DIRECTED BY: Kôji Wakamatsu

FEATURING: Shinobu Terajima, Keigo Kasuya

PLOT: Lieutenant Kurokawa loses all four limbs and is rendered deaf, dumb and disfigured

during the Japanese invasion of China on the eve of World War II; when the Emperor declares him a “Living War God,” his wife Shigeko is ordered to care for the living torso, including fulfilling all her usual wifely duties.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite its perverse premise and its superficial similarities to the Certified Weird Johnny Got His Gun, Caterpillar isn’t that weird; its an intense domestic drama about duty.

COMMENTS: Lieutenant Kurokawa is a monster. Scarred by the war, unable to hear or to speak (with great difficulty, he can sometimes painfully squeeze out a single syllable), he’s essentially a torso, an esophagus and a fully-functional phallus. Flashbacks reveal that the caterpillar, now revered as a god, was actually a moral monster long before his physique was carved up. The duty to care for the god-monster falls upon long-suffering partner Shigeko, who must feed him, wipe him, and cater to his suddenly insatiable sexual needs.  For the wife, the mangled Lieutenant combines the worst aspects of an infant and a spouse—completely dependent, demanding, and incoherent, but with no compensatory cuteness.  She lives alone with him in a one-room house of horrors. Yet, perversely, this seeming disaster delivers an unexpected upside for the poor farm wife. She gains social standing in the village as the caretaker for a god. She is sure to wheel him out in his cart daily to shore up the morale of the rapidly depopulating village as all available able-bodied men are shipped to the front to help failing war effort (even as the daily radio broadcasts detail Japan’s magnificent martial victories). On the home front, Shigeko also eventually learns to enjoy the petty power she has to deny the god a little bit of rice or sex, becoming herself a mini-dictator of an empire consisting of one subject on a straw mat. Caterpillar starts slowly but draws you in to the compellingly claustrophobic dynamic between these two unlikely mates yoked together by fate and obligation. Shinobu Terajima’s performance as the wife is brave and sympathetic (she won many awards, including the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival), but Keigo Kasuya’s turn as the caterpillar is even more crucial to the film’s success. His ability to convey mute fury and desperation with just his eyes, stutters and howls humanizes his role as a symbol of national and domestic fascism. The film never becomes truly exploitative, but there is plenty of caterpillar/human sex, in multiple positions, to titillate the curious. The cinematography is mostly cast in a drab browns that are effective at evoking a backwater rural lifestyle but aren’t particularly pleasing to look at. The budget is obviously tiny: for events outside of the hut and the village, the movie mainly relies on archival footage, along with one war crime recreation with distracting CG flames superimposed over the scene.  But the inherent horrific drama and Wakamatsu’s insistent indictment of unthinking duty overcome the cheapness, and Caterillar metamorphoses into an anti-authority parable worth paying attention to.

Like many Japanese directors, Kôji Wakamatsu began his career in the trenches making “pink” films before graduating to more serious features. His filmography contains some titles he’d probably prefer we forgot: movies with names like The Embryo Hunts in Secret, Diary Story of a Japanese Rapist, and Violated Angels. In the 1970s Wakamatsu began slipping more politics into his exploitation films, culminating in  United Red Army (2008), an entirely serious drama about the collapse of the Japanese radical movement in the 1970s, and in this film. Caterpillar was adapted from a 1929 short story by Edogawa Rampo that was originally banned as perverse and unpatriotic.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a sexually charged two-hander with blunt allegorical implications… Audience interest will be limited to Wakamatsu devotees and the kind of cult-oriented audiences who automatically perk up at the chance to see simulated amputee sex.”–Vadim Rizov, Boxoffice Magazine (contemporaneous)

Nazario provides shelter to Beatriz’ homely prostitute sister, Andara (Rita Macedo) after she is wounded in a knife fight.  Andara has killed her rival and is hiding from local authorities.  The local Church learns of the living arrangement and accuses Nazario of improprieties.  Beatriz and Andara become Nazario’s Mary and Martha, but the paradox of the priest’s hypocrisy is that he pragmatically shuns Andara’s imaginative qualities, labeling it a “sickness.”  Yet, Bunuel invests this setup with an inviting sense of irony.  Nazario is himself the product of a delusional priestly calling.  Imagining himself to be an imitation of Christ, Nazario projects a disdain for his own welfare that is not self-contempt, but rather the publican advertising his asceticism.

In this, Nazario is a bland, literal-minded interpreter of Christ’ personality. He is unable to comprehend and assimilate the Jesus’ quixotic “that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the spirit is spirit,” synthesized with the value of the messianic claim of gifted joy, abundantly imparted.

Nazario’s provision of sanctuary for his female disciples results in a house fire.  The loss of asylum and the sanction of the Church catapults the threesome into agnostic stations as they are pursued by the law.  A young village girl is believed to be healed by Nazario, despite the fact that medicine had been administered to the child before Nazario’s arrival. The three wayfarers come upon another village, ravaged with the plague.  Nazario seeks to assist a dying woman (in a scene clearly patterned after de Sade’s Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man), who refuses the priest’s impassioned and persistent offer to administer extremes unction. Rather, her dying desire is for the touch of her husband.  Much to his confusion and exasperation, Nazario’s priestly function is rendered impotent.

Nazario’s offer to join a road crew and work only for food creates a labor dispute which ends with the workers killing their foreman.  Beatriz’ mother accuses her daughter of carnal love for the priest.  Hysterical, Beatriz denies it, collapsing in a frenzy.  Of course, her fervent denial masks truth, which she belatedly realizes, rejecting her savior in favor of her abusive boyfriend.

Caught and imprisoned, Nazario encounters the two thieves on the side of his symbolic cross.  The unrepentant thief beats him.  The penitent thief confounds Nazario, telling him, “You are a good man.  I am evil, yet neither of us are of any use to the world.”  The wanderer, freed from prison, is offered a choice in the form of manna.  Nazario’s hesitant decision justifies Bunuel’s placid sympathy for the impoverished padre.

Buñuel once said that if proof of the existence of God was available, then his own approach to art and life would remain unaltered.  Simultaneously, if God were proved a complete myth, the aesthetic qualities of Buñuel’s existential letters remain the same.  Buñuel’s messages are neither Christian, nor atheist, but a synthesis.  He categorically denies the agendas of the agnostic, the seeker, the devout, and even the Surrealists in Nazarin.

There is reason Orson Welles astutely claimed that Buñuel was the most religious of all filmmakers. There is a story (most likely apocryphal—not that it matters), that a male acquaintance “caught” the famous atheist philosopher Martin Heidegger genuflecting before an icon.  Called out, Heidegger responded, “a rationalist like yourself would not understand.”  That quote could serve as a segue into Nazarin.

DIRECTED BY: Juan Solanas, Andrea Arnold, Christopher Nolan, Roy Andersson, Toby MacDonald, Lynne Ramsay, Jan Svankmajer, Mathieu Kassovitz, Run Wrake, Virgil Widrich, Ridley Scott, Lars von Trier, Balint Kenyeres, Anders Thomas Jensen, Martin McDonagh, Nanni Moretti

FEATURING: Natalie Press, Brendan Gleeson, Rúaidhrí Conroy, Klas-Gösta Olsson, Kris Marshall, Johannes Silberschneider, Tony Scott, Ulrich Thomsen

PLOT: This collection of sixteen award-winning shorts made by Europeans (mostly Brits) is a

mix of dramas, comedies, and experimental pieces.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Compilations aren’t eligible for the List.  Although there are several short films on this set that are both weird, and great for their length, none of them have the weight it would take to displace a full-length feature film from the List.

COMMENTS: Like any box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get with this collection of sixteen shorts—it could be a caramel, a raspberry creme, or one of the dreaded coconuts.  The wide array of styles from artists working free of commercial concerns makes collections like this excellent primers on what cinema can accomplish, and this selection  from short film specialists Cinema 16 is one of the most award-studded compilations you’ll find.  Not having to worry about the box office receipts allows short film-makers to experiment with technique and go weirder than they otherwise would; indeed, about half of the movies here have at least a nodding acquaintance with the bizarre, while a couple are full-fledged works of surrealist art.  But no matter what direction your tastes run, rest assured there is something here to delight, and to bore, every film fan.

For completeness’ sake, I’ll briefly run down the realism-based entries first, in ascending order of quality.  We’ll then spend a little more time with the experimental offerings, a few of which are extremely important to the world of weird film.

The oldest film, Ridley Scott’s 1956 Boy and Bicycle, about a lad who takes a bike ride to the beach and carries on an inner monologue the whole time, is a tedious exercise that will remind you of the worst film school indulgences.  It’s included here because of the stature of the director, but it shows off little of the talent he would later bring to Alien and Blade Runner.  Pierre le Pou (1990) is an inconsequential comedy about an uncoordinated man trying to impress a talented and attractive female with his basketball prowess.  Seemingly aimed at flattering film festival fans for their superior taste—though there’s sly satire in the portrayal of the pompous manager of an art theater—The Opening Day of Close-up shows the arthouse fallout when Close-up get steamrolled by The Lion King on its opening day.  Extremely thick Scottish accents make Lynn Ramsay’s Gasman, a drama about a man who takes his children to spend one day a year with their half-siblings, very difficult to follow for American viewers.  Before Dawn is the story of illegal immigrants trying to enter a country through a cornfield.  It’s done in a single 13-minute tracking shot and is a technically amazing feat of choreography and camerawork, but there is little for the audience to connect with storywise.  The mildly amusing Election Night is a satire involving a principled liberal desperate to get to the polls before they close who finds himself in a taxicab driven by an obnoxious racist.  Funnier is Je T’Aime John Wayne, a jazzy black and white portrait of an English man who patterns his life after French New Wave films; anyone should find it hilarious, but a knowledge of cinema trivia will pay extra dividends for film fans (e.g., the love interest is a pixie girl named Zazie).  The most memorable of the “straight” films is Andrea Arnold’s Oscar-winning Wasp, a sadly believable and strangely sympathetic portrait of a very unfit single mom struggling to feed her four children while longing to find a sex life for herself.

On to the weirder offerings:

The Irish black comedy Six Shooter is another Oscar winner, and one of the best films in the collection.  It isn’t strictly a weird movie, but it deserves an honorable mention thanks to a funny fantasy sequence wherein a “short fella” repeatedly stabs a cow with a screwdriver to relieve it’s “trapped wind.”  The scenario, by playwright Martin McDonagh, here directing his first movie, involves Brendan Gleeson losing his wife, then sharing a train ride home with the most obnoxious traveler imaginable.  Corpses pile up as Glesson’s character experiences the worst day of his, or anybody’s, life.  Rúaidhrí Conroy is extraordinarily loathsome as the foul- and motor-mouthed sociopath.

Nocturne was Lars von Trier‘s final film school short before moving on to features.  Sadly, it has a stereotypically pretentious “film school” look and feel, but it’s clearly an experimental work.  The “story” concerns a woman who’s afraid of sunlight.  All of the shots are low-light and murky; it’s often a struggle to make out what we’re seeing.  There are some memorable shots, like the double image of a woman watching as a solarized man breaks through a plate-glass window in the background.  In the commentary, the director is more than a little amused by the odd visual theories of geometrical correspondences espoused by his earlier self.

Doodlebug is a one-effect, one-joke effort from Christopher Nolan.  It’s amusing and lightly Kafkaesque, but at a mere three minutes it doesn’t hint at what the director is capable of.

Cinematographer Juan Solanas’ directing debut, The Man Without a Head, won a short film Jury Prize at Cannes, and is a favorite for many.  It’s about a man without a head (naturally), who lands a hot date and decides he needs to buy a noggin for the occasion.  Comic complications result. The scenario is similar to Alejandro Jodorowsky‘s short “La Cravatte” (1957).  Unlike some others, I didn’t find this affectionate fable about self-acceptance moving, but the art direction and music are unquestionably excellent.  The headless man in a tuxedo dancing like Fred Astaire in his dingy apartment is unforgettable.  The imaginary French city (based on Marseilles) has a grimy but elegant Europe-between-the-wars look, and it’s entirely draped in drab olives, greens and yellows that clearly evoke The City of Lost Children (1995).

Copy Shop is about a man who works at a copy shop and one day discovers that things he photocopies show up in the real world; he decides to photocopy himself over and over, resulting in an anarchic world of doppelgängers on top of doppelgängers.  The movie’s unique look results from the fact that what we see on the screen is really a painstakingly fluid animation composed from 18,000 actual paper photocopies, with copy errors and low-toner moments included (and sometimes deliberately induced).  The minimalist score by Alexander Zlamal is reminiscent of Philip Glass; the string lines chase each other like a rondo, aurally mimicking the visual copies.  It’s an impressive experiment that results in a wonderfully distressed film.

Roy Andersson‘s World of Glory (1991) prefigures the precise, absurd cinematic hypnotism the auteur would perfect in Songs from the Second Floor (2000) and You, the Living (2007).  In a scene that’s never placed in context, the movie begins with a crowd silently watching nude people being loaded into the back of a truck, gassed, and driven away.  A middle-aged man keeps glancing back at the camera with a mildly disturbed expression.  (Throughout the film minor characters continue to acknowledge the camera with the same strange look).  We then follow the man through a series of static, repressed tableaux showing his daily life, including his son getting a corporate logo tattooed on his head, his refusal to release the wine cup while taking communion, and finally his insomnia caused by the fact that he hears someone screaming in the distance.  Andersson’s dim view of humanity as a species of moral cowards obsessed with meaningless banality gets under your skin.  It’s cruel and ridiculous, but it’s also frighteningly accurate.  Fans of the director’s grim feature films will feel at home here.

Jabberwocky (1971) is another movie that foreshadows a director’s later work: in this case, Jan Svankmajer signals his intent to mix Lewis Carroll and Sigmund Freud together into a horrifying yet whimsical witches’ brew, an alchemy that would come to full ferment in Alice (1988).  The Czech stop-motion surrealist indulges his love of vintage objects here, particularly dolls.  Weirdophiles will chuckle with delight as Svankmajer takes us on a tour of his unfiltered subconscious.  A narrator reads the poem “Jabberwocky” while a wardrobe wends its way through a forest, then winds up in an apartment full of toys.  The poem soon ends but we continue to watch as Svankmajer manipulates the objects in the room: a suit of clothes dances and rides a rocking horse, dolls indulge in cannibalism, and branches spontaneously grow and drop apples which immediately rot and split open to reveal worms.  An important short film in the history of stop-motion animation, and Eastern European surrealism.

The gem of the entire collection is Run Wrake‘s fabulous (in both senses of the word) Rabbit (2005).  The story of greedy children who slaughter animals for personal gain but are frustrated by a magical idol, it’s told using images from an old English reading primer.  The names of common objects hover in the air.  Rabbit is such an amazing weird film that we gave it its own post years ago (you can watch the embedded movie at that link, as well).

A review by the Sunday Times described one Cinema 16 collection as “film studies in a box.”  That’s only a slight exaggeration.  Any aspiring filmmaker who watched all of these sixteen movies and paid close attention to the included commentaries would be inspired, and fairly well prepared, to go out and make his own short film.

One final note: Cinema 16 has put out two DVDs titled European Short Films, one available in Region 1 (U.S. and Canada) and one in Region 2 (UK and Europe).  The lineups on the two sets are different.  We reviewed the U.S. version.  Copy Shop, Opening Day of Close-Up, World of Glory, The Man Without a Head, Election Night, Nocturne and Jabberwocky overlap both sets, but the Region 2 version has nine different films, including entries by Jean-Luc Goddard, Tom Twyker, and Chris Morris.  If you’re looking for a particular title check carefully to make sure it’s included in the set you’re ordering.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… these directors seem to prefer surrealism and unusual imagery… for the most serious of viewers, but it meets its goal of introducing viewers to the range of European short film.”–James A. Stewart, DVD Verdict (DVD)

“Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before  me.”—Title card at the beginning of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

DIRECTED BY: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

FEATURING: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjira Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Kanokporn Tongaram

PLOT: On his plantation in rural Thailand, the dying Boonmee is visited by living relatives and the ghosts of his past. As they ease him into death, the story is interrupted through vignettes that may represent his memories of past lives.

BACKGROUND:

• Apichatpong Weerasethakul considerately refers to himself as “Joe” when speaking to Western audiences.
• Uncle Boonmee is loosely based on a 1983 book by Phra Sripariyattiweti, a monk from Apichatpong’s hometown of Khon Kaen, Thailand.
• The film is a feature-length component of Primitive, Apichatpong’s ongoing multimedia project, which also encompasses a number of video installations and the short films A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua.
• Received the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. Jury president Tim Burton described it as “a beautiful, strange dream.”
• Sakda, who plays Boonmee’s nephew Tong, and Kanokporn, who plays his nurse Roong, played characters of the same names in Apichatpong’s earlier films Tropical Malady and Blissfully Yours, respectively. In both cases, it’s unclear if they’re meant to be the same characters.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Though it’s chock-full of beguiling, whimsical imagery, the single most memorable sight in Uncle Boonmee is that of a princess in a lagoon, undulating with pleasure as she receives oral sex from a catfish. (Unsurprisingly, the words “catfish sex” became synonymous with Uncle Boonmee‘s brand of weirdness immediately following its Cannes premiere.)

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Critics sometimes identify Apichatpong’s style as a mix of

Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

surrealism and neorealism, and this is a handy skeleton key for getting at Uncle Boonmee‘s weird nature. The film contains plenty of enigmatic images and seeming non sequiturs, but they’re framed as natural, even welcome steps in the cycle of life and death. The characters accept them nonchalantly, going along with the film’s dream logic and implicitly entreating viewers to do the same. No clear border separates the mystical from the mundane. And two hours in, when it feels like you should be totally inured to Uncle Boonmee‘s disorienting twists, along comes a denouement that renders everything else normal by comparison.

COMMENTS: An ox, having escaped its tether, strolls through the forest at twilight.  Eventually, its human owner retrieves it.  Then a large, hairy primate with glowing red eyes comes onscreen and stares straight into the camera.  This is how Uncle Boonmee opens: wordless, tantalizing, with a relaxed pace and exquisite lighting.  No explanation, no exposition, no cinematic shorthand.  Just an ox, its master, and a “monkey ghost”—an omnipresent cryptid invented by Apichatpong, but “inspired by folk tales.”  It’s entrancing.  Or, if you like your narratives linear, it’s frustratingly opaque.

It’s an ideal “weird movie” litmus test.  If, to quote A Serious Man, you can “accept the mystery,” then Uncle Boonmee might be the movie for you.  As you can glean from the opening, the film’s story develops primarily by implication and ellipsis.  Maybe that ox could be Uncle Boonmee in one of his past lives.  Maybe Apichatpong’s saying something about nature’s willfulness, its eternal desire to roam free.  Maybe the monkey ghost is an omen, or a signifier of pervasive magic, or a link between the past and present.  Uncle Boonmee never holds your hand, but neither does it force you to think.  Instead, it forces you to intuit, to caress its wonderfully tactile surfaces and follow your instincts.

As the film shifts into the present day, it becomes more concrete.  We’re introduced to Boonmee, his Burmese caretaker Roong, his matronly sister-in-law Jen, and her son Tong.  They joke, they eat, they discuss Boonmee’s kidney ailment; they have the casual but slightly awkward interactions you’d expect between relatives anticipating a death in the family.  Apichatpong lets conversations and medical procedures play out in long, static, meticulously composed shots.  It’s all so quotidian, yet hypnotically cinematic.  Sonically nestled in the hum of crickets, these scenes acclimate us to Uncle Boonmee‘s magical reality.  It’s warm, inviting, and full of surprises.

Like, for example, a scene where dinner table small talk is interrupted by the ghost of Boonmee’s wife Huay.  At first, the characters recoil. Then they engage with her.  They instantly accept that the boundaries between life and death are permeable, especially now that Boonmee’s health is ebbing away.  This reaction plays as absurdist comedy, but also as spiritual sophistication, and this overlap gets at the film’s light-hearted attitude toward the afterlife.  “Heaven is overrated,” says Huay while embracing Boonmee.  “There’s nothing there.”  All of the performances are so deadpan, so unburdened by ego or affectation, that these traces of humor don’t feel glib or self-satisfied.  They just feel like consistent manifestations of the film’s philosophical outlook.

For all its weighty subject matter, Uncle Boonmee never grows serious.  It meanders along through Boonmee’s last days with an eye for sublime visual detail: the gray-green hue of the evening sky, or the chalky cave where the characters mysteriously travel as Boonmee fades away from life.  It also takes a pair of inscrutable, fantastic detours: first to the past, for the tale of the princess and the catfish, then to a dream of the future told through still images, in homage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée.  Throughout these chapters (and the grand finale that follows Boonmee’s death), the film traffics in everything but absolutes.  It’s playful and unpredictable, dispensing options and suggestions like narrative candy.  It’s not a puzzle box, but a cornucopia of mysteries. In its subdued way, it’s among the weirdest movies in history.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a special taste, dreamlike and sometimes opaque, or at least translucent, to logical analysis.”–Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal (contemporaneous)

“…a total wonderwork: enchanting, bizarre, complex, original.”–Nigel Andrews, Financial Times (contemporaneous)

“Fascinating, hypnotic and deeply, deeply weird… a beautifully shot Thai drama that will baffle and amaze in equal measure.”–Matthew Turner, View London (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Uncle Boonmee at Strand Releasing  – There’s little on Strand Releasing’s Uncle Boonmee page other than a few stills and the surprisingly hard-to-find US release trailer

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (German) – If you can read German, there’s much information to be gleaned about Uncle Boonmee here

IMDB LINK: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Guest Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) – Guest reviewer Kevyn Knox’s original Uncle Boonmee rave for this site

Uncle Boonmee Pressbook – The strange and gorgeous English-language pressbook for the film (.pdf)

Video Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Intensive four part videotaped interview with “Joe” with journalist Louis Danvers for the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels; here are parts 2, 3 and 4

Uncle Boonmee: Interview with Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Virginie Sélavy of Electric Sheep interviews “Joe”

The late, great Apichatpong – Boonmee-focused profile of the director from the English-language Thai newspaper The Nation

DVD INFO: Uncle Boonmee has received a gorgeous DVD treatment from Strand Releasing (buy). In addition to a host of art house trailers, its special features include an interview with the affable Apichatpong and half an hour of deleted scenes. The film is also available on Blu-ray
(buy) and (at the time of this writing) on Netflix Watch Instantly.

“If you didn’t care for Tree of Life then genetically you are not a human being.”–Tim Heidecker (via Twitter)

DIRECTED BY: Terrence Malick

FEATURING: Brad Pitt, Hunter McCracken, Jessica Chastain, Sean Penn

PLOT:  A couple learns about the death of one of their three sons.  Then, a flashback covers events from the birth of the universe to the birth of the couple’s first son, Jack.  A series of impressionistic scenes show Jack growing up in a small Texas town, afraid of the stern father who wants to toughen him up to face life’s trials.

BACKGROUND:

• The Tree of Life may be a partial reworking of Q, a discarded Malick script from the 1970s, which was said to involve “a Minotaur, sleeping in the water, and he dreams about the evolution of the universe…“
• Producer Grant Hill recalls that when he first saw Terrence Malick’s original script for The Tree of Life, it was “a long document that included photographs, bits of material from his research, paintings, references to pieces of music.  It was like something I’d never seen or even heard of before.”
• Special photographic effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull had worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Blade Runner (1982).  He came out of retirement to work on this film at Malick’s request.
• Won the Palme D’or at Cannes in 2011 and was voted “best film” in Sight & Sound‘s 2011 poll.
• After some theatergoers asked for their money back after screenings of the movie, the Avon Theater in Stamford, Connecticut put up a poster reading, in part: “We would like to remind patrons that THE TREE OF LIFE is a uniquely visionary and deeply philosophical film from an auteur director.  It does not follow a traditional linear narrative approach to storytelling. We encourage patrons to read up on the film before choosing to see it, and for those electing to attend, please go in with an opened mind and know that the Avon has a NO-REFUND policy once you have purchased a ticket to see one of our films.”
• A shorter version of the film, featuring expanded versions of the birth of the universe sequences, is planned for a separate release as an IMAX documentary at a later date.
• Our original July 5, 2011 review rated The Tree of Life a “Must See,” but demurred that the film was not quite weird enough to merit a place on the List.  Readers disagreed, and in the 2nd Reader’s Choice Poll they voted Malick’s masterpiece be promoted to a List Candidate.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Thanks to its cosmic visuals, The Tree of Life is compared to 2001: A Space Odyssey more often than any other movie.  That should tip you off that selecting a single indelible image is no easy task.  I could cheat and include the entire twenty minute birth of the universe montage.  I could select my personal favorite image: the child in a flooded, womb-like bedroom who swims out the window to be born as a teddy bear floats in the amniotic brine.  But I believe we will be forced to anoint the “gracious dinosaur” scene as the film’s most unforgettable gambit.  It’s Malick’s “chaos reigns” moment, the juncture at which you either get out of your seat and leave the theater, or experience your first weirdgasm of the evening.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Sometimes, when you spend your cinematic time immersed in the

Original trailer for The Tree of Life

surrealistic worlds of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky, it’s easy to forget how uncompromisingly radical and bizarre a film like The Tree of Life appears to someone whose idea of an “out there” movie is of Cowboys and Aliens.  In our initial assessment of Malick’s grandiose God picture, we concluded that “surrealism is only used as an occasional accent here; overall, the mood is more accurately described as ‘poetic’ rather than ‘weird’” while acknowledging that “[a]ny movie that tells the story of a suburban Texas boy’s troubled relationship with his father—but uses a dramatic encounter between dinosaurs to illustrate its main point—is at least making a nod towards the bizarre.”  In the months since that initial review, however, The Tree of Life‘s empyrean strangeness has continued to impress us as 2011′s best weird work.  The clincher came when co-star Sean Penn complained to the French press, “A clearer and more conventional narrative would have helped the film without, in my opinion, lessening its beauty and its impact. Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out what I’m doing there and what I was supposed to add in that context! What’s more, Terry himself never managed to explain it to me clearly.”  That’s all the endorsement we need: when a movie is too weird for its own Hollywood stars, we have to accept that it’s just weird enough for us.

COMMENTS:  A boy’s tempestuous relationship with Brad the Father is used as a metaphor for nothing less than the turmoil between man and his Maker in Terrence Malick’s moon shot of a movie.  Told mostly as a series of hazy, dreamlike domestic memories, Tree‘s primary mission is to explore Jack O’Brien’s tempestuous relationship with his domineering father (significantly, Brad Pitt’s character is only referred to in the film as “Mr.” O’Brien).  Scenes of young Jack frolicking in the spray of a DDT truck with his two brothers alternate with memories of his father trying to teach the boy to fight by popping pop in the face, and these may be followed by a shot of Sean Penn as grown-up Jack wandering in a desert dressed in a three-piece suit.  Confusing things further, Jack’s reminiscences frequently drift into childhood fantasies: an ominous tall man stoops in a chapel-shaped attic.  When the boy first encounters the facts of death, he imagines his mother as Snow White encased in a glass coffin in the forest.  His own birth is depicted as a child swimming out of a flooded bedroom.  And the movie takes time out not only for these flights of fancy, but also to visit the birth of the universe and the afterlife.

The Tree of Life branches in many directions, but there’s always a method to Malick’s madness.  The film begins with a quote from the Book of Job: God’s terse, non-responsive reply to Job’s complaints about his ill-treatment at the hands of his Maker: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”  After laying out the film’s main thesis, that “there are two ways through life—the way of nature, and the way of grace”, Malick gives Mr. and Mrs. O’Brien a good reason to complain to God: he kills their child, Jack’s brother.  After scenes of the grown-up Jack looking melancholy and lost (which are peppered throughout the entire movie), the story returns to the aftermath of that devastating death as mother Jessica Chastain asks , “Lord, why?  Where were you?”  In the most audacious cinematic answer imaginable, Malick then literally shows us the laying of the foundations of the earth: the formation of nebulae, the birth of stars, molten lava boiling, all merging into visions of the dance of cellular mitosis as the Tree of Life begins to form, a twenty minute bravura sequence ending in Jack’s birth.  As is the rest of the narrative, the scenes of life’s gestation and birth are accompanied by the heavenly choral and symphonic sacred music of Bach, Taverner, Smetana, Mahler, and a host of others; history’s most glorious music written by man to express his wonder at creation.  It is impossible not to be awed by the splendor of the universe Malick lays out before us, and it’s impossible not to be impressed by his brashness in recreating the cosmos for our benefit.

These events occupy the first third of the film, which then settles down into relative normality–considering it features the occasional unexplained shot of an ethereal Chastain floating in midair.  A central conflict soon emerges between headstrong Jack and stern disciplinarian Mr. O’Brien, who insists his son always address him as “father,” forbidding the overly familiar “daddy.”  As a boy’s mischief—tying a frog to a rocket, throwing stones through windows—develops into a dim childish awareness of sin, Brad Pitt’s Father becomes increasingly harsh towards the boy.  Family dinners turn into uncomfortable trials for the three sons, who sit in silence and answer tersely, afraid of accidentally saying something their father will perceive as disrespectful.  When Mr. O’Brien takes a business trip and is out of town for a week, it’s a holiday for the children, who spend the days blissfully romping through their Texas house with mom Chastain, playfully spraying her with a hose.  She is the embodiment of parental love, the counterbalance to Pitt’s implacable fatherly discipline.

With its “two ways through life” slogan, Tree explicitly posits Mother Chastain as the representative of Grace (love), and Father Pitt as the image of Nature (meaning, the struggle, the need to fight one’s way through life).  Pitt tells Jack, “if you want to succeed, you can’t be too good!” and “it takes fierce will to get ahead in this world.”  He teaches him to work hard, and to fight, and he’s disappointed when Jack can’t bring himself to punch Father in the face.  But his fatherly love for Jack is clear, and Jack returns that affection, if only reluctantly.  Pitt’s turn as Mr. O’Brien is the film’s preeminent performance.  Hunter McCracken does well enough as young Jack, but not much is asked of him in the acting department; Chastain is an angelic presence, but her character is one-dimensional.  Sean Penn isn’t onscreen enough, and has too little dialogue, to make a terrific impression.  Pitt is really the only complex, fully rounded character in the film, and the most fascinating both by default and by design.  He exudes toughness, but it’s tough love; his hardness stems from personal bitterness and disappointment, and from his desire for better for his children.  A talented pianist with a love for Brahms, O’Brien forsook music for a career as an engineer, and always regretted it.  He patented numerous inventions but never cashed in on them, and he envies his rich, successful neighbors bitterly.  He nearly saved a neighbor boy from drowning, but ultimately couldn’t resuscitate the lad.   As formal and authoritarian as he may be, O’Brien’s good motives and good heart are never in doubt, and Pitt makes him into a sympathetic figure instead of a mere tyrant.

The fullness of Mr. O’Brien’s character and characterization belies a simplistic Chastain=grace=good, Pitt=nature=bad equation, suggesting a second layer of Christian symbolism.  Much as the characters in Tree of Life protest to God, whose ultimate plan they can’t understand, foolish young Jack complains about his Father, not understanding that the trials Pitt puts him through are meant to make him grow as a man.  This vision fits with the traditional Old Testament image of God the Father as the loving disciplinarian, and mirrors the Job story that begins the movie (and which recurs halfway through in a sermon by the town priest on the arbitrariness of earthly justice).   In this view, Chastain’s loving mother is a feminine Christ figure, the intercessor between the judgmental Father and sinful man.  And this typology helps explain why, though we are put in young Jack’s shoes, we don’t instinctively take his side against his father; instead, we view their strained relationship as a tragedy, and yearn to see them reconciled.

That reconciliation comes in the film’s final sequence which reunites us with Penn as the elder Jack, the resentful little boy now turned into a doubtful and accusatory adult, walks through a door frame hanging in desert space onto a beach of souls where his loved ones are gathered.  It’s an ending that, in its heartrending hopefulness, is every bit as much a gamble as the cosmic sequences.  You may not agree with Tree of Life‘s religious message, but you have to admire the sincerity and passionate intensity with which Malick delivers it.  He leaves nothing on the table; he can’t be accused of stopping short of heaven.  Considering the pandering, preachy crud that passes as “inspirational” cinema these days, it’s a miracle to see a thoughtful spiritual movie that gives doubt its due, and isn’t self-servingly made to elicit “hallelujahs!” from the pious choir.  Like it or not, agree with the message or not, Tree of Life is a challenging, audacious, experimental and surpassingly beautiful work of cinema, and you’ll be better for having encountered it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an exploratory, often mystifying 138-minute tone poem that will test any Malick non-fan’s patience for whispery voiceover and flights of lyrical abstraction.”–Justin Chang, Variety (Cannes screening)

“…[a] mad and magnificent film… a rebuke to realism…there are the baffling and bizarre symphonic passages of non-narrative spectacle, prehistoric jungles, arid deserts, galaxies and spiral shapes – Kubrickian landscapes of wonder. Weirdest of all is the engorged river in which a wounded dinosaur lies prostrate…”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (Cannes screening)

“…a beautiful, messy film: at times lyrical, intimate, and uplifting; at others, vast, inscrutable, and maddening.”–Christopher Orr, The Atlantic (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Fox Searchlight – The Tree of Life – News stories from the film, links, and numerous supplemental video featurettes

The Tree of Life | Two Ways Through Life – A multimedia site featuring short clips from the film

IMDB LINK: The Tree of Life (2011)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Tree of Life | Film | The Guardian – The Guardian shows a serious Tree of Life obsession, cataloging no less than 37 articles and reviews from its pages that reference the film (including interviews with Jessica Chastain and Brad Pitt )

Brad Pitt’s ‘Tree of Life’ Sets Off Mixed Frenzy of Boos, Applause (Cannes 2011) – Hollywood Reporter account on the initially mixed reactions to the movie at Cannes

Giving VFX Birth to Tree of Life – Insight into the creation of the visual effects from the birth of the universe sequence, from Animation World Network

The Front Row: Sean Penn vs. Terrence Malick – The New Yorker‘s Richard Brody takes actor Penn to task for his comments to Le Figaro about The Tree of Life (to be fair to Penn, the report omits the actor’s qualifying statement, “it’s a film I recommend, as long as you go in without any preconceived ideas.”)

Capsule: The Tree of Life (2011) – This site’s initial capsule review of the film

DVD INFO: The Tree of Life has not yet been issued separately on DVD.  It is currently only available in a Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy combo pack (buy).  The Blu-ray disc contains the trailer and “Exploring the Tree of Life,” a thirty minute documentary, as the only extras; the DVD is completely bare.  The film is also available On Demand (rent on-demand).

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

DIRECTED BY: Jean Vigo

FEATURING: Delphin, Jean Dasté, Louis Lefebvre, Gilbert Pruchon, Coco Golstein,Gérard de Bédarieux

PLOT: Schoolboys stage a revolt at a French boarding school.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Zéro de conduite is an important historical film.  It founded the boarding school subgenre, creating a template used by Francois Truffaut (The 400 Blows) and more weirdly by Lindsay Anderson (If…)  With it’s dwarf headmaster, disappearing balls and drawings that come to life, the film is as playful and experimental as a mock rebellion staged by schoolboys before Sunday dinner.  Its mildly surreal oddness nudges the needle on the weirdometer, but, despite its near-legendary status, it’s not thoroughly strange enough to make its way onto the List on the first ballot.

COMMENTS:  Jean Vigo’s extraordinary backstory is almost as fascinating as his films.  The son of an anarchist who died in prison, the auteur left a tiny (about three hours worth of film) but extremely impressive body of work before succumbing to tuberculosis, the age-old nemesis of romantic poets, at the age of 29.  Adding to his mythological stature is the possibility that he may have contributed to his own demise by laboring on his final film up until his last moments, instead of getting much needed bed rest; he may have actually worked himself to death, literally giving his life for his art.

By banning Zéro de conduite, the director’s film about an imaginary rebellion in a boys’ boarding school, for thirteen years, the French censors only augmented Vigo’s legend.  From the perspective of patrons who are used to seeing political leaders openly mocked and clitorises graphically snipped off in movie theaters as they munch on popcorn, the idea of a movie with only a single “merde!’ and no violence, fetal rape, human centipedes, or even an obvious political target would be banned for over a decade is almost unimaginable.  The film contains hardly audible whispers of schoolboy homosexuality, but it was suppressed not for these but for its “anti-French spirit” and “praise of indiscipline.”  Vigo’s anarchic, anti-authoritarian philosophy, which pervades the film’s 44 minute running time, was too hot and subversive for 1933 sensibilities.

Today, of course, the movie is notably tame.  In fact, if you’ve been exposed to any of the anti-authority movies made since Vigo’s film, you may go in expecting to see Nurse Ratchet-styled psychological abuse and sadistic cane lashings.  But there isn’t even one blow delivered in Zéro, much less 400.  The student’s major complaints are being awakened early in the morning and served beans meal after meal.  Their teachers aren’t madmen and dictators, but ineffectual buffoons.  The headmaster is a dwarf with a fake beard; far from being an imposing figure, he’s at eye level with the boys he lords over.  The lack of any real oppression and outrage here expresses Vigo’s libertarian philosophy far better than if  had overplayed his hand and identified authority with excessive cruelty.  What the school is guilty of imposing on the children isn’t tyranny, but a dreary, drab, linear conformity: the rows of beds, the marching in lines, the short-pants uniforms.  The boys don’t revolt against a corrupt social order; they rebel against the ridiculous notion of order itself.  It’s the purest ideal of anarchy.

Vigo wasn’t a card-carrying Surrealist, despite being a contemporary of the movement.  He nonetheless relied on a few of the same shocking, reality-busting techniques as the Un Chien Andalou crew.  His philosophical anarchism extends to the movie’s form; Zéro de conduite refuses to be restrained by logic or possibility.  There’s a scatterbrained teacher who breaks into a Charlie Chaplin impersonation during recess; a ball that magically disappears and reappears; and a cartoon sketch of a “Mr. Beanpole” who animates and morphs into Napoleon.  The children’s first revolt is a dreamlike pillow-fight with slow-motion and backwards sequences, scored to eerie music: a wordless anthem accompanied by a back-masked accordion.  (The music for this scene was actually written out first, then inverted and performed by musicians in reverse, then played backwards on the soundtrack to restore the original melody in a distorted form).  The ridiculous headmaster keeps his hat under a glass dome on a mantlepiece that’s too high for him to reach without standing on his tiptoes.  The weirdest touch of all may occur at the final ceremony that the boys disrupt as their pivotal act of rebellion: the principal and his honored guests and associates sit in chairs in front of bleachers, watching soldiers performing on pommel horses.  The bourgeois dignitaries arrayed behind them are a row of life-sized dolls.

The seldom-seen Zéro de conduite is one of those films you once read about in musty old reference books (or, these days, on a cached blog entry buried deep in your bookmarks) that turns out to be somewhat underwhelming when you finally see it.  The pacing is creaky, the drama underdeveloped.  The grand revolution the film has been building towards consists of about thirty seconds of the boys throwing coconuts and pots down on the heads of the established order, who meekly depart, stage left, without putting up a fight.  It’s a noteworthy and original work, but had the French not banned the film, I doubt it would carry the legendary reputation it has today.  Censors are the best marketing department a movie can have.  Zéro is worthwhile to see for its historical importance, and it’s a work of art, to be sure; but to my mind, it falls just short of masterpiece status.

While it’s combination of weirdness and reputation make Zéro de conduite the most significant title for our purposes, it’s not the headliner of the Criterion Collection’s “The Complete Jean Vigo.”  That honor goes to L’Atalante, Vigo’s only full-length feature, a masterpiece of sentimental romance about a barge captain who takes his young wife to live on board his vessel.  While this tale of love and betrayal is a surprisingly conventional work from the anarchistic Vigo, there are a two famous impressionistic sequences that have a weird-ish poetry to them.  In one, the captain (Dasté, the sympathetic teacher from Conduit) sees a vision of his wife floating in the muddy depths of the Seine; the other is a wispy, sadly erotic montage of the two lovers writhing in separate beds, connected only by a shadowed polka dot motif.  The Criterion disc also contains Vigo’s only two shorts.  Taris is a profile of a French swimming champion.  It features beautiful underwater photography, but shows little true passion, and feels like work done for hire.  Far more interesting is À propos de Nice, an experimental pseudo-documentary (some scenes are staged for comedic effects) on the vacation city of Nice, filmed partly during a street carnival.  Nice features lots of crazy Dutch angles and pans, strange faces, juxtapositions (a shot of a primping woman is followed by an ostrich), and a healthy interest in sex (dig that upskirt camerawork!)  There are a few sequences that qualify as lightly surrealist: tourists who turn into dolls and are raked along with the chips by a roulette croupier, a man with a politically incorrect case of sunburn, and a surprising nude scene.  Like the rest of the disc, Nice won’t be to most modern tastes; but it’s fascinating because it was made before the rules were laid down, by a director making up a visual language as he went along.  It’s novel and enthusiastic enough to catch the interest of anyone serious about cinema.  Vigo scholar Michael Temple provides commentary on each film in the set.  A second disc is full of interviews and documentaries about Vigo, and also contains a (very short) animated tribute by fellow filmmaker Michel Gondry.

Zéro de conduite is in the public domain and may be viewed or downloaded at the Internet Archive, among other venues.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a series of vignettes lampooning the faculty climaxed by a weird, dream-like rebellion of the entire student body. These amorphous scenes, strung together by a vague continuity may be art but they are also pretty chaotic.”–A.H. Weiler, The New York Times (1947 re-release)

FEATURING: Johnny Depp, Aaron Eckhart, Amber Heard, Michael Rispoli, Giovanni Ribisi

PLOT: An alcoholic journalist goes to Puerto Rico where he encounters unscrupulous

capitalists and bottomless mini-bars.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The confluence of three offbeat talents—-seldom seen cult auteur Bruce Robinson (How to Get Ahead in Advertising) directing quirk king Johnny Depp in an adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel by gonzo godfather Hunter S. Thompson—produces a movie that’s far more conventional than you might have guessed.

COMMENTS:  For better or worse, it’s impossible to avoid comparing Rum Diary (unfavorably) with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The film’s producers can’t complain the comparison is unfair, because they cut a trailer that’s obviously aimed at hooking Loathing fans: it’s filled with boozy shenanigans, a bowling ball knocking down ten pin rum bottles, and Johnny Depp promising, in his best deadpan Hunter S. Thompson drawl, “all of this might sound like some crazed hallucination…”  Diary even contains a mild LSD trip sequence that sees Michael Rispoli’s tongue extend six feet in the air “like an accusatory giblet”; of course, this sixty seconds of psychedelics occupies a prime place in the marketing scheme.  There’s also a scene with a voodoo priestess who coughs up frogs—and that’s about it on the weirdness front.  The rest of the movie is a series of drunken war stories in which part-time journalist, full-time imbiber and would-be novelist Paul Kemp (Thompson’s alter-ego, played by Depp as a less manic and assured Raoul Duke) worries about “finding his voice” and flirts with joining up with the “Bastards.”  Why the Bastards (represented by real-estate developer Aaron Eckhart) are so keen to recruit horoscope writer Kemp into their venal cabal isn’t clear; corrupting idealists is what makes them Bastards, I guess.  Also not clear is what’s so darn evil about their plan to build a hotel that would supply thousands of jobs for the local populace on land previously only used for the noble purpose of naval test bombing.  Their marketing plan, which would involve Kemp slipping some favorable words into his columns, is unethical, sure, but hardly a screaming headline, page one outrage.  But the scheme’s investors smoke cigars and complain about Negros and Communists, so they are pretty clearly villainous.  Despite their wickedness, though, the only moral objections Kemp actually raises have to do with the way Eckhart treats his flighty, arm-candy lover (Amber Heard, who looks fabulous in a bikini but disappears from the movie like a neglected girlfriend).  Joining Depp, Eckhart and Heard are Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi as a couple of colorful drinking buddies (Rispoli plays his photographer role like a 1940s New York City cabbie, while Nazi-obsessed basket case Ribisi affects an annoying whine).  The trio’s wandering adventures build to a remarkable anticlimax.  None of the plot lines dangled off this tropical pier snag a catch, but Kemp/Thompson does eventually find his literary voice—too bad for us it only happens after he’s finished narrating this tale.  It’s pleasant to see Depp reprise his role as Thompson, and there are memorable lines of dialogue and set pieces (all of which find their way into the trailer).  But the movie sips at drunken insanity rather than gulping it down; it never goes four-sheets-to-the-wind crazy.  The tone of muted madness here doesn’t do justice to Thompson’s gonzo spirit.  Call it “Mild Concern and Dislike in San Juan.”

“The Rum Diary” was written by Thompson some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s but was rejected by several publishers.  Johnny Depp reportedly discovered the manuscript in Thompson’s basement while he was researching the writer’s mannerisms in preparation for his role in Fear and Loathing.  Depp encouraged Thompson to revise the lost novel; it was published in 1998.   The actor also served as executive producer for this adaptation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…has no mighty gonzo wind… it leaves our freak flag limp.”–David Edelstein, New York Magazine (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Evan Glodell, Tyler Dawson, Jessie Wiseman, Rebekah Brandes

PLOT:  Two jobless, hard-drinking college-age kids struggle with relationships as they

spend their free time building flamethrowers and post-apocalyptic cars out of their favorite film, The Road Warrior.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Try telling people that a movie about the boozy, hallucination-ridden adventures of two slacker dudes who build mad muscle cars in hopes they can rule when Armageddon arrives doesn’t strike you as very weird, and they’ll look at you like you’re crazy.  But you’re right; at bottom, Bellflower is pretty ordinary (for the indie scene, that is).

COMMENTS:  Don’t be fooled by the marketing; despite the references to The Road Warrior, the flame-spewing hot rod centerpiece, and a brutally violent ending, for the most part Bellflower is indie mumblecore drama at its most relentlessly talky.  It’s hard to figure out how to take the movie, because it’s unclear how much of the script is deliberately delusional, and how much is merely myopic.  Thanks to a jumble of flashbacks and fantasies that fill the film’s final fifteen minutes, we’re not sure exactly how tragically Woodrow and Milly’s doomed love resolves, but a more subtle strangeness creeps in long before that.  Bellflower takes place in a Southern California suburb where everyone is over 21 and under 30 years old.  No one who lives there has ever heard of words like “school” or “job” (when Milly asks Woodrow what he does, his answer is “I’m building a flamethrower”), but they all have endless invisible lines of credit to pay for rent, booze, surplus car parts, and munitions.  It’s the perfect movie for anyone who has ever daydreamed about taking off for Texas on the spur of the moment in a car with a dashboard whiskey dispenser (Milly observes “it’s like a James Bond car for drunks!”) to eat truck stop meatloaf on a dare; it’s a dream of endlessly extended adolescence.  On the one hand, the entire story hangs on to plausibility’s cliff by just its fingernail; but on the other hand, it’s presented with hardcore realism—bad beards, overlapping slacker dialogue, and all.  Consider, for a moment, the following exchange.  After Woodrow is struck by a car, possibly sustaining brain damage, his loyal pal Aiden tells him, “you were pretty messed up, mumbling all sorts of weird crap.”  Woodrow asks: “Was it awesome?”  Aiden: “No, dude, it wasn’t awesome!”  This is an egregious example of typical Bellflower dialogue (I didn’t count words, but I wouldn’t be that shocked to hear that 1/10 of the words in the script were either “dude” or “awesome”).  It sounds like it should be a sly comment on the vacuous vocabulary of youth, but there’s little obvious humor or insight to suggest either satire or subcultural self-reflection; it seems aimed at trying to capture “the way people really talk.”  Woodrow and Aiden are obsessed with the “Mad Max” movies and look to Lord Humungous as a role model, but they’re way too cool to believe the apocalypse is literally coming (that would be a different movie).  They’re just extreme, photogenic fanboys with way too much free time on their hands with which to build awesome muscle cars.  It’s possible the entire movie—and not just the apocalyptic, romantic finale—is meant to be nerdy Woodrow’s self-aggrandizing, psychotic hallucination, but the film gives every indication of wanting to be taken seriously as an earnest romantic drama.  In reality, geeky tinkerers Woodrow and Aiden would be delusional dweebs, more Gyro Captains than Lord Humungouses, but Bellflower seems eager to convince us they’re actually awesome lady killers who melt the panties off hot hipster chicks.  To which I can only say: seriously, dude?

As much as I had problems with Bellflower‘s script, which never nails down a sure attitude to its characters’ lives, the technical aspects of the film (especially Joel Hodge’s cinematography) are excellent for a first feature.  Technical types will love this YouTube video the crew put up explaining the “ghetto-rigged” homemade camera they built for the shoot.  This is the equipment everyone will be using to shoot films after the apocalypse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A weird mix of John Hughes and ‘Mad Max’… with the sunburned intensity of a high-summer fever dream.”–James Rocchi (festival screening)

FEATURING: Fernando Santos, Alexander David, Gonçalo Ferreira de Almeida, Chandra Malatitch

PLOT: A conflicted pre-op transsexual drag queen lives with a suicidal junkie.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  I originally wrote: “it’s in the weird ballpark, but Man would need radical surgery to become the poignantly bizarre gender fairy tale it dreams of being.”  As discussed in the comments below, the version of the film I saw was not the version the director intended; but, the film I watched wasn’t quite strange enough to make it onto the List, and restoring the author’s vision would only make it less weird.

COMMENTS:  Funny story.  It turns out that To Die Like a Man isn’t nearly as annoying as I thought it was.  One of the first notes I jotted down in my initial viewing of the film read “telepathic commandos?”  This is because the film opens with a scene of two men in camouflage in the woods staking out a house occupied by two men in drag.  The soldiers speak to each other and their lips move, but there’s no sound; we read their conversation in subtitles.  It seemed like a curiously weird way to start the film, but the silent dialogue continued through the film’s entire two-hour plus running time; we can hear sounds in the background, we can hear it when characters sing or sob, but when they speak—nothing.  Although we’re accustomed to reading titles in foreign or silent movies, to hear birds singing and leaves rustling, see an actor’s lips moving, and yet be banned from hearing their words proves far more frustrating and irritating than you would think.  It robs the actors of half their expressiveness and inhibits our bonding with their characters.

I assumed the silence was an alienating technique designed to put us inside the estranged worldview of Tonia, the confused pre-op protagonist.  But, it turns out there was a simpler explanation for the motif  that I hadn’t thought of.  As it turns out, someone botched the preparation of the digital version I saw via Netflix’s streaming service so that the dialogue track was completely missing.  Oops.  For that reason, I can’t really give To Die Like a Man a fair hearing; it should actually earn a grade of “incomplete.”

I’m embarrassed about not realizing this was a technical issue on my first screening of the film, but in my defense, there is enough strangeness on display here to make it credible that the director would add another experimental gambit on top.  There’s that prologue with the mysterious soldiers hunting drag queens in the woods.  Then, one of the infantrymen turns out to be Tonia’s long lost homophobic son.  Not to mention the subplot where Tonia, the conflicted crossdresser, and his/her suicidal junkie boyfriend find themselves lost in the woods and come across the very same transsexual gingerbread house—where the happily femme inhabitants take them on a nighttime snipe hunt.  If those bizarre narrative elements aren’t enough, then consider the fact that director Rodrigues sometimes drains the color out of the film and changes it to a red/pink monochrome scheme, proving that he’s not above flippant formal experimentation.

Even without the audio track, what can be gleaned of Man‘s story is a mixed bag of originality and cliché.  Even if you haven’t seen a lot of tragic drag queen movies (and I haven’t), the entire dynamic of the aging performer with the worthless addict boyfriend to whom she’s hopelessly devoted and the younger rival who’s slowly displacing her in the audience’s esteem feels awfully familiar.  The idea of the desperate AWOL son forced to hide out with the transvestite father he despises holds promise, but the possible plot line is introduced and then sidelined.  On the other hand, the scenes in the “magical forest” are mysteriously metaphorical, and the weirdest fun you’ll have in a mildly surreal drag queen movie this year.

Perhaps the most unexpectedly brave thing about Man, however, is how it resists the temptation to turn into a rote plea for tolerance.  Tonia is no simple paragon of transgendered virtue: she is catty and paranoid, and her self-destructive devotion to the worthless Rosario is more masochistic and pathetic than admirable.  He/she is also deeply religious, and hesitant about going through with irreversible surgery.  A psychological hermaphrodite, he can’t decide whether he really is a woman, and is skeptical about whether he actually can change his sex.  By staying true to Tonia’s abiding ambivalence about his decision to live as a woman—never giving him that easy moment of psychological triumph—the character remains a sympathetic, confused living person, and is never reduced to a symbolic pawn in the game of gender politics.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a mysterious, fabulously sad fable about the final months of a fado-singing, pooch-pampering drag diva…”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)