Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones / Remembering singer Cassandra Wilson

This is Fresh Air. I'm TV critic David Bianculli. At this point, the Looney Tunes cartoon franchise has been around for almost a century. Warner Brothers launched the first cartoon under that name in 1930 and spent the next several decades supplying cinemas and then television with animated shorts that delighted adults as well as kids. The animators, who over the years included Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Fritz Freeling, and Chuck Jones, were brilliantly funny. So was Mel Blanc, who provided the voices for almost all of the characters, from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck to Elmer Fudd and Pepe Le Pew. Composer Carl Stalling supplied the memorable music for many episodes, and the combined canon included such 1950s classics as The Rabbit of Seville and What's Opera, Doc?, both of which were directed by Jones with music by Stalling and voices by Blanc. These cartoons and characters were widely adored, by several generations, including mine. A streak of anarchy and a lot of violence ran through most of them. But, as comedian Dustin Nickerson observed recently, after trying to introduce these classic cartoons to his young daughter, they haven't necessarily aged well. More than a few characters have speech impediments, he notes, and lots of them exhibit very aggressive behavior. Okay, you don't like that? Well, check it out. There's this skunk. She goes, what's he doing? I go, he holds women against their will. Yeah, they try and get away, but Pepe won't let them. And all the other characters, what they do is they're trying to kill one another. You know how in your shows they're all friends? They're not in these ones. They're trying to murder one another. There's this coyote who wants to kill this bird. The Looney Tunes franchise also got little respect from Warner Bros. itself. A few years ago, the studio, under new corporate management, shelved a completed movie, Coyote vs. Acme, before its release as a financial write-off. The film comedy was based on a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, who imagined a lawsuit filed by lawyers representing one of the familiar Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Wile E. Coyote. Said Coyote, of course, is the persistent but hapless predator who was in constant futile pursuit of his fleet-footed quarry, the Roadrunner. The Coyote never succeeded in his efforts, despite devising endless schemes employing rocket skates, spring-powered shoes, and other devices purchased from the Acme Company. As his lawyers alleged in that New Yorker parody piece, quote, Mr. Coyote states that on 85 separate occasions he has purchased of the Acme Company, hereinafter defendant, through that company's mail-order department, certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labeling, unquote. The film version intermingled cartoon and human characters, like who framed Roger Rabbit, with the animated Wile E. Coyote sharing the same screen as his human lawyer, played by Will Forte. The Coyote hires the lawyer after seeing him on a low-rent TV ad. The Coyote, a kind of small-screen huckstering Bob Odenkirk's sleazy lawyer Saul Goodman used to do on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Have you ever sat a big stack of TNT on the road hoping to blow up your nemesis, but the detonator itself explodes? Have you ever pulled the ripcord of your parachute and only a bunch of silverware comes out? It's not your fault. Acme is evil. It's a very clever, very funny movie, but was buried deep, deep in the Warner Bros. Discovery vaults, until it was rescued this year by an independent distributor, which purchased the rights for $50 million and finally released it in theaters last month. Coyote vs. Acme, written by Sammy Birch and directed by Dave Green, has been shown in relatively few theaters nationwide, but already has made almost all that money back in the U.S., as well as an additional $30 million worldwide. Both the movie plot and the film's history are delightful stories of perseverance. So today on Fresh Air, we're saluting Coyote vs. Acme and the long cartoon history it celebrates by listening back to an interview with Looney Tunes animator Chuck Jones. The cartoon that introduced the roadrunner and his nemesis, Wile E. Coyote, was Fast and Furious in 1949. It was directed by Chuck Jones and introduced the running gag that recurred ever since. The Coyote ordering mail-order merchandise to try and ultimately fail to catch the elusive roadrunner. In later cartoons, that company was identified as Acme, which promptly delivered the faulty goods. That inspired the New Yorker article that inspired the movie Coyote vs. Acme. And, in a way, Chuck Jones, with his Acme idea, also might be said to have inspired the entire rapid-delivery concept of today's real-life equivalent, Amazon. Chuck Jones worked at Warner Bros. from 1933 until the studio closed down its cartoon division in 1963. He then formed his own production company and kept producing and directing until his death in 2002. Terry Gross spoke to him in 1989. Jones also wrote an autobiography called Chuckamuck. That title is borrowed from Duckamuck, which was the cartoon Jones made about cartooning. In it, Daffy Duck finds himself at the mercy of a fickle cartoonist. Daffy opens the cartoon as a brave musketeer, but the cartoonist keeps changing the scenery on him to the most inappropriate settings. A farm, the Arctic, Hawaii. The cartoonist eventually erases not only the background, but Daffy himself. Would it be too much to ask if we could make up our minds? Hmm? Dashing through the snow, ya-ha-ha-ha! Through the fields we go, laughing all the way! Farewell to thee, farewell the two of thee, the wind will carry back our sad refrain. One last embrace before we say, hmm, humph! Buster, it may come as a complete surprise to you to find that this is an animated cartoon, and that in animated cartoons they have scenery, and in all of them, all the years I've. All right, wise guy, where am I? You changed a lot of the characters who you worked with over the years. Can you describe when you first started directing Daffy Duck, who was always my favorite, when you started directing Daffy Duck, what was he like, and then maybe you could tell us a little bit of the character changes that you brought to Daffy? Well, it's a little difficult to isolate them exactly as to what I contributed, but I. Uh. All the characters I felt were part of me, particularly Daffy and the coyote, because they made the kind of mistakes that most of us make only multiplied a bit. But Daffy was an interesting character, I think, because he would rush in and fear to tread at the same time, and he also could be fawning and overbearing at the same time, and I think that happens with very many of us when we. Sometimes in the reverse, when we go in to talk to the boss and ask for a raise, we're overbearing. When we get inside, we're fawning. But Daffy is both at the same time. At the beginning, he was just crazy, as was Bugs, even in the first great. The wild hair that Tex Avery directed. The character was really kind of mad, more like Harpo Marx, perhaps. And I was never comfortable with a character unless I could understand him, and I can't understand crazy people. So I always try to sort of pasteurize my characters to find out who they are. The who is the whole point about character animation, is not what. It isn't what a character looks like or indeed how they're drawn. You sound like a method animator. Well, I guess so. I don't think that I could do it unless I cared about the characters. In your cartoon, Duckamuck, why did you choose Daffy Duck as the character that was going to be at the whim of the cartoonist? Well, I tried it later with Bugs Bunny and it didn't work. Fortunately, I did Duckamuck first, then I did one called Rabbit Rampage, and he also. He also had the same problem, and the person in this case turned out to be Elmer Fudd that was moving him around. But it didn't work, because that's not the kind of person that Bugs is. Bugs is a comic hero, you see, as compared with a comic wimp, which would go back to all the great comedians, starting with Chaplin and Buster Keaton and all the rest of them. They were. They're all kind of semi-losers, aren't they? They're more like us. But I always liked Daffy because he would continue beyond where I would stop simply because I'd be afraid of what. what the community would think of me. Daffy continues, so. But when I was working with him, all I had to do was reach down inside of me and bring the Daffy up to the surface and spread it out and take a look at it and see what would I do if I had Daffy Duck's courage. You told us a little bit about how you changed Daffy Duck and how you drew him a little differently, different characteristics you gave him. What about Bugs Bunny? What are some of the changes you brought to Bugs' life? Well, I think that. One of the nice things about. There were three units there. After 1947, in fact all the films that Warner now owns were directed by Fritz Freeling or Bob McKimpson or me. Bob Clampett left in 46 and Texan around 44 so we had these wonderful sessions when I would get an idea for a film or my writer and I would get an idea for a film we'd call in the other directors and writers and we'd sit down and have this session which we called a yes session which meant for two hours nobody could say anything negative if you couldn't contribute to the idea your job was to shut up but usually the ideas were pretty good when they came in the result of this was that we were all involved with each other's picture although each director had absolute control of what went into his own pictures but there was no internecine warfare. We liked each other and we wanted each other to succeed but if I gave a great gag to Fritz Freeling and he used it and it appeared on the screen and got an enormous laugh naturally I wanted to go out and throw up because that's human nature that's Davy Duck in me When you did your recording sessions, the voice sessions with Mel Blanc what kind of suggestions would you make to him about the characteristics that he should try to be getting at through his voice Well, for one thing I would have completely laid out the picture, all the key drawings that I would be giving to the animators had already been done and I would already have finished the exact dialogue. Mel never sat in on story things or anything like that and in no way could we let any actor, Mel or anybody else ad lib because we had to make pictures exactly to six minutes so the dialogue was all carefully planned to fit into an exact six minute format so when I was ready for the actor, usually Mel about an hour before we were to record I'd call him in. The marvel of Mel was that he was such a brilliant actor that he could immediately get the idea of what you were talking about All the great characters of the Warner Brothers cart were all animals. They're animals with the traits of people but they're not people. They're ducks and rabbits and skunks What are some of the advantages of using animals instead of people for the cartoons? Well, we had ample precedence to go on. I mean going back to Aesop's Fables and Kipling and even Mark Twain did several things about animals and of course Beatrix Potter and so many others but the main thing is that it's easier to humanize animals than it is to humanize humans. And as you know from seeing Snow White and the Poor Princes and all the Disney films, it's very difficult to animate human beings. And when we did animate them, they didn't look very much like human beings I mean, Elmer Fudd doesn't look any more like a human being than Bugs Bunny looks like a rabbit. Bugs is obviously not a rabbit. Rabbits look more like the average rabbit looks very much more like a pillow than anything else However, I think that taking a rabbit and making him as heroic as Bugs Bunny is a lot more easy than it is to take a human being and make him like Bugs with Bugs' characteristics. You always believe that in a cartoon world that you have to create certain rules of the universe and the characters always have to live within those rules Give us an example through say the Roadrunner Wile E. Coyote cartoons, because you created those characters Yes. Tell us a little bit about the universe that you created them in Well, there are several things that happen in all comedy The more you channelize the more you narrow your character down the better it gets. For some reason take Charlie Chaplin when he once got that little costume, look how much he was restricted in what he could do He could only be the little tramp and he also limited the little tramp in pretty much into living in a city We felt that when we got the Roadrunner and Coyote going it was evident that they both lived in the Southwestern American desert and so you immediately say to yourself, that's where they live and that's where they got to live and the fact that the Roadrunner is a Roadrunner means that he should stay on the road and there were a number of other rules about that, that the Roadrunner can never harm the Coyote The Coyote can only harm himself by buying those unfortunate things he gets from the Acme Corporation. And the more rules you apply, you never hear any other sound except the bee-beep and I found that going back then to Bugs Bunny Bugs Bunny is such a powerful character and he's a comic hero other than a loser he's such a powerful character that he could become a terrible bully so we always started Bugs, in every picture we started him in a natural rabbit environment minding his own business a quiet living rabbit, something like Rex Harrison perhaps, before he got involved with My Fair Lady, Ladies and then someone comes along and tries to deprive him of his food or his life or sending him off on a rocket or something, and then he has to fight back you see, and once engaged in the war then he's happily engaged but without that he would just be a bully, and there were some characters like Heckle and Jackal and Woody Woodpecker at some time, who seemed to go out and just heckle people for no particular reason Bugs never did that, and this is vital and necessary if you wanted the character to be believable, and for people to care about him I grew up on the Warner Brothers cartoons, and the older I'd get the more jokes I'd get but I never realized I was missing anything when I was young, because I always liked them, and now as an adult I see things that I didn't see when I thought I was getting all the jokes when I was an older kid. Did anyone at Warner Brothers ever give you an argument that certain things there would go over the heads of the audience? Yeah, yes they did but we didn't pay attention to them we always had going battles on with our producers, so they would issue edicts like, don't make any pictures about bullfights, bullfights aren't funny immediately we'd say, well gee, obviously the guy has always been wrong, so we made a picture about a bullfight and it turned out fine No, we had very little problem unfortunately our producers were not very bright. I remember once seeing a short film that was a combination of kind of pornographic cartoons that some of the Disney animators drew in their off hours, and it ended up getting into circulation, did you guys ever do anything like that at Warner Brothers? Yeah, everybody did. In fact, sometimes in a Pappy Le Pew picture I would I'd put a little salacious one frame, one twenty-fourth of a second and I'd actually put it in the picture and then I'd ask the office manager to come in and I'd say there's a little glitch here, there's a certain hop at this point I don't know what it, I can't figure out what it is then I'd bring it to a stop in the movie Oa, and you know that thing when you look through, and there it would be, you know I knew nobody could ever see it because it was twenty-fourth of a second, but then he would go into shock, you know, and we always had a frame to replace it just in case but I enjoyed doing that to kind of put him in his place. So did he make you take that out or did those frames stay in? No, no, no, I told him it was too late it would cost money to take it out and nobody would ever see it but I had already inserted it, it wasn't there anyway but I did it to see if I couldn't put him into as we used to say, reduce him to moccasins Were any of your scenes or any of your language ever censored? No, no that was left to the brilliant people at the networks, and they take out things that make the whole thing incomprehensible. Did that happen a lot that you felt your cartoons were butchered when they got on TV? Oh yes they were, both at CBS and ABC, to name a few of the guilty ones What's curious to me is that they feel it was necessary to chew up those cartoons but Nickelodeon, which is a program that's supposedly designed for children, sees no need to do that. I'd imagine that the cartoons that had gotten the most objections because of the violence with the Roadrunner cartoons since they're all chase. Well that's absurd though because the Roadrunner never harmed the coyote, the coyote was only a victim of his own ineptitude so the idea that there was any violence involved there is ridiculous. Did you ever think of yourself as doing a pop kind of surrealism? I did some they tell me, but I never did anything by sitting down and saying I'm doing this for a reason. What I was trying to do was to develop the characters that I understood and to have fun doing it and that was the whole secret of Warner Bros. cartoons is a bunch of people happened to come together from varied walks of life all of whom were enormously interested in making films that were fun to do. Chuck Jones speaking to Terry Gross in 1989 he died in 2002 Coyote vs. Acme, the little movie that could is still chugging along in theater theaters nationwide. We'll end our animated salute to Coyote vs. Acme with another Looney Tunes clip. This is from Daffy Duck for President a 2004 cartoon based on the 1997 children's book of the same name written and illustrated by Chuck Jones. Eh What's up duck? What's up is it? I'll tell you what's up. When I'm president I'm gonna pass a law that'll outlaw rabbits. That my poor unfortunate soon to be condemned species is what is up. Very ingenious solution to a long smoldering problem, but there's just one slight technicality. The president can't pass laws. That's ridiculous. The president can do anything. Anything he wants. He's just like a king, only better. He's better alright, but he's no king. Says so right here. You're outnumbered good buddy by the founding fathers. Ha! Bunch of mewling infants, no doubt. What do they know? Hmm, the Constitution. Let's see here. Oh, yeah. The president is responsible for enforcing the laws. Congress makes the laws. You mean I've got to run for Congress? Well, cheer up, Doc. There's been a lot of funny boys sent to Congress, but you may be the first duck to be elected. At least you're not a lame duck. Coming up, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has an appreciation of Cassandra Wilson, the jazz singer, songwriter, and producer who died earlier this month. We'll also play an interview with her from our archives. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Singer Cassandra Wilson died in her hometown of Jackson, Mississippi on September 6th. at age 70. She first attracted attention in the 1980s singing tricky songs by jazz composers Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman. Soon, she was recording albums of her own where she featured a wide variety of material and became one of jazz music's breakout stars, performing on screen in the movies Junior and The Score. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead surveys Cassandra Wilson's 30-year recording career. ♪ Have you seen the valley green with spring Where my heart can go a-journey Over the shadows and the rain To a blossom-covered lane Cassandra Wilson, circa 1986, early in her recording career, on a tune she'd revisit, Hoagy Carmichael's Skylark. She was then in her early 30s, showing all the markers of her mature style. The love of a drowsy tempo, a dusky tone quality, the dramatic lows her contralto voice could reach, and a sultry persona. Also the way she'd swallow an occasional syllable. Wilson heard jazz singers growing up, but began her performing career accompanying herself on guitar in Mississippi coffeehouses. She moved to New York in her late 20s and fell in with saxophonist Steve Coleman's circle of progressives who wrote their own music, as she did. That crowd played on her early albums, which mixed standards with original tunes. This is Cassandra Wilson's Subatomic Blues with Steve Coleman on alto. ♪ We are like the islands in a stream ♪ ♪ So long it seems ♪ ♪ Till the day we die ♪ ♪ Rolling on forever ♪ Cassandra Wilson, from her second album, 1987's Days Away. Another Wilson song, showed her admiration for bebop singer Betty Carter's rapid-fire articulation and Abby Lincoln's philosophical lyrics. Graham Haynes backs her on cornet on If You Only Know How. ♪ Do you recall when every day was a brand new day? ♪ ♪ Nothing was in our way ♪ ♪ And we would chase every rainbow to find ♪ ♪ A bag of gold, but it was easy ♪ ♪ If you only knew how ♪ ♪ If you only knew how ♪ ♪ We'd take the trip ♪ ♪ We'd take the trip to Mars ♪ ♪ And we'd get our homework ♪ ♪ We'd build a ship ♪ ♪ We'd build a ship and sail all the way to Madagascar ♪ ♪ Did we forget how children cried, cried for the moon? ♪ ♪ Knowing the man inside was just a lonely old fool ♪ ♪ We'd sing a song for him to hear ♪ ♪ We'd sing a song for him to hear ♪ ♪ We'd sing a song for him to hear ♪ ♪ Singing was easy ♪ ♪ If you only know how ♪ Funk and hip-hop were also part of the mix early on. Wilson's label pushed her to make a swinging album of standards, The Very Fine Blue Skies from 1988. By now, Wilson had come into her own as interpreter of lyrics. With her low vocal range, her high notes aren't so very high, but still have a soaring quality. Her phrases, might float over the beat. ♪ The music started and was I the perplexed one? ♪ ♪ I held my breath and said, may I have the next one? ♪ ♪ In my frightened arms, polka dots and moonbeams ♪ ♪ Sparkled on a perknows dream ♪ ♪ There were questions in the eyes of other dancers ♪ ♪ As we floated over the floor ♪ ♪ There were questions, but my heart knew all the answers ♪ ♪ And perhaps a few things more ♪ Terry Lynn Carrington on drums. The album Blue Skies was a jazz hit, and a successful straight-up jazz career was Wilson's for the asking. But Cassandra Wilson had bigger ideas. In the 1990s, working with producers, she made music seemingly designed to resist categorization as jazz or anything else. Take her chant Redbone, a character sketch of a hard-living, hard-praying woman that mixes blues and gospel themes, Cuban percussion, and a squirrely pedal steel guitar. ♪ ♪ She loves her God ♪ ♪ She breathes every night ♪ ♪ 'Cause she live real hard ♪ ♪ Now Redbone goes on to heaven ♪ ♪ 'Cause she live real hard, now Redbone goes on to heaven ♪ ♪ She loves her God ♪ ♪ She prays every night ♪ ♪ 'Cause she live real hard, Redbone ♪ ♪ 'Cause she live real hard, Redbone ♪ She told Terry she first got noticed at a club in New York City called the Jazz Forum. And that used to be a place where young musicians would go to sit in, you know, when they came to town. It's like the place people tell you, you know, when you come into town, if you want to sit in or if you want to get into some music, meet some musicians, go to the Jazz Forum. And there I met a great pianist, Sadiq Hakeem, who's no longer with us. And he sort of took me under his wing, and he really liked me and introduced me to a lot of musicians and actually got me my first gig. As you started getting more serious about singing and singing professionally, what are some of the things you wanted to learn and some of the things you wanted to change in your own style as you got deeper and deeper into it? For a while, I did want to become more technically accurate, you know, in terms of my voice. I always felt that that was like a weakness that I had, not actually singing chords, you know, actually singing changes. If you notice, when a lot of singers improvise, they tend to deal within a very simple universe, you know, when it comes to improvising. And that's one thing I always wanted to work on and I still work on to this day is learning actual changes. You know, singing changes and hearing more complicated types of intervals. You sing some standards, but not many, at least not on your albums. Are you trying to, like, sing some, but to emphasize original material? Yes, I'm heading in that direction. I would like to get to the point where I do all original material. I enjoy doing standards, though. I really. I get a lot of fun out of it and enjoyment out of it. So, you know, there are people who tell you, well, if you do standards, then you should do all standards. And there are people who tell you that if you do original music, you should do all original music. And I just pretty much paid attention to my intuition in terms of that. And everything that I. The standards that I choose, I think, fit inside of, you know, the whole body of work that I do. You sing, let's face it, music and dance on your latest album. Did you arrange that yourself? How did you decide to interpret that song? That is one of the songs that many great singers have sung before. Actually, Henry Threadgill suggested that tune. He suggested that tune to me, and I was shocked that he suggested it, because Henry's not really the type of musician who gets into the standard repertoire, but he really liked that song. Everything just kind of happened, you know, in terms of the arrangement. We got into a rehearsal with it. And I heard it very up, you know, and very bright. And finally heard it, like, with a trumpet solo out front. And that's the way it happened. ¶¶ ¶ There may be trouble ahead ¶ ¶ But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance ¶ ¶ Let's face the music and dance ¶ ¶ For the future ¶ ¶ The Riddlers have fled ¶ ¶ Before they ask us to pay the bill ¶ ¶ And while we still have the chance ¶ ¶ Let's face the music and dance ¶ ¶ Oh, soon we'll be without the moon ¶ ¶ I'll make a different tune ¶ ¶ And then there may be teardrops to shed ¶ ¶ But while there's moonlight and music and love and romance ¶ ¶ Let's face the music and dance ¶ ¶ Let's face the music and dance ¶ ¶ Let's face the music and dance ¶ I want to ask you about another piece on your latest album. And the piece is called Apricots on Their Wings. It was composed by Henry Threadgill. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this song? I really don't know what the. Oh, okay, fine. Well, Henry told me that it was. I never understood the lyrics. I mean, and I just had to one day, I came out and asked him, I said, you know, what does this mean? And he said, well, it's kind of a nonsensical type of a lyrical thing. You know? The words sounded pleasant to him. And they worked well together lyrically. So he put them together. How important is it as a singer to really understand and even relate to the lyrics that you're singing? Well, it depends on the material. For something like Apricots, I just got a lot of joy out of the melody of that tune and just the way it moves. So it was always just. I somehow intuitively could feel what it meant and, you know, just from dealing with the sound of it. ¶¶ ¶¶ I reached for the star and got moonbeam I reached for some starlight and I got some moon gold I slid across the Milky Way On a hazy, lazy day in such a crazy way To try and get away Anyway, I reached for some starlight and I got some moon gold Was that improvised or was that composed beforehand? No, it was completely improvised. Do you like scatting? Oh yeah, I enjoy it very much. In fact, I don't really call it scatting. I think that scatting is taken from a bebop era where vocalists tended to. try to imitate horns. But what I do, I really don't try to imitate horns. I just improvise and create sounds that are distinctive to the voice. And sometimes it just so happens that they do sound like instruments but that's like not the initial approach, you know, to sound like an instrument. I like the idea of being a voice. You said before that some people tell you to just sing standards or to sing no standards. Right. Everybody's got an opinion. You know, it's like, oh, you should do this. Have your musician friends discouraged you from singing standards? Yes. In a word. Some musicians really think of singers as just being pretty props to put in front of musicians and they don't really respect them that much. I don't know. You know, and that's why I think standards get that kind of reputation because they're associated with the things that singers do. Have you found that kind of stuff to be true? Yeah, I think that is true. There's a suspicion of singers and standards. Mm-hmm. Uh-huh. I think the distrust of singers comes from something that, it's based on something that historically is true. Singers tended to move into the music without very much of a depth of knowledge in music theory. And so I think as a result of that, musicians just tend to, like, disrespect singers because sometimes when they get up there, they don't know, you know, a lot of the time they don't know what they're doing. They're not really functioning as musicians inside the group. They're functioning as simply singers. And do you want to function as a musician inside the group? Is that. Oh, I do function as a musician inside my group, inside of any context that I am because basically that's what I am, a musician who sings. Cassandra Wilson speaking to Terry Gross in 1988. She died last week at the age of 70. I don't know where we're going I have no idea how this will end From the beginning I've been swimming In the current of your skin The autumn rains Turned into thunderstorms The waters rose I was drowning in your arms But when I woke up in the morning I was breathing In the current of your skin I was breathing Oh, I was alive I saw another country In your eyes This is Fresh Air. This is Fresh Air. Our film critic, Justin Chang, recommends the monster movie Hope, which takes place in a South Korean border town that becomes the site of an alien invasion. It's the latest, from the director, Na Hong-jin, who's known for his thrillers such as The Yellow Sea and The Wailing. Hope is now playing in theaters. Here is Justin's review. The South Korean filmmaker, Na Hong-jin, has directed four feature films over the past 18 years. They're terrific, if not for the faint of heart. I still remember watching Na's 2008 debut, The Chaser, and thinking I'd rarely seen a more brutally relentless thriller or a darker statement about the elusiveness of law and order. His next one, The Yellow Sea, was even better, a gripping mob movie that was also a wrenching portrait of a Korean-Chinese immigrant on the run, a man without a country. Na is a master of tone and genre, and there's a genuine moral undertow to his movies, even as they balance comedy, tragedy, and bone-crunching violence. Na's latest movie, Hope, is a big step up in ambition, if maybe a step down in finesse. It's been divisive, passionately praised and witheringly dismissed, sometimes in the same breath. It's a sprawling, big-budget monster movie set in a remote South Korean town that comes under attack from giant, shape-shifting aliens. That made it an admittedly odd choice to premiere in competition at the recent Cannes Film Festival. Though I was grateful for the genre movie diversion, and floored, as usual, by the robustness of Na's action chops. Even Hope's dumb stretches, and it has them for sure, are touched by brilliance. The movie blurs the lines between schlock and art. It begins in a town called Hope Harbor, located near the border with North Korea. The surrounding countryside is full of barbed wire and undetonated landmines. It's to being on high alert. Yet their most dangerous enemy hails not from across the border, but from the skies. Extraterrestrial monsters have descended and laid waste to the town. The local police chief, played by Hwang Jung-min, arrives late on the scene, and it's through his eyes that we see the destruction after it's already happened. But we don't see the monsters right away. For roughly the first hour of this more than two-and-a-half-hour movie, Na steers us through a dim labyrinth of damaged stores and homes, building up our nervous anticipation scene by scene. Like the Steven Spielberg who made Jaws, Na knows that the less we see, the scarier things are. Indeed, it's a bit of a disappointment when we finally do get a clear look at the monsters, who resemble creatures out of a zombie apocalypse video game circa the early 2000s. But this isn't a deal-breaker. The CGI may be third-rate, but Hope has some of the most exhilaratingly sustained action scenes I've seen in years. Na has a strange ability to juggle nerve-shredding realism with an outlandish, almost slapstick level of violence. Watching his characters tear through the streets with a monster in a hot pursuit is like watching the Steve McQueen classic Bullet, a Mad Max movie, and a Looney Tunes cartoon rolled into one. And there's an extraordinarily beautiful sequence in the woods, in which the monsters are killed, and the monsters are killed again. And there's an extraordinarily beautiful sequence in the woods, in which the monsters are killed again. In which the pursuit takes place on horseback that has the majesty of a western. There are lengthy stretches of downtime during which we get to know the people of Hope, most of them prickly types with salty mouths and big guns. The character development is minimal, but the performances stick with you. Chang Ho-yeon of Squid Game fame is terrific as a plucky police deputy who's a demon behind the wheel. And Cho In-sung is hilarious as an irascible hunter, who stares down one of the aliens, and turns out to have more lives than Wile E. Coyote. As for the aliens themselves, Nod deliberately keeps us in the dark and off balance in terms of who they are, where they come from, and what exactly they want from planet Earth. It's worth noting that they are played by well-known Hollywood actors, including Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Taylor Russell. Though it's hard to recognize them under so many layers of CGI, especially Gryffindor, given the incomprehensible language they speak. Part of me wondered if Nod were making a wry commentary on the inequities of blockbuster filmmaking by pitting his Korean ensemble against a bunch of better-known Hollywood stars. But then in the final minutes of Hope, a truly bizarre narrative reversal occurs. Let's just say that the movie squeezes an entire film's worth of backstory into five minutes and suggests there's more to these extraterrestrial beings than we might have thought. The movie ends on a laughably abrupt cliffhanger, but one with a touch of self-awareness. Nod has already said in interviews that he's planning a sequel. Will the next movie clear up some of our confusion? We can always hope. Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. Hope is the thing with feathers Perches in the soul And sings the tune without the words And never stops at all And never stops at all On Monday's show, Rhiannon Giddens. She plays and sings music from the black string band tradition dating back to slave times. She's the artistic director of the Silk Road Ensemble. She won a Pulitzer for co-writing an opera and played banjo on Beyoncé's Texas Hold'em. Giddens will play banjo, fiddle, and sing on our show. I hope you can join us. It never stops at all It never stops at all To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at nprfreshair. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at youtube.com slash thisisfreshair. We're rolling out new videos with in-studio guests, behind-the-scenes shorts, and iconic interviews, from the Archive. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producers today are Roberta Churrock and Thea Chaloner. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Julian Hertzfeld and Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. Our social media video producer is Hilary Kissinger. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bianculli. Hope is the thing with feathers The perch is in the soul Sings the tune without the words Never stops at all