Un Tour de Manège: A Ride on a Magical Fairground Carousel

Un Tour de Manège: A Ride on a Magical Fairground Carousel</strong

Un Tour de Manège (A Ride on a Fairground Carousel) is an enchanting animated short film by Les Manèges, four young French filmmakers from Gobelins in Paris.  The film is a metaphoric fairy tale in which a magical carousel takes a little girl on the ocean voyage of a lifetime.  It’s a story about childhood fears of early separation from the mother, and of being thrust all alone into the vast ocean of life. On the little girl’s voyage she’s adrift in the ocean where other carousels abound, some inhabited by boys with threatening wolves, and where she must navigate dangerous whirlpools with the assistance of fluttering insects.  In the end, the girl is magically saved and returned to the soothing arms of her mother, at which point she secretly turns to the audience and mischievously winks to let us know that in spite of the dangers, she had quite enjoyed herself.

Un Tour de Manège: A Ride on a Magical Fairground Carousel

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George Washington: The Loss of All Things

George Washington is David Gordon Green’s acclaimed impressionistic Southern Gothic debut film, which one reviewer described as “within a heart-shot of William Faulkner.”  Green won the Best First Film prize from the New York Film Critics, the Discovery Award at Toronto and the Best Director Prize at The Newport film Festival.

David Gordon Green’s feature debut is a seamless blend of subjectivity, pseudo-documentary, evocation of childhood and mythopoeia.  In an impoverished small town in North Carolina, various misfit and poor children converse.  “Look at this place,” one boy says to another. “It looks like two tornadoes came through here.”  The town is dilapidated; one of the “tornadoes” may have been the Great Depression.  Shots of railroad tracks suggest dreams of getting out.  But during the course of the film, death hovers: a boy dies; as a result, another boy feels that God’s judgment is close; another boy almost dies; a boy’s dog dies.  The underlying theme of George Washington is clearly “the loss of all things.”

The videos presented here include the hypnotic opening sequence of David Gordon Green’s auspicious debut film George Washington, another video from the film described as an influential scene in modern cinema and an interview with Charlie Rose, where Green talks about his film George Washington.

George Washington: The Loss of All Things

George Washington: An Influential Scene in Modern Cinema

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Charlie Rose: David Gordon Green Talks About “George Washington”

(Charlie Rose Interview: March 8, 2001)

A detailed review of George Washington can be read in The New York Times here.

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Soupy Sales, Zany Slapstick Television Comedian, Dies at 83

Soupy Sales, whose wacky television routines turned the smashing of a pie to the face into a zany art form, died Thursday night at the age of 83.  A forerunner to Pee Wee Herman as a children’s television show host with wide adult appeal, Soupy bombarded television screens throughout most of his life.  Frolicking with his puppet sidekicks White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie the Lion and Hobart and Reba, the heads in the pot-bellied stove, transforming himself into the private detective Philo Kvetch, and playing host to the ever-present “nut at the door,” Soupy Sales became both a television favorite of youngsters and an anarchic comedy hero for teenagers and college students.

Clad in a top hat, sweater and bow tie, shuffling through his Mouse Dance, he reached his slapstick highpoint in the mid-1960s on The Soupy Sales Show, a widely syndicated television program based at WNEW-TV in New York City.  Soupy Sales became the Godfather of pie-throwing, and by his own count some 20,000 pies were hurled at Soupy or at visitors to his television shows in the 1950s and ’60s.  His celebrity pie-victims included Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis, all of whom turned up just for the honor of being creamed.

By 1966, his wild stunts heightened Mr. Sales’s appeal to young people as a comedian who loved to tease authority, and when he headlined a rock ’n’ roll show at New York’s Paramount Theater on Easter of that year, as many as 3,000 teenagers were lined up throughout Times Square hoping to get seats for his morning performance.  Mr. Sales was later a longtime panelist on television’s What’s My Line? and a host for a variety talk show on WNBC Radio in the 1980s.

In the 1959 video of The Soupy Sales Show: Lunch with Soupy Sales presented below, the television crew from The Soupy Sales Show sneaked an exotic dancer onto the set as a special surprise for Soupy’s birthday.

The Soupy Sales Show: Lunch with Soupy Sales, 1959

You can read more about the life of Soupy Sales in The New York Times here.

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ZooLogic: A Penguin and Gorilla’s Comedic Revolt Against a Pompous Zookeeper Bully

ZooLogic is an unexpectedly hilarious, widely acclaimed 4-minute animated short film directed by Nicole Mitchell. The animated short was both the Development Award Winner and the Grand Jury Award Winner at the 2007 Nickelodeon Animation Festival; ZooLogic then went on to win the 2008 Student Academy Award Gold Medal in Animation.  The vintage-looking, hand-drawn film tells the story of a pompous, over-controlling zookeeper who forces his animals to look and behave as he thinks the public would expect.  This is much to the dismay of a lonely gorilla whose prized stuffed red toy is grabbed and thrown away, and to the annoyance of the lemur whose tail is painfully combed begrudgingly into a heavy display.

The zookeeper’s absolute rule begins to falter, however, when he encounters a fat little penguin, who refuses to be whipped into shape by him.  The mischievously comedic little penguin quickly gives the zookeeper his comeuppance, then teams up with the gorilla to lead the zoo’s other animals through a successful revolution comprised of a hilarious ensuing chain of events.  As an important analogy for children and young people, the animals come together against the zookeeper like children rallying to overcome a bully, but in a humorously light manner that young audiences can digest.

ZooLogic: A Penguin and Gorilla’s Comedic Revolt Against a Pompous Zookeeper Bully

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