[At Congress Square Park] PMA Films: “Eve Biddle Selects”: Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) (Free Screening)
Directed by Robert Zemeckis. 104 minutes. Rated PG. In English.
Screening for free in Congress Square Park!
Screens as part of "Eve Biddle Selects: Beautiful People Doing Impossible Things," a companion to the exhibition "Eve Biddle: Wonderlands."
Director Robert Zemeckis’ feature follow-up to the original Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit continued the filmmaker’s startling blend of humor, imagination, invention and technical innovation to bring together a world where human beings and animated cartoon characters interacted in a comical romantic mystery adventure set in a Hollywood—and Toontown—of yore.
Bob Hoskins stars as Eddie Valiant, a down-on-his-luck gumshoe with a painful past and a dislike of the lunacy of toons—thrust against his better instincts into a whodunnit with a harebrained hare, Roger Rabbit, a cuckolded cuckoo convicted of murdering gag magnate Marvin Acme. Eddie and Roger pair up, much to Eddie’s chagrin, to find Acme’s real murderer, only to uncover a cover-up that could bring ruination (all in the name of progress) to both Tinsletown and Toontown forever!
Featuring lively performances by Hoskins, Christopher Lloyd (Back to the Future) and Joanna Cassidy, along with a gallery of toons both new and beloved—including cameos by no-less animated aristocracy than Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Daffy Duck and many, many more from the Golden Age of animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is the kind of film that must be seen to be believed—and beloved.
Beautiful People Doing Impossible Things
I watch movies to be transported to another world. Because I play with scale and color in my art practice, I think a lot about how my images are kind of impossible. No human has a hand 24 inches long. No landscape is cyan blue. These images exist in a kind of Wonderland of my own imagining — much like the fantastical plots of the movies in this series.
Each feature is paired with a short film by my partner, Joshua Frankel — another beautiful person doing impossible things.
—Eve Biddle
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988, 104 minutes) paired with
Joshua Frankel’s Plan of the City (2011, 13 minutes)
Frankel’s acclaimed “city symphony” is paired with one of greatest urban planning films of all time... Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Robert Zemeckis’s classic is most famous for combining animation with live action. But as the mystery at heart of this noir unravels, the heroes find themselves in a fantastical community defined by social segregation that feels all too familiar, and discover a nefarious plot ripped from history — and which continues to define how we relate to our built environment today.
Frankel’s Plan of the City is also a collage of animation with live action, executed with incredibly precise planning. It is an exhilarating dream that inverts what we know about New York City: skyscrapers rooted in bedrock lift off into the stratosphere. Through joyful fantasy the City's ultimate fears are explored: it is destroyed, re-created, and finally revealed to be less unique than we thought.
The short film is an animated impossible architectural proposal, in the spirit of fantastical visionaries like Claes Oldenburg, Rem Koolhaas and Superstudio.
Plan of the City features music by Judd Greenstein, performed by NOW Ensemble, and was called "One of the best matches of visuals to music I have seen" by critic Ann Midgette at the Washington Post and “Amazing” by NPR.
