Metro Cinema Society: Tales of the Rat Fink

Tales of the Rat Fink

Canada 2006, 78 min, 35mm, Dir: Ron Mann

From the award-winning director of Comic Book Confidential and Grass comes Tales of the Rat Fink, Ron Mann's wildly inventive bio about Renaissance man Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, who engineered a shift in mid-twentieth century culture with his remodeling of assembly-line items. Starting by customizing cars - the ultimate symbol of mass production - Roth soon turned to creating his own space-age vehicles, T-shirts boasting obnoxious characters (his most famous, the Rat Fink, was apparently sparked by his hatred of Mickey Mouse) and model kits based on his hot rod designs. Mann's film captures the capricious pop-art energy and disruptive, rebellious brio of Roth's work, relying on vibrant, candy-coloured animation and lurid, turbo-charged imagery. Boasting a stellar cast of narrators (John Goodman as Roth, as well as Ann-Margret and Jay Leno), many of whose voices are used to bring Roth's crazy contraptions themselves to life, Tales of the Rat Fink is a fitting tribute to a pop-culture pioneer, one of the first to show us that we could reconfigure mass-produced culture for our own purposes. Recorded with real 426 hemi engines. (Toronto IFF)

NOTE: There will not be a screening on Tues, Oct 24. This screening is listed in our program, but it will not be happening on that date. Our apologies for any confusion.