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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ROCK-A-DOODLE (1991)

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DIRECTED BY: Don Bluth

FEATURING: Voices of Glen Campbell, Phil Harris, Christopher Plummer, Ellen Greene, , , Sorrell Booke, Sandy Duncan, Toby Scott Ganger

PLOT: Chanticleer, the rooster whose morning crow brings daylight, leaves for the big city to become a singing star after the Duke of Owls banishes sunlight.

Still from Rock-a-Doodle (1991)

COMMENTS: Walt Disney Animation, purveyors of fine animated fairy tales since 1937, tried in three separate decades to build a feature out of the medieval tale of the arrogant Chanticleer, whose call was thought to summon the sun. The rooster boasted a fine pedigree, including an appearance in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a starring role in a play by Edmond Rostand of Cyrano de Bergerac fame, so a film showcasing a big singing bird seemed right up the studio’s alley. Alas, despite repeated attempts and the efforts of some of the Disney crew’s greatest storytellers in the studio’s history (including Uncle himself), they never found a way to make the story work, finding the central character too unlikable. Maybe it’s just a point of stubborn pride that Disney apostate Don Bluth, who notoriously ditched the 70s-era Mouse House due to its lethargic approach to animation, concluded he was the man to crack the code.

Bluth’s solution was to deliver story in bulk. In addition to the source tale, we’ve got the addition of a new villain with a plot to block out the sun permanently, a mapped-on telling of the later years of a certain king of rock ‘n’ roll and his manipulative manager, the adventures of a bunch of country animals new to the city, and most oddly, a live-action framing story in which a young boy is reading the very story we have been watching, only to be dragged into it himself by a torrential rainstorm accompanied by a surprise dose of magic. The resulting movie somehow suffers both from a surfeit of plot and an alarming lack of it. There’s an awful lot going on, and it’s well-animated, but there’s not enough time for anything to get the attention it needs. (Subtract the credits, and the film barely squeezes by at an hour.) The movie is an undercooked omelet with too many ingredients.

Rock-a-Doodle reeks of post-production panic. The rapid-fire intro strongly suggests a first act hacked to pieces by studio notes and confused comment cards, and the solution seems to be enlisting Harris (a Disney mainstay making his final film appearance) to ladle more and more narration on top of the hastily edited footage in an effort to knit the disparate elements together. Logic takes a beating; it’s hard to reconcile The Duke’s plan to destroy all sunlight with the fact that Chanticleer is shown that the sun continues to rise without him.

Bizarrely, the movie consistently undercuts its best idea: Chanticleer as Elvis. It’s a cute notion to pair up the cock who heralds the sun with the pelvis stops millions of hearts, and the bird’s coxcomb is an amusing analogy to Elvis’ famed pompadour. Bluth and Co. know this is the twist that sets their version apart, and they almost go all in. Bringing in Glen Campbell to voice the character (his ability to impersonate Presley was so pronounced that songwriters frequently hired him as a stand-in for demo recordings). Enlisting Elvis’ own backing group, the Jordanaires. Lacing the film with choice elements including Vegas glitz, rockabilly tunes, and a Colonel Tom Parker analogue. And then, having gone to such great lengths to rhyme with the legend of The King, the filmmakers proceed to interfere with every single one of Chanticleer’s musical numbers, burying them beneath dialogue, sound effects, or narration. We don’t get to hear a single performance all the way through until the closing credits. Every chance to appreciate the joke is obliterated. It’s a perplexing act of self-sabotage.

Rock-A-Doodle feels like an idea that might possibly have worked if given the chance. It also feels like an idea that was thrown into the meat grinder because it didn’t work at all. It’s hard to know which is right. All we can know for certain is that Disney said no thrice, while Bluth said yes once, and it’s the little guy who probably rues his decision.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…in the end I had to surrender every shred of reason and common sense and just go along for the ride. Everything about it, from the grotesque delirium of the animated city sequences to the cornball artifice of the live action scenes with Edmond and his family, is so bizarre and tonally misjudged that it offers up a perverse kind of pleasure. I’m actually amazed that this film doesn’t have a more robust cult following – it has ‘midnight screening’ written all over it. … I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone with a penchant for the weird and inexplicable.” – Scampy, The Spirochaete Trail

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

Rock-A-Doodle

Rock-A-Doodle

  • ROCK A DOODLE ROCK A DOODLE (1 DVD)
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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HELTER SKELTER (2012)

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Herutâ sukerutâ

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DIRECTED BY: Mika Ninagawa

FEATURING: Erika Sawajiri, , , Kiko Mizuhara, Nao Ômori

PLOT:  The struggle to keep up appearances and growing pressure from younger models pushes supermodel Lilico’s physical and mental well-being to the breaking point.

Still from Helter Skelter (2012)

COMMENTS: A helter skelter is a slide. A lighthouse-shaped structure that you climb up through the inside to then slide down on a curving ramp nailed to the outside. The Beatles’ song of the same name gives it away in its opening lyric: “When I get to the bottom, I go back to the top of the slide.” Regardless of what Charles Manson thought it meant, it’s supposed to be about something that’s fun for a brief moment, but it’s also a reminder that everything that goes up must eventually come back down, and sometimes right quickly at that.

If the higher you go means the faster you fall, then Lilico is about to come crashing down at light speed. She is living her peak life: impossibly beautiful, her face graces countless magazine covers and advertisements. She’s about to branch out into film acting, and every girl in Japan knows her by name. So when she spots a sizeable flaw in her perfect skin, it’s a literal crack in her facade, the augur of an explosive downfall. Helter Skelter is all about that implosion, the slow-motion train wreck of her discovery that perfect beauty has always had an expiration date, and that page on the calendar has finally turned.

It’s hard to work up a lot of pity for someone who is rich, famous, and ridiculously attractive, but Helter Skelter does a solid job in showing how Lilico’s life of luxury is not especially enjoyable. She is monstrous but also desperate, and how her misery expresses itself is the primary source of Helter Skelter’s weirdness. She takes out her rage on her doggedly loyal assistant Hana through sexual abuse and humiliation, and starts to have out-of-control hallucinations at inconvenient moments. The fact that she is being tracked by a pair of detectives who resemble the cast of a Japanese reboot of “The X-Files” is appropriate, because Lilico herself is otherworldly. These moments of panic and cruelty are so outlandish, so extreme, that the biggest surprise is that we are expected to view them realistically. Perhaps tales like The Substance have trained us to expect a supernatural element, but Helter Skelter offers no twist. The film straightforwardly insists that Lilico’s beauty has a scientific (if illegal and amoral) explanation, and that her behavior is all her own. The arrival of her very own Eve Harrington, the naturally stunning Kozue, who achieves success despite expressing apathy toward the  fashion business, reinforces that point. Kozue doesn’t expect to be beautiful forever, and while she knows some regurgitation goes with the job, she plans to give it up someday. By contrast, considering everything Lilico has done to secure her position, her fear of decline and the collapse of her enhanced body utterly short-circuit her.

Japanese culture is both fascinated and repelled by celebrity, and Helter Skelter enlists exactly the right people to delve into its darker side. Director Ninagawa was a fashion photographer herself, and she films with the barely controlled energy of a wild photo shoot. Sawajiri also knows the world, having been a successful model before turning to acting. (She gained notoriety for a press conference where she was viewed as disrespectful to reporters and her castmates alike, so audiences in Japan would experience art imitating life in Lilico’s ultimate, disastrous encounter with the media.) Their bona fides are beyond reproach, and there’s no question that the team produces a motion picture with a unique sensibility, bringing their personal experience to the story. The thing is, while Helter Skelter is a beautifully crafted film, a certain sameness creeps in as the story seems to be building toward something cataclysmic, but never quite gets there. Lilico’s fate is inevitable—it is painfully obvious that she is going to crash—but given the many omens of doom and the explosive nature of Ninagawa’s camera and Sawajiri’s volcanic performance, the impact ultimately feels blunted. Lilico’s fate can’t quite live up to the drama of what precedes it.

Helter Skelter is based on a popular manga by Kyoko Okazaki, and it feels like it. It jumps storylines and techniques like a page turning, and the bold and vibrant colors and off-kilter angles feel like they could have jumped straight out of the pages of a comic book. The film’s most striking image, when Lilico faces a room full of popping camera flashes, has the veneer of illustration. But like fashion itself, the movie is successful at delivering style and attitude but quickly moves on to the next new thing without imparting a message beyond the surface. It’s a fun, fast ride, but it’s just a ride. Then I get to the bottom and I see you again.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a feverish character study about fame, vanity, and the terrifying fragility of manufactured perfection… The visuals never settle into a comfortable place. Scenes are filled with exaggerated color palettes and surreal staging, making the environment feel beautiful and suffocating. It’s a world built entirely around image, and Ninagawa constantly reminds the audience how artificial that image really is.” – Chris Jones, Overly Honest Reviews

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

Helter Skelter

Helter Skelter

  • This lurid body horror, based on a manga by Kyoko Okazaki and directed by Mika Ninagawa (Sakuran), is a candy-colored nightmare!

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000)

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We all think we know Faust. The guy who sold his soul to the devil, right? But before there was Christopher Marlowe’s dramatization of the tale of Faust, or Goethe’s two-volume epic Faust, or Rembrandt’s etching of Faust, or Liszt or Berlioz or even Randy Newman’s Faust, there was the actual guy. The historical record finds a Johan Georg Faust born in the last 13th century who went on to become a respected alchemist and astrologer, but who may also have been an outrageous con artist, claiming the ability to reproduce the miracles of Jesus Christ. Rumors suggest that he died in an explosion, a fate which his contemporaries attested to his ties with the devil. Before the century was out, tales of his extraordinary misdeeds had begun to proliferate; one such copy fell into the hands of Marlowe, and the legend of the man who made an unwise bargain with the devil began to spread.

The price of immortality is steep. “Faustian bargain” has become common parlance, and on this very site, two different interpretations of the Faust myth are currently under consideration for eventual induction into the Apocrypha, including a Jan Svankmajer-directed surreal mix and a version of more recent vintage from Russia. Today, let’s dive into a couple more such interpretations, one attempting to faithfully deliver the classic tale with what were then newfangled tools of cinema, while the other takes what it wants from the myth to reach its own, not-especially-lofty ends.

FAUST (1926)

 

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DIRECTED BY: F. W. Murnau

FEATURING: Gösta Ekman, , Camilla Horn,

PLOT: Heaven and hell make a wager over the fate of Faust, a pious man who sells his soul to the devil to save his city from the plague. 

COMMENTS: The short directorial career of F. W. Murnau is so loaded with classics — Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Sunrise, Tabu — that a remarkable achievement like Faust could easily get lost in the shuffle. The film more than earns its place in this august company, though, with style to burn. Though the tale is familiar and the visual gimmicks are naturally dated, there’s a freshness to this telling that sidesteps a lot of the expected reservations.

Murnau is particularly proud of his in-camera effects, and he deploys these techniques with Zemeckisian fervor. An early scene in which the devil looms over a small medieval town like the most imposing mountain would have justified recalling the film a hundred years hence, but Continue reading THEY CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FAUST (1926) / FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED (2000) →

List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: HOPITAL BRUT (1999)

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DIRECTED BY: Le Dernier Cri (Pakito Bolino, Marc Druez, Christophe Istier)

FEATURING: None

PLOT: A revue showcasing the grotesque occupants of the world’s most inhospitable hospital.

Still from Hospital Brut (1999)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Hopital Brut is an indefatigable assault on the senses, combining a deliberately crude and hyperactive visual style, a clamorous soundtrack that never softens or slows, and a giddy disregard for propriety. The curators aim to offend, and they never let up in their compulsion to shock.

COMMENTS: The digital hive mind at Google Translate interprets “hôpital brut” directly as “raw hospital.” However, “brut” alone lso translates as “gross,” and “Gross Hospital” is a far more appropriate and accurate title for these 45 minutes of cartoon cacophony assembled by the French collective Le Dernier Cri (translation: “The Latest”).

One of the things that makes animation anthologies like Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation compelling is the broad range of styles and intentions sitting alongside each other. Hopital Brut is based on comic panels created by more than two dozen stars of the alt-comic scene, and their unique artistic approaches seem well-suited to the format, which promises something distinctly strange behind each door. However, the end product suffers from an interminable sameness, with one chaotic onslaught sliding into the next one. The techniques change somewhat, with stop-motion, paper cutouts, and even the occasional burst of sped-up live action footage spotlighted, but they all share a rapid pace, herky-jerky rhythm, and a love of the coarse. With so many sources of artistic inspiration at play here, and considering the assembled film’s intention to be a patchwork quilt of strangeness, maybe it’s not asking too much to expect a little variety. Instead, the same ideas keep popping up to the tune of the relentless hammering of an industrial soundtrack.

Despite its repetitiveness, a few segments have enough novelty to stand out, such as the tale of the lonely artist who turns to a lord of the underworld in order to get girls, but discovers that the over-endowed demon has more to offer. Another patient freaks out when he sees himself drowning in his soup. A set of genitals features anthropomorphized testicles that look like busts of German composers. A giant praying mantis shows up for a quick orgy of rape and evisceration, which makes for a change of pace from all the poking, prodding, and maiming that the doctors usually employ. But even these moments are only marginally more impactful than their brethren, as the same notions are served over and over again. The chef may change, but the dish remains the same.

There’s little doubt that Hopital Brut is weird. It wears its irreverence and its iconoclasm on its sleeve. But after that, there’s very little to recommend it. The film is a Venn diagram where the categories of “weirdness” and “watchability” are moving steadily apart until they are completely separate circles. It ends as it began, no less defiant and no more engaging than it was from the outset. Still, the collective seems to have landed squarely in the center of its intended target, and there’s an amusing piece of evidence to back that up. If you visit the film’s page at MUBI, you’ll be greeted with a piece of text which is both absurdly tangential and highly apropos: “Hopital Brut is not available to watch. Instead, check out Lars von Trier’s Antichrist.” An even trade? It’s probably a perfect double feature, an algorithmic pairing that would make Le Dernier Cri’s collective hearts flutter.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Don’t want to fry on acid? Afraid your gonna do a Diane Linklater dive off a skyscraper thinking that you can fly and the only “scraper” you’ll get is when they peel you off the pavement?! Look no further than the semi short ‘Hopital Brut’!!!… keep kids far away from this, unless you want your kids traumatized for their rest of their short, miserable lives.” —noisepuncher_caiaav, Noisepuncher

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

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005)

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DIRECTED BY: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe

FEATURING: Harry Treadaway, Luke Treadaway, Tania Emery, Jane Horrocks

PLOT: Conjoined twins Tom and Barry are conscripted into show business by an unscrupulous promoter who plans to make them into gimmicky pop stars, but they follow their own path, becoming punk rock pioneers.

Still from Brothers of the Head (2005)

COMMENTS: The original Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker (who were, in fact, born in Siam, present-day Thailand), were a sensation from the moment they arrived on American shores. For a decade, they toured the country shocking audiences with the horrifying wonder of their physical connection. Their private lives were the subject of public fascination: they married a pair of sisters and fathered 19 children between them, fueling speculation about the physical and moral gymnastics required to accomplish such a feat. They kept slaves until the Civil War, returned to touring to rebuild their fortunes after the war, quarreled with P. T. Barnum, and eventually died within hours of each other.

I was starting to think about how much the plot of Brothers of the Head paralleled the tale of the Bunkers, when the film came right out and made the comparison itself. The Howe boys hold up a picture of their predecessors in conjoined fame, noting the similarity of their situations, and when they did, my heart sank a little. Far from pre-empting any protests, it solidified my fear that this story of shocking originality—conjoined twins become rock stars—was only going to walk down well-tread paths.

Brothers of the Head takes the form of pseudo-documentary, unspooling the short but eventful professional lives of the twins through a series of I-was-there talking head interviews and a remarkably deep treasure trove of archival footage. It’s delivered with a high degree of authenticity, which is not surprising considering the nonfiction pedigree of directors Fulton and Pepe, who helmed two different Terry Gilliam making-of documentaries, including Lost in La Mancha. But it also puts the central characters at a level of remove, ensuring that we can never know them except through the interpretations of others. And that choice ends up causing the most damage to the film’s credibility, because it means that any point the filmmakers want to make must be delivered with skull-crushing obviousness. Suggestions of impropriety by the boys’ handlers are conveyed through nervous tics and unsubtle hints. The arrival of a pretty girl to drive a (metaphorical) wedge between the brothers is endlessly dissected by present-day commentators with 20/20 hindsight. And were you wondering if Tom and Barry were working through their troubles via their songs? If the glaring transparency of the lyrics doesn’t tip you off, then the latter-day interviewee observing “Now what do you think that was all about?” with a cockeyed glare should Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BROTHERS OF THE HEAD (2005) →