Straight Into Darkness

My thoughts on Grace and Pedro: Pets to the Rescue, Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party and Rumors

As someone who was lucky enough to have had my initial encounter with the wonders of the cinema be the Walt Disney classic Dumbo, the notion that there could be little kids out there whose first experience in a movie theater turns out to be something as tritely forgettable as Gracie and Pedro: Pets to the Rescue is almost too depressing to consider. Snobby show dog Gracie (Claire Alan) and rough-and-tumble cat Pedro (Cory Doran) barely tolerate living together under the same roof under the best of circumstance and things go from bad to worse when their family makes the move from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City and the cheapo airline they are taking misplaces the carrier holding them. After they escape and figure out their plight, they decide to set off on their own for Salt Lake City and get involved with all sorts of wacky shenanigans along the way in which they encounter odd characters and get into the kind of scrapes that even the youngest viewers will not find to be too tension-filled. Pursuing them are two duos of wacky side characters—a dumb human detective named Doyle and smarter ferret partner Sherlock (get it?) and a pair of rats who want to help them in order to collect the reward money being offered for their return. For those of you who are now under the impression that the preceding sentences I have written here have been almost unconscionably boring to read, imagine having to actually watch the events cited play out and then sum them up without devolving into hysterical screaming.

“But wait,” you might also be wondering (assuming you haven’t simply moved on), “what about all those fabulous celebrities cited in the ads as contributing voices?” Yes, it is true that the voice cast does include the likes of Danny Trejo, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields, Alicia Silverstone, Bill Nighy and, inexplicably, Al Franken, but their contributions amount to little more than a single short scene apiece and feature line deliveries so lackadaisical that they make Krusty the Klown seem focused and committed to his craft by comparison. Theoretically, that wouldn’t be that big of a problem—there was a time when feature animation didn’t rely on star voice casting and it isn’t as if the target audience is going to be disappointed by a lack of the dulcet tones of Franken—except that practically everything else about the film comes up short as well. The storyline is painfully familiar, the central characters are colorless and forgettable as can be and the dialogue is split between mild hackneyed insults and tedious life lessons about Getting Along and stuff. Even on a visual level, it fails to entertain with its utterly generic animation and character design, all of which suggests the output of an AI system in dire need of debugging. Yes, I know that Grace and Pedro: Pets to the Rescue (where the subtitle proves to be as meaningless as everything else about it) is meant for younger viewers and not for cynical old farts such as myself but kids are smart and my guess is that any of them stuck watching this will be as bored and restless as those unlucky enough to be accompanying them

.Produced in 1983 for MTV, which aired it exactly once before essentially disappearing from view, Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party is a film that both rock fans and cinephiles have been seeking out for years for a number of reasons—it offers a glimpse of Petty and the Heartbreakers during the recording and touring process for their 1982 album Long After Dark, it marked the directorial debut of Cameron Crowe and some of the sequences were said to have served as inspiration for moments found in a little thing called This is Spinal Tap. Cleaned up and augmented with an additional 20 minutes of post-credits footage hosted by Crowe and Petty’s daughter, Adria, the film has now returned from obscurity (along with a deluxe reissue of Long After Dark) and while it may not prove to be particularly substantive or revelatory, it is nevertheless a whole lot of fun to watch. Although it supplies the expected amount of footage showing the band in the studio (including one sequence with Petty recording with Stevie Nicks) and on stage, it also demonstrates a genial, goofy spirit that helped to make it more than the extended commercial that the network executives were presumably expecting to get when they agreed to air it. There is a laid-back and relaxed spirit to the whole thing (we even get footage of Petty sheepishly accepting the key to the city of his hometown of Gainesville, Florida) that still shines through more than four decades later, there are any number of very funny moments (including one sequence that most definitely inspired one of the most memorable bits in Spinal Tap) and the on-screen interactions between Petty and Crowe (who serves as the on-camera host while making fun of such things at the same time) are endearing without devolving into mere puffery. Oh yeah, the music—ranging from hits like “You Got Lucky” to a studio jam on “Wild Thing” to a title song that is still stuck in my head a week after watching the film—is also pretty great, though I suspect that if you have read this far, you are already sold regarding that area. Although it is doubtful that anyone would put Tom Petty: Heartbreakers Beach Party atop the list of all-time rock documentaries along the likes of The Last Waltz or Woodstock, it does serve as a very entertaining reminder of what MTV used to be once upon a time (even if they evidently didn’t quite get it themselves) and for fans of Petty and Crowe alike, it is a must that shows both at key moments in the evolutions of their respective artistic journeys

.The G7 summit is an annual gathering in which the leaders of the world’s top democracies meet in order to discuss and coordinate response to the global issues of the day, though usually accomplished in a manner so vague, haphazard and ultimately ineffective that one wonders why they (not to mention the number of protestors that also turn up) even bother in the first place. Rumours, on the other hand, is a film that depicts that rarest of events—a G7 summit where things actually happen, though perhaps not quite in the way that organizers may have hoped. Set on an estate on the edge of a German forest, the film opens as the current leaders—German chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Cate Blanchett), U.K. prime minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird), aging U.S. president Edison Walcott (Charles Dance, complete with British accent), French president Sylvia’s Broulez (Denis Menochet), Italian prime minister Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello), Japanese premier Tatsuro Iwesaki (Takehiro Hira) and Trudeau-like Canadian prime minister Maxine Laplace (Roy Dupuis)—gather to catch up, avail themselves to the sumptuous buffets surrounding them and, time permitting, putting together a statement about some unmentioned global issue. After a while, they begin to realize that something has happened—their phones no longer work and the various aides and associates seem to have vanished—and they are now apparently on their own. After much internal dithering and hand-wringing, they decide to try to make their way back to the estate on their own and come across a number of increasingly bewildering sights along the way—so bewildering that the vision of a number of recently excavated, apparently revived and clearly masturbating 2000-year-old corpses wandering around is perhaps not the strangest of the things they encounter.

Rumours (whose name was evidently inspired by the Fleetwood Mac album of the same name and the well-known strife that went into its production) was co-directed by that oddest of filmmakers, Canadian Guy Maddin (whose oeuvre includes such brilliant head scratchers as The Saddest Music in the World, My Winnipeg and the staggering short The Heart of the World) and even by his standards, it is a weird one. Perhaps befitting a film that comes across as a bizarre fusion of Night of the Living Dead, Britannia Hospital and some of the stranger Monty Python sketches, the enterprise as a whole is inevitably uneven and those who show up primarily because of the presence of the likes of Blanchett and Alicia Vikander (turning up later in the proceedings as an EU rep) are likely to be confounded by it all. And yet, even as I concede that it never quite pulls itself together into a cohesive or entirely coherent whole, I did find a lot of it quite funny nevertheless. The early scenes in which the leaders of the free world goof around like a bunch of high schoolers putting off tackling a homework assignment are amusing, as are a number of the things they encounter during their long night in the wilderness, and there is an especially funny scene where Laplace inexplicably receives a text that might be from a real young girl seeking help or might be part of an AI program designed to trap potential pedophiles—having failed to put their grand statement together, the G7 members now attempt to create a response just leading enough to arouse the authorities if it is a trap but not so much as to cause undo trauma if it actually is coming from a young girl. Rumours clearly is not going to be for all, or most, tastes but even at its wobbliest, I’ll take it over such recent misfired attempts at satirical international cinema as Kinds of Kindness or Triangle of Sadness in a heartbeat.