.

Viewing Verdict: Avoidable

Introducing The George Sanders Show!

News flash: writing is for suckers!

While I'm certainly sucker enough to continue typing away on this here sliver of cyberspace -- that is, when I finally get off my duff and start writing again -- I am henceforth diversifying my brand and reaching out to that coveted youth demographic by conquering that hip new technological wonder, podcasting! Yes, that's right, from now until the government finds out that all of my film rants are code for smashing the imperialistic state, I'll be yakking about films with my good pal, Sean Gilman, editor-at-large at the great The End of Cinema blog. We're calling the program The George Sanders Show because, well, we're morons. Each week we'll be discussing two thematically similar features, one old, one newer. We'll also jabber about recent news in the movie world, like how much Mark Wahlberg will be getting paid for voicing a pygmy in an upcoming DreamWorks cartoon, because that's what we live for. The inaugural episode is up now for your discerned palettes. It was recorded in Sean's kitchen which contains more Peanuts memorabilia than is probably healthy. Just setting the scene people.

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You can find more information about upcoming episodes at our shared page, thegeorgesandersshow.blogspot.com We can also be found lurking on the Twitter-sphere at -- excuse me, @GeoSandersShow. I'll post updates here as well when new episodes are released. This is truly some utter piffle.

Mickey Mouse Mondays: Week 8: The Karnival Kid

The Karnival Kid sees Mickey slinging hot dogs at a ramshackle fairground. He incurs the ire of a carnival barker whose showmanship is questioned by Mickey's unconsciously competitive and much more honest shouts. Mickey ends up moving his food cart elsewhere and he meets Minnie. The couple then play meet cute over a grill of living, dancing weiners. The short is slim on plot, almost entirely devoid of humor and unpleasant to listen to. The caterwauling that constitutes the two musical numbers is intentional but that does not make them any easier to stomach.

For the most part, The Karnival Kid is just plain weird. The aforementioned spotlight showered upon living hot dogs aside, a strange recurring gag throughout the short involves characters removing parts of their bodies or pulling back their skin. The first one to do it is Mickey, ever the gentlemen, who in lieu of tipping his cap to Minnie pulls off his ears along with the upper part of his cranium in deference to her. We even get a glimpse of the hollow hole inside his head. Shortly thereafter Minnie peels back her leg to retrieve money to purchase a hot dog. The gag is surreal and surprisingly disconcerting but the short doubles down and we get at least four such instances of casual mutilation, each version less effective than the last.

One promising element of the short is its inclusion of a larger character population. Earlier shorts, especially the last few, have seen mostly clones of Mickey and Pete as the tertiary characters. Here, the fairgoers represent the most diverse menagerie we have seen thus far. Of course, cats and mice still take center stage but we get glimpses of a monkey musician (whose beats sound surprisingly contemporary), as well as pigs, cows, and other barnyard animals. These characters have yet to be more fully integrated into the plots but their background appearances make the film's world feel that much larger and is a sign that the productions going forward will be richer.

Viewing Verdict: Avoidable

Mickey Mouse Mondays: Week 7: The Barnyard Battle

War is hell. It is chaotic, ugly, and dehumanizing. Rare is the film that manages to outweigh the death and destruction with the virtuous and noble. Certainly there are heroes but they too are forced to commit atrocities. The fifth Mickey Mouse short of 1929, The Barnyard Battle brings several iterations of war home, pitting a ragtag group of neighborhood mice against the hulking, vicious felines that stalk the land. The short depicts a sort of cinematic fever dream of war, incorporating imagery of the First World War - the trenches and inexhaustible barrage of bullets - as well as harkening back to the primitive reality of the Civil War, with a marching band playing "Dixie".

The film begins with enlistment and we see Mickey going through a demeaning physical, where he is stripped naked and his insides are throroughly examined by a sadistic superior. Deeming the recruit fit for death on the battlefield, the physician brands the cadet with a stamp on his buttocks. OK. Once the war begins, we get several wonderful shots of angled perspective, the two best being the introduction of the ugly, monstrous cats who stalk into the frame before swallowing it whole, and then the shot from the battlefield as bullets and cannonballs fly hither and thither, exploding directly in front of the camera, showering the screen with exploding boulders. The short once again showcases Disney's inherent grasp of music. At the onset, a bugler playing reveille strains so hard for the high notes that he loses weight. Later, holed up in a house with a submachine gun, Mickey runs out of ammo and must resort to using the keys of a nearby piano, which when fired plays a descending scale as the ivory flies out the window.

While The Barnyard Battle is short on plot, it crams a lot of scenes and gags into its seven minutes. The short feels much faster paced than those that preceded it. However, the best cinematic moment of the film is when the proceedings actually slow down. Pete has trapped Mickey in the house. Fearing for his life, Mickey finds salvation when he grabs a shotgun from a nearby wall. Unfortunately, the gun is nothing more than a toy, which Mickey learns only after pulling the trigger. Here the film slows down to a glacial pace as Pete towers over Mickey, fuming and preparing for revenge. Mickey meanwhile tries to play off the fact that he just tried to murder Pete. Whistling a tune, chuckling to himself and walking around in circles. The scene drags on well past the point of credulity - certainly Pete would have assaulted Mickey by this point - and turns into a sort mini-burlesque, with Mickey the hapless performer and Pete a captive audience.

Viewing Verdict: Worthwhile

Cinematic Capsules: March 2013

It's been ridiculously quiet around these parts as of late and for that I apologize. The main reason for the silence, besides the general busyness of this thing called life, has been that I've been watching Doctor Who almost exclusively for the last couple of months and so my film viewing has suffered immeasurably. And if there's one thing the Internet doesn't need more of is blogs dedicated to Doctor Who. All I will say is that I still think Sylvester McCoy is severely underrated.

Chillin'.

Some other housekeeping things that should be mentioned. I have recently joined Letterboxd and have written pithy things about the few films I have managed to squeeze in between City of Death and Remembrance of the Daleks. I am including those below as the capsule reviews for this month. I have yet to decide whether I will continue the Cinematic Capsules after this month or just use Letterboxd for that purpose, leaving this blog to the long term projects (I promise to start posting the Mickey Mouse Mondays more regularly) and for longer individual pieces. There is a handy dandy link to my Letterboxd profile under the Moving Sidewalks heading on the right of this page. And now without further ado, movies! Allons-y!

God Bless America (2012)

There are several laughs littered throughout writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait's revenge fantasy targeted at today's vacuous celebrities. The film is a mash-up of sorts of Harold and Maude, Idiocracy, and Natural Born Killers. Unfortunately, the bloody fun is all but derailed by a seres of strident soapboxing from the protagonists who soliloquize in scene after scene about the decline of Western civilization. Goldthwait's eye for satire, seen in his homages of reality TV, Fox News, and American Idol, is much stronger than his rants, which wouldn't sound out of place in a high schooler's notebook.

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)

The comparisons between Studio Ghibli and the Walt Disney Studios of old are legion, although frequently lazy or misguided. There are just as many differences between the two studios and styles as there are similarities. However, the comparison is particularly apt in the obsessive refinement and attention to detail that goes into every element of a production. Nowhere is that more apparent than in director Hiromasa Yonebayashi's adaptation of the juvenile novel The Borrowers. The Secret World of Arrietty boasts a fantastically realized and thoughtfully conceived world where little people live under the noses of humans. The sets and sound design are practically unparalleled in any contemporary production, animated or otherwise. Compared to a Miyazaki-directed feature, Arrietty is rather slight, but it is a breezy, enjoyable film.

Cinematic Capsules: February 2013

The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008)

Kim Jee-won's stylish Korean Western is a manic, visual thrill. Ever more outlandish action pieces burst off of the screen. It all becomes a bit too much as the film progresses and its the smaller moments that resonate the most. The film stars Song Kang-ho, whom we saw most recently in a very different type of picture. Here he plays a dimwitted bandit who comes across a treasure map coveted by some of the most dangerous outlaws in the land. The film is obviously indebted to its spaghetti western namesake as well as the rest of Sergio Leone's ouevre but there is another director whose influence outshines the famed Italian director. After a career spent aping Asian cinema, it's interesting to see a film that is inspired by Quentin Tarantino, rather than the other way around. Many shots in The Good, the Bad, the Weird come straight from the Tarantino canon (admittedly some of those may have been lifted in the first place as well.)

Argo (2012)

Ben Affleck's Argo, based on the true story of a CIA mission to rescue Americans during the Iranian hostage crisis by pretending they're a film crew, is the perfect Oscar movie. That is in the most banal, calculated sense of the term. It is like the film was constructed in a lab or something. The movie mixes the tired depiction of Hollywood as a vacuous cesspool of phoniness and smarm (that industry insiders apparently just gobble up) with the perceived edginess of incorporating a hot button issue (that the film stubbornly refuses to have any sort of meaningful interaction with). From start to finish it is a defiantly middlebrow production. For a thriller Argo isn't bad but there's never any sense of real danger. There is never a shred of doubt that Affleck's CIA operative will deliver the beleagured Americans back home to safety, or that he will reunite with his estranged family, or that the hostage who intially refuses to go along with the harebrained plan will end up being the one who saves the day. The most egregious part of the film is the lack of any sort of personality from any of the Iranian characters. They're all just faceless, angry, perpetually screaming ciphers, boogeymen for the disoriented American viewers to boo and hiss. Even the one Iranian who isn't out solely for the blood of the Great Satan, despite the fact that the we are only ever given evidence to the contrary before an unearned reveal, is sketched so remarkably thin that a perfunctory coda showing her send off feels like a scene from an entirely different film. Why bother?

Mickey Mouse Mondays: Week 6: When the Cat's Away

The design of Mickey Mouse is truly a wonder. Nowhere is this more apparent than in a short like When the Cat's Away which sees Mickey interacting with a number of other mice. To differentiate the secondary mice from the star their design is slightly more angular in the face and that makes all of the difference. These peripheral mice look like rodents while Mickey and Minnie on the other hand remain as cuddly as ever. In this minor but pleasant short, the mice have broken into the home of one Tom Cat who has drunkenly gone off with his shotgun for the day in a tantalizingly unanswered side story. Shaping a colleague into a key, Mickey unlocks the padlock and the mice run rampant in the house.

Tom must be some sort of musical virtuoso because he possesses a piano, violin and saxophone, as well as a robust record collection. The short plays out with the mice finding clever ways to play the instruments and culminates in one mouse twisting himself into a makeshift record player while another uses his tail and a funnel to amplify the sound. The best part of the short is Disney and Iwerks's attention to getting the musical bits synched correctly. Whether it is Minnie and Mickey dueting on the piano keys or a when a piece of swiss cheese is used as a roll of music in the player piano, the actions and presumably the notes are right. This difficult and subtle effect makes the short much more engaging. Another great thing about the film is that Mickey and Minnie are the correct proportions for their species. When they pop out of a hole on Tom's porch they are tiny little creatures. This small size adds to the charm of the early versions of the mischievous mouse. He remains endearing because he is so plucky. One would never mistake this David for a Goliath.

Mickey gets some decent moments here, the best being when he stretches his tail to avert a mouse trap which he eventually uses to bound up to a high shelf to retrieve the soon-to-be-musical cheese. (It's also a clever gag that the depiction of a mouse acquiring cheese does not result in the cheese being eaten.) However, the best moment in the short comes from one of the secondary mice. After Mickey and Minnie play their piano piece, the film cuts to a group of mice applauding enthusiastically, save for one, who for some reason is displeased with the performance. He stands defiantly in the front and interrupts the cheering with a loud raspberry, which he repeats offscreen as Mickey and Minnie plan their next number. This little guy is onscreen for perhaps five seconds and he steals the show!

Viewing Verdict: Worthwhile