Today’s Saturday Short was suggested by a reader, Nina. Our protagonist in this short, Gustafer Yellowgold, is an alien from the sun who only dreams in green. In the midst of all those kid shows that encourage children to dance around and shout out answers to questions comes one that actually has a calm, soothing nature to it. It’s fanciful personality makes it acceptably weird.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 2/5/10
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):
Terribly Happy [Frygtelig lykkelig](2009): Danish film noir about a police officer assigned to a strange and insular town after he has a nervous breakdown; often compared to the Coen brothers or David Lynch, Slant calls it a “surreal noir” and The Hollywood Reporter called it “seriously weird.” The Danish submission for the foreign language film Oscar; too weird to be nominated. Terribly Happy official site.
NEW ON DVD:
The Time Travelers Wife (2009): Romantic sci-fi/fantasy about a man born with a gene which causes him to become unstuck in time at random intervals. Scripted by Bruce Joel Rubin of Jacob’s Ladder fame from a bestselling novel by Audrey Niffenegger. Few critics thought it was too good, but at least one (Brandon Judell) thought it was “too weird,” which may be considered an endorsement. Buy The Time Traveler’s Wife
Triangle (2009): Time-travel tale about passengers on a capsized yacht who escape to a mysteriously deserted cruise ship. Some viewers call it a surrealistic mindbender, while others suggest its a bigger-budget version of the intriguing but non-weird Spanish film Los Cronocrimes [Timecrimes]. Looks like we’ll have to view it and weigh in. Buy Triangle
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Fear and Loathing is Las Vegas (1998): You often hear the hackneyed phrase “an acid trip on film”, but the description actual fits Terry Gilliam‘s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s hallucinogenic counter-cultural touchstone fairly literally. A big weird Blu-ray addition! Buy Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [Blu-ray]
The Man from Earth (2007): Philosophical, independent sci-fi film about a college professor who claims to be 14,000 years old. A thinking man’s picture, which explains why you’ve probably never heard of it before. Buy Man From Earth [Blu-ray]
The Time Travelers Wife (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy The Time Traveler’s Wife [Blu-ray]
Triangle (2009): See description in DVD above. Buy Triangle [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.
2009 ACADEMY AWARDS: THE ONLY WEIRD THING ABOUT THEM IS THAT PEOPLE WILL WATCH THE 8 HOUR BROADCAST
The 2009 Academy Awards nominations are out, and they are every bit as tepid and conventional as we would have predicted. The small sliver of hope is that, by expanding the field to 10 nominations, one mildly weird film did manage to worm it’s way into Best Picture contention: the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, which also garnered a well-deserved “Best Original Screenplay” nomination. The beautiful looking Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus also got mentions for “Best Art Direction” and “Best Costumes.”
A few non-weird titles we covered in the past year got noticed by the Academy. Coraline received a nomination for “Best Animated Film”: an honor, but a win isn’t in the cards considering the competition it’s Up against. Stanley Tucci was mentioned for his chilling performance as a child murderer in the otherwise unremarkable The Lovely Bones. And, to our shock, the musical snoozer Nine gathered a stunning four nominations: a Best Supporting Actress for the lovely and talented (but for this performance, undeserving) Penélope Cruz; one for art direction; one for costume design (corset and fishnet stocking fetishes are obviously common among members of the Academy); and one for the original song “Take it All” (now, which one was that, again?)
With all due respect to the Academy, we’d like to offer this alternative, weirder slate of nominees:
BEST WEIRD PICTURE OF 2009:
- Antichrist: torture-porn in the style of Tarkovsky
- The Box: a confusing sci-fi fable about moral dilemmas
- Cold Souls: Paul Giamatti misplaces his soul and it winds up on the black market in Russia
- Dark Country: Noir/horror hybrid about a couple that hit a man on a lonely desert road on the way back from their honeymoon
- The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: An ancient mystic with the power to make dreams real in a magic mirror tries to weasel out of a deal with the devil
- Ink: A mysterious creature kidnaps a young girl and takes her into the world of dreams
- Ponyo: A goldfish becomes a real live girl
- A Serious Man: An absurdist retelling of the story of Job embodied by a Jewish physics professor in 1960s suburban Minnesota
- Thirst [Bakjwi]: A Korean Catholic priest tries and fails to suck blood ethically after he is cursed with vampirism
- Where the Wild Things Are: A rambunctious boy travels to a storybook land to meet symbolic psychological monsters
WEIRDEST ACTOR:
CAPSULE: BEYOND RE-ANIMATOR (2003)
DIRECTED BY: Brian Yuzna
FEATURING: Jeffrey Combs, Jason Barry, Elsa Pataky, Simón Andreu
PLOT: A brilliant young med school graduate gets himself assigned to the institution where Dr. Herbert West is imprisoned so that he can enlist the good doctor’s assistance in continuing his forbidden experiments in reanimating the dead.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Beyond is a welcome third installment in the Re-Animator saga that continues the series’ tradition of going way over-the-top, but though it’s deranged, nonsensical fun, it’s not even the weirdest entry in its own franchise.
COMMENTS: Fans of the taste-challenged Re-Animator series should be pleased with this charmingly grotesque third sequel, which zips along briskly with a delightful disrespect for logic to a phantasmagorically bloody zombie prison riot finale. Jeffery Combs, now middle-aged but still looking like a eternally perturbed boy genius, returns as Dr. Herbert West to inject his deadpan wit into the proceedings while the world goes mad around him. A large part of Dr. West’s mad charisma comes from the fact that he’s constantly sowing seeds of chaos by pushing forward into realms where man was not meant to meddle, then staring at the carnage with a slightly befuddled frown as yet another reanimated corpse unexpectedly turns homicidal. Obsessed and opportunistic, he’s a nerdy Dr. Frankenstein with an unabashedly amoral streak, who always emerges from his own foul ups unscathed while his unlucky companions end up in the charnel house. West’s experiments on rats in prison have led him to believe that he can use electricity to restore the souls of re-animated corpses and keep them from killing off the nubile women who always happen to be standing around whenever a new zombie pops up. This time around, it’s a Doogie Hauser-esque young prison MD who risks everything to help West better the lot of mankind by mixing up a new vat of glowing green reanimation juice, but through a long string of unfortunate occurrences ends up getting kickboxed about the head by a hot zombie dominatrix for his troubles. Even though this entry aims more for comedy than horror, the atmosphere is eerie: what’s spookier than a half-abandoned post-riot prison, with sounds of massacres echoing in the background while burning toilet paper rolls cast the shadows of iron bars on gray stone walls? The crazed climax gives us about as many zombie-hyphenates as any reanimated corpse fan could hope for: zombie-rats, zombie-girlfriends, a half-zombie, zombie-vision, zombie-fellatio. There’s also a pill-popping prisoner who gets hooked on reanimation fluid, leading to the flick’s most bizarre and surreal gag, and a “cockfight” that must be seen to be believed. All in all, Beyond Re-Animator should leave your lower jaw hanging reasonably close to the ground, which is all we ask for in any movie with “Re-Animator” in the title.
Technically inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, though not at all uncanny, Beyond Re-Animator is set in mythical Arkham, Massachucets. To get that New England ambiance down perfectly, Yuzna hired a team of regional filmmakers—guys like screenwriter José Manuel Gómez and executive producer Carlos Fernández—guys with mucho dinero, who understand that an authentic Massachusetts prison looks exactly like something you’d find on the outskirts of Barcelona.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: SCARS OF YOUTH (2008)
DIRECTED BY: John R. Hand
FEATURING: Jeremy Hosbein, Amanda Edington
PLOT: A survivor of the apocalypse is conflicted about his mother, who is addicted to a
black fluid that keeps her eternally young but causes disorientation and scarring.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Scars of Youth is a beautifully lensed film, filled with dreamlike images and montages. Although not impenetrable, the tale comes across mysterious and weird, thanks to the oblique, overwhelmingly visual storytelling. Unfortunately, all this beauty pads a thin and unengaging storyline.
COMMENTS: Scars of Youth is easy to critique. It’s visually and sonically entrancing, on its own terms and even more so when you consider the low budget and lack of any special effects. On the other hand, the story is slow, yet hard to follow, and what we do discern of the tale doesn’t add up to very much. The audio in some of the necessary background exposition is deliberately distorted in an attempt to create atmosphere that creates frustration instead. The performances are substandard throughout; the amateur actors can’t convey complex emotions, and the third main character—a sort of adventurer who smuggles immortality fluid past the checkpoints of an unseen civilization to our hero—sports an unnatural laugh that is particularly off-putting. Almost every scene is drawn out for far too long, with actors staring off into space with melancholy expressions or wandering around state parks, disconsolately staring at wire fences. These elements of pure mood can’t take the place of dialogue or action. There is full-frontal nudity to liven things up, but the mother-son incest subtext, intended to provoke, is laid on far too thickly, with sexual symbolism slathered on with so little subtlety that it becomes embarrassing. On the plus side, the eerie ambient music is a highlight, and the photography is especially beautiful and far more professional than the narrative aspects of the film. There are beautiful shots of rippling ponds, closeups of bustling ant colonies, sun-dappled forests, and a consistent, painterly eye for color and composition. Blue filters are used on the interiors in the protagonist’s lonely room, which turn what would otherwise look like a garage with white sheets hung about for walls into something reasonably mystical. The black and white dream and flashback scenes are crisp and lovely; one brilliantly conceived sequence is grainy and filled with afterimages, as well as some of the film’s loveliest symbolism. These short, impressionistic moments are where Scars shines; they could fit comfortably as mood pieces inside a major production with more of a story to tell. They just can’t carry an entire film.
Hand’s earlier film, Frankensteins Bloody Nightmare, was a collage-like creation inspired by the visual styles of cheap and crazy 1970s drive-in horror movies. The look, sound and pace of Scars of Youth is, instead, a tribute to Tarkovsky‘s Stalker. Hand captures the general feel of the Russian minimalist master, but whereas the murky grindhouse visuals of Nightmare made the lack of locations, story and acting talent almost appropriate, the ultra-clean, professionally shot look of Scars of Youth highlights these deficiencies. Both films contain a few gorgeous images which, if they could be judged in isolation, would earn five star ratings; but, in both films we also get the feeling that we’re watching the work of a brilliant cinematographer and sensualist who has yet to find a meaningful story to tell. If Hand’s storytelling abilities ever catch up to the level of his technical skills, he’ll become the Stanley Kubrick of homemade videos.
A signed “limited edition” of Scars of Youth can be ordered directly from JRH films for $15.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“…another successful experimental tweaking of a familiar genre for Hand.”–Mike Everleth, BadLit.com