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)

FEATURING: James McAvoy, Catherine McCormack, Derek Jacobi, Julian Glover (voice actors)

PLOT: Hal, Crown Prince of a kingdom of marionettes, disguises himself as a commoner to try

to uncover his father’s murderer.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Strings is essentially a stock prince-grows-to-be-a-man-and-saves-the-kingdom high fantasy tale, but with a twist: everyone in the film is not only a marionette, they know they’re a marionette. The gimmick is used meaningfully, but given the standard-issue narrative, it’s not enough to movie this film from the “offbeat curiosity” into the “weird” column.

COMMENTS: Strings‘ basic plot, which involves an undercover prince, a kingdom in peril, intrigue and betrayal, prophecies, virtuous misunderstood rebels, appeals to the “power of love,” and a big battle at the end, is at the same time a bit confusing (with lots of characters, factions and subplots to keep track of) and overly familiar. That hardly matters, however, because the movie’s real pleasures come from admiring the meticulously constructed puppets as they dance across the boldly-lit diorama sets, and even more from the film’s creation of a complete marionette culture and mythology. The hand carved puppets have an Old World, doll-like charm, and although their faces are all frozen in neutral expressions, they exhibit an unexpected range of expressiveness just by raising or lowering their eyelids or tilting their heads that make them only slightly uncanny. The filmmakers make no attempt to hide the marionettes’ strings—even going so far as to title the movie after the darn things—and this is the most interesting and curious aspect of the  production. A dozen or more strings rise up from each character’s body, disappearing into the heavens above. A breathtaking aerial view illustrates why airplane flight would be impossible in this alternate reality, as we see thousands of strings rising above the moonlit clouds stretching up to infinity, each set connected to an invisible creature walking about the world below. The film explores every aspect of their strung-up existence; even the city gates and prison cells operate according to weird marionette logic. I won’t spoil every single thread, but it was fascinating to see the mystical “birth of a marionette” scene, as the mother brings the carved wooden block of a baby to life by painfully summoning strings to descend from the heavens, then attaching them to the lifeless wooden doll. It’s tough to figure out who this movie is aimed at—it’s too dark and weird for the kiddie matinee crowd, and not quite dark and weird enough for us—but that very singularity of vision and lack of a clear marketing angle gives it cult credibility. In the end, despite the fact that we don’t make much of a connection with the archetypal heroes, despise the stock villains, or feel much investment in the restoration of the kingdom, Strings still manages to be a visually beautiful and imagination-stimulating movie. And it finishes with an unexpectedly touching ceremony that takes the marionettes’ central metaphor, alien as it is, and uses it to tug a little on our heartstrings as well as theirs.

Strings contains a couple of nods to Shakespeare: the main character who seeks to avenge his slain father, the king, while being opposed by a deceitful uncle, bears a passing resemblance to “Hamlet.” Even more obviously, the protagonist who grows from a foolish boy to a competent king is named Prince Hal, just like the star of the “Henry IV” and “Henry V” plays.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Essence of movie’s weirdness lies in its initial conceit… not quite strange enough to appeal to hardcore arthouse auds who savor the work of Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay and the like, but neither is it cutesy enough to cross over to the mainstream.”–Leslie Felperin, Variety (contemporaneous)

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

“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