Guest Reviews

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: LOVE OBJECT (2003)

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DIRECTED BY: Robert Parigi

FEATURING: Desmond Harrington, Melissa Sagemiller, Udo Kier, Rip Torn

PLOT: In a deviant twist on the Pygmalion myth, a man’s infatuation for a life-like sex doll

evolves into a sinister love triangle when he becomes involved with a coworker.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Love Object, like Lars And The Real Girl which came after, is about a lonely introvert who buys a realistic sex doll for companionship.  Like Ken in Love Object, Lars comes to yearn for a coworker, but has trouble making a connection.  Lars and the Real Girl is a cute movie about the human spirit, and the socialization and evolution of a lonely man.  With the help of his doll and coworker, Lars comes out of his shell, grows and triumphs. In this way, Lars And The Real Girl, while employing a weird vehicle to make its point (the love doll) is more or less a mainstream comedy-drama, no more odd than a Cyrano de Bergerac theme such as Roxanne (1987).

Love Object, however takes a twisted path.  The weird idea of needing the love doll is used to define the protagonist’s nature, but it gets stranger from there.  Ken’s obsession with the doll is not a positive step in the evolution of his character.  It leads him down a dark perverse path toward madness, violence and ruin.  The plot is sick and creepy, the content perverse, and it is skillfully handled, making Love Object a good candidate for the designation of being truly weird.

COMMENTS: It’s tempting to insert some sophomoric humor into this recommendation, but the jokes would be all too predictable.  Despite delivering many elements of black comedy, the overall tone of this surprisingly violent sardonic yarn is serious.  Love Object grimly depicts a bizarre theme with good pacing and artfully blended visual continuity.

Kenneth Winslow is the kind of cold, compulsive dullard who alphabetizes his jock straps.  Taking more interest in the technical world than the human one, Ken writes instruction manuals for electronics —you know, the ones nobody reads.

A joker at work shows Ken a photo of an alluring girl named Nikki, and he is at once smitten.  Nikki is a life-like sex doll, so realistic that Ken can’t detect the substitution.  No devil with the Continue reading RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: LOVE OBJECT (2003) →

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 7/22/2010

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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):

Life During Wartime: Not weird, but of interest, is Todd Solondz’s semi-sequel to his 1998 controversial cult-favorite black comedy Happiness, with different actors in the lead roles.  With Shirley Henderson, Ciarán Hinds, Allison Janney, Charlotte Rampling, and Paul Reubens.  Opening in New York City this week with dates in other major cities in August. Life During Wartime official site.

IN DEVELOPMENT:

Thunder-Sky: Our own Alfred Eaker‘s documentary project about Raymond Thunder-Sky, the outsider artist obsessed with clowns and construction workers. See raw footage, pledge support and follow the project’s progress at the new Thunder-Sky indiegogo page.

NEW ON DVD:

Legends of the Dark Kings: A Fist of the North Star Story (2010):  Fist of the North Star was an influential anime with reportedly weird elements.  This is a Japanese television show; it’s not clear to me exactly what “a Fist of the North Star story” entails, but if you’re in the target market you probably get it. Buy Legends of the Dark King: A Fist of the North Star Story.

A Town Called Panic [Panique au Village] (2009): A stop-motion animated children’s film from Belgium; according to the press release, it “follows the wacky, hilarious and often surreal adventures of three plastic toys named Cowboy, Indian and Horse who share a rambling house in a rural town which never fails to attract the weirdest events.”  Expect a review soon! Buy A Town Called Panic.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Evil Aliens (2005):  Gory would-be cult movie that prefers to compare itself to early Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi rather than to explain what’s unique about this movie.  From the director of Razor Blade Smile (1998).  Buy Evil Aliens [Blu-ray].

Legends of the Dark Kings: A Fist of the North Star Story (2010):  See description in DVD above. Buy Legends of the Dark Kings: Fist of the North Star [Blu-ray].

Tin Man (2007): Nick Willing‘s Emmy-winning SciFi Channel miniseries, a dystopian adult retelling of the Wizard of Oz, hits the Blu-ray ranks this week in a 2-disc edition. Zooey Deschanel stars as Dorothy and Neal McDonough is the Titular Tin Man.  We haven’t seen it, but it was better reviewed than Willing’s followup Alice, which we liked.   Buy Tin Man [Blu-ray].

FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

W the Movie (2009):  Speaking of Alfred Eaker, 366 Distribution is putting W the Movie up on YouTube to watch for free, for a limited time.  We’re describing it, with typical hyperbole, as “a surreal permutation of the Bush years, which could easily have been the Nixon years as well. W the Movie is a nightmare tale straight from the Theater of the absurd, a biblical melodrama told on wrestlemania television, a Greek myth played out on a Christian Broadcast network, the Book of Revelations told as a cheesy 1950’s sci-fi movie.”  If you enjoy it, please consider adding the DVD to your collection.

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

ALFRED EAKER: INTERVIEW WITH MYSELF

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ALFRED EAKER (INTERVIEWER): Alfred, what inspired you to interview yourself? Some might say a self-interview smacks of self indulgence, narcissism.

ALFRED EAKER:  Perhaps.  I am sure to many it is and God knows those tiresome labels are attached to artists all the time, as if it is totally unacceptable.  Yet, to use a stereotypical but dead-on example: a business person cutting throats and screwing their way to a top level is commendable and rarely pointed out as being narcissistic.  Still, all artists are, to a degree, narcissistic and you have to be to continue doing the art.  I do not believe in fair weather artists.  Like Bill Ross recently said when I interviewed him, “The world is not set up for artists and one has to be stubborn to continue doing it.”  So perhaps it is not so self-indulgent.  Actually, a badly misquoted but good-intentioned interview in a local paper from a couple of months back inspired this, proving that most interviewers, God love ’em, are hacks and since I know I am not  a hack and can trust myself… Also, real simply, Glen Gould.  Gould, one of the genuine freaks in music, interviewed himself, quite well I might add.

A.E. (I):  Gould was the Canadian pianist who….

A.E. … Did a total whack job on Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1955, yes.  That was the first of his many transgressions, for which he will be long loved.  The same goes for Stokowski’s Bach transcriptions. Someone once described his transcriptions as high cholesterol Bach and I do have high cholesterol.

A.E. (I): You have quite the love of music?

A.E.: From Mahler onto Cab Calloway, Julie London, David Bowie, Velvet Underground and the Statler Brothers.

A.E (I): I do not wish to get sidetracked in a lengthy music discourse. You tend to talk longer and more enthusiastically about music than you do either painting or film.

A.E.: That’s because I am not a musician at all, so yes I suppose I do.

A.E (I): Let’s talk about film. You are an indie filmmaker and you came to it rather late.

Alfred Eaker in "Jesus and Her Gospel of Yes"
Alfred Eaker in "Jesus and Her Gospel of Yes"

A.E.: I would rather talk painting first, but alright.  Yes, I started my first film, Jesus and her Gospel of Yes in 2002 . I have been painting since the 1980’s.

A.E. (I): The films sprang from performance art.

A.E.: From my BlueMahler character in several performance pieces that began in the 80’s.  Blue is an odd hybrid of identifications I have made in my life.

A.E. (I): You mean influences, not identifications.

A.E.: No, I mean identifications.  Over the years I have realized there are other voices, artists Continue reading ALFRED EAKER: INTERVIEW WITH MYSELF →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SPLICE (2010)

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DIRECTED BY: Vincenzo Natali

FEATURING: Adrien Brody, , Delphine Chanéac

PLOT: When two geneticists (Brody and Polley) mix some human DNA into a cloning

Still from Splice (2010)

experiment, they end up with a rapidly aging chimera child whom neither of them can control.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Despite some bizarre mutation imagery, most of the film remains solidly within the realm of the horror-infused family melodrama, and tends to be more icky than weird.

COMMENTS: Canadian writer-director Natali, best known for his low-budget thriller Cube, has created a love letter to mad scientist stories, from Frankenstein to Cronenberg’s The Fly.  All the expected clichés are present and accounted for, from the sterile, blue-tinted milieu of industrial science right down to the Jurassic Park-worthy mantra of “What’s the worst that could happen?”  In Splice, however, these trappings are refashioned to create a demented parable about the dangers of bad parenting, and much of the film’s commentary in this vein is delightfully on-target.  The scientific method gets entangled with the geneticists’ emotional hang-ups as they try to raise the part-human Dren (Chanéac).  This results in hilarious exchanges like one where Brody cries, “Specimens need to be contained!” and Polley responds, “Don’t call her that!”

However, as the story moves from the laboratory to a rural farmhouse, the film realizes its unpleasantly taboo-violating trajectory.  From there on in, the film trades its humorous insights in for gross-outs and gore, with a climax so unnecessarily vile it makes you want to take a shower while bemoaning its reductive view of gender. Still, Splice has a lot to offer the weird movie fan, as certain images, such as a press conference that becomes a bloodbath or Dren’s development into a bald, feral adolescent, won’t soon be forgotten.  Like his characters, Natali is a kind of mad scientist, deftly integrating the pains of child rearing into an age-old sci-fi premise; maybe next time, there’ll be a little more method to his madness.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s fascinating, sweet and especially grotesque – a distorted aspect of an overall analysis of post-millennial parental fears – all at the same time, and makes for some utterly bizarre imagery. In fact, I think I can say, without a shred of hyperbole, that this movie has some of the strangest moments you’ll see on film this year. If not in the next several years. Or maybe you’ve already seen a man dancing the waltz with a beautiful woman who is reverse jointed, has a mirror effect face, a monkey’s tail and a scorpion’s stinger?”–Nick DaCosta, Eye for Film (contemporaneous)

Capsules

CAPSULE: INCEPTION (2010)

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Must See

DIRECTED BY: Christopher Nolan

FEATURING: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Cillian Murphy, Marion Cotillard, Dileep Rao

PLOT: Cobb (DiCaprio), a mercenary with a unique skill set—he breaks into targets’ subconsciouses as they dream in order to steal business secrets—assembles a team to enter the mind of an heir to a billionaire’s fortune; but will his preoccupation with his lost wife, which is poisoning his own subconscious, destroy the mission?

Still from Inception (2010)

WILL IT MAKE THE LIST?: There’s a rule around here: no movie officially makes the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies of all time until it’s released on DVD, so that we can pore over individual scenes at our leisure. That said, Inception is probably on the borderline. That’s not to suggest it’s a bad movie; in fact, Inception may well be the best movie released so far in 2010, and has surely already nailed down an Oscar nomination and a spot on most critics 2010 top 10 lists. The question is, is it weird? By Hollywood standards, a psychologically thriller about professional dream infiltrators is damn weird; so out there, in fact, that only someone with the clout of a Christopher Nolan could get it made and released as a summer blockbuster. (Though to be honest, the subject matter is not as weird, to a studio executive, as is the concept of purposefully releasing an movie with a script that’s so complicated and tricky it throws viewers into a state of total bafflement within the first ten minutes). Nolan’s latest is pop-weird; it creates just a little bit of pleasant confusion that viewers trust will be substantially resolved by the end. It’s not a movie that will risk leaving us stranded in a psychological limbo. Nolan’s dreamscapes are surprisingly based in realism, carefully constructed from cinematically familiar parts—mainly old heist movies, film noirs and spy flicks—rather than from abstruse symbols, Jungian archetypes, and monsters from the id. With its focus on action and self-contained narrative rather than mysticism and mystery, Inception has more in common with crowd-pleasers like The Matrix or Total Recall than it does with 2001: A Space Odyssey or Stalker. (Although, if we were forced to select the weirdest movie of 2010 in July, we’d be forced to go with this one; thankfully we have five more months of movies to select from).

COMMENTS:  I wondered going into Inception: if I was making a thriller about dreams, one Continue reading CAPSULE: INCEPTION (2010) →

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