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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SONATINE (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Kitano

FEATURING: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura

PLOT: The yakuza dispatches an enforcer to Okinawa to resolve a dispute between rival gangs, but the ensuing conflict threatens the future of his clan and his very life.Still from Sonatine (1993)COMMENTS: If you made a checklist of essential gangster-film elements, Sonatine would check a lot of boxes. Lone assassin, shootout in a bar, car bombing, cute moll faithfully standing by, thoughts of retirement balanced with the inescapability of the criminal lifestyle… they’re all here, and yet not one of them hits in the way you expect. Sonatine is unquestionably a crime film, particularly the Japanese-yakuza-chronicle variety, but it operates at a wildly different pace than its brethren.

At the time he made Sonatine, Takeshi Kitano was as close as Japan had to a “king of all media,” having found success in film, television, and even stand-up comedy. This project, however, found him ruminative and depressed. So it’s probably no wonder that his mob middleman, Murakawa, is similarly disenchanted with his life. Audiences were well-trained to expect an antihero with deep emotions, but very little would have prepared them for the taciturn, blank-faced hitman presented here.

When Murakawa complains that he lost three men on his last assignment, his protest—“I don’t like it”—feels like it would be a threat for retaliation coming from anyone else. But as Takeshi delivers it, it’s a resigned grump. Faced with other threats or inflection points, his response at every turn is quiet contemplation. Rivals have bombed his headquarters? Quiet contemplation. One of his underlings shot in the head right in front of him? Quiet contemplation. He witnesses an ugly attempted rape? He slaps the perpetrator, then quickly shoots the surprised assailant in the belly before quietly contemplating the victim. Murakawa is tired and devoid of hope, a character well-past finding bursts of violence to be alarming or invigorating. Takeshi does more to point up the essential hollowness and indignity of organized crime than 20 film scoldings could accomplish.

The desperate blankness of Murakawa brings brief moments of diversion and happiness into stark relief. As he and his underlings are stowed away at an Okinawan safehouse, he finds moments of pleasure that are surprising in their simplicity. A game with folded-paper sumo wrestlers is transformed into a live-action version, and Takeshi’s smile is captivating. He also has fun shooting fireworks and prankishly digging sandpits on the beach. But he knows all too well that death is close at hand; no pleasant distractions or pretty admirers can solve the fundamental malaise.

The climactic showdown is the ultimate proof of Takeshi’s concept: cornered on all sides, Murakawa plans and implements a bloody revenge on his foes. True to form, we see almost none of it, save for distant flashes of light and smoke and brief intercuts of bloody reprisals (set to the Tangerine Dream-esque score of legendary composer Joe Hisaishi). There’s no joy in it, no escape, no “one last showdown” to give him a brighter future, even if the plot conspired to provide him with one. Filmgoers expecting a gritty crime drama must have found this slow, grim-faced character study a strange proposition. But say this for Takeshi: his checklist might have been different than his audiences, but all his boxes are checked.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sonatine doesn’t encourage a straight reading, where logic dictates meaning and importance. When our normal responses are broken down, we relate more directly to the film… at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, [Kitano’s] pictures carry a charge of originality.”–Patrick Z. McGavin, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by film izle. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Sonatine

Sonatine

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    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGAN’S WAKE (1966)

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    AKA Finnegan’s Wake

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    DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute

    FEATURING: Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson

    PLOT: In a series of disconnected scenes, memories, and dreams, the passing of Finnegan, AKA Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, AKA HCE (and there may be many other names not yet known) is the occasion of a wake, an event which the deceased keeps attempting to attend despite his survivors’ reluctance for him to participate—or perhaps none of that happens.

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The next time you hear someone complain that their favorite book was adapted for the cinema and the filmmakers weren’t “faithful to the original text,” just plop them down and make them watch this ridiculously successful effort to burnish the original medium through adaptation into a new one. Passages never claims to be a literalization of Joyce’s book, instead recognizing that its greatest advantage is the power of its twisted language and putting that front and center.

    Still from Passages from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1966)

    COMMENTS: “When is a pun not a pun?” the jolly bartender asks. It’s an unexpectedly galling question, considering that he’s inside a story that consists almost entirely of plays-on-words, that exists solely to celebrate the flexibility and incomprehensibility of language. The nerve of this guy.

    James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the novel he spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life composing, is enshrined in history as, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “arguably one of the most complex works of 20th-century English-language fiction.” It makes pretensions to having a narrative, but if it is about anything, it’s about words, words, words, and their notorious malleability. Joyce gives nearly every sentence at least two meanings, exploiting meter and importing similar words from other languages and playing with time to such a degree that the last words of the book form a complete sentence with the first words of the book. It’s a 628-page fairground ride of a novel, and it regularly tops lists like “The 10 Most Difficult Books to Read” and features in stories like “This book club finally finished ‘Finnegans Wake.’ It only took them 28 years.” It’s a monument to inaccessibility. I haven’t read the whole thing. Have you?

    So there is enormous praise to be extended to Mary Ellen Bute’s ambitiously foolhardy decision to actually try and visualize Joyce’s wandering scenarios, because it makes the effort of reading the book seem both achievable and desirable. Her film uses an adaptation created by Mary Manning in 1955 staged by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but while all the language comes directly from Joyce’s text, she makes two key innovations that neither book nor stage could offer. The first is the use of tools of cinema; framing, closeups, and editing keep the language moving and prevent the focus from wandering away, while visuals can create a level of surrealism commensurate with the text. A film that looks like it will be stuck in the hall of the titular funeral party can transform unexpectedly into a burlesque show, while what has been a stagebound production through the halfway point suddenly steps out into nature.

    Bute’s second contribution may be even more important: most of the film is subtitled with Joyce’s text, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to both hear and read the language and appreciate the multiple meanings and sneaky substitutions that Joyce has peppered throughout the book. (Here, “throughout” should be taken to mean “in every damn sentence.”) You know who would agree? Joyce’s countryman Samuel Beckett, who said of the original book, “You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” The film version honors this fact, dramatizing Joyce’s maddening doggerel and giving sound and shape to the words so that you cannot miss his fantastical leaps of rhyme and oronym.

    It’s nice of Beckett to show up, because in reviewing a pair of films based on the works of this fellow son of the Emerald Isle, I twice made the observation that there was nothing weird about the films that wasn’t already weird in the original plays. One might expect the same to be true of these excerpts from Joyce’s novel, given that scenes have been adapted as faithfully as possible. However, the transition from prose to moving image puts the absurdism into a wholly new context. Film doesn’t just repeat the weirdness of the original; it highlights it. By the end, as HCE marches off into the sun to the strains of composer Elliot Kaplan’s oddly emotion-drenched score, I don’t have any more of an idea of what’s going on than I did at the start, but the urge to explore the puzzle further is invigorating.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “The movie creates literal visuals to go with the flowing imagery of the book that rapidly moves and shifts between scenes as in a dream… probably best taken in smaller doses. .” – Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

    (This movie was nominated for review, in a small bit of wordplay, by “Finnegans Cake”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: TURBO KID (2015)

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    DIRECTED BY: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell

    FEATURING: Munro Chambers, Laurence Leboeuf, Aaron Jeffrey, Edwin Wright, Michael Ironside

    PLOT: In a post-apocalyptic future, a young kid discovers the fighting gear of the legendary Turbo Rider and sets out to topple the tyrannical overlord Zeus.

    Still from Turbo Kid (2015)

    COMMENTS: Turbo Kid lays down its ace right from the get-go, as a gravel-voiced narrator describes the grim vista of a tomorrow carved out by nuclear winter and acid rain. “This is the future,” he intones, as a boy on a BMX bike pedals into frame. “This is the year 1997.” Time for a quick double-check on the year this came out… yep, and we are truly underway.

    The 366 Weird Movies archive does not lack for films from four decades ago that employed a low budget and suitably barren locations to depict the world-after-the-end-of-the-world to audiences. (Just off the top of my head, I can think of three such movies that I myself have reviewed.) Recent years have seen several attempts at nostalgic pastiche, but Turbo Kid stands alone for setting “80s desolation romp” as a target. In particular, it’s the product of the serial nostalgist collective Road Kill Super Stars (aka RKSS, which consisted of this film’s three writer-directors, until Simard was booted last year for criminal sex charges); when their proposed contribution to the anthology The ABCs of Death was rejected, they had more than enough ideas to expand the concept into a feature.

    Considering that Turbo Kid’s sole objective is to recapture that special 1980s mix of futuristic nihilism and naïve can-do spirit, the effort is remarkably successful. The empty fields and gravel pits in Quebec that stand in for the future’s wastelands are suitably desolate. Costuming and production design tap into the mixed milieu of flashy colors and big hair roaming around what look like abandoned sewage treatment plants. Plenty of props serve as icons of the era, from Rubik’s cubes and Nintendo Power Gloves to the ubiquitous BMX bikes that serve as everyone’s transportation around the barren wasteland. (Not that bicycles would be the most unusual form of transport to dominate the coming hellscape.) Plus, the synth-fueled musical score by Le Matos is both pitch-perfect and tiresome in a way that’s era-appropriate, and is supplemented in the font-of-the-future opening credits with the most fitting rock song choice imaginable, a fist-pumping anthem from Stan Bush (of “The Touch” fame). If you’re fooled for a moment into thinking that this was churned out in 1985, that’s fully intended, because Turbo Kid doesn’t want to just capture the feel of these 80s low-budget sci-fi epics; it wants to be one of them.

    This commitment to verisimilitude extends to the film’s cast, who play everything straight enough to sell the movie’s central joke. Chambers is just the right kind of bland hero, not looking anywhere as young as his outward level of maturity, but fully selling The Kid’s sweet ignorance. As his sidekick and love interest, Leboeuf’s perky Apple turns out to be the most delightful, refreshing thing that Turbo Kid brings to the party. Her indefatigably chipper vibe initially seems like it’s going to become annoying fast but quickly becomes the animating force in the film, with a naively joyful spirit that makes a crucial revelation about her character land with a nod of approval instead of a roll of the eyes. And then there’s the filmmakers’ most crucial piece of casting, landing master of scene-chewing villainy Michael freaking Ironside to do the thing he does. Undoubtedly, he could play this part in his sleep, but while his work here is effortless, he’s in no way phoning it in. He plays the heel with all the acid-tongued vigor of his younger days, in which he no doubt celebrated getting cast over Kurtwood Smith. Ironside even makes a virtue of the directors’ most questionable choice, surrounding Zeus with a less-than-skillful set of minions who leave the overlord shy of his most supervillainous aspirations. It’s a bit of postmodern irony that’s out of place in Turbo Kid’s otherwise resolute commitment to the homage.

    Perhaps the thing that most distinguishes Turbo Kid from its ancestors is the remarkable level of gore. It’s not as though these films are devoid of viscera, as any Mad Max entry will demonstrate, but RKSS is relentless, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake blood spewed via every manner of stabbing, decapitation, and explosion. This festival of fluid is impossible to take seriously, presented in an extremely cartoonish manner, and resembling nothing so much as Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days. It can be outright funny at times, like a sawblade on a helmet that turns its victim into a screw top, or a body that lands squarely atop another person like the most unwieldy hat. So it’s one of Turbo Kid’s better surprises that the orgy of violence ends up showcasing the film’s sweetest moment, a romantic tableau that’s only enhanced by the surrounding rain of blood.

    Given the opportunity for parody, Turbo Kid opts instead for direct mimicry, an odd choice by itself, but one that makes the finished film more earnest than weird. That does make the film a charming watch, if a weightless one. That 80s trash was pretty fun, and this re-creation is pretty fun, too. It’s a low bar, but clearing it is a decent way to spend an hour or two.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a wildly discordant, schizophrenically adorable, gore-soaked fantasy set in an deserted industrial wasteland… Add in the other nutso, hilarious touches, and you have the garnish you need to turn your sweet tale of friendship into a Friday night blood feast.” – Patrick Feutz, Inside the Blue Paint

    (This movie was nominated for review by film izle. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.) 

    Turbo kid

    Turbo kid

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      366 Underground, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

      366 UNDERGROUND FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: I NEVER LEFT THE WHITE ROOM (2000)

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      AKA My Crepitus

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      DIRECTED BY: Michael Todd Schneider

      FEATURING: Michael Todd Schneider, Eric Boring, Tom Colbert, Amy Beth Deford

      PLOT: Hospital patient Jeffrey has violent, bloody dreams revolving around his life as a sex criminal and murderer.

      Still from I Never Left the White Room (2000)

      COMMENTS: The general tenor of I Never Left the White Room is established not in the first act, not even in the first minutes, but in the vanity card of the production company. The Maggot Films banner boasts stabs, screams, and gore to assure the viewer can expect only the most unpleasant, blood-curdling material. By that standard, I Never Left the White Room is an honest production indeed.

      Schneider expands on a short film, and while one is inclined to salute him for deftly hiding the seams between old and new, the patchwork nature of the movie makes that faint praise. While there’s the suggestion of a narrative spine, I Never Left the White Room is really just a collection of disparate images, scenes whose common thread is their origin inside Jeffrey’s mixed-up brain. The title turns out to be a description of our mise en scene. 

      Those visions are largely troubled, and Schneider distinguishes them with varying degrees of stylization. The most compelling is a dialogue set on a railroad trestle that warps the video image with posterization and color correction to suggest the demons inside our protagonist’s mind. Sometimes the beasts are literal, like a monster whose features can be smeared away like shaving cream. Other times, the horror has only the barest pretension to metaphor, like an absurdly lengthy scene in which a man spies on a woman taking a shower, each pleasuring themselves until the woman begins to bleed profusely. If the same central character weren’t involved, you would never know one thing had anything to do with the other. 

      What Schneider is going for, other than checking items off a list, is not clear. There’s murder of women, already an infuriating trope but even more so when shorn of any motivation. There’s gore but, aside from the occasional jump scare, nothing that’s truly inventive. The acting and bare minimum of scripted dialogue don’t help, and there’s neither a hint of disgust nor irony. I think it’s supposed to be chilling, not funny, when the psychiatrist (who might also be a cop?) tells his patient, “I should be straight with you: my wife and daughters were raped and murdered last night.” As delivered, though, it’s not momentous; it’s ridiculous. 

      I Never Left the White Room is trash. There’s a market for trash, of course, as evidenced by Schneider’s later association with Fred Vogel and the August Underground series. But this isn’t even good trash. Schneider has an hour of video to reveal the depths of his imagination; it proves to be shallow and aimless. Leave the white room. 

      WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

      “…the main aspect of this 70-minute piece of headache-inducing insanity is the endless stream of spliced together nightmarish visuals, surreal dreamy encounters, gory visions, bizarre symbolic imagery, lustful masturbatory fantasies sometimes including violence, grating sound effects, eye-slicing color filters, grainy post-editing effects, and so on…. mostly tedious…”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

      My Crepitus (I Never Left the White

      My Crepitus (I Never Left the White Room) [Blu-ray]

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      (This movie was nominated for review by Kenshin, who described it as “very insane, very trippy, very surreal and extremely creepy.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

      Apocryphally Weird

      65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006)

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      “Some audience members get very angry if they can’t process and understand the story in one viewing, and they see that as a design flaw in the film itself. Other people are more open to obscurity and complexity and the idea of needing to revisit something. Those are my favorite kinds of films.”–Richard Kelly

      DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly

      FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn, Wood Harris, Christopher Lambert, John Larroquette, , , Mandy Moore, Holmes Osborne, Cheri Oteri, Amy Poehler, , Miranda Richardson, , Will Sasso, Wallace Shawn, Kevin Smith

      PLOT: In the near future, a terrorist attack transforms America into a cryptofacist police state. The third anniversary of that attack proves to be a day of great significance, with the launch of a new national surveillance agency, the release of an energy source/mind-altering drug called Fluid Karma, and the debut of an enormous luxury zeppelin improbably named for the wife of Karl Marx. On this day, the fates of multiple citizens collide, including an amnesiac action star who has written a startlingly prescient screenplay, a porn actor overseeing a burgeoning branding empire, a former beauty queen-turned-spymaster, a venal fundamentalist vice-presidential candidate who is being bribed by an assortment of neo-Marxist agitants, an international cadre of cult members whose purported invention of a perpetual motion machine masks an effort to bring about the end of the world, and, maybe most importantly of all, a war veteran and his twin brother searching for each other.

      Still from Southland Tales (2006)

      BACKGROUND:

      • Kelly envisioned the film as part of an epic multimedia saga. In-film titles identify sections of the movie as chapters 4-6; the first three chapters were released as graphic novels (now out-of-print collectibles).
      • The film had a notorious premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival when Kelly submitted the film before it was completed. He finished neither the editing nor the visual effects in time, and the extremely poor reception received by the work-in-progress prompted him to cut more than 20 minutes prior to general release (including virtually all of’s performance as an Army general). The version shown at Cannes has since been released, although Kelly himself describes the film overall as unfinished.
      • Several members of the cast are alums of “Saturday Night Live.” Kelly intentionally cast them to play up the screenplay’s satirical elements, and in general wanted to give his actors a chance to play against type.
      • Budgeted at $17 million, Southland Tales grossed less than $400,000 at the global box office.

      INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s little agreement as to whether Southland Tales is a good movie or not, but the one thing that seems to be beyond dispute is that is Timberlake’s Venice Beach lip sync to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” is the standout scene. Timberlake’s yokel narrator Pilot Abilene spends the bulk of the film drawling overheated speeches that rely heavily on the Book of Revelation, which he delivers in the tone of a pothead conspiracy nut vainly trying to lift the scales from your eyes. But here, as he struts through a rundown arcade in a drug-induced haze wearing a blood-soaked undershirt and cavorting with a kickline of PVC-clad nurses, Pilot Abilene claims the screen for himself, demonstrating more comfort with the film’s absurdities than anyone we’ve seen thus far. It’s the one moment where Kelly’s delivers his commitment to over-the-top imagery with any degree of lightness; instead of the ponderousness of significance that accompanies every other set piece, this dance scene really dances.

      TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mirror on delay; rehearsing the performance-art assassination

      WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Richard Kelly is ambitious to a fault, a spectacularly indulgent filmmaker who never had an idea he didn’t want to film and who makes sure you notice every element of his worldbuilding. Southland Tales is a quintessential Kelly experience, with one layer of Philip K. Dickian paranoid surrealism piled upon another layer of Altmanesque interconnectedness, rinse and repeat. The film has been carefully crafted to confuse, with absurd situations, offscreen backstories, and red herrings combining to keep characters and viewers equally at sea.

      Original trailer for Southland Tales (2006)

      COMMENTS: What good is a blank check? If cinematic success affords a director the chance to fulfill their dream, what dream should Continue reading 65*: SOUTHLAND TALES (2006) →