Also this issue:

On the Ball
Gurinder Chadha on making “the ultimate girl-power movie.”
-Cindy Fuchs

On the Line
A phone-wielding psycho stalks a semi-sleazy publicist.
-Cindy Fuchs

New

Continuing

Repertory Film

Showtimes

April 3- 9, 2003

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Futurama: Volume One ($39.98 DVD) "Silly," my friend called Futurama, and after the hairs on my neck were done bristling, I thought about it. Even compared to The Simpsons, Futurama has shown a blessed disregard for the tasteful, the expected, even the logical: In the first season alone, we visit the moon, which has been turned into a giant theme park, and a planet whose entire center has been mined out for spaceship fuel; witness a bidding war for the last remaining can of anchovies in the universe; and meet an alien race who will destroy the entire planet if they can't see the season finale of Ally McBeal -- er, sorry, Single Female Lawyer. And I haven't even mentioned the season finale, which somehow weaves Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Spuds McKenzie and The Simpsons' well-established disgust for Mountain Dew into one giddy, warped travelogue.

Futurama is, admittedly, one of the nerdiest shows ever to grace the small screen; executive producer David Cohen remarks on one of the audio commentaries that accompany each of the season's 13 episodes that the show's writing staff boasts two mathematics Ph.D.s and scores of ex-graduate students. Maybe that's why the show never caught on -- new episodes continue to air because of the years-long production process, but the show's all but been cancelled: No new episodes are being produced, although given the infrequency with which Fox actually manages to air new episodes, the backlog could last for years to come. Or perhaps the show's failure to develop beyond a cult audience has to do with the fact that where The Simpsons began as an anarchic family sitcom, Futurama began as pure anarchy; the moments when we're asked, or expected, to care about any of the characters are few and far between. That said, it's been consistently funnier than The Simpsons every year it's been on the air (which, to be fair, isn't exactly a fair fight). Where The Simpsons revels in pop-cultural currency, Futurama's targets are likely to be either obscure or out-of-date; consider that The Simpsons has poked fun at Presidents Clinton and Bush the first, while Futurama's favorite target is Nixon (or rather, his reanimated head in a jar). Maybe you can hear a Poindexter snort behind some of those egregious puns, but only if you scan backwards, since you'll be too busy snorting yourself the first time around.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit ($29.99 DVD) From the time-hopping of the Back to the Future trilogy to the carefully controlled claustrophobia of What Lies Beneath, Robert Zemeckis has proven himself a master of making the unbelievable believable, and of integrating the latest technology without ever (or rarely) losing sight of the story. The opening few minutes of the otherwise middling Contact still rank as one of the finest, most poetic uses of digital imagery, while What Lies Beneath used its effects sparingly, the better to set the audience up for a fright. The effects in 1986's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (no question mark, please) could hardly be more ostentatious -- the story, of course, involves one of those only-in-the-movies pairings of live action and animation -- but what's truly amazing is how quickly you forget that the titular bunny isn't real (or, conversely, that human lead Bob Hoskins isn't a cartoon). The true test of Zemeckis' talent comes now that virtually all the technology used to make Roger is obsolete, from old-school blue screen mattes to two-dimensional celluloid animation. The muddy quality of some images identifies the film's vintage (and makes you wish they'd spent a little more on the DVD transfer), but the performances -- animated, human and in between -- hold up. (I'm actually surprised how many lines I remembered, considering that I don't think I've seen the movie since its initial run.) It's hard to imagine how history will judge Zemeckis, who seems destined to be dismissed as no more than a craftsman, but it would be a shame if bids for middlebrow respectability like Forrest Gump and Cast Away were remembered over Zemeckis' more inspired excavations of junk culture.