FEATURING: Mark Scheibmeir, Sydney Andrews, Stephen Taylor Fry

PLOT: Virgil, unhappy with his job as an assistant to a taste-tester in a flavor synthesis lab

and struggling with the pressures of a long-distance relationship with his fiancée, risks throwing everything away to dedicate himself to making a perfect goat cheese.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite dream sequences and comic departures from reality, “weird” is too strong a word to use for this ever so slightly exotic concoction.  “Recommended” is also too strong a word, unless you add the modifier “mildly.”

COMMENTS: Artois the Goat is a film that captures all the thrills, excitement and romance of cheesemaking: milking the goats, separating the curds from the whey, aging the final product.  You might think there’s not a lot of thrills and romance in making artisanal goat cheese, but be assured that the Bogart brothers milk the subject for all it’s worth.  (That’s the closest I’m going to come to making a cheesy pun about this movie).  Actually, since the film is about following your passion, it could have just as easily been built around beer brewing, dollhouse building, or cannabis cultivation; but none of those other crafts would produce quite the same blend of snobbishness and ridiculousness as a film about cheesemaking, or appeal as deeply to the Food Channel demographic.  Quips aside, the cheesecrafting side of the film is somewhat educational and engaging, appealing to a certain “how do they make that stuff anyway?” fascination.  The thrust of the story is Virgil’s transition from a timid young adult who can’t commit to either a career or a woman to a fully-functioning adult who gets both.  Like its bespectacled hero (who sleeps in a bed surrounded by walls of books but is never seen reading anything but cheesemaking manuals), the movie is bookish without being intellectual.  It’s set in a world of smart, responsible, confused postgraduates who are neither hipsters nor yuppies, burnouts nor successes.  They have the education and taste to recognize the good life, but not the courage to seize it.  These twee characters and their sub-existential crises are a bit cloying, but thankfully, the movie frequently sets aside reality for comic effect, which keeps it fresh and saves it from becoming too earnestly indie.  There’s a recurring series of dreams (beautifully lensed in the Texas hill country, although not particularly dreamlike), and there are odd characters hanging around the fringes, like the homeless man in a clown wig who foodie Jens believes is an FDA spy and the policeman with a faithful hound who manages to appear whenever a black market transaction in unpasteurized Gouda goes down.  The movie starts off with an interesting technique in which a narrator is telling a story that has nothing to do with the characters we’re seeing onscreen, and there’s a subtly nightmarish bit where Virgil’s new boss seems to be his old boss’ evil twin.  The weirdest element is the goat of the title, Virgil’s shamanic animal guide: as a teatless buck, he should have no utility for the protagonist.  Performances are good for this level of filmmaking, though Stephen Taylor Fry’s German accent is neither convincing nor charming.  The actors do well until their asked to play big emotions while reciting unlikely verbiage; female lead Sydney Andrews comes off best of all, probably because she wasn’t handed any overwrought scenes.  The comedy is of the sort that keeps a near constant smile on your face but never makes you break out in peals of laughter.  The main complaint, in a film that’s supposed to be about knockout tastes, is that Artois the Goat plays it too safe with its seasonings, opting to keep everything light, creamy and pleasant.  The final product is tasty, but challenging the audience with a little more tang or bite couldn’t have hurt.  You wouldn’t feel ashamed serving this movie to your refined Chablis-drinking friends, but it’s not something you’d pull out to wow a cinematic gourmand, either; like even the finest goat cheese, it’s a tasty diversion, not a meal.

Despite not winning any major awards, Artois the Goat did fairly well on the festival circuit and was picked up by Indiepix for distribution, which makes it a success by independent film standards. The Bogart brothers show a lot of talent behind the camera and a willingness to tackle offbeat, uncommercial themes in an innocent style that’s largely out-of-fashion; I’d love to see what they might produce if they dedicated themselves to full-on weirdness, rather than just using it as a subtle complimentary flavor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…charming, slightly surreal, and hilarious.”–James Renovitch, Austin Chronicle (festival screening)

DIRECTED BY: Edgar Wright

FEATURING: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman

PLOT: Slacker bassist Scott Pilgrim must defeat seven evil exes in order to win the girl of his

dreams.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  An alternate reality comedy that at times feels like something Monty Python would have come up with if they’d been raised on video games and graphic novels instead of “The Goon Show” and Oscar Wilde, Scott Pilgrim has substantial cult movie potential.  The movie dispenses with logic scene by fractured scene, but probably its weirdest joke is casting Michael Cera as an action hero.  It’s shiny surface sheen is fascinating, but at heart it’s a conventional coming-of-age tale for the PlayStation set; despite it’s comic leaps of illogic, it’s weird-ish, at best.

COMMENTS:  With its role-playing game quest to defeat seven escalating opponents (right up to the final “boss” battle) and it’s onscreen scoring system (defeated enemies turn into piles of coins as a digital score rises from their corpses), Scott Pilgrim becomes the first film in history to use the video game as a metaphor for growing up.  The movie milks maximum mileage from this conceit: when Scott goes to the bathroom, we watch a pop-up pee meter go from full to empty so we can stay informed on the condition of his bladder.  The viewer is stuffed inside a video game console, treated to constant text updates on the characters’ status.  But even beyond that basic technique, director Edgar Wright piles on the artificiality and stylization whenever an idea crosses his mind: multicolored valentines bloom from young lovers locked lips at first kiss, 1960s Batman-style “KAPOWS!” accompany fight scenes, and when a character’s profanity is bleeped out on the soundtrack a black bar also appears over her mouth.  The bent humor sports a pop-absurdist tone; this is the only movies where a villain sets up a duel to the death by email, then brings his own Bollywood backup singers to the fight.  Sometimes Wright’s choices become overly referential and fall flat, as when one expository scene is announced by the “Seinfeld” theme song, but you have to admire his willingness to try absolutely anything, and there are more hits than misses in the mix.  The film moves almost too fast at times, with dream scenes emerging back into reality with no warning (there’s little difference between the two states anyway), and jarring leaps forward in time.  But Wright embraces the short-attention span aesthetic and makes one of the cornerstones of the film; it’s neither a satirical jab at youth culture nor an unconscious adoption of its rhythms, but a stylistic choice that works in the context of the zeitgeist he’s trying to evoke.  The fast-cut style is also necessary to fit in all the film’s teeming ideas:  Scott Pilgrim is delightfully overstuffed, a real bargain for your matinee dollar.  There are six big, comic fight scenes, multiple romantic subplots and back stories,  a Battle of the Bands, and so many quirky supporting characters you almost need a scorecard to keep up.  Besides everyboy Pilgrim, there’s cool love interest Ramona Flowers (whose shifting dye jobs call to mind Kate Winslett’s Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), jailbait romantic rival Knives Chow, wisecracking gay roommate Wallace Wells, Scott’s band-mates in the awkwardly named “Sex Bob-omb,” evil exes who’ve become Hollywood action stars or Vegan bass players… and even with that list I’ve still omitted somebody‘s favorite of the dozens of significant characters.  The film is anarchic and ramshackle in spirit, but it’s actually tightly controlled and easy to follow and connect with.  With it’s ADD edits, it’s geeky embrace of everything pop culture and willful ignorance of any other type of culture, and its amiable twenty-somethings who act like John Hughes’ teenagers of an earlier era, Scott Pilgrim suggests either that the onset of adulthood is slipping ever closer to 30, or that the film is aimed at a demographic aged much younger than its protagonists.  I prefer to believe the latter; and, like the aforementioned Mr. Hughes’ film, the movie’s innocence about love and the easy answers about life’s big lessons creates a nostalgic crossover appeal for adults, even if they don’t get every NES video game system reference.

Edgar Wright’s previous two films were cultish genre spoofs: the zombie film parody Shaun of the Dead and the cop burlesque Hot Fuzz.  Scott Pilgrim sees Wright stretching his talents with a far more baroque, but equally hilarious, approach.  With Scott Pilgrim Wright’s no longer exaggerating the conventions of an existing genres to ridiculous lengths; he’s inventing an entirely new genre.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The style is Sega surrealism, the narrative strategy 30% Bunuel and 70% Bally.”–Andy Klein, Brand X Daily (contemporaneous)

DIRECTOR: Hal Ashby

FEATURING: Bud Cort, Ruth Gordon

PLOT: Twenty-something rich kid unfulfilled with his life stages fake suicides to peeve

his uppity mother and ultimately finds meaning in life when he meets carefree 89-year-old Maude.

WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST: The May-December romance theme is taken to the extreme by romantically entangling (yes, I mean sexually) a very young man with a very old lady.  Considered taboo by most people, the film makes a plea that the perversion is justified because these two odd souls truly do make a bona fide connection with each other, regardless of age or what society deems as acceptable.

COMMENTS:  First off, I’ll admit that I’m biased when it comes to this film. It has been my all-time favorite for about as long as I can remember. Excepting The Dark Crystal (which just frightened me) it was the first truly “weird” film I encountered as a child.  Like any other kid of my generation, I was enamored by the spectacle that was Star Wars.  Fantasy consumes a child’s existence, and there was no greater escape than those first three films.  I’m guessing around ’84 I first came upon Harold and Maude on HBO.  I was engrossed immediately.  Here was a movie that did not rely on fantasy to hold your attention.  Sure, there is some reality-based whimsy involved.  The humor is dark for sure, some may say morbid, but to a 10-year-old kid watching someone feigning multiple suicides comes off as hilarious.  At least it did for me at the time, and yes it still does.

I know this movie has a huge and dedicated cult following.  Without trying to sound completely snobbish, I hope it stays within that circle.  It deserves to be seen by those who like their cinema offbeat.  I find this movie to be so perfect that I cannot fathom anyone not enjoying it.

Now let’s talk about what makes this movie weird.  The May-December theme is basically a couple who is one-half old and one-half young.  It has been explored many times over in movies, usually in dreadful Hollywood romantic comedies.  Usually, it is the older man falling for the younger girl… yes, tracing a semi-origin to “Lolita,” one of the most popular novels written about the subject, which was made into a couple of “controversial” films.  There are exceptions of good films exploring this theme.  Ghost World (I agree a bit creepy for a couple) or Lost in Translation are good examples, but they never really surpassed plain ol’ sweetness.  What sets Harold and Maude apart, other than the gender-role age discrepancy being reversed, is that they give each other hope and a true purpose for life.

Harold’s mother ceaselessly tries to find a respectable mate through dating services.  Harold wants no part in this shallowness, and bizarre fake suicides are performed to ward each one off.  Upon meeting Maude at funeral services, for which neither one knows the deceased, they hit it off.  Maude takes part in several shenanigans that involuntarily involve Harold.  He starts to see this chaos/anarchy as a means for living and loving.  He tells his mother early on that he has found a companion in Maude and provides evidence with a picture of her.  I believe initially the affair was meant to once again irk his mother, but eventually unfolds to true and devout love.  Of course his mother is aghast and she stops at nothing to prevent the relationship.  Again, the results are nothing short of hilarious.

I have always been fascinated by two people who are linked together and it seems to be a complete mismatch.  The beauty of Harold and Maude is that they are not mismatched at all.  Only the age factor makes it seem that way.  I compare it to seeing a strange couple walking down the aisle of a store.  One is obese and the other is pencil-thin.  It makes you raise and eyebrow and think, “that’s weird.”  Is it?  If they are happy I salute them. Love truly knows no boundaries and it makes this life what it is.  Films like Harold and Maude can show you that love exists, in spades.  It may also tell you to take that spade and dig up that city tree and transplant it in the forest where it belongs.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a doggedly eccentric film which some will reject out of hand. Others will find it profoundly moving and life affirming.”–TV Guide

“How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!

Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d …”–Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry

FEATURING: Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, Mark Ruffalo, Tom Wilkinson

PLOT: A shy introvert named Joel and a kooky gal named Clementine with ever-changing hair colors meet and fall in love.  After a fight Joel tries to reconcile, but discovers Clementine has availed herself of a strange and anachronistic mind-erasing technique to remove all memories of him; in a fit of pique and pain, he decides to undergo the same procedure.  But as Joel begins the erasure process, he realizes he doesn’t want to go through with it, and he travels through the landscapes of his memories to find and hold on to the rapidly vanishing Clementine.

BACKGROUND:

• Charlie Kaufman came up with the idea for this fascinating tale and co-wrote the script with the help of director Michel Gondry and obscure Parisian performance artist Pierre Bismuth.
• The title is taken from the classic Alexander Pope poem Eloisa to Abelard, which reflects a number of philosophical and emotional touchstones of the film.
• Before Jim Carrey expressed a desire to play Joel, the likeliest candidate for the part was Nicolas Cage (!)
• The scene where Mark Ruffalo scares Kirsten Dunst is completely genuine: director Gondry asked that before each take that Ruffalo hide in a different spot to really scare the pants off her!

INDELIBLE IMAGE: This bold and invigorating trip into the subconscious has a myriad of off-the-wall images that are sure to stick in your head. From faceless creatures to over-sized environments to entire train stations being drained of its inhabitants due to memory loss, there is a lot of weirdness going on here.  But as far as an indelible image, the one I pick is the simple scene in which Joel remembers when he and Clementine snuggle beneath an old ratty blanket and he consoles her after she recounts an intimate and revealing story about a doll she named after herself as a child.  As the memory seeps out of his head and Clementine’s body disappears, Joel crawls through the ratty blanket of his imagination begging to be able to hold on to this particular memory.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Any film birthed from the madcap imagination of Charlie

Original trailer for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Kaufman and surreal visualist Michel Gondry has at least a pretty good shot of being kind of different.  But this movie in particular, a film about memories literally being erased from people like they were organic hard drives, really takes Kaufman’s dry strangeness and Gondry’s unhinged wild-eyed wonderment and melds it to a delightful perfection that muses on life while simultaneously compelling us with images of collapsing landscapes and Jim Carrey bathing in a sink.

COMMENTS: Some would say that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie about
the heart, while others would say it’s about the mind, and still others would say it’s about the soul.  That so many people have such diverse opinions on it speaks volumes, especially when one considers the crux of the movie for a moment: Joel and Clementine are simply two lovers who have opted to forget about one another, albeit with their fair share of doubts left behind.  On the surface, it appears to be little more than a quirky romantic drama, and even with the fabulous imagery it still maintains its simple core of a love regretted.  What makes this different than something you would find in the indie film bargain bin is an intelligence and a philosophy behind it that not many other features can boast.

It is a film that speaks to the sad core of a relationship.  Joel and Clementine’s romance is dysfunctional in its optimism.  It is a love that is woefully mismatched and tries to work against it, and the film succeeds in showing the heartache of the divide between two very different people who care for each other.  Clementine is a punky extrovert, wearing her emotions on her sleeve with a loud mouth and wacky colored hair.  Joel is much more insular, opting to watch his carefree spirit from afar.  Their personalities don’t exactly compliment each other, which explains their later tensions and eventual dissolution.  Most films would gloss over the details of such a mismatch and assume that love conquers all, but the gulf between these two and how it weathers a love over time is a refreshingly realistic touch for a movie draped in the fantastique.

What a fascinating idea.  A concept like this, in the wrong hands, could have ended disastrously, but in the capable grasp of Gondry and wunderkind Charlie Kaufman, this film came out almost flawlessly.  You are transported to a world of dreamlike memories that fall away in the face of a procedure that begins to look more and more like a terrible mistake.  It’s as terrifying as it is tragic, and its inevitability bears down upon our hearts every second, even though we still secretly hope for a second chance between Joel and Clementine.  The world inside Joel’s mind is equally impressive as a visual spectacle.  The way the memories manifest themselves—be they half-remembered words and ideas, sketchy faces, childhood fears revisiting the adult manifestation of Joel, or endless loops of seemingly unimportant details—all are lovingly rendered in a style that is both technically impressive and emotionally stirring.

This sumptuous feast for the mind is bolstered by breakout performances by Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.  While I never expected any less from real-deal actress Winslet, Carrey genuinely surprised me.  As Joel, he made me feel so deeply for him that it shook me to my core as an ol’ softie.  There is such a vulnerability there that I never saw before, never would have imagined before.  He changed my opinion of him forever with this role, and for the first time I can look at Jim Carrey with unbiased eyes as a seriously talented actor with a range that can be aptly described as phenomenal.  But let’s not forget that Kate deserves her due for being half of this curious relationship.  Clementine is a free-spirit who doesn’t like being told what to do, doesn’t like boundaries, and it hurts her when Joel seeks to reign her in.  There are a number of scenes here in which she showcases an emotional range that solidifies her as one of the greatest actresses of this decade, and even with badly-dyed blue hair I can take a woman like her seriously.

But the peripheral characters also take us aback with their complex lives.  Lacuna Inc., the shady company that erases people’s memories, has an incredibly strange staff that somehow pull off the illusion that it’s a well-run, totally professional business, when in reality it’s the medical equivalent of hiring someone to steal all the photos in your wallet.  Headed up by Dr. Wierzniak and his assistant Mary, Lacuna uses some strange technology to do their dirty work, sending out slacker techies to make house calls and erase people’s memories from the comfort of their own home.  One of the technicians even tries dating Clementine by using the memories takes from Joel as he is erasing them!  Seedy, but it’s not nearly as bad as the relationship between the doctor and his assistant, which makes for some compelling drama.  The climactic scene between those two will have you aching for these characters, basking in their tragic realities.

So in the end, whether Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about the heart, the mind, or the soul, its expressive visuals and its candid storytelling weave an emotionally ecstatic film that will leave you fascinated and captivated.  It is an experience that you will want to hold onto in your memories for as long as you can.

366weirdmovies adds: Sunshine proposes a brilliantly simple “what if” scenario— “what if you could completely erase the memory of your ex-lover?”—that is a universal daydream of everyone who’s ever been on the “dumpee” side of a dumping. The movie gives an answer that rings emotionally true, and is at the same time shamelessly romantic, life-affirming, and melancholy. In a crucial way, it’s irrelevant whether Joel and Clementine get together and live happily ever after; the key triumph is when Joel decides he doesn’t want to forget, when he decides the temporary pain of their breakup shouldn’t be allowed to betray the beauty of their shared past, decides he’d prefer to stumble down the hard path to recovering from heartbreak than to take a shortcut that would wipe out something precious. Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Synechdoche New York) is often accused of being overly intellectual, distant and tricky; this is his most emotionally authentic and sincere script, and it’s not a coincidence that it’s the one that’s fervently embraced by the widest audience. It’s an amazing and affecting movie, even if you’re not a fan of strange cinema.

As far as weird goes, I find it to be starter-level stuff, more speculative and offbeat than surreal. There is some delightfully resolved confusion resulting from playing around with the timeline, and Gondry’s set-pieces have a music-video type of oddness to them, but once the impossible premise is established the story plays out with a relentless narrative logic. Still, it’s within the weird genre, however tenuously, and it’s such a lovely and beloved movie that I’m afraid readers would hang me in effigy if I denied it it’s rightful place on the List of 366 Best Weird Movies of all time. It’s a great entry point into the deranged cinema of Kaufman and his bizarre cinema kin; starting from here, you can branch out into ever-weirder vistas.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…the director always insists on an excess of surreality by pedantically realising visually every strange detail of Joel’s memory-angst… All very wacky and Dick Lester-ish, like a grad-school Beatles movie, and for about five or ten minutes it’s funny and exhilarating. But it’s over-extended, and tends to undermine the rigorous realism which made the idea funny.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

“Filled with the writer’s trademark neurotic characters, grungy atmospherics, and downbeat emphasis on domestic discord, it’s a baroque and intermittently brilliant brain twister so convoluted that it inevitably deposits the viewer in an alternate universe.”–J. Hoberman, The Village Voice (contemporaneous)

“In this season of abundance for amnesiac romances, Eternal Sunshine – with its laughs and its weirdness and its contemplation of some of the big issues regarding memory and identity – is the hands-down winner… a delightful little wormhole that takes us on a journey to another dimension of consciousness.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

OFFICIAL SITE: Focus Features – Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

IMDB LINK: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

Lacuna Inc. – the fake website for the memory-erasing corporation of Eternal Sunshine that was part of the original marketing campaign for the movie

Roger Ebert’s Great Movies Essay – In-depth meditation by Roger Ebert as to what makes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind such a classic.

The Science of Memory Loss – Slate.com chimes in with an intriguing essay about the realities behind the Eternal Sunshine ”memory erasure” technique.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind at Being Charlie Kaufman – A fansite devoted to screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Here you can find stills, fan art, audio, video, and even drafts of scripts from Eternal Sunshine.

Christian Review of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – An… interesting take on the film from an interesting source!

DVD INFO: The original one-disc edition of this DVD (buy), which is incidentally the one I saw, isn’t incredibly flattering as far as the special features go, but I have seen much worse.  It comes with a Michel Gondry-Jim Carrey interview, which is playful but uneventful, some pretty good deleted and alternate scenes, a fake commercial for Lacuna Inc., and a terribly banal music video for a song The Polyphonic Spree lent to the film. The commentary is an acquired taste, but absolutely seminal if you like your commentary tracks. It’s performed by Kaufman and Gondry, and while it’s really quite informative, it sounds a bit like the David Lynch short The Cowboy and The Frenchman. Kaufman is very droll and American, Gondry is very giggly and French, so it makes for an interesting pairing in the recording booth when they’re both trying to relay their own experiences. Recently, a two-disc edition has emerged that blows the previous version out of the water (buy). It contains an “Anatomy of a Scene,” sit-downs with various cast members, some featurettes, and even a screenplay book! If you can, I would buy that edition, but for the filmgoer on a budget, the standard edition is more than adequate. Eternal Sunshine is also available on Blu-ray (buy) and as a rental on Amazon’s video on demand (rent).

DIRECTED BY: Veit Helmer

FEATURING: Kristyna Malérová, Max Mauff

PLOT: A young couple’s about-to-be-consummated love is threatened when the women of

their village organize a sex strike against the lazy townsmen who will not fix the pipe that brings water to the hamlet.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Disqualified for false advertising in the title: there’s nothing absurdist in this shamelessly romantic comedy.  Still, it’s an offbeat and often beautiful fable that’s kilometers and kilometers away from the competition in this most formulaic of genres.  An exceptional date night movie for people who aren’t idiots.

COMMENTS:  Absurdistan takes place in a central Asian village, once famed among merchants traveling the Silk Road for its beautiful women and virile menfolk, but now forgotten by the modern world.  Unburdened by cell phones, social networking sites and other conveniences of the modern age, the villagers have reverted to simpler ways—which is to say, they think mainly about sex.  And as long as the men are getting it, they have little incentive to do anything else, since the women take up the duties of baking, herding, and farming out of necessity.  They grow too lazy even to fix the town’s water pipe, preferring enduring drought and living in filth to the unacceptable prospect of working up a good sweat.  Although sex in Absurdistan is used as a weapon, overall, the village’s attitude towards the dirty deed is refreshingly frank and seems innocent and healthy compared to our own: its importance is freely acknowledged and respected, and not hidden from the village children like a shameful secret.  This perspective gives the movie a tastefully lusty charm that’s reminiscent of one of its inspirations, Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata.”  The most unique aspect of Absurdistan is the scarcity of dialogue; background info is given via voiceover, but very few words are actually spoken by the characters (and except for the heroine’s name, no words at all are spoken by the male lead).  This is partly due to circumstance; few in the internationally assembled cast could speak properly accented Russian.  More importantly, as an artistic choice it gives the film an aura of timelessness and universality.  With no verbal exchanges, the comedy is delivered silent-movie style, and isn’t always exactly subtle: there’s a bit where a man stuffs two watermelons into a brassiere in order to infiltrate the women’s camp.  None of the gags are gut-busting, but along with the top-notch desert cinematography, exotic music, and assured storytelling, it’s enough to keep the audience well-charmed until the climax.  Director/co-writer Veit Helmer doesn’t skimp on the sentiment—after completing their quest to save the parched village, the young lovers are granted not one but two fairy tale happy endings with heart-melting, magical images.  But the hearts and flowers aren’t slopped on simply because the target demographic expects it.  In the service of an original, well-told story, Helmer earns the right to be a bit sappy, and we earn the right to enjoy it.

Helmer also helmed the 1999 movie Tuvalu, set on the titular island, which features a similar streamlined storyline with minimal dialogue, but adds experimental film-tinting and appears to have a more surrealistic touches and absurd humor.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a bizarre yet charming plot, and the overall ensemble insanity — like Amélie meets Dogville, though not as compelling as either — is curiously entertaining.”–Chris Bilton, Eye Weekly

DIRECTED BY: Goran Dukic

FEATURING: Patrick Fugit, Shannyn Sossamon, Shea Whigham, Tom Waits

PLOT:  In a special afterlife reserved for suicides, three lost souls hit the road: Zia is

searching for his earthly lover, Mikal is convinced she’s here by mistake and is looking for the People in Charge, and Eugene is along for the ride because he has nothing better to do.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Despite the sunglasses-snatching black hole that’s taken up permanent residence under the passenger seat in Eugene’s old beater, Wristcutters never really crosses the shaky border into the land of the weird.  A few magical realist touches decorate this otherwise conventional, indie-flavored road movie/love triangle that’s best described as “quirky.”  (If you know of a review that doesn’t use the word “quirky” to describe this movie, please contact the proper authorities; the writer needs to have his or her critical credentials yanked).

COMMENTS:  Adapted from a story by Etgar Keret, Wristcutters is a romantic comedy disguised as a black comedy, a conventional movie disguised as a bizarre movie, and a shamelessly hopeful movie disguised as a bleak movie.  None of those disguises are particularly hard to penetrate.  “Who could think of a better punishment, really?  Everything’s the same here, it’s just a little worse,” newly deceased wristcutter Zia realizes soon after he gets a pizza delivery job in the afterlife.  In Wristcutters, new suicides wake to discover a Great Beyond that’s not so great: in fact, it’s set in the middle of the Mojave desert where everything is so run down and recycled, even the automobiles are held together mostly by duct tape.  Furthermore, in the most dreadful dissimilarity to the living world, its denizens find themselves unable to smile, a restriction that makes the sympathetic performances of the young principals all the more impressive.  Still, the movie always has a hopeful sense that the main characters can find a way out of their existential predicament, and it doesn’t disappoint those hoping for a happy ending (though some may consider it a cop-out).  Although Wristcutters sometimes reeks of missed opportunities to explore deeper themes and blacker comedy in a more mystical landscape, it’s also apparent that director/scripter Dukic has hit exactly the lightly offbeat tone he was aiming for, and he has the good sense to wrap the story up quickly after his world runs out of new Purgatorial quirks to offer.  A couple of tunes by Tom Waits (who also offers up a memorable turn as ramshackle but wizardly guiding spirit Kneller) and Gogol Bordello bump up the cool quotient considerably.

After this successful debut, Croatian director Dukic is poised between worlds: he could use this feature as springboard to do something even more conventional, or push his offbeat impulses to their logically weird conclusion.  We’ll keep an eye on him.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“What makes it work is that the performers, trapped in a weird movie about a weird place, underplay their astonishment.”–A.O. Scott, New York Times (contemporaneous)

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

DIRECTED BY:  Woody Allen

FEATURING: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton

PLOT:  Neurotic NYC comedian Alvy (Allen) falls in love with would-be cabaret singer

Annie Hall (Keaton), but his inability to relax and enjoy life ultimately dooms their relationship.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Annie Hall isn’t weird, at all.  Some people, however, believe it’s weird, and have even tagged the film as “Surrealism” on IMDB.  I doubt Luis Buñuel would agree.  What people misperceive as weird in Annie Hall are the numerous “breaking the fourth wall” stylistic techniques: speaking directly to the camera, having the adult Alvy visit his own flashbacks and comment on the action, including subtitles explaining what Alvy and Annie are really thinking as they flirt at their first meeting, and including an animated non sequitur explaining that Alvy most identified with the Wicked Queen in Disney’s Snow White.  These techniques, however, are employed in the service of the most conventional plot Allen had conceived up to that time: a true-to-life, impeccably characterized tale of the rise and fall of a romance.  The directorial tools he uses to tell his tale may be unconventional and self-conscious, but they sure ain’t weird.

COMMENTS: Notwithstanding the fact that it’s clearly lodged in the comedy genre, Annie Hall was Woody Allen’s first “serious” movie.  As a dual character study of hapless Alvy and flighty but lively Annie, it shows more depth and ambition than Allen’s previous wacky comedies that had no higher aspirations than too make audiences laugh (and to depict Allen as someone so smart that the audience feels flattered to get his references to Kierkegaard or whomever).  Annie Hall is shamelessly autobiographical (Allen and Keaton really were ex-lovers), and doesn’t try to hide it.  Fortunately, the film’s laden with memorable gags that will stick with you the rest of your life: Alvy’s schoolmates describing their adult interests (one is a methadone addict); Christopher Walken’s brilliant, brief turn as Annie’s unhinged brother; Jeff Goldblum’s even briefer single sentence bit as a trendy Hollywood meathead; and Allen’s classic one-liner regarding masturbation.  Most of the jokes tend towards the witty instead of the sidesplitting, eliciting an appreciative chuckle rather than a hearty belly laugh, but the witticisms come so fast and furious that they keep the audience on edge to see what Allen will come up with next.  They also effectively hide the underlying pain of the tale: Alvy is masochistically self-sabotaging and will never be happy in a relationship, and Annie is too full of life to let Alvy drag her down.  All in all, it’s not quite as relentlessly funny as the comedies that preceded it—Bananas, Sleeper and Love and Death—but Allen’s crafty direction shows a mastery of this particular material that’s hard not to admire.  Allen let the critical praise heaped on him for this serious effort go to his head, turned to directing dramas at the peak of his comic success, and would be only sporadically funny again—a tragic loss for the world of comedy.

The original screenplay was titled “Anhedonia”, a psychological condition describing the inability to experience pleasure.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie gave a fresh confidence to Woody and a generation of solipsistic stand-up comics and it created a new genre, what we might call ‘the relationship picture’, that dispensed with formal narrative… the actual production was a chaotic affair and the picture only came into focus when its editor Ralph Rosenblum reduced the first cut of 140 minutes to a tight 95 in which the real and the surreal co-exist.”–Phillip French, The Observer(DVD)

DIRECTOR: Chan-wook Park

FEATURING: Su-jeong Lim, Rain

PLOT: Young-goon, a young woman who believes herself to be a cyborg, is institutionalized after a gruesome and nearly fatal attempt to recharge her batteries.  Among the characters she meets in the mental hospital is Il-soon, a kleptomaniac who steals not only small items, but character traits from the other patients.  Young-goon enlists Il-soon’s aid to help her discover and complete her purpose as a cyborg, while he finds himself coming to care about her—and seeks to find a solution to her troubles that will remain true to her delusion.

BACKGROUND:

• I’m a Cyborg was director Chan-wook Park’s first film after completing his popular and ultra-violent “Vengeance Trilogy” [Sympathy for Mr. Vengance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2004)].   It was the #1 film in Korea in it’s opening week, but tanked quickly thereafter and ultimately became a box-office disappointment.
• The idea for the movie came to Park after he had a dream about “bullets coming out of a girl’s body.”
• The mail lead, Jeong Ji-Hoon, is a top Korean pop music star who records under the name “Rain.”  He makes his movie acting debut in Cyborg.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The audience-pleasing image is Young-goon sprouting jets from her ratty sneakers so she can elevate to kiss Il-soon.  The most enduring image, however, is the vision of Young-goon as a combat cyborg, with bullets shooting from her fingertips and spent shell casings ejecting from her open mouth.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  The main characters—a woman who self-destructs

Trailer for I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK

because she believes herself to be a robot, and a kleptomaniac with a fondness for bunny rabbit masks—would, at the very least, qualify as quirky.  Add elaborate hallucinatory sequences, including a massacre of the hospital doctors set to the rhythm of a gentle chamber waltz, and a flight to the Swiss Alps in the grasp of a giant ladybug accompanied by yodeling, and the movie becomes fantastic.  But what makes it weird is that the director takes the principals’ delusions at emotional face value, never allowing reality to bully and overcome his madmen’s subjective worlds.

COMMENTS:  We can easily imagine the 2009 Hollywood remake of Saibogujiman Kwenchana.   It might star Keri Russell as the cyborgette (sadly, Meg Ryan is too old), Justin Timberlake as the klepto, and Rosie O’Donnell as the wisecracking obsessive-compulsive who first foils, then assists, their forbidden love.  The lovers’ back-stories would be tragic, but not heartbreaking, and through their voracious sexual passion, they would cure each other’s neuroses where the doctors had failed, exiting the asylum arm in arm, ready to return to their once-promising careers as a caterer and an inventor.

What a difference a culture (and a talented director) makes.  Chan-wook Park found a way to strangen the romantic comedy, the most formulaic of all film genres.

The most important factor in I’m a Cyborg’s success is that it takes the delusions of its characters seriously.  In a curious way, this treatment does the characters—who are honest lunatics, not cute eccentrics—honor.

Though Young-goon can’t actually fire armor-piercing rounds from her fingertips or subsist on a diet of D-cell batteries, her emotional problems cannot be solved unless the rest of the world will treat her as a cyborg.  In fact, no one in the film ever explicitly denies she is a cyborg.  Young-goon’s mother (quite a piece of work herself), seems to accept it as a fact that her daughter is a cyborg; she’s only swears Young-goon to secrecy about the fact because she fears that if it became common knowledge, it would hurt the family restaurant business.  Il-soon never directly challenges the cyborg’s notion of herself; he strives  to solve her human problems with solutions designed for a cyborg.  Even the psychiatric staff never contradicts her.  It does seem to truly be “OK” that she thinks herself an automaton.

Of course, the audience knows Young-goon isn’t a robot, and part of the fascination of the movie is in watching the way her love and loneliness—feelings forbidden to cyborgs—leak through the cracks in her casing.  A cyborg shouldn’t be devoted to her granny, yet she finds a way to twist that emotion so that it becomes an integral part of her robotic prime directive.

Just as no one challenges Young-goon’s delusions, everyone plays along with Il-soon’s metaphysical kleptomania.  The patients all believe that Il-soon steals from them: not just the tiny trifles (like panties) which he physically pilfers, but abstract qualities, such as a fellow patient’s prowess at ping pong.  Il-soon can even steal the other inmates’ psychoses and take them upon himself for a time.  And the sociopathic Il-soon’ ability to selectively steal other people’s psychological characteristics becomes the movie’s turning point, the story’s emotional center.

The fact that psychiatrists in the film never directly contradict their patient’s delusions hardly matters.  Young-goon’s assigned doctor can’t even divine her charge’s secret identity.  The psychiatrists are not a part of the characters authentic existence; they don’t share in the magic, they can’t fly off to the Alps on the wings of a ladybug.  In the Hollywood version, the staff would be serious adversaries to the lovers.  In the Korean version, they are almost irrelevant: well-meaning, but impotent.  Young-goon easily could gun these fools (“white-uns,” as she dismissively calls them) all down, if only she was fully charged.  Her assigned therapist is always wrong at guessing her patient’s innermost preoccupations.  There are a number of times she makes an observation she believes will help her finally connect with Young-goon and break through to a psychiatric solution, only to find she truly does not comprehend her patient at all.  We watch the smile fade from her face; it’s her trademark gesture.  Living in an antiseptic, practical reality outside the realm inhabited by the lovers, the doctors are unable to conceive of their magical universe.

In contrast, Il-soon (through another heist of mystical proportions) is able to not only penetrate into Young-goon’s world, but to actually share  hallucinations with her.  In a beautiful and touching scene of maniacal realism, he instructs her how to escape her padded cell, by shrinking herself and allowing a ladybug to grasp the sides of her bed and whisk her away to the Alps, as he yodels magically.  With it’s CGI possibilities, it’s a scene that would have the Hollywood remake moguls drooling, and though they couldn’t have pulled of the effects any better than Park, at least they would have had the populist instinct to insert the lovers’ kiss in this money scene, instead of the psychological depth Park focuses on here.

Hollywood would also have the good taste to remove the scene where Young-goon, shorn of sympathy, massacres the hospital staff in a hail of gunfire and spouts of blood as a string ensemble plays a merry waltz.  Such a scene would alienate the film’s key demographic, women 18-35.  And, of course, Hollywood would replace Park’s ambiguous ending with something more life/sanity-affirming; Justin Timberlake’s devotion would drive away Keri Russell’s demons, and as the couple flees the asylum they would be heading straight for the nearest motel room to start getting very busy.  That’s the main difference between the formula romantic comedy and Park’s take on the genre: in the Korean’s story, being a cyborg is OK.  In Hollywood, it ain’t–cyborgs don’t knock boots.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…it seems Park has a weakness for a certain sort of kiddified whimsy, which might be, worryingly, an integral flipside of his talent for violence and mayhem… There are bizarre reveries… but this is a frustrating and unsatisfying piece of work.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Like all psychotic ramblings, I’m A Cyborg flits between insane intensity and rambling dullness – but there’s a human heart pumping beneath its mad, metallic surface.” – Jamie Russell, BBC

“The patients’ subjective viewpoints are shown overlapping, colliding, and occasionally even intermingling and merging in moments every bit as romantic (if far more deliriously stylised) than any conventional love scene.” – Anton Bitel, Channel 4

IMBD ENTRY: Saibogujiman kwenchana

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:  Mirror of the Official Site.  This site is slow-loading but quite interesting, containing a flash animation pop-up book.

DVD INFO (UPDATED 10/6/11): After half a decade of being unavailable to North Americans, Pathfinder Pictures has finally done the right thing and issued a Region 1 DVD (buy), though we haven’t seen it and are unsure if it contains any extra features.