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In this short film by Ramin Bahrani, the protagonist finds and loses the love of his life, sending him on an existential quest to reach the vortex. Werner Herzog gives voice to his reflections against a celestial score by Sigur Rós‘ Kjartan Sveinsson. Have we mentioned the protagonist is a plastic bag? You’ll cry anyway.

“Plastic Bag”
Directed, written and edited by Ramin Bahrani
Story by Jenni Jenkins and Ramin Bahrani
Voice of Werner Herzog
Cinematography by Michael Simmonds
Music by Kjartan Sveinsson

“Saint John of Las Vegas” begins with John Alighieri (played by Steve Buscemi) midway through the journey of his life, within a gas station dark and his straightforward pathway lost.
 
Director Hue Rhodes has taken on the retelling of the Inferno and, arguably, the entire Divine Comedy in 85 minutes of flat desert. He pairs John with insurance fraud debunker Virgil (Romany Malco) in a quest to find proof to deny a claim to a wheelchair-bound stripper. John is led through his own circles of hell – corporate America and Las Vegas – by Virgil and delivered into the hands of his smiley-face-bedizened Beatrice, Jill (Sarah Silverman) for the rest of his journey.
 
The film falls within the new genre of quirk but Rhodes doesn’t live up to the higher practitioners of the art (Kaufman, Gondry, Anderson, Jonze) in that he hasn’t created a cohesively odd universe for the audience to immerse themselves in. They find pockets of weird, though, a reigniting human torch comprising some of the best of those moments. Heavy-handed allusions (a lighter that says “Abandon All Hope”) are a shame since they outweigh the defter ones (quotidian gates symbolically open and close between the hell, purgatory and heaven segments).

There are some steadily underplayed performances. From Buscemi, particularly, who makes excellent use of his wounded chihuahua persona to bring a forgiving vulerability to the role.

“Saint John of Las Vegas” might not be a divine comedy, but it’s a comedy of a higher order.

It’s said that there are only a handful of stories and that any others are just a variation on them. Undoubtedly one of these rare originals is the Sanskrit tale, the Ramayana. From the chronicles of Rama – revolving around the abduction of his wife Sita and his quest for her return in which he is aided by his friend, the monkey king Hanuman – have evolved countless direct and indirect adaptations.

In Sita Sings the Blues, cartoonist Nina Paley has taken on the task of animating and recounting the epic and intertwining it with her own journey in and out of love and India. The film’s style fluctuates from figures reminiscent of Kara Walker cutouts to a Hindu Betty Boop.

Sita Sings the Blues opens today and plays until Dec. 31 at the IFC Center. Paley promises she’ll do Q & A’s at most, if not all, of the 8:25 p.m. shows. If you can’t make it, be grateful that she’s a believer in free distribution and you can watch Sita Sings the Blues online.

Didn’t make it to the movies much this past year? All you need to do is set aside seven minutes for the summary of what you missed – and a moving testament to the human need to tell a story.
Edited by Kees van Dijkhuizen

That two adaptations of children’s books by ur-offbeat directors have come out nearly simultaneously has been oft-remarked upon. But there is a vast difference in not only style but the two aspects of the psyche the directors represent.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox” takes place in a circumscribed world. There’s no Plato’s cave dichotomy – even among the human and animal planes, there exists the same mundane rationality. Not so for Max and his wild pals.

Max’s trip to the island of his id is far removed from the us vs. them of the outside world. Instead there is only internal struggle. Carol, appropriately voiced by James Gandolfini, has Tony Soprano-esque dilemmas. His explosive anger, paradoxically born out of a desperate fear of abandonment, drives those around him further away and literally tears members of his pack apart. The morality tale that Max witnesses on the island serves as a reflection of his true life, which Spike Jonze keeps tinged in believable grays and browns and rooted in real childhood angst.
 
The externalization of a conflict of desires within characters is familiar territory for Jonze. Foreshortened office hallways for a worker who feels trapped by his occupation, the literal splitting of one personality into two beings – circumstance accounts for the manufacture of surroundings in the Jonze universe.
 
Alternatively, Wes Anderson’s characters are always fantastical creations of their own egos – fox or not – and Anderson accordingly whimsifies the world around them. With creatures of vulpine, badger and opossum origin, this is less necessary than usual but more encompassing. Taken out of the alterna-New York that Anderson characters often inhabit, he instead starts out with the premise that it doesn’t take urbanity to be urbane.
 
Like all egoistes, Mr. Fox is buffeted by his own petard. It’s his wile that both gets him into trouble and saves him from the consequences of following his nature. In a slick bit of commentary, Anderson illustrates how the members of the Fox family surmount their wild instincts by having them behave as paragons of civilized virtue – until mealtime.
 
The two films make a neat Freudian pair; perhaps even more telling is that both directors put themselves at a remove and, by doing so, take on the role of the super-ego.