Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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What’s up with Netflix?  They tell me the #1 movie in my queue, Ink, which I desperately wanted to review for next week, is available NOW.  Then, they send me the #2 movie in my queue instead.  So, you won’t get that Ink review this week.   Instead, you’ll get a review of Powder, as well as that great double-feature that gets to the heart of Havana soul, Cuban Story and Cuban Rebel Girls.  Throw in some mix of reviews of Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead, Absurdistan, Richard Kelly’s The Box, and the undead baby flick Grace, and you’ve got yourself a week.

As for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week, we’ll go with “www.doctor.assess.movies.com.”   I can only guess that the searcher was looking for a very specific website of film reviews by a M.D.; sadly, it doesn’t seem to exist.  Hope you liked our site instead.

In related news, we’re proud to say that last week we came up #1 on Google for the popular search term, “weirdest sex movies.”  Surely people searching for that phrase are hoping to find descriptions of Lucia y el Sexo and Girl Slaves of Morgana le Fay.  It marks a refreshing change from all the people who accidentally stumble on the site looking for porn.

Here’s the depressingly long reader review queue: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, The Dark Backward, The Short Films of David Lynch, Santa Sangre, Dead Man, Inland Empire, Monday (assuming I can find an English language version), The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Barton Fink, What? (Diary of Forbidden Dreams), Meatball Machine, Xtro, Basket Case, Suicide Club, O Lucky Man!, Trash Humpers (when/if released), Gozu, Tales of Ordinary Madness, The Wayward Cloud, Kwaidan, Six-String Samurai, Andy Warhol’s Trash, Altered States, Memento, Nightmare Before Christmas/Vincent/Frankenweenie, The Science of Sleep, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Gothic, The Attic Expeditions, After Last Season, Getting Any?, Performance, Being John Malkovich, The Apple, Southland Tales, Arizona Dream, Spider (2002), Songs From The Second Floor, Singapore Sling, Alice [Neco z Alenky], Dark Country, Necromania (1971, Ed Wood, unless the original requester gets back to me to clarify what he or she meant), and Hour of the Wolf.

Saturday Short, Shorts

SATURDAY SHORT: “SPACIOUS THOUGHTS”

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The music video is the one form where directors can be weird and experimental without fear of being shunned by the world at large. Made for the band N.A.S.A.’s album “The Spirit of Apollo,” where the concept was to pair unlikely musicians, “Spacious Thoughts” mixes the smooth rap of Kool Keith with the grumblings of ever-weird Tom Waits. Director Fluorescent Hill animates Keith as a black sphere wearing cowboy boots who breathes out Tom as an angry cloud.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 12/4/2009

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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.

Looking over this week’s big-screen offerings, it occurs to me that once 366 Enterprises becomes a multi-million dollar corporation, we’re going to have to relocate our offices to New York City; that’s the only place in America you can see  two exclusive, unavailable-anywhere-else weird films in one week.  Right now, we can’t afford the cost of Manhattan popcorn, much less rent.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Big River Man:  Documentary about Martin Strel, a hard-drinking, overweight, eccentric Slovenian, and his unprecedented attempt to swim the length of the Amazon river.  By their very nature, documentaries start behind the eight ball in terms of weirdness, but Strel is such a character that this doc is being labeled “strange,” “insane,” and “surreal” and “bizarre.”  Appears to be playing NYC only.  Big River Man official site.

Film ist: A Girl and a Gun:  A montage of silent-film footage arranged into a “a highly suggestive, quasi-narrative, but essentially enigmatic mosaic.”  Playing this week at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City only.  No official site, but see Anthology Film Archives for more information.

SCREENINGS (DEC. 11 & 12, NEW YORK CITY):

Coming Soon (2006/2008):  See our review.  The controversial bestiality mockumentary makes its U.S. debut at The Living Theater.  Mark your calendars, and expect one weird crowd.

NEW ON DVD:

The Brooklyn Heist [AKA Capers] (2008):  Three teams of criminals each plan to rip off the same Brooklyn pawnbroker on the same night in this caper spoof; the twist is that each team is living in a different cinematic reality, including a gang apparently based on the French New Wave whose scenes are shot in black and white.  This comedy slipped under our radar, but reviews and film festival audience reactions were both positive.  Looks worth a shot. Buy Brooklyn Heist from Amazon.

WEB EXCLUSIVES:

Creepy Christmas Film Fest: 25 short films, one for every day from Dec. 1st to Dec. 25th, each built around a different creepy Christmas toy selected by artist Beck Underwood from her grandmother’s collection.  The subtly disturbing films come from Larry Fessenden, Voltaire, Graham Reznick, and Ti West, among others.  A couple of these shorts will be featured on these pages in the coming month; for the other 23, you’ll have to go to creepychristmas.net.  It’s a recommended visit.

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.

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

A FEW ODD YULETIDE FAVS

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1. Rankin & Bass’ Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) : There’s a reason this has become a perennial cult and popular classic.  Hands down it is the best of the Rankin & Bass holiday shorts. Most of the team’s holiday specials, such as Year without a Santa Clause (below), have memorable moments, but don’t really add up to a great whole.  Rudolph does.  It’s a great (probably unintentional) weird mix.

A bigoted, misogynist, unlikeable, bitchy Santa, an equally unlikeable reindeer coach (with a baseball cap, no less), Rudolph’s jerk of a father, an abominable snow monster, a winged lion, straight out of apocalyptic literature, who oversees an island of dysfunctional toys, including a polka-dotted elephant, a Charlie-in-the-box, and a cowboy who rides an ostrich.  On top of that is Burl Ives as a talking snowman, a too-cute girlfriend reindeer for our hero (with a bow atop her head), an elf who wants to be a dentist and a prospector by the name of Yukon Cornelius, who steals the  entire show.  Yukon “Even among misfits I’m a misfit”  Cornelius has rightly become a cult figure all by himself.  Oh, and then there’s Rudolph himself, who is understandably a bit bland in comparison but is the necessary catalyst for such a brew.

No amount of eggnog is going to help this fav seem traditionally orthodox.  Max Fleischer did a more straightforward version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1948), although Max’s style is still all over it.

2. Pee Wee’s Christmas at the Playhouse (1988) : Pee Wee Hermann’s  holiday gathering at the playhouse with guest stars Dinah Shore, Charo (!!!), Little Richard, Grace Jones, K.D. Lang, Za Za Gabor, Magic Johnson, Cher, Frankie Avalon, Santa himself and the normal Playhouse gang.

Its almost as divine a time capsule as Paul Lynde’s Halloween Special.  The only disappointment is not getting to see Pee Wee looking up the girls’ dresses with his mirrored shoes.  Fans of the Playhouse will walk away beaming.

santa-claus-conquers-the-martians3.  Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964): You know we had to include this one. Before Pia Zadora had her ten seconds of fame (10 seconds too long), she “starred” in a film  so abysmal, so bad, so weird that only the bravest can get through it.  Try to watch the MS3TK version, it almost makes it bearable.

4. The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974): Rankin and Bass again, but this one doesn’t altogether work (as mentioned above).  We could care less about Santa, the elves, or the reindeer, BUT, the sight of Mr. Heat Miser, son of Mother Nature, doing a jig in the pit of hell Continue reading A FEW ODD YULETIDE FAVS →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SURVEILLANCE (2008)

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DIRECTED BY: Jennifer Lynch

FEATURING: Bill Pullman, Julia Ormand, Michael Ironside

PLOT: Two FBI agents/weirdos harass criminals and innocents alike as they search for a couple of murderers to whom they might have ties.

Still from Surveillance (2008)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Think CSI or NCIS meets Natural Born Killers. The weird quotient is totally crushed by the earthbound whodunnit quotient. It shows promise early on, and while the subtleties of the genre don’t escape my grasp, I don’t think that, in a truly weird movie, I should be asking “whodunit?,” but rather, “what the hell’s going to happen next?”

COMMENTS: Surveillance is the sophomore directorial effort by possibly-nepotistic director Jennifer Lynch, her first being the acclaimed/notorious Boxing Helena. This little nugget of info was what really interested me about seeing Surveillance, and I was hoping, no, begging for it to be just as weird as Helena without, hopefully, the punch-in-the-dignity twist ending.

What I got, unfortunately, was a moderate amount of sadism and unusual behavior, but a decidedly pedestrian tone. It’s a pretty good film, but it’s simply not weird enough to keep me thinking about it or talking about it after I’ve seen it. The leads, and Julia Ormand, are good, and I like the dangerous chemistry between them, but it’s nothing I haven’t seen before verbatim in other movies. The stand-out here is the vicious Michael Ironside, who plays the torturous Captain Jennings, a psychotic cop with a penchant for roughing up people and generally acting schizophrenic. I love his character, and I love his particular intensity that recalls his heyday, circa Scanners.

The script, also by Lynch, is devious, with plenty of funky, uneven dialog that recalls, in small doses, her father‘s wording from Wild at Heart (“Those are dummies, dummy!”). Her direction isn’t bad, either, although far from inspired. She has a good time playing with different filters and tones here, but it’s pretty standard fare. Surveillance is solid feature that I actually enjoyed a bit, and would recommend as a definite rental possibility, but don’t come looking for something genuinely freaky here, because this film can’t sustain real-deal strange in large doses. Jennifer Lynch somehow manages to makes a better film than her debut, but at the expense of creating anything exceptional.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…director Jennifer Lynch tried way too hard to follow in the deep blue surrealist footsteps of her father, David Lynch… But she finds her own voice in Surveillance, a grubby, disturbing serial-killer mystery, a kind of blood-simple Rashomon.”-Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly (contemporaneous)

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