The Seven-Per-Cent Solution & Little Otik

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was an interesting movie, wherein Sherlock Holmes goes to Sigmund Freud to cure his cocaine addiction. Plus, it explains the history of why Moriarty is so hated by Holmes. It's got a great cast, with Vanessa Redgrave, Alan Arkin, Nicol Williamson, Robert Duvall, Laurence Olivier, and Joel Gray all being very good in their roles. I can't imagine a film like it nowadays, it's just so strange. Freud playing court tennis against an anti-Semitic Austrian count? Yeah, just one of the things in it. A Steven Sondheim song? Yep.

Little Otik is bizarre. Absolutely bizarre. I'm not sure there's a better way to describe it rather than just a bizarre Pinocchio story with a homicidal Pinocchio. Anyway, this one ends up being more a condemnation of consumerism and middle class values rather than a call to tell the truth. That it ends up being a fairy tale makes it more interesting, but I think it's clearly too long of a film, since everyone who has read it knows how it will end. Just could have been cut down a little, because it just kept going. I've been interested in seeing the work of Jan Svankmajer since I first saw his name in the list of old movies shown at Duke, and this is the first one I've seen. The animation was pretty good, but I vastly preferred the hand-drawn animation during the fairy tale to the stop-motion animation.