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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: WISE BLOOD (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: John Huston

FEATURING: Brad Dourif, , Dan Shor, Harry Dean Stanton, Ned Beatty, William Hickey, Mary Nell Santacroce

PLOT:  In a small Southern town, WWII veteran Hazel Motes  proclaims the foundation of his new Church of Christ Without Christ, but runs into obstacles including a deceptive preacher and his wily daughter, a simple young man who is determined to help by providing a Native American mummy, and a huckster who gloms on to Hazel’s pitch in pursuit of a quick buck.

Still from wise blood (1979)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Wise Blood pulls off the trick of translating the quirky voice and complex themes of Flannery O’Connor’s writing to the screen, delivering both the surrealism of her situations and the aspirational delusions of her characters in a way that’s faithful to the source material but fitting for the new medium. There’s a lot that an adaptation like this might leave by the wayside, but this one includes every audacious, blasphemous, ridiculous moment.

COMMENTS: I would never have expected to encounter as much John Huston in my tenure at 366 Weird Movies as I have, but a look at the last decade of his career reveals a man who was fiercely determined to do his own thing, but also savvy enough in the ways of Hollywood to play ball half the time in exchange for freedom the other half. So the man’s going to flirt with weird at about a 1:1 ratio. Stints behind the camera for Annie, Victory, or Phobia seem like down payments for more dedicated efforts like Prizzi’s Honor, Under the Volcano, or The Dead. Wise Blood definitely falls into the latter category, as the director waited patiently for his chance to adapt O’Connor’s first novel, undertaking more commercial ventures until his neophyte producers finally came up with the funding. Once he had it, he worked fast and affordably but without compromise.  

I almost feel like all I need to tell you is that it’s a grand showcase for Brad Dourif. A legendarily weird character actor, Dourif takes to a leading role with gusto. His Hazel Motes is an astoundingly meaty part, a character made up of vast contradictions and competing emotions that all somehow fit together logically. He rails against the unkept promises of organized religion, but becomes irate at the sight of false devotion. He yearns for connection to others, but recoils at anyone who would try to attach themselves to him. (He’s at his happiest with the prostitute whom he pays for her affections.) He tools around in a beat-up Ford Fairlane that even he seems to recognize is beyond repair, but he insistently defends its honor against any criticism. We will quickly learn that Hazel is a parfait of fierce pride and acute embarrassment, and the combustible mix only makes him more ardent in pursuit of a purer truth. Each setback heightens his intensity, each failure leads him to repeat with ever more determination.

Alone, Hazel might seem too weird to endure, but Wise Blood surrounds him with a murderer’s row of supporting players who demonstrate that he’s as much a product of his surroundings as he is his own mass of peculiarities. Stanton is a con man whose tongue drips with moral superiority, while granddaughter Wright hopes to use her skills of deception to trick Dourif into a marriage bed. Beatty has a small but crucial role as a sidewalk swindler who infuriates Dourif by not only being better at street preaching but using that talent to fleece the readily gullible masses. Most eccentric of all is Shor, a simpleton with a fascination for mummies and gorillas for whom no surprise revelation of the truth is ever a disappointment. And all this strangeness is just part of the fabric. Everyone’s weird, but no more so than the next guy.

Which points to Huston’s oddest and most successful trick: Wise Blood is a film truly out of time. Are we seeing O’Connor’s 1952, with the settings, costumes, and attitudes of a society still finding new footing after a world war? Or is this the Macon, Georgia of 1979, neck-deep in national malaise and taking an initial stab at a post-racial new South? Huston chooses not to choose, turning O’Connor’s characters into unwitting time travelers who occupy the physical present day but live in a spiritual yesteryear. It makes for a curious watch, but perfectly fits these people who long for change but refuse to be changed themselves.

It says something about both author and director that the final scene of Wise Blood, in which our protagonist’s unyielding principles lead him to his ultimate fate, is both sad and funny. Not bittersweet, but ruefully humorous. It’s the perfect coda to the tale of a man who refused to be relatable and never stopped wondering why he couldn’t relate. O’Connor and Huston were both one-of-a-kind artists, so it’s a lucky outcome that blending the two results in a movie that’s not much like anything else.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Wise Blood is based on Flannery O’Connor’s extraordinary first novel, which infused the conventions of Southern gothic fiction with fiery Catholicism and surrealistic wit. Huston takes to O’Connor’s hothouse style like a gambler to a royal flush. The inevitable results are the very essence of weird.” – Frank Rich, Time Magazine (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by future contributor , who said it “seems a must for the list in my opinion.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Wise Blood

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE APPOINTMENT (1982)

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DIRECTED BY: Lindsay C. Vickers

FEATURING: Edward Woodward, Jane Merrow, Samantha Weysom, John Judd

PLOT: Ian informs his daughter Joanne that he will be forced to miss her upcoming violin concert; Joanne takes the news poorly, and terrible dreams and mysterious occurrences ensue.

Still from The Appointment (1982)

COMMENTS: The Appointment is one of those movies that I’d seen before seeing it, thanks to the pervasiveness of memes. The film’s climactic car crash has been excised and circulated on the web as a bizarre mishmash of extreme closeups of screeching tires, unconvincing steering wheel acting, and a downright gymnastic final moment on the road before the car plunges over the side of a cliff. It’s absurd in isolation, but a notable demonstration of the crucial role of context. Restored to its surroundings, what seemed funny is revealed to be tragic, what was ridiculous is horrifically unavoidable.

The Appointment stands out for being so irrepressibly British. Not merely in its origins, with writer/director Vickers taking his first and only spin in the lead director’s chair after a career as an assistant with Hammer Films, a pastoral country home tailor made for a Britbox mystery series, and a budget bankrolled by the pension fund of the British Coal Board. Not even due to the casting of the quintessentially English, pre-Equalizer post-Wicker Man Woodward, or Weysom’s droopy voice that sounds like a Mike Myers character. No, the thing that makes The Appointment a cinematic version of a “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster is the ongoing and concerted effort to depress the stakes and make this horrific situation as mannered and emotionless as possible.

In many respects, ’s Carrie could be seen as a similar film, with telekinetic powers in the hands of a teenage protagonist confused by oncoming womanhood. But in the hands of De Palma (and original author Stephen King), the scenario is laden with intense drama; the potent subjects of acceptance and rejection fuel cataclysmic events. What The Appointment brings to the party is that classically British sentiment that says, “What if all that, but with everyone making a heroic effort to avoid talking about anything unpleasant?” Joanne’s possible supernatural abilities take a backseat to what the film considers a more compelling subject: a decent middle-aged man beleaguered by the conflicting demands of work and family. Consider that the most intense moment in the film involves a father walking past his daughter’s room, stopping outside the door, and standing motionless for many long seconds while both father and daughter wait for something to happen. Nothing does, and yet with the weight of repressed feelings and damaged psyches, the moment hits as hard as a bucket of pig’s blood.

That doorway scene serves as a litmus test for the viewer; you get to decide just what’s been going on between them, and how distasteful it is. But there are other signs that the rot runs deep in this family. Merrow petulantly complains that her husband ignores her in favor of their daughter, a sentiment he ratifies by absentmindedly complaining that she’s hogging the sheets. There’s the event that calls Woodward away in the first place, an unexplained inquest in which he must testify in place of his (mysteriously) absent business partner about the events that led to an employee (mysteriously) dying.  And that’s the say nothing of the prologue, an effectively shocking scene—that almost seems to have been flown in from another movie—in which a music student two years prior is violently attacked by an invisible force. Death is in the air. Perhaps young Joanne doesn’t come by her covetous rage honestly.

The Appointment goes exactly where it intends to, never straying from its course. This deprives the film of suspense, but it also gives it an unsettling feeling of inevitability. Ian repeatedly tells his daughter that he has no ability to change his plans, and this happens to be true; his fate is set. His dreams and those of his wife predict the circumstances of his demise. Both his own car and its replacement acquire similar damage, as if to ensure that there is no avenue for escape. Time itself is against him; moments that should pass in a heartbeat stretch out before us. Woodward is constantly out of sync with the clocks in his house, and his watch stops working during his drive (before he loses it entirely). That car crash which seemed sloppily edited turns out to be deliberately extended beyond linear time, showing every element of the incident from multiple angles and perspectives and lingering in the moment past what one would reasonably expect. The Appointment is about 10 minutes of story and 80 minutes of mood, but that’s less a shortcoming and more a choice.

The title ends up being the key to the whole film. Woodward has an appointment with death, a fact the film elides to preserve some degree of suspense (and to sidestep litigation from the estate of Agatha Christie). In some respects, that feels like a cheat, like a shaggy dog story that takes an awfully long time to reach its punchline, and with suggestions of more substantial plotlines that never quite materialize. But The Appointment has an almost noble focus on its primary aim, to capture the exquisite discomfort of watching every detail of the last 24 hours of a man’s life as he goes about it in blissful ignorance. Show me the meme that can do that.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an odd, not entirely coherent work, but obvious faults aside, it’s also something rather special, with a couple of stand-out, set-piece sequences which mark it out as a ‘must see’ for genre fans… The suburban doom theme finally manifests itself in an extraordinary, absurd yet chilling climax…” – Eddie Harrison, Film-Authority

(This movie was nominated for review by Morgan, who remarked “it begins with an eerie opening and leads into a chilling accident sequence, one that had me muttering “W…T…F……. Truly a visual wonder.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

The Appointment (Flipside No 44) (Blu-ray)

The Appointment (Flipside No 44) (Blu-ray)
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CHRIST – THE MOVIE (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Mick Duffield

FEATURING: Crass

PLOT: Collages of images reflecting the confluence of Thatcherite policies and the consumerist habits, all intended to accompany live performances by a punk-agitprop band.

Still from christ the Movie (1990)

COMMENTS: Crass never wanted to be called “punk.” In fact, performing music appears to have been only one part of the collective’s messaging arsenal. Their numbers included artists, writers, and campaigners alongside musicians, and you’re as likely to remember Crass for their iconic logo, the fake wedding song they tricked a UK romance magazine into distributing for free, or the mocked-up phone conversation between Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan that pranked the State Department, as much as anything they put out on vinyl. (This AllMusic bio is an great introduction to the band’s political and artistic ethos.) Music was a means to an end, specifically the end of an elitist system engineered to propagate itself on the backs of the masses. The one time they really poured themselves into making a cohesive, artistic musical statement, 1982’s “Christ – The Album,” the Falklands War had commenced and concluded before the band had any opportunity to comment. That seems to have been assessed as a failure caused by mission creep, and going forward, there would be no confusion about what was most important.

It is in this context that we must assess Christ – The Movie, a film that exists mainly to provide background color at Crass concerts, rather than to be screened to an attentive audience. Moviemaking was Duffield’s contribution to the collective, and although the band eventually released Christ – The Movie as a standalone home video some years after disbanding, it’s best to imagine these images being projected on the wall of a dank, crowded club while vocalists yell out the lyrics to songs with titles like “Nineteen Eighty Bore” and “It’s the Greatest Working Class Rip-Off.” It’s best to do this because without that context, the images start to get repetitive and rather dull.

Christ – The Movie is actually a compilation of three separate montages by Duffield. “Autopsy,” the first and shortest of the trio, is also the most haphazard. News clips trade off with banal conversation, with snippets of commercials and dissections. “Autopsy” does contain the most surprising and entertaining diversion, as a camera captures the visitors to a modern art gallery being serenaded by a distorted version of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.” Amidst this, a security guard realizes he is being filmed, and his intense discomfort at finding himself on display hints at the spotlight Crass would like to shine on the unjustly powerful.

The next segment, “Choosing Death,” comes closest to succeeding as a film to be watched on its own. Images of war machines and torn bodies are interspersed with clips from a video encouraging couples to take out a second mortgage in order to rehab their kitchen. The juxtaposition makes clear that the military-industrial complex is counting on the power of shiny things to distract the masses from the atrocities being committed against them and in their name, and the buildup to catastrophe is both inevitable and strangely satisfying. After all, if these are our priorities, maybe we deserve our fate.

The final segment, “Yes Sir, I Will,” best exemplifies the band’s intention for the film: to accompany performances of the album of the same name. Crass eschews any kind of tunefulness, with thrashing guitars and slamming drums that nearly drown out the furious speeches that pass for vocals. With lyrics like “Television is today’s Nuremberg!” and “To ensure control, the superpowers need to maintain the imbalance,” anger at nearly every aspect of capitalist society is the point. To help focus the rage, Duffield repeatedly returns to the same image to represent all that is wrong in the world: the snooty, impassive face of Margaret Thatcher. The passionately despised former prime minister appears on the screen time and again, usually superimposed over footage of military machines, angry protestors, and emaciated children. But it’s almost 45 minutes long, and a little goes a long way. Images of Thatcher and the world she has wrought give way to more of the same, and if you’re not there to scream and mosh and engage in Crass’ version of the Two-Minute Hate, then the novelty wears off pretty quickly.

Crass was, from beginning to end, utterly committed to their ideals, and it’s a mark of their authenticity that the visuals of Christ – The Movie match up so well with their other artistic endeavors. As a snapshot of just why the most left-leaning voices were so angry during the early 1980s, Duffield’s work is peerless. But these movies fall prey to diminishing returns, and the whole is less than the sum of its parts. If you really want to get the maximum value out of Christ – The Movie, I think you’re gonna need a very loud and pissed-off band down front.

(This movie was nominated for review by Robin Hood sun, who said it was “definately weird.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)         

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: XI YOU [JOURNEY TO THE WEST] (2014)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Kang-sheng Lee, Denis Lavant

PLOT: A Buddhist monk moves slowly through the streets of Marseille, until a local joins his pilgrimage.

Still from XI YOU [JOURNEY TO THE WEST] (2014)

COMMENTS: In a disused church in Halberstadt, Germany, a project is underway to perform John Cage’s ORGAN2/ASLSP (As Slow As Possible) in a manner befitting its title. With the help of a specially built instrument, this interpretation of the work is expected to last a total of 639 years, wrapping up in 2640. Cage, an avant-garde rebel probably best known for the expectation-shattering composition 4’33”, has the heart of a comedian, so naturally his piece begins with a rest, which means that for the first two years of the Halberstadt performance, playing the tune involved no melody at all.

While you’re waiting for the next note to be played (set a reminder for August 5, 2026), you could theoretically squeeze in 16,000 screenings of Xi You. It would be an appropriately Zen thing to do, considering how this is essentially a film about doing one thing with intense focus and dedication. In this case, that thing is walking, as Lee’s monk moves in careful, deliberate slow-motion, oblivious to the speed and tension that surrounds him. Like the long-term John Cage recital, it feels like a stunt, a lark at the expense of the cinema of rapid-fire edits and cacophonous explosions. But also like the Halberstadt performance, there’s a purity and a beauty in watching the monk go through his slow-paced paces, achieving a contentment unknowable to most of us.

We’re 15 minutes in before we first see Lee in relation to others (in this case, the people of the city of Marseille). He ambles along the waterfront where passersby are in an awful hurry to get somewhere else. Then he takes a steady jaunt down a busy street, where the only thing stationary is a store mannequin, price tag prominent. Most compelling is the monk’s descent down the steps to a subway station (a mode of transportation he can’t possibly be intending to take) while the camera tilts down to follow him into darkness. It’s the moment that proves there’s moviemaking going on. Tsai didn’t just set up the camera and walk away; our hero is being filmed. The effect is a kind of inversion of Koyaanisqatsi; in that film, we sat still while the world moved around us at breakneck speed. Here, the usual pace of life feels wildly sped up thanks to our focus on the painfully deliberate monk. (Shout-out to the wisenheimer who posted a 6-minute speedrun of the film, as though Tsai had turned the reins over to Godfrey Reggio).

Amazingly, this is but one entry in the Slow-Moving Monk Cinematic Universe. Tsai has released 10 films featuring Lee’s walker since 2011. (The latest, Abiding Nowhere, premiered this past February.) Xi You is noteworthy as one of the longest entries in the series, but it also stands out for the dramatic contrast it presents with Lavant’s character, a despondent man who eventually seeks some measure of solace by adopting a meditative frame of mind. The movie opens with an intense focus on Lavant’s craggy, disconsolate features, as Tsai demonstrates that pain and grief can be equally slow, equally all-consuming. But Lee serves as an angel of hope, almost invisible but omnipresent in Lavant’s darkest moments, so that when we see Lavant trailing the monk in the penultimate scene (there are 14 shots in the course of 52 minutes), his embrace of the hyperfocused life becomes a moment of triumph.

Tsai’s film was not the only one to come out around this time borrowing a title and inspiration from the legendary Chinese epic. While Stephen Chow’s action/comedy is considerably faster-paced, Tsai’s is arguably just as eventful. Xi You feels strange because its sense of time is so out of sync with the world, but that’s precisely the point. Will the monk ever get where’s he’s going? Maybe he’s on his way to Halberstadt to catch John Cage’s grand finale. Even if it takes that long, the thrill will be in the journey, the patient and deliberate journey.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“… a sort of poetic zen burlesque, halfway between Buster Keaton, Andy Warhol, performance art and Jacques Tati…” – Jorge Mourinha, The Flickering Wall (contemporaneous)

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

Stray Dogs / Journey to the West - 2-DVD Set ( Jiao you / Xi you ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - France ]

Stray Dogs / Journey to the West - 2-DVD Set ( Jiao you / Xi you ) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.0 Import - France ]
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: POLA X (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Leos Carax

FEATURING: Guillaume Depardieu, Katerina Golubeva, , Delphine Chuillot

PLOT: Pierre’s happy-go-lucky existence is shattered when he meets a young woman claiming to be his lost sister; suddenly disenchanted with his life, he abandons his mother, his fiancée, and his successful literary formula in search of a higher truth.

Still from pola X (1999)

COMMENTS: Herman Melville needed a hit. He’d received a critical drubbing for his last book, a light tome about the whaling industry, so to improve his fortunes, he poured his effort into a potboiler with Gothic overtones. Did it work? Not only did Pierre, or The Ambiguities not reverse his fortunes, but the negative response went beyond the work and spilled over to the author himself, with the New York Day Book headlining its review, “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY”.

Are there parallels with Leos Carax, who waited eight years following the critical and box office failure of The Lovers on the Bridge to bring forth this adaptation of Pierre? One hates to espouse such a simplistic theory of armchair psychoanalysis, but the shoe sure does fit. Just as Melville poured his wounded heart into his tale, Carax goes all in on every bit of melodrama. He faithfully adapts all aspects of the book, including its  transgressive and destructive relationships. For what it’s worth, the critics all called Carax crazy, as well.

Although he’d be the last to admit it, Pierre is already pretty messed up at the start of Pola X. He speaks in romantic platitudes to Lucie, his fiancée whom he’s cheats upon regularly. (Carax nicely frames one such conversation atop a hillside with a dramatic vista, his camera swooping like the beginning of The Sound of Music.) He has an unusually close relationship with his mother Marie, in whose house he still lives, and who has no qualms about bathing in front of her son. Their unity seems to be a reaction to something in his late father’s past; we don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s bad enough that newsstands are selling books about the old man’s precipitous fall. His cousin Thibault has given himself over completely to the pursuit of money. And there’s his budding career as an anonymous novelist, a vocation that permits him to act as the voice of his generation without any pressure to represent it. Clearly, Pierre is a man of the utmost privilege, the kind you fully expect to see brought low by circumstance.

So part of what makes his fall from grace so surprising is that it is almost entirely self-generated, inspired by his discovery of Isabella, a homeless immigrant who professes to be Pierre’s sister by virtue of one of his father’s dalliances. This dovetails with dreams Pierre has been having about a woman who matches Isabella to a tee, and the discovery completely unmoors him and everyone around him. He cuts off all connection to his past life, he takes up with Isabella and a pair of fellow struggling immigrants (and is shocked when hotels turn them away, cab drivers insult them, and Thibault denies any connection to him), and he declares that everything he has ever written has been fraudulent and now he will write the book that truly blows it all wide open.

Carax has a lot of fun pushing his characters to their limits. Pierre undergoes a full transformation, as the twentysomething socialite takes to wielding a cane and wearing a blanket like a Russian greatcoat, as though he had suddenly become a tubercular artist from a 19th century opera. He adopts a fully disgusted assessment of the human race, telling a young girl that all people stink (a viewpoint that recoils upon her in a spectacularly bad way). Pierre and his troupe don’t merely find themselves on the streets; they wind up at the warehouse headquarters of a spectacular industrial music collective (playing the brilliantly realized score by avant-garde rock legend Scott Walker) that turns out to be a terrorist cell. Lucie doesn’t merely waste away in misery at having been ditched by Pierre, but actually shows up at his door, clinging to him and maintaining a blissful ignorance about his connection with Isabella. And Marie doesn’t merely pine for her wayward son, but roams the countryside on his motorcycle until it becomes the agent of her destruction (in a morbidly funny manner).

And then there’s what he does to Isabella, as they make manifest their bond, explicitly. (Golubeva used a body double for the most graphic moments; Depardieu did not.) It’s almost as though Carax wanted to eliminate any doubt as to whether they consummate their incestuous relationship by presenting it in pornographic detail. But he gets to have his cake and eat it too (not a euphemism), because the scene isn’t romantic in any context. The sex is hungry rather than loving, desperate rather than passionate. Whatever Pierre is trying to find in his life, he pays no heed to any obstacles, physical or moral, that stand in his way. Of course, in doing so, he brings the girl down with him. There’s a reason that he later dreams of the two of them consumed by a river of blood.

Pola X ends up being a peculiar sort of ironic contradiction. A protagonist who has it all but finds a lie at the heart of his happiness, and the ensuing search for truth that brings only pain to himself and those around him. Intriguingly, both of Pierre’s creators found a different way out of their dark places. Melville eventually turned away from prose, devoting himself to poetry. Carax, meanwhile, only got weirder.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not all of Pola X is fully comprehensible… But the images—oh, they capture the mood of this piece and the things that are really important.”–Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

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

Pola X [DVD]

Pola X [DVD]
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