“Afterlife” is a dreamlike interpretation of what happens during death. While sharing the same topic as “The Art of Drowning“, “Afterlife” contains a meditative soundtrack instead of dialog, and promotes the idea of quickly revisiting life experiences just before passing away.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 5/20/2011
A look at what’s weird in theaters, on hot-off-the-presses DVDs, and on more distant horizons…
Trailers of new release movies are generally available on the official site links.
There’s nothing weird in theaters this week (not really a surprise there).
NEW ON DVD:
Daydream Nation: A love triangle between a teen girl, an age-appropriate boyfriend, and their English teacher. The press release calls it a “mash-up of the bizarre and the beautiful” and two separate reviewers have compared it to Donnie Darko. Buy Daydream Nation
Deep Red [Profundo Rosso] (1975): Dario Argento‘s Deep Red, about a jazz pianist caught in a web of murder, is more a standard, suspenseful giallo than a bizarre film, but it shows early traces of the extreme stylization and atmosphere he would expand on to create the Certified Weird Suspiria two years later. This re-issue is reputed to be the director’s preferred cut; at 105 minutes, it’s longer than the 98 minute “R-rated” version that originally played in US theaters, but faster paced than the 126-minute “uncensored” cut. Note that only the director’s cut is on the DVD, but the “full” 126 minute version is also included on the Blu-ray (below). Buy Deep Red
“Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job: Season 5” (2011): Absurdist sketch comedy from the Cartoon Network. Contains the episode “Lucky,” which had been removed from digital distribution for unstated reasons. An entire season fits on one 110 minute DVD. Buy “Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job: Season 5”
Vanishing on 7th Street (2010): Read our capsule review. An unexplained plague of darkness falls over Detroit in this mystical horror from director Brad Anderson. Buy Vanishing on 7th Street
Year of the Fish (2007): Here’s a movie idea you don’t see everyday: a rotoscoped adult retelling of “Cinderella,” with the lead role taken by a Chinese immigrant woman forced to work in a “happy-ending” massage parlor and befriended by a magical goldfish. Previously available only on DVD-R, Fish is now available in a respectable DVD reissue complete with commentary tracks. Buy Year of the Fish
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Deep Red [Profundo Rosso] (1975): See entry in DVD above. Note that the Blu-ray contains both the 105 minute director’s cut and the 126 minute “uncensored” version. Buy Deep Red [Blu-ray]
FREE MOVIES ON THE WEB:
Diseaster [Paashat] (2011): Dutch carrot farmers are terrorized by a killer Easter bunny. This 30 minute horror/comedy features Easter eggs filled with blood, a rapping narrator with Down syndrome, crossbows that shoot sharpened carrots, and scary/ridiculous killer bunny puppets; it’s like a more professional, European version of Thankskilling. With blood and guts and mild nudity and sexuality, but the only thing that might offend is that Down syndrome character. Watch Diseaster for free at the official site.
What are you looking forward to? If you have any weird movie leads that I have overlooked, feel free to leave them in the COMMENTS section.
“CURRENTLY UNTITLED” AND THE AVANT-GARDE
In the 1980s art scene, the fine arts were divided into camps. In one camp there was the dominating, self-proclaimed avant-garde, and in the other, smaller camps were the Surrealists, the expressionists, the pop artists, the hyper-realists, and the traditionalists. I tended to pitch my tent with the expressionists and, with some reservations, the Surrealists and the pop artists as well. While I never gave much credence at all to the hyper-realists or the traditionalists who bored me to tears then (now I simply have succumbed to impatient avoidance and dismissal of that unimaginative, fundamentalist lot), I also have kept the self-proclaimed avant-garde at bay, possibly because I suspect, like the Dadaists and Surrealists suspected, that the avant-garde tends towards overt, dull academia and/or superficiality.
A few years ago I read a review of a Ken Russell film (unfortunately, I did not have the foresight to document the source); the critic essentially took Russell to task for being a failed avant-gardist who straddled the road between populist art and the avant-garde. While the critic had some validity in his assessments of Russell’s work, I felt he missed the mark. Russell was never a member of the avant-garde. Rather, he was a hard school Surrealist whose work has been passionately uneven. Surrealism, of course, has as its vital focal point ordinary expressions, that are then blurred by dreams and imagination. The imaginative dream realm would not exist without the warm-blooded center of reality. Of course, bad Surrealism (or poor imitation of Surrealism) tends to look like the academia of the avante-garde when it loses that vital core, and perhaps that is why the “naïve surrealists” have been so rightly celebrated.
The avant-garde, on the other hand, has always promoted art for art sake. It is an atheistic aesthetic of pure abstraction, and while it first produced a startling movement in many mediums, its tendency towards superficiality quickly took hold. In painting, abstract expressionism became decorative works for the business office; in film, such experiments soon became tedious efforts which jettisoned any and all connections with humanity; and in music, post-Webern electronic experimentation became so disassociated that it made all-too valid Arnold Schoenberg’s question, “but, are they making music with it?” ((Schoenberg was the father of the twelve-tone method. His pupil, Anton Webern, became a favorite influence among the disciples. Towards the end of his life Schoenberg was asked if he realized young musicians were copying his twelve tone method, to which he replied with the question above)).
Of course, this is an over simplified and somewhat idiosyncratic distinction, and to do it justice is beyond the scope or goal of this review, but this description can temporarily suffice. Part of the problem in associating Ken Russell with the avant-garde is Russell’s impetuous giddiness, his desire to be the eternal bad boy, which is filtered through consummate craftsmanship and even occasional sophistication underneath that rebel persona. Russell’s work, while often deeply flawed, is seldom dull. The vitality of his Surrealist oeuvre (at least his strongest works) can be found in an idiosyncratic vision of a journey through dramatic, personal, human experience.
Recently, I came across Indiana filmmaker’s Adam Cooley’s 2010 feature, Currently Untitled,
Part 1 of Currently Untitled (see director’s YouTube page for the other 4 installments)
LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINES (2007)
DIRECTED BY: John August
FEATURING: Ryan Reynolds, Melissa McCarthy,, Hope Davis, Elle Fanning
PLOT: Three separate plot strands—about a self-destructive actor under house arrest, a writer trying to get his series past the pilot stage while being filmed by a reality TV crew, and a video game designer whose car breaks down in the middle of nowhere—intertwine in a mysterious way, with the same actors playing different characters in each mini-story.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any doubts I might have had about considering this pretty good, pretty strange movie as a candidate for the List were allayed when I heard writer/director John August proclaim “we’re a weird movie, for a lot of reasons…” on the “making of” DVD featurette. If the director deliberately set out to make a weird movie, who am I to refuse to consider it? But, while August’s movie scores above average in terms of both quality and of weirdness, I’m not sure that it’s combined totals are high enough to inaugurate it as one of the greatest weird movies of all time, at least not on the first ballot.
COMMENTS: I have to be careful in discussing The Nines not to give away much more than you’d discover on your own by reading the blurb on the back of the DVD case. When you pop the disc into your player, you can expect to see three different stories—“The Prisoner,” “Reality Television,” and “Knowing”—acted by the same core trio, each playing different roles in each tale. Besides the actors, locales, song lyrics, a television series, and—especially—the number “9” recur in each of the divergent plot lines, drawing correspondences and reverberances between these various worlds. There is a thread connecting each strand; and although the first two stories, at least, are engaging on their own terms, it’s figuring out that overarching plan that supplies most of the interest. One thing that can be discussed (and praised) without spoiling anything is the acting. Hope Davis plays, variously, a horny housewife, a conniving TV producer, and a hiker in the middle of nowhere; Melissa McCarthy tackles the triumvirate of a bubbly public relations expert, the mother of a mute girl, and herself, the “Gilmore Girls” actress. But it’s previously unheralded Ryan Reynolds who’s the real revelation here. As a dimwitted, Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE NINES (2007)
LIST CANDIDATE: RUBBER (2010)
NOTE: Rubber has been promoted onto the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time; the official Certified Weird entry is here.
DIRECTED BY: Quentin Dupieux
FEATURING: Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick, Wings Hauser, Roxane Mesquida, Robert the Tire
PLOT: A group of strangers is assembled in the desert, given binoculars, and told to watch.
Through their lenses they see a tire come to life, roll around, and develop explosive psychokinetic powers. A heavy amount of death and destruction follows.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: I think the “sentient rubber tire goes on a killing spree” premise is strange enough to consider it for the List, but the framing of the story as a metafiction involving some self-aware actors, a homicidal accountant, and frequent commentary from a famished “audience” reveals an added layer of weirdness as well as refreshing imagination.
COMMENTS: A number of flimsy wooden chairs sit haphazardly on a dirt road in a desert locale. A cop car drives up and manages to hit everyone single one. Police officer Lt. Chad (Spinella) pops out of the trunk of the car, takes out a glass of water, and proceeds to address the audience with ruminations on the presence of “no reason” in film. Why is ET brown? Why do the characters in Love Story fall in love? Why doesn’t anyone ever go to the bathroom or wash their hands? No reason. Even in real life the phenomenon exists. Why can’t we see the air all around us? Why do some people love sausages and other people hate them? No reason. He explains that Rubber itself is “an homage to the no reason, that most powerful element of style.”
It’s nice to have a straightforward, bluntly in-your-face preface like that, especially when the film that follows really does its best to live up to the officer’s words. The story rolls along as aimlessly as its star tire, reeling in new characters and letting them go just as easily, and leaving a trail of bodies in its wake. There is never an attempt at explanation- how did this tire “wake up” and take on a life of its own? Just how much does it understand? Why can it makes things explode? Just who is in charge here? Everything can be chalked up to “no reason” and the audience can sit back and enjoy the ride.
Of course, not much actually happens in Rubber. There’s only so far one can go with a silent killer tire in an isolated desert. With pleasing special effects, Robert the tire rolls around, crushes a few bottles, mutilates a few wayward animals, and blows up the heads of whatever jerks get in his way while pursuing a pretty lady to a motel and enjoying the finer things in life, like late-night television programming. The police step in when the bodies start to stack up, and conspire to destroy him through subterfuge. Throughout it all, the squabbling “audience” in the desert gives their own commentary, cutting in during the requisite shower scene and other horror-movie clichés. When the characters in the film sleep, they sleep. It soon becomes clear that they’re trapped out there, left to the mercy of a sadistic “Accountant” (Plotnick) who takes his time feeding them. The function of this audience is never explained (of course), but they seem to serve both as a satirical Greek chorus and a joke on the actual audience.
The concept and script begin to lose steam towards the end, but Dupieux smartly keeps his film to a trim 82 minutes, and the innovative meta-film approach, alarmingly high body count, and general irreverence ensure a fun (and weird) time is had by all. The hilarious performance by Spinella and the ridiculous ending give it an extra layer of enthusiasm.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: