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Saturday, January 11, 2025

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Arts + CultureMoviesScreen Grabs: Animated delights from Daft Punk and Wallace...

Screen Grabs: Animated delights from Daft Punk and Wallace and Gromit

From the far-flung stars to cozy Lancashire. Plus: Fish out of water in the 'The Black Sea,' pugilist nostalgia in 'Day of the Fight'

Animated features remain among the most popular products in the entire film industry, and much of their ostensibly live-action competition is so heavy on computer-generated FX, distinctions between the two are increasingly irrelevant. But it’s hard for some of us to get all that excited about new ‘toons when most of them are like this year’s hits Moana 2, Inside Out 2, Despicable Me 4, Kung Fu Panda 4, The Garfield Movie, and so forth—recyclings of franchise formulas that generally weren’t all that fresh in the first place.

This week, however, brings some welcome exceptions to that rule. One is the 4K remaster of Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem, a “visual album” completed two years after the release of Daft Punk’s 2001 Discovery. It was mostly seen in individual segments, as music videos or on Cartoon Network. The project was a collaboration between the French electronic music duo and Japan’s Toei Animation. I’m not a huge fan of EDM or anime, to be honest. But this dialogue-free sci-fi fantasy adventure is a delight—and I’ll admit the music is at least sometimes pretty great, too.

It’s all very meta, with a quartet of blue-skinned aliens kidnapped from their home planet (where their band is big) by nefarious Earthlings, who re-engineer them into flesh-toned purveyors of corporate pop that is very, very big. The indictment of music industry’s corruption and soullessness eventually encompasses a Gothic/Satanic explanation stretching back centuries. This trope-heavy narrative, like the rainbow-hued visuals, isn’t meant to be taken seriously—the whole package is pure audiovisual candy, as ironical as it is energetic.

Running just over an hour, Interstellar will be followed by several equally imaginative classic Daft Punk videos, including Spike Jonez’s “Da Funk,” Michel Gondry’s “Around the World,” Seb Janiak’s “Burnin’,” Roman Coppola’s “Revolution 909,” and Warren Fu’s “Infinity Repeating.” The program commence a regular run at SF’s Roxie Theater on Thu/12 (more info here).

The high-gloss impersonality of so much computer animation makes you grateful for the more traditional techniques—stop-motion and claymation—practiced by the English Aardman studios. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl is the second feature outing for the well-loved titular characters who live at 62 West Wallaby Street in Wigan, Lancashire, who’ve been around since 1989’s Oscar-nominated short A Grand Day Out.

This time long-suffering “man’s best friend” Gromit (a beagle) has his paws full handling even more trouble than usual from oblivious inventor Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead). The latter has invented a robot-gnome “helper” that grows considerably less helpful—indeed, becomes a neighborhood-terrorizing army—after it’s reprogrammed by the duo’s poker-faced penguin nemesis Feathers. Handily balancing cozy Ealing-style village character comedics alongside the need for spectacle in an enterprise of this length, Vengeanceis an antically charming addition to a series capable of keeping viewers of all ages amused. It opens in limited US theaters Wed/18, then begins streaming on Netflix January 3.

If your taste in animation runs towards the more abstract and experimental, SF Cinematheque is conveniently offering “Lewis Klahr: Circumstantial Pleasures” Thurs/12 at The Lab, with the artist in person. While he’s been crafting screen work in the collage idiom for nearly half a century, this program offers just two more recent pieces. 2007’s 17-minute Antigenic Drift is a meditation on medical themes that was his first digital film. The 2000 epic Circumstantial Pleasures, an hour-plus riot of manipulated found materials, live action and diverse techniques in six parts whose non-narrative progress offers a sort of visual time capsule of pre-COVID errata. That pandemic indeed squelched its exhibition history—the Cinematheque’s showing will only be its second, the first having the ill luck to happen just days before lockdown. More info is here.

Some more conventional features opening this Fri/13 celebrate iconoclasm in the form of lone heroes seeking a second chance, and/or redemption for past deeds. In Crystal Moselle and Derrick B. Harden’s The Black Sea, Khalid (Harden) is veteran Brooklyn bullshitter still expecting to be the Next Big Thing in one way or another…though all he’s done so far is burn a lot of bridges while getting nowhere. He accepts an unlikely offer to fly to Bulgaria from a woman “met” on Facebook—she’s been told “a Black man’s touch can heal you,” and is willing to pay this random dude for that favor. Unfortunately, upon arriving in her little coastal town, he discovers she’s just died from whatever he was supposed to cure her of. Her family has no idea who he is, and is certainly not about to fork over the $10,000 she’d promised.

So Khalid is stuck, without money, shelter, relevant language skills, or a way home. Soon he doesn’t even has his passport, which gets lifted one night while he’s sleeping on the beach. He does manage to befriend travel agent Ina (Irmena Chickikova), the former girlfriend of Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), who’s what passes for a bigwig hereabouts. The latter puts him to work in some servile labor, though it’s soon clear that will come with a degree of exploitation/humiliation our protagonist can’t swallow. But a natural penchant for hustle soon proves more welcome here than it was back home, leading to his opening a cafe with Ina.

The Black Sea is a pleasant fish-out-of-water story that seems primarily designed as a vehicle for Harden. He’s a natural, even if ideally he might be taken better in smaller doses—or with better material. The presumably semi-improvised script (no writers are credited) is thin, without any real ending. Still, the film’s goodwill and scenic attractions make it a sort of vicarious 96-minute holiday on an unfamiliar balmy shoreline. It opens at the Roxie.

Meanwhile back in Brooklyn—well, 35 years or so prior—Mike (Michael Pitt) is facing a Day of the Fight in English actor Jack Huston’s first feature as writer-director. “Irish Mike” used to be a big-league boxer. But that was a long time ago, before the prison sentence over a tragic DUI accident that he’s just been freed from. Now he’s orchestrated a comeback bout against the current world middleweight title holder at Madison Square Garden. But in the hours preceding that event, he seeks out awkward, repentant interactions with old acquaintances, as if he were saying goodbye. There’s his foul-mouthed trainer (Ron Perlman), a loyal uncle (Steve Buschemi), a childhood friend turned priest (John Magaro), his embittered ex-wife (Nicolette Robinson), and his once abusively dominating father, now reduced to wheelchair-bound senility (Joe Pesci).

Some of these interactions are touching. Day looks great in Peter Simonite’s B&W photography, and some of the soundtracked musical choices add further grace notes. But this is basically a more pretentious, arted-up recycling of sentimental cliches you’ve seen a million times before, in everything from The Champ to RockyFat City and Raging Bull, with our monosyllablic protagonist a doomed, saintly “former champion with the heart of a lion,” as one character duly spells it out. While the present day is meant to be 1989, flashbacks to Mike’s childhood look like the 1940s, for no reason beyond that hewing closer to a stock celluloid notion of “nostalgia.”

Day of the Fight opens at SF’s AMC Metreon.

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