DIRECTED BY: David Lynch

FEATURING: Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux

PLOT:  A woman (Harring) is involved in a nighttime accident on Mulholland Drive and flees into the city of Los Angeles with amnesia; she sneaks into an apartment soon to be occupied by naive young Betty (Watts), who has come to Hollywood hoping to find stardom.  Meanwhile, a film director (Theroux) finds himself pressured by mysterious mobsters to cast an unknown actress in his upcoming project.  Betty helps the amnesiac woman try to recover her identity, but the clues only lead to a strange avant-garde nightclub, a key, a box, and a sudden reality shift that throws everything that came before into confusion.

BACKGROUND:

• Lynch originally intended Mulholland Drive as a TV series in the mold of “Twin Peaks.”  When the networks passed on the pilot, the French producer Studio Canal stepped in with additional financing to turn the pilot into a feature film.  In between ABC’s proactive cancellation of the series and the creation of the film version, all of the sets and props were dismantled, forcing Lynch to come up with a different way to complete the story.
• Monty Montgomery, whose appearance as “The Cowboy” is an uncanny show-stopper, is a Hollywood movie producer (who produced Wild at Heart for Lynch).  Mulholland Drive is his only acting credit (he’s listed as “Lafayette Montgomery” in the credits).
• Lynch insisted no chapter stops be included on the DVD.
• The original DVD release included an insert from Lynch containing “10 Keys to Unlocking This Thriller.”
• Mulholland Drive received significant critical acclaim, nabbing Lynch a Best Director award at Cannes (shared with Joel Coen for The Man Who Wasn’t There) and a Best Director Oscar nomination.  It was voted best picture of the Year by the Boston Film Critics Society, the Chicago Film Critics Association, the new York Film Critics Circle, and the Online Film Critics Society (where it tied with Memento in the voting).  It was also voted best foreign picture by the Academy Award equivalents of Brazil, France, Spain, and Australia.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: The Silencio nightclub, decorated in Lynch’s trademark red velvet drapes and staffed by his trademark subconscious monsters.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: If the massive reality shifts and actresses unexpectedly playing

Original trailer for Mulholland Drive

multiple roles is not enough for you, then the monster behind the Winkie’s, a Spanish version of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” delivered by a woman who collapses onstage, and a mafia-style media syndicate run by a deformed dwarf who uses an eyebrowless cowboy as his right-hand man will convince you that we are deep in that subconscious pit of eroticism, kitsch and weirdness that can only go by the name Lynchland.

COMMENTS:  Oddly enough, what may be the most important scene in Mulholland Drive involves a marginal character, a thick-browed man whose name or profession we never learn.  After this scene we will see him again exactly one time. The man is eating breakfast at a Winkie’s (David Lynch’s mythical version of Denny’s) with a friend.  He’s recounting a dream that he had that occurred in the very diner they’re sitting in.  He goes out of his way to precisely outline the differences between the dream and the way things are now.  In the dream, his breakfast companion was standing in a different place, and he was frightened.  The light was different; it was neither day nor night, but a kind of twilight.  And, most importantly, in the dream there was a man behind the restaurant—”he’s the one that’s doing it”—and the dreamer could see him through the wall.  He’s come to Winkie’s that morning, together with his friend from the dream, to check behind the dumpsters in the light of day and convince himself there’s no one there, to rid himself of that awful fear.

But, this being a David Lynch movie, he doesn’t rid himself of that awful fear.  Quite the contrary.  And because of what happens, we’re left unsure whether this really is his description of the dream, related in the light of day, or is actually the nightmare itself.

Mulholland Drive is a dream of a movie, one with (at least) two sets of realities and characters, inhabited by one set of actors.  Each separate universe is a looking-glass version of the other, reflecting events as if in a funhouse mirror.  $50,000 in cold hard cash is a mystery in one world, and a sin in the other.  And, unlike some of David Lynch’s other movies, there is a solution (of sorts) to the mystery of Mulholland Drive, although it’s a solution that doesn’t betray the film’s mysteriousness.

In terms of penetrability, Mulholland Drive perches somewhere between the eerie off-ness of Blue Velvet and the relative inscrutability of Eraserhead.  This movie is clearly in the tradition of the psychological thriller (a genre that, somewhat surprisingly, Lynch had never tackled before, at least not head on).  And yet, there are plenty of mystical red herrings and pure dream interludes hanging in the heavy Los Angeles air that envelops Mulholland Drive.  Unlike in a typical mystery tale, with Lynch it’s the sumptuous surrealism, not the solution, that puts the thrill in the thriller.  It’s the red lampshade, the phone calls to nowhere, the dwarf in the wheelchair that drive Mulholland.

As always, Lynch releases beautiful, delicate narrative butterflies into the cinemas, but certain fans (you know who you are) insist on trying to catch them, pin them by their wings, and dissect them to death.  This time around, Lynch explicitly (and in my view, perversely) encourages the segment of his audience that prefers to treat his films as puzzles rather than as experiences to analyze the film to death by releasing a flyer called “Ten Clues to Unlocking This Thriller” (thereby negating his own advice, quoted above, to never “demystify” a movie.  No one ever accused David Lynch of a foolish consistency).

Other, more perceptive souls have pleaded with viewers not to try to understand too much of Mulholland Drive. Rather than delighting in Lynch’s clever construction of the puzzlebox, the always perceptive J. Hobermann writes instead that the movie is as “withholding in its narrative as anything in Buñuel” and, after considering that either half of the story might be an illusion, concludes—with a blithe indifference to the carefully constructed plot—”not that it matters.”  In a survey of film critic’s interpretations of the film, nearly everyone resisted the analytical mode.  Roger Ebert insisted, “There is no explanation. There may not even be a mystery”;  Jonathan Ross accepted the standard dream interpretation but demurred that it was “counterproductive to keep analysing it”; Tom Charity offered explanations but worried “I’m not sure if it helps to be so specific;” Neil Roberts was ” wary of over-analysing it,” warning that “[w]e should be careful not to let all this analysis detract from a fantastic film”; and Jane Douglas offered this advice: “in some ways it is better to just watch it without constantly trying to work out what it means.”  After working intimately on the script over a span of two years, Laura Harring concluded, “You want to get it, but I don’t think it’s a movie to be gotten.  It’s achieved its goal if it makes you ask questions.”  And co-star Justin Theroux reminds us “I think [Lynch is] genuinely happy for [Mulholland Drive] to mean anything you want.  He loves it when people come up with really bizarre interpretations.”

For the sake of those who have unwisely followed Lynch’s Ten Clues to their logical conclusion, traversing the entire length of Mulholland Drive, I offer, as a way to recapture the film’s mysterious magic, the following

TEN MYSTERIES THAT RE-LOCK THIS THRILLER

1. Why does David Lynch ask viewers, in his “10 keys to unlocking this thriller” to consider where Aunt Ruth is?  What difference would it make if Aunt Ruth were alive, dead, or never existed?
2. Who is the man who thinks a monster lurks behind Winkie’s?  If he is a dream, then why would Dianne have a dream from the point of view of a total stranger?  Other than its metatextual mood setting role,what reason is there for the man and his nightmare to exist?
3. Why does a second actress (Melissa George) play Camilla Rhodes in the first part of the film?
4. Why is the syndicate so insistent that Adam cast Camilla Rhodes?  The entire conspiracy plotline, which occupies a large part of the first ninety minutes of the movie, gets dropped.
5. Speaking of the syndicate, why don’t they “shut everything down” after Mr. Roque tells them to?  Is “shut everything down” Hollywood gangster talk for “turn up the heat by calling in the Cowboy”?
6. Does Adam ever see the Cowboy again?  (We do, and Diane does, but does he)?  Why draw so much attention to the number of times the Cowboy would appear—other than that, when he says something so strange with such an aura of threat, it’s terribly frightening?  Unless—Diane is really Adam??
7. Why is the director the only main character whose identity doesn’t change (though his circumstances do)?
8. Why do tiny old people come skittering out of a brown paper bag, laughing maniacally?
9. Why does Robert Forster get a special mention in the opening credits, yet appear in the film for less than a minute, doing nothing even mildly important?  Why did he even get a special bio segment on the DVD release?  Is his agent just that good?
10. Seriously, WTF is the deal with Silencio?  Why is there no band?  Why does Betty have a brief epileptic fit while watching the stage show?  And what about the key?  (Why does the hit man think its funny when Diane asks what it opens?)  And the blue box?
11. Are there actually more than ten unanswered questions about Mulholland Drive?

Getting lost in all this talk about the film’s meaning, or lack of same, are the film’s amazing cinematic qualities: the neon-noir cinematography; Angelo Badalamenti’s brooding ambient score, which fits the director’s vision like a well-worn glove and immediately drops the viewer into a Lynchian world; and Naomi Watts’ eye-opening performance, which moves from ingenue to conniving bitch with a seriously invigorating stopover as seductress of both sexes.  There are great individual scenes, including Watts and Harring’s two tender but scorching love scenes, a murder-for-hire that goes comically amiss with a series of human and non-human witnesses that have to be dispatched in turn, and a heartrending, and very weird, Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” that inexplicably reduces Watts and Harring to tears.   Not only that, but as a bonus you get to see Billy Ray Cyrus cold-cocked onscreen, perhaps the ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasy for millions of Americans who suffered through the darkness of the “Achy Breaky Heart” weeks in 1992.

One of Lynch’s greatest gift is that he skirts the borderline between Surrealism and Symbolism; no one can quite nail him down.  In some movies (this one, for example) lists towards the psychological symbolism end of the spectrum, while in others (INLAND EMPIRE, which is essentially Mulholland Drive on acid) he strives for unadulterated bizarrity.  Most of the time, he mixes comprehensible, relatable psychological symbolism with a deeply irrational and fearful subconscious stream.  He’s pulled off the unique trick of rallying two philosophically opposed film factions: those who treasure the challenge of solving puzzle movies, and those who value the sense of “mysterious fullness” that satisfies precisely because it’s meaning can never be pinned down.  Though claimed by both, he can’t actually belong to both camps.

Can he?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the compelling but intentionally inscrutable return of the ‘weird’ David Lynch that will please his hardcore fans even if it has them scratching their heads as well… for the final 45 minutes, Lynch is in mind-twisting mode that presents a form of alternate reality with no apparent meaning or logical connection to what came before… the sudden switcheroo to head games is disappointing because, up to this point, Lynch had so wonderfully succeeded in creating genuine involvement.”–Todd McCarthy, Variety (contemporaneous)

“The movie is a surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir, and the less sense it makes, the more we can’t stop watching it… The way you know the movie is over is that it ends. And then you tell a friend, ‘I saw the weirdest movie last night.’ Just like you tell them you had the weirdest dream.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The worst movie I’ve seen this year… a load of moronic and incoherent garbage from David Lynch that… predictably ended up at the New York Film Festival, where pretentious poseurs sit with their eyes glued to any screen as long as the projector is still running. From this bizarro atrocity, they should get astigmatism.”–Rex Reed, The New York Observer (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:  Mulholland Drive – some of the features on this ten year old site are broken (like a link to a chat transcript with Lynch), but Universal deserves credit for continuing to pay fifteen bucks per year to renew the domain name a decade after the film’s release—something studios rarely do

IMDB LINK:  Mulholland Dr. (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Mulholland Drive’ – Bill Wyman, Max Garrone and Andy Klein outline the standard (and almost certainly correct) interpretation of Mulholland Drive.  Obviously, this essay contains major spoilers.

Lost on Mulholland Drive – Film fansite featuring guides, essays, a discussion forum for floating personal theories on the film, and even fan-made music videos

Understanding Mulholland Drive: Nice Film—If You Can Get It – Six film critics (Roger Ebert, Jonathan Ross, Neil Roberts, Tom Charity, Philip French, and Jane Douglas)  give their brief interpretations of Mulholland Drive

All You Have to Do Is Dream – Interpretation of Mulholland Drive by Frederick Lane, a Freudian dream analyst, courtesy of salon.com; a fascinating article, although you’ll learn more about dream states than you will about the film

The Naughts: The Romantic Pair of the ’00s – Charles Taylor of the Independent Film Channel selects Betty and Rita as the emblematic romantic couple of the first decade of the 21st century

Sinnerbrink on Lynch -Cinematic Ideas: David Lynch’s _Mulholland Drive_ – An academic treatment of Mulholland Drive from philosophy professor Robert Sinnerbrink, originally published in “Film-Philosophy,” Vol. 9 No. 34, June 2005; insightful but very technical

The Madman and his Muse – From Film Score Daily comes this interview with composer and frequent Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, focusing on his relationship with the director as well as the score for Mulholland Drive

DVD INFO: As David Lynch eschews both director’s commentaries and chapter stops, the Universal DVD (buy) contains no special features beyond the original theatrical trailer and cast bios (including, of course, one for Robert Forster).  The film is also available for download or rental via video-on-demand services.

(This movie was nominated for review by “MtnGoat,” whgo one year ago complained about a “striking lack of David Lynch” on the site. 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.)

DIRECTED BY: Jeremy Kasten

FEATURING: Andras Jones, Seth Green, Jeffrey Combs, Beth Bates, Ted Raimi

PLOT: Awakening from a dream to find himself on an operating table, an amnesiac is

informed that he is a schizophrenic murderer who has been committed to a private institution and is now being sent to a halfway home—nicknamed “the House of Love”—to be rehabilitated.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: The Attic Expeditions sounds echoes of some (better) weird movies: Jacob’s Ladder (in the way that the script offers different possible explanations for the protagonist’s hallucinations, and jerks the viewer back and forth between those theories) and Donnie Darko (in that it seems the director intended to tell a fantastical story that “made sense” on a literal level, but lost control of the story when he took it one paradox too far).  An interesting, confusing, out-of-control picture, it’s as fascinating for its misses as for its hits.  It falls just short of a general recommendation, but it is recommended to anyone interested in psychological, mindbending horror seasoned with heaping doses of confusion and who isn’t a stickler for great acting.  This is the kind of curious, singular picture that could wind up filling one of the final slots in the List.

COMMENTS: Trevor Blackburn may be a schizophrenic murderer, or he may be an amnesiac sorcerer, or he may be the victim of an unethical psychological experiment; or he may be all three.  It’s impossible to tell, especially since The Attic Expeditions is full of contradictions and contains segments where the timeline suddenly resets and the action repeats itself with slight variations.  The mystery promiscuously throws out clues, but every possible explanation for Trevor’s woes seems chained to its own refutation.  Trevor is an unreliable narrator in triplicate: he’s a definite amnesiac, a possible schizophrenic, and, to top it all off, his state-appointed guardian appears to be deliberately playing with his loose grip on reality.  Psychiatrist Dr. Ek (played by Jefferey Combs as a variation on Herbert West as a pot-smoking, skin-popping headshrinker) uses Trevor as a case study for an experiment in housing madmen together, with hidden cameras studying their movements, “Big Brother” style.  Ek is either searching for a cure to schizophrenia, somehow, or else spying on Trevor to try to discover the occult secret locked away in his mind.  Trevor keeps having flashbacks to a bloody Crowley-esque sex and death ritual that ended the life of his girlfriend and sent him to the madhouse.  Of course, as the only convicted murderer in group therapy, suspicion naturally falls on him when his fellow residents start turning up dead.  Amateurish Andras Jones, unfortunately, wasn’t ready to play the tormented protagonist here; in fact, though cast as the lead, he may be the least expressive actor in the entire movie.  Fortunately, Seth Green is around as a fellow paranoid pensioner to take up the thespic slack. The twitchy Green has “R” and “L” written on the appropriate hand and shows an uncomfortable attraction to Trevor. He simultaneously feeds the recovering madman’s conspiratorial delusions by suggesting that everybody in his life may actually be an actor performing for his benefit; he simultaneously acts as Trevor’s only ally in the House of Love, encouraging him to explore the spooky attic with the locked chest that keeps showing up in Trevor’s nightmares. Inside that trunk lies either the traumatic secret to Trevor’s amnesia and lunacy, or else a paradox that will make your head spin and eyes roll. In the end, the film makes no sense, though it appears to want to believe in the occult resolution. What we get instead is the paradoxical spectacle of a movie that uses hallucinatory storytelling to mask and muddle a mystical but comprehensible plot, but botches the serious explanation by including too many leaps of logic and irreconcilable red herrings. The result is an irrational experience that’s legitimately, but not intentionally, a surrealist film. And, fortunately, there are a few great horror images embedded in the mess of a script: there’s little that’s more horrifying than the idea of suddenly waking up on an operating table and gazing up at nurses wearing non-standard uniforms—their faces unnecessarily masked by what appears to be fishnet mesh pantyhose with homemade eye holes cut into them. It’s shivery stuff, one of a set of curiosities that make Attic worth the expedition for horror fans who can overlook uneven acting and aren’t hung up on their nightmares making rational sense.

The Attic Expeditions script had an odd genesis that may help to explain its ramshackle and nearly incoherent final form. The screenplay began its life intended to be the fourth installment of the direct-to-video Witchcraft series, the soft porn/horror line that was a staple of video stores in the late Eighties and early Nineties. Director Jeremy Kasten though the script had potential to be more than just another sexy exploitation horror, so he sent the script to his film-school buddy and writing partner Rogan Marshall for retooling. Here, things get interesting. Marshall claims that he didn’t trust Kasten’s intellect and that he made the script deliberately hallucinatory and incoherent because he recognized that the director was only good at one thing: shooting dream sequences. Kasten, on the other hand, claimed in a podcast interview that Marshall’s script was written in five days, on drugs, and that he had to cut out a lot of the writer’s unsuitable ideas, as well as adding new central elements, like the character of Dr. Ek. So in the end, we may have three different visions of The Attic Expeditions embedded in the movie: Kasten’s occult puzzle fighting Marshall’s hallucinatory nonsense, with the ghost of the original “boobs and broomsticks” exploitation movie occasionally peeking through.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an overly ambitious slice of Grand Guignol that is none too grand in conception or execution… doesn’t make it as horror, sci-fi spoof or psychological thriller, despite strained efforts in each direction.”–Ken Eisner, Variety (contemporaneous)

(This movie was first nominated for review by “Holly,” who said “I love it every time I watch it; and it has always struck me as strange.” After the initial review disappeared, it was re-suggested by “engineerd2011″, who called it “a total mind trip…” Suggest a weird movie of your own).

DIRECTED BY: Calvin Reeder

FEATURING: Lindsay Pulsipher, Robert Longstreet

PLOT: A young woman blacks out after an automobile accident on a lonely rural road, and

wakes up in a nearly deserted world inhabited only by silent women in red robes, truck drivers with a taste for omelets and gasoline cocktails, and man-sized green Muppets.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Though not entirely successful, it’s the most dedicatedly weird surrealism/horror hybrid to come down that lonely pike in quite some time.

COMMENTS: Before The Oregonian screening at the Dallas Film Festival, an almost apologetic writer/director Calvin Reeder came out and told the audience that, if they were expecting to see a horror film, they would probably be disappointed.  He (accurately) described the movie as “a surrealist/experimental film with horror splashes” and confessed that previous screenings had seen “a lot of walkouts.”  A crowd of about 30 people was on hand.  Two people walked out about thirty minutes into the experience, during the “rainbow pee” sequence, a long bit where a bearded wheezing man stops by the side of the road to relieve himself, and his urine stream changes color from yellow to red to green to black.  (Ironically, this was possibly The Oregonian‘s best and funniest sequence, and the walkouts left before the punchline).   Three more patrons departed soon after, when, in response to the heroine’s desperate pleading for help, a man offers her omelet recipes instead.  After that exodus, the remainder of the audience seemed to settle in to the movie’s groove, bursting into laughter when omelet man disposes of eggshells in the toilet and gasping when the shapeless green puppet (which looks like an experiment in splicing the genes of Kermit the Frog with the Cookie Monster) suddenly appears behind the protagonist.  Still, not everyone could make it to the end; two more fled at about the one-hour mark, when the whole crew of accumulated weirdos (by this time the shapeless Muppet and omelet man have been joined by a gentle folksinger, a cigarette smoking man and a pair of robed women who don’t say anything but emit deafening screams) suddenly relocated the party from the Oregon woods to the Mojave desert, for no apparent reason.  None of the audience members left because the content playing on the screen was offensive or shocking; they simply beat it at the point when their personal tolerance for non-narrative noodling reached its breaking point.  The loud and deliberately abrasive, anxiety-provoking soundtrack—featuring eardrum piercing electronics, static, and ominous muddled whispering—did nothing to help keep butts in the seats (though this will probably be less of an issue on DVD when viewers can hit the mute button).  With its blond female protagonist wandering around in a world where nothing makes sense and reality continually resets itself, the touchstone The Oregonian brings to mind is David Lynch’s Inland Empire. But, not surprisingly, The Oregonian lacks that film’s multiple textures, and can’t capture Lynch’s magical ability to create a tantalizing sense of false coherence that keeps the audience’s minds spinning its wheels for 90 minutes.  Reeder tries to create a Lynchian wild goose chase through a flashback in the middle of the film: a dramatic scene from the moments before the Oregonian hit her head and lost her memory that introduces backstory in the form of a verbally abusive, paranoid lover.  For a while we think the story might suddenly be going somewhere, but it’s soon back on its random track.  For an episodic non-narrative film to succeed, it needs either a mock plot (even if that structure is a MacGuffin to hang weirdness on, like the spiritual journey up The Holy Mountain), or else nearly every sequence needs to be a standalone killer—pure weird gold.  The Oregonian achieves neither goal; there’s too much dead weight and filler, with scenes of the bloodied-up Pulsipher wandering around the (admittedly sublime) forests of the Pacific Northwest while eerie music plays, meeting weirdos whose eccentricities are only sporadically creepy.  Most of the visual tricks are fairly standard (superimposed images, fake film grain and quick edit montages), although the final effect where Pulsipher’s face boils is unique.  Still, though The Oregonian is not a complete success, you may want to check it out for a few standout bizarrities—the aforementioned “rainbow pee” sequence, the initial discovery of the giant frog puppet, and to see what that puppet does with a certain corpse—and because so few features these days are willing to go 100% weird.

Director Reeder previously directed several well-received surreal/horror shorts and was named one of Filmmaker Magazines “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2007.  Based on audience reaction and critical indifference, The Oregonian‘s prospects for theatrical distribution look dim.  I would expect it to eventually land on DVD, however, particularly if Lindsay Pulsipher’s star continues to rise (she currently has a recurring role in the hit TV series “True Blood.”)  In any event, The Oregonian is certainly the early leader for weirdest movie of 2011.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…starts off as an exercise in lead-footed David Lynch mimicry and heads downhill quickly. If it ever surfaces on video, the only viewers who will be impressed are those who’ve seen so little of the avant garde that its non-sequitur atrocities look like innovations.”–The Hollywood Reporter (Sundance screening)

FEATURING: Haji Suzuki, Onn-Chan

PLOT: Pinocchio 964, a malfunctioning sex slave, is thrown out onto the street by his

dissatisfied owner.  Without speech or memory he stumbles, literally, into the lap of an amnesiac woman, Himiko, who takes him home to care for him.  As her memory returns she undergoes a cruel personality change, returning Pinocchio to the mysterious corporation that made him.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: 964 Pinocchio is certainly weird, but doesn’t hang together as a totally coherent film.  However, days later, I was still thinking about it.  I don’t think that the film is a satisfying blend of the weird and the entertaining; in fact some sequences are seriously hard work.  Pinocchio deserves a second look in the future though, because odd and confusing as it was, distasteful as some scenes were, that sad sex slave worms his way into your mind.

COMMENTS: 964 Pinocchio is quite clearly a low budget film, but it is inventive, imaginative and uncompromising.  Many scenes are filmed guerrilla style, and I found myself looking sympathetically at the bemused bystanders during some of the full-on craziness.  A film which includes a three minute vomiting scene will not be to everyone’s taste; and it’s not as if that’s an uncharacteristic sequence.  964 Pinocchio is a wet, messy film throughout.  Pinocchio emits a flood of custardy mess from some unspecified point on his head; Himiko regurgitates mounds of porridgy vomit before rolling in it and re-ingesting it; the head of the company which made Pinocchio continually eats cherries from a bowl of spittle.  The film really screams in your face and refuses to apologize for any of its bizarre imagery.

The film introduces us to one of the two central characters, Pinocchio, as he flounders unwillingly in the middle of a M-F-F threesome.  It’s an unerotic sex scene intercut with shots of a man in vague surgical garb, a huge drill bit entering someone’s head, and a voice informing someone that their memory will not return.  The opening scene really lays the film’s cards on the table; it’s just going to get more confusing from here.  Thrown onto the streets for failing to perform sexually, Pinocchio stumbles into Himiko.  She’s sitting, looking through binoculars, and altering a map she’s making so that amnesiacs can find their way around the city.  She firmly rebuffs a crude sexual advance from a passerby but calmly adopts the lanky, dirty ex sex slave when he literally falls on her.  She takes him home, washes him, clothes him, feeds him, and attempts to teach him to speak.  It’s while washing him that she finds a tattoo on his back reading “Pinocchio,” which she assumes is his name.  Pinocchio and Himiko get to know each other and go out for dinner; in an amusing sequence they perform a pedestrian ram-raid on a supermarket, clearly disconcerting the staff.  Pinocchio’s memory and voice begin to return, and Himiko experiences brief flashbacks showing her as a nurse wielding a huge syringe.  Pinocchio has a fit of some sort and begins to spew a thick, yellow fluid from his head which solidifies, gluing him to the floor like a cut price version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian man.  Himiko also goes off the rails as her memory returns.  She experiences the aforementioned vomiting episode in a railway station underpass, calling to mind Isabelle Adjani’s experience in Possession.  Onn-Chan is certainly a gutsy performer, without an ounce of vanity.  Her wild prancing along rail station platforms and rolling in mounds of porridge aren’t performed on closed sets; she’s frequently surrounded by groups of startled, bemused commuters.  If she’s not making a public exhibition of herself then she’s generally shot with a wide angle lens practically up her nose.  Himiko unglues Pinocchio by apparently tossing a bucket of acid over him, tricks him into allowing himself to be shackled by her and drags him through the streets.  Pinocchio is bemused by her change of character, as is the viewer.  Did she work for the organization which makes the sex slaves?  Possibly; because she offers to help the cherry-chewing head honcho find his missing model.  The film climaxes with a lengthy sequence showing Pinocchio dragging a huge four sided pyramid through the streets.  White faced, bloody mouthed, with his little spike of hair discolored to a yellowy green, he looks like a Japanese Joker.  After an age he meets the team from the organization that has been searching for him and kills them.  The final meeting with Himiko is a literal face off.  Himiko tears off her own face and reveals a huge stone head which Pinocchio rips from her shoulders and places over his own head.

964 Pinocchio is certainly confusing, messy and distasteful in parts, but I didn’t hate it.  I couldn’t say, hand on heart, that I enjoyed it all, but there were aspects that charmed me.  The two central actors impressed me with their courage and commitment.  The sequence showing Himiko using a piece of jerky and a wooden spoon to try and teach Pinocchio his name amused me no end, as did the meal on the hoof at the supermarket.  This isn’t a film that I would watch often for entertainment, but I’m glad it’s there and I’m glad I’ve seen it.  Unlike many more beautiful, coherent, entertaining films, 964 Pinocchio has made me puzzle over it.  Why does the title screen read√964?  Pinocchio’s unhappy owner has a scantily clad female companion; she appears to have a name tattooed on her body.  Is she also a sex slave?  The chief of the organization searching for the missing Pinocchio says these slaves are human beings, and there is no indication at any time that the central character is a cyborg/android/robot of any kind.  Pinocchio is clearly not a regular human though, so what is he?  This is a film that raises a lot of questions and offers very few answers, and I ended up liking it despite myself.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a[n] experiential voyage into the crazed and surreal… not for everyone – in fact it’s for a select few. If you aren’t a fan of extreme horror, gruesome imagery, constant screaming, jagged camera work and intense emotions, this movie is probably not for you.”–”SAFM,” Cyberpunkreview.com (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

FEATURING: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

PLOT:  A man suffering from an inability to form short term memories hunts for his

wife’s murderer, relying on notes he leaves himself and important facts he tattoos on his body.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It isn’t weird.  Other than the unconventional narrative structure, Memento could even be viewed as a bit of hardcore realism.   But it is easy to see why lovers of the weird are attracted to it; the cloudy mystery that attaches to the story and its central cipher doesn’t lift until the very end, creating a disorientation that feels subjectively weird even though the story is actually firmly grounded in reality.

COMMENTS: Here, I’ll make it easy for you with this paragraph.  To appreciate just how intricately Memento is constructed, and how big of an accomplishment the movie is, try reading the sentences in a story or essay backwards, from the last to the first, and see how much sense they make and how satisfying the experience is.  This time, it’s executed flawlessly.  The movie is epistemologically pessimistic, but artistically invigorating; it’s one of those rare, unique plot hooks that come around once or twice a decade, and you can only hope the filmmakers don’t compromise and do invest the extra work required to pull it off.  It’s a simple concept but far more than a gimmick; the inversion of cause and effect works wonders.  Nothing distracts our attention from trying to unravel the puzzle.  The direction and the performances by the three principals are professionally transparent; the script is the star, as it should be in a mystery.  Leonard insists that memory is faulty, eye witness testimony is unreliable, and that the only thing he can depend on is facts—the notes he inks indelibly on his own body—but as the story works its way from the conclusion to the origin, we start to suspect that there may be nothing that we can accept at face value.  It quickly becomes apparent that it would be easy to manipulate someone with Leonard’s condition, and we have as much reason as he does to be suspicious of his two principal hangers-on: the unctuous Joe Pantoliano, who looks and acts like a small-time con-man, and beaten down (and beaten up) bartender Carrie-Anne Moss, whose seductive smile and distant eyes scream “femme fatale.”  To keep us as in the dark as Leonard is, Christopher Nolan tells his story in a series of flashbacks that continually move backwards in time; when the next scene begins, we’re thrown into the middle of the action with as little context as Leonard has.  But where did he get that nifty sports jacket, and his expensive sports car, and that scar on his face?  To figure out what’s going on, he relies on notes that he scrawls and checks wherever he can; whenever he meets someone new, he reaches into the pocket of his natty white coat and hopes to find a Polaroid with the stranger’s name and some pertinent information printed on it.  The one constant that sticks in his mind is that he’s hunting his wife’s killer; he’s tattooed the suspect’s name, along with numerous clues, onto his torso.  This is because he’s lost the ability to form short-term memories: after ten minutes or so, he forgets everything except for the facts he knew before a sap to the head sent him bonkers, and must reorient himself to the present.  When Leonard finds himself running through the rows of a trailer park parallel to another runner, he must calmly decide whether he’s doing the chasing, or whether he himself is being hunted down.  Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby has to overcome a handicap that would cause a lesser revenge killer throw up his hands in despair and take up an easier movie vocation, like becoming a ruthless rich bastard and trying to steal the heart of a woman away from a guileless nice guy by bolstering her misconceptions about his innocent kiss with a romantic rival.

Memento‘s uniqueness confounds the tagging system.  It’s not a typical amnesia movie—Leonard only forgets recent events, but he remembers his identity and purpose—but it shares enough similarities with amnesia movies to be listed alongside them.  Also,  it’s technically not a particularly nonlinear movie; only one important scene (shot black and white) occurs out of sequence.  Yet, anyone who’s looking for a nontraditional narrative structure would do themselves a disservice by skipping the brilliant Memento, which mucks up time but plays fair with the viewer according to its own set of rules.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…like an existential crossword puzzle, or a pungent 50′s B-thriller with a script by Jorge Luis Borges… a brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like ‘The Usual Suspects’ and ‘Pi.’”–A.O. Scott, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

FEATURING: Micheal Wrann, Kristina Powis

PLOT: An amnesiac wakes up from a coma; an internal trauma stemming from a

brutal, repressed tragedy is gradually revealed in scenes that mix flashbacks with uncertain reality.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a noble low-budget attempt, but it’s not distinctive enough, and not ready for big-time weirdness.

COMMENTS:  When I glanced at the back of the Burning Inside DVD case and saw that the running time was 120 minutes, I got an anxious feeling; I was afraid that I might end up trapped iside the work of a young director in love with his own vision, who didn’t know when to turn the camera off.  After watching the first scene—five minutes of a nurse shaving a comatose man—my suspicions were confirmed.  The man (known only as John Doe) awakens from his coma with a gasp; 15 minutes later, he hasn’t spoken and we haven’t learned anything at all about him.  30 minutes in, all that’s happened is that he’s drawn a mysterious picture on the wall.  By that time, most people will have given up on the movie, which is a bit of a shame because by the halfway point the pace picks up, the weirdness commences, and some interesting things start to happen: chief among them is a montage mixing a slaughter and a love scene, set to “Ave Maria” (the sudden introduction of music is jarring considering the near silence of the surrounding soundtrack).  Unfortunately, Burning Inside falls prey to a style-over-story fallacy that’s too common in the avant-garde: the filmmakers believe the atmosphere they’re creating is so intoxicating that viewers will want down time to breathe it in without the constant distraction of plot developments.  It ain’t so.  Visually, Burning Inside takes its cue from the grainy, high-contrast monochrome aesthetic of great weird films like Begotten and Pi (not to mention Eraserhead, from which Wrann also took the idea of using a far off industrial hum as sonic wallpaper).  Weird movie fans who’ve seen these black and white classics will feel they’re in a familiar landscape.  There are some very pretty shots along the way, including some bleak landscapes where the contrast is turned up so high the grass glows like snow, and some interesting uses of double images and dissolves (there’s a very effective dissolved where the protagonist appears to be going cross-eyed, until the image resolves and we see that another character has been sharing an eyeball with him).  Some sequences use a washed out color for contrast, as if we were looking at someone’s old Super-8 home films.  The attractiveness of the b&w cinematography is undermined at times by the grain added to the film, which looks blocky and pixelated and very obviously digital.  The performances are competently amateur for the most part, but star Michael Wrann, usually shown in a grimy wife-beater and two day growth of beard, has an effective presence: he displays the necessary mix of torment and menace, and remains enough of a cipher that we’re able to project imaginary tragedies on him.  He’s asked to over-emote at times, but he’s more effective when he stands unspeaking, grim and mysterious. Enough plot is eventually revealed to piece together a backstory, although there’s nothing especially shocking or surprising about the tale, and the viewer will still have to sort out what’s flashback and what’s fantasy.

Burning Inside has about 45 minutes of story to tell, but tries to cram that plot into 120 minutes of film. It could have been an effective mood piece at 80 minutes, and still have been a very leisurely tale with plenty of time for the viewer to soak up the atmosphere. This is a case where studio interference would have been a good thing: would the director really go to the mat for the extra three minutes of shaving footage? 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…Wrann’s style of filmmaking reminds me a lot of David Lynch’s, not for its weirdness, but in the way it stretches scenes and moments out to almost unbearable length – and yet I could not stop watching…  definitely a film worth seeking out, just don’t expect something you can watch with your friends and a six pack as part of a Friday night double feature; it isn’t a low budget slasher/monster flick, but a surreal trip through one man’s bent mind.”–Greg Lamberson, Fear Zone

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by Channel Midnight.

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …”–Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry

FEATURING: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson

PLOT: A shy introvert named Joel and a kooky gal named Clementine with ever-changing hair colors meet and fall in love.  After a fight Joel tries to reconcile, but discovers Clementine has availed herself of a strange and anachronistic mind-erasing technique to remove all memories of him; in a fit of pique and pain, he decides to undergo the same procedure.  But as Joel begins the erasure process, he realizes he doesn’t want to go through with it, and he travels through the landscapes of his memories to find and hold on to the rapidly vanishing Clementine.

BACKGROUND:

• Charlie Kaufman came up with the idea for this fascinating tale and co-wrote the script with the help of director Michel Gondry and obscure Parisian performance artist Pierre Bismuth.
• The title is taken from the classic Alexander Pope poem Eloisa to Abelard, which reflects a number of philosophical and emotional touchstones of the film.
• Before Jim Carrey expressed a desire to play Joel, the likeliest candidate for the part was Nicolas Cage (!)
• The scene where Mark Ruffalo scares Kirsten Dunst is completely genuine: director Gondry asked that before each take that Ruffalo hide in a different spot to really scare the pants off her!

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This bold and invigorating trip into the subconscious has a myriad of off-the-wall images that are sure to stick in your head. From faceless creatures to over-sized environments to entire train stations being drained of its inhabitants due to memory loss, there is a lot of weirdness going on here.  But as far as an indelible image, the one I pick is the simple scene in which Joel remembers when he and Clementine snuggle beneath an old ratty blanket and he consoles her after she recounts an intimate and revealing story about a doll she named after herself as a child.  As the memory seeps out of his head and Clementine’s body disappears, Joel crawls through the ratty blanket of his imagination begging to be able to hold on to this particular memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Any film birthed from the madcap imagination of Charlie

Original trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Kaufman and surreal visualist Michel Gondry has at least a pretty good shot of being kind of different.  But this movie in particular, a film about memories literally being erased from people like they were organic hard drives, really takes Kaufman’s dry strangeness and Gondry’s unhinged wild-eyed wonderment and melds it to a delightful perfection that muses on life while simultaneously compelling us with images of collapsing landscapes and Jim Carrey bathing in a sink.

COMMENTS: Some would say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie about
the heart, while others would say it’s about the mind, and still others would say it’s about the soul.  That so many people have such diverse opinions on it speaks volumes, especially when one considers the crux of the movie for a moment: Joel and Clementine are simply two lovers who have opted to forget about one another, albeit with their fair share of doubts left behind.  On the surface, it appears to be little more than a quirky romantic drama, and even with the fabulous imagery it still maintains its simple core of a love regretted.  What makes this different than something you would find in the indie film bargain bin is an intelligence and a philosophy behind it that not many other features can boast.

It is a film that speaks to the sad core of a relationship.  Joel and Clementine’s romance is dysfunctional in its optimism.  It is a love that is woefully mismatched and tries to work against it, and the film succeeds in showing the heartache of the divide between two very different people who care for each other.  Clementine is a punky extrovert, wearing her emotions on her sleeve with a loud mouth and wacky colored hair.  Joel is much more insular, opting to watch his carefree spirit from afar.  Their personalities don’t exactly compliment each other, which explains their later tensions and eventual dissolution.  Most films would gloss over the details of such a mismatch and assume that love conquers all, but the gulf between these two and how it weathers a love over time is a refreshingly realistic touch for a movie draped in the fantastique.

What a fascinating idea.  A concept like this, in the wrong hands, could have ended disastrously, but in the capable grasp of Gondry and wunderkind Charlie Kaufman, this film came out almost flawlessly.  You are transported to a world of dreamlike memories that fall away in the face of a procedure that begins to look more and more like a terrible mistake.  It’s as terrifying as it is tragic, and its inevitability bears down upon our hearts every second, even though we still secretly hope for a second chance between Joel and Clementine.  The world inside Joel’s mind is equally impressive as a visual spectacle.  The way the memories manifest themselves—be they half-remembered words and ideas, sketchy faces, childhood fears revisiting the adult manifestation of Joel, or endless loops of seemingly unimportant details—all are lovingly rendered in a style that is both technically impressive and emotionally stirring.

This sumptuous feast for the mind is bolstered by breakout performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.  While I never expected any less from real-deal actress Winslet, Carrey genuinely surprised me.  As Joel, he made me feel so deeply for him that it shook me to my core as an ol’ softie.  There is such a vulnerability there that I never saw before, never would have imagined before.  He changed my opinion of him forever with this role, and for the first time I can look at Jim Carrey with unbiased eyes as a seriously talented actor with a range that can be aptly described as phenomenal.  But let’s not forget that Kate deserves her due for being half of this curious relationship.  Clementine is a free-spirit who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like boundaries, and it hurts her when Joel seeks to reign her in.  There are a number of scenes here in which she showcases an emotional range that solidifies her as one of the greatest actresses of this decade, and even with badly-dyed blue hair I can take a woman like her seriously.

But the peripheral characters also take us aback with their complex lives.  Lacuna Inc., the shady company that erases people’s memories, has an incredibly strange staff that somehow pull off the illusion that it’s a well-run, totally professional business, when in reality it’s the medical equivalent of hiring someone to steal all the photos in your wallet.  Headed up by Dr. Wierzniak and his assistant Mary, Lacuna uses some strange technology to do their dirty work, sending out slacker techies to make house calls and erase people’s memories from the comfort of their own home.  One of the technicians even tries dating Clementine by using the memories takes from Joel as he is erasing them!  Seedy, but it’s not nearly as bad as the relationship between the doctor and his assistant, which makes for some compelling drama.  The climactic scene between those two will have you aching for these characters, basking in their tragic realities.

So in the end, whether Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about the heart, the mind, or the soul, its expressive visuals and its candid storytelling weave an emotionally ecstatic film that will leave you fascinated and captivated.  It is an experience that you will want to hold onto in your memories for as long as you can.

366weirdmovies adds: Sunshine proposes a brilliantly simple “what if” scenario— “what if you could completely erase the memory of your ex-lover?”—that is a universal daydream of everyone who’s ever been on the “dumpee” side of a dumping. The movie gives an answer that rings emotionally true, and is at the same time shamelessly romantic, life-affirming, and melancholy. In a crucial way, it’s irrelevant whether Joel and Clementine get together and live happily ever after; the key triumph is when Joel decides he doesn’t want to forget, when he decides the temporary pain of their breakup shouldn’t be allowed to betray the beauty of their shared past, decides he’d prefer to stumble down the hard path to recovering from heartbreak than to take a shortcut that would wipe out something precious. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Synechdoche New York) is often accused of being overly intellectual, distant and tricky; this is his most emotionally authentic and sincere script, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the one that’s fervently embraced by the widest audience. It’s an amazing and affecting movie, even if you’re not a fan of strange cinema.

As far as weird goes, I find it to be starter-level stuff, more speculative and offbeat than surreal. There is some delightfully resolved confusion resulting from playing around with the timeline, and Gondry’s set-pieces have a music-video type of oddness to them, but once the impossible premise is established the story plays out with a relentless narrative logic. Still, it’s within the weird genre, however tenuously, and it’s such a lovely and beloved movie that I’m afraid readers would hang me in effigy if I denied it it’s rightful place on the List of 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. It’s a great entry point into the deranged cinema of Kaufman and his bizarre cinema kin; starting from here, you can branch out into ever-weirder vistas.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the director always insists on an excess of surreality by pedantically realising visually every strange detail of Joel’s memory-angst… All very wacky and Dick Lester-ish, like a grad-school Beatles movie, and for about five or ten minutes it’s funny and exhilarating. But it’s over-extended, and tends to undermine the rigorous realism which made the idea funny.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

“Filled with the writer’s trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it’s a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“In this season of abundance for amnesiac romances, Eternal Sunshine – with its laughs and its weirdness and its contemplation of some of the big issues regarding memory and identity – is the hands-down winner… a delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Focus Features – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

IMDB LINK: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Lacuna Inc. – the fake website for the memory-erasing corporation of Eternal Sunshine that was part of the original marketing campaign for the movie

Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Essay – In-depth meditation by Roger Ebert as to what makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind such a classic.

The Science of Memory Loss – Slate.com chimes in with an intriguing essay about the realities behind the Eternal Sunshine ”memory erasure” technique.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at Being Charlie Kaufman – A fansite devoted to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Here you can find stills, fan art, audio, video, and even drafts of scripts from Eternal Sunshine.

Christian Review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – An… interesting take on the film from an interesting source!

DVD INFO: The original one-disc edition of this DVD (buy), which is incidentally the one I saw, isn’t incredibly flattering as far as the special features go, but I have seen much worse.  It comes with a Michel Gondry-Jim Carrey interview, which is playful but uneventful, some pretty good deleted and alternate scenes, a fake commercial for Lacuna Inc., and a terribly banal music video for a song The Polyphonic Spree lent to the film. The commentary is an acquired taste, but absolutely seminal if you like your commentary tracks. It’s performed by Kaufman and Gondry, and while it’s really quite informative, it sounds a bit like the David Lynch short The Cowboy and The Frenchman. Kaufman is very droll and American, Gondry is very giggly and French, so it makes for an interesting pairing in the recording booth when they’re both trying to relay their own experiences. Recently, a two-disc edition has emerged that blows the previous version out of the water (buy). It contains an “Anatomy of a Scene,” sit-downs with various cast members, some featurettes, and even a screenplay book! If you can, I would buy that edition, but for the filmgoer on a budget, the standard edition is more than adequate. Eternal Sunshine is also available on Blu-ray (buy) and as a rental on Amazon’s video on demand (rent).

FEATURING: Kôji Yakusho, Masato Hagiwara

PLOT:  A detective with a mentally ill wife seeks to solve a series of murders committed

by ordinary people, each of whom has come into contact with a strange, amnesiac man.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: There’s no doubt Cure is a weird one, what with its unexplained creatures tied to shower rods, its ambiguous antagonist, and its head-scratching ending.  It’s also a good psychological thriller, but it doesn’t quite throw the knockout punch needed to give it an undisputed place on the 366 weirdest movies of all time (although I admit the general critical consensus disagrees with that position).  Cure does seem like a movie that could well age into an outstanding vintage if it’s left to ferment in the cellar of the viewer’s subconscious for a time, which is why I suspect I’ll be returning to sample it again someday.

COMMENTS:  Cure is a movie that seeks to sink into the lowest, darkest depths of the human subconscious and wallow there.  It’s no doubt an intriguing, and a weird, movie, but I found it somewhat unsatisfying by the end: it pulls itself apart by moving in too many different directions.  The premise is that ordinary people commit atrocious murders, using the same modus operandi, an “X” cut into their victim’s chest.  Their reactions after they’re apprehended vary from maniacal bereavement to calm detachment, but the perpetrators uniformly report that their horrific actions seemed normal at the time.  The tie that binds these unwitting criminals together is that they’ve all encountered Mr. Mamiya, an amnesiac young man who has a short-term memory span somewhere between thirty seconds and one minute, and who answers almost every question put to him with the same response: “Who are you?”

On one obvious thematic level, the film deals with the question of identity, although it does so superficially (i.e., “who is” Takabe, really: the single-minded professional, or the devoted husband selflessly caring for his mentally ill wife?)  Much more interesting than those speculations is the mysterious dynamic between Mr. Mamiya and those he encounters.  With no memory or personal history, Mamiya is a blank slate, but he manages to reflect the darker impulses of whatever unfortunate he talks to.  Strangely, Detective Takabe seems to be the only one who’s able to resist Myami’s baleful influence: but of course we ask ourselves–can he really?  Takabe’s explosive confrontation with a chillingly calm Myami in a strangely lit hospital cell is the dramatic, and the dreamlike, highlight of the film.  Myami’s character is more interesting in the early reels, when he seems an innocent bringing destruction instinctively, without intent or reflection; as his character grows more obliquely sinister, he loses some of his power.

A late-blooming subplot/possible red herring involving a Japanese cult of mesmerists offers a possible solution to the mystery for the literal minded, but distracts from the more interesting psychological angle.  After building a pleasantly sickening tension, I found that Cure let me down in the curiously rushed climax that ends with a notoriously ambiguous final scene.  I don’t mind the ambiguity in the ending per se:  it works on Kurosawa’s intended thematic level.  I wasn’t grabbed by the director’s invitation to muse about what “really” happened on the plot level, though there’s ample room for argument on that score for interested parties.  But I felt let down, even cheated, on a dramatic level, because the movie suddenly snaps to the credits unexpectedly, without a chance for any real emotional closure or reflection.

It’s worth mentioning that this movie was released only two years after the sarin gas attacks on Tokyo subways.  The idea of seemingly ordinary people manipulated by a mystical, cultlike figure into committing horrific crimes would have had a much greater resonance with a Japanese audience viewing the picture in 1997 than it would to a DVD audience lacking that immediate subtext.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Cure delves ever further into abstraction as it goes along, casting its own hypnotic spell and inviting as many interpretations as a Rorschach inkblot. Kurosawa approaches the story—and, in effect, his country’s existential crisis—as a mystery to be pursued but not resolved, at least in any conventional sense. It may take several viewings to come to terms with Cure‘s loose ends and psychological intrigue, but the film is seductive enough to warrant them.”–Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club (DVD)

This film was nominated for review by reader “Richard L.“. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.” 

–Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” (quote originally intended to introduce Archangel)

DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Kyle McCulloch, Kathy Marykuca

PLOT: In 1919, one-legged Canadian airman Lt. John Boles finds his way to the Russian port of Archangel in the endless night of Arctic winter.  There, he meets Veronkha, whom he believes to be the reincarnation of Iris, his dead love.  Veronkha has problems of her own, in the form of an amnesiac husband who wakes up every day believing this is the day they are to be wed, but Boles tires to woo her nevertheless as Archangel’s ragtag militia battles the Germans and the Bolsheviks without realizing that both World War I and the Russian Revolution are over.

BACKGROUND:

• The city of Archangel was the port of entry for Allied soldiers during World War I; therefore, soldiers from America, Canada, and the European allies might very well have been found gathered there (although probably not East Indians and Congolese, as depicted in the film).  Many Allied soldiers were sent to Russia, partially to help assist the Imperial (White) Russians against the Bolshevik Communist rebels (Reds). 
• Some reports say that the version presented on the “Guy Maddin Collection” DVD is a different cut from the theatrical and original VHS version, with tinting and intertitles added.  I haven’t been able to confirm whether differences exist.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  As his dying act, a lifelong coward strangles a bestial Bolshevik with a length of his own intestine (which is obviously a sausage link). 

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The tale of an obsessive, grieving soldier who thinks he’s found

Short clip from Archangel (French subtitles not in original)

the reincarnation of his lost love in a benighted Russian city where the citizens continue to fight a war that is over would be weird enough if told straight.  Director Guy Maddin exaggerates the already dreamlike quality of this tale by clothing it in the archaic period dress of an early sound film, complete with intertitles describing the action, dubbed voices that are occasionally slightly out of sync, and casually disorienting jumps/glitches in the film.  He pushes this inherently confusing story of terminally confused characters further into strange realms with deliberately surreal elements, such as women warriors going to the front dressed in elegant evening headwear, and even odder sights.

COMMENTS: The city of Archangel seems the perfect place to dream.  Isolated from the world by geography, blanketed in the winter darkness of the Arctic circle, it’s a netherworld for lost souls.  Nothing done inside the city’s radius matters outside: the town’s entire reason for being is to fight wars that are already decided.  It’s the perfect stopover for one-legged Lieutenant John Boles, whose reason for living disappeared into a pit of darkness along with an urn of ashes falling from the deck of a steamer.  Reality’s grip on this town is loose; here, it seems the impossible may become real.  Here, it may be possible to forget. 

This bleak town, with its onion spires, Orthodox icons, and snowy tundra blanketed in inky darkness, deserves to be depicted in black and white.  It also should be a place of great silences, where every whisper is in danger of being blown under a snowdrift and buried forever.  The setting is a perfect match for Guy Maddin’s melancholy style, which focuses on recreating the bleak and distressed look and feel of films of the 1920s as they make the transition from silents to sound pictures.  Archangel is a successful, often poetic film, although a difficult one for viewers who require a straightforward plot.

As much as Maddin’s fondness for silent film styles matches Archangel‘s mood, however, his penchant for surrealism occasionally subtracts something from the dream.  Played straight, but filmed in the style of an Eisenstein or a von Stroheim, the scenario of an obsessed man who believes he has found the reincarnation of his lost love in this absurd dream city could have carried the weight of a classical tragedy, while still maintaining more than enough subtle weirdness to push it over the edge.  But Maddin must push the envelope and add irrational, confusing details to the dream.  Sometimes, as is the case with the doctor’s tale of the outrageously Freudian origin of Philbin’s amnesia, or the assault of bunny rabbits in the trenches which turns out to have a logical if implausible cause, Maddin’s tricks work a charm.  At other times, like the disastrous tangent involving an exploding cactus coupled with risible animation, or the distracting blue and orange tinting that suddenly appears two-thirds of the way through the movie and disappears just as quickly, his experiments fail and are nothing more than gratuitous.  It’s almost as if Maddin uses surrealism here to periodically distance himself from the heavy emotional core of the film.  Such inexplicable things happen in dreams from time to time, it’s true, but in this film they often interrupt the spell being cast.  There’s an aura of parody here that undermines rather than lightens the sincere misery of the plot.            

One place where Maddin allows himself to be unexpectedly, unabashedly romantic is in the climax of the subplot involving the cowardly father and the son who disdains him.  It’s a surprisingly moving sequence, and it serves an important emotional purpose in providing one happy ending (even if it is post-mortem) for Archangel’s denizens, who are otherwise fated for sad ends.  

Some commentators stress that every character in Archangel suffers at some point from a form of amnesia.  While this is true of Philbin and Veronkha, the exact opposite is true of Lt. Boles: he suffers from the curse that he can’t forget Iris.  The mustard gas of the Huns makes Philbin relapse into a happy amnesia, but the one-legged lieutenant gets no such relief when he’s gassed: he remembers his painful existence more keenly than ever, recalling “My name is John Boles.  I’m in Archangel.  Fighting a war.  I’m trying to find the woman I love.  Iris!” 

Where the other characters are trapped by their forgetfulness, Boles is trapped by his persistent memory, which is so powerful and painful that it causes him to willfully misperceive reality: to believe that Veronkha is his dead beloved, and to go so far as to try, like a less ethical version of Vertigo‘s Scottie Ferguson, to trick her into entering his fantasy world.  Philbin and Veronkha, like the Archangel militia who fight wars without knowing they are over, are innocent in their ignorance, but Boles is culpable in his knowledge.  Philbin may cheat on his Veronkha, but it’s an innocent betrayal: it’s only because he forgets his wife’s very existence, so every woman he sees is like the first he has ever seen.  When Boles beats Philbin for flirting with Veronkha, he knows that his American rival is faultless; even if Veronkha doesn’t love her husband, he can’t be blamed for his illness that makes him believe its their wedding day.  The audience forgives Boles because we too feel the depths of his grief, but throughout the film Boles, the hero, is the one who consistently does wrong—motivated by his painful memory.     

Boles swoons and seems to fall into a dream the first time he sees Veronkha, the image of his beloved.  In his dream, he can temporarily forget Iris is dead (although the urn of her ashes pops up unexpectedly at times, as if bubbling up from Boles’ own subconscious).  To forget her death, though, he must convince Veronkha to play along with the fantasy family he creates; but she is destined to reconcile with her true husband, reliving the flight to her wedding bed over and over, trying over and over to get that night right.  In the end, Boles must awake from his dream and abandon his impossible hope of reconciling with the dead.  The final shot—significantly, the only daytime scene in the film—is heartbreaking; Boles at home, at a hero’s parade, mobbed by grateful patriotic beauties, his face blank and haunted, remembering only that he has lost Iris–twice.  

Boles craves the blissful forgetfulness enjoyed by Philbin, where every new day is again the happiest day of his life.  But when Archangel dips its lieutenant briefly in the river Lethe, it holds him firmly by the heel, only to yank him out at the last reel.  Dreams are short; the only eternal forgetfulness is death.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The ludicrous story of ‘Archangel’… matters much less than the archaic style in which it is told. From its flickering, inky cinematography to its wavering late 1920′s-style sound track, to Veronkha’s kohl-eyed vampish look, the movie is an expert parody of a period movie style.” –Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“The characters move in a surreal, fogbound atmosphere of hazy unease; this is a place where fuzzy bunnies rain down into the Russian trenches while the German invaders feast on the throats of their slaughtered enemies. At once perplexing and joyous, Maddin has crafted a film that, for all the confusion inherent in the tale, unfolds on its own unique (and rather tedious) terms. Love it or hate it, this is one film that just doesn’t give a damn what you think.” –Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“Maddin pokes fun at virtually every period propaganda, romantic, and combat cliché, capturing the iconography of that distant age with tireless precision via flash cards, ponderous voice-overs, deliberately unsynched dialogue, and hyperbolic imagery… Anyone looking for an affectionate skewering of the brand of antique-flicks they sat through in college film courses or at retro theaters should deem Archangel a subversive treat.” –Joe Kane, The Phantom of the Movies’ Videoscope

IMDB LINK: Archangel (1990)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Archangel Page at the Canadian Film Library

DVD INFO: Archangel is available on the DVD, “The Guy Maddin Collection” (buy), along with the feature film Twilight of the Ice Nymphs and the award-winning short The Heart of the World.  The DVD also includes a short clip from the documentary Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight and audio commentaries with the director (and others) on the two features.