Two of the most sophisticated and entertaining mainstream films of 2003 were sadly among the year's most ignored and under-promoted. Down with Love and Looney Tunes: Back in Action offer more frothy referentialism and engaging cleverness per frame than all of the year's top ten grossers combined. Both are genre work, meaning a frame, construction, or in the case of Looney Tunes, an entire universe is already there. Like in folk tales or Hollywood's golden age of musicals, time need not be wasted on constructing plots, stories, and truisms as old as time itself. All energy in these films could then be devoted to adding something new and inspired.

Back, But not For Good

From Aristotle on down through Tarkovsky, art has been described as a yearning for the ideal. In director Joe Dante's ideal world, his old boss, Roger Corman would direct the next Batman film with a soundtrack fashioned by the Denmark wierdo conflagration of hip-hop, rock, house, and electronic music that is the self-proclaimed "rhythm bandits," Junior/Senior.

Looney Tunes is a film that, borrowing a trick or two from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, reclaims the embarrassingly failing, creatively bankrupt, Warner Brothers cartoon franchise with a wonderful sense of humor and cocksure aplomb.

As in all good genre work, the plot is a paper-thin construction. DJ (Brendan Fraser) and Daffy Duck both lose their jobs at the outset. An aspiring and accident-prone stuntman fired by special request of sunglasses-and-schmaltz star "real life" Brendan Fraser, DJ is a lowly security guard under the employ of senior guard, and Roger Corman's longtime onscreen alter-ego, Dick Miller. After crashing the Batmobile through the famous WB water tower's support beam, he is fired by the same entity who had just fired Daffy Duck, a corporate ax man played by Jenna Elfman.

Each has to tangle with their demons, obvious product placement, and the colliding universes of Las Vegas, the WB back lot (think Pee Wee's Big Adventure), and every wonderful Looney Tune character I can remember.

And as further contemporary repositioning, the evil ACME Empire must be stopped before they transform the people of the world to monkeys. Sounds unbelievable? Dante deftly pulls off a slew of similarly incongruously amazing feats. Alongside the Looney Tunes redemption, Steve Martin is also yanked out of irrelevancy as the evil ACME CEO while Joan Cusack works similar charms as the Q figure to Fraser's aspiring Bond. Oh and his DJ's dad? None other than failed 007 Timothy Dalton.

True to its inspiration, the absurdly rich wellspring of this animated universe, these characters are used extremely well and thrown into some utterly ingenious situations. The chase between Elmer Fudd, Bugs, and Daffy throughout the Louvre and the paintings themselves is complexity, cleverness, and beauty well worth the price of admission alone.

The sophistication never falters. Similar to the original cartoons, Dante flecks the diegesis with such a wild variety of slapstick, sight gags, reflexion, and loving homage creating such richness that I can foresee this film being a great fun to mine years and years from now. Alongside the Looney in-jokes, Dante's beloved Corman universe gets the occasional nod (an ACME crony is played by Rock 'n' Roll high school principal Mary Waronov). But this is a winking eye that looks down on none.

Crowd report: at this second-run theatre, fantastic. Kids harmonized their wonderment and cheering applause with their parents' appreciative chuckles. Some little ones were actually shouting out visual cues that I, so engrossed in this utterly pleasurable film, had completely missed.

Down with the Doubters

People are so irreparably, irretrievably cynical. If I weren't a reactionary myself, I also probably wouldn't have bothered with rookie director Peyton Reed's thoroughly ignored masterpiece, Down with Love. But am I ever glad I did.

Flashback to yet another second-run theater. Sadly, this time, my friend and I were alone in the audience. Why were these films so underpromoted? I remember virtually tripping over advertisements on the way into Roger Rabbit, 'lo not that many years ago. And that was a strange and brave film, no doubt.

Flashback once again, onscreen now, to 1962, or so. This is the alleged realm of Down with Love, though the films of Rock Hudson and Doris Day from before and after are obvious points of reference. Again, good genre work just uses the foundation as a springboard. Why bother re-inventing the euphemisms and Brooks Brothers suits, after all? Much better to play with these tools, to fashion something new over a perfectly good structure.

This is what may have been turn-off number one for a lot of the intellegentsia, ironically enough the ideal audience for this film: two attractive and talented stars swooning amongst beautifully painstaking art direction and sharp as tacks visuals that recall none other than the filmmaker those tepid Day/Hudson films ripped off, Douglas Sirk. It must be remembered that Sirk, while appropriately revered now as a pioneer of a melodramatic cinema language, was virtually ignored as an artist by all but a few of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd.

Again, the plot is cheekily fragile. Barbara Novak (the constantly puckered Renee Zelwegger) writes a book empowering her sisters to eschew love and try and please themselves. To anyone even mildly conversant with the history of the period, the book immediately brings to mind The Feminine Mystique and its ilk. This hypermodern woman targets the ubermale of the period, macho publisher Catcher Block, played with Sean Connery smoothness by Ewen MacGregor.

Everything layered atop is gravy...or, rather…frosting. This sophistication spills over to the filmmaking itself. For, after all, a well-written film with uninspired visuals isn't exactly worth seeing. The widescreen is used to full advantage, filled with 60's James Bond gadgetry, winking, schmoozing, airborn camera work, and actors who dance their every step. In this hyperexpressive universe, supporters Sarah Paulson and David Hyde Pierce are made to be just as magnetic and fun to watch as the mates fate created in the principles.

The widescreen is used quite well as is the split screen. In perhaps what this film has become a footnote for, some of the cleverest and most suggestive split screen practically shouts in visually symbolic language-cinema as the enthusiasts envisioned it. Sandwiched by such feats of sophistication as a boy vs. girl grooming sequence set alternately to Astrud Gilberto and Frank Sinatra's wildly differing takes on the swing-a-ding classic "Fly Me to the Moon" is a wryly suggestive use of the split involving push-ups.

The sophistication that is Down with Love even spills over into Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake's bitchily clever screenplay. Quips are bandied about as often as martinis are spilled in Block's space age bachelor woman trap. Too bad no one can bear witness to any of this in a film that deserved to be much more successful than it was.

A Second Life?

Now, the great thing about video is that perhaps because it is cheaper to market them, films that weren't given a fair chance to succeed often take off on video. Looney Tunes: Back in Action is certain to move plenty of copies to families interested in nostalgia, togetherness, etc-like the families I sat with at this second-run theater.

But Down with Love? This film has no chance...unless...

OK. See this film. Love it (as you will) and start a grassroots campaign to get everyone you know who loves the fantastic in the mundane, the swing in the step, the homage utterly over the snooty kitsch, to see this film. From frame one on through to the magnificent musical endpiece, it is an utter and endless delight...much like its ignored and maligned twin cousin in hypergenre exercise Looney Tunes: Back in Action.