Listening to an older episode of the Noisy Ghost podcast, there was a mention of the comedy styling of Andy Kaufman, and specifically about his film My Breakfast with Blassie. That warmed the sub-cockles of my heart, as Blassie is still one of my all-time favorite wrestlers, and Kaufman was likely the most important influence on the formation on my love of absurdism. 

I fired up the old YouTube (and the video features an intro from legendary ring announcer Jimmy Lennon!) and fell right into the groove I remembered from my youth, that My Breakfast with Blassie is a documentary about guys who have no reality. 

Freddie Blassie is one of the all-time great pro wrestlers. He was a talker, and one of the best of all-time, but he was also one of those guys who moved beyond wrestling and got on in other arenas, including mainstream TV and even music. Andy Kaufman was a song-and-dance man, but his songs weren't necessarily his own, his dance not necessarily about movement. He was about the presentation, and his presentation was about the traansistor effect between the feed of the performer and the drain of the audience. The expectation is you've got to give the marks paying their ducats laughs, and instead Kaufman wanted to make the paying audience angry to give his real audience, those comics who worshipped him who were invariably standing in the back. That was a smart way of doing it if you are trying to become a legend. In a way, he lived his gimmick, he was weird any time you interacted with him, and weird in a way that would make you keep guessing what was the gimmick and what was him. That's classic wrestlers, like when Freddie Blassie would go to Japan and file his teeth as he walked through the airport. 

The weird thing about the movie is that this is two guys, one of whom is living his gimmick, and the other is not. In fact, I really don't believe either of them are acting, even when they go through written material. They're both interacting with teh material as if they were working a Memphis wrestling angle, but they are specifically doing so to the booking of My Dinner with Andre. The comedy is there, it's really funny, but if you look at the way they are talking, and how Kaufman goes all nutty, and Blassie reacts to that nuttiness, they're playing it towards the confrontation, and in a way that makes more sense than Louis Malle did in his work. 

Yes, the death of Jonathan Demme has led everyone to going back and re-watch Stop Making Sense, Something Wild,  and Silence of the Lambs. Me, I went to one of the best animated shorts in my memory - the Jonathan Demme-narrated short I Thought I Told You To Shut UP!!! It's  alook at the work of David BoswellReid Fleming: The World's Toughest Milkman. 

Just watch it, and all the names it draws, and let us remember Demme as a man who loved film!, 

Kids today won't understand what it was like. You had Saturday Morning Cartoons every week, and the syndicated blocks of cartoons in the afternoon, but they were all from Disney, Hanna-Barbara, Filmation, Kings World. These were usually pretty darned sterile, certainly 100% for kids, and that's not a bad thing.. until you aged out of 'em. 

That's where Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation came in. 

You'd go to the movie theatre and watch a shorts series, probably 20 or so animations, that were 100% for adults, though regularly attended by teens. The series had some stars - While not the true launching point for South Park and the shorts of Bill Plympton, this was certainly where they both became super-stars on their way to greater stardom. 

IN 1995 or so, I went to Spike & Mike's like 10 times, and one of my favorite films was TOny Natoli's I Never Ho'd For My Father, in which Santa Claus is more or less a dirtbag thug, nailing the wives of his elves, doin' lines of coke, and slappin' folks around! He's awesome in a Joe Peschi sort of way. To me, this is the vision of what Spike & Mike's meant. The animation isn't great, it's not polished nor fluid, and th esound is weak, but it makes you laugh, hard. It's over-the-top, totally over-the-top, but it works so damn well.

The fact is today it's harder for these kinds of film to find that audience, and at the same time, it's easier for 'em to find viewers. YouTube and Vimeo are full of these kinds of animations for adults and they're getting tons of hits, but when you've got Archer and Adult Swim, you've not missing out on anything in the mode of mature animation. SPike & Mike's is still around, from what I understand, but it's no longer the stalwert. 

Added to the National Film Registry a few years back, the test for Kodak's two-color Kodachrome process is absolutely gorgeous, not only documenting the process' results and capabilities, but giving us a more-or-less accurate vision of what color was like at the time. 

That will sound strange, but really, other than the few surviving segments in films like Ben Hur (Ramon Navarro, not Chuck Heston) there's not a lot of evidence of what actors of the silent era actually looked like in color. I remember an exhibit on costuming of the Silent Era and being amazed at exactly how colorful they were. I wish there was more of it around. 

The flickering of the hand-cranked camera is still there. The lighting is what's fascinating, and in my eyes what makes this a masterpiece. It is the subject, bright, alinve, front-and-center, with the backdrop dark. All we are given is the actor, lit bright, floating in the void. We would see this in so many avant gadre films less than a decade later, but here, in 1922, it feels fresh. 

If you're not familiar with TATE Shots, you should be. They're both wonderful podcast episodes, and even better mini-documentaries of the Britisher's version of MoMA on YouTube. The TATE Shot about Lictenstein is a wonderful quick view of the Tate's retrospective of Lichtenstein, and a good, quick review not only of what his work was like, but what his style meant. 

Of all the animators who shaped the earliest days of animation, Winsor McKay has to be considered as the one who hit the firmest with those who would become the second generation. While the best known of these has to be Gertie the Dinosaur, but the one that I think is worth all film geeks should really look into is The SIiking of the Lusitania. 

In the early 1900s, it was the era of the newsreel, but at the same time, it was rare to have cameras at the moments of real impact. The sinking of the Lusitania was a media circus, and I am unaware of any footage of the sinking. Though it took two years, and was released at the end of World War I, McKay's The Sinking of the Lusitania was played like a newsreel. Based on survivor accounts, the animation was actually the longest ever produced up to that point. 

It is unlike many of McKay's other surviving pieces. It's more realistic, though it also shows McKay's hand at work. It's a beautiful work, and it took two years to complete, which would make you think that it would have been so far after the fact that it would have lost the heat, but that is not the case. In a way, it re-established the sinking as an important aspect of 20th century, which it has remained to today. 

There are a couple of Russian films in the festival, and there are a couple of comedies, but Boozer Space Invasion is a really funny and short film!

The story is so simple. Aliens like to drink, and apparently, Mothers Against Drunk Driving only exists on Earth, and their nessage of not getting behind the wheel after throwing a few back is obvious in this one. 

The animation is clean, and the story is simple, which allows the comedy to hit hard and fast! The time it takes to get into it is so short that every second we are shown on the screen is perfectly spent!

This film had several unfair advantages. 1) It's about Kurt Vonnegut, arguably the author who has made more effect on me than any other. 2) It's Russian, and I've got a thing for Russian film. 3) It's a super-thinker film that raises questions and gives answers, but the two are not necessarily related. 4) It's so very very very well done. and 5) Stuffies. 

This is a rumination on the nature of everything as seen through the experience of a stuffed Kurt Vonnegut. He's his own words, or at least that's what it feels like. Nothing in this short seems to fall outside of him, and while that could have gone terribly wrong, here it was super-powered perfection! Aleksandr Kirienko's eye for both the message of Vonnegut, and his ability to make a story worth watching out of it, makes this a picture for the ages! 

This is a two-part exploration of a video short produced by Andre Callot (of the Andre Callot Media Empire which includes podcasts such as I don't hate this and the wonderful Fucking Delightful)  who is a remarkably intelligent human being (as evidenced by his work within said Media Empire!) but also a helluva filmmaker. This video called It's Video Art deserves a two-sided consideration, the first as a work of documentary, and the second as a work of video art. 

I have seldom dealt with video art here (my explorations of the works of Jeremy Blake would qualify) but this video is important to look at both ways because of an interesting twist it undertakes. 

In a way, it is an instructional video. Callot looks at the three main feeds for Video Art (Performance, Abstraction, Appropriation) and then creates an example of each. This is where Callot is something of a genius, and hits the points so damned well. The fact is, in many pieces of video art, the idea is to make the audience uncomfortable, not only through subject matter, but through the lengthening of the presentation of the piece. The first segment, where he creates a performance where he pours powder on himself and then activates it with what I believe is hot water, is brief, and intense, but most importantly, the length that is given to us feels just a slight bit longer than we would desire to view. Had it merely been a momentary glimpse, the truth of what much performance-based video art attempts to accomplish would have been lost. On the other, it was not so long that the flow of the piece was interrupted. 

​The other two segments accomplish their intentions well, without doing the obvious and treating the subject as a comedic piece. Callot presents two scenarios that are serious and illustrative, and neither go further than required to give us the feeling for the topic. That is the sign of an exceptional documentary, and on the basis of that, it is a remarkable short doc.