Oedipus has it all: sex, violence, and broccoli rotting in fast-motion under a 1K top-light. © Mama’s Boy Productions Inc.

Oedipus
Tomato-fucking! There, I’ve said it. The subject, like the indiscretions of Wallis Simpson and King Edward, is now aboveboard and on the table. Careful, I left a potato peeler on the table too. There’s a garden of earthly delights, and utensils to match, in Oedipus, a stop-motion short from Compton, California-based animator Jason Wishnow.

A hoot when viewed straight, I wager this can only get better seen with a roomful of drunken theater arts majors. Its premise is simple: Sophocles’ immortal play Oedipus is retold in a streamlined version compressed into eight minutes. What makes this a fresh first in the history of cinema is that this oft-retold classic is here re-enacted by fruits and vegetables. Yes, in the past Oedipus has been staged in periods ranging from its original ancient setting to Victorian England, but no one yet has dared dump the humans for mixed greens. Or stage a sex scene with a potato and a tomato. Points to Wishnow for innovating on both counts.

In practical terms, Wishnow delivers his Cinemascope mini-epic in five scenes: the deadly meeting on the road, the reunion of Oedipus and his mother, a bedroom scene, a visit from a soothsayer, and Oedipus’ farewell to Antigone. The opening scene doesn’t skimp on the violence, with the King taking the form of a head of broccoli that meets a cleaved fate at the hands of potato Oedipus’ two-fisted ninja peeler action. Taking his cauliflower flock with him to the city, Oedipus the shepherd and his roughage pass the time in a bar. (The barkeep will sound familiar; his most famous character had the original pink slip to the Millennium Falcon). On stage, as it happens, a tomato in a dress — the dead king’s wife, and Oedipus’ mother — is the star attraction, and her closing number is, unbeknownst to her, the spectacularly ill-chosen standard Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t (My Baby).

It’s downhill for the whole family after that, as Oedipus and Ma share explicit (never mind impossible) sexual congress. Her immediate reaction of familiarity with her new lover only meets Oedipus’ breezy reply, “Yeah, I get that a lot.” But the next day an onion soothsayer comes with bad news, and when he learns he’s unwittingly killed his dad and married his mother, Mom freaks out, leaps from a high place and makes herself tomato sauce for street pizza. Potato Oedipus plucks out his eyes — all of them — and with a sad nod to the hubris that brought his family to its knees, he bids farewell to baby tomato Antigone and leaves the kingdom.

Wishnow created Oedipus in a warehouse in southern Los Angeles using borrowed equipment, off-the-clock professional friends and a lot of favors. A veteran of the online DIY digital ethos, Wishnow has directed Internet favs such as Tatooine or Bust, a documentary on rabid Star Wars fans, and was curator of 2000’s Aggressively Boring Film Festival, the world’s first festival dedicated to works for the Palm Pilot. His influences on Oedipus, from Ben-Hur to Lawrence of Arabia, are nobly lofty — even as his satire, equally nobly, has both feet planted in the compost heap. In short, Oedipus has it all: sex, violence, and broccoli rotting in fast-motion under a 1K top-light.

A Buck’s Worth is the filmmaker’s second collaboration with Israeli author Etgar Keret. © Tatia Rosenthal.

A Buck’s Worth
A Buck’s Worth is a begging letter about begging, a perfect appetizer for a feature film in the making from puppet animator Tatia Rosenthal and writer Etgar Keret. Rosenthal is an NYU graduate and makes her living as senior animator on the ubiquitous toddler fave Blue’s Clues. In her current film, as in her student film from 1998, this Israeli artist has chosen as her text a story by fellow Israeli Etgar Keret.

Filmed in a richly rough style with painted puppets, Rosenthal’s award-winning student film Crazy Glue was an intimate story about a lonely wife’s attempt to draw back her philandering husband, based on the short story of the same name by Keret. A Buck’s Worth is Rosenthal’s second collaboration with Keret, who is something of a literary star in his native country. (Los Angeles residents have been treated to a handful of his Raymond Carver-esque vignettes in local alternative paper LA Weekly, and you can read his stories Crazy Glue, Fatso, Halibut, and Ironclad Rules in the archive at the paper’s online site.) Brief and unforgettable, Keret’s stories unfold in short, short scenes, played completely straight or dipped finger-deep in magical realism.

Sundance Filmmakers Lab sponsored the development of A Buck’s Worth, the first animated short so honored by the independent festival. The stop-motion film opens with a wide shot of a city awakening, then pushes in to record an encounter between two men on the sidewalk. The mark, a ruffled man waiting for a taxi, is approached by a transient. A strange dynamic builds between them as the transient, voiced by Philip Baker Hall, talks about a dream he had of breakfast with his dead wife. The transient asks for a dollar for a cup of coffee as a gun slips from his grip and drops to the sidewalk between them. The mark, voiced by Tom Noonan, is petrified and offers to give him $50 — or even a trip to the ATM for more — if the man leaves him alone.

The transient is shocked at the suggestion that he’s trying to rob him. But he does admit that this whole event was precipitated on a whim when the gun accidentally came into his hands, and that he’d decided to approach the first man he saw for a buck for a cup of coffee. If he was turned down, he says — putting the gun to his own head — he might as well “join the missus.” The mark is shocked by this turn of events, and all he can do to defend his emotions is try to move through the situation rationally, telling the man he feels exploited, and demanding he drop the pretense and just approach him as a fellow human being asking for help “like any other homeless guy.”

Rosenthal’s foam latex puppets in A Buck’s Worth are only slightly more naturalistic than her creations in Crazy Glue, which were built from mattress foam under a latex skin. She gets in most of her character work from only minimal articulations: a twisted eyebrow, a jutted chin. The voice work is highly affecting, as we’d expect from Philip Baker Hall, star of Secret Honor and most of Paul Thomas Anderson’s filmography, and writer/actor Tom Noonan, a character actor probably best known as serial killer Francis Dollarhyde in Manhunter.

A Buck’s Worth is aptly named: this story about a plea for a dollar is itself just a buck’s worth of something the creative team hope to charge $10 for someday. Rosenthal ends her piece with “To Be Continued,” the continuation being the feature-length script, called $9.99, that Keret and Rosenthal have already completed together. A Buck’s Worth is that movie’s first scene, and hopefully a series of screenings at this year’s Sundance film festival will earn them completion money and a distributor. If finished, the feature would mark a first in American cinema: a dramatic film for a mature audience made entirely in stop-motion.

Taylor Jessen is a writer living in Burbank. You have (1) new messages in mailbox (1).