The Junky's Christmas

1993 stop-animated Christmas classic

Rating: n/r

Plot: A drug addict desperately looks for a fix during the holiday season.

William S. Burroughs wrote this little story which can be found in his book Interzone, and his performance with the Disposable Heroes of Hipocrisy can be heard on the 1993 album Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales. Burroughs is my favorite beat writer, and I'm not sure why this--one of his more coherent tales--hasn't become required viewing for families in December just like the boring stop-animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer or How Charlie Brown Stole Christmas. This is a far more spiritual story. The animation is pretty good. The characters sort of walk like Muppets, that clunky high-foot-lifting walk. I like when claymators use a variety of facial expressions, and the human characters in this--four of 'em, I think--have great faces. Mostly, it's the soothing tones of Uncle Bill Burrough's voice that does it for me. The music is a little distracting in some parts, but for me, it's impossible to listen to Burroughs read anything and not enjoy myself. You can find this online if you're interested. It's a little under 25 minutes long. Burroughs, by the way, is in scenes bookending the animated story. Watching him slice a turkey is almost as good as hearing him read.

Howl

2010 movie about a poem

Rating: 13/20

Plot: It's 1957, and poet/publisher Laurence Ferlinghetti is on trial facing charges of indecency for publishing Allen Ginsberg's lengthy poem Howl. This dramatizes the trial and shows Ginsberg reading the poem and discussing it and his life.

Appropriately, I watched this movie while starving, hysterical, and naked. I wanted to really like it; the subject's interesting and Franco's got Ginsberg's voice and quirky mannerisms down. Mary-Louise Parker's got a small role, and "Funky" Bob Balaban (or, Nabalab Bob backwards) plays a judge. The approach was interesting with all the dialogue coming directly from trial transcripts, interviews, Howl itself, or (I think) letters. There's a mix of poetry reading, the trial stuff, the interview stuff, and animation. Unfortunately, the parts don't really add up to a whole that is all that good. The biggest obstacle for me was the animation of the poem. I thought it was awful, and this is coming from somebody who can appreciate an abundance of phallic symbols. It's got this gross 2-D computer animated thing that just looked cheap. This could have and should have been a lot better, and I know it wouldn't have made much sense, but it wouldn't have hurt to have Mary-Louise Parker naked at some point in the movie. Or Bob Balaban.

Bucket of Blood

1959 delightful beatnik black comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Walter Paisley, an awkward loser, longs to be artsy-fartsy like the beatnik clientele of the Yellow Door Cafe where he works as a busboy. He buys himself some clay, sculpts a gray blob, and stabs his cat. When he's able to turn that feline tragedy into his first artistic masterpiece, he becomes a sensation around the Yellow Door, and the patrons begin to demand more.

More twisted fun from Roger Corman, this one, with its accidental kittycide and grotesque sculptures, also works as a biting satire of the art world. The production's cheap and, I'm guessing, quick, but they made the most of their limited time and monies. The beatnik stuff really dates this, but almost in a good way. I really liked the cool beatnik poet character Maxwell Brock (played by Julian Burton who was in The Masque of Red Death with Vincent Price), over-the-top and every bit of pretentious as he reads poems about ringing rubber bells and beating cotton gongs or saying profound things like "Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art." Paisley's sculptures, any which would look great in my living room, are really cool. I'd describe them, but it'd spoil things. Bucket of Blood is well-paced thriller and purposely funny, some of the darkest funny you might ever see. And the fact that it accidentally has something to say about creation and the art world along the way makes it even more worth the time. Oh, and ironically, I'm not sure there's any blood in this movie at all. And I don't remember seeing a bucket either.