Category Archives: It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CAN DIALECTICS BREAK BRICKS? (1973)

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La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques?

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DIRECTED BY: René Viénet

FEATURING: Hung- Liu Chan, Ingrid Yin-Yin Hu, Jason Piao Pai

PLOT: Alienated proletarians, trained in kung fu, fight against their bureaucratic oppressors.

Poster for "Can Dialectics Break Bricks?" (1973)

COMMENTS: What if a typical kung fu flick was transformed through voiceover into a subversive and radical wanna-be manifesto? Such an anarchic romp could only come from France. But let’s take things from the beginning.

Some definitions should be clarified. Dialectics is a product of the Situationist movement, a group of anti-capitalist artists and thinkers, known cinematically mostly through Guy Debord’s documentaries. Like a lot of spoofs—What’s Up Tiger Lily? (1966) and In Search of the Ultra-Sex (2016) come to mind—this movie takes preexisting material and subverts its meaning through clever use of voiceovers.  The Situationists call the exact technique used here “détournement”, and it could be better defined as a reappropriation in a new and ideologically subversive setting. It is a recontextualization of images so that new meanings, radically different than previous, are produced: a practice commonly used in  postmodernist art of the later half of the twentieth century until our own time.

With the theoretical background of this movie specified, what is it really about? The plot revolves around a commune of proletarian martial artists defending themselves against alienation and their evil overlords. These overlords are not simply your typical evil Western capitalists, but we can trace references to the Soviet Union’s nomenklatura as well. They in fact represent of every possible state, even of those that hypocritically claim to defend the rights of the proletariat.

A main character emerges from the crowd, a typical hero who becomes the focus of the narrative, a man who sets his noble ideals against the bad guys. What is atypical of the genre , though, is that while the choreography of fighting plays out, our characters indulge in deep conversations about class struggle, the abolition of masters, and Wilhem Reich‘s writing, among other subjects. Through voice-over an “essential”  bibliography is mentioned, too, which one of the most unexpected and weirdest elements of the movie.

Don’t worry, though. This is not a heavy movie. Sexual jokes and self-aware irony prove its unwillingness to take itself too seriously. In fact, Dialectics isn’t much more than a funny gimmick. It surely has an appeal for fans of cult cinema, but it is not essential viewing for anyone interested in the Situationist movement. On the other hand, if you enjoy this kind of absurd humor—and the eccentric idea of a martial arts show about the class struggle—and would like to view something similar, albeit in a contemporary setting, try to find the French TV show “Machine” (2024) created by Thomas Bidegain and Fred Grivois.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“An obnoxious and hilarious stunt from 1973…”–Eve Tushnet, Patheos (streaming)

(This movie was suggested for review by Comrade Faustroll, who said “The filmmakers strike the right balance of meaning what they’re saying enough to be really weird, but joking enough to keep it interesting.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: BAD LIEUTENANT (1992)

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DIRECTED BY: Abel Ferrara

FEATURING: Harvey Keitel, Frankie Thorn, Zoe Lund, Paul Hipp

PLOT: A dirty cop indulges his many addictions as he pursues the culprits behind a horrible sexual assault on a nun.Still from Bad Lieutenant (1992)

COMMENTS: Central characters who are bad—flouting conventions, horrifying the prim and proper, indulging the id—are the stuff of Hollywood cliché. Between all the bad moms and bad teachers and bad Santas, these comical antiheroes can feel played out. But Abel Ferrara would never be lumped in with conventional showbiz trends, and his Bad Protagonist can in no way be misconstrued as a good-natured rebel thumbing his the nose at society. If anything, it’s the “Lieutenant” that’s superfluous in this title: our hero is a bad detective, a bad dad, a bad colleague, a bad gambler, a bad Catholic, a bad john. He drinks (sometimes upon waking up), he smokes crack, he shoots heroin, and he steals cocaine and sells it to drug dealers, keeping a little for himself to snort off any handy surface (including pictures of his daughter’s first communion). He robs criminals. He cajoles his colleagues into giving them their money and turns around and makes terrible bets with it. He cavorts with prostitutes, extorts teenagers for humiliating sexual favors… hell, when he shows up to a double homicide, he takes a lingering look at the victims’ breasts. And this is long before we witness him hurling vulgar invective at Jesus Christ. Ya get it, folks? The guy is just spectacularly bad.

Lost in the wonder of Nicolas Cage’s out-there turn in the quasi-sequel Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (and a third film supposedly in the works set in Tokyo and to be directed by Takashi Miike) is the fact that the original was a deliberate shocker in its own time. Ferrara pulls no punches, dramatizing every despicable moment in exacting detail as part of what my colleague Gregory J. Smalley called “an overwrought, magnificent Christian parable that sought to demonstrate God’s infinite capacity for forgiveness by presenting a character that audiences couldn’t forgive.” Bad Lieutenant is a Book of Job for its audience, dragging viewers through the muck and the mire and daring them to re-evaluate their notions of sacred and profane.

One should always be hesitant in using the word “brave” to describe an acting performance; it is just acting, after all. But Keitel’s work here is undeniably go-for-broke, and sometimes it borders on comedy to see just how horrible he’s willing to appear. He never stops talking, only yielding when a woman injects him with smack. He’s hostile to nearly everyone he encounters (including one of his kids portrayed by his real-life daughter). Contemporary critics made much of a full-frontal nude scene, a traditional line-in-the-sand for mainstream cinema, but Keitel is arguably even more naked in his fully clothed, emotionally raw confrontation with Christ, letting all his feigned confidence and gruff bravado drop in a desperate cri de coeur. The film’s Act 3 twist, in which he makes a series of questionable choices in an attempt to find redemption, only makes sense because Keitel has laid the groundwork for a character for whom no decision is unthinkable.

Bad Lieutenant is outrageous in the extraordinary awfulness of its title character, but not especially weird. Keitel’s troubles are entirely of his own making, and his desperate attempts to keep his head above water while insisting on tying more and more weights to his ankles have become more common in recent years, most notably in the frantic machinations of the Safdie brothers. Bad Lieutenant would make an excellent companion piece to the Apocryphally enshrined God Told Me To; both films force their central detectives to confront the nature of the Almighty and their unstable faith in the face of events in the living world, although their journeys are nearly polar opposites.

There’s an entertaining piece of subtext in the way Keitel’s fortunes mirror the championship baseball series that soundtracks the film. We learn from the outset that a comeback by the hapless New York Mets from a 3-0 deficit in a playoff showdown with the rival Los Angeles Dodgers would require nothing short of a miracle. (It’s a feat that would actually be pulled off for the first and only time 12 years later, by the 2004 Boston Red Sox.) Naturally, Keitel has stopped believing in miracles and so forsakes his hometown team, continuing to put his money and his life behind the ascendant Dodgers and slugger Darryl Strawberry, a prodigious talent who himself was infamously brought down by drugs. Of course, Keitel is in so deep to his bad bets that when things go south, he swivels on a dime from attaboy-cheering to racial epithets, punctuated by a gunshot to the car radio. Yes, he’s a bad, bad man, but it’s not his badness that brings him down. It’s his failure to heed the advice of another Met: “Ya gotta believe.”

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an illuminating, excoriating descent into the cesspool of sin, self-loathing and defilement. This is not an easy film to watch… This bizarre ecclesiastical dimension is what makes “Bad Lieutenant” more than a shallow wallow in the muck. Ferrara does make his moral points, and though one feels dirtied in the process, there is an accompanying feeling of purification as well.” – Hal Hinson, Washington Post (contemporaneous)

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

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

Bad Lieutenant (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

  • A degenerate cop who snorts coke, bets on playoffs and drinks himself into stupors starts to pull himself out of the abyss when he investi- gates the rape of a nun who refuses to press charges.

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Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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

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DIRECTED BY: Takeshi Kitano

FEATURING: Takeshi Kitano, Aya Kokumai, Tetsu Watanabe, Masanobu Katsumura

PLOT: The yakuza dispatches an enforcer to Okinawa to resolve a dispute between rival gangs, but the ensuing conflict threatens the future of his clan and his very life.Still from Sonatine (1993)COMMENTS: If you made a checklist of essential gangster-film elements, Sonatine would check a lot of boxes. Lone assassin, shootout in a bar, car bombing, cute moll faithfully standing by, thoughts of retirement balanced with the inescapability of the criminal lifestyle… they’re all here, and yet not one of them hits in the way you expect. Sonatine is unquestionably a crime film, particularly the Japanese-yakuza-chronicle variety, but it operates at a wildly different pace than its brethren.

At the time he made Sonatine, Takeshi Kitano was as close as Japan had to a “king of all media,” having found success in film, television, and even stand-up comedy. This project, however, found him ruminative and depressed. So it’s probably no wonder that his mob middleman, Murakawa, is similarly disenchanted with his life. Audiences were well-trained to expect an antihero with deep emotions, but very little would have prepared them for the taciturn, blank-faced hitman presented here.

When Murakawa complains that he lost three men on his last assignment, his protest—“I don’t like it”—feels like it would be a threat for retaliation coming from anyone else. But as Takeshi delivers it, it’s a resigned grump. Faced with other threats or inflection points, his response at every turn is quiet contemplation. Rivals have bombed his headquarters? Quiet contemplation. One of his underlings shot in the head right in front of him? Quiet contemplation. He witnesses an ugly attempted rape? He slaps the perpetrator, then quickly shoots the surprised assailant in the belly before quietly contemplating the victim. Murakawa is tired and devoid of hope, a character well-past finding bursts of violence to be alarming or invigorating. Takeshi does more to point up the essential hollowness and indignity of organized crime than 20 film scoldings could accomplish.

The desperate blankness of Murakawa brings brief moments of diversion and happiness into stark relief. As he and his underlings are stowed away at an Okinawan safehouse, he finds moments of pleasure that are surprising in their simplicity. A game with folded-paper sumo wrestlers is transformed into a live-action version, and Takeshi’s smile is captivating. He also has fun shooting fireworks and prankishly digging sandpits on the beach. But he knows all too well that death is close at hand; no pleasant distractions or pretty admirers can solve the fundamental malaise.

The climactic showdown is the ultimate proof of Takeshi’s concept: cornered on all sides, Murakawa plans and implements a bloody revenge on his foes. True to form, we see almost none of it, save for distant flashes of light and smoke and brief intercuts of bloody reprisals (set to the Tangerine Dream-esque score of legendary composer Joe Hisaishi). There’s no joy in it, no escape, no “one last showdown” to give him a brighter future, even if the plot conspired to provide him with one. Filmgoers expecting a gritty crime drama must have found this slow, grim-faced character study a strange proposition. But say this for Takeshi: his checklist might have been different than his audiences, but all his boxes are checked.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sonatine doesn’t encourage a straight reading, where logic dictates meaning and importance. When our normal responses are broken down, we relate more directly to the film… at a time when action movies typically hand us a canned experience, [Kitano’s] pictures carry a charge of originality.”–Patrick Z. McGavin, The Chicago Reader (contemporaneous)

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

Sonatine

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    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: PASSAGES FROM JAMES JOYCE’S FINNEGAN’S WAKE (1966)

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    AKA Finnegan’s Wake

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    DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute

    FEATURING: Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson

    PLOT: In a series of disconnected scenes, memories, and dreams, the passing of Finnegan, AKA Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, AKA HCE (and there may be many other names not yet known) is the occasion of a wake, an event which the deceased keeps attempting to attend despite his survivors’ reluctance for him to participate—or perhaps none of that happens.

    WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The next time you hear someone complain that their favorite book was adapted for the cinema and the filmmakers weren’t “faithful to the original text,” just plop them down and make them watch this ridiculously successful effort to burnish the original medium through adaptation into a new one. Passages never claims to be a literalization of Joyce’s book, instead recognizing that its greatest advantage is the power of its twisted language and putting that front and center.

    Still from Passages from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1966)

    COMMENTS: “When is a pun not a pun?” the jolly bartender asks. It’s an unexpectedly galling question, considering that he’s inside a story that consists almost entirely of plays-on-words, that exists solely to celebrate the flexibility and incomprehensibility of language. The nerve of this guy.

    James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the novel he spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life composing, is enshrined in history as, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “arguably one of the most complex works of 20th-century English-language fiction.” It makes pretensions to having a narrative, but if it is about anything, it’s about words, words, words, and their notorious malleability. Joyce gives nearly every sentence at least two meanings, exploiting meter and importing similar words from other languages and playing with time to such a degree that the last words of the book form a complete sentence with the first words of the book. It’s a 628-page fairground ride of a novel, and it regularly tops lists like “The 10 Most Difficult Books to Read” and features in stories like “This book club finally finished ‘Finnegans Wake.’ It only took them 28 years.” It’s a monument to inaccessibility. I haven’t read the whole thing. Have you?

    So there is enormous praise to be extended to Mary Ellen Bute’s ambitiously foolhardy decision to actually try and visualize Joyce’s wandering scenarios, because it makes the effort of reading the book seem both achievable and desirable. Her film uses an adaptation created by Mary Manning in 1955 staged by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but while all the language comes directly from Joyce’s text, she makes two key innovations that neither book nor stage could offer. The first is the use of tools of cinema; framing, closeups, and editing keep the language moving and prevent the focus from wandering away, while visuals can create a level of surrealism commensurate with the text. A film that looks like it will be stuck in the hall of the titular funeral party can transform unexpectedly into a burlesque show, while what has been a stagebound production through the halfway point suddenly steps out into nature.

    Bute’s second contribution may be even more important: most of the film is subtitled with Joyce’s text, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to both hear and read the language and appreciate the multiple meanings and sneaky substitutions that Joyce has peppered throughout the book. (Here, “throughout” should be taken to mean “in every damn sentence.”) You know who would agree? Joyce’s countryman Samuel Beckett, who said of the original book, “You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” The film version honors this fact, dramatizing Joyce’s maddening doggerel and giving sound and shape to the words so that you cannot miss his fantastical leaps of rhyme and oronym.

    It’s nice of Beckett to show up, because in reviewing a pair of films based on the works of this fellow son of the Emerald Isle, I twice made the observation that there was nothing weird about the films that wasn’t already weird in the original plays. One might expect the same to be true of these excerpts from Joyce’s novel, given that scenes have been adapted as faithfully as possible. However, the transition from prose to moving image puts the absurdism into a wholly new context. Film doesn’t just repeat the weirdness of the original; it highlights it. By the end, as HCE marches off into the sun to the strains of composer Elliot Kaplan’s oddly emotion-drenched score, I don’t have any more of an idea of what’s going on than I did at the start, but the urge to explore the puzzle further is invigorating.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “The movie creates literal visuals to go with the flowing imagery of the book that rapidly moves and shifts between scenes as in a dream… probably best taken in smaller doses. .” – Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

    (This movie was nominated for review, in a small bit of wordplay, by “Finnegans Cake”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)   

    Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

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

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    DIRECTED BY: François Simard, Anouk Whissell, Yoann-Karl Whissell

    FEATURING: Munro Chambers, Laurence Leboeuf, Aaron Jeffrey, Edwin Wright, Michael Ironside

    PLOT: In a post-apocalyptic future, a young kid discovers the fighting gear of the legendary Turbo Rider and sets out to topple the tyrannical overlord Zeus.

    Still from Turbo Kid (2015)

    COMMENTS: Turbo Kid lays down its ace right from the get-go, as a gravel-voiced narrator describes the grim vista of a tomorrow carved out by nuclear winter and acid rain. “This is the future,” he intones, as a boy on a BMX bike pedals into frame. “This is the year 1997.” Time for a quick double-check on the year this came out… yep, and we are truly underway.

    The 366 Weird Movies archive does not lack for films from four decades ago that employed a low budget and suitably barren locations to depict the world-after-the-end-of-the-world to audiences. (Just off the top of my head, I can think of three such movies that I myself have reviewed.) Recent years have seen several attempts at nostalgic pastiche, but Turbo Kid stands alone for setting “80s desolation romp” as a target. In particular, it’s the product of the serial nostalgist collective Road Kill Super Stars (aka RKSS, which consisted of this film’s three writer-directors, until Simard was booted last year for criminal sex charges); when their proposed contribution to the anthology The ABCs of Death was rejected, they had more than enough ideas to expand the concept into a feature.

    Considering that Turbo Kid’s sole objective is to recapture that special 1980s mix of futuristic nihilism and naïve can-do spirit, the effort is remarkably successful. The empty fields and gravel pits in Quebec that stand in for the future’s wastelands are suitably desolate. Costuming and production design tap into the mixed milieu of flashy colors and big hair roaming around what look like abandoned sewage treatment plants. Plenty of props serve as icons of the era, from Rubik’s cubes and Nintendo Power Gloves to the ubiquitous BMX bikes that serve as everyone’s transportation around the barren wasteland. (Not that bicycles would be the most unusual form of transport to dominate the coming hellscape.) Plus, the synth-fueled musical score by Le Matos is both pitch-perfect and tiresome in a way that’s era-appropriate, and is supplemented in the font-of-the-future opening credits with the most fitting rock song choice imaginable, a fist-pumping anthem from Stan Bush (of “The Touch” fame). If you’re fooled for a moment into thinking that this was churned out in 1985, that’s fully intended, because Turbo Kid doesn’t want to just capture the feel of these 80s low-budget sci-fi epics; it wants to be one of them.

    This commitment to verisimilitude extends to the film’s cast, who play everything straight enough to sell the movie’s central joke. Chambers is just the right kind of bland hero, not looking anywhere as young as his outward level of maturity, but fully selling The Kid’s sweet ignorance. As his sidekick and love interest, Leboeuf’s perky Apple turns out to be the most delightful, refreshing thing that Turbo Kid brings to the party. Her indefatigably chipper vibe initially seems like it’s going to become annoying fast but quickly becomes the animating force in the film, with a naively joyful spirit that makes a crucial revelation about her character land with a nod of approval instead of a roll of the eyes. And then there’s the filmmakers’ most crucial piece of casting, landing master of scene-chewing villainy Michael freaking Ironside to do the thing he does. Undoubtedly, he could play this part in his sleep, but while his work here is effortless, he’s in no way phoning it in. He plays the heel with all the acid-tongued vigor of his younger days, in which he no doubt celebrated getting cast over Kurtwood Smith. Ironside even makes a virtue of the directors’ most questionable choice, surrounding Zeus with a less-than-skillful set of minions who leave the overlord shy of his most supervillainous aspirations. It’s a bit of postmodern irony that’s out of place in Turbo Kid’s otherwise resolute commitment to the homage.

    Perhaps the thing that most distinguishes Turbo Kid from its ancestors is the remarkable level of gore. It’s not as though these films are devoid of viscera, as any Mad Max entry will demonstrate, but RKSS is relentless, with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fake blood spewed via every manner of stabbing, decapitation, and explosion. This festival of fluid is impossible to take seriously, presented in an extremely cartoonish manner, and resembling nothing so much as Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days. It can be outright funny at times, like a sawblade on a helmet that turns its victim into a screw top, or a body that lands squarely atop another person like the most unwieldy hat. So it’s one of Turbo Kid’s better surprises that the orgy of violence ends up showcasing the film’s sweetest moment, a romantic tableau that’s only enhanced by the surrounding rain of blood.

    Given the opportunity for parody, Turbo Kid opts instead for direct mimicry, an odd choice by itself, but one that makes the finished film more earnest than weird. That does make the film a charming watch, if a weightless one. That 80s trash was pretty fun, and this re-creation is pretty fun, too. It’s a low bar, but clearing it is a decent way to spend an hour or two.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…a wildly discordant, schizophrenically adorable, gore-soaked fantasy set in an deserted industrial wasteland… Add in the other nutso, hilarious touches, and you have the garnish you need to turn your sweet tale of friendship into a Friday night blood feast.” – Patrick Feutz, Inside the Blue Paint

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

    Turbo kid

    Turbo kid

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