Short Takes

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID Three different versions exist of Sam Peckinpah’s elegiac 1973 Western, and each has its own unique character: even the mangled 106-minute studio cut—the one showing this weekend on a double bill with the bizarre Bob Dylan comedy Masked and Anonymous—has long passages of ragged grandeur. James Coburn’s Pat Garrett is the most conflicted in a long line of Peckinpah-surrogate antiheroes, preceded by The Wild Bunch’s William Holden and followed by Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia’s Warren Oates, who must see a dirty job through just to say fuck you to his bosses. The job is killing off his good bud and free-spirited younger self Billy the Kid (Kris Kristofferson); the movie, especially in this cut, is a hallucinatory miasma of killing time to stave off the inevitable, every notch measured in screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer’s twangy outlaw palaver and Dylan’s plaintive score. The cast, a veritable horse-opera hall of fame, includes R.G. Armstrong, Jack Elam, Chill Wills, Katy Jurado, L.Q. Jones and Slim Pickens (whose lonesome death to “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” is one of the movies’ most stirring images of mortality); watch for Rita Coolidge, Dylan as “Alias” (more than one reviewer snarked that he should have used one), and renowned Nashville songwriter and Kristofferson sideman Donnie Fritts among Billy’s gang. —Jim Ridley (Dec. 16 & 17 at the Belcourt)

THE RED BALLOON / WHITE MANE If you’re of a certain age, chances are one of your seminal childhood moviegoing experiences was Albert Lamorisse’s lovely 34-minute The Red Balloon (1956), about a Parisian boy’s friendship with a red balloon so iridescent that I incorrectly remembered the rest of the film as black-and-white. Now you can take your kids and/or yourself to a gorgeously restored new print (overseen by Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son, who also played the boy), released in a double bill with Lamorisse père’s 1953 White Mane, the exquisite story of a similarly angelic lad and his horse-pal resisting capture on the shallow white plains of the Camargue. For all the seraphic beauty of the boys, neither movie resorts more than briefly to cuteness; both are escape fantasies that pay homage to the inventiveness of children in the face of dour adult oppression. In The Red Balloon, which won the Palme d’Or (and, oddly for an all but silent movie, Best Original Screenplay) at Cannes, the boy’s feet clatter over the cobblestones of a bombed-out postwar Paris, and in both films, the final images indelibly evoke the rapture and terror of being carried away—about as good a metaphor for cinema as I can think of. If you come out wondering how Lamorisse (who later died in a helicopter crash while shooting a documentary about Iran) persuaded a balloon to follow a kid around and sail over rooftops, all will be revealed (or imagined) in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s forthcoming Flight of the Red Balloon. —Ella Taylor (Opens Friday at the Belcourt)

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS The only way a Chipmunks movie could be even remotely interesting would be if it deconstructed the characters à la Scrappy in the live-action Scooby-Doo: Make them evil bastards who secretly plan to drive Dave Seville (here played by Jason Lee) to suicide with their crazy antics and obnoxious helium voices. Needless to say, the Bagdasarian family, who created the furry beasts, aren’t about to undermine their cash cow in any significant way—so what we get instead is Alvin, Simon and Theodore rendered huggably fuzzy in CG, which apparently so sapped the movie’s budget that luxuries such as continuity and art direction have gone out the window. And does nobody involved see the irony of the film’s villain being a sleazy record company executive (David Cross, giving it his all) who wants to milk the singing-chipmunk gimmick dry? Lee, acting through gritted teeth, barely musters the energy to yell “Alvin!” But the chipmunks themselves—voiced by Justin Long, Matthew Gray Gubler and Jesse McCartney—are surprisingly appealing, though their newly R&B-tinged rendition of “Witch Doctor” is god-awful. —Luke Y. Thompson (Opens Friday)