Tag Archives: G.B. Hajim

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366: ALOHA! ANIMATION EDITION WITH GUEST G.B. HAJIM

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Audio only link (Soundcloud download)

Quick links/Discussed in this episode:

G.B. Hajim’s Mermaids’ Lament official Facebook page

The Congress (2013): Discussion begins. Read the Apocryphally Weird entry! A new Blu-ray and DVD release of ‘s half-animated dystopian parable The Congress was announced in late 2023, then pushed back, and then the listing disappeared completely. There is a new Region B Blu for Europeans, but we’re still waiting for news on Region A. We discuss the film anyway.

“Masaaki Yuasa: Five Films – Collector’s Edition”: Discussion begins. A major release from Shout! Factory in collaboration with GKIDS. The five fantastic features are the Canonically Weird Mind Game; the Apocryphally Weird Night Is Short, Walk on Girl; the kid-friendly Lu Over the Wall; Ride Your Wave; and his latest, the anachronistic historical musical Inu-Oh. Plus rare shorts, the previously unreleased-on-disc English-language dub of Night Is Short, and more extras. A truly special collector’s edition. This set dropped while the Pod was on hiatus, but we thought it merited additional discussion/notice.  Buy “Masaaki Yuasa: Five Films – Collector’s Edition.”

Some Other Woman (2023): Discussion begins. A woman moves to an island paradise with her husband, but then some other woman replaces her as her reality bends. Not much info on this limited-release indie psychological thriller beyond what you can see in the trailer. Some Other Woman official site.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

Next week’s Pod 366 will be a preview of the Sundance/Slamdance slate, as we officially kick off the 2023 movie season.

In written reviews, Shane Wilson takes on Netflix’s Scott Pilgrim anime spinoff, “Scott Pilgrim Takes Off” for Channel 366; Gregory J. Smalley gives you a somewhat delayed take on ‘s animated fantasy The Boy and the Heron; and Giles Edwards goes deep underground for an online movie called molkipolki, a one-man film with dialogue in a nonsense language (which you can watch ahead of Giles’ report here if you so wish). Onward and weirdward!

Pod 366: A Weird Movies Podcast

POD 366, EPISODE 16: G.B. HAJIM

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

Audio only link (Soundcloud download)

Quick links/Discussed in this episode:

G.B. Hajim interview begins here

The Mermaid’s Lament official Facebook page

G.B. Hajim Instagram

Cannes Film Festival (May 16-27) selection. Discussion begins here.

Director’s Fortnight (May 17-26) selection

Beau Is Afraid (2023): Discussion begins here. An agoraphobic man ventures outside his house to visit his mother and finds a surrealistic nightmare. We’ve been highly anticipating ‘s black comedy starring ; it’s in theaters now (and will be reviewed here soon). Beau Is Afraid official site.

Evil Dead Rise (2023): Discussion begins here. A single mom with three kids and her sister find a copy of the Necronomicon, and soon enough their apartment is swarming with the evil dead. This loosely-connected horror sequel is unlikely to be categorized as a weird movie, but it’s getting great reviews, so fans of the series may want to check it out anyway. Evil Dead Rise official site.

For the Plasma (2014): Discussion begins here. A young woman learns to predict market shifts based on surveillance camera footage of the local forest. Vinegar Syndrome rescued this oddity from obscurity; even the trailer (where the music drowns out the dialogue) is a little bit weird. Available with a Fandor subscription, or on Blu-ray. Buy For the Plasma.

The Seventh Seal (1957): Discussion begins here. Read Gregory J. Smalley’s review. The Criterion Collection updates ‘s death-haunted masterpiece into a 4K UHD (standard Blu-ray also included). Buy The Seventh Seal.

Spirited Away Live on Stage (2022): Discussion begins here. A filmed performance of the Tokyo stage play version of ‘s canonically weird fantasy, screening in theaters on four different nights (with two alternate leads): April 23, 25, 27, and May 2. We’re not sure if these will be offered again, so if you’re interested check GKIDS official site for details.

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE:

Next week’s Pod 366 will feature 366’s own Terri McSorley (AKA Goregirl) and Acidemic‘s Erich Kuersten. We’ll have a special focus on the films of .

On the written review front, Shane Wilson covers another movie that Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue in the Argentinian shot-on-video obscurity Charly, Dias de Sangre (1990), while is afraid he’ll have to be the one to give you the (late-ish) scoop on Beau Is Afraid (see above).

Upcoming Watch Parties can always be found in the sidebar, but we’ll reiterate below:

Sunday, Apr. 23 at 12:00 (noon) ET: Greaser’s Palace (1972) on Tubi via Discord (free)

Thursday, Apr. 27 at 8:00 PM ET: Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion (1997) on Netflix (subscription required)

Onward and weirdward!

Top 10 Lists - Guest Experts

GB HAJIM’S TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES

Leave a comment

GB Hajim is the director, co-writer and chief animator of the Certified Weird Strange Frame: Love and Sax. We described that film’s visuals thusly: “Imagine dropping a hefty dose of LSD on the set of Blade Runner, and you walk through a door and suddenly you’re in the Star Wars cantina. Now, imagine that experience animated by the team behind Fantastic Planet working under the direction of , take that result and square the weirdness quotient…”

Strange Frame is available on iTunes, Xbox, Playstation, Netflix, and most everything else, but if you really want to support the filmmaker and get all the features, the director recommends picking up the DVD from Amazon.

Strange Frame was GB’s first feature film. He makes his home in Hawaii. GB’s current project is the feature film Mermaids’ Lament.

Some of the very best of weird movies vanish into obscurity as soon as the actual print of the film wears out. I am thinking of the 1991 half hour film by Aussie filmmaker Shane McNeil called the Apocryphal History of Meat Part IV – The Brotherhood of Meat. Witty and weird, this movie is an excellent treatise on vegetarianism with lots of exploding meat to keep its tongue in cheek. A list of weird documentaries could be forthcoming—it would definitely include another Australian gem Cane Toads: An Unnatural History and Chris Smithʻs American Movie.

To me, the hallmark of a weird movie is a moment so unique that it can only be brilliant in the context of the certain refined bizarreness a filmmaker has created. Shu Lea Cheangʻs cyberpunk porno I.K.U. (which literally means “cum” in Japanese) has such a great moment, when two of the leads are singing karaoke into rotating throbbing dildos. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie drags, so it doesn’t make my cut for top ten. I also left off some gems that have just become too familiar, and therefore less weird, like The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

1. Bliss (1985), Dir. Ray Lawrence

The movie is a surreal journey of a man who, at the moment of death, has an epiphany so strong that when he wakes he cannot tell the real lies of his life from the lies his brain is telling him. Youʻd think that cockroaches erupting from his chest would be enough to tip the guy off, but youʻd be wrong.

The moment: Harry is having a bad day. His friend offers him a joint. His day only gets worse, beginning with rain. In the downpour, an elephant sits down for a rest, crushing Harryʻs car. Harry, unfazed and very stoned, tries to drive the now roofless car home and is surprised when the police pull him over.

The other reason I love this film is the way it points out the craziness of modern society in contrast to the more sane but difficult life on an anarchist commune. Another film to watch in this vein is How to Get Ahead in Advertising.

2. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Dir.

If the fact that this trip fest was made in 1943 doesn’t blow your mind, you donʻt have perspective. The sound track is eerie, but stripped of any pretension. Each element in the movie is used for maximum impact—a knife, a key, camera movement, a mirrormask. Yes, decades before Neil Gaiman, Maya made an image of a mirrormask that will be etched on my mindplane for life. Continue reading GB HAJIM’S TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES →

Canonically Weird (The List)

156. STRANGE FRAME: LOVE & SAX (2012)

1 Comment

“How fortunate are those who can frame the beauty of the strange.”–opening title of Strange Frame

DIRECTED BY: G.B. Hajim

FEATURING: Claudia Black, Tara Strong, Ron Glass, 

PLOT: In the 28th century, saxophonist Parker falls in love with songwriter and escaped debt slave Naia on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede. The two women form a band, which catches the eye of a music producer. When the producer kicks the sax player out of the band to set Naia up as a solo act, hooks the singer on drugs and isolates her from the outside world, Parker teams up with two interplanetary trash haulers to penetrate the corporate defenses that separate the women.

Still from Strange Frame: Love & Sax (2012)
BACKGROUND:

  • This is the first feature film from Hawaii-based director G.B. Hajim and the first script and soundtrack from co-writer/co-composer Shelley Doty.
  • Hajim and Doty began discussing the project in 1999, and began writing the script in 2002. They envisioned Love & Sax as the first in a series of four films.
  • More than forty Hawaiian high school students worked as interns on the film over its seven years of production.
  • The black and white live action footage edited into the film comes from the all-black feature The Duke Is Tops (1938), starring Lena Horne as a singer who is manipulated into leaving her lover behind with promises of becoming a star in New York City.
  • “Star Trek” alumnus George Takei has a vocal cameo.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Strange Frame is at its visual best when it’s a free-flowing montage: cut-out mutant space lesbians in the foreground, swirling psychedelic backgrounds drifting in and out of focus in the background. It is therefore a difficult task to isolate a single strange frame from this movie; every image is in a constant state of flux. One of the best sequences occurs when Satanically suave agent Dorlan Mig plies the women with powders and rare liquors in an upscale Ganymede nightclub populated by horned celebrity dominatrices and their monocle-wearing cat-person managers. Immediately before the lovers are launched into a trip that’s visually unhinged even by this movie’s extreme standards, we see them reflected in his mirrored shades, one girl improbably and perfectly framed in each lens, before their visages dissolve and morph into pink lips and tongues. That’s about as standout a standalone image as you’ll be able to find in this Heraclitan river of psychedelic cinema.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This story of two renegade lesbian rock stars gigging among the moons of Jupiter is a bit odd, but really not all that weird in and of itself. It’s the visuals that (as the movie’s legend promises) “frame the beauty of the strange.” Imagine dropping a hefty dose of LSD on the set of Blade Runner, and you walk through a door and suddenly you’re in the Star Wars cantina. Now, imagine that experience animated by the team behind Fantastic Planet working under the direction of , take that result and square the weirdness quotient, and you have some inkling of Strange Frame‘s visuals.


Original trailer for Strange Frame

COMMENTS: Strange Frame is an animated psychedelic lesbian science fiction musical. Just to be clear, I would have been happy with any three Continue reading 156. STRANGE FRAME: LOVE & SAX (2012) →