Cinema Arts Festival Houston 2009

Based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name, The Lost World revels in adventure-flick thrills but is equally effective as a cinematic document of our fascination with our own prehistory. Featuring amazing stop-motion sequences by animation pioneer Willis O’Brien, who later animated King Kong, and enlivened by outlandish costumes and sets, this dyno-dino epic was a smash hit upon its release in the mid-Roaring Twenties. An explorer’s journal points to the existence of dinosaurs in a far-flung locale, so reporter Edward Malone makes a deal with the robust Professor Challenger and joins a pseudoscientific expedition to find the mythical monsters. Vicious battles with a menagerie of real and imagined creatures ensue. If only Malone and his fellow explorers had stopped to consider the grave consequences before hauling a mad-as-hell Apatosaurus back to their ultramodern metropolis. While the film exemplifies groundbreaking cinematic techniques and razzle-dazzle storytelling, it also serves as a reminder of (hopefully) obsolete American attitudes toward the big, bad world at large. Amid its now dissonant charms are anachronistic cultural stereotypes regarding science, marriage, and race (complete with a white actor in blackface). Dengue Fever’s score will playfully and lovingly evoke worlds both known and unknown and elevate the The Lost World’s offbeat humor and singular beauty. (Notes by Sean Uyehara, San Francisco Film Festival).

Dengue Fever Dengue Fever’s repertoire isn’t simply Cambodian music or a Cambodian/American hybrid. Bollywood glitz, psychedelic rock, spaghetti Western twang, Klezmer, ska, funk, and Ethiopian jazz all contribute to the band’s unique sound. Singer Ch’hom Nimol’s powerful singing voice, in Khmer and more recently also English, is a luminous vibrato that adds exotic ornamentations to her vocal lines and complements the band’s driving sound.