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Movie Review
"Outside Providence"
The Farrelly brothers unself-consciously put a class-conscious spin on this wonderfully off-beat coming-of-age story.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[09/01/99]

Music Interview
"Everyone has their own clichés"
Richard Thompson gives us a peek -- just a peek, mind you -- into his bag of musical tricks.
By David Bowman
[08/31/99]

Movie Review
"Dudley Do-Right"
Brendan Fraser does the sweet-but-stupid big lug shtick again -- and again, and again ...
By Mary Elizabeth Williams
[08/27/99]

Movie Review
"The Muse"
Albert Brooks proves all too effective at playing a screenwriter who's lost the golden touch.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[08/27/99]

Column
The art of survival
Oscar winners Freida Lee Mock and Terry Sanders salute America's Vietnam War POWs in the awe-inspiring "Return With Honor."
By Michael Sragow
[08/26/99]

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As always, what director George Dunning and designer Heinz Edelmann do with the material makes the film an undiluted delight. It isn't the pop sitar and bell-bottoms and giddy dorm-room graphics that ring an audience's bells. It's the filmmakers' bottomless well of inspiration. While building toward a counterculture utopia, the movie offers a psychedelic history of art in which Magritte co-exists with Milton Glaser. If it once gave off lulling whiffs of weed and incense, it now works like aromatic smelling salts to provide a welcome jolt to the system. Today it's hard to know what's more stimulating: the combination of bravura collage effects and literate off-the-cuff comedy (like Terry Gilliam's Monty Python cartoons) or the zing that all-out, trailblazing pop can bring to a full-length animated feature.

We typically talk of movies as "experiences," when they're often high-tech experiments that reduce us to lab rats. "Yellow Submarine" is an experience -- an almost indescribable one. The story sounds too whimsical to stomach: A courtly old salt named Young Fred -- the Lord Admiral of a one-man fleet, on his maiden voyage -- takes a yellow submarine to Liverpool and cajoles the Beatles into rescuing the undersea paradise of Pepperland from the onslaught of the Blue Meanies. But in the "renovated" version opening in nine cities this month before arriving on home video, the images have an ecstatic lushness. It's as if the filmmakers print them directly on your optic nerve -- once they enter your consciousness, they stay there. And as heard in a gorgeous new digital mix, the songs really do have the power to soothe savage breasts and turn the chief Blue Meanie into an ambulating flower garden.

"Yellow Submarine" boasts two of the most majestic sequences ever animated or filmed. In the "Eleanor Rigby" number, there's an electric poignancy to the Liverpool folk who spend their humanity in iron-cast habits and routines. It's nearly as engulfing as the kinetic rapture of the ethereal yet sensual dancers who cavort to "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" while colors shift and spill beyond their outlines. The moviemakers don't set up these sequences as high points. They're simply a couple of the extravagant wonders that spill out of a cornucopia bigger and more bounteous than the horn in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Of course, Sgt. Pepper and his men turn up as the Beatles' alter egos in the film's alternative universe: they're the official group of Pepperland.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

The movie's boggling matter-of-factness is a key to its enduring -- no, its deepening -- charm. "Yellow Submarine" is a cut-up of a movie, in every sense of the word. Its benign, cheeky attitude extends to its freewheeling snip-and-paste shape. It's not a conventional fairy tale but a tapestry that develops its own protean personality as the filmmakers cunningly unroll it.

Most of our best feature animators, like John Lasseter ("Toy Story," "A Bug's Life") and Brad Bird ("The Iron Giant"), wed their love of classic movies to their love of cartoons, giving their work the same impact as live-action spectacles filmed on creative galaxies far, far away from Planet Hollywood. "Yellow Submarine" doesn't move or develop like these or other movies, as Lasseter acknowledged when he picked it for a tribute at the 1997 San Francisco Film Festival and praised it for "telling a story in a striking graphic way." Sometimes it seems to put us on a moving sidewalk at a World's Fair art exhibit, with the Beatles' verbal byplay operating like a commentary beaming into our skulls from individual Walkmans. At other times it uses the ploys of slapstick or musicals or comic strips to toy with our expectations before sending us down, or up, another fresh route of fantasy. And at all times it follows the beat of a different drummer (say, Ringo), with a pace that encourages gleeful improvisation.

The Blue Meanies, who have the heads of demented Mouseketeers and the bodies of plump male cheerleaders, propel an extraordinary array of thingamabobs against Pepperland, including the Snapping Turks, who sport killer-shark tummies, and the tall, thin, top-hatted Bonkers, who paralyze victims with big green apples. Best and worst of all is the Dreadful Flying Glove, which pays homage to exotic poetry -- the Blue Meanie instructs it to point, and, having pointed, pounce. Even when the Anti-Music Missiles start flying, the movie can stop for a spot of comedy, like the leader of Pepperland's classical quartet refusing to acknowledge the attack until his act is reduced to a solo. Pepperland is like the "Sgt. Pepper" album cover extended ad infinitum -- a flower child's garden of cultural influences, with a late-Edwardian ambiance that's both decadent and wholesome. And it has a boisterous inclusiveness without an inkling of political correctness. Everybody is invited to play.

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