Hedonistic, claustrophobic, original, and downright weird; “Derealiser La Faille” is a nightmare toying with our senses and psyche. Trust me, this one will remain in your subconscious for the remainder of your day.
Déréaliser la faille from Jeremy Zèle on Vimeo.
AKA Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas
DIRECTED BY: Henry Selick
FEATURING: Voices of Chris Sarandon, Danny Elfman, Catherine O’Hara, Ken Page
PLOT: Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown, discovers Christmas and tries to recreate it, with ghoulish results.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As a children’s film, The Nightmare Before Christmas has a high hurdle to overcome. Since it’s aimed at kids, the movie is permitted to indulge in imagination and fantasy, so long as it uses a conventional story framework and takes a stab at conveying a useful moral lesson. Nightmare has a great, morbid motivating idea and is a triumph of macabre art design, but at heart it doesn’t stray very far from the childrens’ film format. If it’s eventually to be counted amongst the weird, it will be solely for its incidentals and visuals.
COMMENTS: The opening song introduces us to the ghastly denizens of Halloweentown, including the expected assortment of witches, vampires and ghosts, but also a creature with black and white striped snakes for fingers, the “clown with the tearaway face,” and a two-faced mayor with a spinning top for a head and a freakishly phallic stovepipe hat. This legion of scary weirdos are ruled over by Jack Skellington, an elegant but spindly skeleton in a pinstripe suit. A grim gray pallor hangs over the town, which features an Expressionist pumpkin patch/boneyard with slanted tombstones and a curlicue hill permanently posed before a giant yellow moon. Bored with the repetitive routine of Halloween, Skellington seeks new vistas and finds one when he stumbles onto Christmastown, an eye-popping festival of lights and toys set among blinding white snowbanks ruled over by a jolly fat man; the town provides the perfect visual and spiritual contrast to gloomy Halloweentown. A holiday architect looking for a new challenge, Jack decides to “take over” Christmas (incidentally kidnapping Santa Claus). After futile attempts to ferret out the meaning of Christmas by dissecting teddy bears and placing crushed ornaments in boiling beakers, Skellington hatches a plan to pose as Kris Kringle and deliver toys himself, which leads to the film’s keystone sequence: a horrific Christmas Eve sleigh ride through a doomed village, where the Santa-suited skeleton leaves ghoulishly inappropriate gifts for Christmastown’s tots, including a severed head and a tannenbaum-swallowing snake. It all ends in disaster, as Jack, who began with the best of intentions, realizes that his amateur staging of Christmas was a Nightmare and that he has to set things right and reaffirm his devotion to the Satanic rites of All Hallow’s Eve. The moral seems to be, attempts to understand other cultures are doomed to failure; stick to your own kind.
The character designs and intricate, almost hidden gruesome details (like the skeletal Halloween cock that crows the dawn) are the triumph of Nightmare. With a couple of exceptions—the bubbly, Broadwayesque “What’s This?” when bemused Jack first discovers Christmastown (“There’s children throwing snowballs instead of throwing heads/They’re busy building toys and absolutely no one’s dead!”) and a deviant number sung by three mischievous trick or treaters who plan to kidnap “Sandy Claws” (“Kidnap the Sandy Claws, throw him in a box/Bury him for ninety years, then see if he talks”)—Danny Elfman’s songs are flat and unmemorable, advancing the plot but not thrilling the ear. The story is also exceedingly thin, even at its trim running time of under 80 minutes. The original concept came from a Burton parody of Clement Moore’s “Twas the Night Before Christmas;” to pad out the running time, a romantic subplot and an antagonist were added. The love interest is Sally, a stitched-together female Frankenstein forever losing her limbs. She’s constantly scheming to escape her creator, a duck-billed mad scientist with a detachable brainpan who wants to keep her locked in his castle, and she acts as a cautionary voice for Jack, trying to warn him off his insane Yuletide scheme. There’s no spark to their relationship, though, and though their romantic ending is pretty, it’s also pretty meaningless in story terms. The villain, Oogie Boogie the Boogeyman, is another wonderful character in search of a plot function. A burlap sack stuffed with creepy crawlies, gruff Ken Page gives him a 1920s boogie-woogie singer’s voice, and he makes a hell of a hellish impression. But he’s introduced late and has no real motivation: it’s unclear why he thinks that bumping off Santa Claus will help him unseat Skellington as king of Halloweentown. He pads the film, but his main purposes are to set up an unnecessary, anticlimactic action sequence for the finale, and (more importantly) to provide Selick the opportunity to build another magical set. And Oogie’s lair is it’s own freaky, fun world: his hideout is casino themed, with living gunfighter slot machines and worms crawling through the pips of dice, and it’s bathed UV lights to give the puppets an eerie glow. Though the script could have done much more to make him a meaningful antagonist, the awesome visuals this boogeyman inspires are reason enough for him to take up space in Nightmare‘s world. The entire story takes a back seat to the cute, Gothic animation, so why should Sally and Oogie Boogie be any different?
The idea for Nightmare was originally sketched out by Tim Burton at Disney Studios, before they fired him for “wasting company resources” by making Frankenweenie. After the director found success outside the Magic Kingdom, Disney was willing to work with him again, and he served as Nightmare‘s producer and even got his name in the title. In a case of history repeating itself, the studio again found the finished work too morbid and were afraid it would frighten young children, so they released it under their Touchstone subsidiary. Despite rave reviews, Nightmare was not an immediate success, but it has found a cult audience on video. Disney has since fully re-embraced the movie, removing all traces of the old Touchstone logos and prominently slapping the Disney name back on the prints, just as if they had been 100% behind it before it became a hit.
Related: Alfred Eaker’s A Few Odd Yuletide Favs.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
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 (WIDE RELEASE):
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Comic comic-book adaptation about a teen (Michael Cera, who will probably be playing teenagers until he starts to go bald) who must defeat seven evil ex-boyfriends to win the heart of his beloved. Certainly a stretch for “weird” but looks quirky, offbeat. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World official site.
FILM FESTIVALS (NEW YORK CITY):
The New York City International Film Festival: Runs Aug 12-19. 120 films (including shorts) from all over the world are premiering here, which means there should be something weird; the only one we could locate is the Spanish entry Lodo. The filmmakers offer the following description: “Three levels in Sara’s mind: obsessions from her past, ghosts from the present, push her towards her own inner hell.” The trailer has a music-video style sheen. The New York City International Film Festival official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Crumb (1995): Landmark documentary on R. Crumb, the famously eccentric comic book artist and counterculture icon, an acid-damaged neurotic with disturbing sexual fetishes and questionable racial sensitivities; the surprise of the doc is that R. appears to be the most normal person in his family. Another quality entry (and surprising choice) from the Criterion Collection. Buy Crumb (The Criterion Collection)
Sea of Dust (2008): Described as a mindbending gory fairytale done in a retro-Hammer style, starring makeup man Tom Savini and seventy-two year old former sex symbol Ingrid (The Wicker Man) Pitt. The tagline reads “David Lynch meets the Brides of Dracula.” It won Best Feature at the non-prestigious Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival, but has also scored a ridiculously low 1.8 user rating on IMDB. For reference, Uwe Boll’s nearly universally hated The House of the Dead scored a 2.0; that 1.8 rating and would qualify as one of the IMDB’s 100 lowest rated movies if it had enough votes to qualify. I confess to being fascinated by the possibilities this one offers. Buy Sea of Dust
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Crumb (1995): See entry in DVD above. Buy Crumb (The Criterion Collection) [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.
Sheila Franklin’s 2004 documentary, The King of Pluto (2004) focuses on the art of Michigan politico Mike Wrathell. From the outset, it is immediately apparent that Wrathell is a genuine oddball. I say the film is about Wrathell’s art because it is not really about his life at all. He and Franklin do not delve into the why of his art, what drives him, or where he came from and that’s just fine because this approach renders the film as quirky, vague, and enigmatic as Wrathell’s art.
Wrathell considers himself a Warhol-inspired dadaist who is obsessed with the planet Pluto. He recollects that when he met president George W. Bush, he asked Bush to support a mission to Pluto. Bush replied “I’m going to send you to Pluto!” Wrathell (in 2004) predicts the mission to Pluto will be a reality by 2006.
Wrathell’s art can be seen on film can be purchased there as well. Wrathell’s silk-screen art, not surprisingly, often deals with Pluto, but he also covers celebrities, such as Maurren O’ Sullivan, John Travolta’s “Pluto Night Fever,” Ted Koppell as an Orwellian Micky Mouse, and Gilligan (as a Plutonian). Wrathell also covers events and topics such as 911, images of Saturn, Venus, Neptunians, Blue Dracula, and why he prefers Martha Stewart to Barbara Walters.
Wrathell is a Republican and has run for various offices, unsuccessfully. He tells us about buying a CIA baseball cap while he was in New York City near ground zero. He buys it so potential terrorists will think he is CIA. Or, they will think he is not CIA since an agent would not wear a cap reading “CIA”; or, a CIA man might buy a cap reading CIA to make us think he is not with the CIA, when in actuality he is. Who knows? But, on reflection Wrathell admits the cap was worth five bucks.
He takes us to Burger King where he describes the perfect Whopper as having two tomatoes, or three, if you order extra tomato, which is what he orders. Wrathell sits down with his Whopper and explains that it should have three tomatoes. When he unwraps his sandwich, he discovers it to be a Chicken Whopper. He returns the sandwich and hums, masking his displeasure, as they make him a new Whopper. They do it right this time and the world is good again.
Back to the art. Wrathell shows us watercolors on postcards and on lined notebook paper. He has started a movement, he says. It is the Ultra-Renaissance art movement, of which he is the sole member.
In the end, I am not sure who Mike Wrathell really is, but then I don’t know much about Pluto either, other than that the idea of it seems pretty cool, and that is good enough. In the end, I would say Wrathell flies the freak flag high. He is the kind of artist to sit down and have a couple of beers with, let him talk as you drink, and the more you drink, the better and better his talk sounds. That is a recommendation.
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DIRECTOR: James Nguyen
FEATURING: Alan Bagh, Whitney Moore
PLOT: A “romantic thriller” from writer/director James Nguyen, the film explores the impact of widespread eagle attacks on software salesman Rod (Alan Bagh) and up-and-coming model Nathalie (Whitney Moore), whose romance has just begun to blossom. It all plays into writer/director Nguyen’s Tippi Hedren fandom.
span style=”text-decoration: underline;”>WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s so bad it’s good, and it’s a real hoot in a theater with an enthusiastic audience, but Birdemic isn’t actually all that weird. The fusion of workplace drama, eager romance, and disaster movie is well-meaning but heavy-handed, and the strangest (and funniest) thing about the film is seeing grown men and women flailing around in fear of atrociously-animated birds, which end up resembling animated .GIFs.
COMMENTS: With production values worthy of a commercial for your local grocery store and a script riddled with non sequiturs, the story of our boring-as-hell heroes unfolds quite slowly. Yes, it’s true that environmental degradation from humans has caused the area bird population to exact a feathery and surprisingly explosive revenge, but before the carnage hits the audience is treated to a large amount of Rod and Nathalie’s work-related endeavors and tepid early dates. Luckily, their stilted performances and poorly-written conversations are enough to keep anyone laughing merrily along until the anticipated birdpocalypse, at which point the fun continues when they team up with a gun-crazy neighbor and two particularly useless children.
As a movie itself, Birdemic is just awful: the dialogue and acting are equally amateur and laughably awkward. The script is poorly structured, thematically very blunt, and often nonsensical. The effects are the lowest of the low, amounting to bird attackers that resemble animated .gif’s from 1997 and adorably tiny explosions popping up out of nowhere. The score is suspiciously repetitive, there’s a host of randomly-appearing characters who serve little purpose in the story, the visual quality and camera work are noticeably sub-par… there’s quite a long list of negative elements.
Of course, it’s all those things and more that make Birdemic a wholly satisfying film-going experience. The (presumably) unintended comedy of the characters and script are so engaging that the addition of horribly CG-ed birds flapping their way around real-life objects just heighten an already-entertaining movie. There’s something terribly endearing about the whole affair, from Rod’s delayed reactions and extended shots of people driving, to uncoordinated camera movements, completely un-erotic sex scenes, and the most unrealistic forest fire I’ve ever seen.
It may be one of the worst movies ever made, but definitely in the most enjoyable way possible. Plus it’s got an environmentalist message, so that’s heartening. And an anti-bird message. Screw those guys, you know?
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
NOTE: This review is also published in a slightly different form at Film Forager.