Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES (1976)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Tatsuya Fuji, Eiko Matsuda, Aoi Nakajima

PLOT: A concubine starts a passionate affair with her master in 1930s Japan.

Still from In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

COMMENTS: When a movie starts with a girl trying to force her way into another girl, you know you will probably have a sexually explicit tale. And while Senses is not hardcore pornography, sex and eroticism play the major role here. One sexually charged encounter follows another, as we follow our young prostitute heroine and her relationship with her master, a middle-aged nobleman and owner of the house where she lives and works with other girls. The development of this relationship proves increasingly disturbing as sex transforms into power play, a game of submission and dominance, while the young girl gradually reveals her more possessive self.

Oshima’s infamous sexual psychodrama shocked on release and remains today a classic of provocative cinema, a transgressive and bold narrative portraying sexuality as a power play. While we cannot consider this movie weird, there are elements of the bizarre. Sexual activities increasingly take on a riskier and more sadomasochistic bent. A few intrusive scenes expressing the characters’ states of mind offer a dreamier aesthetic and a healthy dose of Freudian symbolism. And the graphic climax still shocks sensitive spectators.

In today’s cinematic landscape, however, none of the above is too extreme. Contemporary Asian extreme cinema  approaches similar subjects, namely erotic obsession and the relationship of the two sexes, in more shocking ways. Kim Ki Duk’ s movies, especially Moebius, come to mind, featuring similar imagery and then some. Keeping that in mind, Senses feels a bit dated and mild. The underdeveloped characters and their simplistic or incomprehensible (or just unexplained) motives do not help anything.

In the Realm of the Senses is available on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film invites scorn not only because it depicts almost every sex act you could ever want to imagine taking place—God help us—between a man and a woman (right up to and including a woman inserting pieces of mushroom into her vagina and letting them marinate in her lady juices before serving them up to her man; because if he wants more, it must be true love), but also because it dares to couch the entire hedonistic-masochistic exercise as a cinematic cipher, an oozier version of what, deep down, happens in every relationship.”–Eric Henderson, Slant

(This movie was nominated for review by “Der Ubermolch.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THE MAGUS (1968)

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DIRECTED BY: Guy Green

FEATURING: Michael Caine, Anthony Quinn, Candice Bergen, Anna Karina

PLOT: Commitment-phobic English teacher Nicholas Urfe escapes his girlfriend by traveling to Greece to take a job vacated by his predecessor’s suicide and meets a wealthy eccentric whose activities seem to center around Nico himself.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: When babe-in-the-woods Anne tells her wayward boyfriend, “Oh, Nico, this is life, not an existentialist novel,” it’s not a self-own. She’s having a go at all of us for trying to apply the tenets of reality to a tale that’s really half-philosophical treatise, half-rejection of conventional storytelling. It’s gleefully existentialist, leveraging a traditional leading man and spectacular Mediterranean vistas in service of a full-throated mockery of expectations. The Magus is aggressively weird—even hostile—to anyone who would try to make sense of it.

Still from The Magus (1968)

COMMENTS: “You have entered the Meta-Theater!” declares Anthony Quinn. How utterly baffling that must have been to mainstream audiences in 1968, long before the idea of a metaverse was common parlance and entertainment made a regular habit of sledgehammering the fourth wall into oblivion. Here they are, expecting to see a film about Michael Caine playing fast and loose with the affections of beautiful young women, and this intervening plotline keeps showing up in which Quinn alternately casts Caine in the role of confidant, spy, and test subject. If viewers were confused, that was apparently echoed by the actors themselves: Bergen complained that she never knew what she was supposed to play, while Caine reportedly has named The Magus as one of the worst movies he has ever made (a fantastic claim, especially to any of us who have seen Jaws: The Revenge). If the people making the movie don’t know what’s going on, that’s not going to make it easy on the rest of us.

Toying with structure seems to have been author John Fowles’ whole thing, utilizing tools like split narratives and multiple endings to heighten the uncertainty of existence. Given that Fowles insisted on adapting his own novel (having been unhappy with the previous adaptation of his work, The Collector), we can assume that everything is playing out exactly as he intends. So when protagonist Nico takes a walk through the Greek countryside that just happens to end up at the palatial estate of Conchis (Quinn, styled after Picasso, right down to the bald head and striped shirt), that’s all part of Fowles’ plan. There’s something amusing about the way Conchis changes his story, including his name and profession, every time we meet him. What boring people we must be to try and tie him down to a single identity.

Caine initially seems ideally cast as Nico. After all, it would take someone with his reputation for playing distinctly chilly characters like the brutal spy Harry Palmer or the caddish Alfie to be so cruelly dismissive of the beautiful and adoring flight attendant Anne (a fetching Karina). From that perspective, he seems ideal to portray a man so disdainful of commitment that when his girlfriend asks him to take a later flight to spend more time with her, he promptly books an earlier one. But as he becomes more enmeshed with Conchis’ machinations, which seem to revolve around the hapless beauty Lily (an airless, seemingly dubbed Bergen) but are really more of an indictment of Nico himself, Caine’s aloofness becomes a poor fit. Even when he’s tied up and confronted by the entire populace of the town (and a goofy computer), Caine feels far too confident, too safe to be genuinely threatened by the existential crisis that’s landed upon him.

Ironically, it’s the most straightforward, unadorned scene that retroactively justifies all the metaphysical tricks we’ve seen at play. Conchis’ flashback to his days as the puppet administrator during the Nazi occupation, when he was asked to make a Trolley Problem decision about the fate of the townspeople in the wake of a Resistance action, is a perfectly pitched as a tense, straightforward piece of drama, and its exposure of the cruelty of man. We know enough about both Nico and Conchis to understand how they’ve reached this point, and it makes sense that Quinn would reject the absurd limitations of logic. He’s got the more compelling case, so the ensuing lunacy he perpetrates seems only right.

Unfortunately for Fowles, he cannot quash the natural impulse of film to present even the most ridiculous situations in the stark light of reality. As Nico is left to reflect on his experience, we’re asked to judge what we’ve seen. Was it all just a dream? Has Nico been punished for his infractions? Is this an elaborate revenge on Anne’s part? Philosophy thrives in the uncertainty, but film demands an answer. That’s the paradox of The Magus: after two hours rejecting the tedium and pointlessness of reason, it just can’t quite give it up.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Magus is one of the weirdest films of the late 60’s… those anticipating the standard fare will no doubt be left scratching their head in disquieted belief – their expectations tossed down a well.” – Gary W. Tooze, DVD Beaver

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

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: LAKKI… THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

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Gutten som kunne fly; AKA Lakki, Lakki… The Boy Who Grew Wings

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DIRECTED BY: Svend Wam

FEATURING: Anders Borchgrevink, Nina Gunke, Bjørn Skagestad, Jorunn Kjellsby

PLOT: A young man dreams of escape from his grim life; salvation may be coming in the form of the wings that seem to be sprouting from his back.

Still from LAKKI... THE BOY WHO COULD FLY (1992)

COMMENTS: Lakki comes by his pitifulness honestly. His father is intensely self-centered and will walk away from a relationship without a moment’s notice. His mother fosters a deep narcissism that expresses itself through wanton promiscuity. They’re both heavy drinkers. The boy’s grandfather was hauled away for insanity, and mom has a friend who comes over to the house and just sits around, day after day. Lakki’s school days are miserable, particularly thanks to his hyperaggressive gym teacher, who of course is now sleeping with his mom. None of these adults seems interested or capable of taking care of a child, and Lakki would happily remove their obligation if he weren’t only 14 years old. Growing wings and flying away is honestly the best idea he can think of.

Those wings are, one supposes, the most fantastical element in Lakki. Whenever he hits a particularly low point, he hustles to a mirror sneak a peek. Notably, we only see them when he does. While the film is cagey about how genuine we should find this, there’s no mystery about their metaphorical heft as a means of escape. But on another level, the characters are so outlandishly extreme and the situations are so cartoonish that the whole thing plays as unrealistic. Even Lakki’s ventures into the dark side of his situation play almost as parody. An attempt to offer himself as a rentboy results in a comically violent encounter in which he beats up the wishy-washy would-be John. Meanwhile, a walk down the path of drugs is met with overwrought hellfire and screaming. Far from being a cautionary tale,  even the most dire situation Lakki faces is laced with heightened ridiculousness. It plays like an ABC Afterschool Special, International Edition.

The dialogue is similarly purple, usually making Lakki feel ever more weighted down by the responsibility that the adults disown. His mother is especially dismissive, over-sharing, then dismissing her son’s frustration. (She’s pretentious, too. In a flashback, she tells Lakki, “We mustn’t shout. The night might punish us.”) In a pair of fascinating scenes, Lakki’s parents treat him not as their child but as the peer they yearn to confide in, right down to sharing their booze, and Lakki laps the attention up with needy urgency. Young Anders Borchgrevnik is in every scene trying hard to embody the emotional torment in Lakki’s soul, but some scenarios defy the talents of even the finest actors, and the multiple moments where the boy buries his face in his arm and sobs feel uncomfortably inauthentic.

Writer/director Wam and producing partner Petter Vennerød earned a reputation in Norwegian cinema for exploring social issues, but this, one of their last collaborations, doesn’t really pull back the curtain on the human condition. (After the initial release flopped, the film was recut and issued under new titles to give it another go.) Lakki’s situation is unique and odd, and his resolve to take on the responsibilities that are repeatedly abdicated to him feels more like a surrender than a culmination. Lakki doesn’t fly, and neither does Lakki. He never could.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Lakki is a complete chaos, and the style suggests that Svend Wam for a moment thought he was David Lynch.” – Fredrik Gunerius Fevang, The Fresh Films

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

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZOO ZÉRO (1979)

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DIRECTED BY: Alain Fleischer

FEATURING: , , , ,

PLOT: A singer spends a night trying to escape from her overbearing manager while pursued by one admirer who insists he heard her sing in a city she’s never been to, and another who claims he lost his voice when he heard she’d given up singing.

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Have you ever thought to yourself, if only someone would make a Last Year at Marienbad/The Magic Flute mash-up, written according to the non-narrative principles of  Eden and After? They could have Catherine Jourdan in the lead as the “A” character, and Klaus Kinski as “M”. . . and why not set it in a grimy, late ’70s Paris overrun with rabid animals? Okay, you probably haven’t; but someone did, and that someone was Alain Fleischer. A director largely unknown in the English-speaking/Region A world, Fleischer moved in the same artistic circles as and . While he was clearly influenced by the same ideas as the better known Alains, Fleischer’s work is perhaps too weird to have been rescued from obscurity; all the more reason to give him some consideration.

COMMENTS: There are so many WTF elements in Zoo zéro I can’t possibly cover them all, but between the ventriloquist chauffeur who only speaks through his socialist revolutionary Donald Duck dummy, to a brothel where clients simply listen to prostitutes describing their actions from unlit rooms, practically every scene features someone, or something, inexplicable.

The opening credits sequence recall those of Eden and After‘s. The actors announce themselves by name, then begin reading texts featuring animals, including the biblical story of Noah and the Ark, and the French fairy tale about Reynaud the fox. Each actor keeps reading as another joins the chorus, until, by the end, the overlapping voices form an unintelligible cacophony. A fitting introduction to the experience of watching Zoo zéro: a movie so jam-packed with references and metaphors, its actual meaning becomes almost impossible to interpret.

Zoo begins at the Noah’s Ark nightclub on a rainy night. Eva (Jourdan), dressed like Liza Minelli in Cabaret, performs before an audience all wearing animal masks. A mysterious man later appears in Eva’s dressing room, saying she once knew him as Ivo (pronounced “Eevo”; all the characters have names beginning with vowel sounds and a majority begin with a long “e”.)

Ivo claims to have heard her performance in Salzburg, in The Magic Flute. Even though Eva says she’s never even been to Salzburg, Ivo has a recording to prove it. Uwe, Eva’s manager, takes possession of the tape and refuses to let her hear it.

The dialogue, while not as obscure as in Marienbad, never resolves Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: ZOO ZÉRO (1979) →

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APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965)

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Beware

DIRECTED BY: Joseph M. Sonneborn, Jr.

FEATURING: Balloons, marching bands, parade floats, clowns, and more balloons

PLOT: During an especially drowsy storytime, a boy has dreams about large parade balloons that cavort and loom over him; we then see the balloons in their natural habitat, the 1964 Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, with play-by-play from a possibly inebriated narrator.

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Exhibit A in the case for advertising’s malign influence, this hour-long promo for parade balloons is both horror show and monument to boredom. Viewed through the ironic shades of nostalgia, it’s gleefully ignorant, but as a relic of its era, it’s a searing indictment of the utterly misguided definition of “fun” among the City of Brotherly Love’s cultural elite.

Still from Fun in Balloonland (1965)

COMMENTS: Perhaps you started your day today with a viewing of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a hours-long march of giant helium balloons, high school bands, and uncomfortably cold Broadway performers hiking through the streets of Manhattan. They (and you) are partaking in a tradition that goes back to 1924, but that’s not even the oldest Thanksgiving street party there is. That crown is held by Philadelphia’s parade, created by Macy’s rival Gimbel’s back in 1920. So it’s more than appropriate to turn our gaze toward that venerable Turkey Day bastion, and see how it inadvertently spawned a turkey of a very different kind.

Fun in Balloon Land wastes no time in delivering off-putting weirdness with the shockingly atonal theme song, sung by a man backed by a group of faux-enthusiastic children and the world’s saddest roller-rink organ. Through slant rhymes and methodical destruction of meter, the “tune” previews attractions to come like the Marrying Turkey, suggests that a teddy bear has fallen arches, and just generally shreds the auditory nerve. Already, we’re off balance before we’ve even seen the opening credit for “Giant Balloon Parades Inc. Presents,” a declaration that doesn’t augur well for artistic achievement.

The film kicks off in earnest with the sleepytime dream of Sonny (whose name we won’t learn until the last 10 minutes of the film), who rises from bed to stand in the corner of a book of fairy tales like a punished child and starts imaging a series of locales that correspond perfectly with Giant Balloon Parades, Inc.’s product line, including an undersea kingdom, a farm, and a culturally insensitive Old West. Sometimes these scenes are accompanied by amateur dances, but occasionally the film gets ambitious and tries to tell a story, as when the boy dons a gold lamé diaper and blows off a couple of Philly-accented mermaids. The “magic” of the balloons is meant to be self-evident, so there’s no attempt to reference any actual fairy tales or stories of adventure; they’re just generic milieus. All of this Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: FUN IN BALLOON LAND (1965) →