“A Trip to the Orphanage” appears to be an outtake from Saddest Music, reimagined as a pure mood piece.  The finale of “Orphange”—when Maria de Medeiros kisses a sleepwalker on the cheek, and he says “goodnight, mother” to her—actually appears in the film.  There, the episode has no explanation.  You won’t get one in “Orphanage,” either.  The man walks through a wintry street with a sleepy, dazed expression.  We also see shots of de Medeiros’ China doll face, and briefly view her posing with an anonymous child.  A woman appears and sings a generic aria of lament: “so fraught with pain his yearning soul…”  A sparse piano accompanies her.  Snow falls over all the characters, and lace curtains billowing in the wind are superimposed on the picture; sometimes there’s one set of drapes waving in the foreground and a second set in the background.  Singer Sarah Constible’s voice is opera-trained and lovely, and “Orphanage” is a Canadian saudade that’s as melancholy as a lone snowflake drifting on the wind.  It’s also just as light, and in a mere four minutes it’s there and gone, just like a dream.

“Sombra Dolorosa” returns us to more familiarly comic Maddin territory, with a deranged plot, hysterical intertitles (“to save your daughter you must defeat… El Muerto!!”), and the same psychotic editing that characterized Cowards Bend The Knee.  It tells the story of a bereaved widow who must defeat death in a wrestling match, before an eclipse arrives, in order to save her daughter from suicide (“FROM SUICIDE!”, the titles remind us).  After bodyslaming El Muerto into submission, however, the rules suddenly change.  Now, Death must eat her husband’s corpse before the sun comes up, or he’s forever lost!  Meanwhile, inconsolate daughter Delores decides to kill herself anyway by throwing herself into a river, but a good Samaritan saves her.  It all ends happily (?) with the father’s ghost entering a mule to wander the world.  “Sombra” shows Maddin’s gift for grabbing key elements of a milieu—in this case, Mexican folklore—and filtering them through his distorted lens to create a unique, rich and cohesively warped world.  It’s the dream you might have if you fall asleep in front of a TV showing Mexican wrestling after chasing a bad burrito with three shots of mescal.

A whole different kind of weird comes in “Sissy-Boy Slap-Party,” a humorous approximation of what a pre-Code homoerotic smoker might have looked like if it was made by a clueless pervert who found the Three Stooges strangely erotic.  The plot has a fetishistic simplicity: an old man leaves on a bicycle to buy condoms, warning the languid shirtless men sunning themselves on rocks on a stagebound tropical island, “remember: no slapping!”  No sooner is he out of sight than the boys decide to give the foley guy a real workout as they sissy-slap each other with abandon, in every combination and variation imaginable, non-stop for three minutes until their overseer returns from his errand.  African tribal drums and a jungle bass pulse provide the prono throb, but the desperate avant-garde violin solo laid over the beat carries the slappers to an ecstatically anxious musical climax.  The joke is simple but very strange, and effective because of its absolute dedication to its absurdly kinky premise. The humor hits you like—well, like a slap in the face.  It’s a short every weird movie fan should seek out.

Sissy-Boy Slap-Party keeps getting longer.  It began its life in 1995 as a 2-minute short; unused footage was re-cut into the 2004 Saddest Music in the World version to extend it to four minutes.  A six-minute “director’s cut” also exists and can be viewed on Guy Maddin’s Vimeo page.  I think the four-minute version is the best; the long cut uses a lot of editing tricks that make it overly obvious the movie is a postmodern experiment instead of twisted erotica from a bygone age.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…[the shorts] demonstrate how Maddin can be far more fulfilling when he allows himself a narrower focus. Sissy-Boy Slap-Party plays like a goofy homage to Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and Jean Genet… Sombra Dolorosa [is] a demented take on demented Mexican melodramas replete with grieving widow, masked wrestler and garish (yet oddly beautiful) two-strip colour.”–Anthony Nield, The Digital Fix (R2 DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Shane Carruth

FEATURING: Shane Carruth, David Sullivan

PLOT: Two engineer/entrepreneurs accidentally discover a box that allows time travel, and

soon get themselves into trouble.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Primer‘s baffling story gives you an untethered, free-falling in reality feeling.  But although the dense, complicated, and deliberately obtuse plot produces a level of confusion comparable in effect to the weirdest David Lynch movies, I’ve got the sinking feeling that, if you dissect  it carefully, there’s a perfectly logical explanation for everything that happens.  (That complaint makes the 366 project the only outlet in the world to potentially reject Primer because it makes too much sense).

COMMENTS: If what you most value in a movie is a plot that will inspire you to sit down and create a schematic flowchart—maybe using multiple ink colors to illustrate various contingencies—in order to figure out what’s going on, then have I got a recommendation for you!  Made for an incredible $7,000 on suburban locations with only two major characters and no special effects, Primer relies entirely on it’s smart, knotty script to keep the viewer interested—and succeeds admirably.  After a pre-time travel prologue, joltingly edited and spoken largely in an untranslated engineerese that’s fairly bewildering in itself, Aaron and Abe (A & B?) stumble upon a box that will allow them to travel backwards in time for about a day at a time.  Like any of us would, they initially use the box to play the stock market, investing in the day’s biggest mid-cap mover.  After placing their online orders in the morning, they agree to carefully lock themselves in a hotel room away from the rest of the world so that they won’t accidentally kill their own grandfathers or meet their doubles wandering around on the street.  The plan goes well for a while, but then strange, logic-defying events start happening, and each of the two men wonders if the other is cheating on their agreement, secretly going back a day to change events for personal reasons.  Paranoia mounts as they become suspicious of each other and of reality itself.  That brief synopsis actually makes Primer sound more (initially) coherent than it is; the fact is that only a few very subtle clues are strewn about to explain to us what is actually happening at a given moment, the timeline can’t honestly be tracked on a single viewing (because some scenes replay for a second or third time as time-traveling doubles and triples rewrite events), and Carruth frequently deploys vicious jump-cut editing to further disorient us.  It’s extremely confusing, but that’s the point: when Aaron and Abe begin casually screwing with causality, both they, and we, lose track of what’s going on and which timeline we’re actually in.  At one point, a voice on the soundtrack (making a phone call from some future past) reminds us that “the permutations were endless;” if either of the time trippers are tempted to change the future once, they might change it a thousand times, and even if you trust yourself, can you trust your double?  You can approach Primer in one of two ways: you can look at it as a puzzle to be solved, or you can simply enjoy soaking in the free-floating possibilities of the scenario.  I’m in the second camp: to me there are consequences that are unexplored in the narrative that are as interesting, potentially more so, than the ones that are delineated.   But if you find yourself in the first camp, where your fellow campers huddle about the TV screen watching the movie over and over again with a notepad in hand to transcribe the clues, you should realize that any fan “solution” to the movie is going to necessarily involve some conjecture.  In his director’s commentary, Carruth is candid in saying that he did not want the audience to clearly understand everything that happens, because the characters through whose eyes we experience the story don’t understand everything that is happening to them.  With some time alone with a pen and pencil you can reconstruct most of what happens, but, to my mind, you’d be better off focusing on relishing the possibilities and the “feel” of the story.  To Primer‘s detriment, there is no great emotional core to this highly intellectual story, and there are no wondrous images or masterful scenes for the movie to hang its hat on.  However, considering the budget, Carruth (a former engineer who decided he wanted more from a career and taught himself filmmaking from scratch) does an amazing job of making a professional looking-film.  The cinematography, sound and editing seldom become a distraction by betraying their low-budget origins, and the acting is solid and naturalistic; but, Primer earns its recommended rating entirely on the basis of its clever, novel, and ingenious script.

This Jason Gendler article for Nebula magazine contains a convincing elucidation of the plot (it also uses some technical terms from the field of literary analysis that you may have to look up).  If you enjoy this mini-genre of the time-travel puzzle movie, you’ll want to check out Donnie Darko (of course), Triangle, and Timecrimes as well.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… Mullholland Dr. for math geeks…”–Aaron Hillis, Premiere Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Snowcrash,” who advised, “check it out, it is weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Ki-duk Kim

FEATURING: Seung-yeon Lee, Hyun-kyoon Lee (Jae Hee), Hyuk-ho Kwon

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  3-Iron is a love story in which the lovers communicate their joy, grief, fear, trepidation, trust, and insecurities – believably – without ever exchanging dialogue. Plus, the subtle uncanniness of a man who can move silently, without being seen, adds a poignant surreality to the last quarter of the movie.

PLOT & COMMENTS: The protagonist of 3-Iron is a young Korean man who breaks into people’s houses while they’re on vacation and lives in their homes.  He eats their food, listens to their stereos, and sleeps in their beds, but he also fixes their broken appliances, cleans their laundry, and, more or less, earns his keep.  One night he occupies a house in which a beaten wife, Sun-hwa, is hiding with a bruised and bloodied face; she trails him silently, unseen, as he goes about his chores.  When her husband returns from his business trip and begins to beat her, the young man pelts the husband with golf balls, and then rides off with Sun-hwa on his motorcycle.

In the next half of the movie, the squatter and Sun-hwa continue to live out their innocent breaking-and-entering lifestyle, turning into an efficient and silent house cleaning team.  In a photographer’s apartment, Sun-hwa learns the trade.  In a boxer’s house, the nameless man is beaten by the owner and it becomes Sun-hwa’s turn to feed and nurse a bruised victim. In another house, the hero and Sun-hwa shyly woo each other and kiss.  And in yet another, they discover an old man who has died; they prepare his body for a funeral and bury him, only to be accosted by the deceased’s long-absent family and arrested.

After her release, Sun-hwa returns to her house, but remains silent and cold to her still-abusive husband.  The squatter goes to jail, where he teaches himself to move silently, shadow his guards, and be practically invisible, even to the most attentive observer.  He is eventually set free, and he returns to Sun-hwa and lives in the shadow of her husband.  Elated, she becomes herself again, and her husband believes she has once again fallen in love with him; but the one word of dialogue spoken by our two heroes—Sun-hwa’s simple but honest “I love you”—is meant for the man behind her husband.

It is hard to capture in text the weirdness of a movie in which there is sound, but almost no dialogue.  The depth of emotion the two main characters communicate without using their voices is amazing.  The young man, for instance, whiles away his time by using the three iron (the same one he used to beat the husband) to whack at a golf ball tied to a tree with wire; Sun-hwa interrupts him by standing, vulnerable and crestfallen, in front of him, expressing in a way that words simply cannot how implicitly she both trusts and fears him.  The man, concerned, refuses to hit the ball with her in front of it, acknowledging but refusing her helpless supplication.  Later, as they sit in the living room of one of the houses, drinking tea, Sun-hwa delicately uses her foot to caress the young man’s foot, shyly, with trepidation, but also clearly with love and gratitude.  He looks at her with a mix of surprise and satisfaction and it is at that moment that we know, long before Sun-hwa says it, that they are in love.

Perhaps it is more useful to discuss the few times when dialogue does happen.  The first words we hear are on an answering machine.  But this is not “dialogue.”  Flatly mixed into the soundtrack, the words announcing the absence of a family from their home sound more like the other noises of the movie—traffic, glasses clinking, phones ringing—just objects, like any other.  Real dialogue—from the husband directed at Sun-hwa, between the policemen, from the boxer—is almost always the harbinger of violence or anger.  Most of the attempts at communication fail to verbalize anything deeper than lies, threats, or conspiracy to violence.  The most striking example comes from a policeman accusing the man of having kidnapped and raped Sun-hwa.  He yells, “What have you done to her to keep her so silent!,” not realizing that not only does she choose to be silent, but that it is the husband, not the lover, who has spurred her into her speechlessness.  That a movie can highlight the futility of words to communicate so poignantly is remarkable and ironic, and that it can do so in such a calm, quiet, beautiful manner as this film does is, frankly, shocking.

Obviously, visuals must play a great part in setting the mood here, and the compositions in this movie are flawless.  When the young man interrupts the husband beating his wife, there is a brief shot of the husband looking out the window at the man in the garden, with the reflection of his wife foreshadowing that the young man will come between them. At the photographer’s house, there is a poster of Sun-hwa (who used to be a model) which she cuts into squares and reassembles haphazardly, as an expression of the chaos of emotions and uncertainty inside her.  The scenes in which the young man slinks around in the shadows of his hosts are largely shown from his point of view, and are at once ominous and sweet, certain in their footing, but uncertain in their intent.  This culminates in the end at breakfast: the husband thinks he has won his wife back, the lover is able to live gracefully and quietly with the woman he loves, and Sun-hwa has regained her spirit and happiness. Nothing more than that needs be said.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s actually quite satisfying, in a weird, magical-realism sort of way that manages to disturb and confound as much as it appeases the romantic.”–Michale O’Sullivan, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Linda Hardy, Thomas Kretschmann, Thomas M. Pollard (voice), Charlotte Rampling

PLOT: The Egyptian god Horus shows up in a pyramid floating above Manhattan in 2095 and

possesses the thawed body of a cryogenically frozen political prisoner to search for a blue haired woman.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: It might make the List for the outrageous premise mixing Egyptian mythology and futurist fiction, for the bizarre mingling of live actors with CG characters, and for the confusing storyline which makes the entire film seem like it might be a pagan god’s bad dream after having eaten a tainted planet for a midnight snack.

COMMENTS: The visual ambition of Immortal sometimes surpasses its budget, but it’s always beautifully designed; take the vision of a blue haired pixie women balancing on a girder as she ambles through a cityscape of gray steel art deco skyscrapers.  Immortal‘s Manhattan is a wondrously vertical place of soaring buildings, flying cars, and floating billboards.  No matter how attractive the digital backdrops, though, the watcher is likely to be taken aback by the fact that almost everyone on the screen looks like an animated avatar from the “Final Fantasy” video game series.  You might expect to see computer generated figures portraying the aliens, mutants and ancient Egyptian gods that populate Immortal‘s world, but most of the major human players are completely animated, while the occasional disposable extra of no importance is played by a real live actor.  Charlotte Rampling‘s meddling doctor (with a hairdo made from melted black plastic) is no more important to the tale than a police inspector searching for what he believes to be a serial killer, but one is animated and the other isn’t; it’s disconcerting when they perform scenes opposite each other.  The limited emoting ability of computer-generated images makes them fairly creepy when they’re among their own kind; putting them next to real people highlights their uncanny plastic imperfections.  The seemingly arbitrary decision to animate some characters and use actors for others makes for a strange atmosphere, whether that was the intention or not.  Not that this scenario of an ancient god hunting for a woman through a futuristic city needed much strangening up.  The movie begins with the appearance of a giant pyramid floating in the sky, but no one in town pays it too much attention: this is the Big Apple, where everybody minds their own business.  Besides, New Yorkers in 2095 are jaded to mysterious apparitions: for several months, Central Park has been taken over by an unexplained extra-dimensional “incursion” that’s turned it into an arctic wasteland.  This teeming city is the perfect place for a guy like the falcon-headed god Horus to go about his business of searching for a mate without attracting too much attention.  Along the journey we’re treated to numerous odd touches: Horus’ fellow gods playing parlor games as they wait for him back at the pyramid; red hammerheaded aliens who swim through the skies; scenes shot in blurry, druggy “Jill-vision”; and half-explored subplots about political intrigues and the sinister role of the omnipresent Eugenics corporation in future society.  We are thrust into Bilal’s imaginary world with no explanations, and it takes a first act of near total confusion before we can start to get our bearings on the setting and the story.  “It’s almost like in one of those Greek tragedies… all of the elements will fall into place,” promises one character, whose reason for appearing in Immortal (Ad Vitam), ironically, never becomes absolutely clear.  All of the elements never fall into place—just who was John, anyway?—but I’m guessing if you’re intrigued by the idea of an amoral bird-headed deity stalking the streets of a moody computer-generated metropolis, the trippy sci-fi experience is going to outweigh your need for closure on a few loose plot ends.

Much of the look Enki Bilal creates for Immortal is reminiscent of the imaginary world fellow French national Luc Besson created for The Fifth Element, from its junky flying taxis to the mysterious, hot, semi-divine pixie-woman at the center of the story.  The somber tone is very different, however, and Immortal remains a unique world despite its influences (Blade Runner is another obvious touchstone).  Bilal adapted the story from his own graphic novels, and the setting is clearly rich, with much more background detail than can be revealed in Immortal‘s 90 minute run time.  The more thorough, trilogy-length treatment of this unique universe given in the novels would undoubtedly make more sense, but probably be less appealing to lovers of weird movies.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dreamy, slightly weird, stylish French sci-fi movie… Flawed but good.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Lili.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Amanda Winn Lee (voice), Jason Lee (voice)

PLOT:  A man with a television for a head and a woman with mismatched eyes wake up with

amnesia, are imprisoned on what’s left of the moon, lead a revolt, have a baby, and kill lots and lots of people.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Dead Leaves moves so fast and makes so little sense that it’s almost the equivalent of putting an ultraviolent manga in a high-speed blender and trying to read it while the pieces swirl around.  The plot is nearly incomprehensible, but somehow involves mutant clones and a psychedelic caterpillar.  Weird?  Hell yes.  Recommended?  Well, definitely not to epileptics.  Even for older folks with a healthy neurobiology, the breakneck pacing is as likely to induce a headache as an adrenaline rush.  It’s definitely one-of-a-kind, though, and as an experiment in compressing as much berserk and illogical anime flavor as possible into as short a running time as possible, it’s worth a look, and maybe even an eventual spot on the List.

COMMENTS: Dead Leaves really is something to behold.  It seems to have been conceived, and composed, under the influence of an entirely new drug: amphetashrooms.  The film is essentially one fifty-minute long chase fight/scene, with a very few timeouts to catch your breath.  The female pink-eyed Pandy and TV-headed male Retro wake up, rob a bank, are imprisoned, break out, fire thousands of rounds of ammunition from weapons that conveniently appear when needed, and fight an ever-mutating horde of bad guys; Retro loses his head both literally and figuratively during the journey.  The violence and gore are extreme, but so ridiculous—with characters spontaneously transforming into human arsenals and showers of spent yellow bullet casings flying so thick that they sometimes obscure the carnage—that it becomes almost non-representational.  Animation styles change every few seconds (and sometimes even several times within a second), as the artists involved employ a variety of abstractions, split screens, shaky pans, replicate comic book panels complete with text, etc.  The artwork is so full of slanted planes taking off at all different angles that it looks like something dreamed up by a comic book Pablo Picasso armed with a primary color palette.  Dead Leaves must have looked fantastic as concept art; ironically, no single shot is held long enough onscreen for the eye to soak up all the detail the artists sweated to put in each frame.  The same level of detail was not spent on the storyline, although it can be as mentally confusing as the canvas is visually confounding.  Plot strands regarding the two main character’s amnesiac secret identities, experimentation on imprisoned moon clones as a form of genetic warfare, and a confusing caterpillar metaphor (which seems to relate to the title “leaves“) never come together.  The writers give plenty of hints that these omissions weren’t accidental.  At one point, as a minor character is delivering some much needed backstory, Pandy’s mind starts wandering, and her internal monologue regarding another, irrelevant, memory drowns out his explanation of the couple’s origins; her ruminations magically and nonsensically lead us to the next plot point.  During the final showdown and it’s aftermath, it’s dim Retro who summarizes the audience’s reactions to the plot shennanigans: “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” “I’m not sure I get it,” “This is insane!” and, finally, “Does it really make any difference?”  Retro himself is a screechy shoot-first reprobate that only a teenage male could identify with; Pandy is preternaturally cool and sultry, for contrast’s sake.  There are frequent wang and poop jokes.  The entire enterprise seems like an experiment in conceding to the sad postmodern condition: information overload delivered at fiber optic speed, amorality and vulgarity as a natural background, adult craftsmanship unabashedly placed in service of juvenilia.  The movie almost works as a parody of the pop anime genre; all of its illogical excesses are magnified, and at the same time they’re concentrated and stuffed into a short attention span format.  There’s 90 minutes of material here, but, like a Keystone Cops slapstick sequence, the film’s been sped up 33%.  As an experiment in excess, Dead Leaves is worth watching, but if you’re over 30 you’re likely to find it wearying, as well as empty.

At the time of this writing Dead Leaves is available to watch for free on YouTube (it’s also on Netflix’s streaming service).  The DVD edition adds numerous extras, including subtitled director’s commentary, scenes from the film’s theatrical premiere, a Q&A session with the director and voice actors, interviews, and footage of the producers and animators getting sloshed playing a drinking game.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…’over the top’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. More like ‘over the edge and into the never ending abyss.’ ‘Dead Leaves’ is faster, louder and crazier than just about anything I’ve ever seen.”–Gopal, Beyond Hollywood.com

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “NGBoo,” who accurately characterized it as “fast, loud, wicked & filled with ultimate animated weirdos.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Xavier Tort, Anne Céline Auche, Manuel Solás, Marta Timón, Anna Diogene

PLOT:  A mute male slave’s involvement with romance and rebel pornographers lands him in

trouble in a sex-free future ruled by a totalitarian matriarchy.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: After producing a series of wildly experimental shorts in the 1990s (three of the most twisted of which were anthologized for the collection Codex Atanicus), Spanish filmmaker Carlos Atanes scaled back the surrealism for his feature debut, FAQ.  While plenty of weirdness remains (it’s hard to argue that a movie that casually drops dialogue like “unwrap the cat, we’re taking it with us” and includes a plotline regarding “architectural castration” doesn’t push the boundaries of normality), it’s stretched more thinly than in the shorts: it’s like drinking skim milk after having become accustomed to whole.

COMMENTS: “Failure is inevitable,” concedes a rebel, “but it is our duty to keep trying.”  He’s come to recruit Nono, a mute sound collector who’s never far away from his phallic microphone, to record some bird songs for the resistance’s archive of vanishing natural sounds; their ultimate dream is to someday record a breathing human female.  The quote, however, could just as easily apply to the scrappy spirit of independent cinema FAQ embodies.  As a philosophical dystopian science fiction, it’s not entirely successful: it frequently lags dramatically, especially in a languorous episode in the woods; with minimal sets and cheap-looking green screen effects, it struggles at times to hide its budgetary limitations; and it stumbles into a reality-bending non-resolution of an ending.  But the sincerity and professionalism of the production shines through, and the movie shows enough crazy imagination and intelligence to make you forgive its flaws, both budgetary and dramatic.  Some of the weirdest bits in this pretty weird feature involve the Internet porn of the future; adult actresses remain fully clothed at all times, and since human contact is verboten in the Brave New World, a woman touching a man’s bare chest is the height of salaciousness.  For reasons unknown, this forbidden erotica is created in an avant-garde visual style, set on red glowing Dali-esque alien landscapes, and features nearly subliminal English text (the movie is in French) flashing across the screen (words like “orgasm,” “death” and “bastard” are legible).  Other odd highlights include Nono’s mystical ability to peer into lobotomy holes to view a patient’s memories, and the fact that, when charged with crimes by the feminist state, defendants are given the option of electing their own punishments (one man’s pledge to shave his eyebrows, gouge his belly with a spoon, and hang himself within a year is found acceptable to his judges).  Atanes indulges his lust for surreal tableaux in these segments, and also in an out-of-nowhere fourth-wall breaking finale, but even when it’s playing “serious,” FAQ sports an unaccountably odd tone.  Superficially, the movie unspools as a serious science fiction drama, complete with pretentious poetic narration, but the absurdist touches throughout betray the director’s weird predilections.  The idea of the female supremacist tyranny—the Sisterhood of Metacontrol—is bizarre in itself, and Atanes pushes the premise into farce by making the dynamiting of that great phallic symbol, the Eiffel Tower, a major plot event.  The politically incorrect core of the film—its presumption that radical feminists would abolish sex if they ever came to power—is its boldest gambit, but it’s impossible to know exactly how to take this thesis.  It’s hard to know how seriously to take any film where a character makes a serious speech about a higher reality that is watching us, and then, without explanation, put on a red clown nose and gaze reverently skyward.  FAQ’s apparent antifeminist agenda could be seen as a legitimate attack on the Andrea Dworkin strain of radical feminism, or a lampoon of male paranoia about “feminazis,”  or it could be nothing more than a sly reversal of expectations (any society in which absolute power is vested in one of the two sexes would become a dystopia for the other).  Whatever the film’s actual attitude towards feminism, it is legitimately thought provoking and discomfiting, which is a major point in the movie’s favor.  Not fully surrealist and not entirely sci-fi, FAQ is not for everyone, but there can be no doubt that it represents a unique voice and viewpoint in a sea of blahfilm.  Its commercial failure may be inevitable, but independent filmmakers like Atanes have a duty to keep on trying.

Star Xavier Tort also composed the effective music, using a single, wordless female voice to otherworldly effect.  FAQ was released with little fanfare or promotion on DVD in 2007.  It seems that when the rights reverted to the original owners, they chose to re-release it in this “special edition” in December 2010.  The re-release is unfortunately on DVD-R, and the picture quality is acceptable but leaves much to be desired for videophiles.  The special features include seven minutes of interviews with the cast and crew and two deleted scenes, one an expanded clip of futuristic avant-garde erotica with sadomasochistic overtones. The Special Edition of FAQ is not available from disc rental companies like Netflix but is available on Amazon instant video for rental or download. As pointed out by a helpful reader below, the original 2007 Region 1 release without the special features is available through Netflix.

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by Carlos Atanes.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an unpredictable and intelligent treat, comparable with classic arty dystopias like Godard’s ‘Alphaville’ (1965) and Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ (1985).”–Carl J. Schroeder, MysticalMovieGuide.com (DVD)

FEATURING:  Damian Lewis, Abigail Breslin, Amy Ryan

PLOT:  The lives of three desperate people intersect when a schizophrenic man clings to

sanity long enough to help a distressed woman and her young daughter in the underbelly of Manhattan.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Keane provides a schizophrenics’ eye view of the world. Presented from the protagonist’s unique perspective, we experience his confusion, distress and earnest need to be understood in closeup.  The effect is claustrophobic, frantic at times, and uniquely unsettling.  This makes for a viewing experience that is as unusual as Keane’s compelling odyssey.

COMMENTS:  Intense, suspenseful, unpredictable, Keane is an unsettling story that disorients the viewer by stripping him of any sense of control or foresight. In this harrowing, unusual drama, a mentally ill man struggles to pull himself together when his tenuous personal odyssey is interrupted by a dislocated woman with her eight-year-old daughter in tow.  Keane (Lewis) is frantically searching for his abducted daughter whom he lost in New York’s Port Authority bus terminal months before.  Battling the adversity of delusions and an already unbalanced brain chemistry exacerbated by substance abuse, he aimlessly drifts through seedy Manhattan locales with a feverish purpose.

Querying passersby with a newspaper photo of his child, retracing his steps leading to his daughter’s disappearance, Keane has at best a shaky grasp on reality.  As he teeters on the edge of sanity, he has numerous close scrapes, and we are left to wonder if his daughter and her supposed abduction are real or merely a delusional schizophrenic construct.  Is Keane driven mad because of his sense of guilt over the disappearance of his little girl, or is the entire episode imagined because he is mad?

Keane’s life is complicated, yet conversely given direction when he forms an uneasy alliance with a questionable woman (Breslin) and her bewildered daughter (Ryan) who are mired  in a similarly helpless situation of their own.  Can Keane keep hold of himself long enough to help, and if so, will his efforts bear fruit—or is he being conned?  And what about his missing child?  Is she real?  Can Keane separate fantasy from reality, or will he confuse his situation with that of his new wards?

While Keane shares some fleeting similarities to moments such as the all-night diner scene in Midnight Cowboy, the overall mood of harsh, unbuffered reality, unabashed locations, and the characters’ personal eccentricities compares most closely with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1969 film, The Rain People.

Like The Rain People, Keane offers a stark, almost excruciatingly real and raw, documentary-like dose of gritty people and their situations, unsoftened by mood-setting background music, or storybook establishing shots.  The gloomy, seamy visual footprint is claustrophobic, the settings non-idealized and the treatment of the subject matter unapologetic.

Keane is an unsettling, voyeuristic stare at it’s subject.  Filmed from Keane’s vantage point, the viewer is made to feel like he is that shell of the once sane anti-hero, trapped inside Keane himself, but unable to intervene as a more powerful, perverse alter-ego takes control and carries him along for the ride.  Infused with a mix of empathy and revulsion, we do our best to hold on and roll with the punches as Keane inexorably falters down an uncertain path, doing his best, sometimes falling short, leaving us to hold our breath and persistently wonder, “what next?”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Somewhere between a thriller and a clinical study in schizophrenia, ‘Keane’ is a movie that puts you so far into someone else’s head you may have forgotten your own name by the time it’s over.”–Stephen Hunter, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)

Keane trailer

I tend to avoid writing about films I don’t like, partially because I realize that, regardless of my objective efforts, a certain amount of subjectivity is going to seep its way in. Too, often one may not be in total sync with the filmmaker’s vision.

With that said, I am breaking my standard rule here because Mel Gibson’s 2004 “Lethal Jesus” seems an even more vivid symbol today of what exactly is wrong with the direction “spirituality in film” has taken, what is wrong with certain popular contemporary views of what Christianity means, and what is wrong in the current state of film as an art form.

Oh, and I do get this film’s vision, all too well. Hell, I saw it first in a Jack T. Chick fundamentalist comic tract from the 1970′s which depicted the Passion with a suffering Christ who looked like Hamburger Helper as hooked nosed Jews screamed for his death. The same company produced numerous blatantly antisemitic tracts, including one in which a Rabbi was fried in the fires of hell by a faceless God, sitting on a large white throne. I saw it next in a protestant passion play that I was forced to sit through in which a muscle bound Jesus got involved in a barroom type brawl (in his descent to Hell) with demons who looked suspiciously like caricatured Jews, dressed in black with false noses. Gibson’s Passion of the Christ is a 21st century promotion for the medieval lynch mob.

The Passion of the Christ is not only blatantly anti-Semitic, it is also the most blatantly anti-Christian film ever made. Two-dimensional thinkers will point to films like Bunuel‘s Milky Way (1969), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Rapture (1991), Dogma (1999) or Religulous (2008), as anti-Christian. Yet, all of these edify the spiritual Christian movement.

Gibson’s frighteningly pedestrian take on the passion is a far cry from the spirituality in cinema espoused by master Andrei Tarkovsky. Passion of the Christ also sits on the polar opposite end of films such as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), City Lights(1931), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Song of Bernadette (1943), I Confess (1953), The Gospel According toSt. Matthew (1966), Andrei Rublev (1973), The Scarlet and the Black (1983), The Mission (1986), and Dead
Man Walking (1995).

Independent cinema, at one time, did not actually mimic the formulaic Hollywood recipe. Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St.
Matthew and Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture are remarkable examples of highly original, spiritually enriched films. When the former was released in 1966, Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton was moved by its originality and its refusal to cater to pre-conceived notions. Of course, the era of Paolo Pasolini and Merton was also the era of John XXIII, the Second Vatican Council, and Flannery O’Connor, who may very well be the most poignant Catholic writer who ever lived. Much has changed since then, and certainly not for the better. Indeed, Gibson’s  “independent” sadistic porno, wrapped in 25 million dollar market-savvy linen, is the cinematic result of multiple misguided directions.

When this was released in 2004, churches took their congregations by the busload to see it. Corporate giants like Walmart stocked their shelves by the hundreds of thousands with the DVD. Yes, you could purchase your Passion to take home and enjoy for family viewing, along with Passion merchandised plastic spikes and your buckshot, all in one trip. Amazingly, there were no fast food tie-in deals but, then, who needs them when you have the almighty Walmart behind you?  The movie as a marketing event has seen never seen such a shameful moment as with this movie.

Even the Vatican got involved, giving the film a wink and an official thumbs up. This is not the Vatican of John XXIII, who, as a cardinal, issued false baptismal certificates to Jewish children, in an effort to keep them out of Nazi ovens. It is also not the church of sweet Bernadette or the Little Flower, Saint Theresa. No, this is a post Second Vatican Council papacy which has desperately sought to reverse the reforms of the 60′s and return to the middle ages. It is often a Vatican of extremes that revels in sadistic, racist tripe like The Passion of the Christ and permits bishops like Thomas Olmstead to excommunicate a nun for allowing doctors to save a mother of four over her eleven week old fetus. This is the same Vatican whose current pope actively covered up for predatory pedophile priests, refused to defrock them, rejected the resignation of Bishops who covered up for these priests, and, instead, tries to shift and place the blame on homosexuality and promotion of women in the priesthood. It is a Passion of the Christ-styled Vatican which continues to promote misogyny well into the 21st century, has a Crusade-inspired pope who has uttered racist epitaphs towards Muslims and pooh poohs his own past in Hitler’s Nazi youth. Sounds like Gibson’s version of Christendom after all, even if it is well known now that he and his Holocaust denying pappy actually belong to a splinter Catholic group which, among other things, still insists on women covering their heads during mass and ignores Vatican II’s rejection of referring to Jews as “Christ killers.”

When numerous critics pointed out the overwhelming antisemitism of the film, they were pounced on by apostles of James Caviezel’s “take it like a man” Americanized, superhero, macho Jesus, who is completely alien to the Christ of the Beatitudes. No apologies were issued to those spoil sport critics when Gibson’s antisemitism became common public knowledge. because the religious right arrogantly presumes it is the sole owner of the faith and Church, with nothing to apologize for. Gibson’s Passion is as twisted, ugly and spewing as the hook nosed “Jews” he grossly misrepresents in the film.

Blame shifts entirely from Roman procurator Pontius Pilate to the Jews, despite historical documentation of Pilate’s ruthless lack of mercy.  In this, the film echoes Christendom in elevating to Pilate to near saint. After all, it was Rome who gave the official stamp of approval to Christ’s execution. Echoing Christendom’s big wrong turn, yet again, the film entirely shifts a 2000 year old blame and, through caricaturization, the door is swung wide open for the much bullied upon high school geeks (Christianity) to become the new, improved and officially licensed bullies. Gibson targets the Jews, of course.  The Jews are in league with a very femme looking Satan who, later, actually morphs into a woman and produces a reptilian sidekick, both of who come off as hackneyed rejects from George Lucas’ execrable second Star Wars trilogy. Of course, effeminacy is certainly the root of all evils and, quite obviously, a Jewish trait. Gibson expressed those views previously in a scene depicting Prince Edward from the Academy Award winning Braveheart (1995). The Jews in Passion of the Christ are also in league with the excruciatingly Jewish Judas Iscariot, who is the sole apostle here that tactlessly refers to Jesus as his “Rabbi.”

In this version of the Passion, Christ and his apostles did not evolve from Judaism; they were, with the exception of Judas, never Jewish to begin with. Gibson even manages to outdo Richard Wagner in re-writing history in order to suit his hate-inspired agenda; but at least Wagner could produce great art. Gibson’s film takes a sublime, existential, metaphoric icon, the Stations of the Cross, and transforms it into race bating pornography for fundamentalists. Even Peter is transformed from a very human apostle who, through immense struggles and missteps, became the rock of the Church, into a pre-made rock who comes across more like a Sylvester Stallone-styled first century cop. One keeps expecting to see Our Lady, She-Devil of the SS. Like much the post-Vatican II Church which aspires, in part, to “progressively” morph back into the pre-Vatican II Church, Gibson avoids a real emphasis on Our Lady and drops her organic, spiritual presence like a hot potato.  He-man misogyny and antisemitism are the bows on Gibson’s “gift to the world.”

Ironically, this “Wrath of Jesus” with a medieval Roman Catholic agenda connected most with fundamentalist Protestants; or perhaps, it’s not so ironic after all. In choosing to bypass the whole of Christ’s startling, diaphanous, radical and uncompromising, charismatic message of love and forgiveness, Gibson takes his dirty magnifying glass and homes in on the bloodshed detail, expanding it far beyond what Gospel writers ever fathomed.

Gibson’s passion play is a grimy, ultra violent video game (complete with a Garden of Gethsemane straight out of a George Romero Dead movie), packaged by a brand of corporate Christendom and sold as a bill of goods that takes us to a “new level in realism” because “this is what Jesus went through for you, Johnny”, all the while fanning the medieval and fascist flames in stylized post-Matrix Christian propaganda.

Passion of the Christ is mockingly titled because there isn’t an ounce of passion in this film. It is a dumbed-down, two hour scourging completely removing us from Christ, the compassionate revolutionary. Here, the historical flesh and blood Jesus of Nazareth is reduced to a one dimensional cardboard deity who can take whatever is physically dished out because, unlike you and I, he is a god. What’s missing is the human soul and tragedy of the Nazarene. If Christ were simply a divine figure who endured suffering, we would not be discussing him two millennium later, nor we would still be grappling to come to terms with the meaning of his life and death.

The complex Christ of the Gospels is, at times, paradoxically irritable, empathetically patient of human folly, aloof, accessible, matriarchal, patriarchal, an inspiring leader, servile, the quintessential outcast, communal, philosophical, emotionally charged, ambiguous, crystal clear, fearful, bravely determined, devoted to his mother, and impatient with her. The Christ of the four Gospels is divine because he is the most human of humans.

Even in solely focusing on the passion of the Christ, which Gibson’s film purports to do, these qualities are still vividly present in the Gospel accounts and in the countless artistic depictions of the Stations of the Cross. A visit to a random half dozen parishes will reveal an illuminating, rich diversity in the Stations iconography, ranging from the traditional to modern and post-modern representations. The beauty of the Catholic tradition can be found in its expansive egalitarianism. This egalitarianism is metaphorically expressed in the journeyed stations, which confirm and celebrate the humanity of Christ for the laity.

Carl Theodore Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc homed in on the passion of its subject without dehumanizing her; quite the contrary. Unfortunately, Gibson did not follow Dreyer’s example. Instead, Christ’s life and ministry are substantially missing meat in a film superficially charged with the odor of divine, flayed flesh. Gibson’s film is so lost in its hierarchical simple-mindedness that the egalitarian celebration of humanity, found in the
Stations, eludes him.

Gibson’s recent tirades and outbursts are not surprising at all when viewing this film. Indeed, this is an instance where one cannot separate the creator from his work, because Gibson’s militant misogyny and antisemitism underpin every single frame of this “Passion” as much as Carl Orff’s fascist leanings underpin the bawdy, militaristic “Carmina Burana.”

By comparison, Picasso’s “Guernica” is a work of art that inspiringly captures the sense of startlement towards the horrors inflicted in this world; the kind of startlement that Christ must have felt when he realized he had gone too far and was doomed to be murdered by his frightened, confused, beloved brethren. Gibson’s film is the equivalent of an anti-Guernica. Instead of inspiring empathy or a sense of human identity, which is what it should do, Gibson’s film retroactively harks back to “us vs. them.”

The Gospels report that Christ “learned” from the Samaritan woman. Gibson’s Christ is incapable of learning, especially from a weak and sinful woman. According to Gibson, Christ’s death is not the consequence for bravely espousing a world-changing message. Gibson’s Jesus undergoes two hours of torture to “teach” us a lesson about what it takes to be a god, and this is depicted as penance for our human wretchedness. Gibson even counts himself among the wretched, undeserving of Christ’s sacrifice, by utilizing his own hand to hammer a nail into the flesh of Christ. Of course, Gibson widely publicized that fact, along with the fact that he financed the film himself. The middle-aged multi-millionaire artist as humble saint has rarely rang so arrogant or so phony. Gibson serves as his own elitist pope.

Gibson’s carefully placed and publicized hand is a masturbatory symbol in this exercise in titillation. Titillation equals pornography, and Passion of the Christ is pornography reprehensibly promoted and sold as an artistic vision. I have yet to see a pornographic film which can actually qualify as art. Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ certainly does not qualify as art and, like most pornography, it reduces itself to a series of unimaginative vignettes, climaxing with one repetitious, dull money shot after another, appeasing an audience of Christian thugs.

However, contrary to what Gibson and his like-minded supporters think, the “money shot” is not in the orgasmic, titillating climax, it is in the loving, intimate embrace afterward, which pornography always (and predictably) fails to show. The money shot is in that moment when two people in love, after having made love, fall asleep, one’s head resting on the others’ chest, entwined in their bed together. Oh, Gibson does, all too briefly, depict the fifteenth station—the Resurrection—but, after two plus hours of grinding, one had better give more than a three second embrace in the loving comfort of the ascension. Passion of the Christ, naturally, fails to do that and it is, ultimately, an immature, mud and tractor pull styled adolescent fantasy aimed at attention span challenged moviegoers, fundie porn hounds, and their boxes of Kleenexes.

Seed from Ben Cain / Negative Spaces on Vimeo.