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Dante is one of our great cult stylists, a proponent of irreverent and kinetic cinema. Despite having substantial proponents in Jonathan Rosenbaum and others, he’s still in a marginalized position overall, but I think that suits him. After all, even his most mainstream work takes its cues from the lowest rungs of the genre ladder, a place few directors willingly go. But that’s precisely what makes Dante so valuable as a filmmaker. While lesser B-movie fetishists bother themselves with legitimizing traditionally unappreciated genres, Dante embraces even the lowliest of material, mutating it until it resembles the stuff of pure cinema. In other words, he’s not out to class up the joint, and we’re all the better for it. You can catch my five favorite Dante films after the jump.
- Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) Because of the way he applies cartoon aesthetics to “realistic” film form, Dante is something of a disciple of Frank Tashlin, so it makes perfect (almost divine) sense that he’d direct a Looney Tunes film. Dante deeply understands and takes obvious joy in the anarchic qualities of Looney Tunes, so the film is very entertaining, but its most valued attributes are found in the transcendent symbolism of Dante’s live-action/animation hybrid images.
