Content Warning: This short contains brief drug use and violence.

DIRECTED BY: Kiyoshi Kurosawa

FEATURING: Haruhiko Katô, Kumiko Asô, Koyuki

PLOT: A computer expert’s suicide is the first in a series of mysterious events and

disappearances that leave Tokyo, and the world, depopulated; is a website that dials up people on its own and asks if they want to meet a ghost responsible?

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s creepy and weirder than the average scare flick, but Pulse is tuned to the standard turn of the millennium J-horror wavelength.  It’s a good watch for fear fans, and a seminal one for Asian New Wave horror followers, but it doesn’t go that extra weird mile.  Kurosawa’s ambiguous horror/detective procedural Cure (1997) makes for a better bizarre candidate.

COMMENTS: Pulse slips so quietly from reality to strangeness that you hardly recognize the transition; one minute, you’re watching its characters going about their daily lives, dealing with unexpected suicides and alarming computer viruses, and the next minute the world is almost deserted and ruled by ghosts.  The theme of this horror movie is not really fear but loneliness, and how technology fosters isolation more than cures it.  The film is not too subtle in delivering that message.  A plague of ghosts seems to spread via a computer website; one character immediately diagnoses a low-tech character’s sudden interest in the Internet as a desire to connect with his fellow man; a spirit tells the protagonist “death was eternal loneliness” from inside a foil-lined room.  Even scenes occurring before people start disappearing en masse are shot in disconcertingly deserted urban settings, on empty streets and buses and in lonely apartments.  Characters discuss the difficulty humans have making deep and lasting connections, while simultaneously hungering, struggling, and failing to form those bonds with each other.  Those who encounter one of the malevolent spirits in Pulse go through a syndrome (ghost traumatic stress disorder?) that involves locking themselves inside a room alone and sealing the door with red tape.  What the movie intends to say on the metaphorical level is very clear; what’s a little more confused is what’s supposed to be happening on the literal level.  We get half-baked exposition regarding the mechanics of the ghost world, but the spirits’ malevolent motives aren’t ever clearly explained, and it’s not at all certain how all the pieces are supposed to fit together.  If, as one sage tells us, the dead are now leaking into our world because theirs has exceeded its capacity, how do they benefit from convincing the living to kill themselves?  Wouldn’t that just worsen their overpopulation problem?  If the spirits of the dead have no place to go, shouldn’t the world be overrun with ghostly presences, rather than empty?  What purpose in setting up the spectral website that dials up users on its own—other than to scare a technophobic audience?  The movie glosses over answers to these questions, which does make it feel like a weirder endeavor; in this case, however, it seems the material might benefit from a fairer stab at clarity.  But Kiyoshi (no relation to Akira) Kuroswa is all about atmosphere, and he’s an expert at conjuring it.  The long lonely narrative spaces are broken up by several memorable moments, including glitchy technostrangeness involving a metaphysically malfunctioning webcam with a distorting lens, bizarre broadcast television interference from the Beyond, people who melt into black smudges on the wall, and a genuinely frightening trip inside “The Forbidden Room” to discuss matters of mortality with the death’s head who dwells therein.  Mood, not logic or even philosophy, is the glue that holds the movie together, and while it isn’t the horror masterpiece it might have been if that atmosphere was yoked to a better story, it works well on the shiver-inducing level.

The dumbed-down 2006 Hollywood remake with Kirsten Bell, part of a trend of bastardized American remakes of J-horror classics, was widely despised by critics and audiences alike.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…dolorous, shivery, and surreal.”–Wesley Morris, Boston Globe (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Spike Spencer, Allison Keith-Shipp (English dub)

PLOT:  Following the events of Evangelion 1.11, the Angel incursions against Tokyo-3 increase

in intensity, and two new teenage Evangelion pilots are integrated into the NERV defense team.  Also, the world ends, I think.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  What to do with Evangelion?  A combo teen soap opera/end-of-the-world saga starring giant robots, the series is weird, but in a way that’s actually sort of conventional (in anime terms).  Even worse, there are now four movies (and a long running TV series) telling essentially the same story—with two more on the way.  Should all the movies make the List?  None?  Only the weirdest one?  Whatever the case, I don’t think this installment is capable of being counted among the best weird movies ever made; but I’m also thankful we get to defer the issue until we’ve checked out the series’ entire run.

COMMENTS:  Here’s a typical battle between an Angel (periodically appearing bad guy) and an Evangelion (giant robot that can only be piloted by a teenager).  Battleships fire pink and yellow shells at the Angel, a wire-frame robot with a pendulum hanging between its legs, as it marches towards them, instantly freezing the blood red sea with every stride and leaving a huge snowflake as a footstep.  It shoots laser beams from a globe and blows the battleships, causing the scarlet water to erupt into cross-shaped spouts.  A warplane drops a giant robot (hereafter “Eva”); it evades the green-tipped black lines the Angel fires at it as it falls.  The Eva blows up the Angel with a gun, but it immediately reconstitutes itself.  The Eva next stomps on the Angel’s laser-firing spike, which causes translucent pink and yellow auras to fill up the sky.  Eventually the Eva’s foot forces the spike all the way into its command globe, and the Angel explodes into a pink cross.  Each melee shot lasts for a second or less, increasing the confusion as to what the hell is supposed to be going on.  In Evangelion Angels can take any form, including scuttling robots with dinosaur-skull heads and 1970s-era Pink Floyd laser light shows, and they operate according to rules that are never explained.  (I’m fairly sure the Angels have no actual protocols or limitations—they simply perform whatever act the director thinks will look most awesome at the moment).  The fight scenes are psychedelically beautiful; but the overall plot is about as muddled as an Eva/Angel smackdown.  Viewers hoping for clarification on what the Angels (or the Evas, for that matter) actually are should steel themselves for further confusion and hints of biblical conspiracy instead.  By way of exposition, NERV chief and jerkwad pop Gendo explains, “Our only desire is the true Evangelion.  It’s awakening will coincide with the resurrection of Lilith and usher in the Time of the Covenant. It is crucial that the necessary rites be performed by then, for the sake of the Human Instrumentality Project.”  As wimpy teen hero Shinji responds after his father delivers a generically profound—but in on way on-target—speech about sacrificing for your dreams, “You say that, but I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.”  You also may not even know what scraps of dialogue like “I prefer the living chaos of man, instead of this barren wasteland of death” and “it’s transcending the boundaries of humanity!” are supposed to mean, either.  It’s easier to follow the soap opera side of the story, which in this second installment explores a developing love triangle between emo Shinji, mysteriously catatonic, blue-haired Rei, and brash newcomer Asuka, a blue-eyed, Japan-insulting American hottie with a love-hate thing for Shinji and a hate-hate thing for Rei.  Complicating the sexual dynamic is the fact that Shinji is terrified of the fairer sex.  And you would be too, if you were him: naked women kickbox him in the head, and when he’s just minding his own business random babes parachute down from the sky and smother him with their cleavage.  Although Shinji has grown up a tiny amount since the prior episode, and no longer spends the entire movie moping in his room, his shameless self-absorption in his morass of daddy issues is still the primary obstacle for adults (and well-adjusted teens) to enjoying the series.  How can you root for a character who refuses to stop the apocalypse because he’s off throwing a tantrum?  If you’re in tune with anime conventions, or only crave eye candy and fanservice, you’ll see Evangelion as a paragon of the art form.  It’s not a crossover series that will entice the average adult viewer, however.

I originally understood this second cinematic version of the Evangelion saga was to be a straightforward quartet, but according to Twitch’s Ard Vijn (who knows a lot more about these things than I do), the reality is far stranger.  First, despite the unanswered questions, the storyline is apparently complete with this second film (!)  Secondly, there will be two more episodes, which will cover the same events, but from different characters perspectives (!!)  Sometimes I can’t decide whether I’m more confused watching an Evangelion movie, or trying to sort out the chronology and canonicity of this sprawling franchise.  The series seems to be stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fever dream for sure, but one that has been lovingly embellished with details and technically polished until it has become its own weird-yet-beautiful thing.”–Ard Vijn, Twitch (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

FEATURING: Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kiefer Sutherland, Alexander Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt

PLOT: A young woman grapples with serious depression on her wedding day, causing rifts in her already-tempestuous family relationships. Meanwhile, a planet known as Melancholia is making its way towards Earth.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Von Trier’s rumination on the end of the world is for the most part surprisingly understated, incorporating surrealistic imagery here and there but primarily relegating itself to a realistic study of a family in crisis with a science-fiction background.

COMMENTS: Opening with breathtaking slow-motion shots of a dreamlike apocalypse set to a bombastic Wagner score, Melancholia begins with the promise of something literally earth-shattering. Its ambition and scope seem far-reaching and all-encompassing, much like Malick’s confused 2011 offering The Tree of Life. Shifting to close-quarters shaky cam as the focus moves to new bride Justine’s wedding party, Melancholia becomes an investigation of her debilitating depression and how most of her wealthy, bitter family is unsympathetic. The second half keeps the setting of an isolated mansion inn, but puts the spotlight on sister Claire, whose extreme anxiety is increased by the foreboding presence of the incoming planet.

As the promise of a visually and thematically grandiose event lingers over the film’s proceedings, von Trier endeavors to first fully establish his characters and their relationships. We spend a lot of time with these people, seeing their connections and lack thereof, slowly understanding their underlying flaws and neuroses. The looming threat of complete world destruction is barely acknowledged during the first half as the script is absorbed in Justine’s efforts to hide her disease and Claire’s concern for keeping up appearances. It’s meandering and slow-moving, but the strong lead performances from Dunst and Gainsbourg—along with a charismatic supporting turn from Sutherland—are engaging enough to keep things interesting until the apocalypse strikes.

Because we spend so much time with these characters beforehand, their plight at the end is felt all the more acutely. Seeing how these women lived—raised in wealth but suffering internally (all very Salinger-esque)—is such an intimate experience that it’s hard to not feel involved personally. The planet Melancholia itself is truly an awesome sight, eerie and intimidating, seeming to affect the actors internally and causing a few mouths to open in the audience.  Of course, the ear-shattering Wagner orchestration helps build the intensity.

Weird movie fans will surely appreciate the gorgeous surrealistic imagery peppered throughout, but at its heart Melancholia is a serious examination of mental illness and family ties in the shadow of a cataclysmic event.

G. Smalley adds: Melancholia is an intensely metaphorical movie, but it is essentially a more conventional, dramatic reworking of the theme of clinical depression vonTrier explored in the weirder, more outrageous Antichrist.  The two movies contain common themes and a similar look (I was surprised to discover that they had different cinematographers), but they are so different in their approach that I’m not sure liking one will predict how you’ll react to the other.  In fact, I suspect that many of the people now singing the praises of Melancholia were the ones complaining the loudest at Antichrist and von Trier’s descent into “torture porn.”  Melancholia is strong throughout, but I found the opening the most astounding part.  It’s a six-minute super slow motion surrealistic montage that manages to enrapture while featuring characters and events about whom we know nothing yet.  It opens with a shot of a devastated-looking Kirsten Dunst with dead birds falling in the background, and includes what may be my favorite image of the year: Dunst trudging through a forest glade in her white wedding gown, dragging behind her a train of huge vines tied to her ankles and waist.  The slow motion photography is technically amazing; sometimes you believe you’re looking at a still photograph until you see a foot lift, and at other times it seems figures in the foreground and background are moving at different rates.  It’s thrilling (to me, at least) to see a director who once advocated stripping film down to its basics (the short-lived “Dogme 95″ movement) now embracing the full operatic range of cinematic tools.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In many ways this bizarre, nihilistic meditation is a dreary, redundant, pretentious bore… On the other hand, the magnificent, ethereal visuals/special effects are haunting, particularly the opening collage which compresses the entire story.”– Susan Granger, SSG Syndicate

DIRECTED BY: Written by Vernon Chatman, directed by “Ike Sanders” and three other uncredited directors

FEATURING: Twelve amateur porn stars

PLOT: After a prologue explains that the atom bomb is about to drop, we’re shown a family of three (mother, father and adult daughter) sitting around a kitchen table, deciding that they will stay and “die with dignity.”  The mother and daughter give birth to various food items and the father tires to climb back into the womb, and then daughter relates a dream.  We see a mushroom cloud, then another trio of actors in a different apartment who believe they are in the afterlife: they recite more humorous nonsense about God, death and the apocalypse and enact more bizarre skits before the action shifts to another trio in a different room, then another…

BACKGROUND:

• Vernon Chatman made Final Flesh by submitting scripts to four different amateur porn production companies that specialize in acting out their client’s fantasies.  The scripts were submitted between 2002 and 2009, so the film was actually 7 years in the making.
• Chatman is a stand-up comic and Emmy-winning television writer.  He wrote for “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” and “The Chris Rock Show” before co-creating the short-lived, weird cult TV series “Wonder Showzen” and “Xavier: Renegade Angel.”  He’s most famous for his work with “South Park,” where he provides the voice of “Towelie,” the pot-smoking towel.
• Chatman is a member of the Brooklyn-based art collective PFFR, who produce music, art, and short films.  The first segment of Final Flesh was made as a short film for a PFFR art show, and although the final project was Chatman’s work alone, it was still released under the PFFR umbrella.
• Final Flesh is distributed by Drag City, an independent music label that has only recently branched out into underground film (and may have given up that side-business already).  Drag City’s other 2009 movie release, Trash Humpers, hogged the company’s headlines when it became a minor cause célèbre after Netflix refused to stock it.  Final Flesh received relatively little promotion, despite the fact that Netflix declined to carry it, as well.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: For Final Flesh, we’re going to break with tradition and provide four different “indelible images,” one from each segment of the film.  A girl breastfeeds a porterhouse steak; a woman in a jeans, a tank-top and a skull mask threatens a man on his deathbed; a couple make out by mashing the skulls drawn on their backs together; a young lady in black lingerie performs a wedding ceremony on two corpses lying side by side.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  The conceptual art premise of sending a non-erotic script to be

Short clip from Final Flesh

acted out by pornstars-for-hire might be weird enough, but when that apocalyptic screenplay requires the bemused amateur actors to bathe in the tears of neglected children and recite lines like “I just creamed my demon” after being slapped, we’ve traveled beyond the snarkily experimental into the realm of the existentially deranged.  All the world’s a stage and these men and women play many parts; if some of those roles require them to pour ketchup in a conch shell and poke at it with a turkey baster while moaning orgasmically, then maybe that’s just how this universe rolls.

COMMENTS: In porn, when a woman wiggles and says “oh my God, there’s something going on in my panties!” the viewer expects a certain result to follow.  To say that Final Flesh “subverts” those expectations would be to just barely scratch the surface of what’s going on here.  The script shatters the viewer’s erotic assumptions, then holds the broken shards to his jugular and demands that he laugh at them.  Using the slipshod craftsmanship of shoot-to-order pornography as a metaphor for a shoddily constructed universe, Final Flesh is actually a comedy of despairs where the Bomb is perpetually falling, God imprisons families in apartments and slips notes under the door, actors stumble over unfamiliar words, and the director can sometimes be heard calling out “action!”

What actually happens after the starlet complains of agitation in her undies is that she reaches under her skirt and pulls out an egg.  “I’ve laid an egg!  This is so hot!,” she exclaims joyfully, and begins to kiss and lick it.  “Umm, let me get in on some of that!” says her mom, coming over to where daughter is seated and extending her tongue.  Is anyone getting turned on by this?  Final Flesh continues in this vein, mixing absurdism with sexuality, and exploring Vernon Chatman’s laundry list of activities that superficially look like fetishes but turn out to have no erotic content: women and men sitting on toilets, armpit sniffing, giving birth to food items, a man dressed in a diaper convinced he’s a baby.  And of course, there’s that running father-daughter (and mother-daughter) incest subtext…

The four trashy troupes that act out Vernon Chatman’s existentially perverted “fantasies” here might be forgiven for thinking that they’d stumbled across a heretofore unknown species of pervert.  In fact, one threesome seems to have taken it upon themselves to add a little spice to his smut-free scenarios, as they provide what I assume (since nothing of the sort happens with the other three ensembles) is some off-script explicit male and female masturbation.  They probably thought that they were just giving the customer a little of what he really wanted but was too shy to ask for. The odd thing is that their onanistic antics turn Flesh from something that might have been able to squeeze by with an “R” rating (though it has a fair amount of female full frontal nudity) to an unrate-able pseudo-porn feature; yet, the few seconds of “good stuff” they add won’t make the film yankable to even the horniest surrealist (especially since the script requires the man to stop mid-self abuse to read the obituaries, while the woman’s entire motive for using a pencil as a non-approved marital aid is to “erase the Bible baby inside of me”).

Of course, the different approaches and, um, erotic qualities that the assorted carnal companies brought to the table was a big part of Chatman’s experiment.  He couldn’t guarantee that the actors wouldn’t flub their lines —and he couldn’t rule out the possibility they would improve them by flubbing them.  He trusted that the lack of cinematic sophistication occasioned by the shoot-to-order companies’ down-and-dirty approach to their art would add an air of amateurism that would make the proceedings seem even more absurd.  Switching the players up four times gives you four different approaches to the material, and despite the fact that the performers vary widely in their thespian talents and attractiveness, all of the iterations work, in their own way (thanks to the strength of the crazy script).  The first group is all African-American, and they deliver their lines matter-of-factly; there’s something charming about their unquestioning earnestness.  The second threesome makes little impression, but the physical mismatches and extreme lack of acting ability of the third menage-a-trois (the same ones that volunteered their masturbatory skills) make them a memorable ensemble.  Made up of an older gentleman with glasses and a flat delivery, a Latina mother with orange-blond tresses and a tramp-stamp, and a skinny blond daughter with pigtails and a disturbing faux-Lolita persona, this is the seediest, porn-iest lineup, and they make Chatman’s anerotic, existential dialogue sound positively filthy.

The fourth outfit is both the best looking and the most talented bunch, and whoever directed them attacked the material with an enthusiasm that suggests he had unfulfilled film-school dreams.  In contrast to previous segments, in this one the camera moves, the director offers various angles and closeups when a single two-shot could have sufficed, there are in-scene dissolves and sound effects, and spotlights are used to create deliberate shadows; there’s even an arty shot of dust motes in a sunbeam.  Even the costumes, which tended towards Walmart issue tank-tops and jean miniskirts in earlier outings, are more elegant here: the ladies wear sexy black cocktail dresses and Victoria’s Secret lingerie.  One of the actresses hams it up, possibly relishing the chance to vary her diet by chewing on scenery for a change. The threesome even show some comic timing, as when they look out the window at an approaching nuclear bomb and say “It’s coming!  Oh, it’s coming, ooh, coming…”  They play the joke out a little too long, and one girl can’t help but crack a smile, but it at least shows that they “get” Chatman’s sense of humor and realize they’re producing a comedy.  Although there’s a tendency to assume that Chatman was pranking the porn stars with this project, implicitly making fun of them by putting them through unfamiliar paces and tricking them into creating art, there’s no reason to assume that the performers were totally clueless that they were being played with, or that the author assumed they would be.  Their attitudes might have ranged anywhere from cluelessness to indifference (“we still get paid, right?”) to sincere appreciation for the project.  Part of the fun of the movie is imagining what goes through a young lady’s mind as she delivers a line like “hey God, I’ll let you see me naked if you show me what you look like” before stripping to the buff.

To provide maximum juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the sublime, Chatman has the four half-naked trios spend most of the running time discussing weighty issues such as the coming apocalypse, death, resurrection (three of them die and come back to life), cosmic coincidences, fascism, and religion (in the video’s most blasphemous scene, a woman reads a mangled version of the Koran on the toilet; there’s also a man who accidentally calls out the Bible word for word during sex).  Themes of pregnancy, conception and the womb—the biggest no-no topics in the sex-is-for-fun-only fantasy world of porn—recur in every segment.

Chatman’s method here is both Surrealist and absurdist.  Surrealist because of the dreamlike flow, and because, in the spirit of Surrealist experiments with randomness, Chatman deliberately outsourced his arty script to commercial entities with no competence or interest in these types of ventures so that they would introduce errors and mutations into the piece.  It’s absurdist because it’s carefully scripted to make us chuckle at its nonsense, while chuckling into the Void.  The residents of Final Flesh are trapped with each other in a claustrophobic space; they never leave a single apartment.  Outside their bubble of reality, the world is presumably a radioactive wasteland (alternatively, as the group in segment two thinks, they may be imprisoned inside God’s womb), but it might as well not exist.  Their universe make no sense, and they die in it.  It’s hard not to see the bleak metaphor there.  But, like a true absurdist, Chatman finds their (and our) situation hilarious, implicitly arguing that laughing at our predicament is the only way we can stick it to a world that’s indifferent to our wants.

Make no mistake, Final Flesh is a very funny movie, almost as funny as it is weird.  Even if you’re not amused by a fellatio scene that consists of a woman grating a block of cheese sticking out through a man’s zipper, you have to admire the inventiveness of Chatman’s crazy, incongruous dialogue.  A couple of mother-daughter exchanges illustrate how the offbeat humor here can be as clever as it is strange.  “Mommy, why did you want to kill the president?” wonders one daughter.  “I wanted to use his blood to oil the machinery of capitalism” is the reply.  Another daughter recalls, “Do you remember the first night I walked in on you two boning each other?” “That was the night you were conceived,” is mom’s quick, nonsensical response.

Don’t worry that I’m giving away all the best bits here; at seventy minutes, with an average of two insane occurrences a minute, there are still plenty of surprises to unfold in Final Flesh.  There’s certainly nothing else like it in the weird movie universe; and it’s one of those rare original ideas that, once it’s been done, no one else can copy without looking like a complete ass.  If you’re still unsure what to make of the project, you could always go with Chatman’s description in the prologue: Final Flesh is “an 8 part preapocalyptic triptych in D minor” intended to “test the inadvertent sensual limits of the Flesh Psyche.”  If you don’t find that description at least a little intriguing, then maybe your reading the wrong website?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Chatman is a skilled surrealist, juxtaposing images and thoughts to create a comedy nightmare that manages to feel familiar, even through all of its absurdity… It’s a one-of-a-kind film that probably deserves to stay that way, because, for what it is, it’s perfect.”–John Gholson, Moviephone

“Final Flesh defies description. It’s one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.”–John Blough, Vice Magazine

“…a real life Videodrome with porn actors…”–Hunter Stephenson, Slashfilm

OFFICIAL SITE: Final Flesh | Drag City – There’s almost nothing on distributor Drag City’s official website except for the film’s trailer and a link to buy the DVD

IMDB LINK: Final Flesh (Video 2009)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

FINAL FLESH – The (poorly maintained) Facebook page for Final Flesh

A Chat With the Guy Behind Final Flesh – Half-serious Vernon Chatman Final Flesh interview with Vice Magazine

Back by Popular Demand! FINAL FLESH this Wednesday at the Ritz! – The Alamo Drafthouse announcement of the encore screening of Final Flesh

DVD INFO: The Drag City DVD (buy) includes an incomplete set of credits, and a hidden-in-plain-sight extra feature (a selection of outtakes from the second group of performers, who keep cracking up and complain about having spaghetti sauce poured into their underwear, but who otherwise seem unfazed by Chatman’s bizarre requests). More substantially, it comes with a packet of antibacterial hand gel tucked into the case, and a two-sided fold out poster of concept art.

It’s worth noting that, unlike most movies, Final Flesh is specifically constructed with a DVD presentation in mind; you’ll understand why that’s so after your first full viewing.

FEATURING:  Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jordan Trovillion

PLOT: Several people take refuge in a city tavern when Detroit is inexplicably

plunged into darkness; simultaneously, most of the city’s population has mysteriously vanished.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Vanishing On 7th Street is a straightforward sci-fi horror flick.  The premise is uniquely weird, but the movie itself is not.

COMMENTS:  Something unknown has struck the city of Detroit.  Something just … well just awful!  All the lights have gone out, but batteries, small generators, and solar cells still work.  Except that capacitor function is mysteriously waning, and there is dramatically less and less sunlight every day.

Even more disturbing is the fact that nearly everyone has suddenly vanished into thin air leaving only clothing and synthetic personal effects behind, such as eyeglasses, pacemakers and false teeth.  Suits and dresses lie empty, still bearing the shapes of the people who were wearing them, right where they stood or sat when they disappeared.  Driver-less vehicles careen into obstacles and un-piloted planes fall from the sky.

A brightly lit bar on 7th Street that is still powered thanks to a backup generator draws several people who survived the vanishing.  It seems to be the only reserve generator still running, and it is starting to die despite adequate fuel.

What is this inky blackness that is spreading like a kerosene slick, slithering out of cracks and crevices, creeping up from grates, and oozing into open spaces where it devours people?

7th Street has a lot of potential, but the filmmakers try to make the characters “accessible” by having them behave irrationally.  Ironically, it’s therefore difficult to have empathy for them. This is not the fault of the actors, who all deliver competent performances.

A lot of film time that could be devoted to exploring the vanishing phenomenon and to other, even scarier scenarios is wasted with senseless action, bickering and characters waxing maudlin.  The survivors spend a lot of time arguing and doing very stupid, counterproductive things.

Disappointingly, they fail to do the obvious.  Despite the fact that light is protecting them from the darkness, it never occurs to them to build a raging bonfire.  Desperately scavenging old batteries, they never have a flash of insight to raid the Duracell racks at the nearest Walgreens.  One day I would like to see brighter, more pragmatic people being challenged in a horror movie.

On the other hand, if something really happened such as what we see depicted in Vanishing On 7th Street, the film’s participants would probably be typical, given the cross section of the population I observe daily who cannot complete a simple ATM transaction in under 15 minutes.  Perhaps merit in the choice of characters depends upon whether one expects good drama or fictional “documentary.”

The story in Vanishing has a few plot holes, but the basic idea is good and creepy.  Despite wishing I had a fast forward button handy at times, the film mostly kept my attention and gave me goosebumps.

You may not find Vanishing On 7th Street to be the most thoughtful horror movie you have ever seen, but it is still fun.  It is worth a peek for any but the most discriminating horror fans.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What’s especially maddening about Vanishing on 7th Street is that there are some interesting elements to the film; they just get completely overlooked by the story. Much of the movie is kind of a weird version of the rapture, but its religious imagery is perfunctory and without any real thought behind it.”–Sean Gandert, Paste Magazine (contemporaneous)

Vanishing On 7th Street trailer

“People have wondered how to classify my film.  Absurdism or surrealism?  What the hell is it?… This film introduces a style that I’d like to call  ‘trivialism.’  Life is portrayed as a series of trivial components.  My intention is to touch on bigger, more philosophical issues at the same time.”–Roy Andersson, DVD commentary to Songs from the Second Floor

DIRECTED BY: Roy Andersson

FEATURING: Lars Nordh, Stefan Larsson

PLOT:  Set at the dawn of the millennium in a nameless city that seems to be undergoing an apocalyptic panic—traffic is at a standstill as people try to leave all at once, parades of flagellants march down the street, and the Church considers returning to human sacrifice—Songs unfolds as a series of brief, seemingly unrelated, vaguely surreal scenes.  Eventually a main thread emerges involving a family: the father’s furniture business has just burnt down, one son has gone insane from writing poetry, and the other son is a melancholy cab driver.  The father enters the retail crucifix business and begins seeing ghosts.

BACKGROUND:

• The film was inspired by the verse of the relatively obscure avant-garde Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), whose poem “Stumble between to stars” is quoted in the film.  Anyone who thinks Andersson is obscure would do well to avoid Vallejo, whose work—with its invented words and grammar and difficult symbolism—recalls James Joyce at his most impenetrable.
• Songs  from the Second Floor was Andersson’s third feature film, and his first since 1975′s Giliap.  He spent most of the intervening time directing commercials, although he did complete two highly regarded short films.
• Andersson discovered Lars Nordh shopping for furniture at an IKEA.
• Many of the exterior shots were actually shot inside Andersson’s studio with trompe l’oeil paintings or three-dimensional models as backgrounds .
• All scenes are completed in one take.  The camera only moves once (a calm tracking shot in the railway station).
• At the time of the film’s release reviewers consistently marveled that none of the scenes had been scripted or storyboarded beforehand.  The method here shouldn’t suggest that Andersson simply made up the film as he went along, however, as unused footage shows that each scene was meticulously rehearsed and refined dozens of times, often on incomplete sets with stand-ins for the actors, over what must have been a period of weeks or months.  Andersson says they sometimes shot twenty to twenty five takes per scene to achieve the perfect performance.
• The film took four years to complete.
• Songs from the Second Floor tied for the jury prize at Cannes in 2000 (the jury prize is the third most prestigious award after the Palme D’Or and the Grand Prix).
• Andersson followed up Songs with You, the Living [Du Levande] (2007) (also Certified Weird).  The two movies are extremely similar both thematically (the comically apocalyptic mood) and stylistically (made up of intricately composed, brief vignettes).  Andersson has said he intends to create a trilogy; however, he has suggested that the third film may not follow the same style as the first two.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Fat Kalle standing at a deserted crossroads by the pile of discarded crucifixes, gazing at the figures approaching on the horizon, is an image worthy of European arthouse greats like Buñuel or Fellini.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  There are a few moments of magical realism in Songs from

Scene from Songs from the Second Floor

the Second Floor, involving subway commuters bursting into classical verse and the matter-of-fact appearance of ghosts, but even if these interludes hadn’t been included, the movie would feel strange because of the high artificiality of Andersson’s style: the static camera, the constant crowds of expressionless figurants gazing dispassionately at the action in the foreground, the carefully controlled compositions filled with background detail.  Adding deadpan absurd black humor, bleak existentialism, and a sense of looming catastrophe into the mix produces a singular concoction, one that captured Sweden’s—and the West’s—mood of anxious despair as the new millennium dawned.

COMMENTS: Songs from the Second Floor uses deep focus—the photographic technique that ensures that what’s happening in the background of a scene is as crisply rendered as what goes on in the foreground—as innovatively as any movie since Citizen Kane.  In Songs, what is happening way off in the distance is frequently more interesting than what’s transpiring right before our eyes (as when the parade of flagellants in three piece suits passes by outside a window while the main character is discussing relatively mundane insurance arrangements).  Andersson draws our attention to the “front” of a scene, but before we know it something from the “back” of the scene bursts forth and amaze us.  We realize we didn’t notice it, while it’s been sneaking up on us all along.  The film seems meandering, random, and frequently obsessed with trivialities, but by the end it adds up to a complete vision of human life in all its silliness and sadness.  It builds to an unforgettable existential climax that ties together the movie’s themes and imagery, leaving one lone man railing helplessly against the mysterious spirits of the universe.

Many of the scenes, even those set on city streets, were filmed in a studio, with perspectives forced to make them look like they extend to a vast horizon.  Even interiors are frequently shot in long hallways that appear to extend forever.  (One such hallway is an airport or railway terminal where lines of people struggling with huge racks of luggage struggle to cross the short space where the ticket takers calmly wait to pass them through the turnstiles—the exodus almost disappears to a point on the horizon).  Every shot, each of which is held for several minutes, is meticulously composed like a painting.  Songs‘ visual depth of field mirrors the depth of its ideas.  On the surface, it appears to be about ordinary people—businessmen, taxi drivers—in an extraordinary historical situation—some sort of national financial collapse and mass exodus.  But the themes roaming about like barely visible ghosts off in the distance are massive and universal.  The movie addresses the loss of tradition and the possibility that the past may mislead us, loss of faith in the modern world and the dangers of superstition, the fragility of social structures that may fray and snap when faced with economic challenges, the way individual and communal guilt becomes an almost metaphysical burden, the divinity hidden in the ordinariness of life and the humanity of Jesus, consumerism’s power to disembowel spirituality, and adds a sharp critique of the then-current Social Democratic Swedish government that will go over most viewer’s heads (Andersson tells us in the commentary that certain characters are based on members of the Swedish parliament).

With so many themes, so many possible meanings for the film, what impresses me most about Songs is its structure; in particular, the way it mixes randomness and order.  It begins with a man discussing downsizing with his boss (hidden inside a glowing tanning booth), followed by a man leaving for work while his naked wife tries to convince him to take a day off.  We next see the second man holding on to the first man’s leg as he drags him down the hallway, begging to keep his job, and then we follow an immigrant who tries to deliver a message to an unknown man in the corporate complex and winds up taking a beating for his trouble.  Then a magician tries and fails to saw a man in half, followed by a visit to a hospital where a nurse impatiently asks a doctor when he’s going to leave his wife…  and this all occurs before we meet Kalle, the furniture salesman-cum-arsonist who will turn out to be the film’s main character.  The movie appears to be wandering around in a set of barely connected incidents united mostly by a consistent deadpan style, but Andersson draws connections between images and themes and segues one scene into the next in such a way that we’re aware there’s an underlying order and purpose to it all—although it’s one we have difficulty putting into words.

Andersson has arranged the movie the way he sees life—as a series of bewildering anecdotes, and at the end comes the horror.  Themes, images and characters recur and interweave throughout the story, giving it a sense of coherence and a mysterious purpose.  (For one thing, you’ve never seen any movie before with so many scenes of crowds of people standing in the background, silently and dispassionately gazing at the action before them.  After a while, it turns into quite a creepy trope).  Andersson’s artistry is the hum of an unseen engine.  Using a common motif or playing off a closing line or theme, he guides us from each of the  individual segments, many of which would otherwise seem disconnected. The movie’s music, a calm, melancholy waltz, often strikes up at the very end of one scene and fades into the next, quietly assisting the transition from one scene to another.  Never is this technique more apparent than in the “singing on the subway” scene, where the scene cuts in mid-note from a woman on a train and is picked up by a woman on the telephone in a bar.  Then, there’s the moment where Kalle ends a scene by quoting a line of his son’s poetry—”beloved is the one who sits down”—and we are treated to a montage of many of the minor characters of the film, who take a seat at a bus stop, a park bench, a table in a restaurant.  Much later, a man gets his hand caught in the sliding doors of a train, recalling another of the son’s stanzas: “beloved be the one who catches a finger in the door.”  (These incantations remind us of Andersson’s essential humanism, the fact that he loves his characters even as he torments and laughs at them).

Although the artistry on display is masterful and the issues it raises deep, Songs from the Second Floor is far from a perfect film.  The pace is slow, the static camera takes some getting used to, and it takes the movie quite a while to build up a store of connections: the lack of initial correspondences will make many sympathize with the masses clogging the highways to flee this depressing Scandinavian burgh.  Though Songs is technically a comedy, the characters inside the film do not realize it; there are no punchlines, no mugging for the camera here.  When the stage magician’s trick fails and he accidentally saws into the volunteer, its funny intellectually, but its awkward onscreen, because no one in the audience reacts at all—they all sit and star blank faced at the scene.  The funniest parts are delivered slyly and without comment, as when a crucifix salesman turns the Golden Rule on its head to shame a customer who’s short of funds; you may laugh with your head, but not with your belly.  Not all scenes work equally, and there are many scenes—often in bedrooms—that are simply, and possibly deliberately, banal, lacking in the cinematic magic that Andersson seems able to conjure up so effortlessly at other times.  His dry, deadpan take on the human comedy, and his tendency to raise questions without suggesting answers, won’t sit well with all—well, with most—viewers.  But there are just enough great moments to pull you through to the ending, and if you can go the distance, it’s extremely rewarding.

It all comes together in a magnificent ending that ties up the film and for many will redeems it from being a dour, rambling arthouse bore—albeit one with some memorable imagery—into a complete, if mysterious, artistic statement.  Kalle, our paunchy putative hero, stands alone next to a pile of discarded crucifixes as tall as a man, attempting to liquidate his inventory after having misjudged the public’s millennial demand for religious icons.  Kalle’s been a figure of satire throughout the movie—he’s a cheat (he burned down his own business) and a boor (he can’t comprehend his comatose son’s love of poetry).  But, since he’s begun to be haunted by ghosts—spirits whom he can’t possibly help, and who acknowledge that there’s nothing he can do for the dead anymore—he’s gained a bit of our sympathy.  Kalle, too, has his cross to bear, and it may not be a simple matter to throw it into the dump like unsold merchandise.  As he tries to dispose of his burden, he notices something in the background of the scene, something that has been there all along.  He grows angry and lashes out, yelling into the blank horizon, “What can I do?  I can’t take it anymore! How much can you ask of a person?”  He lashes out, but only makes things worse.  Andersson has a chilling and mysterious surprise up his sleeve.  It echoes a memorable, but seemingly random, sequence from much earlier in the film, and it gives us further assurances that there is an order and symmetry behind it all, a meaning to the seemingly meaningless; but though we can glimpse an organization and arrangement at work here, we still can’t guess the ultimate purpose or plan—just like human life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy–the apocalypse as a joke on us.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)

“…slapstick Ingmar Bergman—wacky yet depressing… there’s no real pleasure in the game—Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than funny.”–J. Hobermann, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“…an ideologically ambitious and cleverly stylish film, with many scenes that linger in the mind – like those of David Lynch’s Eraserhead or Terry Gilliam’s Brazil – thanks to the economic precision of their ability to disturb. But as Kalle’s world breaks down and horror is added to horror, the film’s purpose – a lugubrious danse macabre stifling hope at every step – appears to drown in its own misery.”–Sight and Sound (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The New Cult Canon: Songs from the Second Floor (2000) – Another in Scott Tobias’ excellent series for the Onion A.V. club of expanded reviews analyzing the most polarizing films of recent time

Songs from the Second Floor (2000) at Mubi – synopsis, director’s bio, and a few links to reviews and message board discussions

Roy Andersson Filmproduktion – Roy Andersson’s official site (in Swedish) contains an overview of his films

DVD INFO: The out-of-print but widely available New Yorker Video release (buy) comes packed with numerous extras. Besides the original trailer and production notes, there’s an informative subtitled commentary with director Roy Andersson (don’t expect all the film’s mysteries to be revealed, however). There’s also a behind the scenes glimpse at the making of the “rat” scene, three deleted scenes and an alternate take complete with director’s commentary, and three reels of unused footage showing the evolution of three key scenes—the bar scene, the railway scene, and the airport scene.

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

Once upon a time there was a breed known as independent filmmakers. Usually with shoestring budgets, the indies, taking no prisoners, discarded business plans, forgot to look at marketing strategies, and the image of a proposed target audience was as abstract and surreal to them as their films often were to audiences. The indies were decidedly reactionary to the Hollywood institution. Maya Deren once said “I make films for what Hollywood spends on lipstick.” It was the indies who were progressively harking back to the dawn of cinema, before the rules of filmmaking had been established and canonized.

Stanley Kubrick was the closest Hollywood would get to the indie spirit, but Kubrick, for all his aesthetic brilliance, was, essentially, an academic. Whatever Kubrick’s genre, be it sci-fi, porn, horror, war, swashbuckler, his approach stemmed from a safe classroom distance. Kubrick lacked the fevered intensity and aesthetic struggle of the indies, and subjects such as horror and sex were rendered as studies and, therefore, matters on somewhat safe critical ground for the mainstream.

Newly minted and authorized film critics, such as Roger Ebert, would lavish heaps of praise on Dr. Kubrick, but Ebert was clearly out of his ivory towered ball park when trying to grasp the likes of Larry Cohen‘s God Told Me To or Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, which is unfortunate considering Ebert once scripted for Hollywood outsider Russ Meyer.

The 1990s was the last real decade of the independents. Even by then, they were becoming an extinct breed, and in their place were the new breed of timid indie-lites, who merely emulate the Hollywood recipe without having the budget for the high priced, bland ingredients.

In 1991 Michael Tolkin’s The Rapture did what an independent film is supposed to do: took critics by surprise. Some critics even managed praise. Tolkin followed this success with The New Age in 1994 and then, unfortunately, disappeared from the radar. The Rapture came on the heels of the previous year’s Begotten (1990, E. Elias Merhige), and both are films with spiritually organic testicles.

Sharon (Mimi Rogers, in a mesmerizing role) works as a telephone operator by day.  It is a mind-numbingly monotonous job.  By night, she likes to have sex and she has it passionately.  Sharon plays the swinging game, seeking out new adventures and new partners.  Swinging, however, is becoming as robotic as her day job, because, despite her passion, Sharon is seeking something more.  She is seeking a personally relentless communication which at first she thought she might find through the amorous escapades of the night.

One day at work, Sharon overhears Christian co-workers talking about a dream of a pearl.  The pearl is something akin to an allegorical hymn for the world’s end.  To Sharon, it appears that those who dream of the pearl find God and the meaning of life.  Sharon tries to pass herself off as a Christian, but it’s a bit like someone pretending to be drunk, and her co-workers see through it.

A couple that Sharon swings with cease a night of sex long enough to speak of the Pearl, which one of them has tattooed on her back.  Christian proselytizers show up at Sharon’s door, trying to convert her, and they too speak of the Pearl.  Through the vision of the Pearl, Sharon believes God is calling out to her.  Sharon is in anguish.  One lover abandons her.  Randy (David Duchovny), another lover, argues with her.  Randy is an atheist, who once murdered for money; he sees no meaning at all in life, and compares Sharon’s God-seeking to a heroin addict looking for a fix.

Sharon finally has the religious experience for which she has been yearning.  Like an overzealous, sanctimonious twelve year old girl at Vacation Bible School, the newly reborn Sharon begins proselytizing to callers at work.  Sharon’s boss, himself a Christian, tells Sharon there is a time and place for everything, but not at work.  Sharon knows now that her life must be clean for God.

The power of great sex prevails and Randy, seeing the light of God, marries Sharon.  They have a child and join a fundamentalist group, bonding with those who want to understand God and his plans.  All too briefly, Randy becomes Sharon’s sole personal connection and provides the life she seeks.  Tragedy prevails, however, and bathos rears its ugly head as Sharon is put through several tests.  Her life is thrown into a frenzied quagmire.  Believing she knows God’s intention, Sharon commits a heinous crime when she feels God has failed to deliver his promise.  When all seems lost, the dreaded apocalypse literally comes true and Sharon faces a choice.  Will she profess her love for her heavenly Father or not?

Sharon faces the same dilemma that Job faced, but for Sharon, God is no different than those countless lovers from one night stands so many years before.  God screwed her, but he would not give her the personal communication that she needed.  God used her and took away everything she loved.  When Sharon called out for an answer, God turned his back to her and merely said, “You must still love me.”

The Rapture is about free will, and that includes free will to love or reject the idea of the divine.  Sharon remains fiercely independent in the tradition of Bizet’s Carmen.  She is not afraid of the consequences, even in the threat of a purgatorial eternity.  Sharon’s life and choices are startling.  She is a stupid, proud, passionate woman who has the audacity to tell God, “I knocked and the door was not opened.  I am a stupid woman, but it’s your fault I’m stupid because I asked for wisdom and you denied me.  I will take the purity of my heart over your cold mind and I will not worship the likes of so selfish a lover.”

Of course, Sharon is as selfish as she believes God to be, but she no longer expects to be loved. The Rapture harshly embraces a defiantly feminine spirituality which rejects the barren, patriarchal idea of God.

Like the late Mary Daly, Sharon goes “Beyond God the Father,” and that is simultaneously liberating for her and her downfall, because she approaches her liberating moment with the black and white extremes which have characterized her entire life.

In the Gospel of John, the apostles are instructed to “Go and spread the Good News.”  News is always new and The Rapture takes a new and refreshing approach to a subject which, more often than not, is hopelessly pious, stagnant and, ultimately, saccharine.  This is one of the most challenging, humanistic and Christian films of the last twenty years.

FEATURING: Voice actors

PLOT: Tokyo-3 is under assault by mysterious robot-like creatures known as “Angels”; two

teenagers pilot the mechanical Evangelions that are the only things that can defeat the invaders and save humanity, while simultaneously dealing with pop quizzes and high school bullies.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  How do you assess the weirdness of anime, a fantastical genre in which underage nude sexpots with powder blue hair and blood red eyes don’t raise an eyebrow?  An average anime is pretty damn weird to the uninitiated, but like other specialized subgenres (such as the kung fu film) anime follows its own conventions.  Once the seasoned viewer internalizes those rules, the resulting films don’t look quite so strange.  That means that, to be considered as a candidate for the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time, an anime needs to be weird even by Japanimation’s exalted standards of oddness.  By reimagining stock giant robots as avenging angels in a mystical scenario worthy of a pop-art Book of Revelations, but embedding the messianic tale within the ordinary travails of an extremely wimpy high school freshman, Evangelion 1.11 nearly vaults over this raised weirdness bar.  The hurdle this particular film can’t quite overcome, however, is the fact that it’s incomplete, only part I of a planned “rebuild” series of four movies—and that there’s already a previous entry in the franchise it’s remaking that reputedly blows 1.11 away with its bizarreness.

COMMENTS:   Forget the plentiful, and plenty spectacular, duels between giant robots.  (Obsessive fans of the series may stress to you that neither the Angels nor the Evas are technically giant robots, but don’t be fooled: if it looks like a giant robot, clatters like a giant robot, and shoots death rays from its fingertips, it’s a giant robot).  Set aside the fantastic visions like the giant mutating cube that drops a diamond drill bit into downtown Tokyo-3.  Even overlook portentous (pretentious?) lines of dialogue like, “The Apocrypha of the Dead Sea Scrolls has been passed into the Book of Law; the Time of the Covenant is close at hand” that make you wonder what other cool facts concerning the giant robot invasions of the end times you missed while dozing through Sunday school.  That stuff’s all in there and it’s set to satisfy the sci-fi geek inside all of us, but the weirdest thing about Evangelion 1.1: You Are (Not) Alone is that there’s absolutely no one in this movie that acts anything like an actual person would.  Half the world’s population has been decimated by previous disasters and Tokyo-3 is one of the last surviving outposts of humanity, but there’s no sense of imminent peril or devotion to end-of-times debauchery.  Tokyo-3′s citizens aren’t much concerned about the species’ imminent extinction: Algebra classes and swim meets go on as usual for the city’s middle schoolers, relocation out of the war zone is just something housewives chat about casually while they’re waiting in line to purchase groceries, and disruption of cell phone coverage is a major pain in the butt.  The reluctant hero, adolescent Shinji, is still tormented by bullies despite being one of only two people in the world capable of piloting the Evas, and thus mankind’s only hope of salvation.  (If I were a 14-year old Freshman who held the world’s fate in my hands, I would not be attending Social Studies at 8 in the morning, and I would make sure I had a couple of burly Marine bodyguards beat up any bullies who so much as looked cross-eyed at me).  The movie’s weirdest character is Misato, a sexy NERV lieutenant commander who functions alternatively as 1) a fantasy sex object for Shinji (she originally meets him by sending him a postcard of her posed in cutoff jeans and a tank top with an arrow pointing to her cleavage and the legend “focus attention here”); 2) a highly competent field general; 3) Shinji’s confessor; 4) the film’s only comic relief; and 5) the mouthpiece who explains the details of the story’s history and setting to the viewer.  The movie’s weirdest scene has nothing to do with giant floating rotating cubes whose surfaces shear off and recombine in bursts of color, but rather occurs when Misato invites Shinji to stay at her apartment: she chugs a beer, immediately lunges over the table at him in a spurt of unmotivated fury, then tells him to take a bath but doesn’t warn him about the warm-water penguin with the punk hairdo who lives in her bathroom.  The flightless bird wanders into the living room and settles down with a newspaper, and is never seen or heard from again.  The animation is pretty and colorful, with a wide variety of color schemes including stylized monochrome and duotone sketches and glowing gossamer drawings lit by suffused sunlight.  Rather than being fully animated, the non-battle scene images are often stills over which the camera glides fluidly; they’re so lovely you won’t miss the motion.  One of the major downsides is that diffident Shinji is a whiny protagonist with an eternal battle cry of “why me?”  (His unlikeability is exacerbated by voice acting that makes him sound like Sesame Street’s Elmo simultaneously going through puberty and an emo phase; his high-pitched sniveling is precisely calibrated to drive adults up the wall).  Evangelion 1.11 is also confusing as hell, in a way that appears to result from sloppiness rather than complexity; in the story’s defense, it is a condensation of the first six episodes of a TV series that took about twice the time to tell its tale.  Anime fans will likely eat it up (though those especially fannish of the original series will inevitably find fault); the general viewer is likely to find Evangelion pretty, but too baffling in story and thin in character development to make them crave the three sequels.

The Evangelion series comes with a backstory that’s almost as difficult to unravel as the plot of You Are (Not) Alone.  (Those interested in the whole story are encouraged to consult Ard Vijn’s series primer in his Twitch review of the film’s Blu-ray release).  The tale began as the Japanese TV series “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” which developed a cult following but climaxed with a baffling, inconclusive final episode that spawned a reaction analogous to the fan-enraging series finale of the BBC’s “The Prisoner.”   This led to the series being redone, and two new film versions were released to cinemas: the second, The End of Evangelion (1997), is a surreal “alternate ending” to the TV series featuring a psychedelic apocalypse (this is the version of the Evangelion story that has a shot to make it onto the List).  A decade later, in 2007, Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone was released as the first episode of a planned four-movie “rebuild” (trendy jargon for “reboot,” which is itself a euphemism for the more accurate “remake”).  A second film, Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance has been completed, but in the meantime the studio also re-tweaked the animation of the first film and released the result as Evangelion 1.01.   Further improvements resulted in this release, Evangelion 1.11, which hopefully marks the end of the tinkering.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…mighty perplexing nerd kibble, its highfalutin’ philosophical and psychological banter way too outlandish to seriously engage. Yet as a visceral experience, it’s entrancing…”–Aaron Hillis, The Village Voice (1.0 version)

FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Wallace Shawn, Miranda Richardson

PLOT: In an alternate-universe America controlled by a surveillance-happy government, the

lives of several Los Angeles residents—including a disabled veteran, a police officer, an amnesiac movie star, and a cell of political revolutionaries—intersect on the eve of the apocalypse.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Although its many subplots pile weird images and ideas on top of each other, many of them remain totally superfluous, and the film as a whole is a disappointing nexus of influences and half-baked premises rather than a cohesive work of art.  However, it does contain some moments of mesmerizing weirdness, and could have a chance of being certified weird in the future.

COMMENTS:  To follow up his impressive debut feature, Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly clearly wanted to challenge himself.  With Southland Tales, however, he bit off more than he could chew. All of Donnie Darko’s best and worst tendencies are on display (with an emphasis on the latter), but this time the showcase is twice as long, with enough intricate storylines and bizarre sci-fi subtexts to fill a dozen less ambitious movies.  With his second film’s epic size, Kelly lost the gently emotional touch that made Donnie’s coming-of-age so poignant; his fiery creative passion is still very perceptible here, but it’s obscured behind layers of apocalyptic razzle-dazzle, broad satire, and sophomoric humor.

In Southland Tales’ alternate timeline, Texas was struck by terrorist nukes in 2005, triggering World War III; this back story is filled in via a YouTube-style montage of video clips and hyperlinks.  It’s a genuinely original method of exposition, but alas, it’s a rare example of Kelly’s innovative spirit overcoming his love of non sequitur jokes and stunt casting.  While Donnie Darko just had Patrick Swayze’s unnervingly effective performance as a demagogic motivational speaker, Southland Tales crams in a disorienting array of surprise cameos and supporting players: Jon Lovitz as a hard-as-nails policeman; Kevin Smith as a bearded, paralyzed conspirator; Wallace Shawn as a megalomaniacal inventor who’s always accompanied by a bevy of eccentrics, Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubinstein among them.  This more-the-merrier approach aids in Kelly’s quest to make his movie as idiosyncratic as possible, but it also makes it feel like a 2 ½ hour parade of sideshows that are dragged together for a spectacular but meaningless finale.

These nonstop distractions notwithstanding, the film’s putative focus is on the conflict between the repressive regime of Orwellian snow queen Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson) and Los Angeles’s guerrilla “Neo-Marxists,” with both sides trying to use delusional action movie star Boxer Santaros (Johnson) as their pawn.  Boxer’s fragile mental state during his stay with the Neo-Marxists and porn queen/media darling Krysta Now (Gellar) initially looks like a promising inroad to a neo-noirish mystery, especially as it features a clip of Kiss Me Deadly, but the plot thread degenerates into a series of unsatisfying explanations involving time travel, accidental cloning, and rips in the space-time continuum. Whereas Donnie Darko’s bizarre sci-fi detours worked as analogies for mental illness and self-sacrifice, Southland Tales gets weighed down in its third act by rambling expositional speeches about what’s going on, what it has to do with the energy source “Fluid Karma,” and why it’s all leading to the end of the world.  Why the viewer should care is never really addressed; Kelly just takes it for granted that we’re equally into his indecipherable mind games.

This is why Southland Tales is so frustrating.  Kelly’s desperate commentary on the state of 9/11 America is muffled beneath his extreme self-indulgence: his puerile jokes, like the title of Krysta’s debut album, Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime, which is repeated ad nauseum; his pretentious, self-congratulatory allusions, as when the movie practically grinds to a halt so he can demonstrate his knowledge of T.S. Eliot; and his painfully tone-deaf satire, which is reduced to cheap shots against Nana Mae’s stiff-necked presidential candidate husband (Holmes Osbourne).  The desperation is clearly there; the commentary, however, is lacking.  The film’s most potent scene is the one that’s unburdened by Kelly’s absurd dialogue: a 3-minute music video set to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” in which a scarred, world-weary Justin Timberlake swaggers, lip-synchs, and guzzles beer in a hallucinated arcade.  Functioning like the “Mad World” sequence in Donnie Darko, the pairing of song and set-piece let Kelly escape into pop sublimity.  His dizzying, blatantly artificial visual aesthetic is most enjoyable in this bite-sized chunk; sustained over 144 minutes, it gets a little tiresome, especially when the film runs out of coherent ideas to back it up.

It’s a tragedy, really, because Southland Tales contains all the seeds of a truly great, weird, all-American epic.  Unfortunately, the film’s excesses trample over its subtler, more original ideas, and Kelly’s solipsistic smugness makes some scenes just embarrassing to watch.  The film aspires to meld a Robert Altman ensemble drama with the loopy reality-bending of Philip K. Dick, but settles for a more jokily postmodern version of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.  Maybe if the film’s apocalyptic scenarios weren’t so calculatingly outlandish, or maybe if its lofty political and philosophical themes were given more than a perfunctory nod, then it could’ve been the masterpiece Richard Kelly wanted.  Instead, it’s an awkward jumble, a testament to one man’s artistic obsessions, and a mediocre movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…aspires to meld the satirical sci-fi of Kurt Vonnegut with the mesmerising weirdness of David Lynch, but Kelly hasn’t yet found the filmmaking skill to match his vaulting imagination…”–Paul Arendt, BBC (contemporaneous)