DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Koike

FEATURING: Takuya Kamura, Yû Aoi, Tadanobu Asano

PLOT: Set in a distant future and moving between multiple planets, this is a fairly simple tale of

a major road race taking place on a militaristic planet that doesn’t want it there.  Racers “Sweet” JP, the big-haired underdog, and Sonoshee, a single-minded gearhead, are the main focus of the story.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Armed with an eclectic cast of alien characters and a host of over-the-top shenanigans, Redline might come off as “weird” to someone unfamiliar with anime, but I’d say the stranger humor and visuals fit in pretty squarely with other properties of the genre.  It’s an imaginative and enormously entertaining film, just not especially Weird.

COMMENTS:  The future laid out in Redline is certainly an intriguing one, if completely ludicrous.  Hot shot reckless racer JP makes it to the titular big interstellar race, held on a militaristic planet that hasn’t consented to be the host.  He cozies up to Sonoshee, a cute green-haired lady who is one of the most serious and intimidating drivers there, and together the two attempt to navigate a strange obstacle course against alien competitors (some with inexplicable magic powers) and large-scale weaponry.  Squeezing in ESPN-like profiles of various racers—from an experienced cyborg who’s fused himself with his machine to a pair of scantily clad pop stars hailing from a magical princess planet—there’s some room for satire, too.

This movie is essentially all spectacle and adrenaline, with very little comprehensible or meaningful plot holding it together, but it’s not like the filmmakers are operating under any pretense of depth.  They’ve created a gorgeously animated, pumped-up sci-fi thriller, and that’s all that’s needed!  The characters are slick, and the vehicle designs slicker, with plenty of exaggerated personalities and colorful attachments for an engaging race line-up.  Sure, there’s a silly romantic/secret-past subplot thrown in there, but it’s never taken very seriously.  Various secondary stories are introduced, such as the military planet’s worker resistance and JP’s involvement in race-fixing, but the race itself remains the focus and it’s easy to forget that anything else is going on (the script certainly seems to by the end).  The set-up can be confusing at times due to an influx of minor characters and limited explanation of the obviously complex political and environmental structures.

The strengths of Redline lie almost completely in its visuals and fast pacing.  The dark shading and bright color schemes, the over-the-top hair styles and imaginative alien creatures, the quick-cut-editing and crazy landscapes: it’s all fantastically sweet eye-candy, set to an ecstatic musical score.  It’s violent but fun, and there’s probably political commentary thrown in there somewhere.  The script is cheesy at points, but vaguely self-aware.  It’s just a very cool movie all around, rarely letting up for a moment in its quest to assault the senses with psychedelic imagery and revving engines.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“One of the most visually spectacular toons in recent years, pic is a thumping ride for fanboys, but the script’s underdeveloped central romance and the fizzling out of intriguing plot threads will impede wider acceptance… [Plays] like a twisted combo of “Death Race 2000,” “Speed Racer” and a ’50s hot-rod movie on steroids…”–Variety (contemporaneous)

Content Warning: This short contains brief drug use and violence.

FEATURING: Cory McAbee, Rocco Sisto, Gregory Russell Cook, Annie Golden, Tom Aldredge

PLOT:  A space pilot trades a cat for a “real live girl” whom he can exchange for the “Boy Who

Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” whom he intends to swap in turn for the remains of a dead Venusian stud in order to collect a reward.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST:  Genrewise, The American Astronaut could be described as many things—space western, garage band musical, nonsense comedy—but the one thing it indisputably is is a cult movie.  That is to say, it’s a specialized and peculiar little flick that has a devoted group of followers, and a larger contingent of outsiders who are nonplussed by its popularity.  I have to admit that in this case I lean slightly towards the second group.  American Astronaut is very weird (it has a character named “the Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast,” for goodness sake), but some of it is tedious, like ninety minutes spent watching a clan of hipsters swapping in-jokes you aren’t let in on.  I can sense the magic other people get from the pic without being able to directly experience it myself.  This is a movie on the cusp of being certified as one of the Best Weird Movies Ever Made, but it will require some reader acclaim to sway my opinion towards adding it to the List.  So get to promoting the movie in the comments, Astronaut fans.

COMMENTS:  How many movies can boast a line like “Gentlemen, the Boy Who Saw a Woman’s Breast has left our planet” or a musical number like “The Girl with a Vagina Made of Glass”?  How about a villain who is incapable of killing unless he has no possible grudge against his victim and a “real live girl” who (in this early stage of her development) is just a suitcase that plays a rock tune when you lift a slat on the casing?  The American Astronaut creates a unique, absurd, but consistent universe through a dry, deadpan DIY approach.  It’s set in a boy’s cosmos, where women are strange creatures who live on one planet while the men live on another.  The movie’s nonsense proclivities are a narrative film incarnation of the free-associative lyrics of writer/director Cory McAbee’s mildly punkish band, the Billy Nayer Show.  One song goes, “A-E-, A-E-I, A-E-I-O-U, I owe you nothing, but sometimes you owe me I-U-A-I-E”; another consists of one singer repeatedly chanting “no” while another harmonizes with a rhythmic “tee-nee-oh-yeah.”  When they start smiling and singing about “the baby in a jar with glasses on and a gun,” it seems like a return to the real world.  Visually, the movie does an excellent job disguising its low-budget origins with black and white photography that keeps the backgrounds in deep shadows, suggesting the existence of a wider, deeper world than they can actually afford to show.  Silhouettes are used to create an illusion of grandness, as when the Boy Who…—dressed, as is his habit, like the messenger god Mercury in an art-deco winged helmet—dances in a spotlight for the workers of Jupiter and casts a massive shadow on the crumbling factory wall behind him.  The musical numbers, which sometimes sound like fractured nursery rhymes with odd, childlike melodies, and sometimes like a tight-knit garage band, aren’t half bad.  It’s amusing that the featured singers (for the most part) aren’t glamorous rock star types, but average-looking middle aged white guys; paunchy, baggy-eyed bartender Eddie (character actor Bill Buell) rocks harder than anyone in the cast.  It’s easy to see, and to admire, the love and care that went into the production; predicting whether this highly peculiar vision will click with you in particular is a trickier proposition.  One downside is that McAbee’s spaceman-for-hire isn’t the charismatic rake in the Han Solo mold the film wants him to be; the star is outshined by his co-stars.  Another minus is that the film is slow to get into gear, starting off with longish and not particularly rewarding scenes of McAbee shaving and taking a long spacewalk to the Ceres bar.  Things don’t start to take off until the dance contest kicks in, about twenty minutes into the running time.  That’s when my favorite scene occurs.  It’s a long, rambling warmup joke about “hertz donuts” told by an aged emcee (Broadway veteran Tom Aldredge) with multiple misemphasized punchlines.  The bar full of rogues and roughnecks laugh at all the wrong places as the shaggy-dog gag drags on and on, ending with the comedian confessing “I’ve never understood this joke” amidst peals of laughter.  The tale is a condensed metaphor for the American Astronaut, a movie that paces itself like a comedy but, when it comes time to tell a joke, consistently zigs into nonsense when you expect it to zag into a laugh.

The American Astronaut has a small but rabid cult, but it could have a much bigger one if it had landed a distribution deal.  As it is, the film is mainly sold through McAbee’s personal website, and has never received the widespread distribution from Netflix or other rental outlets it would need to become a breakout cult hit.  The professionally-made DVD features an interesting, off-center variation on the director’s commentary—McAbee discusses the picture while screening it for a bar full of patrons who ask him questions.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A sui generis, love-it-or-hate-it exercise in homegrown American surrealism.”–Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, L.A. Weekly (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Rob” who called it “A strange little film put out by the band the Billy Nayer Show” and added, “It may not make your list, but it’s definitely worthy of watching. The movie features a character known only as ‘The Boy Who Actually Saw a Woman’s Breast.’  I’m pretty sure you couldn’t not watch that.”Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Spike Spencer, Allison Keith-Shipp (English dub)

PLOT:  Following the events of Evangelion 1.11, the Angel incursions against Tokyo-3 increase

in intensity, and two new teenage Evangelion pilots are integrated into the NERV defense team.  Also, the world ends, I think.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  What to do with Evangelion?  A combo teen soap opera/end-of-the-world saga starring giant robots, the series is weird, but in a way that’s actually sort of conventional (in anime terms).  Even worse, there are now four movies (and a long running TV series) telling essentially the same story—with two more on the way.  Should all the movies make the List?  None?  Only the weirdest one?  Whatever the case, I don’t think this installment is capable of being counted among the best weird movies ever made; but I’m also thankful we get to defer the issue until we’ve checked out the series’ entire run.

COMMENTS:  Here’s a typical battle between an Angel (periodically appearing bad guy) and an Evangelion (giant robot that can only be piloted by a teenager).  Battleships fire pink and yellow shells at the Angel, a wire-frame robot with a pendulum hanging between its legs, as it marches towards them, instantly freezing the blood red sea with every stride and leaving a huge snowflake as a footstep.  It shoots laser beams from a globe and blows the battleships, causing the scarlet water to erupt into cross-shaped spouts.  A warplane drops a giant robot (hereafter “Eva”); it evades the green-tipped black lines the Angel fires at it as it falls.  The Eva blows up the Angel with a gun, but it immediately reconstitutes itself.  The Eva next stomps on the Angel’s laser-firing spike, which causes translucent pink and yellow auras to fill up the sky.  Eventually the Eva’s foot forces the spike all the way into its command globe, and the Angel explodes into a pink cross.  Each melee shot lasts for a second or less, increasing the confusion as to what the hell is supposed to be going on.  In Evangelion Angels can take any form, including scuttling robots with dinosaur-skull heads and 1970s-era Pink Floyd laser light shows, and they operate according to rules that are never explained.  (I’m fairly sure the Angels have no actual protocols or limitations—they simply perform whatever act the director thinks will look most awesome at the moment).  The fight scenes are psychedelically beautiful; but the overall plot is about as muddled as an Eva/Angel smackdown.  Viewers hoping for clarification on what the Angels (or the Evas, for that matter) actually are should steel themselves for further confusion and hints of biblical conspiracy instead.  By way of exposition, NERV chief and jerkwad pop Gendo explains, “Our only desire is the true Evangelion.  It’s awakening will coincide with the resurrection of Lilith and usher in the Time of the Covenant. It is crucial that the necessary rites be performed by then, for the sake of the Human Instrumentality Project.”  As wimpy teen hero Shinji responds after his father delivers a generically profound—but in on way on-target—speech about sacrificing for your dreams, “You say that, but I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean.”  You also may not even know what scraps of dialogue like “I prefer the living chaos of man, instead of this barren wasteland of death” and “it’s transcending the boundaries of humanity!” are supposed to mean, either.  It’s easier to follow the soap opera side of the story, which in this second installment explores a developing love triangle between emo Shinji, mysteriously catatonic, blue-haired Rei, and brash newcomer Asuka, a blue-eyed, Japan-insulting American hottie with a love-hate thing for Shinji and a hate-hate thing for Rei.  Complicating the sexual dynamic is the fact that Shinji is terrified of the fairer sex.  And you would be too, if you were him: naked women kickbox him in the head, and when he’s just minding his own business random babes parachute down from the sky and smother him with their cleavage.  Although Shinji has grown up a tiny amount since the prior episode, and no longer spends the entire movie moping in his room, his shameless self-absorption in his morass of daddy issues is still the primary obstacle for adults (and well-adjusted teens) to enjoying the series.  How can you root for a character who refuses to stop the apocalypse because he’s off throwing a tantrum?  If you’re in tune with anime conventions, or only crave eye candy and fanservice, you’ll see Evangelion as a paragon of the art form.  It’s not a crossover series that will entice the average adult viewer, however.

I originally understood this second cinematic version of the Evangelion saga was to be a straightforward quartet, but according to Twitch’s Ard Vijn (who knows a lot more about these things than I do), the reality is far stranger.  First, despite the unanswered questions, the storyline is apparently complete with this second film (!)  Secondly, there will be two more episodes, which will cover the same events, but from different characters perspectives (!!)  Sometimes I can’t decide whether I’m more confused watching an Evangelion movie, or trying to sort out the chronology and canonicity of this sprawling franchise.  The series seems to be stuck in a perpetual reboot cycle.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It is a fever dream for sure, but one that has been lovingly embellished with details and technically polished until it has become its own weird-yet-beautiful thing.”–Ard Vijn, Twitch (DVD)

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

DIRECTED BY: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

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

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

BACKGROUND:

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

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

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

Apichatpong Weerasethakul on Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

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

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

OFFICIAL SITE:

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

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

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

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

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

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

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

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

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

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

DIRECTED BY: Fritz Lang/(version prepared by Giorgio Moroder)

FEATURING: Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge

PLOT: Freder, son of the man who rules Metropolis, discovers the plight of the subterranean

workers who make the city run when he falls in love with a proletarian female preacher; his new lover is replaced by a robotic imposter who intends to lead the workers to ruin.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a powerful candidate for the List, but Giorgio Moroder’s Metropolis isn’t.  Kino’s 2010 “Complete Metropolis” restoration is now the definitive version of the film; Moroder’s re-imagining, with it’s synth-pop soundtrack and vocal intrusions by 1980s rock acts like Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler and Pat Benetar, is a curiosity.

COMMENTS:  Set in a massive, mostly underground city that’s equal parts Futurist dreamscape and Babylonian pleasure garden, Metropolis is an unqualified, iconic Expressionist masterpiece, and if you want to turn down the sound and watch it while listening to Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga mp3s, that’s not going to destroy its visual splendor.  Whatever questionable choices “Flashdance… What a Feeling!” composer Giorgio Moroder may have made with the proto-techno soundtrack that he added to this restoration (more on that score later), this Metropolis looks like it’s been struck from a pristine print, and it’s as feverishly hallucinatory as any other version.  The decision to tint most of the scenes works wonderfully (and may even have reflected Lang’s original wishes; tinting was not at all uncommon in 1927).  The colorization is tasteful and intelligent, with scenes on the surface bathed in radiant sepia, while the underground sequences utilize shadowy shades of steel blue and grey.  This process retains the film’s monochromatic scale, simply shifting the palette towards the blue or the amber spectrum.  Moroder added additional color effects for a few scenes; some of the equipment in mad scientist Rotwang’s laboratory glows with electricity, and when he transforms his robot into the image of Maria, the automaton’s eyes shine with an inhuman, metallic blue glint.  Because some segments of Metropolis were lost, Moroder also incorporated stills and concept art sketches of the sprawling city into the film; they’re mostly inobtrusive, but they are included to bridge some of the gaps in the story (such as explaining what happens after Freder sends a worker to meet Josaphat, a subplot that simply disappears in earlier cuts).  The final non-musical change that Moroder made to Metropolis was to remove most of the intertitles and replace them with subtitles, a move that noticeably speeds up the action and is arguably an improvement.  So far, so good; all of Moroder’s alterations to the print were either neutral, or minor improvements.  But here’s where things get strange: the composer decided that what this dystopian class parable from the Weimar Republic really needed to heat it up was a disco beat and Hallmark-card lyrics, so he invited some of his pop star friends like Bonnie Tyler to sing over Lang’s story.  Despite the fine, reverent work he did on the restoration, his choice of collaborators call Moroder’s taste into serious question.  Did he really believe that the music of Billy Squier was going to endure through the ages?  Were Huey Lewis and the News unavailable?  To be fair, the incidental music is not all bad; sometimes it’s even clever (as when the robots first clumsy footfalls sound like she’s stepping on Herbie Hancock’s electric piano keyboard).  And, heard today, the post-Moog synthesizer effects produce an effect that’s at the same time futuristic and archaic, making the synth-pop an odd, accidentally anachronistic complement to Lang’s future-that-never-was city planning.  What better music to illustrate a cityscape where antique biplanes cruise the between massive Art Deco skyscrapers than soulless synthetic strings backed by heavy mechanical beats?  Still, the vocal interruptions, though short and far-between, are consistently unforgivable.  Jon Anderson’s “Cage of Freedom,”  supposedly the theme of the tyrannical Master of Metropolis, sounds like it would better accompany a training montage for a Rocky sequel.  Who doesn’t cringe when they hear Loverboy sing “now it’s hit the fan!” as the proles are revolting, and who doesn’t throw up just a little bit in their mouth when Pat Benetar croons “hearts catch fire, all the time” during the love scenes?  This twaddle flatly contradicts Lang’s visual poetry, and it’s a testament to the movie’s majesty that it actually shrugs off these desecration attempts rather easily.  Freder’s symbolic crucifixion on a clock, the golden robot enveloped by floating rings of light, the fever-dream sequence where Death leads the Seven Deadly Sins on parade while piping on a leg bone: these weird wonders persist and amaze us, despite the best efforts of a small army of 1980s pop-rock stars to tear them down.

Moroder’s vision was controversial at the time of its release, but if nothing else, it was the most complete and coherent version of Metropolis available since 1937.  Mordoer also deserves credit for keeping the film’s legend alive, and bringing it to a new generation of teenagers and college students who never would have dreamed of watching a silent film without a (then) hip soundtrack.  Even today, Moroder’s fast-paced pop version of the film may prove more palatable to silent film newbies than a purer presentation.  If you’re in the camp that’s willing to miss out on some great cinema simply because it’s silent, give Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis a chance.  You can always graduate to The Complete Metropolis later and play with the big boys.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The movie has a plot that defies common sense, but its very discontinuity is a strength. It makes ‘Metropolis’ hallucinatory–a nightmare without the reassurance of a steadying story line….in watching the Moroder version I enjoyed the tinting and felt that Lang’s vision was so powerful it swept aside the quibbles: It’s better to see this well-restored print with all the available footage than to stand entirely on principle.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1998)

PLOT:  I’m not really sure…  see below.

COMMENTS:  I’m not at all being snarky in regards to being completely unable to wrangle out an explanation of the plot of Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus.  As far as I can gather, after multiple watchings, there are several strands of story involving (a) the escape of three female prisoners, (b) a female cop/bounty hunter, Divine Otaku (Amabelle Singson) who’s dispatched to capture the fugitives, all of whom have a fixation on (c) Rock legend Bobby Barzell, who’s waiting for a liver transplant to save his life and his ass from (d) Osiris (Tony Watt), an Alien Overlord who struck a bargain with Barzell for fame, money and sex in exchange for Barzell’s soul, and now who’s en route to Earth to collect.

Even more confusing is finding out that this film is an homage/reboot/requel to 2001′s Vixen Highway, written & directed by John Ervin (who co-wrote VH 2006), which apparently is a more straightforward version of the above storyline (probably without the alien overlord, I suspect).

Vixen Highway 2006: It Came from Uranus is a lo-budget, meth-fueled cousin of the NBK (Natural Born Killers) Aesthetic.  This movie starts at the level of overkill, and then goes balls out turning everything up to 11.  Everything is Too Much: too much on the sound fx, which goes way past cartoonish; the visual tricks, such as wipes, transitions, split screens—I think that all of the plug-ins of the editing program were used at least twice; the homaging and references, which are so thick, it’s like the filmmakers just poured everything from every grindhouse/exploitation/cult/faux-blaxploitation/mondo movie they liked into the pot; and IT’S TWO AND A HALF HOURS LONG!!

Some may see these as good things, I realize.  Frankenpimp (the director’s previous film) suffers from the same problems, only worse since it’s THREE HOURS LONG!!!  VH:2006 at least has that tiny, tiny bit of restraint… But Too Much for Way Too Long feels like you’re being mentally bludgeoned if you try to take it all in at one sitting.  The only way I got through both films was to take a little at a time—20-30 minute screenings.  The best way to experience the films may be in the background at a party, where you sample the film in bits and pieces and you’re not hammered relentlessly by the constant overkill, and not bothered by the slow movement (or lack of movement) of the narrative.

Tony Watt’s website

DISCLAIMER: A copy of this film was provided by the production company for review.

DIRECTED BY: Lars von Trier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

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

FEATURING: Richard Joseph Paul, Andrew Divoff, Jimmie F. Skaggs, a parade of C-list all-stars

PLOT:  Many years from now, on a faraway planet, a one-eyed alien villain comes to the frontier

outpost of Oblivion to raise a ruckus and murder the sheriff in cold blood.  It’s up to the sheriff’s empathic, violence-shunning son to assume his father’s mantle and save the day.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: A sci-fi/Western mashup has an inherent level of oddity, and the casting is genuinely off-the-wall, but in the end, Oblivion is really just a Western rehash dressed up with some futuristic elements in an effort to make it seem more unusual than it is.

COMMENTS: Years before Cowboys and Aliens would take up the task of blending, um, cowboys and aliens, Oblivion would stake its claim, opening with a magnificent beauty shot of a familiar looking Western landscape, into which zips a nifty flying saucer. Once a snake-skinned alien emerges and kills a creature that looks like the furball from Captain EO just to make a point, we’re well on our way.

The town this villain stalks into sure looks like the Wild West: dusty streets, men in long coats and Stetsons, a stockade in the middle of town. Make no mistake, it’s the future, with such touches as a robot deputy, laser pistols, a rare and powerful substance called draconium which has reduced gold to a pittance, and giant scorpions roaming on the outskirts of town. Oh, and ATMs. ATMs of the Old West.

Exploring one genre through the conventions of another is a time-honored tradition, but that’s not what Oblivion is up to. This movie is really just a Western with science fiction elements pasted on to make it feel different. But having done that, all the clichés are still the same. For example, when the sheriff lays down his poker hand before a showdown, it can only be aces and eights–a dead man’s hand. The fact that you’re seeing the cards on a handheld LCD screen doesn’t reinvigorate the cliché. It merely dresses it up in new clothes. Much of Oblivion is like this: something outwardly strange, but quickly revealing itself to be something quite ordinary.

If the movie’s not as weird as it wants to be, that’s not to say it isn’t odd. It’s just that the bulk of the strangeness seems to have originated in the office of the casting director, where a remarkable ensemble of semi- and not-quite-stars was assembled. The list includes Jackie Swanson, Woody’s girlfriend Kelly on “Cheers,” as a hard-bitten frontier merchant (pulling off the hard-bitten part about as well as you expect of Kelly from “Cheers“ ); Meg Foster, the love interest from They Live, playing the town’s robot deputy as though channeling Blanche from “The Golden Girls”; Julie Newmar, “Batman”’s longest-serving Catwoman, cast in the role of the town saloonkeeper, named (wait for it) Miss Kitty.  Even Isaac Hayes shows up (although never in the frame with anyone else) doing what seems to be a Jack Palance impression.  Best of all, there’s giant Carel Struycken (in a hilariously tall hat, given his already-tremendous height) as the town’s angel of death, uttering more lines than he probably has in his entire career.  It’s hard to imagine what led the filmmakers to put so much dialogue in the mouth of an actor best known for playing Lurch in The Addams Family.  Struycken is game, even if none of the lines flow easily from his lips.  It’s a cast selected by the “Family Guy” manatees.

Which is why it’s a real tribute to George Takei that he somehow manages to out-overact everyone in the film in his role as a falling-down drunk doctor/robot repairman with a thick Southern drawl.  From his first moment onscreen, when he staggers into frame hoisting a bottle of whiskey and declares, “Jim Beam me up!” it’s clear that he’s playing on a level all his own.  (This is but the first of a host of horrible “Star Trek” puns that, according to IMDb’s trivia section for Oblivion, screenwriter Peter David blames on ad-libs by Takei.  Even if true, this does not let David off the hook for a Schlitz beer joke that is possibly the worst moment in the entire film.)

Oblivion is not without its charms. Given that most of the sci-fi touches are exactly that—touches—the art and set direction from Colin de Rouin and Nicki Roberts is actually quite clever and well-deployed.  Little touches like ceiling fans suspended from towers in the middle of town add a lovely touch of unfamiliarity, and a red-and-blue siren mounted over the door of a traditional wooden sheriff’s office is amusing. Kudos, too, to composer Pino Donaggio, whose score is respectful of the Western genre, rather than pillaging it.

Ultimately, however, nothing much happens in Oblivion.  After Redeye—the only alien in Oblivion, by the way, save for a couple creations from the creature shop—kills the sheriff, his goals as conqueror are not terribly clear, and he’s in no hurry to achieve them.  He and his gang vandalize the general store, torture the hero’s native sidekick, and just generally make a nuisance of themselves.  Once our hero finally decides to saddle up and pursue the miscreants, there’s only a brief battle before Redeye ends up in the pincers of the night scorps, and the audience is treated to the most shocking sight in the entire film: a title card reading “To Be Continued.”  So little story, and they still couldn’t be bothered to finish it in one film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…for all that it lacks it makes up for with its general ridiculousness. This is a movie I would put on if I were trying to show someone just how insane low budget movie-making had become during the early part of the nineties.”–Joshua Samford, Varied Celluloid (DVD)

FEATURING: Peter Scanavino, Jason Robards III, Ana Asensio, David Thornton

PLOT:  In the year 2044 people have been genetically engineered to feel perpetually happy, so

they perversely seek out illegal drugs that bring intense pain; in this society, a dealer in pharmaceutical misery stumbles upon what may be a generations old conspiracy that goes by the code name “Zenith.”

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  More confusing than weird, Zenith is at the same time a laudable and thought-provoking, but forced and undramatic, attempt to create a cult-y reality-bender along the lines of more organic puzzle movies like Primer.

COMMENTS:  Zenith is one bewildering conspiracy movie.  It creates frustration and paranoia by chopping up its narrative with lots of fast-forwards, rewinds, out-of-sequence scenes, and even episodes of déjà vu.  Elisions, false clues and dead end leads increase the confusion quotient.  Although the sloppiness of the story is an intentional strategy meant to put us inside the paranoid heads of the protagonists, the procedure still occasionally comes off as the director jerking the viewer around—especially when it comes to the rug-pulling conclusion, which tempts alienating the movie’s core audience.  Writer/director Vladan Nikolic crafts an intricate scenario here that may please fans of “difficult” stories, but it’s more rewarding, above and beyond the plot level, to think of the movie as an examination of the conspiracy fan’s psychology.  “Dumb” Jack, the pain-pill pusher (a grungy and intense Peter Scanavino), begins the story thinking of his defrocked priest father, Ed, who’s obsessed with trivia about the Illuminati and the Bilderbreg group, as a crazy old coot.  But the more he watches old VHS tapes of dad’s decades-old investigations of the “Zenith” conspiracy, the more he comes to be just like him, until at the end the two men have become virtual doppelgängers.  The movie suggests that it may be able to easier to get sucked into irrational conspiratorial beliefs than it seems, especially seeing as how it asks the viewer to take pleasure in following the clues and tagging along as they track down that mysterious man who, if only he can only be located and cornered, will Explain what it’s All About.  Any good conspiracy thriller needs a red herring, and this turns out to be one of Zenith‘s downfalls—because the major red herring here is the science fiction setting, and it turns out to be more interesting than the main storyline.  The movie creates the intriguing prospect of a society in which everyone has been genetically engineered to be eternally happy.  Paradoxically, this perpetual pleasantness creates a black market in the items Dumb Jack specializes in—”heavy duty tranquilizers with massive side effects, expired thirty years ago”—so thrill seekers can feel something painful, novel and intense.  The idea is a classic science fiction conceit: what happens when technology purports to change the basic nature of human beings?  If people are happy all the time, will they get inevitably grow jaded?  Everything in the utopian/dystopian world of 2044, except the nightclubs, looks run down—peeling paint, missing windowpanes, light poles lying on the ground.  Is the suggestion that, with gratification built into the genome, the ambition to keep the world clean and orderly has disappeared?  These are fascinating speculative questions that cut to the core of the human experience, and Zenith could have easily filled up ninety minutes exploring the philosophical and satirical ramifications of a society built on a foundation of unearned satisfaction. There seem to be two movies cooking in the same cinematic oven here, and although the thriller conspiracy comes out reasonably well done, the dystopian parable winds up only half-baked.  Still, though there’s some frustration, and the movie never really settles into a groove, the ideas alone make it worth seeing.  The twist ending, taken literally, is shopworn; but after some consideration, you may conclude that Nikolic has overlaid a clever meta-twist on the tired cliché.  There’s a false ambiguity to the conclusion, and the temptation to pick the less compelling of the competing versions of events may be related to the overriding theme of the movie.

Zenith is relying on a bit of marketing gimmickry in hopes of building an audience.  The movie starts off with blatantly fake disclaimers stating that the movie contains “illegal material” and proclaiming that filmmakers will not be held responsible for damages resulting from the viewing of the film.  It also professes to be directed by “Anonymous” (Nikolic is quietly billed in the end credits as “experiment supervisor”).  Furthermore, Zenith is a transmedia experience: if you go to the movie’s website and follow the “Stop Zenith” link, you’ll be taken to a website (which links to other fake websites, including Dumb Jack’s time-traveling blog) that claims to provide more information on the film’s conspiracy.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“During the strange third act, derangement seems to spread from one character to the next like a plague, infecting not only the players but also the film itself… the indescribably odd ending only sends the viewer off more confused.”–Glenn Heath Jr., Slant Magazine (contemporaneous)