Category Archives: Capsules

Capsules

CAPSULE: BUNRAKU (2010)

1 Comment

DIRECTED BY: Guy Moshe

FEATURING: , Gackt, , , Ron Perlman

PLOT: Set in a post-apocalyptic future that outlaws guns but promotes copious amounts of sword-heavy battles, Bunraku follows two mysterious lone strangers—a card-playing cowboy (Hartnett) and a pacifistic Japanese warrior (Gackt)—as they strive to take down the all-powerful crime lord (Perlman) who controls the city.

Still from Bunraku (2010)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The visuals are stunning and innovative and the effects are wildly impressive, but the cookie-cutter sci-fi/western tale and clumsy script hold it back from approaching true Weirdness.

COMMENTS: Introduced by a gorgeous animated sequence involving puppetry (which is also the only time the film’s title comes into play), Bunraku takes place in a type of future many films have already established. There was a world-wide nuclear war, everything was destroyed, and human beings build the world back up to create a lawless, decrepit landscape where everyone fights all the time.  The all-knowing, presumably winking narrator is upfront about what type of story this is, making cracks about the type of mysterious loners always found in places like these.  This self-awareness pervades the script and certainly makes the film more digestible.

The set-up and story don’t make a lot of sense, with bouts of under- and over-exposition that either confuse or bore.  Hartnett’s Drifter is stiff and stern, with no emotion and no reason for the audience to care about him.  Gackt’s Yoshi is likable enough (and magnetically androgynous), but like Drifter he’s so enigmatic there’s barely any character left for the actor to embody.  They’re one-dimensional archetypes to the fullest extent of the word, but Moshe seems fully aware of this. Woody Harrelson brings some levity and charisma to The Bartender, a friendly but heartbroken working man who doesn’t take sides but finds himself pulled into Drifter and Yoshi’s war against Nicola (Perlman), the vicious and world-weary “Woodcutter.”  Demi Moore is extremely out of place as the crime lord’s resentful woman, but her role is small enough.

Luckily there is plenty to distract from the weak characterization!  Bunraku is chock-full of fascinating visuals and downright exciting fight scenes.  The lighting is over-saturated and the locations are highly stylized, with cut-paper backgrounds and a few Caligari-esque sets.  A sizable chunk of the running time is devoted to intense action sequences, with an inexhaustible amount of literal Redshirts ready to be killed by our heroes (led by Kevin McKidd as Killer #2, easily the weirdest character in the film) in elaborate group scenes.  There are fistfights, swordfights, polefights, circusfights, axefights, and one cool car chase. The effects are excellent, transitioning from comic-book style animation to CG enhancements to miniatures with a believable flow.

For all its thrilling action and memorable visuals, Bunraku suffers from an overcomplicated yet under-explained plot and an inexcusably long running time.  It could easily have lost 30 minutes and become tighter, better paced, and more enjoyable.  The writing is hit and miss, with some really sly moments that show Moshe’s self-awareness and sense of fun, and others that are over-serious and dull.  Aside from its looks, the film doesn’t do anything different but it doesn’t mean to, so it’s forgivable.  It’s just a fantastical, stupid romp with the colors of a 1950’s musical and the stylized gore of a Frank Miller comic.  What’s not appealing about that?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Extremely cool-looking in the manner of ‘Sin City,’ but clumsily staged, slackly acted and mind-numbingly dull, Israeli director Guy Moshe’s English-language fantasy is set in a future when guns, and apparently coherent conversations, have been outlawed.”–Lou Lumenick, New York Post (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: TABLOID (2010)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Errol Morris

FEATURING: Joyce McKinney

PLOT: The strange but true story of Joyce McKinney, the former Miss Wyoming who caused a

Still from Tabloid (2010)

tabloid sensation in Britain in 1977 when she was convicted of kidnapping a Mormon missionary, tying him up, and forcing him to have sex with her for three days.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Joyce McKinney, the subject of this documentary, is as odd and eccentric a woman as you’ll find outside of an institution, but the film itself isn’t otherwise weird.

COMMENTS:  “I don’t see what a 32-year-old sex-with-manacles case has to do with cloned puppies,” opines Joyce McKinney as the third act of Tabloid dawns.  The only connection between those two disparate headlines, of course, is McKinney herself, who, if she isn’t crazy, at least attracts crazy to herself like a cloned puppy attracts fleas. Now in her sixties, the former beauty queen still has a sweet old country gal drawl and a disarming charm that makes her, in oddball documentarian Errol Morris’ revival of a long dead scandal, a Tabloid star.  After winning the title of Miss Wyoming, McKinney’s story begins in earnest when she falls in love and plans to marry a handsome young Mormon in Utah.  One day (as she tells it), her beau simply disappears without warning or notice.  She tracks him to London where he is serving his two year Mormon mission, assembles a gang of bodyguards and a freelance pilot to track him down, and leaves for England with thirteen suitcases full of disguises and surveillance gear.  The sexagenarian ex-sexpot has consistently maintained that the liaison between her and her Latter Day Saint loverboy in a cottage in Devon was not only consensual, but one of the world’s great love stories: she deprogrammed her brainwashed lover with a “honeymoon” weekend of sex and back rubs, before the Church got their hooks back into him and turned him on her.  Once she’s put on trial, archival footage and testimony by journalists involved in the case paint a picture of a woman who loves the limelight almost as much as she loves abducting sex slaves.  Things heat up even further when the press digs up startlingly juicy details from her shady past and splays them on the cover of the Daily Mirror.  Disillusioned with notoriety, she skips bail and flies back to North America disguised as a deaf-mute.  Decades later, still pining for the lost love of her life, the once-gorgeous McKinney remains an old maid and a virtual hermit, comforted only by the unconditional love of her pit bull Booger and his eight clones.  Since the victim in the case has retired to normal life and refuses to be interviewed, and her primary accomplice is dead, the story is told almost entirely from McKinney’s viewpoint.  But the lack of rebuttal testimony doesn’t make her version of events much more believable; even before she explains how she trained her dog to dial 9-1-1 using a telephone with extra-large buttons, McKinney’s not a very credible witness.  But even though you may not buy her story, you may find yourself having a harder time doubting her sincerity; she ironically muses that “sometimes you can tell yourself a lie for so long that you start to believe it.”  The remarkable thing about Tabloid is how likable and harmless McKinney appears on screen; she comes off more as a grandmotherly type reminiscing about the good old days through rose colored glasses than like a multiple felon inventing self-serving justifications for her crimes.  The tale is told almost entirely via interviewees speaking directly to the camera, although Morris assembles a few witty collages from torn newspaper clippings to fill in the extra spaces.  The issue of the British press’ exploitation of the whole salacious affair (which the dubbed the “Mormon sex in chains” case) is touched upon, but Tabloid isn’t an indictment of trashy gossip journalism: it’s a clever, polished example of it.  There’s little to the movie besides the bizarreness of the yarn itself.  It’s entertaining, but if it has a downside it’s that you may start to feel sorry for the deluded, exploited McKinney in ways she never intended you to when she seized this opportunity to (once again) tell her side of the story.

Devout Mormons will want to stay away from Tabloid, as the film takes some dry shots at the religion (including revelations about their beliefs re: the mystical powers of undergarments, and animated segments illustrating planetary dominion in the afterlife).  The inclusion of an anti-Mormon activist, who has no relationship to the McKinney case, as a talking head is one of the documentary’s few obvious missteps.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a bizarre crime tale recounted by the loopy ex-beauty queen alleged to have committed it… in Joyce McKinney, Morris has found a fittingly weird and funny muse.”–Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE MANSTER (1959)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: George P. Breakston, Kenneth G. Crane

FEATURING: Peter Dyneley, Tetsu Nakamura, Jane Hylton, Terri Zimmern

PLOT:  A Japanese scientist corrupts an American foreign correspondent in Tokyo, eventually

Still from The Manster (1959)

turning him into a two-headed monster…. um, man-ster.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: When you’re titling your movie The Manster, you’re probably not expecting to make any exclusive lists, other than the List of the Most Shamelessly Cheesy Movie Titles Ever.  Thanks to its historical provenance and overwrought, tastefully depraved atmosphere, this psychotronic oddity is worthy of a mention; it will take its place as a footnote to the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies Ever Made, and like it.

COMMENTS:  The Manster may not be a very good movie, but it does have transformations, geishas, chaste drunken orgies, theremins, hyperactive overacting, and an erupting volcano, with a plot cribbed from “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” swaddled in Pysch 101 theories about the duality of man.  That counts for something.  Need more?  It’s also got a mad scientist with a cave laboratory complete with giant mushrooms, a cell for his mutated wife, and a furnace for disposing of unwanted monsters.  The cheesy sci-fi accoutrements are shuttled into the background for much of the running time, as the main action becomes watching Peter Dyneley act like a jerk, drinking saki with loose women and slapping his long-suffering wife after being shot up with Japanese chemicals.  (Dyneley takes to the lifestyle of a gin-soaked heel like a 1950s mad scientist takes to collecting Tesla coils).  His chemically-induced devotion to the dark side results in his killing Shinto monks during blackouts and growing an eye on his shoulder, which eventually develops into a full-grown noggin.  Through the magic of b-movie moral alchemy he’s able to kill his creator and redeem himself, literally splitting apart from his hairy id (an extraordinary moment).  The final words of a journalist documenting the mad tale give us all a paradox to mull over: “I’m a reporter, not a mystic, Linda.  But there are things beyond us, things perhaps we’re not meant to understand.  If what’s happened here had made this all clear, well then, perhaps it made sense after all.”  Gotcha: the story makes sense because it makes it clear we weren’t meant to understand it.

Probably The Manster‘s greatest claim to fame is being originally released as the bottom half of a sublime/ridiculous double bill with Eyes Without a Face (which was dubbed and retitled Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus to make it appear like just another B-horror movie!)  As the world’s first two-headed man/monster movie, it’s also the great-grandfather of How to Get Ahead in Advertising, and Sam Raimi even paid The Manster tribute in the weirdest sequence of Army of Darkness.  That’s pretty good company for a movie that began its life as an unsophisticated, exploitative b-quickie!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…its gorgeous shadow-strewn cinematography, bizarrely mismatched performances, and loopy juxtapositions of Asian and American nightmare iconography make it unforgettable trash that, in its more insane moments, even attains a sort of accidental bargain-bin poetry.”–Ian Grey, Baltimore City Paper (DVD)

Capsules

CAPSULE: CARMEL (2009)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Amos Gitai

FEATURING: Amos Gitai,  (voice)

PLOT: A series of autobiographical reflections mix with impressionistic recreations of a battle between Romans and Jews and poetry read by Jean Moreau.

Still from Carmel (2009)


WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although there are a few moments of effective weirdness, most of Carmel is too personal to convey much meaning to anyone other than its director.  Far too much of the movie is misty flashbacks of characters we can’t place fondly reading letters from relatives we don’t know.

COMMENTS:  Carmel is a confusing movie, and its lack of urgency about telling a story combined with disinterest in avoiding dull patches doesn’t serve it well.  To give it its due, it does announce itself as a “poem”—one supposedly “about people, what they think and what they want and what they think they want”—providing ample warning that, if you don’t like to read poetry, you’re probably not going to like this movie.  Of course, that’s a very different proposition from saying that if you do like to read poetry, you will like this film.  Scattered interesting images and turns of phrase aren’t enough to make great verse; good poetry, after all, exhibits focus, discipline, and communication, which are Carmel‘s weak points.  That said, Carmel does turn a few fine film phrases, which save it from being a complete, solipsistic waste of time.  The first of these phrases happens early on, when Gitai evokes an ancient battle between Romans and Jews.  Moreau narrates the battle over Hebrew dialogue, and, further in the sonic background, an English-speaking voice (could it be Sam Fuller, who makes it into the credits?) chronicles the exact same events, but out of phase with the primary narration.  Visually, two (sometimes three) overlapping images play onscreen at the same time, all featuring centurions in horsehair helmets battling robed Jews by torchlight.  The effect is dreamy and abstract, rather than chaotic; this montage would be successful if were extracted and presented as a short film all its own.  We fast-forward in history for the film’s second meaningful moment, which also utilizes the overlapping dialogue motif.  A father (Gitai himself) is searching for his recently-deployed soldier son at a gas station.  He shares coffee with the attendant, but their attempt at conversation, while taking the outward form of a dialogue, drifts into the two men delivering two completely unrelated monologues.  A metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian relations?  Both those bits occur in the movie’s first third, and (besides an unexpected re-occurrence of the battle scene at the movie’s midpoint) we have to wait almost to the end before encountering the movie’s third interesting interlude, a bizarre bit involving a young couple who wander into an old woman’s home during a terrorist attack, borrow gas masks, recite prophecies and poems, briefly make out, and leave when the air sirens fade out (promising to return for a chat if they’re ever in the neighborhood).  The vast valleys between Carmel‘s high points, however, are filled with autobiographical boredom.  There are pretty establishing shots that establish nothing, and lots of readings of old family letters that lead to pastoral flashbacks.  Characters are shown, but not introduced.  Who is the red-haired boy who writes letters home from boarding school?  One of Gitai’s sons, maybe the one who later becomes a soldier, or Gitai himself as a kid?  (It doesn’t help that the lad looks like no one else in Carmel, not even the kid Gitai is shown auditioning to play the role of his son in [another?] movie).  Who is the pretty brunette woman shown endlessly looking at herself in the mirror while an opera aria plays—a younger version of Gitai’s mother?  Of his wife?  A daughter?  The familial relationships, along with the symbolism, can probably be untangled, but the author gives you little inducement to want to figure out who is who or what they really want, as opposed to what they think they want.  It’s all important to Gitai, but he never makes it important to us—the film seems aimed at an audience of one.

The “Carmel” of the title may refer to Mount Carmel, which is associated with the Old Testament prophet Elijah. There are several other towns and settlements in Israel called “Carmel,” including one that was involved in the Bar Kokhba revolt against the Romans in the second century A.D.—could this be the site of the battle shown in the film?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Gitai seems to care little about what the audience will glean from this oddity, which is its strength and weakness… fuses documentary, narrative and stream of conscious forms in creating a singular, occasionally exasperating, work.”–Mark Keizer, Box Office Magazine (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: LE QUATTRO VOLTE (2010)

Leave a comment

AKA The Four Times

DIRECTED BY: Michelangelo Frammartino

FEATURING: Giuseppe Fuda

PLOT: An old goatherd dies; a goat is born, grows up and dies; a tree is cut down and made

Still from Le Quattro Volte (2010)

into charcoal.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Le Quattro Volte is a strange document crafted to illustrate a strange thesis; its weirdness comes more in the conception than the execution, however.  Most of the time, Le Quattro Volte is like watching a National Geographic special with the narrator’s commentary track stripped away.  It can be mesmerizing if you’re in a contemplative mood, but it doesn’t put that “weird” feeling in your gut.

COMMENTS:  If someone accidentally wandered into a theater playing Le Quattro Volte and observed the sequence of events—there’s no plot, per se—without any preparation or background information, they’d be completely confounded by this mystical, dialogue-free film.  In the first forty minutes an old man herds goats, drinks ashes mixed with water, and dies.  In the next twenty minutes a goat is born, explores its world, gets separated from the herd, and dies (presumably ) under a tree.  In the second-to-last segment that tree is cut down by villagers, stripped of bark and branches and used as the centerpiece of a vaguely pagan tree-climbing ritual; for a finale, the trunk is chopped up and made into charcoal.  The end.  Puzzling, no?  Of course, having access to the pressbook we know [“spoiler” alert],  that the “quattro volte” (“four times”) of the title come from a quote by the ancient Greek mystic and mathematician Pythagoras, and refers to his theory that the human soul is composed of rational (represented by the shepherd), animal (goat), vegetable (tree) and mineral (charcoal) parts, and that the soul may be reincarnated at the moment of death into any of the four types of matter [end “spoiler”].  As the viewer journeys through Volte, he encounters a number of scenes which work as odd little self-contained film poems.  There’s the mysterious shot of a steaming mound that starts the film, a live goat birth, and a woman who measures out and wraps the dust she sweeps up from the church floor into a little bundle made from a magazine cover with the same precision a cocaine dealer uses when preparing an eight ball.  (There is a heavily ritualistic, almost sacred component to even the smallest actions in Le Quattro Volte).  Most impressive is an astounding eight-minute, one-take scene involving a passion play, centurions who unwisely park their pickup truck on a hill, and a vindictive sheepdog that should leave you wondering how in the world the choreography was accomplished.  The film is shot in sunny, tan Calabria, a picturesque region of rolling hills and rustic stone homes with tile roofs that seems unchanged by the centuries; many of the longshots look like landscape paintings from old Italian masters, but with figures slowly moving deep in the background.  People do speak in the film, but only off in the distance, so that speech is just sonic texture, like the barking of dogs, the bleating of goats and the rustling of leaves in the wind.  Language, and human activity in general, is abstracted in the film, marginalized, so that the fate of a man is no more important than the fate of a goat or a tree.

With landscapes, compositions and narrative pace that all resemble a picture postcard, Le Quattro Volte is art with a capital “A.”  As a film it can neither be generally recommended, or recommended against.  It’s intended for a specialized audience of aesthetes and film critics, and it’s a movie that’s unlikely to transcend that demographic.  If you’re at all intrigued by the description above, you’ll probably want to check it out.  But if you have your doubts about whether you can stand staring at the screen while an ant slowly crawls across a shepherd’s craggy face for minutes on end, then watching this movie will seem like taking medicine: you may sense it’s good for you, but you’re sure to grimace trying to get it down.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a devastating, profound and at times surreal work of art.”–Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post (contemporaneous)