FEATURING: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Roxan Mesquida, Robert the Tire

PLOT: A group of strangers is assembled in the desert, given binoculars, and told to watch.

Through their lenses they see a tire come to life, roll around, and develop explosive psychokinetic powers. A heavy amount of death and destruction follows.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: I think the “sentient rubber tire goes on a killing spree” premise is strange enough to consider it for the List, but the framing of the story as a metafiction involving some self-aware actors, a homicidal accountant, and frequent commentary from a famished “audience” reveals an added layer of weirdness as well as refreshing imagination.

COMMENTS: A number of flimsy wooden chairs sit haphazardly on a dirt road in a desert locale.  A cop car drives up and manages to hit everyone single one.  Police officer Lt. Chad (Spinella) pops out of the trunk of the car, takes out a glass of water, and proceeds to address the audience with ruminations on the presence of “no reason” in film.  Why is ET brown?  Why do the characters in Love Story fall in love?  Why doesn’t anyone ever go to the bathroom or wash their hands?  No reason.  Even in real life the phenomenon exists.  Why can’t we see the air all around us?  Why do some people love sausages and other people hate them?  No reason.  He explains that Rubber itself is “an homage to the no reason, that most powerful element of style.”

It’s nice to have a straightforward, bluntly in-your-face preface like that, especially when the film that follows really does its best to live up to the officer’s words. The story rolls along as aimlessly as its star tire, reeling in new characters and letting them go just as easily, and leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. There is never an attempt at explanation- how did this tire “wake up” and take on a life of its own? Just how much does it understand? Why can it makes things explode? Just who is in charge here? Everything can be chalked up to “no reason” and the audience can sit back and enjoy the ride.

Of course, not much actually happens in Rubber.  There’s only so far one can go with a silent killer tire in an isolated desert.  With pleasing special effects, Robert the tire rolls around, crushes a few bottles, mutilates a few wayward animals, and blows up the heads of whatever jerks get in his way while pursuing a pretty lady to a motel and enjoying the finer things in life, like late-night television programming.  The police step in when the bodies start to stack up, and conspire to destroy him through subterfuge.  Throughout it all, the squabbling “audience” in the desert gives their own commentary, cutting in during the requisite shower scene and other horror-movie clichés.  When the characters in the film sleep, they sleep.  It soon becomes clear that they’re trapped out there, left to the mercy of a sadistic “Accountant” (Plotnick) who takes his time feeding them.  The function of this audience is never explained (of course), but they seem to serve both as a satirical Greek chorus and a joke on the actual audience.

The concept and script begin to lose steam towards the end, but Dupieux smartly keeps his film to a trim 82 minutes, and the innovative meta-film approach, alarmingly high body count, and general irreverence ensure a fun (and weird) time is had by all. The hilarious performance by Spinella and the ridiculous ending give it an extra layer of enthusiasm.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“..an uber-cerebral spoof that is at once silly and smart, populist like a mildly trashy B-movie yet high brow like absurdist theater.”–Farihah Zaman, The Huffington Post (festival screening)

FEATURING: Ole Olsen, Chic Johnson, Martha Raye, Hugh Herbert

PLOT: Although Ole and Chic work tirelessly to undermine any consistent plot, the film is

ostensibly about their attempts to sort out a love triangle between their high society friends in time for a big musical revue.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Made at the height of Hollywood classicism, Hellzapoppin’ breaks every rule of conventional filmmaking, then makes up a few more so it can break them, too. A nonstop barrage of postmodern comedy infused with explosive surrealism, it only has a few spare that moments that aren’t weird in one way or another.

COMMENTS: Adapted from comedy duo Olsen and Johnson’s long-running Broadway musical of the same name, Hellzapoppin’ is an unruly, unstoppable hodgepodge of absurd running gags, mind-boggling non sequiturs, and endless meta-humor, all of which are used to disrupt its self-consciously hackneyed romantic storyline. This is take-no-prisoners, joke-a-minute filmmaking, with no regard for cause-and-effect, segues, or good taste; in fact, with their fondness for violent physical humor mixed with disorienting editing tricks, Olsen and Johnson could be the hallucinogen-puffing cousins of the Three Stooges.

It’s fitting, then, that Hellzapoppin’ should be introduced by Stooge Shemp Howard, who plays Louie, the film’s grumbling projectionist. He rolls the opening credits, and a line chorus girls—with a very literal “BANG!”—is transformed into a gaggle of garishly costumed demons, all of whom promptly fall into the bowels of hell. This is definitely strange, as is the infernal musical number that follows, but it’s nothing compared to the incipient arrival of hell’s “prize guests” (naturally, Chic and Ole). The second they burst out of their cab, which is inexplicably driven by an irate jockey, the two of them begin shooting off wordplay and self-referential jokes like machine gun fire. Each zany incident tops the one before it: one of Satan’s minions is drafted into the U.S. military; a woman and her adult son fall through the floor and into an untapped oil reserve; and Chic accidentally blows up the cab with his breath.

That last point leads into a rather revealing scene where Chic and Ole, curious to find out how the explosion occurred, demand that Louie rewind the movie. “What’s the matter with you guys?” cries Louie. “Don’t you know you can’t talk to me and the audience?” Undaunted, Ole replies: “Well, we’re doin’ it, aren’t we?” and Chic adds, “Yes, folks, this is Hellzapoppin’!” as the two of them break down into uncontrollable giggles. This is their philosophy throughout the film: it doesn’t matter whether they, as actors on screen, shouldn’t or can’t do anything. This is Hellzapoppin’, so they do it anyway. As if to drive that point home, a man solves a tic-tac-toe game on a horse’s rump, and the director of Hellzapoppin’ calls “Cut!” Chic and Ole retreat into the movie studio, eagerly peeling back another layer of the film’s reality, and begin arguing with the director about the role of “story” and “logic” in a movie. All this, and they’re only getting started.

The film’s real story, if you can call it that, doesn’t begin in earnest until about 10 minutes in. After a noisy, fruitless walk around the studio, the director sits Chic and Ole down so he can explain the romantic intrigues between socialite Kitty Rand and her two paramours, Woody and Jeff, who are also best friends. But even this is done in a formally radical style: the three of them watch the scenario unfold through moving pictures, commenting derisively on the action and imitating the voices of Kitty’s parents. In doing so, they anticipate the advent of “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ by roughly half a century. Then, as if everything else had been erased from memory, the boys settle comfortably into this new story, determined to help their pal Jeff win over Kitty.  We’re introduced to a new supporting cast: Hugh Herbert is a delirious detective/trickster god; Martha Raye is Chic’s manic, man-hungry sister; and Mischa Auer is the gold-digging Prince Pepi.

Thus, against the backdrop of a weekend-long party at the Rand estate, Chic and Ole are all set to lob one Molotov cocktail after another onto the film’s narrative scaffolding.  Granted, the cliché-ridden story plods along amidst their hijinks, but it’s barely audible underneath the cacophony of their never-ending interruptions.  Either Chic is trotting out a novelty-size lighter, or Herbert’s detective is gleefully shooting arrows in all directions, or Louie is messing up the film’s projection, leading to a fun-with-editing scene right out of Buster Keaton’s surreal masterpiece Sherlock Jr.  Whenever the film begins to sink into anything resembling normality, the characters are ready with an especially jarring break of the fourth wall.

Everything comes to a head during Jeff’s musical revue, which takes up the film’s last half-hour. For convoluted reasons (motivated by strangely conservative sexual mores), Chic and Ole decide to sabotage the performance with every means at their disposal—starting with the relatively mundane, like flypaper and sneezing powder, but escalating to the cruel and unusual, like tacks scattered under the dancers’ feet and a litter of kittens let loose on the stage. During one unbelievably outré moment, Chic’s sister flies off the stage, only to be thrown back by Frankenstein’s monster, and land on the back of a bear riding a pogo stick. As the end approaches, the gags get more and more outlandish, and the movie overflows with talking animals and half-applied invisibility spells.

As the film-within-a-film ends, the screenwriter for Hellzapoppin’, played by film noir mainstay Elisha Cook, Jr., proclaims his love for the original musical, and the fed-up director shoots him repeatedly.  Cook takes a drink, and water streams cartoonishly out of his bullet holes.  It’s an appropriately nonsensical ending for a movie that could very well be the love child of Duck Soup and Un Chien Andalou: barbed with caustic satire in the least expected places, and totally dismissive of character motivation or logical causation.  Although Olsen and Johnson’s names are forgotten today, Hellzapoppin’ has had a profound influence on countless filmmakers, including Mel Brooks and Joe Dante, and their aggressively meta-cinematic brand of comedy feels right at home in the 21st century.   And even in an era when characters break the fourth wall on a regular basis, the raucous, high-energy antics on display in Hellzapoppin’ still feel freshly transgressive. It’s simply audacious to break that many rules and still have a grin on your face.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Hellzapoppin’ is full of sudden noises; it is also chockful of an anarchic collection of unfunny gags; it is not only insane, it is labored. Theatregoers coming out of the Rivoli yesterday wore startled expressions on their faces.”–The New York Times (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Koen Mortier

FEATURING: Dries Van Hegen, Norman Baert, Gunter Lamoot, Sam Louwyck

PLOT: A writer agrees to become the drummer for a band formed by trio of handicapped

lowlifes to win a Belgian battle of the bands; he ends up manipulating them into destruction.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  With it’s inverted skinhead and brief tour of a ravaged vagina, Ex Drummer is definitely weird; the problem is, it’s so unpleasant, pretentious, tedious and nihilistic that the oppressive atmosphere makes the viewer desperate to escape the movie.

COMMENTS:  There are many possible interpretations of Ex Drummer—for one, the script at times implies it is a vague meditation on “personal sadness”—but the most honest explanation of what the film is comes from writer Dries’ confession when he agrees to join “The Feminists” as their celebrity drummer:  “I want to step outside my happy world.  Descend into the depths of stupidity, ugliness, obtuseness, unfaithfulness… Latch onto the life of losers, but without belonging to that world and in the knowledge that I can always return to my own world.”  In other words, it’s moral tourism among the disadvantaged: the underclasses do the craziest things, like constantly rape each other and neglect their children until the tykes chomp down on excrement from hunger.  Who wouldn’t want to enter such a world for ninety minutes, aside from most film-goers?  Besides the drummer, the blackguard band’s principals are an abusive deaf guitarist, a gay rhythm guitarist with a stiff arm from an accident incurred when he was caught masturbating as a teen, and a misogynist skinhead singer with a lisp.  Upper-class, educated Dries’ turns out to be the worst scoundrel of all, callously manipulating and scripting these mooncalves into cruel ends for his own amusement.  True, the film can be very weird (gravity works backwards in the skinhead’s flat, where toothpaste and blood flow towards the roof), but the weirdness sits uneasily: the director seems to view unreality as just another form of ugliness to be savored.  As a black comedy, more comedy and less black would have been greatly appreciated.  First time feature director Mortier has a few interesting ideas and shots, such as an extended early sequence where the film unspools in reverse as the band bicycles backwards from Dries’ flat into their own backstories.  But the pity is that the main memories we take home from Ex Drummer aren’t these few moments of inspiration; rather, there’s an impression that most of the movie was full of endlessly padded scenes of the band squabbling among itself or fighting other bands or organizers, hurling epithets and fists whenever anyone perceives the slightest slight to their egos.  Since there are no characters anywhere in the film to root for, we have no reason to care who wins the battle of the bands.  After that contest’s decided, there’s really nothing left for the movie to accomplish, but it presses on for another distasteful fifteen minutes, because having nothing to say or do has never stopped it before.  Ex Drummer‘s attempts to forge nihilistic poetry from the lives of pariahs has gained it critical comparisons to Trainspotting; these are off, because Danny Boyle’s movie was about real people, and never indulged in such undisguised contempt for its characters.  A more apt comparison is that Ex Drummer is a Belgian Gummo, with Eurotrash substituting for poor white trash, and even more shameless and self-aware gawking at the freaky antics of the disadvantaged.

On the plus side, the aggressive punk/metal soundtrack (with a few mellower indie rock numbers strategically inserted for a much needed change of pace) is actually pretty good, and likely the real reason for the film’s cult following.  If you’re a fan of this type of music you’ll probably be much more forgiving of this movie, which could at times be described as an extended, uncensored, and rather pretentious music video.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…bizarre, horribly violent and frequently brilliant black comedy from Belgium: a melange of Irrevérsible, Clockwork Orange, Man Bites Dog and This Is Spinal Tap.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Denny.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Najwa Nimri

PLOT:  Lucia, a waitress, falls in love with Lorenzo, a young novelist with a secret in his

past; their passionate love story is intertwined with dramatized scenes from Lorenzo’s novel, with it left to the viewer to decide what is “real” and what is “fiction.” 

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Sex and Lucia‘s fractured narrative is more confusing than weird.  It’s meta-narrative conceits call to mind Adaptation, another movie that ultimately felt too much like an intellectual exercise to be extremely weird. Sex and Lucia treats it’s fiction-within-a-fiction structure with more subtlety and ambiguity, though Charlie Kauffman’s screenplay exists on a satirical plane that in the end makes it the more centered and satisfying effort.

COMMENTS:  The best things about Sex and Lucia are sex (important enough to get its own paragraph!) and Lucia (Paz Vega, whose acting is as naked as her body). While counting its plusses, we should also mention the cinematography, done on a digital camera, with the scenes on the Mediterranean isle bleached like a seashell in the sun.  The story is another matter.  Many viewers find it frustrating that Medem riddles his script with narrative wormholes which shuttle the story back in time or to an alternate resolution, then demands the viewer assist in the construction by choosing what is part of the “real” story and what is in Lorenzo’s imagination. The bigger problem may be that none of the possibilities he offers have a tremendous emotional resonance.  The movie is arty and self-conscious throughout, with multiple obviously significant shots of the moon. Symbolism is pervasive and tends to make sense, but adds up to little in the way of genuine insight.  While these difficulties make Sex and Lucia less than it might have been, it’s still beautiful enough to be lightly intoxicating, like a Mediterranean vacation or a one-nighter with a beautiful woman.

The sex scenes, especially those between the gorgeous and unselfconscious Vega and Ulloa, are undoubtedly a major attraction.  The lovers’ exploration of their bodies and sexual tastes during their whirlwind courtship is erotic and tasteful; the scenes are arousing, but are also beautifully constructed to create a sense of true intimacy between the characters.  The sex is front-loaded; after the middle of the film, when a sordid and pornographic but equally erotic fantasy occurs, sex leaves Lucia and Lorenzo’s relationship, replaced by tragedy and arguments.  Medem refused to let the sexier parts of the film be cut for distribution, but the scenes of tumescent male nudity and fellatio are so brief that they are unnecessary and reek of gimmickry; it’s difficult to rationalize the director’s passionate defense of the artistic necessity of erections.  The film may be purchased in either a unrated cut or in an R-rated version; your enjoyment of the movie is unlikely to be affected by which version you choose (I can’t determine if there’s a difference in runtime between the two versions).   

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“At its best, Sex and Lucia works literally like a dream, like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive or Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away — the narrative is fractured and oblique, the meaning suppressed. It will infuriate a lot of moviegoers, perhaps especially those looking for a high class dirty movie.”–Phillip Martin, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (DVD)

DIRECTED BY: Spike Jonze

FEATURING: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Columbus

PLOT:  Adaptation tells two stories: in one, a “New Yorker” journalist (Meryl

Streep) becomes obsessed with the subject of her nonfiction book, a trashy but passionate collector of orchids (Chris Cooper); in the other, a depressed screenwriter (Nicolas Cage) struggles to adapt her book “The Orchid Thief” into a movie, while fending off his chipper and vapid twin brother (also played by Cage), himself an ersatz screenwriter.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Adaptation is a metamovie, the filmed equivalent of metafiction (a literary style where the real subject of the work is not the ostensible plot, but the process of creating of the work itself).  In Adaptation, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) inserts a fictionalized version of himself into the script, writing and rewriting the story as the movie progresses.  Adaptation may appear unusual, and even weird to those who aren’t used to this kind of recursive style, but it’s a purely intellectual exercise about the creative process, and the mysteries presented in the movie have a purely logical explanation when considered in their literary context.

COMMENTS:  Adaptation sports perhaps the smartest script written in this young millennium, a story which twists and turns back upon itself with sly wit and playful intelligence.  (The screenplay was nominated by the Academy for “Best Adapted Screenplay”; maybe it would have won if it had been properly nominated in the “Best Original Screenplay” category).  In addition, the acting by the three principals—toothless and trashy Chris Cooper as the orchid thief, Meryl Streep as a jaded, intellectual journalist drained of passion, and Nick Cage as the twins, Charlie and Donald Kaufman—shows three veterans at the very peak of their games.   All three were nominated for Oscars, and Cooper won for “Best Supporting Actor.”   As good as Cooper was, it’s Cage’s magical performance as the writer paralyzed by artistic ambition and self-doubt, and also as his clueless doppelganger with a maddening Midas touch, that carries the film.  This is easily Cage’s best performance in an uneven career.

Despite the superlative script and performances, Adaptation falls just short of being an unqualified classic.  The problem is that the secondary plot—despite such welcome spectacles as Meryl Streep trying to imitate a dial tone while tripping balls—pales beside the more intriguing internal struggle of poor Charlie Kaufman.  When Streep and Cooper are on screen, we are always anxious to get back to Cage throwing barbs at himself.  Adaptation is geared towards a specialized audience—mainly writers, movie reviewers and other highly creative types—but will also appeal to fanatical film fans and industry insiders and would-be insiders who want to have a good wicked laugh at the cutthroat compromises required to bring a screenplay to life in Hollywood.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an occasionally maddening and sometimes brilliant motion picture that varies between being insightfully sharp and insufferably self-indulgent…  I can’t imagine Adaptation having much mainstream appeal, but, for those who look for something genuinely off-the-wall in a motion picture, this will unquestionably strike a nerve.”  -James Berardinelli, Reel Views