DIRECTED BY: Christiane Cegavske

FEATURING: With one minor exception, all characters are silent animated puppets

PLOT:  A group of aristocratic white mice commission rodentlike creatures with beaks (called the “Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak”) to create a doll for them, but once the puppet is fashioned the Creatures refuse to give it up; instead, they revere it and sew an egg they find floating in a creek inside its torso.  The mice steal the doll and take it to their lair, so the Creatures set out on a journey to recover it.  Along the way they meet a frog sorcerer and a spider with a human face, and everything changes when the egg inside the doll hatches.

BACKGROUND:

• The film took 13 years to make, with Cegavske animating perhaps 10 seconds a day.  Many of the models and effects used show up in the director’s 1992 short Blood and Sunflowers.
• Cegavske intends for Blood Tea and Red String to be part of a trilogy, and in 2011 she announced the second part of the project, titled Seed in the Sand.  She estimates this installment will take five years to complete.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blood Tea is bizarre throughout, and many will be attracted to the psychedelic splashiness of the sequence where the Oak Dwellers eat hallucinogenic berries and see morphing pink and green leaf patterns overlaid on the courtyard garden.  For my money, though, things are at the weirdest when we climb inside the dark mouse hole and watch the well-dressed vermin pour bloody tea onto the lips of the lifeless doll while their skull-headed pet raven looks on.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: A dialogue-free stop-motion animated fable done in the style of Jan

Original trailer for Blood Tea and Red String

Svankmajer, but with a darkly feminine spin, Blood Tea and Red String gently folds surrealism into its fairy tale structure to create a weirdly compelling world.  It’s an inverted Alice, told from the perspective of mutant rodents, depraved white mice, and mystical frogs.

COMMENTS:  Artist Christiane Cegavske had been living with the haunting creatures of Blood Tea and Red String in her head for years before bringing them to life.  Her first visions of white mice were far more terrifying than the subtly unsettling red-eyed rodents who eventually made it to the screen.  In their first appearance in a Cegavske painting, the vermin torture a nude, bound woman in a rose garden: two of the creatures threaten her breasts with massive scissors, while a third kneels between her spread legs, sewing her up with red string.

Cegavske’s view of the creatures had softened by the time she conceived the story for Blood Tea, and their menace subsided into a background aura.  In her DVD commentary the artist consistently speaks of these creatures, along with other denizens of her subconscious world like the Oak Dwellers (sort of a mutant hybrid of shrews and crows), as if they were real beings with an independent existence; she has learned some things about them, she tells us, but does not pretend to have all the answers.  She confesses that she does not know the name of the Spider, or where the mice get the hemoglobin to brew their favorite beverage, or where the Frog finds the hearts he uses in his magic rituals.  Her understanding of the creatures evolved over time, and with greater familiarity it seems she no longer sees them as terrifying, as did the young girl who painted the first image of torturer mice.  By the time of Blood Tea the characters had become ambiguous, mysterious fairy tale creatures with inscrutable habits and customs, unfit to be judged by human standards.

I’m not implying Cegavske is a crazy woman who literally sees visions of twisted creatures and catalogs their behavior like some schizophrenic crypto-anthropologist.  It’s just that she honors these characters’ subconscious origins; she conceives of each entity in a dream and slowly cultivates a relationship with it, letting it divulge to her what it will over a period of many years.  Her approach to characterization is patiently Surrealist.  When she finally unleashed the results of her studies of these beings and their curious customs on the world, they simultaneously appear fully fleshed-out, breathing creatures, yet they remain full of secrets.

The affluent mice have somehow discovered a vintage Victorian portrait of a human woman with blood-red cheeks and lips, and they want the Oak Dwellers (obviously this world’s premier artisans) to create a simulacrum for them. The Oak Dwellers do so, but fall in love with their own creation, sew up an egg they find floating in a stream inside it, and mount it on their tree like a crucified savior (or a scarecrow).  The mice, arriving in the night in their turtle-drawn carriage, steal the doll and take it back to a mouse hole full of ticking clocks, where they get drunk on blood and play a game where they deal out hands of blank cards.  Meanwhile, the Oak Dwellers put on cloaks and set out on a journey to recover their creation.  They encounter carnivorous plants, but are saved by an amphibian wizard who feeds the hungry pods hearts in place of their prey.  And so it goes.  The story has the outline of a fairy tale or an epic fantasy quest that makes it easy enough to follow, but the details are gnarled, amazing and strange.  It’s a near-perfect blend of surrealism and story, with no language to nail it down to a single meaning (the Dweller’s squawks and the mice’s squeaks convey only the most basic of emotions, like anger or alarm).

The world Cegavske fashions recalls the earliest folk versions of fairy tales—before they were refashioned by Victorian moralists to teach children useful behavioral lessons—stories set in lands populated by inscrutable magical creatures with obscure motivations.  The meanings of these tales, which accrued and mutated over generations, are often unclear and often amoral; the point of the stories, invented to amuse, is to evoke wonder.  But meanings do suggest themselves, seeping through the fabric of the tale.  Though Blood Tea and Red String is decidedly and deliberately undidactic, motifs of female reproduction poke through the story.  The title itself subtly evokes a feminine hygiene product, and an obvious image of menstruation occurs with a shot of blood leaking between the doll’s feet.  Eggs are an important symbol, and are even kept inside the doll (the only clearly female character in this otherwise sexless world).  There is a pregnancy and a birth (rendered grotesquely, Alien style).  Creatures are continually being wrapped up into womblike containers—the carnivorous plant pods which envelop the sleeping Oak Dwellers, the spider that tighly wraps its captured prey in a red string cocoon, a corpse sewn snugly into a leaf coffin.  There are fewer symbols of the male reproductive system, but they do appear, in the form of acorns.  This seed first appears nonchalantly affixed to the lead Dweller’s staff.  Later the crew gets drunk on Frog’s brew (sipped from nut cups) and see a vision of an acorn which splits open and turns into an egg.  Why this reproductive imagery is in the movie is unclear (perhaps it has to do with the project’s long gestation), but it does help unify the unconscious rhythms of the film, while distantly linking the story to ancient fertility myths.

Visually, Blood Tea owes much of its look to Czech Surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer, an influence whom Cegavske is eager to credit.  The white mice fashion their sartorial style on Alice‘s white rabbit, down to their white ruffled collars and scarlet frock coats.  Most of Cegavske’s models have that weathered, antique quality—like leftover wooden toys from a pre-plastic era—typical of the objects Svankmajer loves to animate.  Yet, while she takes cues from the Czech master, Cegavske does create a style of her own, by setting her action not in the real world but inside of carefully composed, pastoral dioramas that resemble children’s pop-up storybooks.  Svankmajer confines his creatures in claustrophobic interiors, but for the most part Cegavske lets hers roam in open fields and gardens—gardens where the sunflowers have faces.

Blood Tea‘s animation is necessarily herky-jerky, but the style works in favor of the mythical material by removing the action one step from reality while still remaining rooted in the physical world.  Like the movie’s story and visuals, Mark Growden’s score is off-key yet oddly melodic, mixing calliopes with recorders or lutes with a Jew’s harp to create tunes which sound medieval and otherworldly at the same time.

For a project that took an amazing thirteen years to complete, it’s remarkable that Blood Tea and Red String isn’t overly thought out—and I mean that as a compliment.  Half-rodent, half-crow creatures who live in oak trees and build dolls for blood-addicted mice don’t need extensive backstories.  It’s enough to know they tend sunflowers, sew eggs into puppets, and implicitly trust mystical frogs who carry endless supplies of hearts beneath their robes.  What seems like randomness to us to them is ritual.  We should feel honored and privileged to glimpse these noble and elegant creatures as they trek about their Faerie world on wispy business we’re too thick and pragmatic to fully comprehend.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain… Often grotesque, though never in the ‘Sick and Twisted’ juvenile gross-out mode, dreamlike feature is as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet, with Mark Growden’s avant-garde folk score in perfect synch.”–Dennis Harvey, Variety (festival screening)

“…the tale becomes both increasingly macabre and bizarrely poignant… if the tale’s moral is less than clear, its haunting images speak directly to some dark, preverbal corner of the heart.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

“In a word, crazy, but while Cegavske’s craft… is nothing if not painstaking, her story unravels dispassionately, and with zero sexual innuendo—an arbitrary string of strange happenings that starve for subtext.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE:

Blood Tea and Red String - There’s only a little bit of information on this page—plot synopsis, quotes from favorable reviews, and links to buy Blood Tea merchandise—but you may enjoy poking around the rest of christianecegavske.com

IMDB LINK: Blood Tea and Red String (2006)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Blood Tea & Red String Panel – Brief clip of Cegavske discussing the film and her influences at the Anime L.A. convention in 2007

Seed in the Sand by Christiane Cegavske – Kickstarter – Information on the second part of the intended trilogy that started with Blood Tea and Red String, including a plot synopsis and a peek at a set.  The project is already funded.

DVD INFO: The Cinema Epoch DVD (buy) contains a wealth of revealing background material, as befits a labor of love like Blood Tea and Red String.  Cegavske shares some of her “miniature paintings” (many of which appear in the film) and shows and discusses the sketches in which the characters from Blood Tea first revealed themselves to her in a segment called “character and story development.”  The brief, narrated survey of “production stills” gives us insight into the sets and provides us with a sense of scale.  Most important and interesting is the commentary, which takes the form of a conversation between the creator and actor/film critic Luke Y. Thompson.  In the commentary Cegavske seems shy, very much the distracted artist; she’s pained to give answers to certain questions, but she warms up enthusiastically when talking about her creations.  She has a refreshingly different personality than most directors: she comes off as a cool, weird chick with an eternal girlishness about her.

(This movie was nominated for review by NGboo, who called it “one of the most creative and imaginative fantasies. Surreal, enigmatic, bittersweet, cutely-morbid & bizarre stop-motion animation.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

“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.

DIRECTED BY: Bill Plympton

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

BACKGROUND:

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

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

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

Scene from Idiots and Angels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

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

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

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

IMDB LINK: Idiots and Angels (2008)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

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

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

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

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

FEATURING: Andy Lau, Carina Lau, Bingbing Li, Chao Deng

PLOT: When court officials begin spontaneously bursting into flames as her coronation

approaches, Empress Wu suspects a conspiracy and hires the one man she believes can uncover it: Detective Dee, whom she imprisoned years ago for treason.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although there are some strange fantasy elements (an talking deer courtier called “the Chaplain”) existing alongside historical material (Empress Wu and Dee himself are real figures), when you get right down to it, Detective Dee is probably only as weird to Western eyes as Indiana Jones was to Asian eyes.

COMMENTS:  Detective Dee does just about everything above average, and it does one thing really well: art direction.  From the skyscraper-sized Buddha being built for the Empress’ coronation to the flooded underground city where lowlifes go to hide when the heat is on to the everyday pageantry of the Chinese imperial court, Dee is a fantastic looking film, and it’s always a pleasure to watch the film’s ass-kicking characters cavort across these carefully rendered backdrops.  The fight sequences (orchestrated by cult choreographer Sammo Hung) are typically spectacular—the scene where Dee kicks a leaping stag in the head as he flies by is amazing—but they sometimes lack spontaneity and soul, feeling over-studied and over-crafted.  (I admit to a prejudice here: I miss the balletic martial artistry of the old Shaw Brothers films that relied solely on the performers’ athleticism.  But I accept that wire fu is here to stay).  The abundant CGI effects are of acceptable quality, a few years and a few million dollars behind contemporary Hollywood standards; fortunately, they are mainly used for artistic rather than realistic effect.  The only place where Dee drops the ball a bit is in the plot.  Continuity and clarity are not qualities one expects to see highlighted in Hong Kong fantasies, but considering that this one is explicitly couched as a “mystery,” the audience might have expected a little more misdirection and revelation.  Instead, clues pop up arbitrarily, sending our detective to yet another exotic locale where enemy agents await him in ambush.  And with the introduction of various rebel factions and their separate schemes that may or may not be related to the main mystery, the plot gets confusing, without being particularly intricate.  Still, those are minor objections, easily solved by going into the movie with the expectation you’re going to be watching a detective who solves riddles with blows from his feet and his magic mace, rather than his mind.  Among its weirder features, Dee sports a talking deer with symbols scrawled on his head, robed robots, a kung-fu battle on top of two teams of thundering horses, and a character named “Donkey Wang” who disguises himself using acupuncture.  Dee isn’t a game-changing epic, but it is a two-hour mix of history, fantasy, pageantry, mystery, novelty, intrigue, spectacle and thrills—and that’s a lot for your entertainment dollar.

University of Texas-educated director Tsui Hark is one of the most important figures from the Hong Kong New Wave, basically founding the modern fantasy wuxia genre with his groundbreaking Wu: Warriors of the Magic Mountain (1983).  He has also been enormously important as a producer, financing and guiding odd fantastical projects like the unforgettable A Chinese Ghost Story (1987).  Before Detective Dee, Tsui had helmed a number of financial and artistically disappointing features since the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong in 1997.  This film has been widely hailed as a return to form by the beloved fantasy icon, and a prequel is already in the works.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Nothing is meant to seem real in the Chinese ‘Detective Dee,’… [it] entertains us because it is so audaciously unreal.”–Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Ingmar Bergman

FEATURING: Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Nils Poppe, Bengt Ekerot, Bibi Andersson

PLOT:  A disillusioned knight and his cynical squire return to a 14th century Sweden ravaged

by the Black Plague; Death comes for the knight, but he entices the Reaper to play a game of chess for his soul.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  The Seventh Seal is undoubtedly a great movie, but its weirdness is in doubt.  In fact, trying to decide if this film is strange enough to make it on the List almost makes me feel like Antonius Block wondering if there’s a God out there.  As an existential allegory, the film has a significant amount of unreality in its corner; although much of the movie is a starkly realistic portrait of medieval life, Bergman often ignores logic in minor ways when necessary to make his larger metaphorical points.  He also incorporates the fantastic in one major way, by making Death a literal character in the film, a “living, breathing” character who not only plays chess but also poses as a priest and chops down a tree with his scythe.  That’s not much weirdness to go on, though, and the best external support I can find for considering the movie “weird” is the fact that it’s been (inaccurately) tagged with “surrealism” on IMDB.   I’m torn; the weird movie community will need to chime in on this one.

COMMENTS: The Seventh Seal has a big, imposing reputation as a masterpiece of world cinema, but if you haven’t seen it yet, you may be surprised to find that most of what you think you know about it is wrong.  In the first place, it’s not nearly as gloomy as you may have heard.  True, every frame of the film is suffused with the foreknowledge of death—Bergman is very in-your-face with his message that you are going to die, and it’s going to be horrible—but the grim scenes alternate with lighthearted, comic ones.  The entire dynamic between the drunken smith Plog, and his unfaithful wife Maria, and her unlucky paramour Scat, for example, has a tone of bawdy Shakespearean comedy.  The idyllic scenes where the knight enjoys a meal of milk and wild strawberries with the juggler Jof and his family have a warmth that temporarily drives away the chill—even though there is a skull peering over the picnickers’ shoulders.  The movie is also not as challenging or enigmatic as you may have been led to believe.  While Seal is an allegory, it’s not exactly an obscure one: you don’t need to scratch your head and try to figure out which character represents death.  It’s the guy in the black robes with the skull face who says, “I am Death.”  Characters have deep thoughts about the meaning of life, but they don’t hide them under layers of poetic obfuscation: they say exactly what they think (in fact, they say what we all sometimes think, but are afraid to say out loud).  One final thing that may surprise you is that, despite the fact that the knight’s chess game with Death makes a powerful plot hook, Max von Sydow‘s troubled paladin doesn’t dominate the film.  The Seventh Seal is a true ensemble piece, full of episodes and subplots that simultaneously evoke a believable medieval milieu and give each cast member a moment to shine.  There’s Bergman’s recreation of what a Dark Ages variety show might have looked like, an amazing pageant of flagellants, and a minor villain who threads his way in and out of the story and gets his comeuppance. Von Sydow’s performance is actually a bit theatrical, and the best thing about it is the way at a mere twenty-six years of age he projects a much older figure, one who’s been crushed by the weight of the world. As the earthy squire, Gunnar Björnstrand, a calmly atheistic counterpoint to von Sydow’s tormented agnostic, makes a bigger impression.  He’s more nuanced than the one-note knight, capable of singing a bawdy song one moment and rescuing a damsel in distress the other, and we suspect that Bergman admires the squire’s unflinching defiance of death and refusal to grasp at existential straws (even when he’s about to fall into the void, he exults that he is still able to roll his eyes and wiggle his toes).  One thing about the film that doesn’t belie its reputation, of course, is the imagery.  Gunnar Fischer’s cinematography, with its many subtly unnatural lighting schemes, is a triumph.  The bookend images of Death playing chess, then leading his new conquests on a macabre dance on a hillside by a fjord, burn themselves into your mind’s eye and endure through the ages.  There’s a reason they’ve been parodied in everything from Woody Allen’s Love and Death to Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, and it’s not because they’re risible or easily forgotten.

The Criterion Collection 2-disc DVD contains all the usual bells and whistles plus a bonus feature, the documentary Bergman Island, an 83 minute series of interviews with the venerable director shot after his retirement to the remote island of Fårö.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The actor’s faces, the aura of magic, the ambiguities, and the riddle at the heart of the film all contribute to it stature.”–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

(This movie was nominated for review by “Nightingail,” who said, “it’s on a lot of critics’ lists as one of the greatest movies of all time, but it’s also wonderfully weird, I think :-)” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Conrad Veidt gives a harrowing, anemic performance as Ivan the Terrible.  Angular and clammy, this segment is a paranoid fable which ends with a stark, memorable scene of the scourged despot forever turning the hour glass, convinced of his fate (death by poisoning).  Leni’s use of Eastern Orthodox iconography, inhabiting a shadowy world, is refreshingly and expressively idiosyncratic.  Helmar Lerski’s cinematography, which proved to be a considerable influence on Eistenstein, aggrandizes Ivan’s maniacal state.

The Jack the Ripper finale has been much discussed and is more a sketch than a climax. Werner Krauss plays the infamous Whitechapel serial killer who dominates the shadows, blade in hand, awaiting the poet and his lover.  This surreal whisper was originally intended to lead into a fourth narrative based off Vulpius’ “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”  Although the dreaded captain’s wax likeness can be seen in several scenes, budget restraints forced that narrative to be deleted.

After Waxworks, Hollywood beckoned.  Considering what was to follow in Hitler’s Germany, Leni’s departure from his homeland may have saved the Jewish artist, but, most cruelly, fate prematurely deprived him, and us, of his life and art.

FEATURING: Anthony Geary, Dyanne Thorne, Sam Gilman, Susan Damante

PLOT:  A Vietnam veteran falls in love with a water nymph, but she can’t love a man who has a

soul; the local topless witches’ coven offers to get rid of his for him.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Because, let’s face it, the movie’s terrible.

COMMENTS:  Sometimes, exploitation movies are so rushed and cut so many corners that they become incoherent and unintentionally strange.  Cases where movies aimed at a six-pack swilling Friday night crowd dare to be intentionally bizarre are far less common.  Blood Sabbath is an ultra-rare example of a jiggle-fest that manages to be weird in both ways.  The story of a world-weary vet who walks to Mexico, falls in love with a water spirit, and sells his soul for love could have made for an odd enough little modern fairy tale, played straight.  But, instead, Blood Sabbath begins with a scene of a gang of longhaired peaceniks luring our hitchhiking hero to their flower power van so they can spray him with beer and taunt him with the dangling melons of a topless hippie chick as they zoom off into the sunset.  Then, a gang of picnicking naked women (including mammacious nudie fave Uschi Digart) try to pants the harried soldier and chase him until he rolls down a ravine and gently knocks himself unconscious.  The casually introduced fantasy elements—water sprites, the witches coven that demands an annual blood sacrifice from the local peasants—and the solemn tone make this an unusual enough drive-in horror movie, but the way the director seizes any opportunity to put a naked woman on screen, regardless of logic, is its weirdest, and its defining, feature.  In the course of the movie we discover that topless go-go dancing is a much bigger part of Satanism than anyone realized, and being sacrificed at a black mass turns out to be surprisingly similar to getting a lap dance.  The flick is amazing, and amusing, in its shamelessness.  The thespianship is abysmal all the way around; the quiet, tormented village priest who occasionally explodes into loud, dramatic bouts of anguished “acting!” is the worst offender.  Campy though her performance may be, future Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. Dyanne Thorne (playing a witch-queen named “Alotta”), emerges as the best actor in the troupe (though the guy who plays the hermit who looks like Lloyd Bridges caught in the early stages of werewolf transformation isn’t half bad).  Of course, it would be hard for anyone to shine when reciting lines like “take my soul, damn you!” and “It’s David.  He came into the cave with blood all over him.  Sacrificial blood!”  Ensorcellment is indicated by the usual array of low-budget acid trip clichés: double images, solarization, colored filters, and zoom-lens abuse.  A random shot of David cradling a dying solider suggests it’s all an allegory for America’s experience in Vietnam, or something.  Though it’s pretty terrible, it’s seldom boring, and you already knew whether you were in this film’s target audience or not when you reached the lines “taunt him with the dangling melons of a topless hippie chick…”  With its eerie fairy tale + naked lady formula, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that director Murphy had been inspired by the previous year’s (much better) Girl Slaves of Morgana le Fay.

Some jokes are just too easy.  I was going to quip “this movie should be called Boob Sabbath,” but when I went looking for a critical quote, I found that someone (probably many people) beat me to it.  Great minds think alike.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…this bizarre cross between seventies witch movies, NIGHT TIDE, LOVE STORY and ORGY OF THE DEAD, with romantic meadow-romping, tepid gore effects, crass exploitation… and bad acting is, in a word, awful.”–Dave Sindelar, Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings (DVD)

FEATURING: Otto Jespersen, Glenn Erland Tosterud, Johanna Mørck, Tomas Alf Larsen, Urmila Berg-Domaas

PLOT: Three journalism students traipse about the Norwegian countryside following a

mysterious poacher, only to discover he is a government-funded troll hunter trying to contain an outbreak of monsters in the mountains.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though a troll-themed found footage horror/comedy sounds like a novel concept, for the most part TrollHunter is a straightforward and predictable—and enjoyable—horror flick.

COMMENTS: Building slowly up to its fantastical pay-off and composed of edited footage purportedly sent anonymously to a news station, TrollHunter begins with Thomas (the reporter), Johanna (the sound woman), and Kalle (the rarely-seen camera operator) driving through the Norwegian mountains after suspected bear poacher Hans. There’s something fishy going on with this guy, as evidenced by his strange, solitary habits and tricked-out hunting truck, and they aim to find out exactly what’s up.  When they finally catch up with him, they learn firsthand that he’s an honest-to-goodness troll hunter, employed by the government to protect humans from troll attacks.  An entire troll subculture is explored and explained matter-of-factly; they’re like a typical woodland animal species, only ten times bigger and wholly improbable.  They’ve been breaking out of their contained areas and wreaking havoc lately, so it’s up to Hans and his new camera crew to determine the cause.

Hans’s gruff and fed-up line deliveries coupled with the students’—especially Thomas’s—befuddled reactions make for much of the film’s cheeky comedy, but they rarely elicit big laughs, keeping an understated atmosphere for most of the running time.  Of course, when the actual trolls come into play, action and thrills take precedence.  Director Øvredal makes good use of unseen monsters and intense sound effects, injecting the affair with fear of the unknown more than anything else.  The trolls are well CGI-ed, kept primarily in dark lighting; the effects showcase several different monster designs.  The shaky-cam vérité style can be taxing at points, but overall the first-person camerawork is incorporated effectively.

TrollHunter is the kind of genre mash-up that doesn’t lean to any one side.  Many will think it should be much funnier, or much scarier, or both. Personally, I appreciated its low-key approach.  The story and characters are interesting enough to keep the momentum going, and the gorgeous Scandinavian scenery and multiple gruesome troll bouts are entertaining to the eye.  Some of the specifically Norwegian references are likely lost on outside viewers, but this look into Norwegian folklore is never abstruse or alienating.  For the most part, it’s just fun!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“With impressive technical credits, stunning fjord and forest locations and a winking ownership of its own absurdity, ‘Trollhunter’ manages to be at once spooky, satirical and endearing.” –Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Alexandra Lamy, Mélusine Mayance, Sergi López

PLOT:  A single mom factory worker gives birth to a very special baby; of course, every mother

thinks her baby is miraculous, but in this case the press thinks so, too.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  A minor but sometimes effective meditation on motherhood, Ricky might not be good enough to make this exclusive list even if it were extremely bizarre.  Its “what if” premise and strange, vacillating tone is just off-normal enough to place the movie within the weird genre, but it in no way pushes the boundaries of the bizarre.

COMMENTS:  If you’ve read other reviews of Ricky, you might have already discovered what it is that makes this baby special; only a few critics have managed to keep the film’s turning point a secret.  I don’t think it’s necessary to give away the surprise to discuss the film, but you might be able to figure it out anyway from context.  It’s less important precisely what it is that makes Ricky a special baby, which is mainly a matter of concern for the special effects crew, then it is to consider the role Ricky’s “specialness” plays in the story: a metaphor for the wonder with which a mother views her own offspring.  The wizardry that brings the baby to life is inconsistent—the analog elements are neat looking, if unconvincing, while the digital realizations are just unconvincing—but that’s not what most people will find unsatisfactory about the film.  Ricky begins life as a dreary domestic drama, then shifts gears about halfway through and tries to be a whimsical semi-comedy before gliding into a mystical, suspiciously happy ending.  As the movie gets weirder the tone gets lighter, but the hard realities of the earlier drama still weigh it down.  The two hemispheres of the movie work against each other; the part of the movie that’s well done is kind of boring, while the more intriguing portion often seems thrown together on the fly.  As stressed lower-middle class parents Katie and Paco, Alexandra Lamy and Sergi López are believably flawed: they bicker and accuse each other, they sometimes neglect Katie’s older child Lisa, and they can be irresponsible parents (no pediatrician for Ricky?), but in the end they fight through their own limitations to do the right thing for their offspring.  Lamy sells the film’s potentially ridiculous emotional climax and makes it affecting; a poor performance would have turned it into pure camp.   It’s a serious and thoughtful movie with points to praise (particularly Lamy’s performance); but, even as an experiment in deliberately inconsistent tone, it’s hard to say the film works on the whole.  In the end, Ricky never really gets off the ground.

The movie begins with an out-of-sequence prologue that’s incompatible with the rest of the story.  Although the scene frustrates and confuses some viewers, it’s a great tear-jerking moment for Lamy; and, more importantly, by it contrasting the grim reality of single parenthood with the fantasy that follows, it’s the key to the film’s psychology.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film is bewildering. I don’t know what its terms are, and it doesn’t match any of mine. I found myself regarding it more and more as an inexplicable curiosity.”–Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: Robin Williams, Annabella Sciorra, Cuba Gooding Jr., Max von Sydow

PLOT: A pediatrician dies and goes to paradise, but he’s willing to throw away an eternity of

bliss to find his wife, who’s trapped in a far less pleasant afterlife.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Majestic visuals make Dreams worth a gander for most, but due to high levels of sugary sentiment it’s contraindicated for diabetic cinephiles.  While it has some unusual moments (and a cool eyeblink cameo from weird icon Werner Herzog as a tormented head), its weirdness isn’t much higher than any other Hollywood-approved fantasy.

COMMENTS:  The romantic afterlife fantasy What Dreams May Come flopped at the box office, but won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Visual Effects.  When pediatrician Chris (Robin Williams) dies and goes to heaven, the afterlife manifests as one of his wife’s oil paintings.  Williams (joined by spiritual guide Cuba Gooding Jr.) wanders around inside an incredibly detailed landscape that looks like it was literally created out of paint; when his shoe slips on the mud, it exposes an undercoat of iridescent green and orange. It’s a miraculous mise-en-scène that, by itself, makes the movie worth catching.  Other visuals pack quite a punch as well, especially when the action moves from a prismatic heaven to a gray hell: we watch a horde of swimming dead menacing Chris’s boat, and see him carefully transverse a field where the faces of the damned grow like heads of lettuce.  Unfortunately, the other aspects of the production can’t keep up to the standard set by the visuals, and a vein of sappiness undermines the whole endeavor.   What Dreams was made during the period when Robin Williams was still transitioning from a wacky motormouthed comedian to a “serious” dramatic actor, and he received some praise for this performance at the time; looking back, however, it seems too restrained, as if he’s trying to keep his massive personality in check.  Gooding Jr. tries to compensate for Williams’ surprising lack of energy, and goes over the top a couple of times (I half expected him to shout out, “show me the salvation!”). Annabella Sciorra comes off best, but she needed a better agent; she gets third billed, behind supporting player Gooding Jr., and doesn’t even get her name before the title! The story actually has an affecting emotional core which is cleverly explored—Chris’ descent into his wife’s personal hell mirrors a real life tragedy suffered back on earth—but the pathos doesn’t come through as powerfully as it should; you might come away from the picture with the feeling that the message is that the only things that survive death are love and therapy.  Distractions keep the story from getting into gear until the movie’s already half over.  Sure, the visuals are awesome in Paradise, but the story dawdles there, just taking in the scenery.  Chris’ relationship with his children is awkwardly handled as a pair of intrusive subplots to the main love story; it’s unsettling how, amidst so much longing for his wife back on Earth, he remembers to ask about his kids as an afterthought.  The dialogue frequently sounds like it should be printed on a motivational poster rather than coming out of the mouths of believable human beings: there’s about a dozen variations on the theme of “never give up,” plus such cringe-inducing lines as “you don’t have to break in half to love somebody” and “what some folks call impossible is just stuff they haven’t seen before.”  But even with all the kitsch and mawkishness spread throughout the film, it’s the ridiculous, nonsensical finish—with its teary hugs and wildflowers and sunlight glinting on the water and swelling strings—that leaves a sickly sweet aftertaste that almost ruins the whole experience.  (An unfinished but more sensible alternate ending, which follows the original novel, is included as an extra on the disc).  While What Dreams makes lots of references to fine art, from its “Hamlet”-inspired title to its mythological plot and the visual citations to 19th century paintings, it’s all a surface sheen of culture masking a limp, New Agey, nondenominational spirituality.  Even Richard Matheson’s original novel, while not high art on the level of the masterpieces the movie references, seems bowdlerized (the author is on record as finding the adaptation disappointing).  Though it clearly wants to be taken seriously as Art, the movie is simultaneously too concerned with being inoffensive and inspirational, so it ends up playing like Orpheus as adapted by someone whose only previous experience was writing greeting cards for Hallmark.

In an unusual move, What Dreams May Come listed about a dozen paintings which inspired the various looks of the film in the credits.  19th century German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich was the most cited inspiration, with his The Wanderer Above the Mists and Two Men Contemplating the Moon singled out. You may notice just the tiniest hint of another influence, Hieronomous Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, in the Hell scenes.  The Paradise scenes, on the other hand, often have riotous color schemes that are more reminiscent to me of a modern impressionist like Leonid Afremov or even the Disney inspired work of Thomas Kinkade than the much subtler works of the Old Masters cited in the credits.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…probably not mainstream enough to enthrall audiences and assure a big return at the box office. It is arguably too offbeat… Director Vincent Ward’s view of heaven is surreal and spectacular, with special effects enhancing everything from the subtle greens of the mosses and grass to the crimsons, violets, oranges, and blues of the flower petals.”–James Berardinelli, Reel Views (contemporaneous)