Tim's Toons: Biking through Belleville

Tim here, to celebrate National Bike to Work Week in the only way I possibly could. Because when it comes to animated movies about bikes, there's nothing that can top 2003's The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet's lightly mocking love letter to the most quintessential elements of French and American culture. Wine and frog-eating on the one side, obesity and urban rudeness on the other, and most importantly for our current purposes, the Tour de France, the most famous bike race in the world.

The bubbly, convoluted story pivots on Champion, raised by his grandmother, whose only interest as a lonely child was in biking. This translates, years later, into his competition in the Tour, from which he's kidnapped by the French mafia as part of their underground gambling ring, from which his grandmother can only rescue him with the help of a trio of elderly cabaret performers. I said "convoluted", right? Because that's a nice word to describe how random and weird Triplets of Belleville can be in its pileup of absurd plot developments. But also, always, delightful and beguiling.

Chomet's tribute to the bike culture in France is, like everything else, predicated on outrageous grotesquerie: in a movie where the entire cast have impossible, distorted body shapes, Champion himself is one of the most extreme examples.

It only takes one glance at his rail-thin body and enormous legs to grasp that this is what a lifetime of single-minded dedication to competitive bike-riding looks like. It might seem like a nasty-minded commentary on athletes destroying their bodies, except that the whole film is based on exaggerated caricature; we could just as easily say that Champion's malformed body is the expression of a soul-consuming passion that's so important to him that he doesn't even realize when the mafia has him chained in front of a movie screen, biking on an endless loop.

That went and got a little nihilistic on me, so let me switch tracks over to the film's other big biking-related sequence: the Tour de France itself, a beautiful little parody of the over-the-top, carnivalesque enthusiasm that crops up when a small town has a great big national event to celebrate, going out of its way to realign everything around this one chance to shine.

And on the more generous side of things, the film also shows off the undulating beauty of its animated countryside, a tribute to the landscape of France that wonderfully shows off the justification for having an internationally well-known biking tour all throughout that country in the first place. The films resting state is to be sardonic as all hell, as often as possible, but it doesn't lack for heart, or even a kind of sentimental affection for the textures of rural France.

The fair concession to make is that The Triplets of Belleville isn't really "about" biking in any sustained way; it's not about any one thing at all. But those things it chooses to glance at get treated with quite a lot of imagination and flair. This might not be cinema's most probing, deep consideration of bikes and the Tour de France, but it's certainly one of the most memorable.

Women's Pictures - Sofia Coppola's Lost In Translation

Happy 44th birthday, Sofia Coppola! I do love when kismet works in our favor. On this special day, we are celebrating Coppola’s second feature film, the 2003 critical hit Lost in Translation. (And, since it’s also my birthday, all pictures will be of Scarlett Johansson.) The film was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Director, which made Coppola the third woman to be nominated for Best Director. However, like her predecessor Jane Campion had a decade earlier, Coppola walked away with Best Original Screenplay at the 2004 ceremony. Not bad for a second film!

The setup sounds familiar. Bob (Bill Murray in the middle of a career renaissance) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson on the cusp of superstardom) are two insomniac Americans in a hotel who meet accidentally over and over before they finally decide to meet on purpose. Bob is a movie star in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial that he hates. Charlotte is the wife of a photographer whose job and ego keep him busy. Once the two wanderers meet, they fall into an intense friendship made all the more exciting and sad for the knowledge that it exists only as long as their stay in Japan does.

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What's Up With Opera Pictures, Doc?

For the past year or so various Streep related announcements have revealed a curious trend: Meryl Streep is suddenly really into musically-themed pictures with four consecutive pictures of that ilk from 2014-2016 (with the exception of her cameos in other prestige dramas). First came Into the Woods, then Ricki & The Flash and next year it was supposed to be all about the Operas.  Opera? Yup. She signed on for a very promising sounding comic bio about a terrible singer Florence Foster Jenkins to be directed by Stephen Frears. The fate of the fourth picture, a filmed adaptation of the stage play Master Class, a fictionalized drama about Maria Callas's time as a voice teacher, is now up in the air. The HBO project aimed to reunite Streep with her most frequent collaborator Mike Nichols but five months after the project was announced, Nichols passed away.

Whether or not Master Class goes before cameras (with or without Streep) it will surely keep getting stage revivals since "La Divina" continues to fascinate actors and storytellers.  French diva Fanny Ardant already played the opera singer for the screen in Franco Zefirrelli's Callas Forever (2002) and word broke yesterday, complete with this gorgeous promotional poster, that Noomi Rapace is next. 

Noomi Rapace recreates a famous Callas photo

She'll star in the already fully funded Callas for director Niki Caro. Rapace broke out in a big way with the Swedish Dragon Tattoo movies but subsequent efforts as an international leading lady haven't attracted as much attention (sorry but Michael Fassbender stole all Prometheus thunder). Still, the writer/director Niki Caro isn't a slouch when it comes to winning her actresses attention. She's only made five movies including the very recent and very atypical McFarland USA, but two of them resulted in Best Actress nominations: Keisha Castle Hughes in Whale Rider and Charlize Theron in North Country. So chalk Rapace down as a threat for the shortlist in 2016 or 2017, depending on how quick they are about this. 

E.T.'s Wish Fulfillment Fantasy

National Bike to Work Week. Here's Lynn.

It’s fun to zip around on a bike, but who among us hasn’t dreamed of having a bike that can literally fly?  If The Wizard of Oz engraved the image of a flying bicyclist into our brains as the ultimate nightmare (that moment when the mean neighbor turns into the Wicked Witch of the West still sends chills down the spine), then E.T. replaced it with the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy for legions of ’80s kids everywhere.

In a movie filled with memorable images, this one (which Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment would later adopt as its logo) remains the most iconic.  Separated from the film, there’s something haunting, even melancholy, about the sight of that tiny silhouette suspended against the giant, low-lying full moon – a hint, maybe, that E.T. must wane before he waxes again.  Yet the memory it evokes is Elliot’s incredulous joy as E.T. lifts his bike into the night, accompanied by John Williams’ soaring strings.  No matter how many times you’ve seen it, it still feels like the first time.  Never mind that the scene was shot against a blue screen, with cranes, and the footage of the forest and moon added in post-production.  It’s still magic.

The second liftoff comes at a much tenser moment, following an emotionally draining sequence in which E.T. dies and is brought back to life, and a white-knuckle bike chase – a standout scene in itself – in which E.T. and the boys are almost cornered several times by the authorities.  The suspense is surprisingly drawn out, as the viewer knows by now that E.T. has the power of flight at his fingertips and can’t help wondering, What’s he waiting for, why doesn’t he do it?

The moment he finally does, taking the boys with him, brings as much relief as exhilaration.  It also marks a brief return to the joy and wonder of the first half of the film before the imminent four-hankie farewell.  Once again, we have the image, now expanded, of a whole row of bikes against a large bright orb.  This time it’s the sun—a setting sun.  E.T.’s time on earth is drawing to an end.  But we’ll always remember when he made our bikes fly.

Ask Nathaniel About...

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) was the first movie to get a Happy Meal tie-inFollowing this week's pure emotion and best (second) actress... it's time for more reader questions. Before you happily type away, do remember: the more cumbersome and enormous your Q, the least likely it gets an A. Not every question is answered but every one  is absorbed and sometimes they inspire later posts.

Questions involving 1979 (our year of the month) or summer movie season in general are especially welcome this week (though you can ask other questions too). Did you know that two hugely destructive forces that caused miners to starve and children to become obese, respectively, came to power in the summer of that year: Margaret Thatcher and Happy Meals!