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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE HOLE (1998)

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Dong, aka The Last Dance

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DIRECTED BY: Tsai Ming-Liang

FEATURING: ,

PLOT: In the face of a growing epidemic and environmental calamity, two of the only remaining occupants in an apartment building struggle to maintain their lives and find themselves inexorably drawn to each other through the hole in the ceiling that connects them.

Still from The Hole (1998)

COMMENTS: It never stops raining in The Hole’s Taipei. Condensation drips down every surface in the apartment building where we spend the entirety of the film, and its’ so humid that our two lead characters, the Man Upstairs and the Woman Downstairs, strip down to their sweat-soaked undergarments as soon as they get home. Wallpaper peels off the walls like it was held on by a Post-It note. For drinking, though, boiling is an absolute must. The world is becoming unlivable, and yet people still cling to the past. When an older man is unable to find a favorite bean paste, but learns that he can have the exact same product under a different brand name, he responds with devastated silence, unable to even consider a change of such magnitude. Even in the face of complete loss, the commitment to the world we think we know remains strong.

Created for the French television “2000, Seen By” project, which also counts such films as Don McKellar’s Last Night and Hal Hartley’s The Book of Life among its number, The Hole is a grim preview of the near future, featuring such highlights as environmental catastrophe, massive class inequality, and a rapidly spreading worldwide plague. For us pandemic fans, that last one hits like a prescient ton of bricks, even though though it’s the source of the most science fictional element of the film, as this particular plague curses the afflicted with cockroach-like behavior, crawling about the floor on all fours and retreating to dark, enclosed spaces. Yet despite this outwardly negative view of the new millennium, Tsai infuses The Hole with a hopeful streak, as the residents of this rundown apartment complex defiantly persevere in the face of adversity.

The titular aperture, which inadvertently connects the Man Upstairs and the Woman Downstairs, is appropriately the most emblematic show of humanity’s persistence. They go to their jobs, stock up on toilet paper, boil their water, and stare longingly at the incessant rain, but the hole forces them to cut through their routine and see each other. Initially a source of conflict, it wrecks their privacy, and they sometimes pick at each other out of humorous spite. It ultimately proves to be a means of connection, however, becoming increasingly important as things fall apart.

The movie’s most overt sign of optimism, and its most radical element, is the occasional shift into glitzy musical numbers, as Yang gets gussied up and leaves her apartment to dance and lip-sync to the tunes of Chinese chanteuse Grace Chang. In the best tradition of , the tunes are thematically appropriate and graft peppy dance numbers directly onto the dank, crumbling sets. Tsai actually dedicates the film to Chang, saluting her as a source of comfort in dark times, and she ultimately soundtracks the bittersweet coda. The film does not take a clear position on whether this is true cause for hope or bitter irony, but the cheery vocals and Yang’s joyfully amateurish dancing provide a strong endorsement for fiddling while Rome burns, and lift The Hole beyond its compatriots in the sad future brigade.

Look up any discussion of the filmography of Tsai Ming-Liang and you’ll inevitably stumble upon the term “slow cinema.” We’ve seen one of the most extreme examples of that genre on this very site. The Hole is unquestionably deliberately paced, but that is well-suited to a tale where life itself seems to be coming apart in slow motion. The rain is constant, the hole will never be repaired, so when change does come, it’s galvanizing. When we waited through our own pandemic, connection is what we were desperate to get back to at the end. The Hole knew that two decades earlier, and the waiting is what makes the payoff exquisite.

The Hole is now (if you’re reading this in summer 2026) in theatrical re-release.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The premise is weird enough, but interrupting the metaphorical story with delightfully amateurish song and dance sequences… takes it still further into uncharted territory.”–Geoff Andrews, Time Out 

(This movie was nominated for review by B. Gibson. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

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    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE 4TH MAN (1983)

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    De vierde man

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    DIRECTED BY: Paul Verhoeven

    FEATURING: Jeroen Krabbé, , Thom Hoffman, Dolf de Vries

    PLOT: A writer prone to waking nightmares encounters a mysterious woman who he hopes to use to reach a man for whom he lusts, but realizes that his urges may have led him into a dangerous trap.

    Still from The 4th Man (1983)

    COMMENTS: A sentence that has never been uttered regarding the career of Paul Verhoeven is, “I admire his subtlety.” His whole ethos is big, bold, and blatant. That made him particularly well-suited to transition from European art cinema to American box office. His refusal to put limitations on his excesses would ultimately cause its own set of problems, but let’s turn the clock back to Verhoeven’s pre-Hollywood days, when his budgets were smaller but his subversive imagination was still unbounded. That’s where we find him making The 4th Man, the enjoyably twisty psychological thriller that raked in millions of guilders and punched the director’s ticket for greener pastures in the States.

    Based on the novel by Gerard Reve, the film stars Krabbé as a writer named Gerard Reve. (“Reve” is the French word for “dream.”) Gerard has a suitcase full of issues, including unchecked alcoholism, a voracious bisexual appetite, a long-term relationship that now fills him with disgust, an alarmingly low bank account, and a devout Catholic faith. These elements combine early on to produce striking images—peepholes become eyeballs, blood pours down the walls of a train car—as Gerard slips into waking nightmares that deliver visions of impending death. These have a corresponding comical mirror image as Gerard is confronted with the reality of his visions, such as when a wreath on a casket bearing his name is pulled back to reveal the actual occupant. Whatever the cause, Gerard is an exposed fuse, ready to spark at any moment.

    The match turns out to be Christine. An archetypal icy blonde, Soutendijk plays up the self-evident sweetness and innocence of the character, even as Gerard keeps uncovering evidence that she may be secretly sinister. (Careful observers of the opening credits will note that Verhoeven provides a pretty on-the-nose metaphor.) If anything, Gerard is the more obvious villain, tripping clumsily over his honest feelings (during sex, he covers her breasts and tells her she looks like a beautiful boy) and blatantly wagging his tongue at a beefcake photo of Christine’s occasional boyfriend Herman. As he dives deeper, though, he learns more about her past husbands and the circumstances of their collectively untimely demises. The ensuing battle between his uncontrollable urges and his devotion to the protective interventions he is certain are coming from God and the Virgin Mary will send him hurtling to the shocking and amusing climax.

    A lot of the tricks Verhoeven pioneers here will return in his Hollywood ventures. His affection for cartoonish violence will appear in Robocop and Total Recall, the defiantly cavalier attitude toward sex is a hallmark of Showgirls, and the whole noirish plot feels like a rough draft of Basic Instinct. His most important trick, however, is his state of mind. There’s no subtext that can’t quickly become text, and the sheer outrageousness of Gerard’s plight is what keeps viewers in suspense. For a little while, this approach would make Verhoeven one of the more unpredictable directors to top the global box office. It’s nice to catch him at a time when his audacity still had an undercurrent of hunger.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…so loaded with symbolism that the film leans toward camp… The 4th Man is one of the most audacious movies ever made, but the imagery isn’t just fancy trimmings because Verhoeven grounds the movie’s bizarre flights of fancy within the twisted yearnings and fears of Gerard’s mind.” – James Newman, Images Movie Journal (DVD)

    (This movie was nominated for review by TheRealFolkBruce. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

    The 4th Man (1983)

    The 4th Man (1983)

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      Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

      IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: NEWSBOYS: DOWN UNDER THE BIG TOP (1996)

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      DIRECTED BY: Steve Taylor

      FEATURING: Newsboys (John James, Peter Furler, Jody Davis, Duncan Phillips, Jeff Frankenstein, Phil Joel), Phil Madeira, Greg Menza

      PLOT: A popular contemporary Christian pop band takes a break from their tour to try and organize a grand finale for a dying circus.

      Still from "Newsboys: Down Under the Big Top" (1996)

      COMMENTS: In the fall of 1967, the Beatles were experiencing the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Their newest album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was already being recognized as a landmark in the history of pop music, and their worldwide broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” had reached more than a billion people in the heart of the Summer of Love. On the other hand, they had abandoned the grueling work of touring, and their manager Brian Epstein had just died, leaving the band without anyone to advise them or act as a buffer for their wildest ideas. In the face of this adversity, and with the confidence that comes from being the biggest rock band in the entire world, the Beatles moved forward with a Christmas TV special, Magical Mystery Tour, that would go down in history as their first mammoth flop. The program, a hodgepodge of proto-music videos, improvised sketches, and random clips slammed together in hopes of achieving comedy via cognitive dissonance, is actually the kind of thing we like around here, being that it is so wildly ungoverned by factors such as logic, restraint, or taste. Despite that, and the fact that other Beatles projects like the “Get Back” sessions have been rehabilitated through the passage of time, the Magical Mystery Tour remains a hard watch.

      So if the Beatles couldn’t do it, what on earth made Newsboys think they could pull it off? This 90s-era Australian-American pop band that brought a Savage Garden-Barenaked Ladies-Gin Blossoms musical sensibility to the upper echelons of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) charts does not immediately seem like a good match for a personality-driven medium like film. And they’re not. Their songs are mildly catchy, their vibe is low-key amiable, and their humor is mainly of the dad variety. We’re not exactly looking to Newsboys to let their freak flag fly, and the banner they end up hoisting is pretty benign.

      (A necessary sidenote: Newsboys are still around, like the Temptations having gone through numerous personnel changes . A recent lead singer for the group was accused of heinous sexual misconduct, but at this stage he and his collaborators are years away from joining the band. So you won’t see any known offenders in this film.)

      There is something exceptionally odd about the whole production, but it’s the kind of strangeness rooted in inexplicable choices. Why choose a circus theme and then not have any of the trappings of a circus? Beyond the big tent itself and a couple clowns, the circus is mostly talked about, not shown. Why spend so much time demonstrating the lameness of the slate of performers? Not catastrophic awfulness, mind you, but just categorically bland and weak. Why give characters elaborate quirks and then not commit to them? Twins Carlene and Darlene never get into lockstep, and while we can be grateful that the presence of little people as mob enforcers is not played for the stereotypical cheap laughs that you might expect, the result feels less like trope subversion and more like virtue signaling. The film doesn’t even know what kind of joke it wants to tell. It’s not as over-the-top loony as Spice World, only dips its toe into the waters of Spinal Tap-style mockumentary, and definitely has no interest in the subversiveness of Head. I supposed they’re too Christian to get no-holds-barred weird on us, although they even soft-pedal the evangelism: a prayer is cut short by hijinks, while a copy of the Bible is revealed to have been stolen from a hotel. (Um… commandment?) It seems like someone in the Newsboys camp wanted to get outrageous, while somebody else kept a tight grip on the leash.

      So if the story’s not the thing, then their best option would seem to be to appeal to the mass of diehard, rabid Newsboys fans. Big Top doesn’t really do that, either. The filmmakers seem to recognize that none of the band members has a grain of personality, but resting what little plot exists on the shoulders of lead singer John and bassist Phil only highlights how threadbare the story is. The movie can’t even work up enough interest to see Newsboys being Newsboys, aside from snippets of a concert and two full music videos clumsily dropped in during the last ten minutes (a fact the director helpfully lampshades). Of course, this turns out to be the right move, since those videos contain exponentially more wit than anything that has come before.

      Down Under the Big Top is definitely a strange object, baffling in that it does nothing to satiate rabid Newsboys fans, and also doesn’t go far out enough to draw in curious outsiders or connoisseurs of weirdness. It just sits there, without so much as an “I Am the Walrus” to justify the effort.

      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “It truly is a weird little movie that, on the surface, seems worthy of derision. However, it really depends on the angle from which you want to critique it… Is it terrible from a cinematic perspective? Absolutely. Does it have storytelling issues? Without question. However, it possesses an awkward, oddball charm that is kind of fun.” – Nicole Pramik, Sci-fi Fantasy Lit Chick

      (This movie was nominated for review by Jenn. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

      Newsboys: Down Under The Big Top [VHS]

      Newsboys: Down Under The Big Top [VHS]

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        Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

        IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994)

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        DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hull

        FEATURING: Kenji Sugimoto

        PLOT: A documentary account of a Japanese math professor who comes to America in search of his hero, Albert Einstein— specifically, the scientist’s brain, which was extracted during an autopsy and removed to points unknown.

        Still from "Relics: Einstein's Brain" (1994)

        COMMENTS: Among the most cherished books of my childhood were the three volumes that made up “The People’s Almanac,” a peculiar reference book that purported to comprise only the most interesting and widely unknown stories and facts from the span of recorded history. Where else would biographies of fictional characters who have become immortal through extended popularity sit comfortably alongside histories of some of the world’s leading news publications? A particularly memorable story was the one told in “People’s Almanac #3” by journalist Steven Levy about his successful search for Albert Einstein’s mind-meat, harvested (and possibly pilfered) by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Levy chronicled the strange afterlife of the physicist’s brain, culminating in his memorable description: “I had been granted a rare peek into an organic crystal ball. Swirling in formaldehyde was the power of the smashed atom, the mystery of the universe’s black holes, the utter miracle of human achievement.” So the result of screening a documentary about another person’s hunt for this very same organ 15 years after Levy’s article was a uniquely odd sensation for me specifically. For a film that proposes to solve a deep and thought-provoking mystery, I kept watching with a nagging question in my mind: “Didn’t we already figure this out?”

        Maybe Levy’s report was lost to history, or only the barest of information made it through time’s game of telephone to tickle the fancy of a Japanese math professor. In any event, Einstein’s Brain kicks off the search with a retroactive information deficit, armed with only the knowledge that the mind behind relativity was plucked from its braincase during an autopsy in Princeton in 1955. From there, we pick up the trail with Professor Kenji Sugimoto in hot pursuit as he crisscrosses the country in search of the wayward noggin-nugget, encountering a university professor in New York, a neuroscientist in California, a police officer in Missouri, a pile of redacted FBI records in Washington, DC, a biologist in New Jersey, William S. Burroughs (who plays him a clip from “The Day After” and provides directions to Harvey’s home), and even Einstein’s granddaughter, working our way ever closer to Albert Einstein’s cranial cortex.

        Einstein’s Brain has its origins in television, airing on the long-running BBC documentary program “Arena” as part of a series called “Relics” that purported to be about treasured artifacts but was really more interested in the people who sought them. That makes Prof. Sugimoto an intriguing subject, because the only thing we know Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994) →

        It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

        APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS (1971)

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        Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou

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        DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

        FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka

        PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.

        WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.

        Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

        COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”

        Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.

        We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.

        Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.

        There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?

        WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

        “…a surreal psychedelic experience like no other… Many of the bizarre, dreamlike sequences that act as short interludes or scenes of escapism for the adolescent at the heart of the film elicit the traits of a Jodorowsky film.”–Tom Bielby, Film Bantha

        (This movie was nominated for review by Adam. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)