FEATURING: Voices of Mátyás Usztics, Tamás Széles, Tibor Szilágyi, Ágnes Bertalan
PLOT: God creates the universe; Lucifer, the eternal spirit of negation, tells God that Man will inevitably revolt, and is allowed to tempt Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. After the Fall, guided by Lucifer in various guises, Adam watches his descendants slip into tyranny and debauchery in more than a dozen succeeding segments that run from the earliest cavemen to the last humans of the far future. Adam returns from his historical survey feeling suicidal.
BACKGROUND:
Based on Imre Madách’s 1861 play “The Tragedy of Man.”
The same story was adapted to film in 1984 as The Annunciation, with the story enacted by a cast of children.
Although production began in 1988, it took Jankovics 23 years to complete this magnum opus. Since his state-backed financing ended with the fall of Communism in 1989, he animated individual segments one at a time as funding allowed.
Because the film took so many years to make, many additional voice actors had to be brought in, although Mátyás Usztics (Lucifer) and Tibor Szilágyi (God) were available for the entire production.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a nearly 3-hour animated film where each individual frame is a work of art, it’s a boggling process to try to pick a single image to represent the whole. Forced to pick, we’d have to go with something depicting Lucifer, the key figure driving the drama. The version of him as the red-eyed shadow with translucent wings, reminiscent of Fantasia‘s Chernabog, works as well as any other.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: The French Revolution was just Johannes Kepler’s dream, Spaceship Adam
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The literary source material might be dry, but Marcell Jankovics uses it as a launching pad for his constantly morphing, psychedelically-colored cosmic animations, transmuting the already complex story into a nearly-three-hour-long fever dream.
PLOT: As a snowstorm approaches, a young woman travels for the first time with her boyfriend Jake to meet his parents, but inwardly she is struggling to work up the courage to end things between them. Strange things happen at Jake’s house: not only is his parent’s behavior awkward, but their ages change before her eyes. Meanwhile, the action frequently cuts to an elderly high school janitor as he makes his rounds; the third act will bring the couple into contact with him.
An early prestige property for Netflix, who gave it a limited theatrical release in 2020 to qualify for awards season, then kept it locked into their exclusive streaming service.
Several of the film’s monologues—including Buckley’s poem, her opinions on John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, and Plemmons’ “acceptance” speech— are lifted wholesale from other people’s writings (“Bonedog” by Eva HD, Pauline Kael’s review, and A Beautiful Mind‘s Nobel speech, respectively).
The film-within-the-film, a romantic comedy credited to Robert Zemeckis, is fictional. (Zemeckis is thanked in the credits for allowing his name to be attached.)
The end credits include a list of the various books, artworks, etc. referenced throughout the film.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: A cartoon pig leads a naked elderly man through the sterile hallways of a high school in the middle of the night. Bloody droplets drop from the animal’s underbelly, staining the newly-shined floor, as he plods along—maggots, he explains, as he is a maggot-infested pig.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Ice cream in a blizzard; animated maggot-ridden pig leads naked man to awards ceremony
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This labyrinth of awkward interactions, faulty memories, and uncertain identities may just be Charlie Kaufman’s most surreal film.
Original trailer for I’m Thinking of Ending Things
PLOT: In the near future, a terrorist attack transforms America into a cryptofacist police state. The third anniversary of that attack proves to be a day of great significance, with the launch of a new national surveillance agency, the release of an energy source/mind-altering drug called Fluid Karma, and the debut of an enormous luxury zeppelin improbably named for the wife of Karl Marx. On this day, the fates of multiple citizens collide, including an amnesiac action star who has written a startlingly prescient screenplay, a porn actor overseeing a burgeoning branding empire, a former beauty queen-turned-spymaster, a venal fundamentalist vice-presidential candidate who is being bribed by an assortment of neo-Marxist agitants, an international cadre of cult members whose purported invention of a perpetual motion machine masks an effort to bring about the end of the world, and, maybe most importantly of all, a war veteran and his twin brother searching for each other.
BACKGROUND:
Kelly envisioned the film as part of an epic multimedia saga. In-film titles identify sections of the movie as chapters 4-6; the first three chapters were released as graphic novels (now out-of-print collectibles).
The film had a notorious premiere at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival when Kelly submitted the film before it was completed. He finished neither the editing nor the visual effects in time, and the extremely poor reception received by the work-in-progress prompted him to cut more than 20 minutes prior to general release (including virtually all of Janeane Garofalo’s performance as an Army general). The version shown at Cannes has since been released, although Kelly himself describes the film overall as unfinished.
Several members of the cast are alums of “Saturday Night Live.” Kelly intentionally cast them to play up the screenplay’s satirical elements, and in general wanted to give his actors a chance to play against type.
Budgeted at $17 million, Southland Tales grossed less than $400,000 at the global box office.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s little agreement as to whether Southland Tales is a good movie or not, but the one thing that seems to be beyond dispute is that is Timberlake’s Venice Beach lip sync to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” is the standout scene. Timberlake’s yokel narrator Pilot Abilene spends the bulk of the film drawling overheated speeches that rely heavily on the Book of Revelation, which he delivers in the tone of a pothead conspiracy nut vainly trying to lift the scales from your eyes. But here, as he struts through a rundown arcade in a drug-induced haze wearing a blood-soaked undershirt and cavorting with a kickline of PVC-clad nurses, Pilot Abilene claims the screen for himself, demonstrating more comfort with the film’s absurdities than anyone we’ve seen thus far. It’s the one moment where Kelly’s delivers his commitment to over-the-top imagery with any degree of lightness; instead of the ponderousness of significance that accompanies every other set piece, this dance scene really dances.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Mirror on delay; rehearsing the performance-art assassination
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Richard Kelly is ambitious to a fault, a spectacularly indulgent filmmaker who never had an idea he didn’t want to film and who makes sure you notice every element of his worldbuilding. Southland Tales is a quintessential Kelly experience, with one layer of Philip K. Dickian paranoid surrealism piled upon another layer of Altmanesque interconnectedness, rinse and repeat. The film has been carefully crafted to confuse, with absurd situations, offscreen backstories, and red herrings combining to keep characters and viewers equally at sea.
PLOT: Pod leaves his remote homestead for the bright lights of Bangkok, ignoring his grandmother’s warning that he will grow a tail in the big city. There, he loses a finger working in a sardine factory, then falls head over heels for cleaning lady Jin, who is intensely focused on a book that she found after it fell out of a crashing passenger jet. Her curiosity leads her to monomaniacal environmental activism, leaving no attention for Pod, who tries to remain close to her through a series of odd jobs that bring him into contact with some of the city’s more unusual residents, including a man who licks everything, an undead motorcyclist, and a child-like woman in a passive-aggressive relationship with her teddy bear.
BACKGROUND:
Based on a novel by the director’s wife, Koynuch, which Sasanatieng illustrated. The novel was, in turn, based on Sasanatieng’s unpublished screenplay.
The title is a pun on the city’s name, “Bangkok, Great City.” By changing one letter in the Thai translation—Krung Thep Maha Nakorn to Krung Thep Mah Nakorn–-the name becomes “Bangkok, City of Dogs.”
Boonyaruk is a musician (some of his music appears in the movie) making his film debut here. Gate-Uthong is also a film novice, having worked previously as a fashion model.
The foreigner handing out protest leaflets who Jin dubs “Peter” is played by Chuck Stephens, an expatriate film critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Thai cinema expert, who also worked on the movie’s subtitles.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Sasanatieng’s candy-colored Bangkok is rife with visual pleasures, but none as dramatic as the literal mountain comprised of plastic bottles that Jin recovers and carefully cleans, a peak which Pod and Jin separately ascend in a desperate search for meaning and jointly summit in celebration of love. Just as Bangkok itself is portrayed as an urban nightmare made beautiful by the people who live and love there, this mountain of trash is transformed into a wonder by the community.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: A chain-smoking woman-child’s love-hate relationship with her teddy bear; Grandma’s gecko rap
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The one thing that’s guaranteed to come up in any discussion of Citizen Dog is a reference to that milestone of quirky romance, Amélie. The comparison is not without merit: the two films share a bemused enjoyment of life’s pleasures. Sanasatieng looks to do the French hit one better, though, marshaling all his resources to highlight the strangeness of his characters, be they main, supporting, or background. No one in Citizen Dog zigs when they could zag, and strangeness and silliness are very much the norm. The opening scene in which everyone sings along with the soundtrack would be a musical number in most contexts, but here it feels diegetic, the voice of a community singing as one.
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“We live in strange times. We also live in strange places, each in a universe of our own. The people with whom we populate our universe are the shadows of whole other universes intersecting with our own.”–Douglas Adams
DIRECTED BY: M dot Strange
FEATURING: Voices of Halleh Seddighzadeh, David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Chaylon Blancett, M dot Strange
PLOT: In the phantasmagorical metropolis of Stopmo City, two outcasts—eMMM, a boy with the head of a doll, and Blue, an ethereal, suffering young woman—search for a cherished ice cream parlor. Ongoing battles between grotesque monsters make their journey perilous. An avenging hero, Rain, defeats many of the monsters, but when the ultimate evil is revealed to be a harlequin-faced beast of a man called HIM, eMMM and Blue will have to confront the menace themselves.
BACKGROUND:
M dot Strange is the nom de cinema of San Jose-based Michael Belmont, who in addition to dappling in animation is a web designer, musician, and video game creator.
Demonstrating multiple animation styles, the film was created on multiple platforms of varying sophistication and complexity, ranging from Adobe After Effects to Mario Paint.
M dot chronicled the making of the film in a series of videos (like this one) that built a fan base of more than a million YouTube followers. Upon its release, the trailer for We Are the Strange racked up 500,000 views in its first four days.
The film received the Golden Prize for Most Groundbreaking Film and the Silver Prize for Best Animated Film at the 2007 Fantasia Film Festival.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: So it is foretold: “He will return and strike down evil with a fist made of aluminum foil. Then, we will celebrate with many scoops of iced cream.” And so it comes to pass, when a bubble-shaped automaton emerges to face off against the big bad, and the hellscape Power Ranger at the controls is revealed to be our diminutive dollboy with the M on his forehead. For a film that devotes itself to style over substance and a pervasive gloom, it’s an unexpected flourish of feel-good storytelling and a nifty summation of the director’s particular blend of high-tech and lo-fi animation techniques. Alas, the promised ice cream is not in evidence.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Living, hungering arcade game; a trip on the ice cream train
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Multiple forms of animation and visual styles share space in a bouillabaisse of dread and visual overstimulation. Stop-motion mingles with computer-generated anime, and both appear alongside 2D paper-folding and hand-crafted miniatures. Every scene feels crafted to be as outlandish and disturbing as possible. The randomness of it all is sometimes eclectic, often cacophonous, and frequently intriguing.
