Cinema Report: "Kansas Is Corny!"

Watched Ralph Bakshi's American Pop this weekend. Haven't seen the whole thing in quite a while.

Not an entirely successful film, full of rotoscoping, stock footage, backgrounds with motionless crowds, some thin sound design, real songs and real voices attributed to ficitonal musicians, and so on.

It's pretty awesome, too, at least at certain points. Such as this one, which is one of my favorite scenes from any movie, ever.

Tony, the latest in the music-tinged family line (which stretches across the 20th century - it's one of those kinds of movies), leaves New York and heads cross-country to California. Along the way, he stops off in Kansas, and falls for a waitress in a roadside diner. After he works a shift as a dishwasher, they head into the cornfields:



There's a genuine sweetness there. And there's a great sense of pace, as the scene picks up speed in a series of starts and stops with Tony's performance (and the rotoscoping does work, in this scene at least, to preserve the performance, Robert Zemeckis take note). Tony surges ahead with rambling enthusiasm, ambition and desire, and then comes to a stop while gazing at her, and then starts up again, all leading to the moment where she quietly takes control of the scene, reduces him to single words, and offers him the fleeting promise of the final line. Really fine, fine stuff.

The rest of the movie doesn't usually hit this level, but there are a few moments, here and there. Might do a little review entry about the film later. I dunno. Is anyone reading this stuff?