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.
“The Tree of Life, which led the Online Film Critics Society nominations with seven, was the big winner at the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards. The film took home the prize for Best Picture as well as trophies for Best Director (Terrence Malick), Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain), Best Editing and Best Cinematography. No other film won more than one award.
The other three acting winners were Michael Fassbender winning Best Actor for his performance in Shame; Tilda Swinton’s work in We Need to Talk About Kevin won the award for Best Actress; and Christopher Plummer received the Best Supporting Actor prize for his work in Beginners.
The full list of winners of the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards:
We’re such whiners. Last year at this time, we were complaining that 2010 was “two or three weird movies shy of being a great year.” We didn’t know how good we had it back then, frankly. Movies like Black Swan, Inception and even Scott Pilgrim vs. the World all got major theatrical releases, while of this year’s nominees only The Tree of Life can claim the same level of exposure. Perhaps the great weird films of 2011 are still lurking in the shadows—we’ve found a few of them, but we expect more revelations as these unseen gems crawl their way out of the festival circuit and start getting belated DVD releases. (Of course, that process can take a while: we’ve been waiting a year already for Jan Svankmajer‘s Surviving Life).
The truly deranged stuff just doesn’t make it into theaters, and 2011 continued the trend of re-releases and delayed DVD releases blowing away the theatrical releases in terms of weirdness. We finally saw Bill Plympton’s worth-waiting for angelic black comedy Idiots and Angels (2008), Otto Preminger’s amazing psychedelic flop Skidoo (1968) surfaced after almost four decades, and the Criterion Collection resurrected Louis Malle‘s two major forays into weirdness—Zazie dans le Metro (1960) and Black Moon (1975)—along with new editions of cult classics Shock Corridor and Solaris. In terms of vintage oddities, 2011 was another banner year.
Though weirdness wasn’t omnipresent this year, the cinematically surreal did get a serious prestige boost from our top weird movie of the year.
The Tree of Life: The year’s best weird movie is also the year’s best movie, period. Stunning cinematography, sacred music, the birth of the universe, graceful dinosaurs, childhood hallucinations and a glimpse of the afterlife all mixed together in the most ambitious movie of the past decade. We dare the Academy to nominate this for Best Picture.
Tomorrow we will present our official Top 10 Weird Movies of the Year List. This list covers all movies released in 2011, weird or not.
This year, for the first time, I will be voting for the Online Film Critics Society Awards. Taking this commission seriously, I have watched perhaps a hundred of the most highly acclaimed 2011 movies, with a few nominees still left to see before my vote is due. From the perspective of a weird movie specialist, this process has provided me two benefits. First, it’s given me that baseline of movie normality that I need to be able to recognize the stuff that’s really out there to the average viewer. Watching only the strangest of the strange week in and week out skews your perspectives. Hopefully, I will never again fall into the trap of thinking The Tree of Life is too conventional, as I did in my initial review of the movie.
Secondly, gathering that “baseline of normality” has made me appreciate the weird all the more. Conventional award-winning movies are all alike; but every weird movie is weird in its own way. You can tick off the list of qualities that great movies should have: moving performances, arresting cinematography, sparkling dialogue. A weird movie may have these qualities too, but it also has a spark of divine madness or folly that sets it apart from the herd.
You may notice that six of my top ten choices could be pigeonholed as children’s movies. That’s not by design (last year my list would have contained only one, Toy Story 3). But I did not feel the need to bump the children’s movies off the list to make room for more “adult” fare. The truth is that children’s films are the most lucrative segment of the movie market right now, and studios are taking more time and care (not just more money) in making them. They’re writing clever, multi-layered scripts to appeal to adults as well as kids; spending more time on storytelling basics and character development; and crafting more exciting and spectacular set-pieces. If movies made for grown-ups are to increase their share of next year’s list, well, then, they’ll just have to make better movies.
We’ll start off this list with 10 Honorable Mentions. I would have been comfortable including any of the films below on my year-end list, but by the narrowest of margins each came up a little short.
PLOT: Santa’s sleigh is stuck in the Florida sand, so he shows the assembled kids a movie until help arrives in the form of a giant rabbit-man in a fire truck.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is weird enough to make the List, but the fact that it can only be endured by injecting Novocaine directly into the part of the brain responsible for processing continuity would make Certifying this movie a public health risk.
COMMENTS: When someone like me, who’s watched They Saved Hitler’s Brain multiple times—voluntarily, not as part of a CIA experiment in breaking interrogee’s wills—tells you that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is quite possibly the worst movie they’ve ever seen, you should take notice. First off, there’s the paradoxical fact that Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny is hardly Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny at all. It’s actually much more Thumbelina. Or, maybe it’s primarily an advertisement for a sad-sack, pre-Disneyland southern Florida bemusement park called Pirates [sic] World. If you’re confused, and not concerned with the prospect of having Ice Cream Bunny‘s plot spoiled, then read on.
The movie begins with what looks like home-movie footage of Santa’s sleigh stuck in the sand on a Florida beach. The tone-deaf Kris Kringle sings a plaintive (dubbed) tune of lament, then falls asleep, then psychically summons the neighborhood children to help him. (This sequence of events suggests that the entire movie may be St. Nick’s heat-stroke influenced nightmare). At any rate, the children flock to his aid, bringing livestock (?) and a man in a gorilla suit (??) to attempt to dislodge the sleigh out of the half-inch of sand it’s buried in (why did the kids think a pig would succeed where eight magical reindeer had failed?) When this brain-dead plan predictably bears no fruit, Santa decides to tell everyone a story—a story of eternal hope, a story about a magical place called Pirates World.
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“It is the gassiest, grooviest, swingingest, trippiest movie you’ve ever seen… Anybody that don’t like that, daddy, don’t like chicken on Sunday.”–Sammy Davis, Jr. recommending Skidoo to the younger generation in the film’s trailer
PLOT: Tony is a retired mobster living in the suburbs with wife Flo and daughter Darlene, who has an unwelcome (to Tony) interest in dating hippies. A crime kingpin known as “God” pressures the ex-hit man into doing one last job—going undercover in Alcatraz to assassinate a stool pigeon. When Tony accidentally ingests LSD in the pen, his entire worldview is flipped and he decides to ditch the hit and break out of the clink; meanwhile, Flo and Darlene have taken it upon themselves to track down God with the help of a band of flower children.
BACKGROUND:
Director Otto Preminger had been nominated as Best Director for two Academy Awards (for Laura and The Cardinal). Known for pushing the envelope on taboo topics, Preminger was instrumental in breaking the back of the Hollywood Production Code by releasing The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), which dealt with the then-forbidden topic of heroin addiction, without MPAA approval.
Skidoo was a giant flop sandwiched between two other Preminger flops, Hurry Sundown (1967) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970). Despite its notorious reputation, Skidoo was part of a series of failed films and was not solely responsible for Preminger’s fall from grace.
Two years after Skidoo, screenwriter Doran William Cannon penned the exceedingly weird Brewster McCloud (1970).
This was Groucho Marx’s final film. He dropped LSD (with writer Paul Krassner) in preparation for the role.
Preminger also took LSD, supposedly under the guidance of none other than Timothy Leary (who promoted the film in the trailer). Preminger had originally been slated to make an anti-acid movie, but had decided that he should experience the drug before condemning it. After his trip he decided to make Skidoo instead.
Frank Gorshin, Burgess Meredith, and Cesar Romero, who all have cameo bits in Skidoo, had also appeared together in the same movie just two years before: as the Riddler, the Penguin, and the Joker in Batman: The Movie (1966). Director Otto Preminger had a rare acting role as Mr. Freeze in two episodes of the “Batman” TV show in 1966.
After flopping in 1968, Skidoo became virtually a lost film—not because it was suppressed or the prints were unavailable, but because no one seemed interested in exhibiting it. A Turner Classic Movies screening in 2008 was the first opportunity most people had to view the movie since its release.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jackie Gleason’s acid trip is one for the ages, particularly when he sees Groucho Marx’s cigar-puffing head affixed atop a rotating wood screw. His response to the apparition, naturally, is to say “Oh no, I’m not playing your game… go ahead, drop,” at which point the screwball vision slips down the prison sink drain.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Like an onion soaked in high-grade acid, Skidoo contains layers upon layers of weirdness. In 1968 it was not that far out for a movie to take us on a swirly psychedelic journey to check out that purple haze all in our brains. What was freaky was for establishment icons Otto Preminger, Jackie Gleason, Carol Channing and Groucho Marx to serve as our tour guides. Add to that the fact that the film is a notorious flop full of painfully strained attempts at comedy, jaw-dropping left-field musical numbers, scattershot satire, and Harry Nilsson singing the closing credits, and you have a singular pro-drug oddity that mines rare camp.
Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski discussing the trailer for Skidoo (1968)
Stunning cinematography, sacred music, the birth of the universe, graceful dinosaurs, childhood hallucinations and a glimpse of the afterlife all mixed together in the most ambitious movie of the past decade. We dare the Academy to nominate this for Best Picture.
