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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: POST TENEBRAS LUX (2012)

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Light After Darkness

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DIRECTED BY: Carlos Reygadas

FEATURING: Nathalia Acevedo, Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Willebaldo Torres, Rut Reygadas, Eleazar Reygadas

PLOT: A family moves to a remote area, where the father’s relationships with his wife, his children, and his neighbors steadily fracture.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Reygadas’ deeply personal film casts aside linear narrative in favor of a series of scenes that serve as gloves-off introspection. It features startling situations and memorably surreal images driven by what feels like a rich vein of remorse and self-recrimination.

COMMENTS: The opening scenes of Post Tenebras Lux send a clear warning of trouble ahead. We open on a dreamy sequence of a little girl wandering alone through an open field. Initially, she seems delighted by her surroundings, but as she calls in vain for her parents and large animals encroach upon her, our worries for her safety increase exponentially. From here, we retreat to the relatively safe confines of a home late at night, but someone arrives to wake up a young boy: a tall goat man, glowing red, boasting a low-hung package, and carrying a toolbox. Is it a metaphorical demon, retiring for the evening before getting up to do evil once again, or the genuine article? From the look on the boy’s face, the difference scarcely matters.

That both of these terrorized young people are portrayed by director Reygadas’ own children says something about his commitment to the personal aspect of the story, as well as his possible ignorance of the consequences of being so open on the subject. The director’s method makes it impossible to know for sure which scenes are drawn from personal experience and which are merely invention, but he seems determined to explore his life with depth, so the visit by central couple Juan and Nathalia to a French sex club feels just as true as the moments spent watching the rugby team of an English prep school psyche themselves up for battle.

If Juan is Reygadas’ stand-in, then he is unexpectedly candid about the less savory elements of his character. Indictments against him include a savage beating he issues to a dog who displeases him, lame confessions that he offers in private after attending an AA meeting, and flaunting his wealth around the rural community to which he has brought his family. Post Tenebras Lux is frequently reminiscent of All That Jazz, another movie in which a tempestuous filmmaker creates a central character who magnifies all his worst characteristics. Like Joe Gideon, Juan seems regretful, especially after he is gravely injured when he interrupts a home invasion and flashes forward to a future where his wife and now-teenaged children live happy lives without him. To be fair, there’s a lot of awful going on in the small community, including the man who hires someone to chop down a large tree to spite his wife, as well as the rueful assailant who makes amends by tearing his own head clear off his body.

The most notable visual element may hold the key to Reygadas’ intentions. Throughout the film, the frame is surrounded by a blurry circle that resembles the beveled edges of a mirror. Probably a nod to this Mirror, another filmmaker’s jumbled familial reverie. Like Reygadas himself, we view Juan’s life through a dark, cracked looking glass. The result may be a negative fantasy, or possibly an apology. Whatever it is, and the filmmaker is fervently seeking out the light at the end of the tunnel.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…casts a strange and powerful spell… It’s as if we were sometimes in the world of David Lynch, sometimes in the world of Stanley Kubrick and a whole lot of the time in the world of Andrei Tarkovsky, with the complicated social tragedy of Mexico ladled on top.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (contemporaneous)

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

Post Tenebras Lux

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: “AFRAID SO” (2003) AND THE SHORT FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT, 2001-2011

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jay Rosenblatt

FEATURING THE VOICE OF: Garrison Keillor

PLOT (“AFRAID SO”): A series of questions are proffered, each of which elicits the unspoken title as a regretful affirmative, accompanied by a visual snippet reinforcing the dreadful outcome.

COMMENTS: With the advent of VHS tapes and later DVDs, a long-running market for the distribution of educational films and documentaries on 8mm and 16mm reels dried up in an instant. Schools and other institutions suddenly had storage closets full of unneeded film reels, and most were unceremoniously tossed in the trash. This development meant little to most people, but was a vital discovery for one man in particular: filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, who rescued the unwanted footage and, for three decades, has repurposed that castoff celluloid into new forms, using images from the past to provide ironic counterpoint to the fears and anxieties of the present. We have seen this kind of resurrected montage before, most notably in “21-87”, Arthur Lipsett’s influential assemblage of rescued cutting-room-floor effluvia. (Among those who carried the torch was a very young film student named George Lucas, who drew upon Lipsett’s technique in his first work.) But where Lipsett used clips to carry the weight of delivering his message, Rosenblatt often deploys his found footage to serve a larger narrative, as subtext rather than text.

Consider the film recommended to us: “Afraid So,” unusual in Rosenblatt’s oeuvre for being an adaptation of Jeanne Marie Beaumont’s poem, which derives grim humor from the escalation of stakes, the questions it asks rising in significance from “Was the baggage rerouted?” to “Do I have to remove my clothes?” and eventually to “Is the bone broken?” Garrison Keillor’s trademark lethargic Minnesota demeanor (originally recorded for radio) is a good match for the piece, delivering a ruefully funny air of resigned doom, so it’s fair to think that visuals won’t add much to the poem’s impact. Initially, Rosenblatt seems to prove this thesis true. “Is it starting to rain?” yields drops in a puddle; “Are we out of coffee?” leads to a filling cup. But as Keillor progresses, Rosenblatt heightens the tension, choosing pictures that make the negative outcomes so much worse than what Beaumont’s words imply. “Will this go on my record?” is accompanied by footage of a man clubbing someone from behind in a public place, a crime distinct from the mere speeding ticket you might suspect. Similarly, “Will it leave a scar?” hints at a medical procedure, but Rosenblatt’s chosen clip makes it clear that the operation at hand is a mastectomy. Once we reach “Will this be in the papers?” and “Is my time up already?,” the title answer is not just worrisome, but deathly. Appropriate, then, that the only sound aside from Keillor’s voice is the piercing tri-tone of a weather alert. Yes, bad things are coming.

“Afraid So” was released on home video as part of a compilation of Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: “AFRAID SO” (2003) AND THE SHORT FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT, 2001-2011 →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ALUCARDA (1977)

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AKA Alucarda, la hija de las tinieblas; Innocents From Hell

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Tina Romero, Susana Kamini, , David Silva

PLOT: When orphaned 17th-century teenager Justine is shipped off to a convent, she meets up with the similarly motherless Alucarda— who happens to be the spawn of the devil—and soon the pair are wreaking havoc amongst the clergy.

COMMENTS: In the recent papal political potboiler Conclave, ’ Cardinal Thomas Lawrence makes the case for the critically intertwined nature of faith and doubt. Certainty, he tells his fellow cardinals, is dangerous because it nudges us toward arrogance and intolerance. “Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand-in-hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery.”

One can scarcely imagine what Cardinal Lawrence would make of Alucarda, a film that hasn’t got a doubtful bone in its body. Given director Moctezuma’s history as an acolyte of Alejandro Jodorowsky, one might expect a certain amount of surrealism or mysticism, but this is a movie that fully believes in the devil and doesn’t find metaphor in a single damn thing. When a satyr cavorts with young girls, communion with Satan can be the only goal, and when you meet the story’s lone skeptic, a doctor who stakes out a position firmly in favor of science and reason, you can be sure that he will learn a harsh lesson in demonic possession and will drop his rational pose at a moment’s notice. Your sense of the film’s credulity is very dependent upon your willingness to believe that biblical evil lurks nearby awaiting its opportunity.

That amusingly unambiguous tone drives the film’s central performance, the teenaged, born-to-be-bad Alucarda herself, who exudes a nervous wild-eyed energy, desperate to win the favor of her potential new playmate Justine, and irrepressibly eager to start being naughty. (Romero, in her 30s, is an impressively convincing youth. Her counterpart, Kamini, is… not.) She’s like a toddler in her emotional purity, which gives her quest to upend the stodgy righteousness of the convent a potent charge. Unfortunately, that single-mindedness serves other characters less well, like the upright, uptight Father Lázaro (Silva, in his final role) who leads a round of self-flagellation to fend off bad thoughts, or the host of nuns whose performances must be reductively but accurately described as histrionic, writhing and shrieking in turn. The world of Alucarda is devoid of nuance, which is a time-saver, but makes the proceedings less engaging.

If there’s one word that sums up Alucarda, it’s “impatient.” Moctezuma aspires to the wildness of Argento or the eroticism of Rollin, but you get the meat of those filmmakers without any of the sauce. It’s mere minutes from Alucarda and Justine meeting a goat man to that same demon leading the two girls in a nude blood ritual, and a full orgy in the woods is just around the corner from that. Moctezuma is in such a hurry to get to the good stuff there that he dispenses with all of the build-up that makes the shock and gore so entertaining. Alucarda is a horror film without suspense, like frosting without cake or sex without foreplay.

As a delivery system for horror conventions, Alucarda is an impressively efficient machine, but that makes it more like a highlight reel or a series of clips on TikTok than like a real film. What it really needs is a little uncertainty, some sense of mystery to give it depth. As it is, Alucarda is like faith without doubt, which some among the religiously inclined might tell you is not faith at all.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This movie is just plain weird… The story is really shallow (girl meets girl, girls worship Satan, everybody dies) and simplistic.” – Alec Pridgen, Mondo Bizarro

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

Alucarda

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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE MIDNIGHT AFTER (2014)

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Na yeh ling san, ngoh choh seung liu Wong Gok hoi mong Dai Bou dik hung Van

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Wong You-nam, Janice Man, Simon Yam, Kara Hui

PLOT: A bus from Mong kok to Tai Po arrives at its destination to find a neighborhood rendered empty by some unknown catastrophe, and the passengers are left to unravel the mystery of what happened, and what might happen to them.

COMMENTS: If a credit alone could catapult a film onto the Apocrypha, then “Based on the Novel by Pizza” would be a strong contender, even more so when you learn that this particular novel debuted in serialized form on an internet forum. Alas, this is not the first wonderfully weird credit we’ve come across around here, so I guess we’ll have to rely on Pizza’s ideas to judge whether this movie merits inclusion. Indeed, there are some offbeat notions at the heart of The Midnight After, but they are all in service to a greater mystery that is only inconsistently the story’s main focus.

Chan smartly kicks things off in the hyperkinetic atmosphere of modern Hong Kong, with a lively sequence in which the various personalities find their way onto the van. The city is energized, with joyful revelers, anxious workers, and quarreling lovers all populating the opening sequence in a way that gives the city its own character while establishing a contrast with the abandoned landscape we will soon enter. That contrast also gives us our first glimpse into the kaleidoscope of tonal shifts that Chan will employ throughout the course of the film. We’ll soon be treated to wistful romance, snarky comedy, surreal music videos, gritty justice, and disturbing horror. The Midnight After gets your attention, but once it has it, it quickly changes the game.

As we are introduced to the individual backstories of the passengers—the married couple who loves English football, the low-level gangster who has alienated his family, the junkie who never seems to realize what is going on—it starts to feel like the story would be better served as a TV series. One series in particular, in fact: “Lost,” the turn-of-the-millennium puzzle-box American series that thrived on unveiling mysteries with the promise of answers somewhere down the line. Like that show, Midnight assembles an unusually diverse collection of characters whose personal motivations and conflicting interactions make up the story’s drama. Also like “Lost,” new mysteries and complications keep getting thrown into the mix, including a cadre of hazmat-suited Japanese soldiers, a round of vigilante justice against a sex criminal, and a coded signal that seems to be transmitting the lyrics to “Space Oddity.” Unlike the series, The Midnight After attempts to deliver all of this in roughly two hours, as opposed to the six years afforded to the passengers of Oceanic Flight 815. The compressed time frame is acutely felt, with more stories than Chan could possibly hope to resolve. Supposedly an unrealized sequel would have brought some closure, but wrapping things up seems to be far from anyone’s goal.  

Cultural elements are necessarily lost on an outsider like myself. For those in the know, The Midnight After is a metaphor for the impending handover of control of Hong Kong to the Chinese government, with the stranger-in-a-familiar-land vibe of the bus passengers’ predicament mirroring that of Hong Kong residents who find themselves absorbed into an entirely new political and cultural environment. You’ll also find references to Sino-Japanese relations, the uneasy alliance between capitalism and faith, the ongoing threat of aerial pandemic, and multiple genre parodies. Ultimately, it’s that stew of ideas that becomes the weirdest thing about the film. The basic mystery – “Where’d everybody go?” – is pretty straightforward. It’s the sheer mass of the additional ornamentation that throws you off.

All that The Midnight After could have been is captured in its final image, a beautiful tracking shot in which the camera pulls through the bus and shows the faces of people who are trying to take in the scope of all that they have lost. It’s a potent vision, but also one that highlights the open-ended nature of the tale. They don’t know where they’re headed, and neither do we. It’s an unusual approach to storytelling, but also a deeply unsatisfying one.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Blithely unconcerned with subtlety, coherence or the Chinese market, the film sizzles with untranslatable colloquial wisecracks, trenchant social satire, and an ensemble cast of character actors and young up-and-comers at their freaky best. A mercurial ride that is decidedly outside the mainstream, it should nonetheless delight genre aficionados and bonafide fans of Hong Kong cinema… Dream sequences and spooky visions further add to the surreal atmosphere…”-– Maggie Lee, Variety (festival screening)

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

The Midnight After

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FELIX THE CAT: THE MOVIE (1988)

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DIRECTED BY: Tibor Hernádi

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: David Kolin, Chris Phillips, Maureen O’Connell, Peter Newman, Alice Playten

PLOT: When Princess Oriana is kidnapped by the sinister Duke of Zill, only Felix the Cat and his magical bag of tricks can save the day—so long as his arch-frenemy The Professor doesn’t interfere.

COMMENTS: It’s fun to imagine a Sunset Boulevard scenario wherein Felix the Cat hearkens back to better times, angrily reminding anyone who will listen that, back in his heyday, he was bigger than Mickey Mouse. He’d go on about how he moved so much merchandise in the silent era, but faltered when talkies came in. How he got his groove back when television snapped him up, jump-starting his career with a voice, new supporting characters, the introduction of his iconic bag of tricks, and an insidiously infectious theme song. How the lack of a deep-pocketed studio to protect him and dust him off every so often (like that infernal mouse had) left him floundering, and how his chief animator and owner of his copyright, Joe Oriolo (and later Joe’s son Don), struggled to keep Felix in the game with ever-growing levels of desperation, including a bizarre misguided attempt at a live-action series and even a Baby Felix cartoon made exclusively for Japanese television. And here’s where Felix would ball up his fist and pound it on the table, lamenting that if anyone knows him at all today, it’s as a clock.

Maybe that can be the scenario for Felix’s next feature. For now, we’re stuck with this one, probably his thirstiest bid at a revival. Felix is a simple character, a monochromatic feline with a classic stretch-and-squash movement and a seeming immunity to misfortune. But to wring 80 minutes out of him, it’s essential to complicate, complicate, complicate, first with a prologue presenting a proto-CG version of Felix’s disembodied head, then by launching an elaborate plot to save a fairy-tale kingdom from an evil overlord, with a panoply of odd characters including a heavily rotoscoped princess, a gun-toting yokel, a host of psychedelic wildlife, and an army of robot trash cans led by what appears to be an ape with a bubble for a head.

The animation, from Hungary’s Pannonia Studio, is wildly erratic, veering from elaborately detailed landscapes and imaginative creature designs to obvious looped animations and jumpy movement. Case in point: Princess Oriana is sometimes shown in the kind of fine detail one associates with the Disney Renaissance, but then is seen in a herky-jerky, poorly drawn style one associates with direct-to-truck-stop mockbusters. But even at its best, the animators’ work is undercut by a script that spends inordinate amounts of time on exposition and setup, forcing the artists to vamp to fill time. In fact, Felix the Movie is almost allergic to anything that stays focused on the plot. The vile Duke is supposedly seeking to conquer the kingdom as revenge against the Princess, but instead of showing us his schemes, we watch him make her do interpretive dance. Numerous scenes are dedicated solely to watching one cartoon beast or another go about their business, even while we’re aware of an impending danger happening somewhere way offscreen. Even the musical numbers seem completely separate from the proceedings, such as a showcase for a family of foxes who have nothing to do with anything, or an extended dance break for a pair of rat/lizard hybrids. (This latter sequence lasts for more than two minutes, almost 3% of the film’s runtime.)

Adding to the muddle is the decision to include two of Felix’s foes from the TV series, the nefarious Professor and his hyper-nerdy nephew Poindexter. They have the potential to throw another obstacle in Felix’s path, but they spend most of the film trailing behind their quarry and end up helping once they finally catch up. One presumes they represent the movie’s attempt to cater to Felix nostalgists, but they’re meaningless to the young, adventure-hungry kids who are the most likely audience for this kind of thing. The movie aims for everyone and hits no one.

Given how uninterested it is in anything logical and linear, it’s fitting that the movie just sort of stops, with Felix saving the day by throwing a book at a giant robot. (That’s literally the whole solution. Deus ex libro. He doesn’t even use the bag of tricks.) Felix the Cat: The Movie should have been a chance for the once-famous feline to get his groove back, but the film never finds a way to let him be the hero he once was, and it doesn’t have a solid idea of what it wants to do instead. So somebody buy the old guy another drink and let him rant and rave about his cruel fate. He deserves another shot at the big time, and this ain’t it.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The original Felix cartoons were always surreal in some way, but not in a studied manner, more of an organic, natural development out of the character’s quirks and goodnatured ingenuity. Here, however, there is an attempt to plonk him down into a world that is already weird, almost a post-apocalyptic version of a fairytale land that suffers too many digressions into strangeness for its own sake without furthering the plot… You can see it entertaining the very young who are not aware of Felix’s history, but as a tribute to him it falls flat when it really could have been any generic character starring here: he doesn’t even take off his tail and use it as a cane.” Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image

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

FELIX THE CAT The Movie DVD (USA Format) 2003

FELIX THE CAT The Movie DVD (USA Format) 2003
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