FEATURING: Edward Hogg, Simon Farnaby, Verónica Echegui

PLOT: An agoraphobic young man remembers (or hallucinates) a trip he took across Europe

with his hard-drinking, sexually voracious, gambling-addicted pal Bunny.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  It’s a mildly surreal comedy that’s in the weird ballpark, but it’s not nearly unhinged enough to make the List on weirdness alone, and too uneven to be counted among the best weird movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Bunny and the Bull begins by introducing us to Stephen Turnbull, an shut-in with severe OCD issues who files his used dental floss and checks the pH of his urine every morning, then shows in flashback how he degenerated from a functioning neurotic to a full-fledged basket case.  An emergency involving rats violating his boxes of hermetically sealed vegetarian lasagna forces him to phone Captain Crab for a takeout meal, unlocking a flood of memories.  The logo on the takeout box inspires Stephen to remember the time he was stood up by a girl he intended to propose to at a Captain Crab.  In the movie’s first anstract sequence, he imagines a restaurant constructed entirely out of painted paper; even the fish swimming in the aquarium are cardboard cutouts.  The motif carries over in the next scene, where an entire horse race is re-enacted with similar animated, spray-painted two-dimensional figures.  These two scenes set up the expectation that the entire movie will carry through this hazy-dream-version-of-a-high-school-play look, but as Stephen and Bunny begin their tour of Europe, subsequent sequences are shot on realistic looking sets, though sometimes employing blurry rear-projection or other random visual trickery.  Then, halfway through the movie the cinematographer pulls out a new look: a world full of gleaming brass CGI clockwork contraptions.  The different visual signatures each look great on their own, but the schizophrenic hopping about from one to another makes you wonder if they switched art directors halfway through film, then ran out of money in the special effects budget.  Bunny‘s visuals are frequently likened to those of The Science of Sleep, but that comparison only holds for the cardboard-cutout scenes; the lack of a consistent look for the whole film diminishes its visual impact.  As a comedy, Bunny is general a pleasant affair, although there’s one grossout digression involving a homeless Russian man who raises dogs as livestock.  But it’s not wall-to-wall belly laughs; the mismatched buddy/love triangle plot doesn’t pay off comedically the way it should.  I suspect your overall reaction to the film depends on how you view the character of Bunny.  The movie asks you to see him as a lovable rogue whose drinking, gambling and womanizing are endearing, but to my mind Simon Farnaby doesn’t bring the character across that way.  We know that Bunny funds the European road trip, but other than that the movie doesn’t give us a tremendous amount of evidence that this girlfriend-stealing, troublemaking, bear-pilfering bloke is a very good friend to Stephen.  Rather, he comes across as an obnoxious, irresponsible lout who hangs out with the timid Stephen because no one else can tolerate his company.  (Bunny’s irresistibilty to women is another puzzling bit of scripting—maybe if he trimmed up that giant mop of blond hair I could see it…)  At any rate, if you can’t bring yourself to see Bunny as a charming chum, the emotional impact of the ending is muted.  Still, Bunny boasts a number of successes, from its visual triumphs (the mechanical bull made of gears and scrap metal with butcher knives for horns) to moments of inspired comedy (a Captain Crab waitress dressed as a lobster, breaking up with her boyfriend in the middle of taking an order).  And there’s scattered imaginative weirdness to keep you watching: the unreal sets, Stephen hallucinating that characters from the flashback appear in his apartment to comment on the story, and the awkwardly creepy and easily-offended Russian dog herder.  Bunny and the Bull didn’t captivate me with its characters, or make up for that deficiency with loads of laughs, but it’s a movie with a lot of imagination and a basically good heart; I can see how others would respond positively.

Writer/director Paul King is best known for the absurd British comedy series “The Mighty Boosh.”  “Boosh” stars Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt appear in Bunny and the Bull in small roles (Barratt as the Russian and Fielding as an “expert” matador).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Director Paul King brings his talent for the surreal to the big screen… worth a watch if you fancy something different and an astounding film to look at.”–Alex Zane, The Sun (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Infinity Starr,” who called the movie “a mixture of the movie Amélie and the TV show ‘The Mighty Boosh’ with a dash of The Science of Sleep” and added “if you do not know what I am talking about in either of my references than that would truly be WEIRD.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Manjinder Virk, Christine Bottomley, Natalie Gavin

PLOT:  A quasi-documentary about the short life of Yorkshire playwright Andrea Dunbar, the

impoverished housing estate she called home, and the troubled family she left behind, told with actors lip-synching to tape recordings of real-life individuals.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Arbor is built around an unusual, film-length gimmick.  The movie itself, however, is a straightforward telling of Dunbar’s life. The story is surprising, but all too believable in its depiction of circumstances impossible to overcome.

COMMENTS: Andrea Dunbar was 15 when she began writing a play about her life in a working-class slum. The play, called The Arbor, was eventually discovered and produced by the prestigious Royal Court Theater.  Her next play, Rita, Sue and Bob Too! was successful enough to be made into a film, and it seemed she had the makings of a great theatrical career.  But Dunbar was something of a screw-up.  Probably alcoholic, she was careless with relationships and had three children by three different fathers.  Ultimately, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage while out drinking in her favorite pub at the age of 29.

This biography would be interesting enough, but The Arbor has a trick up its sleeve: director Barnard recorded interviews with Andrea Dunbar’s family and friends, and then cast actors to lip-synch those interviews, literally mouthing every word, stutter, and vocal tic.  It sounds like a stunt, but this technique gives Barnard a level of freedom unprecedented in documentary filmmaking.  Rather than a series of talking heads narrating unseen events, Barnard is able to place her actors in tableaux that reflect the accounts provided by the authentic voices.  In one early scene, recalling a fire set by one of Dunbar’s daughters, two adult actors stand side-by-side in the burning room, delivering contradictory recollections of the people they portray in a way the two real women never could.

It’s a daring convention, and sometimes a distracting one. A title card announces the technique at the start, and it’s almost impossible to forget as you watch each actor’s lips and try to get your head around the idea that they are channeling someone else’s voice.  Barnard seems to welcome the disorientation.  Consider that one of the actors (George Costigan, playing one of Dunbar’s occasional boyfriends) was also one of the stars of the movie of Rita, Sue and Bob Too!  Blurring reality seems to be the goal.  Add to that the fact that scenes are filmed in actual locations, including the pub where Dunbar died, and the line between reality and fiction is almost completely obscured.

Perhaps an even more clever touch is the staging of scenes from the play The Arbor on the streets of the Buttershaw Estate where the playwright grew up.  Even more than the archival footage of Dunbar from over 25 years ago, her play brings the world of late 70s working-class England to life, and the contrast with today reveals the community to be a gravity well of misery from which no one seems able to escape.  Plus, it’s immediately clear how thinly-disguised Dunbar’s characters are.  She, too, kept reality at a close remove.

The word “harrowing” is almost cliché in stories like this, but it’s hard to think of a better one as we learn the awful fate of Dubar’s daughter Lorraine.  An alien in her own family (half-Pakistani, she is scorned by the community, and possibly even by her own mother), Lorraine has resentment to spare.  However, it becomes clear that she has made even worse life choices than her mother, culminating in an unspeakable personal tragedy.  Here is where the gimmick works best, as the deadened voice of the real Lorraine Dunbar mixes with the sad eyes of actress Manjinder Virk to create the perfect blend of lament and hopelessness.

Ultimately, The Arbor is a bold attempt to do something new with the documentary format, to find a visually compelling way to tell a true story.  The lens we view the story through is an odd one, but the film’s real power is an all-too-familiar story of people in desperate circumstances.  Dunbar got a little closer to making her way out, but the outcome is heartbreakingly familiar.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The disconcerting effect of the lip-syncing becomes exacerbated as Barnard surrealistically positions her subjects within their own descriptions of the past…The resulting eeriness combines identification with the characters and a Brechtian removal from them, establishing the mystery of the director’s intent.”–Eric Kohn, INDIEWire (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Voices of Ewan McGregor, Timothy Spall, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant

PLOT: British farmers unite with Churchill and Scotsmen to repel Nazis who invade London by

tunneling under the English Channel.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The idea of an absurd Nazi invasion of England acted out by children’s toys is odd and appealing, but the premise is undercooked, and never hits either the weird or (more importantly) the comic notes that it should.

COMMENTS: Hitler in a dress!  That should be funny, right?  It could be either a great punchline, or the beginning of a running series of gags that see (for example) der Führer more concerned with what’s going on with his hemlines than with developments on the front lines.  But Hitler’s transvestite cameo is emblematic of the problem with Jackboots.  The joke is never developed; the movie just trots out the dictator dressed as the Queen of England, with a pearl-handled Luger, and expects us to laugh.  Although the occasional amusing one-liner slips through the fog of war (usually delivered by Timothy Spall in his dead-on Churchill impression), for the most part Jackboots‘ quips don’t exactly stomp on your funny bone.  They’re sparse, as well.  A lot of time is devoted to chuckle-free dramatic scenes between big-handed farmhand turned soldier Chris (McGregor), his lady-love Daisy (Pike), and her disapproving Vicar father (Grant), as well as to intricate battles between plastic Panzers and Punjabi guards that—considering they’re enacted with toy tanks fighting Ken dolls in turbans—are more thrilling than expected.  Jackboots is part WWII movie parody (with a roughneck American pilot who thinks the Nazis are Commies), part clever historical references (the defeated Brits retreat to Hadrian’s Wall, and the Germans are fearful of pursuing where even the Romans dared not go), and part pure silliness (a Braveheart spoof takes up a large part of the last act).  There is a running undercurrent of mock-prejudice against the Scottish (who are depicted as cannibals in skirts) that must be funnier to U.K. residents than to those in the U.S. and elsewhere—at least, I hope it is; otherwise, it’s just another Jackboots comic misfire.  The movie manages to be unique without ever finding its own voice, which makes it interesting without ever being engaging.  Mainstreamers hoping for a script with the sly gross-out humor of Team America or the pop-culture savvy of TV’s “Robot Chicken” (which uses the same action-figure aesthetic as Jackboots) will be disappointed, if not angry and frustrated, by the oblique comedy on display here.  But even if it’s not riotously funny, little touches like a ghoulish pig-nosed Goebbels, a cat who looks like Hitler, puppet gore, and an attack vanguard of bazooka-wielding Nazi dominatrices in black lipstick should be enough to keep weirdophiles watching to the end.

Though the end result is mediocre, Jackboots‘ crazy synopsis managed to attract top-notch cult British acting talent.  Besides McGregor, Pike, Spall and Grant, the voiceover cast includes Alan Cumming (as Hitler), Tom Wilkinson (as Goebbels), and Richard O’Brien (as Himmler).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for sheer oddity value… must rank as some kind of collector’s item.”–Henry Fitzherbert, Daily Express (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Carlos Atanes

FEATURING: Marina Gatell, Ana Mayo, Paco Moreno, Ardiana Ferrer, Ignasi Vidal

PLOT: On the night before the world is to be swallowed up by a black hole, a man discovers a

world underneath his bed ruled by a chess-obsessed dominatrix queen.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Carlos Atanes is a defiantly, and proudly, surrealistic director, and his brief filmography (three features and dozens of bizarre shorts) already constitutes a body of weird work that could be worthy of recognition on this List.  With its wardrobe of black leather and chrome dental restraints along with a powerful musical score that ranges from 40s show tunes to 80s synth pop, Maximum Shame is perhaps Atanes’ most ambitious and polished—not to mention weirdest—feature work.

COMMENTS:  You have to love the tagline for Maximum Shame, which describes the movie as “an apocalyptic fetish horror musical chess sci-fi weird feature movie.”  The surprising thing is that the film, which plays like a combination of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Orpheus legend staged by refugees from a leather bar in a deserted warehouse, largely lives up to that description.  The words “apocalyptic,” fetish,” and “chess” define the three motifs that keep the film (somewhat) grounded.  The story, such as it is, takes place as a black hole is encroaching on earth (or so we are told), and characters mention the total destruction of the world sometimes as an imminent cataclysm, and sometimes as a disaster that’s already come to pass.  The film’s s&m/b&d fetishism is obvious from the costuming, most notably the deviant dental equipment used to keep slaves’ mouths perpetually splayed.  (Although the Queen plays games of dominance and submission, there is no overt sexuality in the film—which, together with its alienating weirdness, makes it of only marginal interest to the bondage crowd).  All of the characters have, or are given, the names of chess pieces, and talk of gambits and sacrificing rooks makes up a large part of the plot.  “Horror” and “sci-fi” turn out to be the least accurate of the descriptors.  The film does speak of black holes and invokes a theory of infinite parallel universes in a throwaway bid to explain the inexplicable existence of a decaying warehouse ruled by a roller-skating dominatrix under the protagonists’ bed, but, unlike Atanes’ previous feature Proxima, Shame is not hardcore (or even softcore) science fiction.  As for horror, the overall feel of Maximum Shame is disquieting, and the male and female leads both find themselves in some sort of jeopardy, but the rules of the movie’s world are too fluid and arbitrary to create a relatable terror; characters are just as likely to break into a friendly song as they are to to tie you up, insert a ball gag in your mouth and imprison you in a cardboard box.  Indeed, the film could almost as easily be called a “comedy” as a sci-fi or horror picture; there are as many absurdly funny moments as there are terrifying ones.  As far as the “musical” designation, while the score by immensely talented newcomer Marc Álvarez is eclectic and impressive—I love the bit where he has a distant xylophone shadowing Ana Mayo’s words for emphasis—there are actually only two full-fledged production numbers in the film.  Both pieces are wonderfully incongruous, like a Gilbert and Sullivan arias arising in the middle of a Cinema of Transgression atrocity.  They’re also beautifully belted out (one actress is dubbed by professional soprano Dulcinea Juárez), but there’s little to no choreography to go along with the singing—if only the ghost of Busby Berkeley had been available to give these pieces the surrealistic staging they deserved!  Of course, of the seven major tagline adjectives (we leave “feature” to one side as too obvious) “weird” is the superlative that fits the movie tighter than a slave girl’s latex corset.  If the above description hasn’t made that abundantly clear, I’ll leave you with a teaser for the movie’s “Queen of Catalan Love” sequence, in which the Queen nearly has an orgasm while receiving a foot massage and channeling the lovely British model Eleanor James on her magic mirror, but becomes confused when the image begins eating handfuls of cooked spaghetti and trans-dimensionally dripping them from her mouth onto the cement floor while upbeat New Age music straight out of a tender montage from a 1984 romantic comedy plays in the background.  The sequence is funny, erotic, and genuinely creepy all at the same time; it’s sort of the distilled essence of the shameless craziness that is Maximum Shame.

I do have one clear complaint about Maximum Shame, but it relates to the burn-to-order DVD, and not the film itself.  Although the packaging is attractive, I encountered playback annoyances.  When I inserted the disc into my Blu-ray/DVD player, it began playing automatically and immediately without going to the usual title screen.  When I brought up the DVD menu to see what I might have missed, I found a menu design with the movie title, but nothing that could be selected.  I had to eject and re-insert the disc to resume play.  When I tried to play the film on my personal computer with VLC media player, it consistently crashed.  The program could be immediately restarted, but it defaulted to that dead-end menu screen.  The movie could only be viewed by manually selecting “Title 1″ from the software’s playback menu.  On both machines, I could eventually play the movie, but the botched DVD architecture made it a hassle.  It’s possible my disc was specifically defective, but I can say that there are no special features on the DVD—and not even any standard features like individual chapter stops.  Since DVD-R’s can be changed on the fly, these problems may be addressed in the future. UPDATE: I’ve been informed the problems with the DVD-R are being looked into and should be corrected within a few days.  UPDATE 2: I’ve been informed that the DVD architecture has been fixed.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Carlos Atanes has stuffed the allegorical envelope so full that very little in his down-the-rabbit-hole fantasy Maximum Shame remotely resembles anything that could be considered reality.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com (DVD)

DISCLOSURE: Screener copy provided for review by producer.

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: John Bradburn

FEATURING: Heather Darcy, Mish Boyko, Dave Rowland, Nicola Hardman, Ellie Clemments, Rhian Green, Sean Harris, Aidan Keenan

PLOT: A woman moves in to an idyllic country house to recover from a traumatic event. One

day she rescues a man from crashing his motorbike. She becomes obsessed with him and is slowly drawn into his world in an experimental narrative that flows through reality, fantasy, fear and imagination along different streams of consciousness.

COMMENTS:  Wrists (official site) is more successful in the experimental realm, in communicating mood, than it is in the narrative, which is pared down to the bare minimum.  There’s not much dialog to clue one in on what’s happening; the first spoken word isn’t heard until 14 minutes into the film.  It’s a novel way to immediately involve the spectator by forcing him to construct what’s going on, but it could take several viewings to get the picture.  In my own case, I was fairly certain for the first 20 or so minutes that some artsy apocalyptic disaster had occurred and that the two main characters would be the only ones in the narrative… until the first car and other character appeared.

While providing a minimum of information to allow the audience to work out things for themselves can be stimulating, it only went so far with Wrists.  Combined with its languid pace, the film was very good at inducing a nap midway through the running time.  Twice.  Your own experience may vary.

That said, I do appreciate the approach that the filmmakers took. I probably would have had a greater love for this film had it been half the length (it’s 86 minutes), or if the director had pandered more to my need for more clues to the concrete narrative, such that provided in the official synopsis below:

Wrists follows Julie as she recovers in an isolated rural cottage. Bored she wanders the countryside and tries to waste time. Hearing a noise outside she rescues a mysterious young man – Clark – from a motorcycle accident.

Slowly she becomes obsessed with him and is drawn in to his dark world. He works in a city collecting debts. Clark has never really thought of escape. In meeting Julie he way have met his saviour.

Wrists is not really that weird—the most successful element is its atmosphere and mood, which is very dreamlike due to the lack of dialog.  It’s almost like being in the minds of the two main characters.  The thing is, the characters don’t really do very much, and what action there is was more conducive to going on the nod than to engaging fully with the film—in my case.

This is John Bradburn’s second feature. His first, Kyle (IMDB), about a young man’s attempt to fit back into society after being released from prison, screened in festivals and small venues, and Wrists will apparently follow the same strategy.

An interview with Bradburn looks in-depth into his aesthetic; he also shared his reactions to Kyle‘s reception at its premiere at the Seattle Film Festival in an article for Vertigo Magazine.

A DVD of Wrists, which comes paired with a zine about the production, is available here.

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

FEATURING: Jim Sturgess, Joseph Mawle, Clémence Poésy, Nikita Mistry, Eddie Marsan

PLOT: A photographer with a disfiguring heart-shaped birthmark on his face sees demons on

the streets of London, then is drawn into a Faustian bargain with a sinister being known as “Papa B.”

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Not weird enough.  Although the ending delivers a sudden load of psychological ambiguity, and the middle section contains great eerie moments and dreamlike images, Heartless‘ odd tone too often results from the uneasy attempt to mix an arthouse character study with standard horror film tropes.

COMMENTS: For better or worse, expectations make a difference in appraising movies.  If Heartless had been the work of a first time director, it would be a promising debut; as Philip Ridley‘s first new film in 14 years, it actually arrives as a very slight disappointment.  Whenever Heartless falters, there’s the temptation to ascribe the failing to directorial rust rather than to inexperience, and to wonder what Heartless might have amounted to if Ridley had kept up his cinematic chops all these years.  That’s not to say Heartless is a bad film, just one that fails to live up to its promise.  It starts off with an intriguing setting: London (in the near future?) is literally Hell on Earth.  The urban decay on display goes way beyond shoplifting chavs and the litter of graffiti covering every public surface; the gangs prowling the streets setting little old ladies on fire are actually demons, wearing hoodies to cover their reptilian features.  Our protagonist, photographer Jamie, is one of a few who has accidentally caught a glimpse of their real visages; this supernatural vision doesn’t make as much of an impression on him as you might guess, however, as he’s more preoccupied with his own problems, in the form of a disfiguring birthmark which makes him hide his own face from all but his closest relatives.  After a long, but not particularly deep, session of character development, things start cooking 40 minutes in when out of the blue Jamie gets a call from from a mysterious “Papa B.”  Papa B lives in an apartment in a tenement tower building in London (the one with the eerie green glow coming through the window) where he recruits new hoodie-wearing hoodlums to go out and spread chaos in the streets in return for the favors only he can provide.  Papa B’s lair, with its distressed walls and bizarre lighting schemes, is a masterpiece of low-key nightmare set design; the entity himself is portrayed by a scary-as-hell Joseph Mawle with a narcotic detachment.  Living with him in the flat is Belle, a young East Indian girl who seems to know Jamie’s family history intimately and immediately bonds with him; she plays good cop to Papa B’s bad cop, and the pair’s seduction of Jamie is Heartless‘ high point, dreamlike and freaky.  Things cool off down the stretch, however, as the deal not unexpectedly turns rotten for Jamie, and the script dabbles in gratuitous jump scares and other horror movie clichés (including a victim whose incomprehensible stupidity makes him complicit in his own demise).  A visit from a Satanic Cockney bureaucrat known only as “the Weapons Man” livens things up before the movie trickles to a conclusion.   Suddenly abandoning the supernatural for a symbolic psychological explanation of Jamie’s torments, the ending proves unsatisfying because we don’t actually know his psychology well enough to respond emotionally to the resolution.  The threat from the once omnipotent Papa B simply fades away, and we get a flashback to a maudlin speech from Jamie’s dead father about darkness and stars that illuminates nothing.   Heartless winds up as a familiar Faustian fable with a trio of extraordinary diabolical characters (Papa B, Belle and the Weapons Man) and some wonderful sets (the mad tenement apartment, the streets of London glowing sickly yellow as midnight approaches).  The results are worthwhile, and individual scenes are knockouts, but it feels like there’s a classic weird horror tale lurking inside this movie that just can’t quite burst out if its shell.

Director Philip Ridley debuted in 1990 with the Certified Weird The Reflecting Skin, the strange story of a troubled boy who believes his neighbor is a vampire.  In twenty years Ridely has only completed three feature films, but the polymath has kept busy, writing nine children’s novels, thirteen plays for adults and children, and seeing three major exhibitions of his photographs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Best appreciated for its sustained creepy vibe and sporadically arresting images, ‘Heartless’ moves from one outré moment to another, from one self-conscious allusion to the next (‘Donnie Darko’ and ‘Taxi Driver’). It doesn’t go anywhere special or much of anywhere, though it goes there in appreciably icky style.”–Manhola Dargis, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

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.)

DIRECTED BY: Alan Parker

FEATURING: Bob Geldof, Bob Hoskins, Jenny Wright

PLOT: A rock singer, “Pink,” isolates himself in a hotel room and reflects upon his life while

slipping further into drug addiction and madness. The film has little in the way of dialogue and is heavy on visual interpretations of Roger Waters lyrics for the 1979 double album of the same name.  The metaphorical “wall” is constructed around the rock singer’s life separating him from the outside world and alone with his tortured thoughts and memories.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Possibly for one reason only: the fantastic and bizarre animation sequences rendered by British political caricaturist Gerald Scarfe.  Although the sequences are relatively short, the horrific images blaze across the screen in such a haunting way that the impact makes up for the brevity.

COMMENTS: Watching, or listening, to Pink Floyd: The Wall is one miserable experience. All the key elements of a depressing film are on display: madness, alienation, the atrocities of war, mind-numbing drug addiction, infidelity, fascism…well, you get my drift.  This is not an upbeat or fun movie by any stretch of the imagination.  Yet, the film is constructed in such a skillful manner by director Alan Parker that it is hard not to justify its reputation as a work of art.

Upon the opening scene we see the protagonist rock star “Pink” (Bob Geldof) in his hotel room staring blankly at the television screen with a long burned out cigarette perched between his fingers.  Pink is in this position and state of mind for many of his scenes.  It is open to interpretation, but perhaps all of the scenes of the film are what is playing out in his unraveling mind.  The images correlate to the lyrics of each song, and we start off things by learning of Pink’s father’s death in World War II.  His bunker was blown to bits by an air raid bombardment.  Pink never knew his father and it is clear that this had a major impact in his childhood, as evidenced by a scene where he is playing in a park as a young child and desperately tries clinging on to a hand of an unsuspecting and unwilling male father figure.  As Pink grows up and goes to school he’s subjected to the harsh British educational system.   (I’ve listened to enough British music [The Smiths, for example] to know that schooling in England back in the day was brutal).  Pink is caught scribbling poetry into his notebook and is promptly ostracized and smacked on the knuckles by his teachers pointing stick.   This gets him sent directly to the evil headmaster’s office.  During this sequence, however, we are privy to a weird fantasy in Pink’s young mind: students, marching like mindless drones onto a conveyor belt and wearing creepy faceless masks, fall limp into a grinding machine which churns them out as strands of meat.  Yet, rebellion and anarchy eventually take over the fantasy as students trash the school and set it on fire.

Now that the themes of war and education have been touched upon we can move on to another main component of the film: sex.  Pink’s descent into madness is exacerbated by his wife’s infidelity.  In an early scene, she strips in an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him; he only becomes annoyed that she is blocking the soccer game on TV.  His lack of affection drives her away to the arms of another man.  Sex seems to be a mere diversion for Pink, and one that he’s seldom interested in.  Of course, being a rock star you will get your share of groupies; however, no girl could prepare for being alone with this guy.  A female fan’s amazement at his array of guitars and vast bathtub quickly turns to fear as he trashes his hotel room in true rock star fervor, winging furniture and wine bottles in her direction.

Bob Geldof does an impeccable job as the deadened rock star.  He has almost no lines of dialogue outside of screaming “stop!” or howling obscenities as he trashes his hotel room.  Most of his lines are lip synched to Roger Waters lyrics.  His empty stares and body language are all that is needed to make this a good performance.  Geldof’s best scene is when he “transforms” himself by shaving off his body hair… eyebrows included.  (This scene was culled directly from an incident involving former Floyd member Syd Barrett, who did this at a dinner party, apparently).  It is very disconcerting to see a person without eyebrows, for some reason.  By the end of the film Pink has morphed into a dictator performing for his captive audience/fascist regime, complete with a crossed hammer insignia in place of swastikas and arms struck in Naziesque poses.  White supremacists were actually hired as extras for these scenes, adding to its already chaotic and anarchic nature.

Now that you have the gist of the film, I’ll state my case as to why this a weird movie… those animation sequences.  All I can say is…wow! They are psychedelic in a nature, but bleak nonetheless.  Warplanes turn into crosses.  The Union Jack also becomes a bloody cross.  Flowers that blatantly resemble genitalia writhe and twist for sexual dominance.  Marching hammers goose-step like rhythmic soldiers.  The coup-de-grace is the final animation sequence that portrays Pink on trial.  Here we witness the judge as a talking anus with a scrotum for a chin; a former parochial teacher hanging by strings like a marionette; Pink’s mother transformed into a monstrous scorpion.

Scarfe’s animations are weird and amazing.  The live action is the meat of the film and the animation is the pudding, but how can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Pink Floyd fans are going to find ‘Pink Floyd: The Wall’ pretty cosmic; employing almost no dialogue, it uses fantasies, animation and assorted psychedelic froufrou to flesh out a rock album more enthusiastically than any film has since ‘Tommy’… [Alan Parker's images are] nothing if not bold. These effects, while some are individually powerful, are dwarfed by the towering selfimportance of ‘The Wall’ and by its lack of focus.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)