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Capsules

CAPSULE: BUFFALO ’66 (1998)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Vincent Gallo, , , ,

PLOT: When Billy Brown looses a $10,000 bet he can’t pay for the Buffalo Bills to win the Superbowl, he’s forced to do prison time for a crime he didn’t commit; when he’s released from jail, he kidnaps a random girl to pretend to be his wife in order to pull the wool over the eyes of his unwitting parents, who think he’s working for the government.

Still from uffalo '66 (1998)
WHY IT SHOULDN’T MAKE THE LIST: There’s not a scrap of strange and fantastic here, and sometimes the stark realism is agonizing and tedious. Vincent Gallo portrays Buffalo, New York as a soulless town with a cast of idiots. Buffalo ’66 plays like a Daniel Clowes comic but without the eccentricity: dazed and dissociated people wander through a wasteland of football, TV, chain diners, and strip joints. Unlike in Clowes, the protagonist comes out of it a changed man.

COMMENTS: Vincent Gallo plays Billy Brown, a guy who really needs to pee. He spends nearly the first twenty minutes of the movie looking for a place to go and, in the process, reveals that he’s an incorrigible jerk by beating up a stranger in a bathroom he deems a “faggot” and kidnapping a girl to pass off as his wife. Perpetually peeved, Billy even bothers to complain about how filthy the windshield is during the kidnapping in which he also fusses about how he can’t drive her “shifter car.” Finally, once in a residential neighborhood, Billy gets out of the car and pees, releasing his anger and annoyance in urine. But where does it all stem from? Why is this guy such a jerk? Via overlapping flashbacks displayed while Billy lies on a park bench in a monochrome landscape of grey, we watch his monotonous jail time: glimpses of water fountains and chess games. He goes from grey to grey, from the prison to Buffalo, New York, in winter. It’s a place where, in a football-centric household, his parents stare vacantly into space and shove food in his direction. His dad is a retired lounge singer totally uninterested in his son, but he takes a sexual interest in Billy’s fake wife, Layla. Billy’s sugar n’ sunshine mother, dolled up in her Buffalo Bills merchandise, can’t even remember her son’s severe allergy to chocolate. During an uncomfortable bedroom scene in which Layla forces Billy’s dad to sing some show tunes from days gone by, Billy tears up at the sight of a photograph of him as a boy. Underneath his unremitting jerk exterior, he’s a pathetic figure living in the shadow of what could have been, if the Bills had won the Superbowl. As bitter and miserable as he behaves, there’s a child living in him who’s never truly had a chance to grow up.

The film begins with a freeze frame of Billy as a boy, underscored with Gallo’s own song with the lyrics “all my life I’ve been this lonely boy.” When huddling alone in a bathtub in a sleazy motel, Layla remarks that Billy looks “like a little boy” We see Billy teetering under the weight of the tough guy role he feels he has to play through a confused lament in a Denny’s restroom. He’s convinced himself he’ll go into a strip joint and kill the placekicker whose missed field goal has ruined his life, and then kill himself; but then, as if Clarence has come down from heaven to make him appreciate being alive, Billy, the over-grown child and tough guy jerk becomes kind and comfortable in his own skin. In drastic contrast to the painful realism of a film characterized with its grotesque personages, Billy undergoes a quick change in personality: from cantankerous to joyful. This transformation of an inveterately unlovable character changes this film from sour to saccharine, with an artificial sentimentality that couldn’t even warm Frank Capra’s heart.

While Billy may be the main focal point of the film, Chrisina Ricci’s character is infinitely more interesting. Wearing searing blue eyeshadow and a promiscuous blouse to a tap dance lesson, Layla is sex-starved and ready for adventure, so when a scruffy stranger kidnaps her, she resists only a little, putting the bulk of her energy into crafting a romantic history for Billy’s parents. She is the sweet and sincere to oppose Billy’s sour phoniness. His stridency hardly bothers Layla because he’s the only boy who’s ever shown her any attention, so she pays back his nonstop cruelty with love. While Billy’s theme song may be “Lonely Boy,” Layla’s is King Crimson’s “Moonchild,” played during her awkward tap dance number in a bowling alley. This scene portrays her as a beautiful but naïve creature, in violent contrast to Billy’s hackneyed disenchantment.

Although bearing complex and distinct characters, Buffalo ’66‘s artificial resolution rings hollow enough to undermine the power of the miserably real plight of Billy Brown, the embittered protagonist who bet more than he had on a football team his mother taught him to believe in.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…plays like a collision between a lot of half-baked visual ideas and a deep and urgent need… There’s not a thing conventional about this movie.”–Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: BLACK CAT, WHITE CAT (1998)

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Crna Macka, Beli Macor

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Florijan Ajdini, Srdan Todorovic, Bajram Severdzan, Branka Katic

PLOT: Dadan, a local gangster, promises to release Matko’s debts if he will marry his son to Dadan’s sister.

Still from Black Cat, White Cat (1998)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s a great movie, but we have to make our way down a long list of more appropriate adjectives—eccentric, madcap, farcical, etc.—before we get to “weird” as a way to describe it.

COMMENTS: Black Cat, White Cat is almost Shakespearean in its comedic plot: you have two sets of young lovers and a horde of older, money-obsessed fools whose scheming complicates the youngsters’ chances for happiness. Set in a village on the banks of the muddy Danube, the main plot is set into motion by 17-year old Zare’s father, the irresponsible Matko, who hatches a harebrained scheme to try to steal several train cars loaded with gasoline—a caper which requires the assistance of not one, but two sets of gangsters. Things predictably go awry, leading Matko to promise Zare’s hand in marriage to coke-addled Dadan’s short and shrewish sister, Ladybird. But Zare is in love with a feisty barmaid, while Ladybird refuses to marry a man she doesn’t love; Dadan, however, insists that his family honor requires Ladybird’s marriage, and is intent on staging the nuptials at gunpoint, if need be. This leads to a festive but awkward gypsy wedding that is further complicated by a corpse on ice in the attic and a pending visit from a more powerful mobster.

Quirky characters abound, from the crime boss with bad teeth and a love of Casablanca to Zare’s thoughtful grandfather, who figures that his own demise may save his grandson from his no-good father, but it’s Srdan Todorovic who dominates as Dadan. With an open-necked shirt revealing his gold chains, a pair of live-in groupies, and a crucifix filled with cocaine, Dadan seems to have stepped out of a Seventies disco movie: Serbian Night Fever. Amped up on nose candy, he constantly pumps his fists from nervous energy, sometimes to a thundering beat that echoes only inside his own coked-out skull. He’s also fond of firing automatic weapons into the air and juggling hand grenades for sport, so despite his ridiculous appearance, he’s not the kind of guy you want to trifle with. A bride disguised as a tree stump and a booby-trapped outhouse provide slapstick interludes. There are a few weird touches here, as well, such as dead people coming back to life, a thoughtful grandson who brings a seven piece band to visit his sick grandpa, and a pig who inexplicably eats a car. With a small town’s worth of Eastern European eccentrics, a knotty romantic plot and grotesque and vulgar comic details (like the woman who pulls nails from a board with her clenched buttocks), Black Cat, White Cat is an amphetamine rush that never lets up. Thick and spicy as goulash, it’s the kind of script Leonard Elmore might have written if he’s been born a Bosnian gypsy.

Stung by politically-motivated criticism of his previous movie, Underground (1995), Emir Kusturica had publicly announced his retirement from filmmaking. He changed his mind to start working on a documentary about gypsy music, a project he never completed but which sparked the idea for the story that became Black Cat, White Cat.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a mad scramble through the Felliniesque realm of Mr. Kusturica’s imagination, and it proves nothing if not this much: give this man the Danube, gypsy musicians and a camera and you’ve got a party.”–Janet Maslin, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by Dr D, who described it as a “joyously insane gangster-wedding-crime movie!” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

366 Underground, Capsules

366 UNDERGROUND: BAD CHICKEN (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Carter Mays

FEATURING: Isabelle Gardo, Michael Palaniuk, voice of David Schweizer

PLOT: A chicken convinces a beautiful woman to participate in a fake reality TV show, hoping to seduce her.

Still from Bad Chicken (2013)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s got a sociopathic chicken, which is something you don’t see everyday, but it doesn’t have enough weird huevos to crack the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies ever made.

COMMENTS: Bad Chicken sets me to wondering about the dilemma of low-budget filmmaking. What can you do to set yourself apart from big-budget pictures? Bad Chicken is well-shot, well-lit, well-edited, with a good score (by Schweitzer, who also voices the main chicken) and an accomplished credits sequence; technically, it’s television show-quality affair (thankfully, it doesn’t stoop to mimicking the handheld production values of the reality shows it mocks). I could imagine some steroid-fed variation on this idea playing in theaters, with 3-D CGI chickens and a second-tier comedian like Kevin James voicing the bird.

A comedy about cute puppets engaging in politically incorrect bad behavior would have been an underground outrage in 1989, but in the 2010s, after Seth McFarlane’s Ted, it’s straight cineplex stuff. With bad taste mainstreamed in the post “South Park” world, there’s less and less the underground can give us that Hollywood isn’t be willing to supply, only with bigger names and higher production values. Bad Chicken has a decent enough gimmick and it makes for a watchable enough comedy, but it doesn’t push the outrageousness meter to the lengths it would have to go to get noticed. Sure, there’s a (non-explicit) montage of Charlie Chicken picking up hookers for hotel room trysts, and a scene of two chickens dueling with dildos, but there’s nothing here you couldn’t see done better on a cutting edge TV-14 sketch comedy show. The situation is absurd, but the big punchlines never arrive (there are no poultry-based puns, which seems like a gamble in a chicken comedy).

On the plus side, starlet Isabelle Gardo (not pictured) ruffles some feathers with her satirical turn as a shallow, celebrity-obsessed bimbo; she appears to have a minor orgasm from reading an email announcing that she has been selected as a reality show contestant. Her performance, however, is mainly impressive in the sense that it makes you hope to see her in something a little bigger. This is the dilemma low-budget independent films find themselves in: it’s not enough to be just as good as regular entertainment. They have to be better, weirder, or at least make your blood boil when you watch them. They have to have zero restraint, they can’t leave any bad taste on the table. Bad Chicken isn’t a bad watch—it’s a painless way to kill ninety minutes—but it works better as an advertisement for its makers’ potential to move up the production ladder than it does as on its own as a wicked cult item.

Bad Chicken was picked up for distribution by Gravitas Ventures, which specializes in video-on-demand distribution. The film can be screened digitally through Amazon, Itunes, etc., and can be rented on a number of American cable networks. DVDs can be purchased directly from the makers at the official site.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…part media satire and part hallucinogenic weirdo comedy.”–Graeme Clark, The Spinning Image (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: COMPUTER CHESS (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Andrew Bujalski

FEATURING: Patrick Reister, Robin Schwartz, Myles Paige, Gerald Peary

PLOT: In the early 1980’s, computer programmers gather in a hotel to compete in a computer chess tournament.

Still from Computer Chess (2013)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Computer Chess has a few bizarre moments and boasts oddly creative editing techniques that make it worth mentioning on this site.  However, the weirdness is too mild to be seriously considered for the List.

COMMENTS: Witness the birth of the cyborg, the collision of man and machine. The 1980’s were the decade that saw the explosion of the tech industry. With the acceleration of hardware design and subsequent rapid development of more efficient calculations by programmers, the initial platform of humble computers created during this time period blossomed exponentially within a very short time frame. The movie Computer Chess, which takes place in this era, is as close an analysis as we are going to get about the rise of modern tech-culture and the consequences that we may face (or already face) because of it. Computer Chess presents its take with exuberant humor and smudges of dark trippiness.  In other words, welcome to geek heaven!

The movie’s minimal plot concerns a group of early techies competing in a chess tournament for a cash prize, only the moves are determined by computer programs and not the players themselves. Besides the tournament action, scenes are filled with philosophical conversations about programming, the future of computers, and human nature. The artful editing (cracks and glitches), set design (Lynchian hallways full of cats), and the physical appearance of the participants are some of the movie’s strengths in the weird department, offering a balanced tone of subtle eeriness and quirky humor. The on-screen font signifying the different stages of the event gives the picture a retro-technological vibe, while the programmers wear thick-rimmed glasses and consume drinks like Scotch and red wine.

Peter (Patrick Reister), the central protagonist, acts as a sort of human calculator, staying up for days at a time trying to debug the flaws in his computer program, while his mentor, a seemingly stable family man who has brought his wife and kid along to the tournament, guides him through the fiasco while reminding him not to let his own personal ideas interfere with the process of fixing the problems. Peter remains completely focused, obsessing to the point where each consecutive scene makes him appear less human. The sole female participant in the tournament shows him considerably more attention than she does the others, and this seems to have no effect on him at all; his face is expressionless and contemplative at all times. Sharing the same space as the tournament competitors is a spiritual marriage counseling group led by a soulful and charismatic African man. The group represents the purely humanist side of the scenario, as the aging and uncomfortably erotic couples avoid scientific notions of progress, standing opposite the nerdy and repressed machine fetishists competing for mathematical dominance. One scene shows the couples fondling warm loaves of bread while they moan together in ecstasy: a starkly humanistic counterpoint to the exacting and calculated behavior of the chess competitors. A sense of unity is developed between these two paradigms through a metaphor likening the movements of people to the movements of pieces on a chess board, signifying the absurdity of the vast and chaotic mathematical outcomes within the two.

From an early point in the movie, there is a central message given about the definition of human consciousness and how it translates to the creation of artificial intelligence, and it’s precisely during the resulting conversational junctions between characters when vague but powerful feelings of unease begin to surface. This hyper-modern anxiety is fully embodied by Peter, who is competing in the tournament but having trouble getting his computer to work properly. The black and white picture and utterly bizarre snippets of alien-synthesizer can sometimes recall other computer/science films such as ’s Pi, but instead of giving us a manic character study about obsession we are given a series of quiet, somewhat dark suggestions that these calculating machines we depend on for all sorts of human needs are actually entities. Luckily, the heaviness of these concepts is delightfully balanced with oddball humor and ample substance abuse. The movie even dips into meta-fiction a few times, making references to the conceptual dynamics between digital and analog technologies (the guy in charge of filming the tournament tells the cameraman not to point it at the sun), and it is effective because we already know where the technology is headed—to a place where boundaries between people and machines appear to grow thinner by the second. Today, one doesn’t have to be geeky to have a deep relationship with a computer, or a camera for that matter.

A single scene is shown in color, in which the compellingly off-putting (albeit humorous) moocher/programmer Michael Papageorge (Myles Paige) searches his mother’s home for money that he owes some of the other programmers. The picture abruptly changes back to black and white, triggered by the vocals of Pat Henderson (Gerald Peary), who recites the phrase, “lost in a loop.” The theme of looping, previously mentioned in a stoned conversation between the team members in a hotel room, could be seen as a convergence of human cognition and mechanical calculation. Key philosophical questions are raised about the nature of the human brain and its relationship to computer technology—thinking machines. The relevance of these kinds of philosophical inquiries is powerful in an age where technology has come to define what a person is, whether it’s through the use of cell phone apps or social networking profiles.

The ending is pleasantly funny and wickedly surprising with an insane punchline that has miles of implications, both about the main character and about the future of humanity. It’s almost creepy in its quietly dry delivery, but is outrageous enough to remind the viewer not to take everything they just saw too seriously.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Dryly humorous and wonderfully weird, this is a preternaturally mundane evocation of early 80s nerdery and an almost scary peek at the history of AI.”–MaryAnn Johanson, Flick Filosopher (contemporaneous)

Capsules

FOR EVER MOZART (1996)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Vicky Messica, Madeleine Assas

PLOT: Although there are many digressions, the two main plotlines involve a group of actors traveling to Sarajevo to put on a play and a movie director trying to make a film called Fatal Bolero.

Still from For Ever Mozart (1996)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It feels like assigned homework for Professor Godard’s graduate-level “Advanced Semiotics in Cinema” course.

COMMENTS: A woman, the granddaughter of Albert Camus, wants to stage a play in war-torn Sarajevo (for reasons that are never made completely clear). Her uncle (I believe) is casting a movie called The Fatal Bolero, and she convinces him to fund their expedition. They set off for Sarajevo (in Camus’ car), but the director ditches them along the way. The three actors are captured by soldiers, who plan to commit war atrocities on them while running around slapstick-style dodging shells lobbed from unknown destinations. We then return to France to follow the director, who is struggling to make his movie on a tight budget. The crew discovers two bodies in a burnt-out building—either sleeping derelicts, or corpses—and puts a red dress on the female, who later awakens and plays the lead role. The ending is a cute self-referential bit where audiences lined up to see Bolero ask if there will be nudity; when they’re told the answer is no, they threaten to leave to go see an American film, and the desperate producers spontaneously change the movie. It takes some work for the viewer to figure out those basic outlines. That plot, per se, is not of much concern to Godard; what he is interested in, as his directorial stand-in directly proclaims, is the “a saturation of glorious signs bathing in the light of absent explanation.” By design, the characters aren’t well-defined or established (it’s not even clear what their names are, and there are a lot of “who’s that guy again?” moments). There are gaps in the action, non-sequiturs, and scenes that begin suddenly without orienting the viewer. Everyone in the movie talks like an off-duty philosophy professor waxing poetic after two glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon. “There is no death. There’s only me, who is going to die,” muses a young actress while staring out of a train window. Later, sitting around a campfire, her sister responds, “the sensation I have of existence is not yet a ‘me.'” Godard glancingly addresses a multitude of issues, from the existential to the cinematic/theoretical, and sometimes his almost absentminded reflections are brilliant: his thesis that cinema has a greater mystery and dignity than literature because film incorporates actors and props that have a separate existence outside the imagination of the author, uttered by the movie’s director while the camera focuses on the face of an actress huddling against a cold beach wind, is fascinating to consider. But the absence of humanity exhibited by the nearly anonymous characters makes the movie too cold to be involving, and the lack of rigor in its intellectual musings means many of its tossed-off insights come off as hot air. It’s vintage late Godard: brainy, but boring, too thoughtful to be totally dismissed, but too flighty to be embraced.

Spoken phonetically, the title For Ever Mozart sounds like “faut rêver Mozart” (“dream, Mozart”) in French.

The previous New Yorker DVD of For Ever Mozart contained no extra features; the 2014 Cohen Media Group release includes a commentary by film critic James Quandt and an interview with Godard.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

 “…full of deep musings, potent symbols and academic references from every corner of Western culture, but they’re thrown up on the screen in a manner that will confuse and infuriate anyone expecting a conventional narrative or readily identifiable characters. If what you’re expecting is an austere, lyrical essay that takes many tangents and requires serious deciphering, ‘For Ever Mozart’ is a film to be savored.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)