2018

July 26, 2019 admin Leave a comment

Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs and Blu-rays (and hot off the server VODs), and on more distant horizons…

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

NEW ON HOME VIDEO:

The Book of Birdie (2017): Read Giles Edwards’ review. A novitiate hallucinates in a convent. Previously on VOD only, hard copies now available on DVD or Blu-ray. Buy The Book of Birdie.

The Doors (1991): Read Scott Sentinella’s review. Oliver Stone‘s worshipful, over-the-top hallucinatory biopic of Dionysian rock star Jim Morrison is a guilty pleasure. This is a 4K upgrade (standard-def Blu-ray also included) with two cuts of the film (which are reportedly not very different at all) and some new and old extra features. Buy The Doors.

The Erlprince (2016): Amidst flights of fancy, a teenage Polish prodigy works on a theory of parallel universes, and on a doomsday clock for this one. Screen Anarchy suggests it resembles “a Polish Donnie Darko.” DVD, Blu-ray or VOD. Buy The Erlprince.

The Milky Way [La Voie Lactee] (1969): Read the Certified Weird review! One of Luis Buñuel‘s most difficult late-period movies is a series of surreal episodes based on esoteric Christian heresies. Kino Lorber acquires the rights formerly held by the Criterion Collection—the Criterion disc has been long out-of-print– and adds a commentary by film critic Nick Pinkerton. On Blu-ray or DVD. Buy The Milky Way.

LIVE TOUR:

“Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show Parts 1 & 2”: Oddball nonpareil Crispin Glover hosts an evening of films and monologues in late July and August. The program may change slightly from appearance to appearance, but includes a double feature of his rarely screened surrealist films What Is It? (2005) and It Is Fine. Everything Is Fine (2007); a sneak preview of his upcoming project (in post-production and still untitled, but apparently not the third entry in the “It” trilogy); Q&As and book signings; and Crispin reading from his books, accompanied by a slideshow. A strange performance deserves an equally strange series of venues: starting at the Kranjska Gora International Film Festival in Slovenia on July 29-30; moving to Brooklyn on August 14-15; then off to Paducah, KY, where Crispin’s father Bruce will also appear, on August 21-22; and winding up in Huntington, NY, August 27-28. More details here.

CERTIFIED WEIRD (AND OTHER) REPERTORY SCREENINGS:

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). We won’t list all the screenings of this audience-participation classic separately. You can use this page to find a screening near you.

Baltimore, MD, 7/31 – Eraserhead (1977). At the Senator.
Boston, MA, 7/26-7/28 – Time Bandits (1981). At the Brattle.
Boston, MA, 7/28 – Last Year at Marienbad [L’Année Dernière à Marienbad] (1961). At the Museum of Fine Arts.
Chicago, IL, 7/26-7/27 (midnights) – Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). At the Music Box.
Cleveland, OH, 7/27-7/28 – Last Year at Marienbad [L’Année Dernière à Marienbad] (1961). At the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Columbus, OH, 7/26-7/27 (midnights), 7/27-7/29 – Dead Alive (1992). At Gateway Film Center.
Columbus, OH, 7/26-8/1 – Heavenly Creatures (1994). At Gateway Film Center.
Columbus, OH, 7/30-8/1 – The Wicker Man (1973). At Gateway Film Center.
Columbus, OH, 8/1 (midnight) – Donnie Darko (2001). At Gateway Film Center.
Los Angeles, CA, 7/27 – Freaks (1932), with House on Haunted Hill (1958), Thing from Another World (1951), Them! (1954), The Haunting (1963), and Cat People (1942) (one-price marathon). At the Egyptian.
New York City, NY, 7/26-7/27 (midnights) – Brazil (1985). At IFC Center.
New York City, NY, 7/26-7/27 (midnights) – Mulholland Drive (2001). At IFC Center.
Pittsburgh, PA, 7/27 – Pink Floyd the Wall (1982). At the Row House.
Santa Ana, CA, 7/26 – Black Swan (2010). At the Frida.
Santa Ana, CA, 7/29-7/31 – Perfect Blue (1997). At the Frida.
Toronto, Ont., Canada – El Topo (1970). At the Royal.
Tuscon, AZ, 7/27 – Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) (free admission). At the Loft.
Vancouver, BC, Canada – Brazil (1985). At the Rio.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE: Next week we’ll again have lots and lots of content as Giles Edwards finishes up his three-week Fantasia Festival 2019 marathon. He’ll whet your appetites for a pair of very weird low-budget European films with Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway and Alien Crystal Palace, brief you on a couple of more (relatively) mainstream horror titles in Daniel Isn’t Real and 1BR, and review even more films to be named later. We don’t expect to have any more surprise pop-up reviews from outside Fantasia, but then again, we didn’t expect to last week, either (guess that’s what makes them surprising). In any case, onward and weirdward!

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.

Miscellanea

2019 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: OMNIBUS FIELD REPORT #2

July 25, 2019 Giles Edwards 8 Comments

Film Is a Man’s Best Friend

By now, I should be able to slow down to mere double features to match last year’s tally; but that would mean slowing down.

7/18: Knives and Skin

Still from Knives and Skin I’ve been mulling over what to say about this movie for close to twenty-four hours and I’ve still got nothing. My fear is, I suppose, that if I started going on about the various misteps, I might not stop, and that would send an inaccurate message about Jennifer Reeder’s earnest, feminist, melodramatic feature debut. Various crummy home lives are explored as we observe a small cross-section of No Name, USA, in this movie about people making decisions of varying degrees of emotional stupidity during the aftermath of a student’s disappearance and death.

But why do these women (and they are predominately women) insist on conducting their lives in such a way? From all the narrative facts revealed, they each have far more agency than they care to take advantage of. There’s a quasi-rape scene of a young woman set up to dismay the audience, but there’s also a quasi-rape scene of a young man that is just dropped by the wayside. I’ve noticed acutely since this Festival began that there’s far too large a market for emotional movies about emotional idiots. I wanted to care about these people, and I managed to do so briefly for some of them, but when they keep shooting themselves in the foot over and over, I can only invest so much sympathy. (And frankly it didn’t help that the filmmaker dissected, a-capella’d, and dirge-ified Modern English’s new wave classic “I Melt With You.”) If anyone wants to tell me in the comments what’s up with this movie, I would be very happy to talk with you.

7/19: It Comes

Still from It Comes And boy did it. And in so coming, my faith in J-Horror was restored. Obviously this is mainstream fare—I wasn’t jumping out of my seat or suffering nightmares afterwards—but it had an unsettling edge to it, characters who evolved, and a really gangbusters finale involving exorcists from all known religions, cracking timbers, and blood-soaked caterpillars. Director Tetsuya Nakashima made what will be looked upon fondly as one of my favorite Christmas movies (yep, things come to head on 12/25), as well as one of my favorite dream sequences, where we can see the rice-omelette visions of a cheerfully sleeping two-year-old girl. I’ll admit it was a bit long-winded, but that allowed for a rare, full dissection of all the characters’ motivations—and while I didn’t find them entirely Continue reading 2019 FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL: OMNIBUS FIELD REPORT #2 →

Interviews

RAW AUDIO: “DANIEL ISN’T REAL” DIRECTOR ADAM EGYPT MORTIMER

July 24, 2019 Giles Edwards Leave a comment

Giles Edwards sits down with Adam Egypt Mortimer, the director of Daniel Isn’t Real, a 2019 psychological horror about a grown man and his imaginary childhood friend, to discuss stylistic choices and his favorite French New Wave movies. Some controversy arises about what city is actually his hometown. The voice that joins in at the end belongs to Fantasia Fest publicist Kaila Hier.

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: COINCOIN AND THE EXTRA-HUMANS (2018)

July 24, 2019 Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies) 2 Comments

Coincoin et les z’inhumains

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Bruno Dumont

FEATURING: Alane Delhaye, Bernard Pruvost, Philippe Jore, Alexia Depret

PLOT: Four years after the events of Li’l Quinquin, Quinquin (now Coincoin) has grown up and joined a far-right political group, while Commandant Van der Weyden investigates a mysterious black tar that is falling from the sky and a plague of doubles showing up in town.

Still from CoinCoin and the Extra-Humans (2018)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: If Li’l Quinquin was worthy of consideration, then his equally odd brother Coincoin must be, too. Too bad we can’t mash Quinquin and Coincoin together into a single seven-plus-hour festival of Gallic strangeness.

COMMENTS: A lot has changed in the Côte D’Opale since we last visited Quinquin; and yet, nothing has really changed. Sure, Quinquin is now a strapping teenager who goes by “Coincoin” (like so much else in this world, the change in nomenclature is left a mystery). His old love interest, Eve, is now into girls. The outsiders are now undocumented Africans living in shantytowns on the outskirts of Calais instead of suburban Muslims. And no one worries about dead bodies found inside cows anymore; they’re more concerned with the black goo that’s falling from the heavens, usually splattering the cops at inconvenient times. But though the case may have changed, the tic-ridden Commandant Van Der Weyden and his foul-toothed assistant Carpentier are still on it. Their cruiser still tilts up on two wheels (in fact, it does so much more often). The townsfolk are still quaintly thoughtless and provincial. And there still is no resolution or logical explanation as to why this quiet French outpost is the locus of so much metaphysical weirdness. Most importantly, the project feels exactly the same: eccentric, tone-shifting, with little surreal jaunts off the beaten path, like Season 1 “Twin Peaks” set at an out-of-the-way beach resort.

As for the weird bits: there’s a scene where CoinCoin can’t figure out how to kiss Christ, some blackface, a man attacked by a gull, and “clown” clones, not to mention the bizarre alien invasion (if that’s what it is) and a surprise at the end that I won’t spoil. Few of the comic bits—which stray close to border of anti-comedy—are funny in themselves; they only succeed through a relentless repetition that demonstrates Dumont’s sincere commitment to his style. Repetition is itself often the meta-joke: Carpentier does his “two-wheel” trick so often that his Captain complains it’s getting annoying (then continues to do it for several more episodes); doppelgangers are switched in mid-conversation so that conversations repeat themselves over and over and over. Meanwhile, Coincoin’s own plotline (now clearly secondary to the antics of the gendarmes) is almost entirely a realistic coming-of-age story; the boy is concerned with girls, mischief, and peer pressure, oblivious to what increasingly looks to be a modern Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style crisis until the events of the fourth episode force him to pay attention.

It’s hard to explain why Quinquin/Coincoin‘s blend of low-key absurdism, social awkwardness, grotesquerie, political swipes, and rural drama works; it seems like it shouldn’t. But it captures the Western world’s current mood of ambivalent anxiety as well as anything out there. An apocalypse is coming—maybe—and it’s actually sort of funny—a little.

Although it’s mostly of interest to those who saw the first miniseries, there’s no reason you can’t jump straight into this sequel first if you like.

The four episodes of Coincoin and the Extra-Humans are currently screening as a single long feature at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York City through July 28 and at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on July 26 only as part of the Boston French Film Festival. Lil Quinquin played Netflix briefly after its release, but is now streaming on the Criterion Channel. That seems like the likely eventual landing spot for Coincoin once its brief theatrical run concludes. We’ll keep you updated.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Dumont hasn’t been a comedy director for very long but it now seems impossible to imagine a world without his endearingly ridiculous sense of humor and his genuine love for his affably weird protagonists. Dumont’s comedies are a gift we were never promised and now they’re something we should never have to live without.”–Scout Tafoya, RogerEbert.com (contemporaneous)

Interviews

YI OK-SEOP, KOO KYO-HWAN, & THEIR PET FISH, “MAGGIE”

July 23, 2019 Giles Edwards Leave a comment

Review of Maggie (2018)

I introduced myself to Yi Ok-seop (the director) and Koo Kyo-hwan (actor/producer) and handed over 366’s business card. Unfortunately, my handwriting in Korean is just as bad as my handwriting in English.

366: My name is Giles Edwards and I’m here for 366 Weird Movies. I may have written that incorrectly below…

Yi/Koo: “Dogs”?

366: Oh dear. My hand-writing is pretty bad, I was just looking that up before I got here… Not “dogs”—um, “movies”. But!… I want to ask about the choice of songs for the movie, as they were very clear and dominant from the beginning.

Y/K: When editing, we usual edit as we play music, and look through what kind of music goes well with this scene, this situation, and this line. And when we feel stuck when trying to explain the story in a better way, we look toward the music instead of hanging on to the problem we have in the story. So we look through music and try to find the solution by looking. We felt really empowered by putting the music and the scene together, because when they go really well together, it feels much more synergistic than when we tried to solve this problem as written, or when we couldn’t solve the problem at all, so it was a hint as well as a solution for us.

366: Last night, you both spoke about the nature of the catfish and the prediction of earthquakes. I was wondering if you might be able to repeat that again for this interview.

Y/K: The nature of “Maggie”, the catfish, is that they can sense, predict when there will be an earthquake in the next three or four days—it could be longer, it could be shorter—it’s not precise, but it can sense it and predict it. We thought the character of the catfish was like, when you were at school, in a classroom, and there are so many different people, but there is one group of people who are not really talking much, not really involved in any groups, or socializing with others, so you might think they don’t know anything, but at the same time they’re witnessing everything going on in the class-room, they know everything, every little story that’s going back and forth with other people. So we thought the character of Maggie, the character of those people on the streets in daily life that we think know nothing are kind of similar.

Also, the look of Maggie, there was this little… beard that would kind of make him look wiser in appearance. So the reason we decided to have a catfish was that we probably need little elements like Maggie, like a catfish in our everyday lives, where it just comforts us by just looking at it. And even if it’s not going to protect us in a precise way, it will let us know when things go wrong. It’s also a question about whether to “believe” or not—something might happen tomorrow, it might happen three days later, or a week later, but it is still there. Continue reading YI OK-SEOP, KOO KYO-HWAN, & THEIR PET FISH, “MAGGIE” →

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