Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: L’ANGE (1982)

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AKA The Angel

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DIRECTED BY: Patrick Bokanowski

FEATURING: Jacques Faure, Martine Couture, Jean-Marie Bon, Rita Renoir

PLOT: A swordsman parries and thrusts with a suspended doll; a servant brings a tray of food to a handless man; a group of librarians catalog books, and then rescue a woman from a box; figures attempt to ascend a vast, steep staircase to the heavens; and a number of other actions are captured in shadow and sepia and are repeated multiple times to demonstrate variance and nuance.

Still from L'Ange (1982)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Baseball fans calculate a statistic called similarity scores to compare players, often used to determine if a given player would sit comfortably alongside other legends. The greatest players, like Willie Mays or Babe Ruth, aren’t truly similar to anyone, but the ones who come within sniffing distance are all Hall of Famers. So it goes with L’Ange. There isn’t really anything like it, but it sits comfortably on the shelf alongside such subversive classics as Meshes of the Afternoon and Dog Star Man. Every image has been created specifically for the film, but it has heavy echoes of the found-footage assembly of Decasia or the random documentary of Koyaanisqatsi. Michel Chion, writing for Cahiers du cinema at the time of L’Ange’s debut at Cannes, described the film as “A 2001 produced under the same conditions as Eraserhead.” Whatever L’Ange may be, it keeps good company with some of the most legendarily strange movies ever made.

COMMENTS: In the video to one of my all-time favorite songs, They Might Be Giants’ transcendent “Birdhouse In Your Soul,” director Adam Bernstein plays with the theme of light to reflect the tunes narrator, a nightlight. In one particularly memorable image, John Linnell (the accordion-playing half of the duo) is captured in a light that repeatedly fades out only to spring back to life. After a moment, it becomes clear that Linnell himself is responsible for the light show; a dimmer switch on the arm of his chair allows him to control the illumination, and he is mischievously turning the lights out on his own performance.

I assume that this moment popped into my head while watching Patrick Bokanowski’s challenging feature because of the frequent interplay of light and dark. But I also contend that a similar spirit of mischief is woven throughout this movie. As harsh sepia-toned beams burst through the center of the screen only to be replaced with sequences that mimic the stage but repeat at random angles and speeds, you quickly begin to suspect that Bokanowski is playing with his audience, like a cat with a mouse.

Having made an impression with his first two short films, La Femme qui se poudre and Déjeuner du matin, he clearly decided that a feature Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: L’ANGE (1982) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, Shorts

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: ANALOG (2012)

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DIRECTED BY: Ebbëto

FEATURING: Fábio Norat, Giovanna Velasco

PLOT: An android tasked with guarding a lone man in hibernation on a deep-space journey takes radical steps to protect his charge, including creating a female companion and acting to protect the pair from sin.

Still from Analog (2012)

COMMENTS: Surely we’ve learned by now that leaving an artificial intelligence in charge of the future of all life on a lengthy space voyage is a risky proposition. The supergenius mainframe might become homicidal. A highly damaged android might implant the embryos of a malevolent race of unstoppable killers. An autopilot might plot to prevent humanity from returning to its ancestral home. There’s a good argument that those pesky AIs can’t be trusted with our safety at all, and Analog provides us with a new reason to be skeptical: the dang thing might try to become God.

Filmmaker Ebbëto (in addition to directing, he also takes credits for screenplay, cinematography, editing, and 2D animation) makes his intentions clear in his own description of the film: “Strange events with biblical analogies begin to occur, disturbing the machine and making it rethink its priorities.” The obviousness is not overstated. Sensing his charge’s loneliness, The Machine extracts a rib for the purposes of crafting a companion creature. Later, he will probe the minds of the pair and discover desires that he cannot sanction, as though they had new knowledge of themselves. What Analog brings to the table is an appalling realism: the cutting, bleeding, and growing attendant with these procedures are made explicit. So, too, is the humans’ punishment for their sinful thoughts. This is Adam and Eve retold as horror.

Analog is a marvelous example of the remarkable potential of DIY filmmaking. Ebbëto creates a number of immersive settings, including the cramped, industrial spaceship. It’s not always completely realistic – the green-screen technology sometimes gives off that DVD-ROM cut-scene vibe – but it’s thoroughly otherworldly and cleverly overcomes its limitations. There’s a lot of mileage to be gotten out of smart cables, rotating tubes, and robot repair.

But what little story there is amounts to a kind of grotesque punchline. The biblical beats hint at critique or satire but are really just the excuse for an outline, and once you’ve admired the bang-for-your-buck ethos, there’s not much more to it. Analog works best as a proof-of-concept for Ebbeto’s filmmaking skills; that’s the more interesting genesis story going on here.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Analog definitely isn’t going to be for everyone. It is slow and obtuse, and while I tend to dig that kind of deliberate, cautious tempo, I’ll admit, the whole thing does feel too long… Analog is still an interesting watch. There is a creepy ambience, and while that blanched out visual style can overwhelm your eyes from time to time, the look is consistent and unique.” – Brent McKnight, Giant Freakin Robot 

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

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Zach Helm

FEATURING: Dustin Hoffman, Natalie Portman, Jason Bateman, Zach Mills

PLOT: Mr. Magorium, who has run his magical toy store for nearly three centuries, prepares for his imminent departure from the earthly realm, but his plans to hand the reins over to store clerk and aspiring composer Mahoney are endangered by her ambivalence, the suggestions of a straight-laced accountant, and the protests of the store itself.

Still from Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (1993)

COMMENTS: From Dictionary.com:

whim·​sy [ˈ(h)wim-zee] n. 1: capricious humor or disposition; extravagant, fanciful, or excessively playful expression: “a play with lots of whimsy.” 2: an odd or fanciful notion. 3: anything odd or fanciful; a product of playful or capricious fancy: “a whimsy from an otherwise thoughtful writer.”

Zach Helm has an undisguised interest in finding joy amidst the frustrations of life. His screenplay for Stranger Than Fiction focused on a person who has spent his whole life in the grey and comes late to discovering the beauty of leading a more colorful existence. Here, making his directorial debut, he presents a world drenched in color and offers us a character who revels in it, until she doesn’t, and has to find her way back. The former film looked wistfully at the joyful world that was lost. This time around, we need to be right in the heart of that joy, and Helm’s weapon of choice is whimsy. Truckloads of it.

Our setting, identified in the title, is a sort of mad mashup of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory and Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes. It’s a hyperactive place, perpetually bustling with children who have somehow pried themselves away from their PlayStations so that they can indulge in the unexpected surprises of the toyshop. The toys come to life. Any plaything you desire can be found in a great big book. Bouncy balls are always on the lookout for an escape opportunity. There is always something going on, so much so that the movie is its own Easter egg generator. It’s the kind of a place where dinosaur skeletons peek out the window, Playmobil figures do actual construction, and Kermit the Frog does his weekly shopping. (That’s Kermit himself, looking strangely embarrassed to be stared at, or maybe just to be in the movie.) It’s fun, and then it’s fun, and ultimately it’s FUN, DAMMIT. 

All this is overseen by an enormously affected Hoffman. With eyebrows to rival Thufir Hawat and an Ed Wynn-style lisp that would be mincing under any other circumstances, he’s carefully constructed to be eccentric. Sometimes that’s refreshing, best exemplified by his equanimous attitude toward the impending end of his life. He’s not at all cynical, but eager to indulge in pleasures large and small right to the very end. On the other hand, he’s liberally draped with quirks: wearing loud patterns, bantering with his zebra roommate, and obsessed with hot dog buns. This can have mixed results: I groaned Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: MR. MAGORIUM’S WONDER EMPORIUM (2007) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE CEMENT GARDEN (1993)

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DIRECTED BY: Andrew Birkin

FEATURING: Andrew Robertson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alice Coulthard, Ned Birkin, Sinéad Cusack, Jochen Horst

PLOT: Four siblings experience the sudden death of their parents and bury the mother in the basement to hide her death from the authorities; the oldest siblings, Julie and Jack, take on the role of parents, while developing an inappropriate romantic attraction.

Still from The Cement Garden (1993)

COMMENTS: One of the many borderline taboo jokes throughout the run of the TV show “Arrested Development” was the forbidden attraction of young George Michael Bluth to his cousin Maeby. Circumstances were constantly pushing him to pursue his urges, even while they were reinforcing how wrong it was. One of the more sinister temptations was a notorious French film called Les Cousins Dangereux, which George Michael admired for its European sensibilities. If the writers of “Arrested Development” drew direct inspiration from a screening of The Cement Garden, it would absolutely track. It would highlight the uncertainty and discomfort of his incestuous longings in precisely the same way, and central figure Jack is virtually a role model for his sitcom successor.

The art-house incest flick is common enough to be its own trope, so much so that Eugene Vasiliev compiled his own list of leading examples of the genre for this site; a list which includes The Cement Garden in particular. But even in this august company, he notes that there’s a certain paint-by-numbers element to The Cement Garden’s approach to the subject, saying that the film is so stereotypical that it “can be stored in an iron safe in the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in the suburbs of Paris.” This particular tale’s literary origins (adapted from one of Ian McEwan’s provocative early Gothic novels) lift it out of the rut, and the utter isolation of the family makes this more of a take on Lord of the Flies by way of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. But the artfully prolonged tug-of-war between agony and ecstasy, that’s straight out of the playbook.

Our focus is on Jack, a painfully immature young man who resents the responsibilities forced upon him. (He is arguably, in a literary sense, responsible for his father’s death through his deliberate inattention.) Given the chance to control his own fate, he gives up. He stops bathing, preferring to cavort in the rain in the nude. He plays with insects. He reads a fantasy adventure called “Voyage to Oblivion.” And he finds himself increasingly in thrall to his older sister. If we’re to believe Jack’s POV, Julie is constantly putting the quandary directly in his face: performing a skirt-dropping headstand on his birthday, asking him to apply suntan lotion to her naked back, and flaunting her maturity by dating an older man. It’s a depressingly limiting view, making Julie into a kind of intentional vixen rather than pointing out the entire family’s damaged emotional state. The younger siblings aren’t doing much better, after all, with Sue composing angry diary entries addressed to her mother while youngest brother Tom takes to sleeping in a crib, drinking from a baby bottle, and dressing in girl’s clothes with a blonde wig. (Julie’s speech justifying the choice is the source of the lengthy sample that begins the Madonna single “What It Feels Like For a Girl.”)

A cement garden, of course, is a place where nothing can grow but weeds, and this family has been stopped in its tracks. Given their surroundings – their crumbling house is surrounded by the rubble of other homes torn down for new development – it’s arguable that the kids were doomed long before their parents were lost. But the note of quiet triumph that ends the film is starkly at odds with the circumstances we’ve seen. The Cement Garden is the tale of young people going nowhere, and not wise or worldly enough to see the road ahead.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“A very odd film… The Cement Garden is hardly for everyone (the heavy twin themes of sibling incest and death are right up front), but it’s a gorgeous mood piece, rife with tension and promise in a surreal manner you rarely get to see.” – Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

(This movie was nominated for review by feraltorte, who recalled “It was my first weird movie. It has weird movie mainstay Charlottle Gainsbourg.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: PRAYER OF THE ROLLERBOYS (1990)

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DIRECTED BY: Rick King

FEATURING: Corey Haim, Patricia Arquette, Christopher Collet, J. C. Quinn, Julius Harris, Devin Clark

PLOT: In a dystopian near-future where greed and widespread drug addiction have reduced the United States to third-world status, a cult of white-supremacist rollerbladers seeks to consolidate power; a lone skater, Griffin, infiltrates the gang to scuttle their operations and save his little brother.

Still from Prayer of the Rollerboys (1990)

COMMENTS: The brave new world of Prayer of the Rollerboys would seem to be a breeding ground for satire. The schools of the Ivy League have been carted off to Japan brick-by-brick. Mexican troops are repelling American immigrants at the border. Germany has conquered Poland once more, this time with its checkbook. Oh, and there’s rollerblading. Lots of rollerblading. But don’t laugh: screenwriter W. Peter Iliff (from whose pen Point Break and Varsity Blues will soon spring) wants you to be alarmed about even the most outlandish projections for America’s doomed future. There’s darkness coming, and only one thing can save us: Corey Haim.

Poor Corey. The prospective viewer of today might see the presence of the more tragic half of the Coreys in rollerblades as a guarantee of solid so-bad-it’s good entertainment. But it doesn’t turn out that way. It’s no secret masterpiece, but Prayer of the Rollerboys turns out to be a passable action flick, bringing low-budget grittiness and late-80s ethos to a familiar tale, with just a hint of eye-rolling over the near-future mise-en-scene.

After establishing his rollerblading bonafides in the opening credits, we properly meet Haim wearing a barbershop quartet’s striped jacket and boater and slinging an AK-47 for his job as a pizza delivery boy. (His boss: “If anybody messes with the van, [singing] kill ‘em.”) He’s trying to stay out of trouble and take care of his younger brother Miltie. Griffin’s just a good man in a bad world, you see; this world’s version of Marshal Will Kane.

There’s a lot out there to make him wary, like the vast amount of homelessness, the preponderance of populace-pleasing entertainments like nude women wrestling, and of course the narcotic du jour, an phosphorescent inhalant called “Mist.” But the biggest threat comes from the Rollerboys, an organized gang of skating thugs who deal Mist on the downlow while publicly sponsoring food drives and handing out their fascist literature to indoctrinate the masses. They occupy the Venn diagram intersection between Nazi Youth, the Proud Boys, New Kids on the Block, and the cast of Starlight Express. The film luxuriates in the sight of them cruising down the sidewalks of Venice Beach on their inlines, and the image of a dozen pretty rollerbladers decked out in flowing ecru trenchcoats and skating in a uniform flying-V is… well, not cool, exactly, but certainly memorable.

The film works best when it fully commits to the outlandishness of its premise. Griffin’s old grade school buddy Gary has grown up to lead the Rollerboys, and Christopher Collet gives it his all as a low-rent, roller-skating James Spader, a grinning crocodile who is fairly fit to burst into violence. (He even has a pet Komodo dragon to stroke malevolently.) No subtlety here; Gary’s plan to sterilize the population is literally called “the final solution.” His henchmen also bring the barely contained insanity, including Mark Pellegrino as a Jake Busey-wannabe strongman and the perpetually simmering Morgan Weisser, who even bites into an apple with repressed rage.

Against this, Haim does a creditable job, keeping an even keel as a guy who just wants to rollerblade in peace and now finds himself embroiled in chaos. He and Collet have genuine chemistry, engage in a rather effective fight scene, and bring authentic gravity to their final showdown. No, in our topsy-turvy world, the worst performance probably belongs to future Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette, zipping through the film in an admittedly weak role as an undercover cop in a series of joyfully ridiculous outfits (special consideration for her Dale Evans getup) and very little indication of the terrific acting career that lay ahead.

Once you get past the nightmare future of rampaging young white supremacists (all too believable) and full combat on skates (somewhat less so), there isn’t really anything wrong with Prayer of the Rollerboys. It’s derivative and a little silly, but the biggest problem is that the film is punching well above its weight. There are some intriguing ideas lurking in the movie: the allure of fascism, the impotence of our protectors, the weaponization of youth… but it’s all still riding on the shoulders of a Corey Haim rollerblading movie. It has to rehabilitate a teen heartthrob, create a credible future, call out the foibles of society, and do it all while embodying a youth culture that always seems to be just a step out of Hollywood’s reach. It would be a stretch for any movie to pull this all off. This is not the movie to do it.

Prayer of the Rollerboys isn’t bad enough to satisfy the snark-watchers, but not good enough to step out of the bin of forgotten B-movies. It does hint at an alternate universe where Corey Haim was able to realize his potential as an actor, and where we as a society anticipated the dangers of ceding power to pretty people who would co-opt it for nefarious purposes. Alas, in both cases, that stretches credulity just a shred too far.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The impact of screenwriter W Peter Iliff’s distinctly weird and intriguing premise is gradually eroded by the eventually unsurprising developments in its interestingly outlandish storyline and also by the over-familiarity of the usual, regulation futuristic setting of a chaotic, dystopian  tomorrow’s world.” – Derek Winnert, derekwinnert.com

(This movie was nominated for review by Lovecraft in Brooklyn, who says the film “features characters that somehow predict the modern alt-right.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)