Word: tales
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trade the land for the wind. Here is Simon Magus, an early Roman necromancer who rose skyward (possibly by means of a balloon) before a crowd that included St. Peter. To the relief of the early Christian spectators, Magus suffered an instant-and fatal-crash. Haining wistfully relates the tale of Bladud, a doomed 9th century British king, who borrowed a page from Greek mythologies and perished like Icarus with a pair of feather-and-wax wings. George Faux, a 19th century English eccentric was more fortunate. In 1862 he jumped from a roof, flapped his arms violently and plummeted...
...everyone in town. If you were among the younger set, your personal stock rose with your ability to tell hair-raising stories about what the Big Wind had done to your family's house. (I always came off the winner in contests like these, after repeating the probably apocryphal tale of how the storm wave lifted up our cottage and left it sitting right on top of second base in the local softball field.) And even now, many townspeople are perversely proud of the fact that the hurricane wrought more damage in our town than any other on Fire Island...
Safe Targets. For better or for worse, this is a fairy tale, not a cutting satire. Neither the bullets nor the issues are real. Dick and Jane pick only safe targets; they knock over a telephone company office and win a round of applause from the queue of bill payers. Briskly propelled by Director Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), they skim through their adventures as innocently as a pair of prankish collegians. The only laws they are unable to flout are the iron laws of comic contrivance. They must, it seems, receive an implausible invitation to a party...
...program proves that the animation technique need not impose any stylistic formula on the animator. The mood and subject of these short essays range from the melancholy romanticism of Raoul Servais's Sirene, a tale of love between a mermaid and a flutist after a holocaust, to the wry wit of Kick Me by Robert Swarthe in which the protagonist is a pair of headless legs...
...FESTIVAL'S highlight is the complete version of Ladislas Starevitch's The Mascot, a fairy tale of innocence astray in a wicked world. The film, made in 1934, is a classic of puppet and object animation. A dew-eyed puppy puppet--who bears a vague resemblance to Alfred Hitchcock--is brought to life by the tears of a dollmaker who is too poor to buy her sick daughter the oranges she dreams of. The dollmaker sends the puppy to be sold in a toy store. He manages to escape his new owner there as well as his fate...