Saturday Evening Movie Thread [moviegique]: Hundreds of Beavers

How often do we see a movie that is exactly what it says on the tin? Since mainstream movies aren't all named "Soulless Crap", those are out. But it's long been a practice in the indies to name your movie something you can't really live up to. The odds of exaggeration go up exponentially when there's a number in the title. Two Thousand Maniacs? More like two dozen maniacs. A Million Ways To Die In The West? Fifteen, tops! (It affects music, too! "Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover" has about four or five ways, depending on how you count. Shrinkflation was really bad in the '70s.)

Beaver count in Hundreds of Beavers? Literally hundreds. You lose track, there are so many. But the movie, knowing how often the audience has been betrayed, toys with us at first, giving us a couple of beavers here and there along with a lot of raccoons, bears, wolves, and other furry, skinnable critters, before the third act reveal.

But let us begin at the beginning.

Now THAT is a movie poster!

Ryan Brickson Cole Tews plays Jean Kayak, a furrier in the frontier days of the country, and in the movie's setup, we see that he is a great grower of apples—and a great purveyor of applejack, to which he finds himself in thrall. His drunkenness causes him to lose his factory and apple groves, to say nothing of his reputation, and he must find another way to survive in the perpetual winter of Wisconsin (or possibly Michigan).

He attempts to trap animals for food and fails miserably, but ultimately ends up teaming up with The Master Fur Trapper, who teaches him all the tricks. When The Master meets an untimely demise, he strikes out on his own, trading with The Merchant, who runs his shop exactly like one you might find in a computer role-playing game. A knife is one penny, a rope is two pennies, a pipe is three beavers, and so on.

Did I say "like" a video game? I mean...EXACTLY THE SAME AS.

In this way, our hero "levels up" and captures more and more pelts of various sorts.

But what he really wants is The Merchant's daughter, and The Merchant demands hundreds of beavers in order to purchase an engagement ring.

But while Jean Kayak has been struggling to get ahead in the wolf-eat-dog world of fur trapping, the beavers have been making their own, possibly sinister, plans. (Even in retrospect, I'm not sure the industrious beavers were exactly villainous. It's more a collision of world views.)

Will Jean Kayak survive the frontier? Will he get the girl? Will he be able to survive hundreds of beavers?

If the little clues didn't tip you off Hundreds of Beavers (which is fun to say and type) is a comedy, brought to you by the masterminds that made Lake Michigan Monster. Without a lot of money, and with a lot of resourcefulness and creativity, Tews and director/co-writer Mike Cheslik have created a new, old kind of comedy.

The lovely Miss Graves skins a beaver. (She's also a proficient pole dancer!)

Filmed in black-and-white (in part to hide the low-budget) and "silent" (in terms of having almost no dialogue), HoB uses the tropes and gag mechanics of the silent era and Looney Toons, then blends them with video game tropes, and non-stop, wall-to-wall gag which hit way more often than not.

I mean, by the time you're registering that a joke didn't quite hit, there have been two others that did. And, almost shockingly—because who remembers how to do comedy these days?—a lot of times, the joke that only got a little smile out of you comes back later in different forms, funnier each time it comes back.

Like The General or The Gold Rush (which it cannot help but evoke), or a Road Runner cartoon, the movie trains you in its comedic language. For example, there's a gag involving a wolf whistle, which inexplicably summons an enraged woodpecker. OK, kind of cute in context, but not hilarious. As the movie goes on, Jean Kayak finds himself repeatedly tormented by said woodpecker, but ultimately finds a way to exploit this mechanism to his advantage.

On trial for beaver crimes.

It's so ingrained that by the end of the movie, you're just laughing at the whistle itself. A month later when seeing a different film, I poked my head into the theater showing HoB, heard the whistle, and laughed without even seeing what was on screen. (And the theater was about 2/3rds full.)

My only complaint, if I had to make one, was that it was slightly too long, in particular a very video-game-y segment in the third act.

But this is a quibble. I haven't seen a new movie this funny in years and I don't expect to see another until these guys do a follow-up.

Made on a budget of $200,000—apparently the various costumes cost $10K each!—it has broken $300K at the box office, playing week-after-week—three months as of today, in fact—playing in about a dozen theaters nationwide. It's the sort of film you drag your friends to.

Tews is perfect, as he was in Lake Michigan Monster, and Wes Tanks (as The Master Fur Trapper) and Doug Mancheski (as The Trader) are great in their roles. A special shout-out to Olivia Graves as Kayak's love interest, who enjoys tormenting her suitor. This is a tricky role just because we're rooting for Tews and she's making his life hard, but in a charmingly ridiculous way.

Another point of interest is Luis Rico, who plays The Indian Fur Trapper, and whose part is laden with classic Amerind movie tropes. I'm not foolish enough to believe we've gotten past our cultural madness, but it was sure nice to see a bunch of "injun jokes" that people were laughing at, without a single dudgeon being raised on high.

If you're not fortunate enough to be living near one of the dozen theaters it's in, it is available for streaming on Amazon and Apple, and will be available for purchase in a few weeks.

This is also as close to a "general recommendation" movie as I get these days. You almost have to be anti-comedy to not be able to appreciate this. Heck, you could be anti-comedy and just appreciate the craftsmanship here. The writing—the sheer effort that must have gone into packing in hundreds of gags—is admirable just as a work of art.

Plus, it's a Christmas movie!

Other Films Of Note:

Chocolat (1988): Not the 2000 Johnny Depp/Juliet Binoche romance but a "slice of life" memoir about French Cameroon in the '50s. Beautifully shot with a competent (and good looking) cast, but not a lot to say for itself.

Late Night With The Devil: Breakout horror hit of the year, this "found footage" film stretches (and even breaks) the boundaries of the genre to provide a very compelling experience.

Remembering Gene Wilder: A fun documentary narrated by Wilder, and hitting the highlights of his career. A lot of smiles with the mandatory memento mori end.

Arcadian: Nicolas Cage indulges his agent, who wrote this thinly plotted horror which makes less and less sense the more you think about it.

Le Samourai (1967): Classic French noir about a hitman with a code, complete with made-up quote from the Bushido. Hard-boiled inspiration for every filmmaker dabbling in noir ever since.

The Teacher's Lounge:  Moral uncertainty plagues a German school, leading one teacher (a Pole) to an increasingly tenuous career position. Fine acting and buildup puts the writers into a corner they don't dare try to get out of in this Oscar-nominated film.

Chinatown (1974): The fiftieth anniversary of the Best Picture Oscar-winner that reminds you that Jack Nicholson used to put out some amazingly subtle performances before becoming a caricature of himself, and Roman Polanski could direct a great film, no matter how big a creep:

The Pianist (2002): We're in-between the 20th and 25th anniversary, making me wonder if this isn't part of a(nother) push to rehab Polanski by reminding us that, even as recently as 2002, he could direct a hell of a film. Adrien Brody's breakout role.

Woman in the Dunes (1964): The highest rated film I've seen in the past year (with an 8.5 on IMDB), this tells the story of an entomologist trapped in a pit with a woman for two-and-a-half hours. I don't think I "got" this one.

The Taste of Things: I loved this movie about a 19th century French gourmand and his lifelong chef/lover. The first hour-and-a-half is mostly cooking, but it slows down after that a little. Juliette Binoche looks rather good naked even at sixty.

Perfect Days: Wim Wenders gives us a story of a peaceful, happy toilet cleaner in Japan, whose life is touched by the chaos in others', but only just. A drama for people who don't like drama.

Amelie (2001): Jeunet's classic love-song to Paris is as charming as ever—a rare film where the heroine is a coward, or is overcoming her cowardice—and even more remarkable in its resemblance to A Christmas Story. That is to say, it was a nostalgic film at the time, and of a time that is so far gone, nary a trace remains.

With a little searching, you can find HoB posters for "Reservoir Dogs", "Sleepless In Seattle", "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" and many others.

posted by Open Blogger at 08:03 PM

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