Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: NEWSBOYS: DOWN UNDER THE BIG TOP (1996)

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DIRECTED BY: Steve Taylor

FEATURING: Newsboys (John James, Peter Furler, Jody Davis, Duncan Phillips, Jeff Frankenstein, Phil Joel), Phil Madeira, Greg Menza

PLOT: A popular contemporary Christian pop band takes a break from their tour to try and organize a grand finale for a dying circus.

Still from "Newsboys: Down Under the Big Top" (1996)

COMMENTS: In the fall of 1967, the Beatles were experiencing the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Their newest album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, was already being recognized as a landmark in the history of pop music, and their worldwide broadcast of “All You Need Is Love” had reached more than a billion people in the heart of the Summer of Love. On the other hand, they had abandoned the grueling work of touring, and their manager Brian Epstein had just died, leaving the band without anyone to advise them or act as a buffer for their wildest ideas. In the face of this adversity, and with the confidence that comes from being the biggest rock band in the entire world, the Beatles moved forward with a Christmas TV special, Magical Mystery Tour, that would go down in history as their first mammoth flop. The program, a hodgepodge of proto-music videos, improvised sketches, and random clips slammed together in hopes of achieving comedy via cognitive dissonance, is actually the kind of thing we like around here, being that it is so wildly ungoverned by factors such as logic, restraint, or taste. Despite that, and the fact that other Beatles projects like the “Get Back” sessions have been rehabilitated through the passage of time, the Magical Mystery Tour remains a hard watch.

So if the Beatles couldn’t do it, what on earth made Newsboys think they could pull it off? This 90s-era Australian-American pop band that brought a Savage Garden-Barenaked Ladies-Gin Blossoms musical sensibility to the upper echelons of the Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) charts does not immediately seem like a good match for a personality-driven medium like film. And they’re not. Their songs are mildly catchy, their vibe is low-key amiable, and their humor is mainly of the dad variety. We’re not exactly looking to Newsboys to let their freak flag fly, and the banner they end up hoisting is pretty benign.

(A necessary sidenote: Newsboys are still around, like the Temptations having gone through numerous personnel changes . A recent lead singer for the group was accused of heinous sexual misconduct, but at this stage he and his collaborators are years away from joining the band. So you won’t see any known offenders in this film.)

There is something exceptionally odd about the whole production, but it’s the kind of strangeness rooted in inexplicable choices. Why choose a circus theme and then not have any of the trappings of a circus? Beyond the big tent itself and a couple clowns, the circus is mostly talked about, not shown. Why spend so much time demonstrating the lameness of the slate of performers? Not catastrophic awfulness, mind you, but just categorically bland and weak. Why give characters elaborate quirks and then not commit to them? Twins Carlene and Darlene never get into lockstep, and while we can be grateful that the presence of little people as mob enforcers is not played for the stereotypical cheap laughs that you might expect, the result feels less like trope subversion and more like virtue signaling. The film doesn’t even know what kind of joke it wants to tell. It’s not as over-the-top loony as Spice World, only dips its toe into the waters of Spinal Tap-style mockumentary, and definitely has no interest in the subversiveness of Head. I supposed they’re too Christian to get no-holds-barred weird on us, although they even soft-pedal the evangelism: a prayer is cut short by hijinks, while a copy of the Bible is revealed to have been stolen from a hotel. (Um… commandment?) It seems like someone in the Newsboys camp wanted to get outrageous, while somebody else kept a tight grip on the leash.

So if the story’s not the thing, then their best option would seem to be to appeal to the mass of diehard, rabid Newsboys fans. Big Top doesn’t really do that, either. The filmmakers seem to recognize that none of the band members has a grain of personality, but resting what little plot exists on the shoulders of lead singer John and bassist Phil only highlights how threadbare the story is. The movie can’t even work up enough interest to see Newsboys being Newsboys, aside from snippets of a concert and two full music videos clumsily dropped in during the last ten minutes (a fact the director helpfully lampshades). Of course, this turns out to be the right move, since those videos contain exponentially more wit than anything that has come before.

Down Under the Big Top is definitely a strange object, baffling in that it does nothing to satiate rabid Newsboys fans, and also doesn’t go far out enough to draw in curious outsiders or connoisseurs of weirdness. It just sits there, without so much as an “I Am the Walrus” to justify the effort.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It truly is a weird little movie that, on the surface, seems worthy of derision. However, it really depends on the angle from which you want to critique it… Is it terrible from a cinematic perspective? Absolutely. Does it have storytelling issues? Without question. However, it possesses an awkward, oddball charm that is kind of fun.” – Nicole Pramik, Sci-fi Fantasy Lit Chick

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

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    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994)

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    DIRECTED BY: Kevin Hull

    FEATURING: Kenji Sugimoto

    PLOT: A documentary account of a Japanese math professor who comes to America in search of his hero, Albert Einstein— specifically, the scientist’s brain, which was extracted during an autopsy and removed to points unknown.

    Still from "Relics: Einstein's Brain" (1994)

    COMMENTS: Among the most cherished books of my childhood were the three volumes that made up “The People’s Almanac,” a peculiar reference book that purported to comprise only the most interesting and widely unknown stories and facts from the span of recorded history. Where else would biographies of fictional characters who have become immortal through extended popularity sit comfortably alongside histories of some of the world’s leading news publications? A particularly memorable story was the one told in “People’s Almanac #3” by journalist Steven Levy about his successful search for Albert Einstein’s mind-meat, harvested (and possibly pilfered) by a pathologist named Thomas Harvey. Levy chronicled the strange afterlife of the physicist’s brain, culminating in his memorable description: “I had been granted a rare peek into an organic crystal ball. Swirling in formaldehyde was the power of the smashed atom, the mystery of the universe’s black holes, the utter miracle of human achievement.” So the result of screening a documentary about another person’s hunt for this very same organ 15 years after Levy’s article was a uniquely odd sensation for me specifically. For a film that proposes to solve a deep and thought-provoking mystery, I kept watching with a nagging question in my mind: “Didn’t we already figure this out?”

    Maybe Levy’s report was lost to history, or only the barest of information made it through time’s game of telephone to tickle the fancy of a Japanese math professor. In any event, Einstein’s Brain kicks off the search with a retroactive information deficit, armed with only the knowledge that the mind behind relativity was plucked from its braincase during an autopsy in Princeton in 1955. From there, we pick up the trail with Professor Kenji Sugimoto in hot pursuit as he crisscrosses the country in search of the wayward noggin-nugget, encountering a university professor in New York, a neuroscientist in California, a police officer in Missouri, a pile of redacted FBI records in Washington, DC, a biologist in New Jersey, William S. Burroughs (who plays him a clip from “The Day After” and provides directions to Harvey’s home), and even Einstein’s granddaughter, working our way ever closer to Albert Einstein’s cranial cortex.

    Einstein’s Brain has its origins in television, airing on the long-running BBC documentary program “Arena” as part of a series called “Relics” that purported to be about treasured artifacts but was really more interested in the people who sought them. That makes Prof. Sugimoto an intriguing subject, because the only thing we know Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: RELICS: EINSTEIN’S BRAIN (1994) →

    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: THROW AWAY YOUR BOOKS, RALLY IN THE STREETS (1971)

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    Sho O Suteyo, Machi E Deyou

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    DIRECTED BY: Shuji Terayama

    FEATURING: Hideaki Sasaki, Masaharu Saito, Yukiko Kobayashi, Fudeko Tanaka

    PLOT: An angry, aimless young man drifts along in search of purpose, despairing at society’s shallowness and cruelty.

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: Terayama’s filmed essay defies traditional elements such as narrative or a consistent point of view. It is, instead, a howl of righteous anger using a cinematic techniques to depict a society in chaos and an individual’s profound isolation.

    Still from Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)

    COMMENTS: A legend that has arisen over the years about philosopher Henry David Thoreau focuses on a single night in 1846 when he was arrested and jailed for failing to pay taxes, a stance he took to protest government policy on slavery and the Mexican-American War. In the story, his friend, the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, discovered that he had been imprisoned and rushed to visit him. As dramatized by playwrights Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, a despairing Emerson asks, “Henry, what are you doing in jail?” Thoreau, fueled by his righteous commitment to civil disobedience, replies indignantly, “Waldo! What are you doing out of jail?”

    Thoreau would find common cause with Eimei, our guide through this kaleidoscopic tour of 1970-era Japan. Eimei opens the film angry… at us. He’s been standing by as we’ve sat through a couple minutes of a solid black screen, and he has had it. He castigates us for mindlessly tolerating the nothingness like an audience of sheep. Don’t be offended, though. We will soon see that he has much to be angry about. He has little money, no respect for his family, his community is obsessed with sex and lacks any other ambition, and his culture is becoming uncomfortably Americanized and subsumed by rapacious capitalism. By the end of the film, he dabbles in a small-scale dream of his own, only to be attacked and robbed. He ends screaming his hatred for Japan—but no one truly escapes his wrath.

    We see the subject of his ire first-hand. Eimei wanders through a series of scenes with an air of disconnection, not because he doesn’t care but because he can find no way in. The local school does nothing but practice soccer, where Eimei lamely offers to tidy up the locker room. Showcasing society’s whacked-out priorities, the coach happily takes him down to the local prostitute for a chill-out deflowering, which does nothing for him at all. His grandmother, knowing she’s about to be kicked out of the house, lies to strangers about her dead family in a bid for sympathy. Eimei’s father, who fought in the war, is a shiftless layabout whose only profession is molesting young women. Most tragic is Eimei’s flighty (and possibly mentally compromised) sister, who initially has an unhealthy attachment to her pet rabbit until her grandmother arranges to have the animal killed, which somehow leads to her terrible assault at the hands of the entire soccer team. It’s an extraordinary set of circumstances, but the film in no way sensationalizes or finds dark humor in the accumulation of miseries. Imagine living in a world where each day brings not just bad news, but a completely different kind of bad news (if you can even picture such a scenario), and you get a sense of the struggle Eimei has just to get up each day.

    Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is reportedly adapted by Terayama from his own play, which is an extraordinary notion, because the movie feels in no way tied to the stage. Terayama has a vivid and far-ranging approach to visual storytelling. He mixes film stocks, employs surprising framing and shot angles, toys with film tinting and superimposition, and stages scenes with the eye of a Surrealist. He also has a solid appreciation of the power of sound, often staging scenes with repetitive sound effects or scoring transitions with proto-punk anthems to soundtrack Eimei’s oppressive surroundings. Interspersed among the scenes of Eimei’s world are staged interviews, fantasy sequences, and dream-like images of early pioneers of flight. This is one of Terayama’s first films, emerging the same year as his controversial Emperor Tomato Ketchup, and it mixes a newcomer’s urge to play in his new sandbox with an experienced storyteller’s confidence in abstract and nonlinear storytelling.

    There are no rallies in Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets. There are barely even books (although urgent quotes are graffitied across the landscape). That title isn’t a synopsis but a call to action, a demand from Terayama. Look at your world. Why do you tolerate this? Aren’t you going to do anything about it? Given what he shows us, it’s not hard to understand his contempt. If we’re not rallying in the streets, just what are we doing?

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a surreal psychedelic experience like no other… Many of the bizarre, dreamlike sequences that act as short interludes or scenes of escapism for the adolescent at the heart of the film elicit the traits of a Jodorowsky film.”–Tom Bielby, Film Bantha

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

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ROWS (2015)

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    Rows is available for rental or purchase on-demand.

    DIRECTED BY: David W. Warfield

    FEATURING: Hannah Schick, Lauren Lakis, Nancy Murray, Joe Basile, Kenneth Hughes

    PLOT: The daughter of a prolific real estate developer must find her way out of a mysterious maze after she attempts to deliver an eviction notice to a malevolent tenant.

    COMMENTS: If you’ve driven across the American Midwest and Great Plains in summertime, you’ve probably been witness to a notably dissonant image: vast fields of corn and wheat, dotted with a mix of ramshackle, rotting old farmhouses and barns teetering on the brink of collapse, contrasted with brand-new, modern houses with lush green lawns and a pair of fresh-off-the-line pickup trucks parked out front. You zip through an economic metaphor, a thruway uniting past and present, a great big landscape of disconnect. Rows knows this feeling. Rows is clearly stimulated by the perplexing feelings that this vision inspires. And Rows is still trying to figure out what comes next.

    The world that Rose (get it?) stumbles into bears some of the marks of that confusion. She’s a pretty, rich girl whose only job is doing office chores for her daddy. She’s already feeling the pain of her privilege. As a result, she’s nervous long before she first sets foot inside the house of Mrs. Haviland to boot her from the premises, but her encounter with the woman (and her highly suspect cookies) is proof of how dangerous it is to leave suburbia to venture into America’s breadbasket. We know Rose is going to have to do some penance. What’s intriguing is that her punishment seems to be mental, as she finds herself in a recursive loop which drags her and her friend Greta into the inescapable maze of the cornfield, with escape leading inevitably back to the farmhouse. It’s very nearly Groundhog Day meets Drag Me to Hell.  

    Writer-director Warfield puts a lot of skill on display. The film is fantastically shot, making the endless fields of corn look both alluring and ominous. (Surprisingly, the classically Midwestern settings were shot in Maryland.) He also has a knack for pacing; even when Rose’s traps and time loops feel inevitable, there’s a steady unfolding of dread that keeps the psychological horror fresh and visceral. If you aren’t particularly interested in logic or the familiar beats of storytelling, then Rows is a reasonably impressive effort. If anything, the cracks start to show when the script actively adds new elements to keep things interesting, like the addition of an outsider character posing another threat to Rose and Greta, or the out-of-left-field introduction of some malevolent spirit trying to seduce Rose’s father. Rows plays the weird card very effectively, especially once you recognize the repetition that serves as Rose’s purgatory.

    When you move past the film’s gimmick, you have a production that looks good but has no real depth. The movie never invests in its characters, for example, especially Schick, the only person in the film we can be certain is real. Without that, the appeal is reduced to its lead actresses wandering through the cornfields in tight tank tops. (The performances are serviceable, although the leads seem to have matriculated at the Joey Tribbiani School of Acting.) The script never really wraps up its intriguing plot, framing the climax as Rose finally learning to look deep inside herself, but then couching it inside other Twilight Zone-ish twists. Rows has some solid tricks up its sleeve, but that only makes the stab at some sort of relevance feel not just unearned but premature. It’s a pity, because there’s genuine filmmaking talent at work, and Warfield has stumbled on to an issue and a community that could really be at home in the thriller and horror genres. There’s some interesting houses along this road, but ultimately a lot more empty fields of grain.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…events become increasingly surreal… a difficult film to synopsise without giving too much away. Partly because its story is such a strange, dreamlike one… becomes something of a chore to keep caring for an answer to its mystery once you hit the midway point. Interesting, but flawed.” Stuart Willis, Sex Gore Mutants (DVD)

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

    Channel 366, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022)

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    DIRECTED BY: Becky Sloan, Joseph Pelling, Baker Terry

    PLOT: Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck find their days consistently interrupted by anthropomorphized objects in their home and uninvited guests who insist on teaching them lessons about life via song, dance, and increasingly unsettling interactions.

    Still from "Don't Hug Me, I'm Scared"

    COMMENTS: There’s a reason that children’s television is, on the whole, weird. After all, there are two competing, even contradictory goals at work: these shows often want to teach young people some valuable life lesson (the alphabet, how the mail is delivered, treating your friends with decency and respect), but hold the audience’s notoriously wandering attention while doing so. All those talking aardvarks and talking Blue Heelers and talking magical unicorns are handwaving determined to steal a child’s focus with any degree of strangeness necessary. Landmarks of the genre going back decades—“Captain Kangaroo,” “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” —have all danced along the line where oddness tips over from charming to off-putting. Even the grand poobah of them all, “Sesame Street,” had to overcome initial concerns that its central conceit—humans and puppets living side-by-side—would be incomprehensible to children. Obviously, the kids figured it out.

    Any success inspires parody, satire, and critique. Children’s TV has certainly earned its fair share, as can be seen in the stressful adulthood of the characters in Avenue Q, the aggressive surrealism of “Wonder Showzen,” and the oppressive nightmare of today’s subject, “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared.” This British web-series-turned-TV-show is perfectly captures the way that just living in the world can feel like unavoidable oppression. The machinations of people who are venal, stupid, or both conspire against “Don’t Hug Me”‘s characters, through the lens of two puppets and a guy with a crimson mop for a head who just want to get through the day. For anyone who remembers childhood as an endless series of grownups trying to kill your fun with their wondrous tales of adulthood and education, this is a show that sees you clear as day.

    “Don’t Hug Me” began as a web series, and it establishes its theme—the world is fundamentally cruel—right away. In the very first short, a singing sketchpad shows up to share the wonders of thinking with boundless imagination, and after engaging the trio, she immediately proceeds to shut down their creative efforts with helpful corrections like “Green is not a creative color.” And there’s always room for things to get worse. A collection of creatures trying to describe love pile on more and more parameters and qualifiers, culminating in the revelation that they worship a giant idol and feed it gravel. An interest in food spurs on a storm of questionable nutrition advice, recommending aspic and referring to vegetables as “soil food.” These Continue reading CHANNEL 366: DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED (2011-2016, 2022) →