For some Adult Swim viewers, it was hard enough to believe that Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim’s grotesquely odd television series received a second season. To their dismay, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! premiered season five (season “cinco”) in February of this year. Although the series focuses on comedy, Wareheim claims that the show is greatly influenced by the awkwardness of David Lynch‘s work.
WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 4/2/2010
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):
Birdemic: Shock and Terror (2008): Badly animated CGI birds attack community theater actors who swat at them with coat hangers. Those of you who thought that the trailer we posted yesterday was an April Fool’s Day joke, consider yourself fooled. Birdemic is all too real. Watch for midnight screenings this week in New York City, Phoenix and Los Angeles; in upcoming months it will play Austin, TX; Washington, DC; Portland, OR; Denver, CO; Detroit, MI; San Francisco, CA; Philadelphia, PA; Milwaukee, WI; Minneapolis, MN; Houston, TX; Dallas, TX; Cleveland, OH; and Seattle, WA. Sounds worth a road trip. Birdemic: Shock and Terror official site.
NEW ON DVD:
Alice in Wonderland (1951) (2 Disc Special Un-Anniversary Edition): Disney re-releases Uncle Walt’s original animated version of Lewis Carroll’s tale to capitalize on the popularity of Tim Burton‘s mediocre live-action reimagining. Extras on the second disc include a “making of” documentary, a deleted scene and a deleted song, the Mickey Mouse short “Thru the Mirror,” and interactive games. Buy Alice in Wonderland (2-Disc Special Un-Anniversary Edition)
Girly [Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly] (1970): Intriguing sounding, obscure British black comedy about a lunatic family that kidnaps hippies and forces them to play deadly games; losers are “sent to the angels.” It’s comforting to see that offbeat, forgotten films like this still surface on home video from time to time. Buy Girly
I Sell the Dead (2008): Offbeat tale of a pair of Victorian grave robbers who specialize in digging up, capturing and trafficking the un-dead—a lucrative underground business they dub the “resurrection trade.” With Ron Perlman. Part of Glasseye Pics innovative “ScareFlix” series (which also includes the Certified Weird I Can See You). Buy I Sell the Dead
FREE (LEGITIMATE RELEASE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:
The Usual Children (1997): No real information on this obscure movie, but it’s a family musical fantasy about a young boy who wishes his sister dead on Christmas Eve, and finds his wish granted in a parallel universe. The hitch is, his little sister returns as a ghost to haunt him. Sounds pretty odd to us. Watch The Usual Children free on YouTube.
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.
A COUPLE OF EARLY OSCAR FAVORITES?
We don’t usually like to pimp mainstream movies here, but we’ve recently learned of two upcoming films that we predict are going to dominate the Oscar buzz next season, and decided we just had to share them with our readers.
The two movies occupy opposite hemispheres of the cinema world. The first (still untitled) movie, from a director who shall remain nameless, is an inspiring drama/romance/comedy/thriller packed full of catch phrases that hip people are sure to be quoting on their Facebook profiles.
The second movie could not be more different, but is just as likely to find favor with the Academy. From visionary director James Ngyuen, master of the romantic thriller, this is a beautifully imagined, CGI-heavy (in the tradition of Avatar), an environmentally conscious thrill-ride that brings to mind Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:
JUST TONY (1922) & SKY HIGH (1922)
It all began with the legendary Tom Mix, the yardstick by which all B-Western stars are measured.
Born in 1880, Mix had worked with the Texas Rangers, had been a bartender, a sheriff, and a champion rodeo rider in his Wild West Show. Hollywood had a bona fide true blue western legend. After becoming THE cowboy movie star at the age of 30, the extremely prolific Mix worked and played equally hard, developing a love for fast cars, fast women (married five times) , and reckless spending. Most of his 20’s westerns were adapted from Zane Grey novels and were high quality entertainment for the masses. Mix often wrote, produced and directed in addition to acting. He was the polar opposite to William S. Hart’s dusty realism. Mix combined humor, increased action which featured his own stunt work, a star horse named Tony, flashy showmanship and enthusiastic energy in his films. When his stardom naturally began to dim in the 1930’s, mainly due to age, he toured with his beloved Tom Mix Circus before an untimely high speed auto accident and a flying metal suitcase to the back of the head on an Arizona highway put an end to all the Circus in 1940, but not to the legend. For ten years after his death, the Tom Mix Radio Show continued on with immense popularity. Tom Mix comic books were also extremely popular for several decades, as was the touring Tom Mix festival which finally ran down (but not entirely out) in the mid 90’s. Since most of his films are silent, few today have even seen a Tom Mix film, and his reputation by far exceeds the actual films. Here are two Mixs from Sinister Cinema’s Sinister Six-Gun collection.
Just Tony begins, aptly enough, with a trailer. “Hit the Trail! The Gun Ranger is out to clean up the town! Bob Steel, two-gun deputy whose twitching fingers itch for fights! Outlaws Rustlers Cowboys Posses and Bob Steel as the Gun Ranger! A Republic Release.” This trailer promises white hat cow dude Steel kicking black hat bad guy butt, a mix of masked bandits, pencil-thin mustached villains and a pretty girl exclaiming “Oh, Dan!”
Tom has his eyes on the beautiful black wild stallion, Tony, that he wants to tame, but first things first as he has Continue reading JUST TONY (1922) & SKY HIGH (1922)
53. BRONSON (2008)
“I always wanted to make a Kenneth Anger movie, and I wanted to combine great theatrical tradition and British pop cinema of the 60s, which was very psychedelic, and at the same time, to make a movie about a man who creates his own mythology. It had to be surreal in order to pay off.”–Director Refn on Bronson
DIRECTED BY: Nicolas Winding Refn
FEATURING: Tom Hardy
PLOT: Narrated from a theater inside his own mind by Michael Peterson (later to rechristen himself Charles Bronson, his “fighting name” ), the movie is an aggressively stylized account of the true story of Britain’s most notorious prisoner, who spent 30 years of his 34 year sentence in solitary confinement for his violent behavior. Peterson knocks over a post office with a sawed-off shotgun and receives a seven year penitentiary sentence; inside, he finds he has a natural affinity for institutional life as he nurtures a burgeoning passion for taking hostages and picking fights with prison guards. Shuffled from prison to prison, and serving a brief stint in a hospital for the criminally insane, Peterson is furloughed, becomes a bare-knuckle boxer and adopts the name Bronson, and lasts a few months in the outside world before finding himself reincarcerated, at home once more.
BACKGROUND:
- The movie stays true to the spirit of the real life Michael Peterson/Charlie Bronson, while omitting many facts and inventing others. The real Charlie Bronson has won several awards in prison-sponsored contests for his artwork and poetry and has published several books, including a fitness guide and an autobiography titled “Loonyology.” In one of his hostage-taking escapades, he demanded an inflatable doll, a helicopter and a cup of tea as ransom.
- Before incarceration Michael Peterson actually worked as a circus strongman, which may be where he developed his distinctive trademark handlebar mustache and shaved pate.
- Danish director Refn was previously best known for the gritty, documentary style Pusher trilogy, a look at the criminal drug dealing subculture in Copenhagen.
- Some of the paintings appearing in the film and in the animated sequences are actual drawings by the real life Bronson. Examples of Bronson’s artwork can be found here.
- Actor Tom Hardy put on about 40 pounds of muscle for the role. Previously best known as “Handsome Bob” in Guy Ricthie’s RocknRolla, Hardy is poised to become a breakout star, slated to replace Mel Gibson in the new “Mad Max” series.
- Cinematographer Larry Smith began his career with Stanley Kubrick, working as an electrician on Barry Lyndon and a gaffer on The Shining before graduating to assistant cameraman for Eyes Wide Shut.
- At the film’s London premiere, a tape recording of Bronson’s voice was played, stating, “I’m proud of this film, because if I drop dead tonight, then I live on. As long as my mother enjoys the film, I’m happy… I make no bones about it, I really was… a horrible, violent, nasty man. I’m not proud of it, but I’m not ashamed of it either, because every punch I’ve ever flung in my life I’ve taken 21 back.” This incident caused the Prison Officers’ Association to complain, because it is illegal to record a prisoner in a British prison without authorization. The Association also accused the film of “glorifying violence.”
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Bronson turning himself and his art teacher into living paintings in the very strange finale.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Hyperstylized to the point of surreality, Bronson is biopic as mythology, an appropriate tack when dealing with a self-deluded, self-promoting subject. The portrait that emerges is not so much of a fascinating but essentially unknowable real-life sociopath as it is a portrait of Bronson’s pseudo-artistic attempt to create a public image as an antihero, with notes of humanizing sympathy but also with plenty of knowing irony added to deglamorize its subject.
Original trailer for Bronson
COMMENTS: Tom Hardy’s performance in Bronson undercuts my theory of acting. I Continue reading 53. BRONSON (2008)