Marlon Brando is not the quintessential American male movie star. That honor belongs to John Wayne. John Wayne was a shrewd actor who carefully manufactured his on screen persona. For many, Wayne represents the All-American WASP, yet he was of Irish descent and a Roman Catholic. Most of the B western actors had a favorite horse. In his B western beginnings, Wayne had the horse Duke, yet he disliked horses, preferred slacks and dinner jacket to western duds, wore a toupee through most of his career, and felt more at home on his boat than he ever did on a ranch.
In addition to the being the archetypal cowboy, Wayne represented the ideal American soldier, yet he never served a day in the military. When the second World War broke out in 1941, many of Wayne’s contemporaries, such as Jimmy Stewart, Clark Gable, and Henry Fonda, all enlisted. These actors were already established as “A” list stars in 1941. Even with Stagecoach (1939) behind him Wayne was not yet secure in his career and still languished in numerous “B” films. Wayne saw this as a golden opportunity, while the competition was away, to grab the number one spot, and he did just that. It was less a case of draft dodging, and more a calculating career move, one for which John Ford would relentlessly needle him ever after. The war interrupted the careers of numerous actors, such as George Reeves, who seemed to be on the way up, but had not yet established themselves in a large enough body of “A” productions. Upon his return, Reeves and many others found they had been virtually forgotten while they were away, never to regain their previous career position, let alone surpass it. So much for studio patriotism towards its contract players.
Wayne symbolized American virtue, yet he had countless affairs with married women. Some maintain he was racist. In a 1971 interview he made naive and blatantly ignorant remarks about African Americans and Native Americans, yet he enjoyed working with African American co-stars, and was drawn to native American spirituality, an interest on display in his film Hondo (1953), produced and distributed by Continue reading JOHN WAYNE AND THE SHOOTIST (1976)
LIST CANDIDATE: THE WAYWARD CLOUD [TIAN BIAN YI DUO YUN] (2005)
DIRECTED BY: Ming-liang Tsai
FEATURING: Lee Kang-Sheng, Shiang-chyi Chen, Sumomo Yozakura, Yang Kuei-Mei
PLOT: During a nationwide drought, a Taiwanese porn star courts a shy and lonely apartment dweller obsessed with watermelons; characters occasionally burst into fantasy song-and-dance numbers.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: As a romantic, pornographic, hallucinatory musical that makes sure you will never see watermelons or Taiwanese sex movies quite the same way ever again, The Wayward Cloud is audacious and, yes, weird. The powerful downside is the fact that, outside of the musical sequences, Tsai’s minimalism—long takes, a motionless camera, and the absolute minimum amount plot and dialogue he can possibly get away with—is the most acquired of acquired tastes.
COMMENTS: There are seven memorable scenes in The Wayward Cloud—three bizarre sexual encounters (and a couple of ordinary ones) and four outlandish musical numbers. Given all that’s going on, it’s amazing that writer/director Ming-liang Tsai still managed to keep the script so arid, and to convey an overall feeling of malaise rather than excitement. Without these seven scenes, the movie would hardly exist; the wisp of a plot involves a boy-meets-girl-and-never-quite-loses-her story that’s told in nearly dialogue free episodes of long takes of actors reacting to nothing. The meet-cute (or in this case, meet-mute) involves Shiang-chyi coming upon Hsiao-Kang while he’s napping, then sitting down across from him and taking a nap herself. It’s five minutes of hot napping action before they exchange their first words. (It’s helpful to know that these characters have met before, in Tsai’s What Time Is It There? [2001], and in a subsequent short film.) Hsiao-Kang doesn’t divulge his job as a professional video gigolo to his new girlfriend, but there’s no cover story, no sense of urgency that she might discover his vocation, and there’s nothing divulged about her to suggest she would care either way. There is a quiet, believable sort of intimacy in scenes where Hsiao-Kang smokes a cigarette held between Shiang-chyi’s toes; the lovers are so comfortable together they don’t have to say anything to each other. But we, the viewers, still wish they would say something for our benefit.
Fortunately, there is the sex. It’s graphic, but not explicit: there’s no visible genital- Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: THE WAYWARD CLOUD [TIAN BIAN YI DUO YUN] (2005)
CAPSULE: DEAD SNOW [DØD SNØ] (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Tommy Wirkola
FEATURING: Vegar Hoel, Charlotte Frogner, and other professional but fairly interchangable Scandinavian actors
PLOT: Eight medical students travel to a remote ski cabin for a little rest and relaxation,
only to find the snowbound retreat is haunted by pesky Nazi zombies.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: If it’s weird, it’s weird in a familiar way. There’s a powerful “been there, done that” feel here that will satisfy those who just want to have another laugh in the face of the upcoming zombie apocalypse.
COMMENTS: Despite garnering some minor praise after a successful midnight run at Sundance in 2009, Dead Snow is a derivative and dull affair—until a derivative but no-longer-dull final half hour, when it redeems itself with a nonstop, intestine spewing Nazi zombie slayathon that sweeps away all logical objections in a river of blood. Even the key conceit of fascists as undead villains is nothing new—see Shock Waves (1977), Zombie Lake (1980), Oasis of the Zombies (1981)—it’s just that it hasn’t been done in quite a while. The only thing that’s somewhat original about Dead Snow is the setting: I can’t remember a zombie movie that’s been played out in a winter wonderland (to better show the blood splatters on the virgin snow). The setup seems to drag on forever, with eight medical students driving and hiking to a cabin in the scenic mountains, snowmobiling, listening to Scandinavian pop-metal, playing board games and drinking beer, and all of the time not making much of an impression as characters. Eventually a grizzled old man from Oslo central casting wanders into the cabin to tell them the backstory about a unit of Nazis who hid some treasure in the region before the locals massacred them with farm implements. Low-impact deaths of minor characters occasionally lighten the mood. Dead Snow is a comedy, but mostly in the sense that it doesn’t take itself seriously, not in a way that makes you laugh. The movie hits every possible horror movie cliche on its way to the final slaughter. Instead of going to the trouble of thinking up some original Continue reading CAPSULE: DEAD SNOW [DØD SNØ] (2009)
BORDERLINE WEIRD: TOKYO! (2008)
DIRECTED BY: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Joon-ho Bong
FEATURING: Ayako Fujitani, Denis Lavant, Jean-François Balmer, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yû Aoi
PLOT: An anthology of three short films set in Tokyo: an experimental filmmaker’s girlfriend feels useless until she undergoes a strange transformation; a bizarre man-creature crawls out of the sewers and terrorizes the city; and an urban hermit falls in love with a pizza-delivery girl with buttons tattooed on her body.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: It suffers from the curse of most anthology films: unevenness. Leos Carax’s “Merde” is almost weird enough to carry it across the finish line, but the other two entries, while interesting, drag the film down to the borderline.
COMMENTS: If Paris’ tradition earns it an anthology film dedicated to love, then teeming, tragic Tokyo gets a triptych on the theme of weirdness. But even though Tokyo is top-billed, this exercise is hardly about the city at all. The Japanese metropolis is depicted as too practical, too generic, for a love letter; it instead becomes a metaphor for urban absurdity and anxiety. Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) is up to bat first. His “Interior Design,” about a couple sleeping on a friend’s floor while searching for an apartment, starts out so slow that mainstream viewers may be tricked into thinking it’s a conventional drama. The character development and performances are good, although these particular people—a struggling experimental filmmaker and his passive, too-sacrificing girlfriend—don’t seem quite interesting enough to make a movie about, so we wonder what exactly he’s up to. Along the way there’s a subtle and funny parody of a parody of the sort of pretentious art-school films that don’t really exist anywhere, but that people like to imagine anyway when dismissing the avant-garde (the beams from the headlight of a motorcycle driven by a skull faced man form a swastika, among other absurd jokes). The third act brings a metamorphosis that lets Gondry indulge his talent for weird and striking visuals; it ends with a disturbing and humorous metaphor for depersonalization that makes the sly point that there may be greater things to aspire to in life than just being useful.
Joon-ho Bong’s “Tokyo Shaking” is the closer, and the weakest outing. His story concerns a “hikikomori,” or urban hermit, living on takeout pizza in a self-imposed exile from human contact and sunlight. It’s an interesting character and there are some bizarre incidents along the way, but in the end the story misses the universal pathos at which it was aiming.
The centerpiece, Carax’s “Merde,” is a change of pace in tone and an upping of the ante in weirdness. The scenario involves a nasty man named Merde with a twisted red beard, milky eye and a shuffling gait who randomly arises from the sewers and makes an extreme nuisance of himself, embarrassing and assaulting the proper Japanese bystanders, before descending back under the city as quickly as he came. Eventually his provocations go beyond the merely gauche and he’s hunted down and put on trial; his defense lawyer is a civilized Frenchman who shares the same physical characteristics and inexplicably speaks his language of grunts, whines, hops and slaps. Merde himself is reminiscent of one of those socially obnoxious “Saturday Night Live” sketch characters that Will Ferrel used to specialize in, if Ferrel had been willing to play mute and push the character’s oddness to scary limits. On the way to a mystical conclusion the script takes satirical jabs at Japanese xenophobia and the death penalty, and parodies the frenzies created by TV news broadcasts. Fans have interpreted this strange story as everything from a spoof of Godzilla films to a twisted Christ allegory, and both theories fit the film; it’s that kind of parable. Although Gondry and Bong’s offerings fit into the weird genre, it’s “Merde” that makes this omnibus of unease worth the watch for fans of the absurd.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
REVIEW WRITING CONTEST #3: JUNE, 2010. WIN TWO DVDS!
Our first review writing contest went fabulously: we landed Pamela de Graff, who’s turned into a valuable contributor for the site.
Our second review-writing contest went as badly as the first went well. We got zero responses.
We’re upping the ante this time. Last time, we offered a review copy of the experimental, surreal horror movie Frankenstein’s Bloody Nightmare. We’re holding that offer over, and adding a review copy of the surreal indie horror Burning Inside (2010). So, you can win two rare screener DVDs with a single review!
The rules of the contest are simple:
- Write a review of a movie that you think should be on the List of the 366 Best Weird Movies, but that hasn’t been covered here yet. Including the following sections: DIRECTOR, FEATURING (listing the most important actors), PLOT (a one sentence synopsis), WHY IT DESERVES TO MAKE THE LIST (a one sentence to one paragraph description of why you think the movie is weird), COMMENTS (one to two paragraphs describing the movie in more detail). If you have a suggestion for a still to represent the movie and/or a quote from a critic on the film, you can include those, but they are not required.
- In rare cases, a well-thought out “second opinion” on a movie that we have already considered, but that you think we got wrong (either by putting it on the List when it shouldn’t have made it, or rejecting a film that should have made it), will be an acceptable subject for a review. We would still prefer reviews of movies we haven’t yet covered.
- Submit your work on our contact form. By submitting your entry on this form, you agree to allow 366weirdmovies.com to publish your work, either whole or in edited form, on this website. Your work may be selected for publication even if you are not chosen as the winner.
- The contest is open to anyone whose work has not previously been published on 366weirdmovies.com. If you submitted a review to the last contest and did not win, you are still eligible to enter this contest even if we published your review.
- You may not write a review promoting a film which you were involved in the production of, or in which you have a financial interest.
- This site strives to remain “PG” rated; do not use profanity in your review.
- The contest will remain open for one month, until June 30, 2010, at which time the editor will select the best entry. The winner will be chosen on the basis of writing style, insight, and appropriateness of the movie chosen. The deadline may be extended, depending on the number of entries received.
- In order to be eligible to receive the prize, you must supply a valid email address and a valid mailing address. International addresses are acceptable. If the winning entrant does not supply a valid mailing address, or declines the prize, the DVD will be given to a randomly selected entry with a mailing address in the United States. If no entries are from the United States, then the deadline to complete the contest will be extended.
TIPS: Avoid merely summarizing the plot in your comments. Avoid giving away “spoilers” in your descriptions that might ruin the enjoyment of the film. Obscure titles are fine—in fact, they may be worth bonus points—but try to pick a film that is available on DVD, or is at least likely to be released. If you write on a film no one will be able to view or locate, the movie may be judged as inappropriate.
One final tip: don’t be scared away by thinking you have to write something profoundly insightful. Simply consider it as a chance to describe and recommend a film to that narrow audience of people who are interested in the same kind of weird movies as you are.
Have fun! The winner, and even the runners-up, may be invited to become regular contributors to the site!