Capsules

CAPSULE: WILD ZERO (2000)

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DIRECTED BY: Tetsuro Takeuchi

FEATURING: Masashi Endô, Kwancharu Shitichai, Guitar Wolf, Makoto Inamiya

PLOT: Guitar Wolf (frontman of the pistol-packing punk outfit Guitar Wolf) makes Ace a blood brother when the would-be greaser is injured during a showdown between the band and an evil club owner; the rock star gives him a whistle he can use to summon the band in times of need, which comes in useful when Ace finds himself trapped in a town overrun by zombies.

Still from Wild Zero (2000)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s more “wild” than “weird,” and more “awesome” than “great.”  The surrealism sometimes seems to result from carelessness—as if the director is thinking, “no one’s going to care if this character suddenly shoots lasers from his eyes, as long as something blows up and the soundtrack’s loud”—rather than an ideological dedication to absurdity. It’s a crazy, fluffy pop confection made from zombies, punk rock and flying saucers, fun but totally non-nutritious; the younger, or the drunker, you are, the more likely you are to fall in love with it.

COMMENTS:  When Wild Zero‘s advertising proclaims it a “super rock and roll jet movie!,” it reminds us that Westerners are as fascinated and amused by the way the Japanese absorb and alter American pop culture, chewing up and spitting our entertainment idioms back at us in twisted forms.  Wild Zero is a fairly obvious mashup of Rock and Roll High School and Night of the Living Dead, but when seasoned with casual Oriental surrealism, it turns into something that feels unique and unclassifiable: a “super rock and roll jet movie!”  The band Guitar Wolf, with their leather jackets, shades, shared surname (frontman Guitar Wolf shares the stage with sidekicks Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf), and fast and furious odes to teen rebellion, shamelessly crib from the Ramones.  However, they add their own flavor to the recipe.  The Ramones never had magical powers, arsenals of munitions, or flames shooting from their microphones, and to my knowledge they never went so far as to act as superheroes for their most dedicated fans, explode zombie heads with glowing guitar picks, or use samurai blades hidden in guitar necks to gut alien motherships.  Superhumanly cool and macho, like Clint Eastwood if he Continue reading CAPSULE: WILD ZERO (2000) →

List Candidates

LIST CANDIDATE: FAUST (1994)

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DIRECTED BY:  Jan Svankmajer

FEATURING:  Petr Cepek

PLOT:  A grim “Everyman” is lured to a decaying theater and prompted to re-enact an adaptation of the Faust legend, with the lines of reality and fiction frequently skewed.

Still from Faust (1994)

WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Svankmajer offers a strange and twisted version of the famous story with little in the way of exposition or explanation. Humans interact with claymation figures and life-size puppets, the scenery changes without warning from theatrical sets to real-life exteriors, and mysteries and ambiguities abound. While the foundations of the Faust tale are definitely there, they’ve been contorted and disguised into true Svankmajer surrealism.

COMMENTS:  I haven’t actually read any of the multiple versions of the Faust legend (most notably adapted by Christopher Marlowe and Goethe), so Svankmajer’s film was my introduction. The wordless opening depicts a sullen middle-aged man who is given a map with a red dot. After some strange happenings in his apartment, he decides to follow it and ends up in a dark theater populated by a silent crew and an array of stop-motion oddities. For reasons unknown, he dresses himself up as Faust and begins reading the script aloud, eventually making his way to a stage facing a recently-assembled audience. He gets stage fright and abandons the costume and stage, but continually finds himself back in character, summoning the devil’s demonic aid Mephisto, signing away his soul, and generally making a black magical mess of things. His real life merges seamlessly with his performance, as he switches back and forth between puppet form and human form, painted backdrops and the streets of Prague.

What makes Faust so puzzling is the lead character’s complete refusal to question what is happening to him—the viewer is in the dark for the entirety of the film, left to either coax out some explanation for the events onscreen or abandon any attempt at making sense of things (I opted for the latter). Our Everyman is compelled to act out the legend, with demonic apparitions and mysterious sights appearing in both the “stage” version and his supposedly real life, casting a dreamlike shadow over all of the proceedings. Two silent and conniving fellows follow him around, manipulating his actions without clear motivation. Like a more horrific  Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, the protagonist seems lost and aimless until he is speaking pre-penned lines out of a Faust script, eventually becoming the character he speaks for simply because there is little other choice. His strange experience is revealed to be cyclical: a host of unassuming “Everymen” have surely fallen prey to Faust‘s allure.

Regardless of the story’s meandering, perplexing structure, the imagery alone is enough to captivate any viewer. A clay baby forms itself out of an hourglass and proceeds to evolve through all the stages of life; huge wooden heads roll down a mountain path and assemble themselves into puppet forms of an angel and a devil; a restaurant table inexplicably spouts wine; a host of puppet royalty drowns in a painted sea; Mephisto takes on the eerily sculpted appearance of Petr Cepek when he speaks; a team of ballerinas harvest hay in unison; a human man gets down and dirty with a wooden devil disguised as a female puppet. It’s all there, and more! Along with, of course, Svankmajer’s noted ear for terrific and often unsettling sound effects.

It’s weird, it’s confusing, it’s imaginative: Faust transforms a familiar tale into a strange and compelling dream. The words remain true to the source material, but all of the visuals are wonderfully bizarre and often without precedent.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Svankmajer introduces a dark, squishy, perversely surreal world: It’s part Lewis Carroll, part Kafka, part David Lynch and absolutely not American… Using stylistic elements that he’s developed over 40 years of film making — live action and stop-motion animation, wooden and clay figures, grotesque imagery and vivid sound effects — Svankmajer creates the warped, disturbing logic of a bad dream.”–Edward Guthman, San Francisco Chronicle

 

Faust [Blu-ray]

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Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Reminder: you have one more week to vote in the Weirdcademy Awards poll!  Currently, Enter the Void sports a healthy lead over Black Swan for weirdest picture; Zachary Oberzan leads Heath Ledger for weirdest actor; Delphine Chaneac and Natalie Portman are neck and neck for weirdest actress (a surprisingly close race); and Enter the Void‘s orgy sequence leads Black Swan‘s transformation scene for weirdest scene of the year.  There’s still time to influence the results!

Next week brings you another full slate of reviews, beginning with Jan Svankmajer‘s second feature film, a predictably weird adaptation of Faust (1994); from the reader suggested review queue, we’ll take a look at the Japanese rock n’ roll zombie movie Wild Zero (2000); we’ll check out Sam Fuller’s insanely over-ambitious melodrama Shock Corridor (1963); and Alfred will continue his survey of Terence Fisher‘s Hammer work by examining the Brit’s version of The Mummy (1959).

Our survey of weird search terms used to locate the site this week brought us a person who apparently believes Luis Buñuel was a pornographer: how else to explain the search for “longest ejaculation shot in bunuel avant garde film”?  We were too confused by “miss swan augmentation mamaire” to nominate it for the weirdest search term of the week, and “bizzare section bringis you bizare action and free wei…,” was too obvious (though we like the fact that the searcher bothered to type out the trailing “…”).  For our official Weirdest Search Term of the week, we’ll go with “download classic black and white movies free woman on the run suddenly a guest i the house please murder me,” because of the fact that the searcher apparently went insane between the time when he started typing the search term and the point where he finished it.

Here’s that ridiculously long reader-suggested review queue (more after the break): Possession; Wild Zero (next week!); Nothing (2003); The Peanut Butter Solution; Perfume: The Story of a Murderer; Faust; Sublime;  Pink Floyd: The Wall; Toto the Hero [Toto le Héros]; Paprika; The Holy Mountain; Brazil; The Casserole Masters; Dark Crystal; Throw Away Your Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: MY FAVORITE THINGS THAT I LOVE (2010)

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Remember those awful Lisa Frank animations that appeared on binders, stickers, pencils, and any other supplies a typical 90’s girl would carry around during grade school? (If not, you can always look up their equally terrible commercial on YouTube.) “My Favorite Things That I Love” could be described as an an enjoyable version of that phenomenon. Soaring unicorns, dancing woodland critters, poodles with make up, and even more kitsch awaits you in the video below.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 2/18/2011

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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.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Vanishing on 7th Street: Darkness takes over the streets of Detroit, literally leaving death in its wake, in this “apocalyptic thriller.”  We take note of it because it’s from director Brad Anderson (The Machinist, Session 9).  Simultaneously available on some on-demand cable systems.  Vanishing on 7th Street official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Hellacious Acres: The Case of John Glass (2011):  A minimalist post-apocalyptic comedy about a man who wakes from a cryogenic slumber to discover the world has been devastated by nuclear war followed by an alien invasion.  From the demented mind of Pat Tremblay, who gave us the still-unreleased Heads of Control: The Gorul Baheu Brain Expedition, so the scenario is likely to be even weirder than described.  This is now apparently completed, although it has not yet debuted.

NEW ON DVD:

Repo Chick (2010): Alex Cox’s long awaited (by us, at least) “spiritual sequel” to the groundbreaking Repo Man is a “kooky” comedy casting what appears to be a modernized “Valley Girl” as the Repo Chick drawn into a kidnapping plot in Los Angeles.  Looks deliberately cheap and campy, shot entirely in green screen, and the trailer’s frankly uninspiring.  Where has Alex been since turning down the chance to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? Buy Repo Chick.

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within (2010): Documentary on Naked Lunch author and beat icon Burroughs.  Not weird but “of interest,” and it contains tributes from weirdmen David Cronenberg and John Waters, among others. Buy William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Network (1976):  In the reality-TV era, Paddy Chayefsky’s satire about a network that revives sagging ratings by cynically exploiting the on-air mental breakdown of a news anchor no longer seems that weird.  Still, up until this week we were mad as hell that this classic black comedy had never been released on Blu-ray before. Buy Network [Blu-ray].

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.

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!