Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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) →

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) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: OVERTURN: AWAKENING OF THE WARRIOR (2013)

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DIRECTED BY: Ivan Doan

FEATURING: Ivan Doan, Maria Glazunova, Konstantin Gerasimyuk, Eric R. Gilliatt, Bill Konstantinidis, Philippa Peter

PLOT: Christopher Gabriel emerges from a dream to find himself a pawn in an international game of geopolitical warfare, and attempts to uncover the meaning of his role and explore his newly discovered abilities.

Still from OVERTURN: AWAKENING OF THE WARRIOR (2013)

COMMENTS: “What do you mean?” It’s easily the most common line of dialogue in Overturn: Awakening of the Warrior. A character unleashes a complex metaphysical monologue with a raised eyebrow and a self-satisfied smile, smug in their superior  knowledge. Their conversational partner invariably responds with narrowed eyes and the tone of someone with a well-used BS detector, “What do you mean?”

It’s a crucial question for the film itself, which tries to fake importance by spouting a lot of dialogue that doesn’t “mean” anything at all. The barest scraps of a plot revolve around a young man’s discovery of a titanic battle between good and evil, but neither the scale of the conflict nor the stakes of the outcome are ever articulated. His interactions aren’t with characters so much as with signifiers with names like The Servant, The Judge, or The Informer: all portent, no content. Every other scene is one of those dialogues where characters say big words with great conviction, broken up with occasional martial arts demonstrations and—most oddly—vlog posts where Christopher alludes to all the crazy stuff going on. (Said crazy stuff is never detailed with any specificity.) What passes for tension is mostly bluster, and what passes for conflict is merely pronouncement.

At this point, I should note that, while researching this film, I discovered that it’s a continuation of a webseries called “Overturn” featuring several of the same actors and characters. Is it a direct sequel, or a re-imagining of the same premise, à la Adolescence of Utena? That’s not really clear, and while I could try speedrunning the series, I don’t think there’s much value in doing so, because the film is so lacking in anything concrete that it honestly doesn’t matter what the connection is. There’s nothing in the feature that would suddenly become more explicit with the background provided by a 3-minute episode. It’s just bigger.

The thing is, Overturn: Awakening… is actually a pretty good-looking film. Cinematographer Sergey Kachanov stages attractive vistas in and around the lively parks and gardens of Kyiv circa 2013. (Given current events, seeing the city in this way is bittersweet.) And the cast looks the part, from the pretty Glazunova to the ominously grizzled Gerasimyuk. Given that exactly one actor in the film can call English their first language, they deliver their word-salad speeches with reasonable skill overall. In particular, I strongly suspect Gerasimyuk is delivering all his English dialogue phonetically, but with no discernible decrease in menace. Doan, a strikingly handsome lead who sports the film’s best American accent and demonstrates decent martial arts skills, anchors the film. (It’s often obvious when punches are being pulled, and the faceless ninjas he fights do that thing where they gang up on Doan but then attack him one-by-one. Let’s give the fight scenes a B-.) Parts of Overturn et al pass themselves off quite effectively as a new addition to the spy canon.

Unfortunately, Doan the actor is significantly hamstrung by Doan the screenwriter, Doan the director, and Doan the editor. Aside from the frustrating lack of anything actually happening, Overturn: AOTW has absolutely no pacing whatsoever. Scenes slam into each other with no regard for logical development, intriguing ideas are quickly dropped and forgotten, and rhythms repeat without variation to the point of tedium. There are almost no scenes with more than two people, and an excessive number of them take place on park benches and riverwalks. What’s ultimately weirdest about the movie is that its perception of itself is so wildly different from what it actually presents. It thinks it’s a deep exploration of the psychology of self. It’s mainly people talking in circles.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…certainly takes the worlds of martial arts action and philosophical pondering to a different place… a straight-forward, thinking man’s amalgamation of philosophy, action, and science fiction rolled into an independent film effort that feels like a story only getting started.” – Kirk Fernwood, OneFilmFan

(This movie was nominated for review by Dick, who described it as “Bruce Lee meets Andrey Tarkovsky.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)