‘A Town Called Panic’ ***1/2
So this is what deadpan slapstick surrealist Belgian stop-motion animation looks like. I like it!
Expanding upon a cult TV series, this 75-minute joy ride combines the aesthetic of Gumby and Pokey, the dryly assured framing and timing of “Wallace & Gromit” and the relentlessly destructive anarchy (but not the crudeness) of “South Park.” “Panique au Village” takes place in a bucolic corner of the world where plastic figurines named Indian, Cowboy and Horse live together and the bike-riding postman seems to have swung over from Jacques Tati’s “Jour de Fete.” It’s Horse’s birthday, and Indian and Cowboy want to build him a nice brick barbecue. The online brick-purchasing process goes awry (50 million bricks instead of 50), and by film’s end we’re taken to an underwater parallel universe that makes as much sense as anything else. Filmmakers Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar favor a manic pace that some may find wearying; I found it a tonic, and words can barely express how much fresher and funnier “A Town Called Panic” is than, say, “Ice Age 3.”
Running time: 1:15. Opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. In French with English subtitles. No MPAA rating (tiny bit of language, but fine for all ages).
–Michael Phillips
‘Glorious Exit’ ***1/2
You can’t pick your family, but if it’s large and globally rangy enough you certainly can be surprised by its complexities. Deceptively artless in its approach, this fine cultural mash-up of a documentary (shot on Beta video) is about an LA actor, the eldest son of a Swiss mother and a Nigerian chieftain father. The man, Jarreth Merz, is expected to arrange his father’s Nigerian village burial, which turns out to be a monstrous challenge. Months after the body has been put on ice at the local mortuary, the inter-clan and intra-familial machinations grind on. Who’s to pay? With Merz’s half-brother, Kevin, chronicling developments, “Glorious Exit” becomes a rich story of a man trying to do the right thing in a situation he can barely get his head around, in a poverty-ridden, tradition-bound corner of his newly expanded world. The footage has been very shrewdly edited to keep Merz at the center of everything, without turning the film into another Westernized-perspective lesson in cultural anthropology.
Running time: 1:15. Opens Friday at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. In English and German with German subtitles. No MPAA rating (some disturbing imagery).
–M.P.
‘The Missing Person’ ***1/2
Writer-director Noah Buschel’s ambitious, stylish neo-noir “The Missing Person” starts so self-consciously that it verges on parody but gains depth and breadth as it evokes 9/11 post-traumatic stress. It’s a great-looking movie, with an evocative use of music and, in rugged-yet-sensitive Michael Shannon, an actor whose forceful, focused presence is the film’s linchpin.
Shannon’s John Rosow, a martini-loving, hardscrabble Chicago private eye, is awakened in the night with an offer he can’t afford not to take. For $500 a day plus expenses he is to board a train to Los Angeles at 7 a.m. to tail one of its passengers (Frank Wood), who has in tow a little Mexican boy. Rosow is to bring the man, about whom he is initially told nothing, to New York.
Rosow encounters an array of people who are either comical, ironic or sarcastic — or all three. Just as the viewer is about to give up on the possibility that anyone will ever give Rosow anything resembling an ordinary, normal response, the film adroitly shifts gears; we gradually realize that Rosow and his target have had their lives transformed by 9/11. In a sense, Rosow is as much a missing man as is his quarry.
Despite honoring noir genre conventions, Buschel also draws upon his fertile imagination in dialogue and in storytelling that allows his film gradually to accrue meaning.
Running time: 1:35. Opens Friday at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. No MPAA rating.
–Kevin Thomas, Special to Tribune Newspapers
