DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Brent Neale

PLOT: Villagers of the Alpine town of Tolzbad believe that avalanches will bury them if they are not meticulously careful to keep their voices low and their movements measured.  The film follows the adventures of a family of a widowed mother and her three sons: Johann, who is engaged to be married; Grigorss, who is training to be a butler; and Franz, a mute who never leaves his chair in the attic. Presaged by the appearance of the blind ghost of the father, the family’s repressed emotions eventually erupt into suicide, duels, and the dreaded avalanche.

BACKGROUND:

• This was Guy Maddin’s third film, and his first fully in color (Archangel featured a few tinted scenes). The chromatic process used in the film mimics the so-called “two-strip” Technicolor which was used before 1932.
• The setting of Careful was inspired by “mountain movies,” a 1920s subgenre popular in the German national cinema, although Maddin admits in the DVD commentary that he had not actually seen any mountain movies when he made the film.
• Long-time Maddin screenwriting collaborator George Toles appears in Careful as a corpse in drag.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: I am tempted by the vision of the mountain mineworkers—women stripped down to their underwear, wielding pickaxes while wearing candle-bearing diapers on their heads—but the film’s most significant image is Johann gazing manically at his mother sleeping under her goat’s-head headboard while spreading the limbs of his massive garden shears.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If movies themselves could dream, their dreams would look like Guy

Original trailer for Careful

Maddin movies: sludgy jumbles of styles, moods, and melodramatic preoccupations, composed of fragmented images made up from bits of misplaced, distressed celluloid. Like Maddin’s other movies, Careful keeps us at two removes from reality: it displaces us once by its narrative dislogic, and then a second time by its archaic stylization. In Careful the technique is particularly appropriate, since the subject matter—repressed incestuous desire—demands to be buried under layers of mystery.

COMMENTS: Careful begins with what amounts to a pre-Code Public Service Announcement, as an elder of the high-altitude Alpine village of Tolzbad warns, in a calm, hypnotic voice over carefully plucked harp arpeggios: “Children! Heed the warnings of your parents! Peril awaits the uncautious wayfarer, and strews grief where laughter once played.” The dangers of living in a craggy burg are, apparently, legion. There is the obvious danger of falling off the mountain slope. The fear of avalanches is so great that all domestic animals have their vocal cords severed lest they unwittingly bring death from above down upon the town. The citizens make a virtue of caution, so necessary to their survival, and they have perfected it as a habit to guard against the remotest dangers. For the residents of Tolzbad have many sad tales of the tragedies that result from heedless behavior. A baby once lost an eye when his mother foolishly clasped him to her bosom without making double-sure her brooch pin was fully closed. That same child lost his other eye as an adult when he peered too close to a cuckoo clock just as it burst forth to announce the dawn of a new hour. The elders have a rich storehouse of tales of woe with which to educate the young, but no number of cautionary fables can protect from every possible threat, from the “wild uncontrolled sound of nature,” the avalanche-tempting cries of migrating geese and the folly of the undisciplined human heart. That is why the citizens must always be alert, must carve the instincts of discretion and reserve into their bodies and souls, must always be careful.

The warning prologue is delivered, appropriately enough, in a monochrome print tinted a cautionary traffic-cone orange. In his third feature, Guy Maddin works for the first time in color, and like a 1920s German filmmaker given unlimited access to a two-strip Technicolor machine, he seizes upon the possibilities afforded by this new visual dimension to invent new forms of Expressionist storytelling. The Tolzbadians practiced public blandness is belied by the movie’s flamboyant color schemes: their repressed desires bleed onto the screen. Careful‘s visual compositions look like turn of the century Swiss postcards from which most of the dye long ago faded away. Early Technicolor processes usually used a green filter and a red filter, which in combination covered most of the color spectrum and resulted in an image that projected vaguely realistic hues. Throughout Careful Maddin experiments with using, for example, a yellow and a pink filter, creating chromatic combinations that are as off-key as the concept of the sexually repressed Alpine village itself is.

Early scenes, such as the Feast of St. Mathilde where the village youths serenade a crowd of swooning maidens with a concerto blown on their grotesquely oversized Alpine horns, are rendered in pleasing, if unnatural, pastoral shades of cornflower and periwinkle. These halcyon days glow as pure and blond as the Aryan hair of young Johann, who chastely woos a village maid by the name of Klara. Of course it is not always so; at moonrise in Tolzbad, the amber sun fades away and is replaced by a purple moon. A violet moonbeam casts a blotch on the face of Johann’s older brother Franz, a lame mute who sits covered in cobwebs in the family attic eternally staring out the window. Bathed in lavender revelation, Franz sees a vision of his blind dead father, who warns the shut-in that his brother now “dreams of your mother like a bridegroom; he is confused; his virginity has become a curse,” that his mother’s unfulfilled desire haunts the house, and that poor Johann has “breathed it in.” Such is the moonrise in Tolzbad. In the next scene the once harmonious color palette is completely broken; tormented by his forbidden desire, Johann confesses to Klara “purity sickens me” and wonders “the sounds of angels singing hymns to our virginal love was in reality a choir from the deepest pits of Hell?” The lovers’ figures are indistinct and shadowy, covered in a color fog that Maddin calls “sickly urine yellow.” From this point on, the chromatic schemes swing as wildly as the characters’ cascading emotions; Klara will go to labor in the purple and gold mines of Tolzbad, Johann’s brother Grigorss will graduate butler school and land a position in Count Knotkers hunter green castle, and we’ll visit the glacial blue heights of Mitterwald’s Tongue and the electric orange peaks of Mt. Uhlander.

The visual exuberance is a sharp contrast to the acting; as in Maddin’s previous Archangel, the characters deliver their outrageously melodramatic lines (“God has left this mountain to the devil. We have all joined his unholy dance”) as if they were half-asleep and speaking in a daze. Here, the narcotized underacting is appropriate to the theme of repression, but it doesn’t help us bond with the characters, and the hard-to-hit tone of buried passion the script requires exposes the amateurism of a few of the cast members. (Franz, whose complete immobility makes him the safest and therefore most exemplary citizen of Tolzbad, is also the film’s exemplary actor; he’s forced to act silent movie style, and his face is free to express an unfettered alarm and bereavement that the others, bound to language, must suppress). The plot, while not awful, is one of Careful‘s few negatives. It lingers too long at the setup. It’s hard to identify with the characters. There’s no one who engages our sympathies, the story switches the main character on us a third of the way through, imposes an unconvincing romance on us in the third act, and the continues after the natural climax of the duel to follow what is essentially a subplot. These failings far from ruin the film, since Careful has more than enough amazing atmosphere, style and psychological queasiness to admire, but to me they do keep it from being one of Maddin’s top works. The extra features of a master work—the deep involvement in Lt. Boles’ amnesiac tragedy in Archangel, the manic energy of Cowards Bend the Knee, the professional exuberance of Isabella Rossellini and Mark McKinney’s performances in The Saddest Music in the World—are missing in Careful, leaving us with little more to enjoy besides Maddin’s extraordinary style and the cleverness of the incest conceit. These minor flaws make Careful more a film for those who are already in the Maddin cult than an entry point into the canon (I recommend newbies start with Saddest Music, which is Maddin’s most accessible movie while still remaining astoundingly strange to the average person).

Like all of Maddin’s movies, Careful is a tragicomedy, and one that succeeds only because the humor is so absurd and dreamlike that it tempers the tragedy without mocking it. Maddin peppers his tepid Freudian melodrama with moments of full-bore Surrealism. An egg drops a fully developed, moving bird when cracked into a frying pan. A tale of incestuous rape is confessed during a yawning fit. In Careful, when two characters have a duel, it involves a drawn out ritual of frantic unbuttoning of overcoats, interspersed with the duelists blowing on their hands to keep warm in the Alpine cold, followed by a frantic round of unbuttoning of waistcoats. It’s funny, but it doesn’t diminish the dramatic stakes of the contest: two men fighting for their lives, and younger combatant threatens to kill his symbolic spiritual father. Dead birds fall out of the sky around the victor. He carefully arranges their jumbled corpses into orderly rows. Such are the surreal psychological avalanches of Tolzbad, where it always pays to be careful.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…hilariously bizarre… like some lost masterpiece from a time-warped alternative dimension — a strange artifact that time forgot.”–Hal Hinson, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

“…the film remains one long ‘look what I can do, Ma,’ drawing attention to the director’s conceits just when the viewer should be focusing on, oh, say, some sort of coherent plot.. Too strange for its own good.”–Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“Uniquely weird, subtly macabre, and utterly compelling.”–Time Out Film Guide

OFFICIAL SITE: Careful at Zeitgeist Films – A synopsis, stills, quotes from positive reviews, and a detailed Guy Maddin biography

IMDB LINK: Careful (1992)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Technicolor history – For the technically inclined, here is a discussion of early film color technology that Maddin mimics in Careful

DVD INFO: Zeitgeist’s “Remastered and Repressed” DVD (buy) preserves Maddin’s uniquely bizarre color and sound schemes, faithfully reproducing each imperfection. There is a buried treasure of bonus material; a commentary with the director and under-appreciated writing partner George Toles is of primary interest. There’s also the utterly surreal five minute short film “Odilon Redon” (which can be watched here, though with a different soundtrack). The most impressive extra is the informative one hour documentary Waiting for Twilight, narrated by none other than Tom Waits, which covers Maddin’s early history and was filmed as the nervous auteur was fretting over the production of 1997′s Twilight of the Ice Nymphs.

This title is also available, with all the same features, as part of the four-disc set “The Quintessential Guy Maddin” (buy): other movies featured are the aforementioned Ice Nymphs, the Certified Weird movies Archangel (1990) and Cowards Bend the Knee (2004), the 2003 vampire ballet Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, and the magnificent Surrealist/Constructivist short “The Heart of the World.” “Quintessential” is the only box set available anywhere to date containing an incredible three Certified Weird movies. At the time this review was published the compilation was priced at only a few dollars more than the single disc, making it an almost irresistible bargain.

Careful is also available for online purchase or rental (rent).

(This movie was nominated for review by Eric Gabbard, who argued “Careful ‘out-weirds’ both [Archangel and Cowards Bend the Knee] easily. In fact, I would definitely put it in my top 10. Such dreamlike photography puts you in a trance.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING:  Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Will Patton, Zoe Kazan, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson

PLOT: A small group of settlers faces an indefinite fate when they gamble their survival on the

veracity of two diametrically opposed guides, each of questionable character.

WHY SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: On its face, Meek’s Cutoff appears to be a steady, plodding historical-fiction drama, a slow, tense tale about the perils of trust and the tedium of uncertainty. And it is…to an extent. But there’s something going on under the surface. When the film refuses to relinquish it’s heavy, solemn tone by employing a musical score or comic relief as the unrelentingly grim and heavy nature of the characters’ conundrum intensifies and hangs on our conscience like dead weight, and as the subtly surreal nature of the setting and the situation sinks in, the weirdness mounts. The effect combines the absurdist, futile tedium of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, the eerie sense of a malignant grand design of Yellowbrickroad (2010), and the pensive, serenely surreal atmosphere of Housekeeping (1987). The result is unique and unsettling.

The sudden, quietly shocking ending and the location in the story in which it occurs appalls the viewer with a sickening insight. This epiphany reveals that the movie is not about the drama which has been unfolding up to this point, or about how it is to be resolved, but that it concerns something entirely different. Upon grasping the filmmakers’ message, we realize we have had a genuinely weird viewing experience.

COMMENTS: From the first frame, it’s obvious that Meek’s Cutoff is a serious, authentic, carefully crafted story. As is the case with so many independent art films, a majority of viewers may reject it. Audiences who are pining for a reprise of Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider should skip Meek’s Cutoff and instead opt for something like True Grit. They will find Meek’s Cutoff  boring, and it’s climax confusing, unsatisfying and disturbing.

Viewers who enjoy artfully cerebral movies with ambiguous conclusions however, will like Meek’s Cutoff. The clever ending dramatically drives home the thrust of the film, revealing it to be much more than just a Western genre pic.

In Meek’s Cutoff, three families split away from a larger wagon train to follow a shady rogue scout named Stephen Meek. Meek promises them a quicker, safer route over the Cascades to Western Oregon. Once past the point of no return, Meek reveals himself to be unorthodox, incompetent, and possibly insane.

Vain, full of colorful, sophomoric bravado, nursing a penchant for savage violence, Meek gets the settlers completely and utterly lost on an endless, wasted plain. Desperate, running out of water, and coping with numerous potentially life threatening hardships, the pioneers form an uneasy alliance with a captured Cayuse brave.

Offering rewards, the settlers clamor to entice the warrior to lead them to water, squaring off with an inflamed Meek in the process. Meek tries to kill the Indian, claiming the Indian nearly precipitated a massacre when attempting to report the settlers’ presence to his tribe. The settlers suspect Meek is crazy. Has he been contracted by the Hudson Bay Company to deliberately maroon them in favor of French emigrants? Has the Cayuse tribesman been signaling to trailing warriors bent on overtaking the small wagon train? The homesteaders are split as to whom they can trust.

The three families find themselves at the mercy of two antagonists locked in mutual animosity. Will one man save them, or will both men damn them?

Eastern Oregon’s stark, high desert scrub wastes accent striking cinematography in this quietly tense, plodding, surreal story about faith versus uncertainty. Jeff Grace’s haunting, dreamlike score, combined with the alien setting, gives Meek’s Cutoff the feeling of an odyssey. Rather than shot, the picture seems almost engraved into the blanched, weathered rock and parched loam of the blasted landscape.

The desolate geography, at once romantic and forlorn, forms not only the backdrop for the action, but the backbone of the plot. It brandishes a chilling openness, contradicted by a claustrophobia achieved by the way its hills and dales obfuscate any possible sign of deliverance at the horizon. Recalcitrant, unforgiving, the desert is in collusion with the homesteaders’ nemeses, channeling the settlers to a vague and ambiguous fate. Trekking across an alien, vacuous landscape, the emigrants are like cosmic explorers; like spacewalkers attached to their capsules by an oxygen lifeline, the homesteaders are tethered to their Conestogas by the umbilical reins of their oxen. In this way, the harsh countryside is itself an antagonist, incipiently complicit with the story’s provocateurs.

Time seems to stand still during the families’ sojourn upon the featureless terrain. Progress is measured by reaching a horizon that only reveals yet another one beyond it. The significance of the settlers’ destination becomes subordinated to the minutiae of the routine actions and regimentation of the journey itself.

The minutiae are the journey, and the journey is the story. Repetitive tasks have a grounding effect, providing a measure of the day and a way to combat the disorientation of the wide open plain. Despite the expansiveness of the sky above, however, the travelers’ situation is often claustrophobic: dips, dales, and buttes obscure the view of their surroundings. It seems they are always looking up to the rim of a basin instead of out to the horizon. Long hooded bonnets and wagon covers become blinders.

Meek’s Cutoff can be reminiscent of Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. Time dilates. Resolution fails to manifest. What was predicted to be a two week journey stretches to five. Meek perpetually promises that water is just over the next hill, but it never is.

It’s the conflict between Meek and the Cayuse brave, the ambiguity of the guides’ intentions, and the severity of the situation that distinguishes Meek’s Cutoff from an excruciating absurdist play. We want to see who is telling the truth, who is mad, who is sane, what will come from the animosity between the guides. The serenity of the plain is an illusion. The threat of sudden slaughter and annihilation lurks just beyond the edges of sage covered hillocks.

Meek’s Cutoff is about much more than a quest for water and safe passage. This is where its categorization as a “Western” proves troublesome. The film is an odyssey about trust, doubt and fatalism, its story related through a seamless ribbon of vignettes. These segments emphasize the challenge, tedium and visceral rawness of the daily survival struggle made by desperate people with limited resources and modest technology in a hostile environment. The matches of wits and elements of fate provide Meek’s Cutoff with a unique depth.The point is driven home by a strategic, unconventional denouement. Upon beholding its sudden, heavy, ambiguous ending, we realize Meek’s Cutoff is really about the monotonous hell of perpetual mortal uncertainty.

APPENDIX:

Loosely inspired by, but not based on an actual incident, Meek’s Cutoff is set in the year that a wagon train met tragedy in the central Cascades in what today is known as Meek’s Cutoff. The real life Stephen Hall Meek was born in Virginia in 1807. An experienced mountain man, he hired himself out as a trail guide to settlers traveling the Oregon trail from Independence, Missouri.

In 1845, Meek led 200 wagons, between 750 and 1000 settlers, and thousands of heads of cattle and oxen across the high plains west of Vale, Oregon toward the eastern slopes of the Cascades. Hoping to establish a more direct middle route through the region, Meek attempted to find a shortcut to Oregon City, by following the course of the Malheur River south and then west.

When the pioneers failed to locate water en route, they abandoned their westerly course, turning north. Sending out multiple search parties in a 25 mile radius, the settlers eventually located water at Buck Creek and the South Fork of the Crooked River. By the time Meek’s wagon train arrived in The Dalles in the Willamet Valley, some distance from Oregon City, at least 23 of the pioneers were dead. Weakened from their ordeal, an unspecified number died shortly after their arrival at The Dalles. (Karen Bassett, Jim Renner, and Joyce White. Meek Cutoff, 1845, [Oregon Trails Coordinating Council 1998]; Keith Clark and Lowell Tiller. Terrible Trail: The Meek Cutoff, 1845, [Bend, OR: Maverick Publications Inc., 1966])

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a film ponderously slow in pace yet kinetically charged with insight; starkly realistic yet allegorical too; psychologically astute yet politically resonant.”–Rick Groen, Toronto Globe and Mail (contemporaneous)

Actors Will Patton, Michelle Williams, writer Jonathan Raymond, and director Kelly Reichardt may be familiar to some viewers from the 2008 independent drama Wendy And Lucy.

DIRECTED BY: Dziga Vertov

FEATURING: Mikhail Kaufman (cameraman)

PLOT: A plotless record of twenty four hours of life in the Soviet Union of 1929, exhibited

through series of experimental camera tricks.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Man with the Movie Camera is a visually inventive, historically important and formally deep movie that reveals more secrets with each viewing; but, the only quality in it that might be called “weird” are the surreal camera tricks it occasionally deploys. It’s a movie that demands space on the shelf of anyone seriously interested in editing techniques or film theory, but as far as weirdness goes, it’s purely supplemental viewing.

COMMENTS: Reviews of Man with a Movie Camera often spend as much, if not more, time discussing the history and philosophy of the production and its influence on future films than they do describing what’s actually in the movie. That’s because the challenge the movie sets for itself—to create a “truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature”—is more fascinating than the film’s subject matter (the daily lives of Soviet citizens in 1929). On a technical level, Movie Camera is a catalog of editing techniques and camera tricks, many of which were pioneered in this film but are commonplace or obsolete now. Be on the lookout for double exposures, tricks of perspective, slowing down or speeding up the camera speed, freeze-frames, reversed footage, split screens, and even crude stop-motion animation. One of the most interesting techniques is the amphetaminic editing of Movie Camera‘s climax, which moves almost too fast for the eye or mind to follow (a technique Guy Maddin fell in love with and used to ultra-weird effect in the Constructivist/Surrealist hybrid The Heart of the World). Structurally, the film flows along as a series of counterpoints, alternating between two sets of scenes to create ironic contrasts (cross-cutting a funeral procession and the birth of a baby), metaphors (scenes of soot-covered workers in the mines followed by women being pampered in a beauty parlor to suggest the dignity of the worker compared to the frivolousness of the bourgeoisie), or other surprise connections (the cameraman getting dangerously close to the being hit by a speeding train is intercut with a sleeping woman tossing and turning as if having a nightmare). Other sequences interlace shots of the cameraman and film crew with the footage being shot so the audience can see how the movie is made; for example, we see the cameraman filming horse drawn carriages, then watch the reaction of the bonneted women out on a Sunday ride trying to act as if they don’t realize they’re being spied on by the car speeding beside them. At several points the movie pauses and we focus on Vertov’s wife working in the editing studio splicing the footage together into a montage, as if we’re watching the movie being assembled before our very eyes.

Philosophically, Movie Camera advocates a pure Marxist agenda; thanks to the distance of time and circumstance, the preaching is not as heavy-handed and obvious to the modern viewer as it may have been to the film’s intended audience. The common worker, whether miner, factory worker or clerk, is spotlighted and glorified throughout. All that footage showing the cameraman and the physical process of making movies serves double duty here, reminding the audience that the propaganda artist is not a privileged class but is a fellow worker sweating away in the trenches. The film also advances temporary policies of the time: in 1927, Stalin had embarked on a policy of rapid industrialization to close the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West. Movie Camera therefore fetishes the machine, taking a voyeuristic delight in glorifying belching smokestacks, pumping pistons, and particularly in the clicking shutters and winding cranks of its own favorite apparatus, the camera (I half-suspect director Vertov only shows the explicit birth of a baby because the vagina reminds him of a camera aperture).

At a more abstract level, the non-narrative, everyday subject matter of the film expresses the director’s ideological hostility to the fictional films of the West. Like Leon Trotsky, Vertov saw the spectacle and fantasy of fictional films as an opiate for the masses that needed to be reformed into something useful to the socialist state. This last position, turning the cinema away from escapism and towards practicality, was Vertov’s central concern in Movie Camera, but it resulted in two ironies. First, there is a paradox in that Vertov wants to limit himself to depicting reality, but so many of the images he chooses are fantastic and even surreal: a man with a movie camera standing on top of mountainous movie camera, a building collapsing on itself via split-screen manipulation, a plate of cooked prawns coming to life and slithering around. Presumably, Vertov resolves this apparent inconsistency between concern for reality and addiction to fantasy by constantly reminding the audience that they are watching a film and not a story, by emphasizing the role of the omnipresent unhidden cameraman and showing how he accomplishes his tricks, thereby unmasking the illusion and revealing the reality behind it. There remains, however, a (not unpleasant) tension between the director’s championing of reality over fiction and the way he continually undermines the reality of his motion picture.

The second irony is that, despite the fact that Movie Camera‘s foundation was doctrinaire Marxist theory, the movie was rejected and disavowed as avant-garde and decadent after Stalin adopted the official Soviet aesthetic of “social realism.” The Communist stance became that filmmakers should depict easy-to-digest, non-stylized narratives that could inspire the average theatergoer, showing him exemplary citizens and uplifting historical victories such as Alexander Nevsky‘s victory over the Teutonic Knights. Vertov stopped making his own films after 1934 and finished out his career as nothing more than an editor. Invented to celebrate the proletariat, Man with the Movie Camera was mainly of interest to the cultural elites; intended as a leftist manifesto, it proved too radical in its formalism for the Marxists.

Man with the Movie Camera is a recommended film, but with a qualification: you almost certainly must have an interest in film history or film theory to enjoy it. If anyone without such interests were to call the movie insufferably tedious, I wouldn’t be able to refute them. Because the movie itself is in the public domain, but the various soundtracks are not, you have several options to watch the film. It can be streamed or downloaded from the Internet archive, but there is no musical accompaniment. The three main competing DVD versions currently available are distinguished by their unique soundtracks, each made in different styles but following Vertov’s broad original scoring notes. Kino’s 2003 release (buy) features a minimalist score by Hollywood composer Michael Nyman. The record label Ninja Tune released a DVD (buy) with a hipper score from the electronic jazz outfit The Cinematic Orchestra. The version I watched to prepare this review was the 2002 Image disc (buy), with a very good soundtrack from the Alloy Orchestra that is hypnotically rhythmic and occasionally exotic; it plays as both period-appropriate and “futuristic” at the same time, and reminds me a little of the style of George Antheil. The Cinematic (digital version) and Alloy (digital version) versions of the movie are both available for online rental or purchase.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the] wiggiest effects would seem to violate the idea of verit. But that’s the intoxicating power of making movies–you start out trying to record realism, and you end up animating a plate full of prawns.”–Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene (DVD)

As we begin our review of the candidates for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest, we wish to highlight a surprisingly persistent fallacy: many searchers out there believe that Google is psychic. How else to explain searches for “weird movies that i like” and “what was this film about?” To get one more preliminary mention out of the way, we’d like to give special recognition to “onlion saxy grail and hores” for being the only search term we’ve ever seen that does not bring up a porn site in the first page of Google results. That’s some impressive mangling of the English language! On to our standard contestants: we really liked “free longpantys” (for some reason we like to imagine “Longpantys” is the pseudonym of some sort of feminist rabble rouser who’s been imprisoned in Iran, but that’s just us). The judges were also impressed with “hustler sad clown and his love nurse,” which might be the title of an abandoned Larry Flynt video project. But nothing caught our attention like “adult diaper rubber pants made in thailand burnout video,” which gave us a startling mental image while warning us about a potential geriatric health catastrophe, thus earning right to be named 366 Weird Movies’ Weirdest Search Term of the Week.

Here’s how the ridiculously-long-and-ever-growing reader-suggested review queue looks at this moment in history: Careful (next week!); “My Wrongs 8245-8249 and 117″; Dellamorte Dellamore [AKA Cemetery Man]; The Hour-glass Sanatorium [Saanatorium pod klepsidra] (out of print in North America, but we’ll keep looking); Liquid Sky (re-review); 3 Dev Adam; Fantastic Planet; “Twin Peaks” (TV series); Society; May; Little Otik; Final Programme; Sweet Movie; The Triplets of Belleville; “Foutaises”; Johnny Suede; The Tale  of the Floating World, Un Chien Andalou, Bloodsucking Freaks; Three Crowns of the Sailor;  8 1/2; Dororo; Lost Highway; Valerie and Her Week  of Wonders (official review); Dogville; Julien Donkey-boy; Amelie;  The Ten; The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao; 1; Fast, Cheap and Out of Control; Tokyo Gore Police; At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul; The Trial [Le procès] (1962); Marquis;  Hell Comes to Frogtown; Seom [The Isle]; Allegro Non Troppo; Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus; Lust in the Dust; Celine and Julie Go Boating;  “Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life;” The Magic Christian; Black Cat, White Cat; The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; Abnormal: The Sinema of Nick Zedd; Robot Monster; Nightdreams; 3 Women; “To Oblivion”; Rubin & Ed; Teeth; Vera; Weirdsville; Prospero’s Books; Inferno; Garden State; Persona; The Real McCoy; Rat Pfink a Boo Boo; Themroc; Candy (1968); Run Lola Run; Pink Flamingos; Buffalo ’66;  Northfork; Weekend; The Room; Glen or Glenda?; Night of the Hunter; The Fox Family;  Midnight Skater; Angelus; Cloudy with a Chance of  Meatballs; Twister (1989); Yokai Monsters, Vol. 1: Spook Warfare [AKA Big Monster War]; Britannia Hospital; This Filthy Earth; Conspirators of Pleasure; Piano Tuner of Earthquakes; Clean, Shaven; Bubba Ho-Tep; Sheitan; Innocence; “Chingsao the Clown”; Léolo; 2001: A Space Odyssey; Blue Velvet; ID (2005); Master of the Flying Guillotine; Yesterday Was a Lie; The Ninth Configuration; Love Me If You Dare;  Forbidden Zone; The Cell; My Dinner with Andre; The Illustrated Man;  Fando y Lis; Rampo Noir; Head; Christmas on Mars; “Broken Glass”; Videodrome; Air Doll; The Ossuary and Other Tales; Arrebato; Symbol; Wicked City (1992  live action); Barbarella; Picnic at Hanging Rock; The Cars that Ate Paris; The Boxer’s Omen [aka Mo];  Portrait of Jennie; Salo, the 120 Days of  Sodom; The Last Sunset (1961); Orpheus (1950); A Scanner Darkly; Safe; The Atrocity Exhibition; Slacker; Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell; Color of Pomegranates; Horror Express; Noroi; Cutie Honey; The Shape of Things; On the Silver Globe; Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; 2012 Aficionado DVD Zine Issue #0; The Last Days of Planet Earth;  “Charleston Parade”; Tales from the Quadead Zone; A Snake of  June; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover; The Neverending Story; Cat Soup; Jack and the Beanstalk (1974, Japan); Drowning by Numbers; Fudge 44; From Beyond; The Saragossa Manuscript; The Drifting Classroom; Brain Dead; Uncle Meat; Meet the Hollowheads; Nuit Noire; Screamplay; Grendel Grendel Grendel;  Eyes Wide Shut; Twilight of the Cockroaches; The Ruling Class; Indecent Desires; Daughter of Horror [AKA Dementia];  The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; Daisies; Beauty and the Beast [Panna a Netvor] (1978); Parents; Dark City; Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters; 1 Day; The Doom Generation; Black Devil Doll;  Multiple Maniacs; Phantasm IV; and Vermilion Souls (2007) (depending on availability); Lovers on the Bridge; No Smoking (2007); Reflections of Evil; The War Zone; Gahjini; Natural Born Killers; The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb; One Eyed Monster; Reflections of Evil; Natural Born Killers; The Fountain; Save the Green Planet; Crimewave (d. Sam Raimi); Wool 100%; Murder Party; The Annunciation (1984); Funeral Parade of Roses; Stroszek; Bad Taste; Aguirre, the Wrath of God; Audition; The Fall; Me and You and Everyone We Know; Visitor of a Museum [Posetitel muzeya]; “Serial Experiments: Lain” (TV show); Darc Arc; Russian Ark; Genius Party; Watership Down; Tampopo; Goodbye Uncle Tom; The Idiots; Repo Man; Der Todersking [The Death King]; Titicut Follies; Mr. Nobody; The Shout; “Premium” (depending on availability); Sleepaway Camp; The Pit (1981); Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams; The Falls; Spermula; Killer Condom; The Godmonster of Indian Flats; Perfect Blue; I Am Here Now; Sir Henry at Rawlinson End; The Bothersome Man; Moebius; Skeletons; Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song; The Brave Little Toaster; The Adventures of Picasso; Charly: Dias de Sangre (depending on availability); Meet the Feebles; The Adventures of Mark Twain; Tourist Trap (1979); Thundercrack!; SLC Punk; Anguish (1987); Buddy Boy (1999); Bliss (1986); La cicatrice intérieure; Avida (2006); Brain Damage; Amazon Women on the Moon; Chronopolis; Blue (1993); Metropia; Zachariah; Labyrinth; Battle in Heaven; The Taste of Tea; Evil Ed; I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse; Cafe Flesh; Buffet Froid; Dunyayi Kurtaran Adam [AKA Turkish Star Wars]; The Signal; “Alma” (short); The Double Life of Veronique;  “Chick”, Felidae; Spirited Away; Decasia (2002); Killdozer;  I (heart) Huckabees;  Electric Dragon 80,000 V;  Santa Claus (1959); Strange Circus; Mad Detective; Wild at Heart; Revolver; The Tenant; A Zed and Two Noughts; Litan (1982) (depending on availability); Dark Waters; La Razon de Mi Vida (pending English language DVD release); The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea; Bernie (1996) ( depending on availability); The Ruling Class; Tank Girl; Things (1989); Hair Extensions; Haggard; Svidd neger (depending on availability); RoboGeisha; Schramm; Executive Koala;  Coonskin; Time Masters; Hard Candy; Waiting for Godot (2001); Crash (1996); La Dolce Vita; La Cravate; Spirits of the Air, Gremlins of the Clouds (depending on availability); Last Year in Marienbad; Alphaville; Savages; Big River Man; This Must Be the Place; Heart of Glass; Little Deaths; Akira; L’Ange; La Teta y La Luna; Finisterrae;  The Adventures of Baron Muchausen; L’Âge d’or; Breakfast of Champions; Heavenly Creatures; Vase de Noces; Lucky; Ichi the Killer; La antena; Mystics in Bali; Feherlofia; Versus; “Meshes of the Afternoon”; Birth of the Overfiend; A Dog Called Pain; The Bed Sitting Room; Memento Mori; That Deadwood Feeling; Happiness; Let the Right One In; Porcile [AKA Pigpen]; Lisa and the Devil; Django, Kill!; Underground; Caligula; Hotel (2004); Hardgore; Survive Style 5+; Fantasia; Philosophy of a Knife; The Last Movie; Lord Love a Duck; Amarcord; The Swimmer (official re-review); I Married a Strange Person; Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale; The Canadian Films of Paul Driessen; And The Ship Sails On; Mondo Trasho; Teorema; Marat/Sade; Darjeeling Limited; Casino Royale; The Phantom of Liberty; Space Thang; Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life; Drunken Wu Tang; Insidious (2010); The Earl Sessions (2011); Sitcom; They Came Back, Prometheus’ Garden, “Harpya”; Bruce Lee vs. Gay Power; Dumplings; Attenberg; Return to Oz; “Star Maidens”; “The Mighty Boosh”; The Element of Crime; Lo; Roller Blade; “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes”; Mind Game (2004); Down and Dirty Duck; Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure; The Tin Drum; Dante’s Inferno; Bad Timing (AKA Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession); Troll 2; Calamari Wrestler; Death Powder (1986);  Big Man Japan (official review); Angel in the Flesh: The Confidential Report on Mr. Dennis Duggan aka The King of Super 8 (if it’s released; the director says it might be); Static; Ichi the Killer; “The Big Shave”; Incubus; W.R.-Mysteries of the Organism; Marebito; The Appointment (1981); “The Big Shave,” Pierrot Le Fou; and The Cement Garden; Visions of Suffering; Singapore Sling (re-review); Koyaanisqatsi; and In the Mouth of Madness.

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

IN THEATERS (WIDE RELEASE):

Dark Shadows: The accursed vampire Barnabas Collins (from the cult Gothic soap opera “Dark Shadows”) is resurrected in the 1970s and has trouble fitting in to wacky disco culture.  No offense intended to the once-great Tim Burton, but lately, every time you make a movie, it causes a little piece of our collective soul to die. Dark Shadows official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

You Are Here (2010): This Canadian festival eye-opener concerns a woman who discovers various artifacts and disconnected clues hinting at some metaphysical mystery; it’s self-described as a “Borgesian fantasy” and a “meta-detective story.” Opening at ReRun Gastropub in NYC, with late summer dates in Toronto and Edmonton to follow. We’ll look for it on DVD. You Are Here official site.

FILM FESTIVALS: CANNES (Cannes, France May 16 – 27)

Unlike past years, Cannes didn’t sneak up on us in 2012. The slate is fairly manageable this year, with Leos Carax’s Holy Motors the only title we’re truly enamored with (it’s the only weirdish movie playing “in competition,” that is to say, eligible for the Palme D’or). The last two Palme D’or winners (The Tree of Life and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) went on to even greater honors (they were Certified Weird by 366 Weird Movies); we predict that unlikely trend will end this year (though we certainly hope not). We’ll be keeping an eye on a couple of possibly-weird films screening in the “Un Certain Regard” category and movies playing out-of-competition: check below to see what caught our eye this year.

• Antiviral – Here’s a bizarre premise: adventures in an underground trade supplying fans with viruses taken from their favorite celebrities. The debut of Brandon (son of David) Cronenberg. Cronenberg Sr. will also be at Cannes with Cosmopolis, a (non-weird) adaptation of a Don Delilo novel.  Antiviral is playing in the Un Certain Regard category (ironically, his father’s film Crash was the impetus for creating this category, which was invented to keep wickedly weird films from winning the big prize).
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – A six-year old girl named Hushpuppy contracts a fever, which ushers in the apocalypse and a plague of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. This one debuted at Sundance. Un Certain Regard.
• For Love’s Sake [Ai to Makoto] – Judging by the trailer (which is all we have to go on), the latest from extreme provocateur Takashi Miike appears to be a musical comedy based on “West Side Story.” Playing out of competition.

• Holy Motors – A mysterious man named Monsieur Oscar drives through Paris one night, cycling through various personas. From too-infrequently seen director Leos Carax, and with an exciting cast mixing fresh faces with weird movie vets: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Michel Piccoli, Eva Mendes… Playing in competition.
• Meekong Hotel – A surprise entry from “Joe” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul); this movie is still listed as “in production” by IMDB, but is showing up for a “special screening” at 61 minutes. The synopsis is not too much help, but the film “shuffles different realms, fact and fiction” and appears to deal with actors making another movie at the titular hotel.

Cannes Film Festival Official Site (English)

NEW ON DVD:

Ganja and Hess (1973): Professor Hess (Duane Jones of Night of the Living Dead) is stabbed by an African knife and becomes an immortal bloodsucker. Playwright Bill Gunn was hired to deliver a black horror movie a la Blacula, but instead created a surreal art film that thrilled French critics at Cannes and bombed in 42nd Street theaters. If nothing else, this seldom-seen film is a major curiosity and gets an appropriate remastering from Kino Classics. Buy Ganja & Hess.

Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampire (2011): A woman (named “Eve Dark”) is bitten by a snake and turns into a vampire. The director is credited on IMBD with 35 titles in just six years of filmmaking, mostly conspiracy documentaries like Alien from Area 51 and The Murder of Mary Magdalene! We think this will be inevitably odd. Buy Lady of the Dark: Genesis of the Serpent Vampire.

Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012): Read our capsule review. Reviews (including ours) were mediocre for this big-screen comedy version of the absurd TV sketch show, but true T & E completists surely will want to own it anyway. Right? Buy Tim & Erics Billion Dollar Movie.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Ganja and Hess (1973): See description in DVD above. Buy Ganja & Hess [Blu-ray].

Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie (2012): See description in DVD above. This release includes a DVD and digital copy of the film. Buy Tim & Eric’s Billion Dollar Movie [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Metropolis [Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis] (2001): A detective and his boy sidekick search for a cyborg girl created by a mad scientist in a future world where robot slaves live under a massive city. Not quite an uncredited anime remake of Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, but pretty darn close to it. Watch Metropolis free on YouTube.

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

In direct contrast to the virginal Keeler, Blondell is the much more interesting, wise-cracking working girl who manages to get Guy Kibbee into a compromising situation. She uses that to her advantage and blackmails Guy into financing Dick’s Broadway production. Naturally, it will all work out.

Plot-wise, that’s about all one needs to know. Unfortunately, the film does not spin the plot quite that fast and it takes some time before we get to Berkeley’s numbers, but once we do, most is forgiven.

Blondell is Warren and Dubin’s “Girl At The Ironing Board” and, on the surface, the song seems a bit subdued. But, the discerning eye will notice that not only is she singing to the fellas’ shirts on the clothes line, but the shirts are singing back. This number, set at the the turn of the century, is eyelash batting cynicism that only Blondell could have done justice to (with Keeler, the piece would have fallen flat). Blondell is a good sport even when one of the undie shirts gets a sleeve-full of her tush.

Dick sings “I Only Have Eyes For You” to Ruby and, to prove it, he imagines every girl in the number as a Ruby Keeler clone. She’s the Silver Lear Cigarette Girl. She’s the Willard Hair Gal. And when she is transformed into the Society Cosmetics model she literally morphs into hundreds of  decapitated heads floating in a crepuscular abyss. The Ruby Keeler Ferris wheel is adorned with row after row of lily white twirling Ruby divas. Busby’s black marble floor serves as a pond  for the Rubys, who are now, literally, water lilies. These form a Kong-size decapitated Ruby head, petrified in a synthetic grin. The real Ruby ascends from the iris of an eye, wearing a dress split all the way up to the mystery of her crotch. The army of Rubys end the high camp number by forming the pattern of a mirror handle.

‘What Do We Go For? Beautiful Dames!” is among the most blatantly sexist musical numbers ever filmed. Paired dames in negligees rise from their silky beds, stretch, and jump in a tub-full of “Calgon, take me away” bubbly. One shy blonde objects to the camera’s voyeuristic eye and powder puffs the lens. Now it’s make-up time, and of course all long-legged dames apply their foundation while wearing garters. Off to the stage and the girls, now dressed in skin-tight black leotards, spread their legs in unison, a promise in exchange for that gold ring, fellas! But, heaven promises far more than just that and your gal, on a wire, will “float” right up to the door to greet you! (Obviously, the genesis of the Promise Keeper dogma.) Released the year that the Hayes code went into effect, Berkeley (mostly) compensates for increased censorship by barraging the viewer with kaleidoscopic patterns. Berkeley sneaks in some jokes at the expense of suburban values and gets some jabs in through Herbert’s pious, hypocritical character. The Hayes restrictions inspired some “imaginative dodges” on Berkeley’s part, but, compared to his pre-Code films, there is the sense here that his wings are clipped, which may be another reason for the film’s unevenness.

Aptly,  Dames concludes with a drunken brawl, which was, alas, all-too familiar territory for Berkeley. The eternal mama’s boy had as a big a weakness for the juice as he did for the dames. A few months after the release of this film, a drunken Berkeley plowed into two vehicles, killing three people. Berkeley was charged with  triple murder. Warner Brothers invested in Berkeley’s representation with legal top gun Jerry Geisler. Geisler’s work was cut out for him, but he eventually won an acquittal for Berkeley after two hung juries. The studio execs at Warner’s were impressed enough with the attorney that they would hire him again to (famously) get Errol Flynn acquitted of statutory rape charges.

After the death of  his mother, Berkeley went through numerous personal and career slumps. He attempted suicide several times, plowed through six marriages, was briefly committed to an institution, had a comeback in the 1960s and died in 1976 at the age of eighty. To this day, Busby Berkeley, the most innovative choreographer in cinema, does not have a star on Hollywood Boulevard. But, who the hell needs reality?

DIRECTED BY: Commodore Gilgamesh, Ghoul Skool

FEATURING: None (found footage and movie clips, although you can catch glimpses of faded celebrities like Tim Allen and Gary Busey)

PLOT: 55 minutes of 1 to 5 second clips of strange and funny dog footage from movies and

videotapes, arranged into a psychedelic montage that loosely follows the plot of Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s surrealist epic The Holy Mountain.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: You would think a “remake” of The Holy Mountain made up from found footage of dog movies would easily qualify as one of the 366 weirdest movies of all time. There are only two obstacles to adding Doggiewoggiez! to the List immediately. One is a philosophical issue: since this is just a compilation of clips—albeit one put together with wit and skill—with no original material save for a few kaleidoscopic canine collages, does it even meet the definition of a “movie”? The second objection is more practical than philosophical: if Doggiewoggiez! is in fact a “movie,” it potentially fails “the grandma test.” When considering a movie for the List, I imagine showing the movie to my grandma (God rest her soul); if at any time during the imaginary screening she leaves the room, muttering under her breath, “that was weird,” I add the film to the List. Now, I didn’t show this movie to my dead grandma, but I did show it to a living grandma—and she loved it and thought it was cute. Can a movie be truly weird if dog-loving grandmas find it adorable?

COMMENTS: A startling indictment of the indignities desperate Hollywood producers will inflict upon man’s best friend in the name of cheap entertainment, Doggiewoogiez! features every terrible sub-Disney talking dog movie in which an uncomprehending pooch is forced to recite a horrible pun acting against a slumming Dave Thomas, Fred Willard, or Cuba Gooding, Jr. And it’s not just the major Hollywood players that are into abusing the long-suffering fidos, either, as Doggiewoggiez! collects plenty of examples of amateurs touting undignified forms of dog massage, puppy training, and owners posing nude with their pooches. The consortium at Everything is Terrible! bring us morphing mutt montages of lifted legs, doggie-style rutting, and bitches attacking crotches. Watching this compilation you’ll see more footage of dogs surfing or riding dolphins than you ever thought existed, along with vintage racist dogs, dogs in sports, dogs going to heaven… well, you get the picture. It’s a non-stop assault of pop-culture canine iconography, often trippily manipulated (where else but in Doggiewoggiez! “The Dog Molecule” segment will you see a dog puffing on a tiny duplicate pipe version of its own head, that’s also puffing on itself?) And, as promised, the organization of this dog show does mimic The Holy Mountain, from the opening scene of “ritual” poodle shaving to the “zoom back, camera!” fourth-wall smashing finale. Much of Jodorwosky’s music and dialogue is slyly integrated into the compilation; the line “your sacrifice has completed my sanctuary of one thousand testicles” is followed by a dog breeder observing “the more testicles you cut off, the fewer dog fights there are.” There’s no real meaning to the cross-breeding of Mexican surrealists with preposterous puppy clips, other than that Everything is Terrible! (correctly) thinks that both are cool, and that the mixture is uniquely bizarre. Picking out the clever correspondences is a fun bonus for those intimately familiar with Mountain, but it’s not necessary to enjoy the bow-wow barrage of barking mad dog clips.

Doggiewoggiez! runs 55 minutes, which is about the perfect length to keep it from overstaying its welcome. Fortunately, there’s almost 3 hours (!) of “extra” material on the disc, so you won’t feel ripped off. The supplemental features are divided into three separate categories. “2 Minute Movies” are expertly compressed versions of ten truly horrible films like Revenge of the Red Baron, featuring a wheelchair-bound Mickey Rooney haunted by a remote controlled toy airplane possessed by the spirit of the WWI ace. “Best Of” contains a selection of demonically bad found-footage discoveries including several accidentally frightening Christian puppet shows (and, to show that bad taste knows no denomination, scenes from a terrible Jewish children’s video called “Torah Tots” featuring a character who promises to float around the world vacuuming up all the Jews and depositing them in Israel). And, just so you won’tbe shocked when you come across it, we’ll mention that hidden inside the ten minute “Mondo Bigfoot” compilation collected from the 1970s Sasquatch craze are the fake hardcore porn scenes from the Bigfoot rapist oddity The Geek (1971) (grandma would not approve). Finally, there’s a special section devoted to “Music Videos,”of which the most famous number is Tim Curry’s rendition of “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” from The Worst Witch; the strangest item, however, is “Don’t Do Drugs,” in which a teenager in a skimpy black bikini falls asleep on a beach, dreams about four much younger kids doing an anti-drug rap while imagining herself buying smack and being arrested for vagrancy, then wakes up to a guy offering her a bottle of booze. Because of copyright issues (the main feature constitutes fair use but some of the supplements are problematic), new copies of Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! is unlikely to be sold through legitimate retail sites. Look for used copies or buy directly from Everything is Terrible! while supplies last.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie could easily coast on the ridiculous amount of work that went into realizing its weird conceit… Seemingly thousands of videos ranging from the obscure to the I-wish-it-were-obscure (Tim Allen’s public nude scene in The Shaggy Dog) have been shredded like the morning paper into seconds-long fragments, and then meticulously sequenced into a variation on Jodorowsky’s psychedelic-surrealist masterpiece that conveys pretty much every memorable image in the film…”–Benjamin Pearson, Tiny Mix Tapes (DVD)

FEATURING:  Emily Browning, Rachael Blake, Ewen Leslie

PLOT:  A quiet but reprobate student blindly contracts for unconventional assignments with an

enigmatic madam, to cater to the peculiar perversions of the ultra-rich.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST:  Sleeping Beauty is not a sex-movie, but rather a tense, eerie multiple character study.The focused, unadorned manner in which it is shot, without a musical score, combines with the bizarre nature of its story to set an unusual mood which demands that we take it seriously. This atmosphere, and the choices the writer and director made in deciding what elements of its story to show us, to make Sleeping Beauty a weird and unusual viewing experience.

(Ignore the website and DVD jacket descriptions of this slick Aussie thriller; because US distributors don’t know how to present unusual efforts to a general audience, the synopses grossly mischaracterize this effort as some sort of racy potboiler. Sleeping Beauty is is not a sex piece, even though Emily Browning looks just like a Real Doll sex doll in the trailer. Sleeping Beauty is not another Eyes Wide Shut. It is not designed to be racy or titillating. Nor is it a murky, confusing David Lynch-style movie, although fans of Lynch’s works will surely love it. Sleeping Beauty is in no way what I expected. It is unpredictable and although it declines to utilize a demented twist ending, I assure the reader he will never guess where it is heading).

For additional fun, be sure to look for an appearance by actor Hugh Keays-Byrne, who played the crazed “Toecutter” in 1979′s Mad Max.

COMMENTS: Wow! What a gem! I was hoping for something different and creepy from the trailer. I was not disappointed! Yet I was surprised. I was expecting something sci-fi or horror, about turning girls into living sex dolls. Sleeping Beauty turns out to be so much more unsettling, sophisticated and subtle. From its opening frames, the somber cinematography and unabashed, close-in concentration on it’s characters makes it clear that you are watching a serious, high-quality effort crafted by a writer and director who know exactly what to do. There’s a controlling sensation that your impressions are being skillfully manipulated by the filmmakers. They are.

Pert Lucy (Browning) studies and works hard. She diligently struggles to hold down two jobs and make ends meet. Despite her disciplined efforts to get ahead, Lucy is secretly morally bankrupt. She leads a double life. She is a quiet, proletariat schoolgirl with a middle-class bearing. Yet with little fanfare, she is capable of almost invisibly slipping into deplorable, high risk behavior.

When a low-key professional outfit sends a “talent scout” to size up her character, they recruit Lucy into an ethereal shadow-land of opulent decadence. Lucy is not fully informed as to the context of her odd obligations, however, and as she executes them, she is drawn toward an uncertain destiny in a perverse world.

We watch nervously, and finally succumb to a mild, muted horror as we behold what she does and what happens to her. With her madam (Blake) overseeing Lucy’s refinement in the social arts as well as painful beauty makeovers, Lucy undergoes a transformation, becoming an object of desire. Now she is a girl of elegance and aesthetics: a living doll.

Sleeping Beauty is an art film, but there is no gimmicky, independent film-style “artiness” in the production. It is an unconventional movie, but it lets its creepy, unusual story and unsettling characters, rather than its shooting style, provide the bizarreness.

Filmed like a serious drama, Sleeping Beauty is anything but. This film is carefully structured, put together in an orthodox manner, yet it is excruciatingly agitating to watch. Delicately macabre characters flicker in and out of quiet scenes which blur the boundaries between suspense, thriller, horror, and mystery.

In the end however, Sleeping Beauty is an exquisitely presented character study of refined unscrupulousness. One of the keys to its effectiveness is its subtlety. Exposition is sublimely furnished, in real time, via strategically revealing scenes of the most vicarious nature. Like coyly spying voyeurs, peering from behind sunglasses or from the corners of our eyes a restaurant booth or a few coach seats away, we behold the participants gently unveiling their most damning personality quirks.

Sleeping Beauty is a study of unexpected contrasts, of anachronisms and contradictions which lurk on the boundary of the dark side of life. They are the types of anomalies we tend gloss over, the verboten sort. Polite decorum dictates that it is not merely unpleasant, but too morbid and ghastly to acknowledge them.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fantastical mix of formal-dress sex parties, furious perversity and sly nods to the tropes of fairy tales and dreams…  will likely frustrate some, but others will find it all a tantalizing enigma — impenetrable, as it were.”–Rafer Guzman, Newsday (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Ellen Barkin, Richard Masur, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sharon Wilkins

PLOT: A teenager falls in with a group of anti-abortionists in her quest to become pregnant.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: As if the plot isn’t off-beat enough, Palindromes‘s teenage porotagonist is played by a variety of actors of different ages, sizes, races, and even genders.

COMMENTS: The standout feature of Palindromes is the unorthodox casting of a series of different actresses (and one actor) in the role of Aviva Victor. The variety of thespians allows Solondz to express the evolution of Aviva’s self-image, physically reflecting changes in her emotional state during the movie. When we first meet Aviva, she is played by a young African-American girl who wears her emotions on her sleeves and in her facial expressions. She is the only child to middle class parents (Barkin and Masur) living in an anonymous suburb in the Northeast United States. Horrified at the probable suicide of her cousin Dawn and alienated by the material nature of her mother’s love, Aviva becomes obsessed with the idea of having lots of babies to ensure she has someone to love her. Then, as a Caucasian brunette in her early teens, she has an ill-advised encounter with the son of a family friend, and gets pregnant. As a reedy, red-haired, slightly older girl, she strenuously resists but eventually accedes to getting an abortion. As a more confident and more attractive brunette, she runs away with the help of a truck driver, with whom she has sex in the hopes of once again getting pregnant. Abandoned by the truck driver, she wanders through wilderness in the shape of a teenage boy and then is discovered—now as a large, older African–American woman—by the driven and very Christian Mama Sunshine, who runs an orphanage for children with medical infirmities. Here Aviva is least like herself: in a completely alien environment, she has to lie about her name and her past to fit in, and her self-doubt and anxiety are apparent in her magnified size, awkward movement, and change in race. The plot unfolds from there involving more pedophilia, a quest to assassinate the doctor who aborted her fetus, and a shootout in room 11 of a seedy motel, with Aviva switching from shape to shape, becoming more assertive and mature. At the point where she feels most grown-up, she returns to her family as a world-weary, bedraggled 20-something waif (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She holds her own in an existential debate with her older cousin, Mark, and easily wins arguments with her parents. But, as the title of the movie suggests, things come around: Aviva meets up with the boy who got her pregnant to begin with, reverts mentally through the chain of actors who have portrayed her, until she is once again the vulnerable, out-of-place, emotionally needy little black girl. As seductive as the message is that everything eventually returns to its beginning state, palindrome-like, some things in the film are irreversible: death, certain operations, and murder among them. In the end, it’s these things that will eventually shape the person Aviva will eventually become, but she’s not yet become them yet.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What makes this strange story even stranger is Aviva is played by eight different performers… Solondz constructs a deadpan sheltering bubble around his film, thereby defusing most of the issues he raises. It’s all one Warholian shrug. Still, ‘Palindromes’ is unlike anything you’ve seen at the movies.”–Bob Longino, Atlanta Journal-Constitution (contemporaneous)