“What is this, a freak out?”–Violet Beauregarde

DIRECTED BY: Mel Stuart

FEATURING: Gene Wilder, Peter Ostrum, Jack Albertson, Julie Dawn Cole

PLOT:  Charlie is a poor boy supporting his mother and four bedridden grandparents with the earnings from his paper route.  When eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka announces he will be awarding a lifetime supply of chocolate and a tour of his mysterious candy factory to the finders of five golden tickets, Charlie wants to win more than anything.  When he, along with four bratty companions, finally meets the exceedingly odd Mr. Wonka,  Charlie finds the factory, and its owner, far stranger and more magical than anything he could have imagined.

BACKGROUND:

• A note for those who believe product placement and corporate tie-ins are a recent phenomenon in movies: although this film was based on Roald Dahl’s bestelling children’s novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” it was retitled to incorporate the Wonka name in order to promote the release of real-life Wonka candy bars (which were still made up until 2010) by Quaker Oats, who financed the production.
• Dahl himself wrote the original script, but it was extensively rewritten by an uncredited David (The Hellstrom Chronicles) Seltzer, reportedly to Dahl’s displeasure.  (It’s worth noting that Dahl, like most authors, pretty much hated every adaptation of his work).
• This was the only movie Peter Ostrum (Charlie) ever acted in.
• The movie just broke even at the box office, but became a cult sensation thanks to television screenings and home video.  In 2003, Entertainment Weekly ranked Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as the 25th biggest cult movie of all time.
• The score was nominated for a “Best Music, Scoring Adaptation and Original Song Score” Oscar but lost to Fiddler on the Roof.
• Despite the fact that he was rejected for the role of the candy shop owner in the film, Sammy Davis, Jr.’s 1972 rendition of the film’s first musical number, “The Candy Man,” became a #1 hit and a staple of his live shows.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton‘s 2005 adaptation of the same material with Johnny Depp as Wonka, is somewhat closer to Dahl’s original novel.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Wonka’s face, bathed in flashing red and green lights, as he shrieks incoherently at the end of his terrifying trip down a psychedelic tunnel of horrors.  It’s the capping image of a horrifying scene that’s been scarring unsuspecting children for 40 years now.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Is it Gene Wilder’s ultra-eccentric performance as the charming

Original trailer for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

but vaguely demonic candyman in a purple velvet jacket and burgundy top hat who suavely arranges for wicked children to hang themselves with the licorice ropes of their own vice?  Or the chorus of orange-faced, green haired, dwarf laborers who sing moralizing “Oompah Loompah” tunes after each victim ironically offs him or herself?  No, we all know it’s the bad trip boat ride, where Wonka recites Edgar Allan Poe inspired verse (“By the fires of Hell a’ glowing/Is the grisly reaper mowing?”) as the craft careens down a tunnel of horrors while colored strobe lights flash and avant-garde footage plays on the walls that tips this celebration of imagination into the weird column.

COMMENTS: When I was a kid, they used to play Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory ontelevision exactly once a year (just like that other annual TV staple Wonka so closely resembles, The Wizard of Oz).  The first time I saw it, what lodged itself in my mind was the singing and dancing Oompah Loompahs.  I think “oompah loompah doompity do” must have been stuck in my head throughout the third grade.  When the next year’s showing rolled around, I eagerly tuned in, expecting more hot candy, child jeopardy, and painted-midget action.  The second time around, I remember being disappointed at how long it took to actually get inside the magical candy factory; it was an eternity of waiting, 45 whole minutes of sickly singing, corny comedy, and a weepy family poverty drama before the debonair Mr. Wonka rolled himself down that red carpet and let the kids inside to try way too many experimental confectioneries and have some good, scary fun.

If there’s one legitimate criticism to be lodged against Wonka, it’s my old childhood complaint—it takes too long to get out of dreary reality and into the chocolate factory.  Remember how quickly Oz whisked us out of drab Kansas?  Wonka loiters in a mundane Munich.  As an adult, I find the pre-factory scenes mildly amusing—the worldwide furor over the chocolate contest, the incompetent teacher who multiplies Charlie’s candy bars by a factor of one hundred because he can’t figure out decimal percentage—but the movie, which limps along pleasantly enough to start, suddenly reveals hidden greatness when Gene Wilder somersaults onto the stage as Wonka.  Dressed like a Victorian fop outfitted by Hugh Hefner, quick with an erudite non sequitur (when a girl tells him there’s no such thing as a snozberry, Wonka replies “we are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”), Wonka is, to say the least, an unpredictable fellow.  Wilder prances about, swinging his cane haphazardly at his guests, plucking hairs from their heads at random, and expressing mock concern for their fates after they disobey his direct orders. (“I don’t understand it, the children are disappearing like rabbits,” he says nonchalantly).  He’s sarcastic, and insults everyone in the tour group without their realizing it, yet he remains a lovable father figure—to Charlie, at least.

It’s partially his sincere, childlike love of “pure imagination” that makes any transgression Wonka commits seem harmless, but mainly its the fact that Wonka reserves his wry wrath for those who truly deserve it.  Besides pure-hearted Charlie, the chocolate mogul has invited along four of the most wickedly bratty children anyone could ever hope to see get their poetic comeuppances, along with their equally despicable chaperone parents.  Each kid represents some sort of childhood deadly sin—gluttony, greed, and, uh, gum-chewing and TV-addiction.  Wonka has filled his candy factory full of deadly attractive nuisances, like a river of chocolate and a teleportation machine, calculated to lure naughty children to their doom.  Each tot meets a nasty fate when they let their baser natures get in the way of good behavior.  One is half-drowned and sent to be boiled; another bloated with juice and threatened with explosion; one falls down a garbage chute leading to a furnace; and the final victim is shrunk and sent to be stretched on the rack.  Even Charlie himself has a moment of weakness that almost leads to him and his grandpa being cut to ribbons by fan blades.  The parents freak out, and Wonka shows an amusingly appalling lack of concern, explaining at one point that a kid’s odds of survival are pretty good, as the furnace is only lit every other day.  There’s an Old Testament pitilessness to the ironic punishments each sinful child endures; there’s a black and white moral lesson to be learned, but kids also thrill to the spectacle of bad kids getting theirs (as long as the good one gets his ultimate reward).  It’s as black of a comedy as most kids can endure, but they savor being pushed to their limits.

That punishment/reward morality play forms Chocolate Factory‘s basic structure, but what lodges the film in the memory is the parade of extravagant, imaginative, and often weird set pieces.  There’s the living coat hangers that grab visitor’s hats off their heads unbidden.  Our first glimpse of the Chocolate Room, with its liquid chocolate waterfall, candy toadstools, and lollipops growing on the banks of a muddy cocoa stream.  The refugee race of Oompah Loompahs, with their orange complexions, green hair, bushy white eyebrows, and synchronized dance numbers.  Violet turning into a blueberry and being rolled off for juicing.  Veruca Salt’s show-stopping, foot-stomping dance tantrum “I Want the World!” (“I want the world, I want the whole world/I want to lock it all up in my pocket, it’s my bar of chocolate!”)  Fizzy lifting drinks.  Wonka’s office with it’s half-lamp, half-clock and half-safe.  “You get nothing!”  And, of course, the cherry on the sundae, the mad boat ride through the chocolate factory’s tunnel of horrors, which looks like what Kenneth Anger would have delivered if he’d been hired to design the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World.  Among the images that play on the tunnel walls as the Loompah-propelled gondola speeds heedlessly along are a giant eye, a man with a snake slithering across his lips, and a chicken being decapitated (!)

Willy Wonka likely looks weirder to an adult than it does to a child, for whom it’s splendiferous wonders are just everyday magic.  But—and here’s why the film belongs on a weird movie list—Wonka‘s sugar-rush produces the kind of candy-coated hallucinations that stick with you for a lifetime.  Face it, if you saw this as a kid, a Greek chorus of Oompah Loompahs are forever bobbing up and down in your memory, warning you about the dangers of greed, gluttony, and gum-chewing every time you even think about climbing out on the precarious banks of a chocolate river.  Admit it—the mere thought of a three-course dinner compressed into a stick of gum now fills you with unthinking dread.  This is the sort of delightful lifelong psychological trauma Willy Wonka breeds in us.  It’s what makes it the perfect gateway weirdness for that treasured tyke in your life.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…never finds an appropriate style; it’s stilted and frenetic, like Prussians at play.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (contemporaneous)

“…captures the spirit of Dahl’s children’s literature, which mixed typically bright and cheery flights of imaginative fantasy with unexpectedly dark and bizarre undertones… the film also reflects a sort of last gasp of ‘60s psychedelia: the bright colors of Wonka’s factory would not be inappropriate on a poster advertising a rock festival, and a scary boat ride through a dark tunnel (complete with flashing lights and horrifying images, like a chicken’s head being chopped off) feels like a bad acid trip… The supporting cast (including veteran character actors Jack Albertson and Roy Kinear) does a nice job of embodying Dahl’s weird caricatures.”–Steve Biodrowski, Cinefastique (DVD)

“For all the wonder of a film, with its bouncy, silly songs, art design in candy colors, and mix of innocence and strangeness, there is also an edge to Gene Wilder’s simultaneously weird and warm eccentricities, like a mix of storybook fantasy and Grimm Fairy tale updated to the industrial world of the twentieth century.”–Sean Axmaker, MSN Movies (DVD)

IMDB LINK: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Golden Tickets to Hell: Willy Wonka – Tour Guide of the Abyss – Good analysis by science fiction author Lou Anders, pointing out Wonka‘s debt to Dante’s Inferno

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Fan Club – There are some fun quizzes, polls and so forth on this FanPop page dedicated to the movie

Willy Wonka’s everlasting film plot – A BBC article on Dahl’s reaction to the adaptation of his book

20 Things You Might Not Know About ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ – trivia nuggets about the film courtesy of the moviephone blog

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Dahl’s orginal children’s novel

Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – Director Mel Stuart’s account of the making of the film

I Want it Now! A Memoir of Life on the Set of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – Memoir by actress Julie Dawn Cole (Veruca Salt)

DVD INFO:  As befits a peculiar movie, Willy Wonka has had an interesting video release history.  Wonka became one of the best-renting titles on VHS, far surpassing the popularity of its original theatrical run.  Today the Wonka fan has a large variety of options to choose from to own the film. In 2005, Warner released a “special edition” DVD containing numerous extras including the original trailer, the featurette “Pure Imagination: The Making of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (named after director Mel Stuart’s memoir), a photo gallery, four karaoke-style sing along numbers, and commentary by the five grown-up child stars.  The odd thing about the release is that, underestimating the cultiness of the film’s rabid audience, Warner originally planned to release it only in a chopped pan n’ scan full screen version; after a letter writing/e-mail petition, they added a widescreen option.  Though now out of print, both of these DVDs are still widely available and can be purchased at bargain prices (Full Screen/Widescreen).

2011 saw Warner do it right (or go overboard, depending on your viewpoint) with the release of a deluxe 40th Anniversary Ultimate Collector’s Edition Blu-ray/DVD combo set (buy) that includes all the special features of the previous release but adds a new interview with director Mel Stuart and a short original promotional film and comes in a collector’s box with a 144 page (!) book, and even includes a pencil case shaped like a Wonka bar.

If you’re not interested in the knicknacks you can save money and purchase the DVD (buy) or Blu-ray (buy) separately (no word on special features available in these editions).

An even cheaper option is to rent or buy the film through Video-on-Demand (Video on Demand).

(This movie was nominated for review by “MCD,” who reminded us it comes “complete with one of the scariest moments in movie history, the infamous boat ride.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

PLOT:  A loathsome man spends his days in a dingy, depressing bar where he lusts after the blonde barmaid, who is also the bartender/owner’s wife.  One day he discovers he is growing wings on his back; initially, he’s thrilled to be able to fly, but comes to hate them when they develop a mind of their own and force him to do charitable acts.  Other, equally venal, men plot to steal the wings to use them for their own selfish purposes.

BACKGROUND:

• Bill Plympton has been nominated for Oscars twice for his animated short films.
• Plympton made Idiots and Angels independently with a small team of four assistant artists for an estimated $125,000.
• Per Plympton, the film consists of 30,000 drawings.
• Per Plympton, the film was rejected by thirty distributors.  The animator is self-distributing the movie.
• Idiots and Angels won the Best Film award at the Fantasporto festival in 2009 (previous Fantasporto winners that were Certified Weird are Toto the Hero and Pan’s Labyrinth).
• Idiots and Angels is “presented by” Terry Gilliam.
• The amazing soundtrack, featuring Pink Martini, Nicole Renaud, Tom Waits and others is not available for purchase at this time—and due to licensing issues probably never will be.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The obvious choice would have something to do with wings: maybe a manacled butterfly, or a fat stripper showing off her wingspan to a crowd of leering males, or an angel mooning a passing airliner.  More shocking and unforgettable, however, is the moment near the film’s climax when a full-grown man, wrapped in a placenta, emerges from another man’s navel.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Plympton sets his pitch-black parable about a wicked man who

Scene from Idiots and Angels

grows angel wings in a dialogue-free barroom Purgatory.  Fantastic daydreams mix with increasingly surreal realities to paint a wordless portrait of the eternal, internal struggle between good and evil.  A hip, hypnotic art-pop soundtrack helps sweep the viewer away into Idiots and Angels‘ weird world of bitter cocktails and unexplained appendages.

COMMENTS: The unnamed antihero of Idiots and Angels (the official plot synopsis calls him “Angel”) is a truly loathsome man, as we gather from his literally inflammatory treatment of a motorist who steals what he believes should be his personal parking spot in front of Bart’s Bar.  Dressed in a three-piece suit, briefcase in tow and cigarette affixed to lip, Angel spends his entire workday in the bar, every day, drinking cocktails, abusing the clientele, and savoring lustful fantasies about the shapely barmaid.  He’s the kind of guy who is only genuinely happy when savoring the feel of  the butterfly guts he’s just squished between his fingers.

When Angel awakens one day to find he’s grown a pair of wings, his initial thoughts are only of the embarrassment he’ll suffer for being a freak.  He soon considers an unforeseen upside: unseen, he can glide down from above and snatch women’s purses, or swoop down on unsuspecting ladies sunbathing in the nude in their fenced-in backyards.  His elation turns to grief, however, when he finds that not only do the wings frustrate his attempts to use them for evil purposes, they actually force him into duty as an unwilling Good Samaritan.  He soon finds himself going to extraordinarily painful lengths to rid himself of the unwanted wings; but other men, just as evil as Angel but with an ingenious plan to force the feathery limbs to their wills, have their eyes on the appendages as well.

A strange story demands to be told strangely, and animator Bill Plympton delivers the oddness as always with his highly stylized artwork.  It’s squiggly and full of penciled-in crosshatching, rendered this time out in dampened shades of grey and brown.  This nearly monochromatic palette creates a noirish effect, particularly in the scenes in the dank bar where most of the action takes place (there are numerous moments when Plympton plays with light/shadow effects, as when a driver shoots bullet holes in the roof of his car, causing shafts of light to appear).  The cartoon reality of Idiots and Angels is fluid, moving according to its own associative logic; Angel’s morning ritual sees water rinsed off his face turn into milk pouring on his cereal, and a spoon inserted into his mouth morphs into a car key in the ignition.  At one point the road Angel drives every morning to the bar is depicted as an endlessly spinning treadmill; the trees lining the avenue cast shadows that look like bars on a moving cell.  The absurd physical visual gags we expect from Plympton are out in full force, but there is also an unexpectedly sincere emotional component.  At one point, Angel sheds a single tear but, unwilling to experience tenderness, he gathers it up with a finger and stuffs it back into its duct.

 These visual metaphors are crucial because the story is told without any dialogue, a neat abstracting trick that helps the cartoon parable take on a dreamlike, universal aspect.  Pantomime scenes convey the players’ essential characters.  When a butterfly appears in the dank saloon, the regulars each have a revealing daydream that tells us what we need to know about their personalities.  The owner cooks up an idea for opening a “Butterfly Bar” where patrons flock to see his captive lepidopteron; the aging, overweight floozy playing solitaire at the corner table imagines an act where an audience of mustachioed men in tuxedos shower her with jewelry when she spreads her own wings on stage; the lonely barmaid has a pastoral fantasy where a giant butterfly carries her away into the sky, incidentally making aerial love to her along the way.  Characters even take on different aspects depending on whose eyes we see them through.  When we first see the barmaid dancing to salsa music in an objective third person view, she’s expressing an innocent joy in rhythm and movement; when the angle changes to show the view from Angel’s barstool perspective, she suddenly looks like an exotic dancer, and her broomstick becomes a stripper’s pole she’s humping.  Silent movies at least used intertitles to convey slight amounts of dialogue and narration; Plympton sets the bar even higher here with no words at all (except for bar marquees and newspaper headlines).  The fact that we can follow the story easily—despite all the impossible events and surreal digressions—marks Idiots and Angels as a masterpiece of non-verbal storytelling, one that stacks up favorably against the works of Charlie Chaplin or Jacques Tati.

With no dialogue to speak of, music becomes paramount, and Plympton assembles an impressively moody, melodic soundtrack.  The main theme is ethereally doubled by a warbling whistle and a musical saw, with a French accordion providing rhythmic accompaniment.  The background sound textures range from Hawaiian swing to classical guitar; most of the selections have a consistent cocktail lounge/Playboy-Club-after-hours feel to them that befits the film’s smoky, retro-barroom ambiance.  Avant-garde accordionist/singer Nicole Renaud‘s otherworldly soprano performance in “Le Gris” is a stratospheric accompaniment to Angel’s first flight.  Back on Earth, an abstract sexual assault is scored to Tom Waits’ grungy “Kommienezuspadt”; the husky troubadour’s whiskey-soaked ballad “Flowers Grave” also supplies an emotional highlight.  In a pleasingly coincidental parallel to 2010′s Black Swan, the theme from “Swan Lake” backs a climactic scene where a character spouts wings.  Sound designer Greg Sextro deserves a shout out for integrating the musical snatches, foley effects, and the sparse grunts and gasps that pass for voice acting here into a flowing, effective river of sound that serves as the perfect complement to Plympton’s constantly morphing visuals.

The concept of a man dead-set on battling his inner angel is at the same time funny and moving, and what may be most impressive in Idiots and Angels is how confidently the film manages its complex, contradictory tone.  It’s dark without slipping into nihilism, and hopeful without turning sappy; it manages to be sweet and sour, cynical and romantic, satirical and Gothic all at once, and the dichotomies all merge together and harmonize beautifully.  The movie’s flowing images, atmospheric music, oneiric lack of dialogue, and bits of free-floating weirdness (Angel’s bird-based hallucinations, bars patronized entirely by burn victims in full-body casts) all add up to something unlike any other animated product out there.  But Idiots and Angels gives us even more than that: the movie has a brain and a heart, which together make a soul.  It’s a weird one, sure; but we can see our own humanity, in all its grotesqueness and nobility, reflected in Idiots and Angels.  After all, we’re all part idiot, part angel.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Plympton mines elegance from the utterly gonzo.”Aaron Hillis, The Village Voice (festival screening)

“In this bleak environment – it looks and feels like a David Lynch hangover – the ridiculous mutant wings appear as a symbol of divine intervention, or of a belief in mankind’s better nature. “–Greg Quill, The Toronto Star (contemporaneous)

“…the expected Plymptonesque comedy soon gives way to more uncharacteristic, serious-minded gothic horror, romanticisms, and surreal drama, and this would be great if not for the fact that the morality is simplistic and the plot points belabored.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre (DVD)

OFFICIAL SITE: Idiots and Angels Official Movie Website – clips, stills, a downloadable press kit with and miscellanea

IMDB LINK: Idiots and Angels (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Idiots and Angels Filmmaker Interview – 10 minute videotaped interview with Pympton made for the American Film Institute

Cartoonist Bill Plympton Talks About Idiots and Angels and Finding Success on His Own Terms – This interview with San Francisco Weekly is very short but one of the few available print publications wherein Plympton discusses the film

Ani-Cam at Bill Plympton Studio – While production was ongoing a webcam (dubbed the “ani-cam”) captured Plympton making his pencil sketches for Idiots and Angels live; it’s now available archived

DVD INFO: Unfortunately, the self-distributed DVD (buy) contains no features other than the film itself.

DIRECTED BY: Guy Maddin

FEATURING: Mark McKinney, Isabella Rossellini, Maria de Medeiros, Ross McMillan, David Fox

PLOT: During the Great Depression Lady Port-Huntley, a legless beer baroness from Winnipeg, organizes a contest to discover which nation produces the saddest music in the world, offering a $25,000 prize.  Musicians from across the globe descend upon the city, including three members of a Canadian family: a father (representing Canada) and two brothers (one a Broadway producer representing America, the other an expatriate cello virtuoso playing for the honor of Serbia).  It turns out that the family has a twisted history with each other, and with the contest organizer, involving amnesia, medical malpractice, broken hearts, betrayals, and beer.

BACKGROUND:

• The Saddest Music in the World was based on a screenplay by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go), but was extensively rewritten by Guy Maddin and his writing partner George Toles (for one thing, the setting was moved from 1980s London to Canada in the Great Depression).
• With a budget of 3.5 million Canadian dollars, this was the largest budget Maddin had ever worked with.  Unfortunately, the film made back less than $1 million at the box office.
• Maddin sent Rossellini copies of the “legless” performances of Lon Chaney in West of Zanzibar and The Penalty to watch in preparation for the role of Lady Port-Huntley.
• The Saddest Music in the World was the second Maddin feature released in a busy and amazing 2003; Cowards Bend the Knee (also Certified Weird) debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival in January, while the relatively more mainstream Music was first shown in August at the Venice Film Festival.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Isabella Rossellini’s bubbly new gams, which she proudly displays while dressed as Lady Liberty as dancing girls dressed as Eskimos lie on their backs kicking their heels in the air, all set to the heartbreaking strains of the melancholy ballad “California, Here We Come!”

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Guy Maddin’s promiscuous mix of retro-film techniques, including

Original trailer for The Saddest Music in the World

iris lenses and a primitive two-strip Technicolor process, that drops us into an artificial, alternate movie world that never really existed.  These visuals illustrate a preposterous plot packed with the delightfully absurd coincidences that were the coin of early melodrama—everyone of importance in the movie has a dark, hidden history with everyone else—all interrupted by screwball one-liners and absurd Busby Berkeley-style production numbers.  It’s as if random selection of melodramas and musicals made between 1915 and 1935 had been carelessly stacked on top of each other, and over the years the degenerating nitrate gradually melted into a single filmstrip.

COMMENTS: The Saddest Music in the World is the strangest, and funniest, movie about sorrow you’ll ever see.  Chester, a down-on-his-luck Broadway producer, is unable to feel sadness, and proud of it.  An ominous stock fortune teller from the film’s prologue warns him he must “look to your own miseries… otherwise, you are a dead man!”  But when Lady Port-Huntley recounts the tale of how she lost her legs and asks him, “doesn’t that make you sad?” his chipper response is, “life’s full of surprises—take away those surprises, and life’s a pretty dull proposition!”  This Canadian transplant takes a typically “American” approach to sad music: “it’s gotta be vulgar, and obvious—full of gimmicks.  You know, sadness, but with sass and pizazz!”  His final contest entry—a spectacular number with scantily clad dancing Eskimos memorializing a kayaking tragedy—lives up to that promise.  It’s also an apt description of the movie: sadness, but with sass and pizazz.

At first former “Kid in the Hall” Mark McKinney’s hardboiled, campy performance as Chester seems like its going to be a trial to watch for feature length, but the longer the movie goes on, the more it grows on you—the more appropriate his blithely vapid approach to a vapid character becomes.  McKinney’s got a swell Depression-era mien, at least, for a palooka.  He can’t feel sadness, but he’s better off than his estranged brother Roderick, who’s eternally bereaved over the death of his child and disappearance of his wife.  Roderick always dresses like a beekeeper at a funeral, and he has become so sensitive that the sound of someone breathing through their noise can drive him to hysterics.  He didn’t feel that he was sad enough on his own, so he took on the national sorrow of Serbia, becoming “Gravillo the Great,” the world famous “maestro of melancholy.”

Chester can’t feel sadness, and his brother can’t feel joy.  Roderick can’t forget his personal tragedy, and Chester’s mistress, the nymphomaniac Narcissa, can’t remember anything about her history.  Clearly, these are characters who operate only at the extremes. Legless Lady Port-Huntley, the domineering baroness bent on cornering the American beer market when Prohibition ends, is almost the normal one in the bunch; but she, like all the others, is slowly revealed to have bats in her belfry, too.

Lady Port-Huntley’s plan to increase brand awareness south of the border quite logically involves hosting a depressing battle of the bands, of global scope.  The contest has families across the world glued to their radios.  The first challenge pits a Siamese flautist backed by birdsong (he’s put out his parakeet accompanists’ eyes so they’ll have “a bit more soul” in their chirps) against a Mexican mariachi band, who sing a mother’s traditional mourning song for her dead child (the lyrics implore the tyke to stay in his grave and not come back as a ghost to suckle at her breast).  A buzzer announces each contestant’s turn to play, while the crowd guzzles Lady Port-Huntley beer; the winner celebrates advancing to the next round with a slide into a swimming pool-sized vat of ale.  Other marquee musical match-ups include a Canadian pianist vs. by African tribal drummers playing pygmy funeral music, and the Serbian cellist taking on a Scots drum and bagpipe corps.  Spanish flamenco ensembles and sad Italian clowns get their shot at jerking prizewinning tears, as well.  Melodramatically, in the end it all boils down to a contest of brother versus brother: the American Broadway producer versus the Serbian virtuoso.

That’s all strange enough, but Maddin can’t resist adding surrealistic embellishments, like the sleepwalkers roaming the snowy streets of Winnipeg, the talking tapeworm who psychically controls Narcissa, and the hockey teams who break into spontaneous serenades.  And, most obviously, there’s the director’s fond embrace of weird primitive monochrome aesthetics: the grain in the film so thick it’s becomes like smoke covering the picture; the way the iris lenses keep the center of the scene in crystal clear focus while the edges of the frame bend and melt away; the way Klieg lights hitting pancake makeup make Isabella Rossellini’s face glow with an unearthly brilliance.  There are color sequences here, too;  scenes tinted blue for memories, red for nightmares, and glorious Technicolor for climactic production numbers (and, for some reason, funerals).  But even the color scenes are blurred, faded and hazy; the reds and blues are so unnaturally prominent, it looks like each frame has been clumsily colored in by hand.  Maddin is entranced by the awkwardness of style found in decaying old movies, by the way they imperfectly capture the visual world, the way they exaggerate the extremes of light and shadow and turn the ordinary into the strange.  Maddin’s art is all about finding the beauty in imperfection—in imperfect shots, imperfect plots, imperfect thoughts.

Comedy is also a form of imperfection, found in the gap between the world as it’s supposed to be and the world as it is.  The Saddest Music in the World is, first and foremost and without apology, a comedy, with jokes that collide at the corner of calamity and hilarity.  The film contains the single funniest double amputation ever filmed.  Roderick always carries with him a jar, containing his dead son’s heart, preserved in his own tears—and if that’s not funny, I don’t know what is.  The screenplay is crammed with sappy, snappy lines that spit in the eye of sorrow: Chester’s pithy “Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass!”; a radio commentator’s observation that “no one can beat the Siamese when it comes to dignity, cats or twins, but I’m embarrassed to say that before now I’d never taken Siamese sadness all that seriously;” and Lady Port-Huntley’s famous pronouncement, “if you’re sad, and you like beer, then I’m your lady.”   What, in life, is a happier subject to laugh at than the concept of sadness itself? Guy Maddin is too lighthearted to ever create a truly sad, heartrending movie; but if he does, I’ll be disappointed it he doesn’t name it The Funniest Joke in the World.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What Maddin makes of [the plot] is a comedy, yes, but also an eerie fantasy that suggests a silent film like ‘Metropolis’ crossed with a musical starring Nelson Eddy and Jeannette McDonald, and then left to marinate for long forgotten years in an enchanted vault.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…the weirdest, freest-wheeling, most obsessively inventive motion picture you’ll see this year. Parts are confusing, parts are berserk, parts are exasperatingly slow. But in a wold of cookie-cutter movies, Maddin’s movies are like nobody else’s — funny, Romantic, as deliriously overwrought as a drug lord’s wedding.”–John Powers, LA Weekly (contemporaneous)

“Maddin… is so in love with his own kooky ideas that he hasn’t bothered to comb through them for any real meaning. He takes his zany devices — beer-filled legs! Who’da thunk of that? — and churns them up with old-movie-melodrama tropes, and the result is not magic but a peculiar kind of experimental-movie mud.”–Stephanie Zacharek, salon.com (contemporaneous)

IMDB LINK: The Saddest Music in the World (2003)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Sad Songs Say So Much – Maddin’s mock-serious (“today I paid a scenic painter $2,000 not to sleep with the Polish soprano who’s been singing in the lunchroom the last three days”) production diary for The Saddest Music in the World, published in The Village Voice

DVD INFO: Surprisingly, MGM Home Video bought up the DVD rights to The Saddest Music in the World and issued an excellent package (buy) that lacks only a director’s commentary to make it the ultimate Saddest release in the world.  The disc features the original theatrical trailer along with three minutes of teaser trailers organized around the various “sad-off” musical matches from the film.  Even better are the fifty minutes of featurettes, divided into two mini-docs—”Teardrops in the Snow” and “The Saddest Characters in the Word”—both narrated with arch humor (“how does such a strange and wonderful picture get made? Arcane, almost cabalistic methods are required…”) by a voice actor who simultaneously channels Orson Welles and Vincent Price.  But the best treats of all are three complete Maddin shorts: the melancholy mood piece “A Trip to the Orphanage” (which stars Maria de Medeiros and is possibly a deleted scene from the movie—a small bit of it does actually appear in the film); “Sombra Dolorosa,” in which a bereaved widow wrestles death to save her daughter from suicide (!); and, best of the best, an extended four-minute cut of “Sissy Boy Slap Party” (1995), a sort of pre-Code homoerotic Three Stooges fetish short that must be seen to be believed.  (These three short films are reviewed in more detail in this post).

MGM’s decision to purchase DVD rights for Saddest Music may have something to do with a perceived need to fill out their catalog of musicals, since they soon released it as part of a baffling ten-disc collection of musicals (snuggled up with such strange bedfellows as A Chorus Line and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) (buy).  It’s also in a 4-disc collection (buy) along with The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Without You I’m Nothing, and Absolute Beginners!

The Saddest Music in the World is also currently available on Video on Demand (rent).

(This movie was nominated for review by “alexis” who called it one of her “favorite weird ones.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Paul Bartel

FEATURING: Ayn Ruymen, Lucille Benson, John Ventantonio

PLOT: A sexually curious teenage runaway negotiates the deviant scumbags in her crazy

aunt’s creaky boarding house.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  It might make the List thanks to the atmosphere of sleazy psychosexual depravity that’s slathered on thicker than the blue eye shadow teenage Cheryl cakes on to try to make herself look like a woman.

COMMENTS: Private Parts is a haunted  house movie, except that the ghosts bedeviling the heroine are the bizarre, boozy boarders at her aunt’s decrepit hotel, and she’s not nearly as wary of them as she need to be.  This is a movie full of creaking floorboards, turning doorknobs, and unseen men peeping through knotholes in a dusty old hotel.  Adding to the atmosphere is a wonderfully overwrought Bernard Hermann-inspired soundtrack that’s with us so constantly that it actually creates tension when it disappears for a moment to allow the characters to speak.  Not that what this collection of skid-row oddballs has to say would be particularly reassuring.  We have the Reverend, who at one point suggests he should slip out of his clerical vestments into something more comfortable; the spooky old hag who calls young Cheryl “Alice” after a resident who disappeared a long time ago under suspicious circumstances; and there’s the hotelier herself, Aunt Martha, who loves funerals, hates painted women and believes “the body is a prison.”  There’s also George, the silent young photographer with the darkroom in the basement and the creepy stare that focuses on pubescent Cheryl whenever she’s in the room.  Each of these weirdos has deeper secrets in their closets, which Cheryl will uncover when she starts snooping around their rooms against her Aunt’s orders (hint to future runaways: you should never trust a guy who owns a customized carrying case for his personal syringe).  Obviously, this is no place for a naïf like Cheryl, but she’s not oblivious to the degeneracy—she’s actively drawn to it.  Curious about sex but totally inexperienced, she enjoys the feel of a grown man’s eyes on her developing body, without understanding the difference between healthy lust and sick perversion.  All she knows is, after receiving presents of erotica and spiderweb lingerie from a secret admirer, boys her own age suddenly seem boring.  Although the movie sports a body count, the tension comes from hoping Cheryl will somehow escape what seems to be her inevitable seduction and corruption.  If IMDB is to be believed, Ayn Ruymen was 25 years old when she played the part, but you may have a hard time believing the actress is a day over 16.  Not only does she have an adolescent build, she plays the part with a wonderful mix of innocent naughtiness; she mischievously snoops and pranks the boarders, but still sleeps with a teddy bear and isn’t half as sophisticated as she thinks.  The bits with a bizarre, customizable “blow up” doll are unforgettably creepy.  After playing as straight psychohorror through most of the running time, Private Parts takes a strange detour into black comedy territory for the conclusion with the arrival of a couple of ludicrously blasé cops, and throws out a couple of scarcely believable twists at the very end as the weird capper.  All told, Private Parts a deliciously depraved debut from oddball Paul Bartel.

Private Parts is a should-be cult movie that’s still searching for its cult forty years after release.  For some reason, MGM picked the movie up for distribution, then apparently balked at the pseudo-pedophiliac subject matter and buried the movie.  The flick has been consistently overlooked since; those who caught it in its brief theatrical run or stumbled upon its unheralded VHS or DVD releases remember it, but word of mouth has never made it a hit, despite its midnight movie feel and pleasing perversity.  Ironically, director Paul Bartel received more exposure making films like Death Race 2000 for Roger Corman (Roger’s brother Gene was producer on Private Parts) than he with this Hollywood debut.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for pure excess and surreal humor, it’s something of a minor pop art masterpiece; a careful blending of the eccentric and the sleazy, very much akin to other midnight revival mainstays like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and the ’70s films of John Waters, with a wickedly unique take on repressed desire and secret shame.”–Paul Corupe, DVD Verdict (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Gerby” who called it “a strange one!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Also released as Psycho Boy and His Killer Dog, and on video as Mad Don (to cash in on the unexpected celebrity of Don Johnson and the success of Mad Max)

DIRECTED BY: L.Q. Jones

FEATURING: Don Johnson, Tim McIntire (voice), Susanne Benton, Jason Robards

PLOT: Vic roams the post-apocalyptic desert wasteland with his telepathic dog Blood, who has the ability to sense the presence of human females.  Blood finds a woman for Vic in an underground bunker; as Vic is about to rape her, a band of marauders come upon them, and Vic and Blood fight them off.  The woman gives herself to Vic willingly but later sneaks away; Vic follows her to her strange underground world, leaving the badly wounded Blood behind on the surface.

BACKGROUND:

• A Boy and His Dog was adapted from Harlan Ellison’s novella of the same name.  Ellison began the screenplay but ran into writer’s block, and director Jones and producer Alvy Moore completed the script.
• Jones wrote the film’s infamous last line.  Ellison has gone on record as “despising” the final dialogue.
• Director L.Q. Jones was better known as a character actor (usually a heavy) in westerns, appearing in small roles in five films by Sam Peckinpah among his 150+ acting credits.  This is one of only two feature films he directed.  He appears as a cowboy in the film-inside-the-film.
• Blood, the dog in the film, was played by Tiger, who also portrayed (in one episode) the family pet in the “Brady Bunch” television show.
• Ellison continued the adventures of the post-apocalyptic pair in the (now out-of-print) graphic novel Vic and Blood: The Continuing Adventures of a Boy and His Dog .

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The setting and ideas of A Boy and His Dog are more memorable than the imagery, but the clown-faced residents of underground Topeka worm themselves into the memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A Boy and His Dog gives us two weird worlds for the price of one: a

Original trailer for A Boy and His Dog

scorched earth surface roamed by sarcastic, hyper-intelligent telepathic dogs, and an underground society of impotent totalitarian mimes.  Either vision on its own might have been weird enough to get this movie onto the List, but put them together and you’ve got something radically unique.

COMMENTS: A Boy and His Dog may be the weirdest “buddy” movie ever made, thanks to the fact that one of the pals is a telepathic mutt who uses his psychic abilities to find rape victims for Don Johnson.  The relationship between the dog, Blood, and the boy, Vic, is the heart of the movie: they often bicker like an old married couple, but the loyalty they show each other is the only worthwhile thing that survived the Bomb.  Reversing expectations, it’s Blood the beast who’s the brains of the partnership, and the human who’s all animal instinct.  It’s Blood tries to teach the reluctant Vic post-apocalyptic history (incidentally letting the audience in on the film’s backstory), and it’s Blood who dreams of finding a better life (a paradise where people have rediscovered agriculture, located “over the hill.”)  Vic, who seems to be about 18 years old, is girl-crazy and is only interested meeting women in a world where females are scarcer than at a World of Warcraft convention in Juneau, Alaska.   Vic is a habitual rapist, and Blood his psychic pimp who finds him victims in exchange for food; and yet, somehow, their relationship is sweet, in a blackly comic way.  A young Don Johnson is surprisingly good as the rash redneck who fearlessly charges into a band of roving thugs to steal a few cans of food, and his performance is especially noteworthy considering he acts opposite an animal, often reacting to lines of dialogue that will be dubbed in later.  But Tim McIntire is perfect as Blood; he creates the character so completely that it’s impossible to imagine another actor in the role.  Blood has an acerbic sense of humor—when Vic gets sexually frustrated, he spontaneously invents a dirty limerick to taunt the boy—and McIntire’s delivers his putdowns (many of which go over Vic’s head) with perfect irony.  When he suddenly switches gears and turns sincere and vulnerable, though, the effect can be heartbreaking.  The beautifully written repartee and constant needling between the two compadres suggests a lifetime of shared experiences.  Blood and Vic are brains and brawn, complementary to the point of being almost co-dependent, and should be inseparable chums on their scavenging journeys.  Throw a beautiful woman—the traditional solvent that dissolves the bond between two men—into this balanced equation, though, and things get dramatic.

It’s a good thing that the chemistry between Johnson and McIntire is so good, because it immediately sells the outlandish premise.  The emotionally complex interactions between Vic and Blood are so realistic that we soon forget we’re starting to sympathize with a talking dog.  We hardly even wonder how man’s best friend came to be his master’s intellectually superior psychic wingman and mentor.  The script never bothers to explain it to us, but asks us to take this crazy universe as it is (Ellison’s novella adds more details, but I like the way the movie simply ignores the suspension of disbelief problem and asks us to accept its world on faith).

The post-apocalyptic mise en scène—punk gangs scurrying about a desert wasteland fighting over scarce resources, whether they be water or women—is familiar to us now, but A Boy and His Dog is the godfather of the genre.  George Miller would adapt this same basic setting (including the amoral tone) four years later in his hit Mad Max, then sanitize the setting in his mega-hit The Road Warrior.  Hordes of imitators would follow throughout the 1980s before the cycle largely burnt itself out, but, in 1975, this anarchic post-nuke scavenger society was a strange scene indeed, even minus the chatty canine.

Jones and Ellison imbue their world with mildly surreal touches that their imitators never got hip to (or wisely abandoned).  There’s an outpost of civilization in the wilderness, but it’s an odd one; essentially, it’s a truck stop built around a drive-in movie.  Sure, you can get a shower there, and a date with what must be the world’s busiest prostitute, but cinema alfresco is the main attraction.  (It’s an appropriate touch considering A Boy and His Dog probably played at a lot of drive-ins in the  mid-Seventies).  Of course, the proprietors can’t just screen any old movies to the horny desert rats who trade their hard-earned cans of peaches and tins of sardines for tickets to the show.  The star attractions are a series a scratchy old worn-out black and white smokers and burlesque reels that appear to date back to the 1950s and 1960s (the film is set in 2024).  As Vic and Blood go about their business, advancing the plot, we get occasional peeks at the action onscreen.  The seamy, scrambled feature we can recreate from our glimpses of the action is a strange one: we see a woman stripping, couples making love, cowboys, lynch mobs, a man on fire, coitus interruptus at gunpoint.  The print has faded to a golden sepia, vertical streaks obscure the action, and sometimes a frame of film is upside down.   When our focus returns to Vic and Blood arguing over a popcorn purchase and stumbling onto a major plot point, diegetic screams of pain or moans of pleasure fill the air.  These jumbled antique porno snippets create a weird background hum of social decay, and make what could have been a throwaway scene into something unforgettable.

If a land of psychic dogs hunting women across an irradiated landscape seems strange to you, brace yourself for when Vic abandons Blood to chase a pretty little derriere down a rabbit hole and into the far more bizarre Wonderland of Topeka.  Civilization, of a satirical sort, has survived the holocaust underground, where what appear to be a band of Lutheran farmers have recreated Norman Rockwell’s America in an eternal twilight.  The men dress in bow ties or overalls, the women in prairie dresses, and both sexes smother their faces in white greasepaint and highlight their cheekbones with obscene amounts of blush.  Topeka seems to be throwing a perpetual pot luck picnic at a park planted with fake shrubbery, complete with clown marching bands and barbershop quartets.  In between meals you can step inside the church, sit in the pews, and watch the governing Council do its business: handing out blue ribbons for the best canned goods, and sentencing wrongdoers to “the farm” for the generic crime of “lack of respect, wrong attitude, and failure to obey authority,” all with a strict adherence to Robert’s Rules of Order.  A loudspeaker constantly blares through the streets of Topeka, giving the citizens news, “sound tours” into the past (the growls and trumpets of lions and elephants), history lessons, prayers, “helpful hints for living,” and instructions for making the perfect country breakfast.  The propagandistic PA echoes the seedy drive-in sound system that, earlier in the film, piped in the sounds of sex and fighting; this time the background noise is a barrage of ironically incongruent, wholesome nonsense.

After being forcibly bathed, Vic decides he wants out of the two-bit town, until the Council makes him an offer that sounds (and is) too good to be true.  Thankfully, morally upright Topeka has a teenage rebellion problem of its own, and Vic is able to escape their dastardly plans and make it back topside, with his female prize in tow.  Once there, he meets up with Blood again, and realizes he never should have deserted his dear friend to chase some skirt.  Vic has to find a way to make up to his best friend for his betrayal.  The solution he comes up with leads to the film’s infamous, ironically perfect ending and its killer final line.

Many people find the film’s ending to be in bad taste.  Many find the entire movie to be in bad taste, in fact, and they have a point.  A Boy and His Dog has frequently been accused of going beyond just being a “guy movie” and transgressing into the realm of outright misogyny.  And while I’m not sure that the movie goes that far—I think the film is more pro-womanizer than it is anti-woman—I confess that the sub-misogynistic subtext, while not ruining the film, does detract from my enjoyment of it, and makes A Boy and His Dog  difficult to unconditionally endorse.

Viewed one way, A Boy and His Dog is about the hero recognizing and affirming a real, enduring friendship above a passing erotic fancy.  That’s a fine message, but the overall context of the film begs a different reading.  What we actually see in A Boy and His Dog is 1) a guy who’s enjoying life hanging out with his male buddy, occasionally using women to satisfy his sexual urges, who 2) falls emotionally for a woman and abandons his friend and 3) is tricked into a hellish version of wholesome family life; 4) the woman turns out to be a conniving deceiver who was just using him, so he 5) viciously kicks her to the curb to reunite with his true friend.  The women in A Boy and His Dog are commodities (the movie’s most disturbing quote is not the final punchline, but Vic’s spontaneous reaction when he finds a bloody, still-breathing rape victim: “Hell, they didn’t have to cut her!  She could have been used two or three more times”).  The only meaningful relationship in the film is between guys; the only woman we meet pretends to be a victim, but is really a trickster and deceiver out to trap the hero.  The horrifying world she comes from is civilized and family oriented, but it’s also feminized—even the men wear makeup.  The horrifying event Vic must escape from is, significantly, matrimony: a nightmarishly twisted wedding ceremony.  And how can Vic redeem himself for succumbing to his need for love?  Only by rejecting the civilized world and returning to his former lifestyle of treating women as disposable chattel.

By the time Ellison wrote the original novella, he had already been married three times, with the longest lasting four years and the shortest seven weeks.  He characterized his first marriage as “four years of hell” and had written an anthology of cynical “romance” stories entitled “Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled.”  Given his troubled relationships with women, it may not be shocking that he would pen a scenario that portrays the world of rootless, feral males as more desirable than the prison of civilization with its castrating institution of forced monogamy.  It’s true that A Boy and His Dog is “just a story,” that Vic’s attitudes towards women are absolutely in tune with the setting and true to the way men would think and act if faced with a catastrophic shortage of women.  It’s arguable that Quinella June is a unique character and shouldn’t be viewed as the representative for her sex.  You could defend the position that the movie’s misanthropic rather than specifically misogynist: the men aren’t exactly portrayed as good people, either.  You could view the intellectual, asexual Blood, who proclaims that “breeding is an ugly thing” and whose main interest in copulation is in tracing the word’s Latin roots, as a symbol of the mind in opposition to Vic’s libido, which puts a much different and more favorable spin on the symbolism. Still, there’s something extremely disquieting about the film’s resolution, which manipulates us into cheering when Vic finds redemption by rejecting erotic love (shown to be a cruel illusion) and resuming his career as a rapist.  It’s a surrealistic version of the male gangsta ethos that’s summed up in the phrase “bros before hos”; call it “pooches before cooches.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a weird, offbeat sci-fi movie… It’s got a unique . . . well, I was about to say charm, but the movie’s last scene doesn’t quite let me get away with that. “–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“The good ideas are marred by awkwardness; the terrible ideas are redeemed somewhat by being, at least, unpredictable… The underworld part, brilliantly grotesque as it partly is, breaks the realistic vision of the beginning. The two parts don’t really work together…”–Richard Eder, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Some scenes towards the end are simply bizarre. However, if you’re a serious SF buff, then you’ll probably look past the film’s weaknesses and ‘get’ what made the movie the definite cult classic it is.”–James O’Ehley, The Sci-Fi Movie Page (DVD)

IMDB LINK: A Boy and His Dog (1975)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Apocalypse Wow! – The Montreal Mirror‘s Matthew Hays interviews L.Q. Jones 28 years after A Boy and His Dog‘s release

“A Boy and His Dog” in “Harlan Ellison: the edge of forever” – Via GoogleBooks comes this chapter about the original novella, discussing the differences between the story and film versions and the misogyny controversy, from a critical work on Ellison by Ellen Weil and Gary K. Wolfe

A Boy and His Dog: The Final Solution – In a contemporaneous essay, feminist Joanna Russ claims “sending a woman to see A BOY AND HIS DOG is like sending a Jew to a movie that glorifies Dachau”

A Boy and His Dog at TV Tropes – Listing for the film at the sometimes perceptive, sometimes hilarious cliché-cataloging site

DVD INFO: A Boy and His Dog has yet to receive the DVD treatment it deserves.  The 2003 First Run Features “Special Edition” release (buy) presents the feature in widescreen, but the print is grainy and un-restored.  There is a lively commentary by L.Q. Jones, cinematographer John Morrill and film critic Charles Champlin, and two trailers for the film.  The box cover advertises liner notes from science fiction author Robert Heinlein, but all reports indicate that these notes were never actually included with the package.

(This movie was nominated for review by “Kathryn,” who characterized it as “not great, but definitely some weird ideas floating around there.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING:  Chris Morris, Mark Heap, Amelia Bullmore, David Cann, Julia Davis, Kevin Eldon, Roz McCutcheon

PLOT:  “Jam” was a six episode TV series that originally aired on UK TV Channel 4.  Each 25

minute episode was aired without ad breaks or credits.  The show featured various “sketches” and faux interviews dealing with suicide, murder, sexual abuse, rape, child death, and medical malpractice.  The whole thing was backed by occasionally intrusive ambient music and some segments were filmed or dubbed in an out of synch fashion that made them even more awkward and disturbing than the subject matter would suggest.

The show was repeated at a later hour as “Jaaam!”  This variation took the original sketches and remixed the visuals to make the viewing experience more tricky and surreal with shots sped up, fed through filters and replaced with stills.   Many of the sketches were born in a BBC Radio 1 very late night/early morning show called “Blue Jam” which mixed vocal skits with ambient tracks.  Some of the radio sketches were taken directly from the old soundtrack and then lip synched on TV, resulting in another layer in the onion of weird that was “Jam.”

COMMENTS:  To mix preserves, “Jam” is like Marmite: you’ll either love it or hate it.  Allow me to give you a taster.

A couple believes their young daughter is a 45 year old man trapped in a young girl’s body, so they have the genitals of a 45 year old man grafted to her body.

A woman calls a plumber to her house to fix her dead baby.  He is aghast, but she explains the baby is only 3 weeks old and they’re meant to last longer than that, and after all “it’s just pipes really.”  In a throwaway comment she reveals that the father has said he will leave if she doesn’t stop “going on about the pipes.”  An offer of £1000/hour convinces the plumber to give it a try, and later he takes her up to the bedroom to see his work.  He’s plumbed the baby’s corpse into the heating system to make it warm and added a little tap so it will gurgle.

A couple bargaining for a house negotiate a reduction in price in return for sex sessions with the seller.  When he receives a better offer, he threatens to renege on the deal, so they offer the services of the husband’s mentally disabled sister.

Some folks will have already decided that “Jam” is not for them, and I can’t really blame them.  Part of me died when I typed the words “he’s plumbed the baby’s corpse into the heating system.”  My mother would be so proud.  “Jam” is as much horror as comedy; at times, it stretches its muscles to the tearing point while pushing the envelope.  Maybe it tries too hard most of the time.  Morris repeatedly invites us to laugh at some absurdity, and then muddies the water until we no longer know what to think or how to react.  Disgust swells as laughter dies.

Take the “Baby Plumber” sketch as an example of his technique.  A dark ambient soundtrack plays throughout the whole thing, and the dialogue is delivered in a very quiet, understated way.  The sketch starts traditionally enough: a woman answers the door to a plumber who says he’s come to fix her boiler.  It could almost be a ropy porno.  Immediately she corrects him and says that it’s not the boiler, it’s her baby.  The plumber looks as nonplussed as anyone would.  As the woman explains the situation he looks by turns puzzled, disgusted, pitying.  Then she mentions the money, and his pity and disgust are gradually replaced by greed.  He doesn’t immediately jump at the offer; his moral wrestling is visible on his face at every moment.  When he takes her upstairs to see his handiwork, he is clearly revolted and proud in equal parts.  Any amusement we might have found in the initial absurd request dies as we hear the plumber detail what he has done, and we see steam rising from the out of the shot.  Then as the viewer deals with this the sketch ends with the mother leaning over the cot, talking to the baby as though he is alive, and saying she doesn’t think daddy will leave now.

There is some fine acting on display, from both performers.  And the writing subtly draws a picture of a broken woman whose baby has died and whose marriage is collapsing as a result.  The plumber isn’t a bad man, he pities the woman, is horrified by her request, but he’s weak and venal and £1000/hr is a lot of money.

But is any of this funny, in any way?  Are we meant to smile, or wonder what we would do in similar circumstances?

“Jam” poses this question time and again.  We can all imagine finding the house of our dreams.  If someone offered us a substantial discount in return for sexual services, would we be wrong to consider the option?  This sketch starts out amusingly enough.  What is really funny is not the offer but how the couple reacts.  When the man thinks that the seller is just interested in his wife, he thinks it’s a great idea.  When it becomes clear that the seller is happy for the husband to perform the oral sessions, suddenly he’s not so sure.  His wife not only overcomes her own reluctance but takes grim pleasure in paying him back for his willingness to sell her services just moments before.  Smart acting tells us lots about this couple and their relationship; so far it’s amusing and thought provoking.  Then suddenly the sketch takes a detour to the very dark side.  When the wife offers the services of her mentally disabled sister-in-law, everything immediately becomes very wrong indeed.  Then we see the final shots of the confused young woman being taken into the house by the leering seller, and none of this is funny anymore.

And here’s one of the problems I have with “Jam.”  Morris clearly wants to mess with our heads.  Everything, the unconventional filming, the odd soundtrack, the bad taste, is designed to keep us off balance.  Had the “Sex For Houses” sketch occurred in a more conventional series it would have been breathtakingly shocking, but “Jam” tries so hard to shock us that after a while, particularly if you watch more than one episode at a time, your mind starts to go “meh,” just to protect itself.

Watch “Jam” and you’ll see male porn stars ejaculate to death, a man have sex with a seductive doctor while his wife struggles to give birth alone, a six-year-old girl who cleans up crime scenes, an acupuncturist who nails her clients to the table and leaves them to hang, a lonely woman so desperate for friends that she kills to keep them.  I don’t think that TV has to be safe, bland and unchallenging, and I’ve always laughed at inappropriate things, but I struggled with “Jam.”  It tries so hard that all too often the effort shows, and it reduces its own impact by screaming its bad taste in your face for twenty five minutes at a time.

Chris Morris’ work is always challenging, though.  In the UK Morris is best known for his TV work on “The Day Today,” a satirical news show shown on BBC 2 in 1994, and for his controversial current affairs satire “Brass Eye.”  He recently directed the full length film Four Lions, about a group of inept terrorists from Sheffield.

“Brass Eye,” in particular, courted controversy by tricking celebrities into lending their names to fake publicity campaigns about (for instance) a made up drug called cake, and an elephant in a German zoo that had its trunk stuck in its anus.  Morris’ masterpiece is probably the “Paedogeddon” episode of “Brass Eye,” which mocked the press and public hysteria in the UK surrounding pedophilia.  This is an excellent piece of work and if you can find the DVD of “Brass Eye” I wholeheartedly recommend it, even if some of the cultural references don’t translate.

If “Jam” were a movie rather than a TV series, it would be a List candidate;  it’s certainly unremittingly weird.  The lack of availability will probably count against it.  The DVD can still be found on some UK sites such as Play.com and is Region 0, so if folks are really keen they could get hold of a copy if they act quickly.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…most of Jam feels hideously, frighteningly wrong. But that’s what makes it so right. The word ‘genius’ gets flung around pretty casually; but if you accept that a good definition of a genius is somebody who creates something thoroughly new, utterly unlike what has gone before, then Chris Morris is a genius.”–The Independent, Thursday, 20 April 2000

DIRECTED BY: Roger Corman

FEATURING: Jonathan Haze, Mel Welles, Jackie Joseph, Dick Miller, Jack Nicholson, Charles B. Griffith

PLOT:  Mild-mannered delivery boy Seymour breeds a new plant in an attempt to impress

his boss and the sexy cashier at his flower shop; the talking mutant Venus flytrap grows to extraordinary size, but only so long as it is fed a constant supply of blood and bodies.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s not weird enough, though it certainly marches to the beat of its own drummer.  Filmed in two days from a quickie script by Roger Corman scribe Charles B. Griffith written on the fly to take advantage of some leftover storefront sets, Horrors was seat-of-the-pants filmmaking.  Aided by an inspired cast, the inherent quirkiness of the Faustian plant food fable shines through.  Often called the best movie ever shot in 48 hours, The Little Shop of Horrors is a fast, fun ride that every cinephile should check out at least once; it’s a triumph of imagination, dedication, and sheer luck over budgetary constraints.  It’s too bad it’s not a little bit weirder.

COMMENTS: “I’ve eaten in flower shops all over the world, and I’ve noticed that the places that have the most weird and unusual plants do the best business.”  That’s the sort of universe Little Shop of Horrors takes place in, one where minor characters stand by casually chomping on salted gardenias and handing out plot advice to the principals.  Set in a mythical Skid Row, “the part of town everybody knows about but nobody wants to see—where the tragedies are deeper, the ecstasies wilder and the crime rate consistently higher than anywhere else,” this is black comedy circa 1960.  Not only is murder made a joke, but more scandalous taboos like sadomasochism and prostitution are part of the fabric of daily life on Skid Row.  Man-eating plant aside, the movie’s greatest charm is the cast of crazy supporting characters that pop in and out of the story: the floral gastronome, Seymour’s hypochondriac mom, an unlucky woman whose relatives are constantly dying, two flat-affect flatfeet (broad spoofs of the duo from “Dragnet”), a pair of bouncy high school cheerleaders, a hooker who persistently tries to pick up a hypnotized trick, and a sadistic dentist and his masochistic patient (the latter played by Nicholson).  The main players are good as well: Jackie Joseph is an acceptably ditzy and breathy love interest, and Jonathan Haze plays nebbish Seymour like Jerry Lewis under a successful regimen of epilepsy medication to control his spasms and vocal contortions.  But it’s otherwise unheralded Mel Welles as exasperated florist Gravis Mushnik who actually carries the picture.  He’s a Jewish immigrant stereotype with a gift for casually mangling the English language; even the signs he hangs on the shop wall reflect that special Mushnik linguistic twist (“we don’t letting you spend so much,” one brags, in a typical Mushnik “finger of speech”).  He can be mercenary and curt, but of all the characters the audience identifies the most with him and his befuddlement at the nutcases surrounding him.  The entire company of Corman stock players seem to be peaking at the same time; the dialogue is punchy: witty lines delivered with near-perfect timing.  Corman’s direction is typically competent and unobtrusive, allowing the script and the actors to shine through.  You may have guessed already that the emphasis in this horror/comedy is heavily on the funny side of the spectrum, but there is something spooky and nightmarish about the plant moaning “feed me!” with the selfish persistence of a newborn child.  And a dark cloud of fate hangs over the film; as likable and seemingly harmless as he may be, Seymour is doomed from the first time he gives in to the plant’s demands so that he can preserve his shot a botanical fame.  Working outside the Hollywood system, the film isn’t required to give the hero an easy, happy out, and it doesn’t.  Wicked but not at all crass, Little Shop is a fascinating look at how seedy topics could be handled with wit and grace in a more innocent age.

Notoriously cheap Corman never wasted the fifty bucks required to renew the copyrights on his quickie features, so like most of his 1960s work, Little Shop of Horrors fell into the public domain.  It can be watched or downloaded from the Internet Archive.  Today, DVDs are sold with Jack Nicholson’s name and face taking up the majority of space on the box cover, even though he’s only in the film for about two minutes (his name appears fourteenth out of the fifteen actors’ names in the opening credits).  Corman and Griffith tried to repeat the formula of Horrors the very next year with The Creature from the Haunted Sea, another whirlwind horror/comedy packed with quirky characters.  The abysmal failure of Haunted Sea demonstrates just how much luck was involved in the success of Little Shop; everyone involved just happened to be clicking on all cylinders the week they made it.  Frank Oz‘ 1986 musical remake, while very different in style, is also offbeat and worth a look.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“There is a genuinely bizarre sense of humour to the film… [it] has a silliness that verges on surrealism…”–Richard Scheib, Moria: The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Aramis Sartorio

FEATURING: Aramis Sartorio, Caleb Emerson, Vincent Cusimano, Kimberly Kane, Camilla Lim, Karen Sartorio, Gia Paloma

PLOT:  Struggling actor Tommy Pistol isn’t much of a success, but he doesn’t let that hinder

his dream of becoming a star, even when his wife and child leave him.  Left alone with hot dogs, porn and a penis pump, Tommy dreams his dreams of success and stardom, but even in dreams, things don’t turn out as he hopes.  And his reality is just about to get even worse…

COMMENTS:  It’s not inaccurate to call TGDOTP a Troma-esque grossout horror-comedy anthology, but that description leaves out quite a lot. It’s also a cautionary tale about obsession, fame and filmmaking in Los Angeles with autobiographical elements.

Unfolding as a series of dreams, the first, “Snuff Said,” has a young Pistol fresh off the train, answering an ad on a web site to act in a movie.  It turns out to be a snuff film, but Pistol, not being the sharpest tool in the box (so to speak), thinks that it’s just extremely realistic special effects.

The second dream, “10 Minutes of Fame”, sees Pistol sneaking onto a location set of a major film and gradually worming his way to become the assistant of the star—Arnold Schwartzenegger!  He accidently kills Arnie and takes his skin, which gives him the ass-kicking skills to take out the rest of the crew.

In the last dream, “Attack of the Staph Spider”, Tommy is a porn director whose lead actress is bitten by a radioactive spider in the alley just prior to the shoot.  Things do not turn out like “Spiderman,” unfortunately—the actress develops boils and starts leaking addictive fluids, which end up infecting the crew.  Meanwhile, Tommy’s biggest problem is getting the makeup person to make her presentable so the shoot can go on.

The humor is pitch-black; as in most of the Troma-esque lot, the grossness factor is pushed pretty much past the hilt, then doubled.  All of the characters in the dreams are, at their best, amoral to immoral; but in a satire about fame and filmmaking, that’s probably an accurate portrayal.  It also helps that the movie’s pretty damn funny.

What raises TGDOTP a notch above most of its cousins is that the grossness isn’t merely for the sake of grossness—there’s actually some substance behind it.  “Tommy Pistol” is actually Sartorio’s nom de porn when he was acting in adult films such as Repenetrator, The XXXorcist and Neu Wave Hookers.  Deciding to branch out, he made “Staph Spider” as a short, then pursued other opportunities as a struggling actor in Hollywood.  Although his wife did not leave him, many other elements in the film—being late for auditions, getting fired from ‘real’ jobs and dodging creditors—Sartorio probably knows all too well, as well as the other side of Hollywood: sketchy characters willing to do anything to anyone; narcissistic actors; and the desperation and self-delusion of everyone in town, especially those attempting to find their big break.  It may be exaggerated, but there’s a definite sense that there’s some personal experience involved.  The best example is a scene in the first dream, which mocks the aside to camera in JCVD, but also functions in the very same fashion.  And surprisingly, the movie ends in a sad and strangely graceful place, something completely unexpected, and also appreciated.

The acting is strong—better than you would expect in films of this ilk; and tech is pretty good, especially in the effects.  The humor is not going to appeal to everyone, obviously, but those who ‘like it black’ will enjoy it, especially the segment about Schwarzenegger.

Ultimately, it’s not a weird film, despite the over-the-top humor.  Most reviewers have been calling this Troma-esque, and Troma, especially “balls-to-the-wall, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink grossout humor Troma” is just not “weird” anymore.

Even calling it a “horror-comedy’ isn’t quite correct, but a “horror-comedy” is a much easier sell than a “pitch-black Hollywood satire.”

The Gruesome Death of Tommy Pistol facebook page

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

DIRECTED BY: Terry Gilliam

FEATURING: Jonathan Pryce, Kim Greist, Michael Palin, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Peter Vaughan, Bob Hoskins, Charles McKeown

PLOT:  Sam Lowry is a lowly, unambitious bureaucrat working in the Records Department in an authoritarian society “somewhere in the Twentieth century” who frequently dreams he is a winged man fighting a giant robotic samurai to save a beautiful woman.  An error results in the government picking up a Mr. Buttle as a suspected terrorist instead of a Mr. Tuttle; Buttle dies during interrogation.  Sam visits Buttle’s widow to deliver a refund check for her dead husband, and finds that the upstairs neighbor, Jill, looks exactly like his dream woman; he transfers to the “Information Retrieval” Department to access Jill’s personal files and learn more about her, but ends up running afoul of powerful government interests.

BACKGROUND:

• Brazil is the second part of Gilliam’s unofficial “Imagination” trilogy, which began with Time Bandits and ended with The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.  Time Bandits is told from the perspective of a child, Brazil from that of an adult, and Munchausen from an elderly man.  Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm and Monty Python buddy Michael Palin all appeared in Time Banditsas well.
• Terry Gilliam co-wrote the script for Brazil with Charles McKeown (who also plays Harvey Lime here, and would later collaborate on the scripts for The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus) and playwright Tom Stoppard.  The three together were nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.  Novelist Charles Alverson also worked on an early version of the script, but he and Gilliam had a falling out and he was not credited for his work, although he was paid.
• Besides Best Original Screenplay, Brazil was also nominated for a Best Art Direction Oscar.
• The movie is named after its theme song, Ary Baroso’s 1939 “Aquarela do Brazil” ["Watercolors of Brazil"].  “Brazil” represents the exotic, colorful world (with an amber moon) that Sam dreams of escaping to. According to one story, the film was originally to be titled 1984 1/2, but the title was dropped over worries about lawsuits from George Orwell’s estate (a fine adaptation of 1984 had been released the previous year).
• Robert De Niro read the script and lobbied to play the part of Jack, but Gilliam turned the star down because he wanted Palin in the role.  De Niro accepted the role of Tuttle instead.
• Brazil has a legendary distribution story.  The film was released overseas in Gilliam’s original cut, but in the U.S. Universal Studios did not like the unhappy ending and attempted to recut the film, reducing it from 142 minutes to 94 minutes and editing the ending in an attempt to give it a happy ending.  (This studio cut of the film later played on television and has been dubbed the “Love Conquers All” version of Brazil).  Gilliam opposed the changes and feuded publicly with Universal Studios head Sid Sheinberg, blaming him personally for holding up the movie’s release, appearing on the television program “Good Morning America” and holding up a picture of Sheinberg, and paying for a full page ad in Variety reading “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my movie?”  Against studio orders, Gilliam screened the uncut film for free at the University of Southern California.  Curious critics attended the screenings, and before the movie had been released to U.S. theaters, the Los Angeles Film Critics voted Brazil Best Picture of 1985.  In a compromise agreed to by Gilliam, Universal cut only 11 minutes from the complete version, left the unhappy ending largely intact, and released the movie soon after (reportedly so as not to jeopardize its chances at winning an Academy Award).
• Calling its style “retro-futurism,” Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet credit Brazil‘s art design with influencing their vision for Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children.  Brazil’s junkyard of the future look also directly inspired the visual sensibilities of movies such as Dark City, Tim Burton‘s Batman, and 2011′s Sucker Punch.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Some may nominate Sam’s dream of soaring as a mechanical angel battling a giant robotic samurai, or the torturer posed in his decrepit doll’s mask in the foreground with his tiny victim chained in the center of a massive open-air tower in the distant background, but it’s Katherine Helmond’s personal plastic surgeon gripping and stretching her facial flab impossibly tight that’s the most striking, incisive and unexpected of Brazil‘s many visual non sequiturs.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Terry Gilliam explained his vision for the milieu he molds in Brazil

Original trailer for Brazil

as one that’s “very much like our world” but “just off by five degrees.”  He was shooting for an atmosphere that’s uncannily familiar, something just strange enough to shock the viewer while still highlighting the absurdities of modern existence.  Watching Brazil‘s many surreal touches—as when what appears to be a giant boozing tramp peers over a horizon dominated by cooling towers painted sky blue with white clouds—most viewers will conclude Gilliam overshot the five degrees at which he was aiming.  But in the unlikely event the rest of the film isn’t strange enough for you, wait for the finale in which Gilliam pulls out reality’s remaining stops, including a scene where a man is literally killed by paperwork.

COMMENTS:  Terry Gilliam wasn’t kidding when he located Brazil “somewhere in the twentieth century.”  Though sometimes considered as science fiction, this film is not set in a future that could someday be, but in a fantastic alternate world miscellaneously mixing mechanized elements from the bloody industrialized century that brought us totalitarianism, terrorism, two world wars, and air conditioning.  The architecture of Brazil‘s society brings to mind the Bauhaus movement of the 1920s and 1930s.  The Information Ministry is fronted by a giant art-deco eagle that merges sleek modernist abstraction with fascist statuary.  The characters’ wardrobes are temporal wormholes that open somewhere between the 1920s and 1950s; even low-level functionaries wear felt hats and gray three piece suits to work.  (Katherine Helmond’s leopard-skin high-heel hat is an obvious sartorial exception here; it could only have been fashionable in the stoned 1960s or the tacky 1970s).  The propaganda posters that litter the movie’s every wall (with cheery slogans like “loose talk is noose talk”) are variously patterned on Soviet and Nazi (and even British) wartime posters or cheery advertising from 1930s magazines.  Television is omnipresent, but it mostly broadcasts movies and shows from the 1940s and earlier (Casablanca, black and white Westerns and the Marx Brothers are featured presentations).

Although Sam’s dream sequences where he flies on golden mechanical wings and fights a giant robotic samurai are done with then state-of-the-art effects (that stand up beautifully today), Gilliam mostly mines cinema’s past for Brazil‘s stylistic elements; this grab-bag of film techniques further belies the supposedly futuristic setting.  The drab gray color schemes of the city mimic monochromatic film.  Dramatic shots, lighting, odd camera angles, and abstract designs hearken back to German expressionism of the 1910s and 1920s (indeed, the world of Brazil‘s looks like it might have been designed by Fritz Lang if he’d survived to 1985 and been handed a fifteen million dollar budget).  The characters’ fedoras, the double-crosses, and the cynical tone of paranoia and distrust evoke 1940s film noir.  Pryce delivers a couple of out-of-place slapstick routines that could have come out of Charlie Chaplin‘s Modern Times (1936): in the most famous, he shares a desk with a man in a neighboring office, and they engage in a tug-of-war through the wall.  Further broadcasting the movie’s intent to merge the cinema of the past 85 years, the rescue scene directly quotes from the classic Soviet propaganda film The Battleship Potemkin (1925).  The theme song comes from 1939, and even Michael Kamen’s brilliantly overwrought, melodramatic incidental music, with its swelling heroic and romantic themes, simulates a symphonic soundtrack from Hollywood’s golden age.

Just as the film’s look and atmosphere is a messy amalgamation of styles from across the decades, the machines and technologies that dominate this world exist outside of time.  Gourmet steak is served in a mushy green lumps (is it Soylent brand?) A few security robots roam the halls of the ministry, but they are just elaborate clattering riggings housing a camera on an eyestalk; they look like they’ve been built from leftover 1950s sci-fi B-movie parts, though they beep like R2D2.  Computers are also everywhere, but they resemble old Smith-Corona typewriters with mounds of gears and tubing attached, except that they’re equipped with transparent crystal monitors that look futuristic even today.  Gilliam materializes the intense mechanization of this world as a series of ductwork and flexible plastic tubings that stick out of every wall; even swanky restaurants have giant pipes running through the dining room floor. The movie begins with an advertisement pitching the ability to spiff up your old-fashioned ducts with Central Service’s new line of multicolored ducts.  Sam is bewildered when he looks behind a panel in his apartment wall and sees its stuffed full of a convoluted maze of hoses, wires and and tubes.  There’s a jury-rigged, junkyard look to the Brazil‘s industrial appliances, as if each new machine was built on top of an older machine, with everything constantly growing more and more complex by a process of accumulation.  And the machines people depend on to live their daily lives are constantly breaking down.  Sam’s alarm system, apparently designed by Rube Goldberg for George Jetson, not only fails to go off, making him late for work, but also pours his morning coffee onto his toast.

The malfunctioning machines of Brazil are little images representing the biggest dysfunctional apparatus of all: the modern State.  The world of Brazil is a horrifying dictatorship, but its citizens are accustomed to it and don’t notice.  When there’s a terrorist bombing in the restaurant, no one reacts with anything but mild annoyance, and management thoughtfully puts up a screen to shield the diners’ eyes and sensibilities from the bloody limbs scattered about the next table.  The embodiment of the State’s otherwise disembodied evil is Michael Palin’s Jack, who disgusts us because he’s so normal and respectable.  He’s invariably polite and proper, he’s a dedicated family man (though he sometimes confuses his triplet daughters’ names), he buys a stack of Christmas gifts for his co-workers, and he looks out for Sam’s upward social mobility, goading him to conform and fit in.  Jack just does his job, and he doesn’t even notice the bloodstains on his smock anymore, nor does it ever cross his mind that there’s anything to hide or be ashamed of about his job in the trenches “retrieving information” and combating terrorism.  Evil has never been more banal than Palin.  In Brazil, there’s no sense of Big Brother, of a cabal pulling strings behind the scenes; society simply seem to have gradually slipped into this horrid condition unnoticed, as a result of everyone doing their job unquestioningly, following proper procedure, playing their role as an insignificant cog in the State’s vast machinery.

It’s bureaucracy and paperwork, the reduction of human beings to slips of paper and signatures on the proper form, that keeps this world going, much in the same way that obsessive documentation kept the Nazi regime running (like the bureaucrats in Brazil, Nazi charged Jews for expenses related to their own deportations and executions).  There has never been a movie in history so contemptuous of paperwork (a character even dies onscreen in a hail of forms), and that’s one of the features that allow viewers to connect with the story.  Brazil is what the entire world would look like if the CIA was under the direction of the IRS.  Every major plot development stems from a slip up in paperwork; a name misprinted on a form will eventually lead to the death of at least two characters, and the permanent insanity of another.  But paperwork is also the source of most of the film’s mirth.  A renegade becomes an enemy of the state because he illegally fixes people’s heating and air conditioning units outside of the state servicing monopoly, without filling out the proper forms; he works like Batman, sneaking in at night to work on the AC and sliding down a zip line to safety when he’s done.  (Gilliam once expressed astonishment that the political right embraced the film—he shouldn’t have been surprised after he made a folk hero out of a freelancer who valiantly defies ridiculous government over-regulation).  When stormtroopers seize Mr. Buttle, they make a terrified Mrs. Buttle sign a receipt for her stolen husband (and are careful to take their own receipt for her receipt).  Sam stymies a couple of meddlesome technicians by asking them if they have a form 27b/6, which sends one of the pair into an apopleptic fit.  A victim facing torture is advised to confess quickly so as not to jeopardize his credit rating.  Anyone who’s ever stood in the wrong line at the Department of Motor Vehicles for a half-hour can relate to the devilishly funny absurdity of Brazil.

Scrapped together from various historical parts, with added twists of both fantasy and science fiction, Brazil is a unique world for the viewer to explore. It’s also one of the most densely detailed movies you’re likely to see.  Because jokes, visual quips, and even important plot points pass by in the blink of an eye, it’s worth a second or third viewing to catch all the minutia (try to read every one of the propaganda posters pasted on every wall).  My favorite blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag occurs when Sam has to pause in his pursuit of his dream girl to pick up some papers he’s dropped on the street at the insistence of a busybody out walking her dog.  She raps loudly on the sign advising “keep your city tidy” with her cane as she browbeats the meek Sam, who’s still accustomed to following the conventions he’s grown up with.  At the end of the scene we briefly see the evidence that this old lady practices what she preaches: she’s placed masking tape over her yapping lapdog’s anus to keep it from pooping on city sidewalks.

Gilliam’s genius in Brazil was to recast George Orwell’s propaganda-ridden nightmare 1984 not as some disaster that might happen in the distant future if humanity is not vigilant, but as something that has already happened, and went unnoticed.  The ugly industrialization, the quiet assimilation of machines into daily life, the crushing bureaucracy, and the dehumanization and insignificance of the individual are all events that actually came to pass in the twentieth century. Brazil‘s dislocation in time isn’t just a random choice decided on because of its cool-looking steampunk aesthetic.  By creating a world that incorporates elements from his grandfather’s generation to his own, Gilliam compresses a bleak century into a little less than two and a half hours, and makes us chuckle at its sorry excesses and horrors.  But while we laugh, the hair on the back of our heads rises a little in fear—because we can still feel the hot breath of modernity stirring on the nape of our own necks.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie is awash in elaborate special effects, sensational sets, apocalyptic scenes of destruction and a general lack of discipline. It’s as if Gilliam sat down and wrote out all of his fantasies, heedless of production difficulties, and then they were filmed – this time, heedless of sense.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

“…a glimmering hunk of fractured brilliance riddled with Orwellian paranoia encased in a production design seemingly pieced together from the shared dreams of Franz Kakfa and Salvador Dali…”–Wesley Morris, The San Francisco Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“…a willfully absurdist dystopian fable about an impossible future that feels more like an antiquated past, a Romantic pretzel-twisting of Orwell and a nursery-rhyme-inflected sci-fi dream epic that appropriates equal parts Fritz Lang, Hellzapoppin’, Orson Welles, and illustrator Brian Froud.”–Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice (1998 director’s cut re-release)

IMDB LINK: Brazil (1985)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Wide Angle/Closeup: The Terry Gilliam Files – Look for and click on the still from Brazil to reveal links to interviews with Gilliam, Palin, and production designer Norman Garwood, along with production sketches and audio files of script read-throughs by Gilliam, Pryce and McKeown

Terry Gilliam | Dreams: Brazil – The Brazil page at Dreams, the Terry Gilliam fansite, contains a FAQ, production stills, and a vintage collection of promotional material

Shot to Remember: Welcome to Brazil – Gilliam annotates a series of stills from a climactic moment of the film for “DGA Quarterly” (Vol. 2, No. 3 – Fall 2006)

Modernity and Mise-en-Scene: Terry Gilliam and Brazil – Article by Keith James Hamel for “Images” magazine on the film’s relationship to modernity and how Gilliam employs an “optimistic” mise-en-scene for fantasy sequences and a “pessimistic” one for scenes based in reality

Brazil (1985) at AMC Filmsite – a detailed overview of Brazil from critic Tim Dirks as part of the “Greatest Films” series; it includes a complete synopsis of the movie that runs for several pages

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut – Journalist Jack Matthews recounts the epic battle between Gilliam and Universal over the release of Brazil

DVD INFO: Universal’s 1998 DVD release (buy) is the currently in-print version of Brazil, and the one used to compose this review.  This release restores Gilliam’s original cut of the film, including the 12 minutes cut from the U.S. theatrical release (much of which consisted of a single scene of Jack Vaughn, dressed as Santa Claus, talking to the imprisoned Jonathan Pryce).  This release is unfortunately light on extras, containing only production notes, cast and crew bios, and the original trailer.  Designed before widescreen TVs became commonplace, the image is both letterboxed and pillarboxed to recreate the proper 1.85:1 aspect ratio, resulting in a small ini picture playing in a large black space; this setup initially takes some getting used to.

True fans of the film may want to track down the out-of-print but readily available 3-disc Criterion Collection edition (buy), which was the first release to restore the film to the director’s original vision and includes commentary by Gilliam, the usual Criterion booklet, the featurettes “The Battle of Brazil” (detailing the spat between Gilliam and Universal) and “What is Brazil” (a “making of” mini-doc), and production notes.  A curiosity takes up the third disc: “Love Conquers All,” the infamous bowdlerized 94 minute studio cut of the film that was only shown on American television, with commentary by critic David Morgan explaining the edits.  Criterion also issued a single disc edition of Brazil (buy) containing only the complete film and Gilliam’s commentary.

Universal is released a Blu-ray edition of Brazil on July 12, 2011, sans extras (buy).

(This movie was first nominated for review by “Kass,” who added, “not seeing Brazil on the list struck me as a terrible injustice to weirdness and Terry Gilliam.”  Consider this injustice rectified.  We would have fixed the oversight earlier, but we lost the paperwork.   Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Kevin Bacon, Liv Tyler, Nathan Fillion

PLOT: A schlub of a fry cook (Wilson) takes drastic action after his wife (Tyler) leaves him for

her drug dealer (Bacon), deciding to become a superhero called “The Crimson Bolt” to win her back. Teaming up with a lively comic store clerk (Page), he experiences the pain and very real violence that isn’t detailed in the comic books he reads.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s yet another “regular guy becomes a superhero” story, equally mixing dark humor and gritty drama while throwing in some comic book action segments. It stands out for its more realistic portrayal of the premise and unexpectedly unsettling moments, but never exceeds “offbeat” on the Weird-o-meter.

COMMENTS: At its core, Super offers nothing new. After a life-changing event, a “normal” loser realizes how easily he can dress up in a funny costume and run around at night surprising “bad guys” with a blunt weapon. Wearing a mask and taking out his frustration with his own bad luck in life makes him feel powerful and gives him a new perspective, etc, but he also learns that being a fake superhero has real-life consequences. It’s only the bleakly comic tone set against hyper-realistic violence that makes the film stand out from an over-slicked, stylized effort like Kick-Ass.

Attempting to balance kooky jokes and drug-fueled shootouts, writer/director James Gunn capriciously changes moods from scene to scene. One moment Rainn Wilson is delivering delightfully deadpan narration, and the next he’s unleashing a crazed fury indicative of a truly unsettled mind.  One moment Ellen Page is excitedly extolling the fun of superhero-dom, and the next she’s purposefully crushing someone’s legs with a car.  Kevin Bacon cracks wise over a strange breakfast of scrambled eggs, and later encourages his seriously drugged-up girlfriend to give herself over to a horny drug lord.  There is a constant tugging at the audience’s emotions and affections, and honestly, my nerves.  I was more often uncomfortable or just turned off by the proceedings, especially when the unnecessary religious angle was added followed by a stupid attempt to give Page and Wilson a romance.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find Super very funny at times, primarily a result of the talented cast.  Wilson has his share of cute, quirky moments, while Nathan Fillion’s all-too-short appearance as a Christian TV superhero is gleefully hammy. Bacon impressed me with an unexpectedly entertaining performance. It’s really Page who stands out though, infusing comic nerd Libby (aka “Boltie”) with as much bubbly enthusiasm as she does unhinged sadism.  Boltie’s more outspoken and petty than the Crimson Bolt, and just as easily incited to violence, serving as whatever the opposite of a “conscience” would be.

Super never finds its footing, resulting in an uneven attempt at a realistic superhero movie, though I’m sure Gunn was aiming for a unique and more in-depth exploration of the concept. It’s primarily a comedy, but the heavy doses of drugs, violence, and relationship drama make for a confusing watch.  Some of the action sequences are exciting, but more often than not they feel out of place.  It’s watchable for the cast (especially the ever-likable Page), but doesn’t excel in any other area, except perhaps for a very cool animated opening credits sequence.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“In the end, this diffuse and off-balance film—one that weirdly combines cardboard characters and emotional urgency, high conceptualism and visceral rawness—does come together, albeit in a strange, and strangely fitting, way.”—Nathan Heller, Slate.com (contemporaneous)