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    <title>The Animated World of John Canemaker's Recent Activity - Spout</title>
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      <title>Film:The Animated World of John Canemaker</title>
      <link>http://www.spout.com/films/The_Animated_World_of_John_Canemaker/325454/default.aspx</link><description><![CDATA[<table width='100%' style='font:10px/10px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;'><tr><td><img align='left' src='http://www.spout.com/images/no_image.jpg' hspace='10' style='height:80px;' /></td>
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<strong>Title:</strong> The Animated World of John Canemaker<br/>
<strong>Plot:</strong> Oscar nominated independent animator John Canemaker (The Moon and the Sun) is profiled in this documentary focusing on the New York artist/teacher/author/historian's remarkable career. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide<br/>
<strong>Times Tagged:</strong> 3<br/>
<strong>Number of Lists:</strong> 1<br/>
<strong>Number of blog posts:</strong> 3<br/>
</td></tr></table>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 13 Jul 2007 20:00:51 GMT</pubDate><spout:Title>The Animated World of John Canemaker</spout:Title><spout:Plot>Oscar nominated independent animator John Canemaker (The Moon and the Sun) is profiled in this documentary focusing on the New York artist/teacher/author/historian's remarkable career. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide</spout:Plot><spout:TimesTagged>3</spout:TimesTagged><spout:taglevel>Slightly Tagged (1-5)</spout:taglevel><spout:Numberoflists>1</spout:Numberoflists><spout:NumberOfBlogPosts>3</spout:NumberOfBlogPosts><spout:FilmCoverURL>http://www.spout.com/images/no_image.jpg</spout:FilmCoverURL><spout:SpoutFilmDetailURL>http://www.spout.com/films/The_Animated_World_of_John_Canemaker/325454/default.aspx</spout:SpoutFilmDetailURL><spout:type>Film</spout:type></item>
    <item>
      <title>Spout Post: From Jump Rope to Jazz, the Docs Are In</title>
      <link>http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/archive/2007/4/29/7820.aspx</link><description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Post By:</strong> <a href='http://www.spout.com/members/11756/default.aspx'>TheReeler</a><br/>
<strong>Post To:</strong> <a href='http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/default.aspx'>The Reeler on Spout</a><br/>
<strong>Post Date:</strong> 4/29/2007 8:49:49 AM<br/>
<strong>Body:</strong> One of the jump rope powerhouses of Stephanie Johnes' Doubletime

By Michelle Orange 

I seem to have tapped into a documentary-rich vein three days into my Tribeca tunneling, and three of them have a distinctly New York angle.  A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory , joins the ever-increasing canon of Warholia, but only tangentially; director Esther Robinson has attempted to eke out the story around the 1966 disappearance (and apparent suicide) of her uncle Danny, a one-time Factory denizen. 

Robinson gets access to a host of Factory personalities, some of whom may be remembered from their last (albeit fictional) appearance in February’s Edie Sedgwick bio-hazard, Factory Girl. The problem is that no one seems to recall the young man from Massachusetts, further proof of the solipsistic, craven opportunism fueling Warhol’s so-called family. What people like Brigid Berlin recall in detail is the emotional politics raging within Warhol’s inner circle, and the disaffection that led most people to seek out entry. The jewel in Robinson’s documentary is a cache of previously unseen films shot by Williams, a budding filmmaker at the time, and editor of the first Maysles brothers film. Williams is shown to have a luminous, idiosyncratic eye, and in reeling through them, along with poking into her family’s omerta on the subject, Robinson crafts a fittingly oblique tribute to her uncle. 

Another disappeared personality is the subject of The True Legend of Tony Vilar, first time director Giuseppe Gagliardi’s sweet, sometimes enervating, bizarro documentary about the vanishing of a young Calabrian crooner. Tony Vilar left Italy in 1952 for Argentina, where he wound up becoming a famous singer before suddenly falling into obscurity. Italian musician Peppe Voltarelli plays a distant cousin of Vilar’s who is determined to track him down. Beginning in Buenos Aires in 2005, Peppe, with his outré wardrobe and shady sideburns, fits right in with the colorful locals; Gagliardi combines a series of obviously staged happenstance with archival footage of Vilar to form a sort of emigration picaresque. 

Peppe finds a vibrant Italian community in Argentina, and when his search takes him to New York City, he is surprised by the staunch Italians populating the Bronx, Brooklyn and New Jersey. Most of the scenes of Peppe interacting with the locals are played for laughs, and the rambling re-enactments begin to bleed into actual musical numbers, with Peppe extolling the strange benefits of this globally extended Italian family. The journey and the destination lose sight of each other early on, but the film’s winking look at Italian stereotypes and the proud heritage of third and fourth generation Italian Americans develops a stand-alone charm. While male American singers like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash are regularly feted with hagiographic biopics, female legends of the same period seem to have make due with capable and comprehensive documentaries. Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer is a pocket treasure of O’Day performance footage spanning over 60 years, almost up until her death last November. Co-directors Ian McCrudden and Robbie Cavolina have assembled a retrospective of the lauded jazz singer’s career, skimming along with her private life, including two husbands, a stint in jail and a 15-year heroin habit, all of which she reflects on with a canny wit. A girl singer who liked to dress like one of the dudes, extended clips of O’Day’s early performances bring her remarkable improvisation skills and exquisite phrasing to the fore. Clearly a personality of force and fortitude (who outlives a long heroin detour?), O’Day is often noted as the only white woman whose name is uttered in the same breath as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. But killing at the Apollo was no big deal for Chicago’s “jezebel of jazz.” That’s the kind of broad I’d love to see get the silver screen treatment, but McCrudden and Cavolina’s tribute is better than fine for now. 

Harlem’s Apollo theatre is also the site of the climactic heart of Doubletime, Stephanie Johnes’ rope-jumping documentary. Nicely shot and brimming with the all-American elbow grease ethic epitomized by the much-imitated Spellbound, Doubletime looks at the evolution of double dutch and rope skipping as competitive sports. The interesting dynamic here is that of the mostly white kids from North Carolina, who have been invited to the international competition held at the Apollo each year for the first time. Double dutch is said to have originated in Harlem, a street activity for kids (mostly young black girls) born of a lack of recreation centers in the impoverished inner city. The fact that white kids from the burbs are now getting in on it as well is a source of worry for said white kids, but as they discover upon hitting New York for the competition, the ability of the Japanese to co-opt American culture and then serve it back to us better than we can do it ourselves will overshadow them almost completely. Johnes does a nice job of building the competitive tension (there are some really neat skipping tricks out there), and weaves in the deeply felt motivations of the coaches and surprisingly positive side effects of what most of us know as a schoolyard pastime. 

Sports seem to be the repository for myriad sublimations in both Sons of Sakhnin, United and Unstrung, films about an Arab-Israeli soccer team and the American junior tennis circuit, respectively. Bnei Sakhnin is the only soccer team for the minority population of Arabs living in Israel, and when they won Israel’s State Cup, it seemed to be a breakthrough for the residents of the small town, though when the team attempts to keep its premier league status, competing against strictly Jewish teams from Nazareth and Tel Aviv, tensions inevitably break through. Director Christopher Browne seems to find the obvious focal point in Arab team captain (and Israeli national team member Abbas Suan, who bears the brunt of impassioned locals on both sides, but the film strays from him and the narrative’s powerful throughline (the potential of sports to heal and divide) is diluted.   

Unstrung is a fairly straightforward “championship” doc along the lines of Doubletime, where several competitors are followed on their way to big cook off. Here teenaged boys with hopes of tennis stardom (and equally, it seems, Nike contracts) tweak and thwack their way to Kalamazoo 2006, and tennis stars like Andre Agassi, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Andy Roddick pop up with their takes on the state of tennis today and the (very small) likelihood that any of these kids will turn pro. That seems to be born out by the late appearance of Sam Querrey, a laid back string bean who, unlike the boys we have seen, doesn’t seem to be under crushing pressure from his parents, and is now the only one of the bunch with a top 100 seeding. 

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

 A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory 
The True Legend of Tony Vilar   
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer  
Doubletime   
Sons of Sakhnin, United
Unstrung  Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler<br/>
</div>]]></description><pubDate>Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:49:49 GMT</pubDate><spout:postby>TheReeler</spout:postby><spout:postto>The Reeler on Spout</spout:postto><spout:postdate>4/29/2007 8:49:49 AM</spout:postdate><spout:body>One of the jump rope powerhouses of Stephanie Johnes' Doubletime

By Michelle Orange 

I seem to have tapped into a documentary-rich vein three days into my Tribeca tunneling, and three of them have a distinctly New York angle.  A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory , joins the ever-increasing canon of Warholia, but only tangentially; director Esther Robinson has attempted to eke out the story around the 1966 disappearance (and apparent suicide) of her uncle Danny, a one-time Factory denizen. 

Robinson gets access to a host of Factory personalities, some of whom may be remembered from their last (albeit fictional) appearance in February’s Edie Sedgwick bio-hazard, Factory Girl. The problem is that no one seems to recall the young man from Massachusetts, further proof of the solipsistic, craven opportunism fueling Warhol’s so-called family. What people like Brigid Berlin recall in detail is the emotional politics raging within Warhol’s inner circle, and the disaffection that led most people to seek out entry. The jewel in Robinson’s documentary is a cache of previously unseen films shot by Williams, a budding filmmaker at the time, and editor of the first Maysles brothers film. Williams is shown to have a luminous, idiosyncratic eye, and in reeling through them, along with poking into her family’s omerta on the subject, Robinson crafts a fittingly oblique tribute to her uncle. 

Another disappeared personality is the subject of The True Legend of Tony Vilar, first time director Giuseppe Gagliardi’s sweet, sometimes enervating, bizarro documentary about the vanishing of a young Calabrian crooner. Tony Vilar left Italy in 1952 for Argentina, where he wound up becoming a famous singer before suddenly falling into obscurity. Italian musician Peppe Voltarelli plays a distant cousin of Vilar’s who is determined to track him down. Beginning in Buenos Aires in 2005, Peppe, with his outré wardrobe and shady sideburns, fits right in with the colorful locals; Gagliardi combines a series of obviously staged happenstance with archival footage of Vilar to form a sort of emigration picaresque. 

Peppe finds a vibrant Italian community in Argentina, and when his search takes him to New York City, he is surprised by the staunch Italians populating the Bronx, Brooklyn and New Jersey. Most of the scenes of Peppe interacting with the locals are played for laughs, and the rambling re-enactments begin to bleed into actual musical numbers, with Peppe extolling the strange benefits of this globally extended Italian family. The journey and the destination lose sight of each other early on, but the film’s winking look at Italian stereotypes and the proud heritage of third and fourth generation Italian Americans develops a stand-alone charm. While male American singers like Ray Charles and Johnny Cash are regularly feted with hagiographic biopics, female legends of the same period seem to have make due with capable and comprehensive documentaries. Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer is a pocket treasure of O’Day performance footage spanning over 60 years, almost up until her death last November. Co-directors Ian McCrudden and Robbie Cavolina have assembled a retrospective of the lauded jazz singer’s career, skimming along with her private life, including two husbands, a stint in jail and a 15-year heroin habit, all of which she reflects on with a canny wit. A girl singer who liked to dress like one of the dudes, extended clips of O’Day’s early performances bring her remarkable improvisation skills and exquisite phrasing to the fore. Clearly a personality of force and fortitude (who outlives a long heroin detour?), O’Day is often noted as the only white woman whose name is uttered in the same breath as Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. But killing at the Apollo was no big deal for Chicago’s “jezebel of jazz.” That’s the kind of broad I’d love to see get the silver screen treatment, but McCrudden and Cavolina’s tribute is better than fine for now. 

Harlem’s Apollo theatre is also the site of the climactic heart of Doubletime, Stephanie Johnes’ rope-jumping documentary. Nicely shot and brimming with the all-American elbow grease ethic epitomized by the much-imitated Spellbound, Doubletime looks at the evolution of double dutch and rope skipping as competitive sports. The interesting dynamic here is that of the mostly white kids from North Carolina, who have been invited to the international competition held at the Apollo each year for the first time. Double dutch is said to have originated in Harlem, a street activity for kids (mostly young black girls) born of a lack of recreation centers in the impoverished inner city. The fact that white kids from the burbs are now getting in on it as well is a source of worry for said white kids, but as they discover upon hitting New York for the competition, the ability of the Japanese to co-opt American culture and then serve it back to us better than we can do it ourselves will overshadow them almost completely. Johnes does a nice job of building the competitive tension (there are some really neat skipping tricks out there), and weaves in the deeply felt motivations of the coaches and surprisingly positive side effects of what most of us know as a schoolyard pastime. 

Sports seem to be the repository for myriad sublimations in both Sons of Sakhnin, United and Unstrung, films about an Arab-Israeli soccer team and the American junior tennis circuit, respectively. Bnei Sakhnin is the only soccer team for the minority population of Arabs living in Israel, and when they won Israel’s State Cup, it seemed to be a breakthrough for the residents of the small town, though when the team attempts to keep its premier league status, competing against strictly Jewish teams from Nazareth and Tel Aviv, tensions inevitably break through. Director Christopher Browne seems to find the obvious focal point in Arab team captain (and Israeli national team member Abbas Suan, who bears the brunt of impassioned locals on both sides, but the film strays from him and the narrative’s powerful throughline (the potential of sports to heal and divide) is diluted.   

Unstrung is a fairly straightforward “championship” doc along the lines of Doubletime, where several competitors are followed on their way to big cook off. Here teenaged boys with hopes of tennis stardom (and equally, it seems, Nike contracts) tweak and thwack their way to Kalamazoo 2006, and tennis stars like Andre Agassi, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Andy Roddick pop up with their takes on the state of tennis today and the (very small) likelihood that any of these kids will turn pro. That seems to be born out by the late appearance of Sam Querrey, a laid back string bean who, unlike the boys we have seen, doesn’t seem to be under crushing pressure from his parents, and is now the only one of the bunch with a top 100 seeding. 

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

 A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory 
The True Legend of Tony Vilar   
Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer  
Doubletime   
Sons of Sakhnin, United
Unstrung  Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler</spout:body></item>
    <item>
      <title>Spout Post: Of the Airborne and Avant-Garde</title>
      <link>http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/archive/2007/4/28/7766.aspx</link><description><![CDATA[<div><strong>Post By:</strong> <a href='http://www.spout.com/members/11756/default.aspx'>TheReeler</a><br/>
<strong>Post To:</strong> <a href='http://www.spout.com/blogs/thereeler/default.aspx'>The Reeler on Spout</a><br/>
<strong>Post Date:</strong> 4/28/2007 12:10:28 PM<br/>
<strong>Body:</strong> A glimpse into Ken Jacobs' RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World

By Eric Kohn 

With less than a month to go before Michael Moore unveils Sicko at Cannes, the entries at Tribeca that carry a contemporary angle look relatively tame. But looks can be deceiving, and while I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne sports an awful title, it provides far more insight than the majority of recent nonfiction offerings dealing with the current generation of troops. Following a team of young American fighters from training to overseas incursions and back again, director John Lawrence strikes a unique tone that’s both interrogative and sentimental. 

Shooting on low grade video and primarily employing a classic verite technique, Lawrence reveals the specific military mentality that breeds a patriotic killing frenzy. “You are looking for the prey,” one instructor tells his men (and they are all men). There are plenty of memorably awkward moments that suggest the Army lives in an alternate universe of spin, including a late scene that finds a top advisor presenting the troops with a flag from the World Trade Center (they’re in Iraq, for crying out loud). Despite including such incredulous sequences, Lawrence never condescends to his subjects. Allowing them to directly address the camera and guide the viewer, his movie refreshingly avoids exploring why the troops are there in the first place (we’ve heard that rant enough by now) and settles, instead, on cultivating authenticity. We’re left not with a justification of militaristic brutality, but a better understanding of it.  A much more familiar perspective on the war in Iraq hovers over the abstract imagery of RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World, veteran avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacob’s curious Tribeca entry. Those unfamiliar with Jacob’s work -- or not too keen on experimental cinema in general -- won’t get into his radical style, but there’s no question that it’s undoubtedly his trademark and no one else’s. Jacobs generally uses a strobe light effect as he toys with archival footage, creating immersive 3-D imagery (and seizures, for those prone to epilepsy). His latest foray into this terrain stays in line with the tradition he cultivated several decades ago, but his transition into the realm of digital filmmaking is a slightly awkward one. Toying with the images and movement of early Kinetoscope films and other material, Jacobs explores contrasts the dreamy tranquility of daily life with the insanity of violence (the latter concept arises from an audio sample of Thomas Edison giving his two sense on war). The images eventually create a fascinating interrogation of Cubism, but you’ve got to sit through a hefty 20 minutes or so before the approach pays off. When I spoke to Jacobs recently, he told me that last year, the festival gave him a copy of Final Cut editing software, which he used to create RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World. I find that there’s something intrinsically funny about a guy from the Beat Generation toying around with digital technology, but it’s not the sort of humor that makes the entire movie worthwhile.  

One artist whose work bears no sign of dicking around with digital effects: John Canemaker. The Oscar-winnning animator, whose finest shorts receive a terrific retrospective in The Animated World of John Canemaker, creates majestic worlds with infinite layers of depth. Canemaker has written books on the history of the medium, but he doesn’t rip off the early masters; he builds on them. Combining exaggerated physicality with a tendency for sentimental storytelling, Canemaker’s shorts make him seem like a sweeter version of Bill Plympton. He’s actually more like a contextualized Walt Disney, spinning simple yarns that overflow with metaphor. In The Wizard’s Son an aging magician grows despondent over his boy’s insistence on becoming a jazz musician. It’s at once hilarious (drawn like a low budget Saturday morning cartoon) and sad, a classic father-son conflict. Canemaker is clearly culling from his personal life, as the recent The Moon and the Son demonstrates. The short, which won Canemaker an Academy Award in 2006, tells the story of an older man who engages in internal dialogue with his dead father. Narrated by John Turturro, the anguish of family turmoil gets graphically realized.  

As Canemaker’s book on Little Nemo creator Windsor McCay proves, the animator acknowledges that graphic media don’t necessarily need to move in order to get brought to life. He’s one of the few voices absent from Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, a crash course on the evolution of the seminal comic book auteur, who created The Spirit in the Forties, coined the term “graphic novel” in the '70s, and just died last year. Exploring the trajectory of his life through the memories of colleagues like Jules Feiffer and the late Kurt Vonnegut, Andrew Cooke doesn’t bring anything new to the table -- but that’s clearly not his intention. Eisner’s innovations prove that genuine creativity requires constant reinvention.  

That revelation was still in my head as I sat through the mediocre Mexican drama Two Embraces, which uses an interlocking stories device mildly reminiscent of 21 Grams, and it relies on a similarly (and excruciatingly) obvious gimmick: A young boy falls for a troubled teen at the local grocery store. A lonely cab driver helps his cranky passenger and falls for the guy’s daughter. Both threads lead to the hugs of the title. Music swells. If drama were this easy, movies would’ve gone extinct ages ago. A better foreign offering that delves into human tragedy is Tuya’s Marriage, a gorgeously shot narrative about a fierce Mongolian woman forced to divorce her aging husband and find a new suitor. Torn between allegiances to the slightly misogynistic culture and her own individuality, she never sacrifices her ideals. Now there’s some tough drama.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

 I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne 
RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World   
The Animated World of John Canemaker  
Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist   
Two Embraces
Tuya’s Marriage  Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler<br/>
</div>]]></description><pubDate>Sat, 28 Apr 2007 16:10:28 GMT</pubDate><spout:postby>TheReeler</spout:postby><spout:postto>The Reeler on Spout</spout:postto><spout:postdate>4/28/2007 12:10:28 PM</spout:postdate><spout:body>A glimpse into Ken Jacobs' RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World

By Eric Kohn 

With less than a month to go before Michael Moore unveils Sicko at Cannes, the entries at Tribeca that carry a contemporary angle look relatively tame. But looks can be deceiving, and while I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne sports an awful title, it provides far more insight than the majority of recent nonfiction offerings dealing with the current generation of troops. Following a team of young American fighters from training to overseas incursions and back again, director John Lawrence strikes a unique tone that’s both interrogative and sentimental. 

Shooting on low grade video and primarily employing a classic verite technique, Lawrence reveals the specific military mentality that breeds a patriotic killing frenzy. “You are looking for the prey,” one instructor tells his men (and they are all men). There are plenty of memorably awkward moments that suggest the Army lives in an alternate universe of spin, including a late scene that finds a top advisor presenting the troops with a flag from the World Trade Center (they’re in Iraq, for crying out loud). Despite including such incredulous sequences, Lawrence never condescends to his subjects. Allowing them to directly address the camera and guide the viewer, his movie refreshingly avoids exploring why the troops are there in the first place (we’ve heard that rant enough by now) and settles, instead, on cultivating authenticity. We’re left not with a justification of militaristic brutality, but a better understanding of it.  A much more familiar perspective on the war in Iraq hovers over the abstract imagery of RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World, veteran avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacob’s curious Tribeca entry. Those unfamiliar with Jacob’s work -- or not too keen on experimental cinema in general -- won’t get into his radical style, but there’s no question that it’s undoubtedly his trademark and no one else’s. Jacobs generally uses a strobe light effect as he toys with archival footage, creating immersive 3-D imagery (and seizures, for those prone to epilepsy). His latest foray into this terrain stays in line with the tradition he cultivated several decades ago, but his transition into the realm of digital filmmaking is a slightly awkward one. Toying with the images and movement of early Kinetoscope films and other material, Jacobs explores contrasts the dreamy tranquility of daily life with the insanity of violence (the latter concept arises from an audio sample of Thomas Edison giving his two sense on war). The images eventually create a fascinating interrogation of Cubism, but you’ve got to sit through a hefty 20 minutes or so before the approach pays off. When I spoke to Jacobs recently, he told me that last year, the festival gave him a copy of Final Cut editing software, which he used to create RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World. I find that there’s something intrinsically funny about a guy from the Beat Generation toying around with digital technology, but it’s not the sort of humor that makes the entire movie worthwhile.  

One artist whose work bears no sign of dicking around with digital effects: John Canemaker. The Oscar-winnning animator, whose finest shorts receive a terrific retrospective in The Animated World of John Canemaker, creates majestic worlds with infinite layers of depth. Canemaker has written books on the history of the medium, but he doesn’t rip off the early masters; he builds on them. Combining exaggerated physicality with a tendency for sentimental storytelling, Canemaker’s shorts make him seem like a sweeter version of Bill Plympton. He’s actually more like a contextualized Walt Disney, spinning simple yarns that overflow with metaphor. In The Wizard’s Son an aging magician grows despondent over his boy’s insistence on becoming a jazz musician. It’s at once hilarious (drawn like a low budget Saturday morning cartoon) and sad, a classic father-son conflict. Canemaker is clearly culling from his personal life, as the recent The Moon and the Son demonstrates. The short, which won Canemaker an Academy Award in 2006, tells the story of an older man who engages in internal dialogue with his dead father. Narrated by John Turturro, the anguish of family turmoil gets graphically realized.  

As Canemaker’s book on Little Nemo creator Windsor McCay proves, the animator acknowledges that graphic media don’t necessarily need to move in order to get brought to life. He’s one of the few voices absent from Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist, a crash course on the evolution of the seminal comic book auteur, who created The Spirit in the Forties, coined the term “graphic novel” in the '70s, and just died last year. Exploring the trajectory of his life through the memories of colleagues like Jules Feiffer and the late Kurt Vonnegut, Andrew Cooke doesn’t bring anything new to the table -- but that’s clearly not his intention. Eisner’s innovations prove that genuine creativity requires constant reinvention.  

That revelation was still in my head as I sat through the mediocre Mexican drama Two Embraces, which uses an interlocking stories device mildly reminiscent of 21 Grams, and it relies on a similarly (and excruciatingly) obvious gimmick: A young boy falls for a troubled teen at the local grocery store. A lonely cab driver helps his cranky passenger and falls for the guy’s daughter. Both threads lead to the hugs of the title. Music swells. If drama were this easy, movies would’ve gone extinct ages ago. A better foreign offering that delves into human tragedy is Tuya’s Marriage, a gorgeously shot narrative about a fierce Mongolian woman forced to divorce her aging husband and find a new suitor. Torn between allegiances to the slightly misogynistic culture and her own individuality, she never sacrifices her ideals. Now there’s some tough drama.

Discuss these and other Tribeca titles at Spout:

 I Am an American Soldier: One Year in Iraq with the 101st Airborne 
RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World   
The Animated World of John Canemaker  
Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist   
Two Embraces
Tuya’s Marriage  Syndicated Feed From:The Reeler</spout:body></item>
    <item>
      <title>Spout Tag:animation</title>
      <link>http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/animation/MemberTagFilms.aspx</link><description><![CDATA[<div style='display:block;height:120px;width:400px;font:10px/10px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;'><a href='/members/0/tags/animation/MemberTagFilms.aspx'>animation</a>
<strong><br/> Number of films tagged:</strong> 295</br><br/>
<strong>Number of people who tagged:</strong> 58</br><br/>
<strong>Number of times used:</strong> 209</br><br/>
</div>]]></description><pubDate>Mon, 05 Oct 2009 21:34:12 GMT</pubDate><spout:numFilms>295</spout:numFilms><spout:numPeople>58</spout:numPeople><spout:timesUsed>209</spout:timesUsed><spout:type>Tag</spout:type></item>
    <item>
      <title>Spout Tag:tribeca2007</title>
      <link>http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/tribeca2007/MemberTagFilms.aspx</link><description><![CDATA[<div style='display:block;height:120px;width:400px;font:10px/10px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;'><a href='/members/0/tags/tribeca2007/MemberTagFilms.aspx'>tribeca2007</a>
<strong><br/> Number of films tagged:</strong> 114</br><br/>
<strong>Number of people who tagged:</strong> 2</br><br/>
<strong>Number of times used:</strong> 115</br><br/>
</div>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 23 Nov 2007 05:53:45 GMT</pubDate><spout:numFilms>114</spout:numFilms><spout:numPeople>2</spout:numPeople><spout:timesUsed>115</spout:timesUsed><spout:type>Tag</spout:type></item>
    <item>
      <title>Spout Tag:thereeler</title>
      <link>http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/thereeler/MemberTagFilms.aspx</link><description><![CDATA[<div style='display:block;height:120px;width:400px;font:10px/10px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;'><a href='/members/0/tags/thereeler/MemberTagFilms.aspx'>thereeler</a>
<strong><br/> Number of films tagged:</strong> 116</br><br/>
<strong>Number of people who tagged:</strong> 1</br><br/>
<strong>Number of times used:</strong> 116</br><br/>
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