All posts by Gregory J. Smalley (366weirdmovies)

Gregory J. Smalley founded 366 Weird Movies in 2008 and has served as editor-in-chief since that time. He is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, and his film writing has appeared online in Pop Matters and The Spool.
Canonically Weird (The List)

133. LOST HIGHWAY (1997)

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“In my mind, it’s so much fun to have something that has clues and is mysterious — something that is understood intuitively rather than just being spoonfed to you. That’s the beauty of cinema, and it’s hardly ever even tried. These days, most films are pretty easily understood, and so people’s minds stop working.”–David Lynch

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Balthazar Getty, Robert Blake,

PLOT: Fred is a free jazz saxophonist who finds that mysterious videotapes are being dropped off on his doorstep. After an encounter with a ghostly pale man at a party, he blacks out finds himself accused of the murder of his wife. In prison Fred begins having headaches, and then one day he disappears and a completely different man—a young mechanic—is discovered in his death row cell.

Still from Lost Highway (1997)

BACKGROUND:

  • The screenplay to Lost Highway was co-written by Barry Gifford, who also wrote the novel “Wild at Heart” that Lynch adapted into a film in 1990.
  • Lost Highway received two “thumbs down” ratings from Siskel & Ebert’s “At the Movies” syndicated movie review program. Lynch insisted the movie poster be rewritten to highlight the critics’ dual pans, describing the bad ratings as “two good reasons to go and see Lost Highway.”
  • The film cost about 15 million dollars to make but grossed less than 4 million at the U.S. box office.
  • Lost Highway boasts a number of cameo roles, including rockers Henry Rollins as a guard and Marilyn Manson as a porn actor,  mainstay  in a voiceover, and Richard Prior as one of Pete’s co-workers.
  • This film marks the last onscreen appearance of , who appeared in all of Lynch’s films until his death in 1996.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Robert Blake’s “Mystery Man,” an eyebrow-free, perpetually grinning pasty-faced ghoul who likes to crash L.A. cocktail parties and whose idea of small talk is to call himself on his cell phone to deliver obscure metaphysical portents of doom.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Imagine you’re on a desert highway. It’s long past midnight and you can’t see anything but the onrushing yellow traffic lines a few feet in front of the car’s headlights. is crooning “funny how secrets travel” from the stereo. David Lynch is at the wheel, he’s jittery from drinking too much coffee, and neither you nor he has no idea where you’re going. Strap yourself in. It’s going to be a wild ride.


Original trailer for Lost Highway

COMMENTS: Made five years after the divisive mixed blessing that was Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway marks the beginning of the Continue reading 133. LOST HIGHWAY (1997) →

Miscellanea

16TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS (WITH OUR VOTES AND COMMENTS)

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From the Online Film Critics Society press release: “The Online Film Critics Society has announced the winners of its 16th annual movie awards. Ben Affleck’s film Argo, about the fake film shoot that was used as a cover to extract six Americans from Iran during the Iran Hostage Crisis, was named by the organization as the Best Picture of the 2012.”

The results of the OFFS tend to fall in line with results of other film critics polls, rather than the more populist Academy Awards, and should not be seen as a predictor of future events: in fact, the OFCS and the Academy have only agreed on the Best Picture three times during their coexistence. When they disagree, however, the OFCS tends to go with the better and bolder choice, selecting the gritty L.A. Confidential ahead of the treacly Titanic in 1997, recognizing both Memento and Mulholland Drive (both snubbed for Oscar noms) ahead of A Beautiful Mind in 2001, giving the nod to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (another Academy slight) over Million Dollar Baby in 2004, and having the foresight to recognize The Tree of Life as Best Picture last year (not that The Artist was bad, but come on—Life was monumental).

As a voting member of the organization, I take these awards seriously. I try to see all the nominees, and I do not push “weird” candidates unless I truly feel that they truly belong among the year’s best. I have listed all the winners of the various categories below, along with my thoughts on the winner and my reasons for casting my ballot as I did. Of course, no comment below, however snarky, is meant to disparage the opinion of any of colleague (or reader) who voted differently than I did. I believe everyone voted their conscience.

BEST PICTURE

Winner: Argo

Also Nominated: Holy Motors, The Master, Moonrise Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty

Our Vote: The Master

Comments: Argo, the story of the rescue of diplomats stranded in revolutionary Iran in 1980 by a CIA agent pretending to be a producer scouting locations for a science fiction epic, is a consensus-type pick. It’s a very solid thriller from a director who’s paid his dues, and it helps its credibility that it’s also based on true events (qualities it shares with Zero Dark Thirty, which was hurt mainly by the fact that it arrived in theaters so late that many voters didn’t get the chance to see it). Argo is a conventional formula flick, but it executes its script nearly flawlessly, mixing tension, political import and comic relief in effective ratios. I liked it, but I believe it lacks the kind of serious artistic ambition necessary to be a real Best Picture contender; as good as it is it doesn’t transcend its genre. Argo‘s proponents probably don’t feel as passionately about it as champions of some of the other films do, but the movie also has fewer downsides—excepting ZDT, the other nominees all have alienating features that drive conservative voters away. The remaining non-Argo votes are split between the three more peculiar films. I wouldn’t be shocked to see Argo to do well with the Academy, particularly since it also pokes gentle fun at the Hollywood film industry, something voters tend to respond to (see The Player).

Personally, I would have voted for Beasts of the Southern Wild as Best Picture, had it been nominated. It takes far more chances than Argo, and while it’s not perfect, I’ll take a great but flawed performance with a high degree of difficulty over a perfect rendition of a standard routine any day. Of the remaining candidates, I thought The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson’s existential tale of confused post-War spirituality, produced the best blend of strong filmmaking and artistic vision. The wild card was Holy Motors, which I was shocked to see nominated. The fact that I ignored Motors‘ Continue reading 16TH ANNUAL ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARDS (WITH OUR VOTES AND COMMENTS) →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/4/2013

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Our weekly look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…

Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.

It’s a very slow week for new releases, theatrical or otherwise, as the movie industry takes a brief post-holiday breather and prepares to gear up for awards season and the upcoming festival slate (Sundance kicks off the year in independent film this January 17). We’re enjoying this break ourselves, but we do have a couple of items to bring to your attention.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

The Devil’s Carnival, Episode 2 (est. 2013): Read our review of episode 1. This followup to the cabaret horror musical moves the action from Hell to Heaven, and they seem to be making a big deal of the fact that someone named “Tech N9ne” is appearing in it. We’ll be on it.

..

NEW ON DVD:

Cosmopolis (2012): David Cronenberg‘s latest is an adaptation of a Don DeLilo novel about a financial whiz-kid (Robert Pattison) traveling across Manhattan in a limo as financial apocalypse approaches. This one arrived on DVD one day too late to be considered for our 2012 Weirdest Movies list, but it is in our reader-suggested review queue. Buy Cosmopolis.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Cosmopolis (2012): See description in DVD above. Buy Cosmopolis [Blu-ray].

What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: HOLY MOTORS (2012)

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Holy Motors has been promoted to the List! Please check the Holy Motors Certified Weird entry for more information and to comment. This initial review is left here for archival purposes.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , , Kylie Minogue,

PLOT: “Mr. Oscar” drives around Paris in a limo taking on nine “assignments” which require him to become an accordion player, a hitman, and fashion model-abducting leprechaun, among other personae.

Still from Holy Motors (2012)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Holy Motors is overwrought, pretentious, obscure, scatterbrained, confusing, and self-indulgent—all qualities that typically make for a great work of art. The main knock against it certifying it as one of the 366 Best Weird Movies immediately is that it’s not yet out on DVD—but keep an eye out for it in the near future.

COMMENTS: Leos Carax’ segment in the portmanteau film Tokyo! revolved around a gimpy, gibbering leprechaun dubbed “Merde” (played by Denis Lavant) who arose from the sewers to scandalize the polite people of Japan by eating money and licking schoolgirls on the street. In that movie Merde served as a symbol of Japanese xenophobia, a surreal and satirical rendition of boorish Western invaders as seen through Eastern eyes. Lavant reprises Merde in Holy Motors, but here the character is even more random, limping through a Parisian cemetery eating flowers off of gravesites and abducting a fashion model (Eva Mendes) with the backbone of a rag doll. The idea that an already mysterious and absurd character like Merde would be resurrected and tossed into a situation that’s even further out of context is typical of Holy Motors‘ approach. In between a very weird prologue featuring director Carax as a man living in a secret room behind a cinema where shadowy beasts prowl the aisles, and very weird epilogue featuring chauffeuse Edith Scob and a parking lot full of telepathic limousines, Lavant (presumably) plays ten different roles—nine “assignments” and his base character of “Mr. Oscar.” There are no connections between the parts he is assigned: some, like Merde, are purely absurd, some are musical, and some are legitimately moving human moments. Each segment operates according to its own internal illogic. The roles are arbitrary, like the jobs any working actor would take: this month an action hero, next month a dying benefactor. At times we see, or at least think we see, hints of the “real” person behind Mr. Oscar, but mostly we see him applying his makeup in front of his mobile vanity mirror, preparing to disappear into a new role. It’s never suggested what the purpose of these performances might be, or whom they are for the benefit of, or if they ever end (when Oscar goes home for the night, it appears he is only playing another insane character). Scenes that appear to involve Mr. Oscar as “real” person sometimes turn out to be part of another assignment; if we try to figure out who Oscar really is, we’re continually frustrated. By the end of the long twenty-four hour session Mr. Oscar looks weary, sad and resigned; but he must wake up in the morning and do it all over again. It’s a bravura suite of performances by Lavant, who is appointed to capture the whole strange and tragic spectrum of human activity in a single day. In Carax’ eyes this spectrum involves motion-capture sex scenes, accordion intermissions, and mixed human-chimpanzee marriages. Prepare to be perplexed. You won’t, however, be bored.

Carax assembled a fascinating cast for his first feature film in over a decade. Gnarly faced Lavant, who has appeared in all of the director’s previous films as well as gracing weird works by ,  and , was the obvious choice for the lead in the most ambitiously odd art film of the French calendar. The casting of Scob and Piccoli, who between them have worked with all of the great European Surrealist filmmakers of the past, from to to Buñuel, is an equally obvious nod to Carax’ influences, one that positions Motors as the latest link in a long cinematic chain. Australian popstress Kylie Minogue immediately scores unexpected cool points by appearing in this project, while glamour girl Eva Mendes follows up her role in ‘s Bad Lieutenant with this even weirder part. We definitely approve of the way her career is headed (even though her recent choices probably make her agent tear his hair out).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…weird and wonderful, rich and strange – barking mad, in fact. It is wayward, kaleidoscopic, black comic and bizarre; there is in it a batsqueak of genius, dishevelment and derangement; it is captivating and compelling.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by “Dwarf Oscar,” who said it was “weird, weird, weird. You already guessed, I know that, but right now I’m making it official. For once, I’m pretty confident it’s going to make its way to the List…” . Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Top 10 Lists

TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2012 – THE MAINSTREAM EDITION

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Sure, this site focuses on weird films, but that’s not all we watch. We love movies. How will we understand what lies at the extremes if we don’t keep a finger on the pulse of “normal” cinema? Great craftsmanship is great craftsmanship, and if every movie was made to push boundaries, things would get boring pretty fast. With that in mind, we hereby release our list of the best movies of 2012, regardless of genre and irrespective of conventionality. You may notice that three of these films also made our Weirdest Movies of 2012 list, but in a different order than they appear here; that’s because this list is based strictly on the quality of filmmaking without regard to any consideration of weirdness. With that prologue out of the way, let’s dive right into it, starting with #10:

10. Seven Psychopaths – Playwright-turned-director ‘s second feature film (after In Bruges) sports a hip, manly cast (, , Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson, ) and brisk violence, mixed with an intricate script that sometimes threatens to go into meta-movie territory (Farrel’s character is working on a screenplay entitled Seven Psychopaths). This quirky caper comedy involving dognapping and serial killers is reminiescent of classic Quentin Tarantino and will be remembered for a couple of exchanges that became immediate classics, including a bit where an unimpressed Walken is held up at gunpoint that caps off an impressive highlight reel for the beloved character actor.

9. The Dark Knight Rises – It’s not the revelation that The Dark Knight was, but it’s a fitting end to a trilogy that brought arthouse sensibilities to comic book characters without sacrificing action. may be the only director capable of making superhero movies for adults, complete with complicated plots and character development. His Dark Knight will be missed.

8. Lincoln  – The title implies that this will be a biopic covering the life of the 16th president, but the movie actually focuses very narrowly on a single political subject: Lincoln’s efforts to get the 13th Amendment banning slavery passed. The “Honest Abe” depicted here walks an ethical tightrope as he tries to swing reluctant Democrats to support the controversial legislation, resorting to bribery, misdirection and political threats. Stephen Spielberg manages to keep the dry subject matter engaging, helped along greatly by an able (hee hee) performance from Daniel Day-Lewis as the Great Emancipator, supported by Sally Fields as Mary Todd and Tommy Lee Jones as obnoxiously idealistic Radial Republican Thaddeus Stevens. It’s pure Oscar bait, but it’s good Oscar bait. It’s got gravitas out the butt.

7. Argo – Solid thriller from director Ben Affleck detailing the real-life tale of six U.S. diplomats who, aided by a CIA operative, escaped Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis by pretending to be a movie crew scouting locations for a fake sci-fi extravaganza. John Goodman and Alan Arkin supply welcome comic relief as a pair of Hollywood insiders who help agent Affleck implement the crazy scheme. After sitting through the tense final half hour, you’ll never complain you had a tough time going through airport security again.

6. Doggiewoggiez! Poochiewoochiez! – We weren’t kidding about naming this loose remake of the surrealist epic The Holy Mountain composed entirely out of dog footage clipped from Hollywood movies, instructional DVDs and public access programs our Weirdest Movie of 2012, and we’re not kidding when we say it should be counted among the best movies of any sort released this year. It’s cutting edge, utterly original and, if nothing else, it’s the year’s funniest comedy, with triple the laughs per minute of a big budget misfire like 21 Jump Street (a movie made for people whose sense of humor peaked in high school). It’s not “mainstream,” but it stands up on its own four paws against the best fluff the mainstream film Continue reading TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2012 – THE MAINSTREAM EDITION →