The Great Movies III

Chop Shop is about a hard coming of age. Ale's dream is that he and his sister will buy a taco truck and go into business on their own. He saves every dollar. She won't have to work in Ahmad's truck anymore. In a heartbreaking scene, Ale glimpses how she has started to augment her income. He never directly confronts her. He works harder to make money, to buy her things, to make money less necessary to her. He is a brother, but also, in a sense, a husband. He wants to take responsibility. He learns some inescapable realities about the limitations of his power and undergoes a shift into tacitly understanding why she earns as she does. He will be thirteen soon, and then twenty-three, and one day we are sure he will own a taco truck, but not now, and certainly not the shabby truck he has set his dreams on. Reality is taking him on the first steps toward the American Dream, and they are lower steps than we like to imagine.

Ramin Bahrani was born in 1975 in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and is not, as has been misreported by many, including me, an immigrant from Iran. His parents came from Iran. His father is a psychiatrist in Winston-Salem, practicing much among poor blacks and whites. Bahrani says neither he nor his family has experienced racism there, although at school, there were "whites, blacks, and my brother and me." His parents have instilled a love of Persian poetry. Once during a conversation, he mentioned the poems of Hafez of Shiraz (1315-90), which are used as an oracle like the I Ching by many Persians. I asked if I could present a question to Hafez. He told me not to speak it aloud. He telephoned his father in North Carolina, who opened his volume at random and took fifteen minutes to translate what he found there. It was relevant.

It may be this dual heritage that inspires Bahrani to look more closely at the many new Americans among us. Man Push Cart was about the Pakistani operator of a Manhattan sidewalk bagel cart. Such carts are part of the daily routines of many New Yorkers, who may rarely look at those behind the counter. His 2008 film, Goodbye Solo, is about a Senegalese-American taxi driver in Winston-Salem, and an old man who hires him for a trip that worries him. The taxi driver is played by Souleymane Sy Savane, from the Ivory Coast. The old man is played by Red West, who met Elvis Presley in high school and was his longtime bodyguard. Only in America.

A film director, like an orchestra conductor, is the lord of his domain, and no director has more power than a director of animated films. He is set free from the rules of the physical universe and the limitations of human actors, and can tell any story his mind can conceive. That's no doubt why Chuck Jones, after creating the characters of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, immediately wrote down the rules of what could and could not happen in their universe. If anything could happen (and it could), the comedy would be lost in anarchy.

Jones and other masters of the cartoon short subject created a world apart from the real world and also apart from feature-length animation, which tended to be more story-driven. In their films, which were usually about seven minutes long, comic scenarios were driven by eternal conflicts between a character and his desires: Elmer Fudd wanted to shoot a wabbit, and over and over he tried, and over and over he was outwitted (except once, as we will see).

There was a time when the feature was invariably preceded by a cartoon, and audiences smiled when they heard the theme music for Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies from Warner Bros. Cartoons have long since been replaced by fifteen minutes of trailers in many theaters, an emblem of the greed of exhibitors and their contempt for their audiences. In those golden days, the cartoon (and even a newsreel and a short subject) was a gift from the management.

There are several main lines in cartoon shorts: Disney (Mickey, Donald, and Goofy), Warner Bros. (Bugs, Daffy, Elmer, Tweety and Sylvester, the Road Runner), MGM (Tom and Jerry), and UPA (Mr. Magoo). Many of these little films are available on DVD, lovingly restored (Roy E. Disney personally supervised a series of Disney classics, which come packaged in aluminum canisters). To choose one director or a few titles from the cartoon universe is daunting, but I'll choose Chuck Jones, because I knew him and because three of his cartoons have been included in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress: "Duck Amuck" (1953), "One Froggy Evening" (1955), and "What's Opera, Doc?" (1957)-