Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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OK, 2009 is over, but we’re still catching up on some of the worthy weird flicks we missed, so check us out next week for reviews of Terry Gilliam‘s Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (still in theaters) and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. We’ll also thrown on a review of William (Exorcist) Friedkin’s paranoia piece, Bug (2006).

As far as the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week: we got the usual rash of weird fetish requests (1ooporno pregnant horse”) , but these are getting  a little boring.  When your bombarded with bestiality search terms, they no longer seem that weird.  We like offbeat phrasing, so we’ll select “what’s good with weird movies.”  Our answer: buttered popcorn, slathered in haggis.

We actually made some progress on the reader-suggested review queue last week, knocking out two good ones with Greaser’s Palace and Waking Life.   The remaining list looks like this: Survive Style 5+ (just discovered that this isn’t available on Region 1, which may delay our getting to it), 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], Necromania (1971, Ed Wood), Hour of the Wolf, MirrorMask, Possession, Suspiria, Mary and Max, Wild Zero, 4, Nothing (2003), The Peanut Butter Solution, and Ninja Scroll.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/15/2010

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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):

44 Inch Chest: Aging London gangster drama about a bad guy who kidnaps an enemy he believes slept with his wife and considers taking revenge while being egged on by his sleazy mates.  Apparently includes fantasy sequences, which is why we mention it.  From the writers of Sexy Beast and the producers of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.   44 Inch Chest official site.

NEW ON DVD:

The Brothers Bloom (2009): Read our capsule review.  Quirky caper comedy with style to burn.  Buy The Brothers Bloom.

CockHammer (2009): CockHammer, a snuff film producer and dabbler in the occult, kidnaps the girlfriends of two losers in this deliberately juvenile and offensive home video horror-comedy. Judging by the trailer, it appears to be made by folks who believe Troma studios have sold out to the forces of good taste and glossy production values. We do like the tag line: “Sanity is for sissies!” Buy CockHammer.

Ghost in the Shell 2.0 (1995): A cosmetic update of the beloved cyberpunk anime—a few of the scenes have been redone with computer aided animation.  This is a rare case where the Blu-ray came out a few months before the DVD release. Buy Ghost in the Shell 2.0.

À l’aventure (2009): Not much info on this French softcore flick about a woman discovering her sexuality, but it looks like a throwback to the days of Emmanulle, only with mystical overtones (e.g., intense orgasms can apparently cause levitation). Buy À l’aventure.

Moon (2009):  Read our capsule review.  Intelligent sci-fi from David Bowie’s son; Sam Rockwell’s performance should garner an Oscar nom. Not very weird but we liked it anyway. Buy Moon.

Nun of That (2009):  Comedy involving a nun selected to join a secret supernatural religious order dedicated to wiping out the mob (!) Features cameos from Jesus, Moses, and Ghandi (!!)  Why didn’t this play our local mutliplex? Buy Nun of That.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

8 1/2 (1963): Criterion upgrades this classic weird movie to Blu-ray. A great way to get the taste of Nine out of your mouth. Buy 8 1/2 (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray].

The Brothers Bloom (2009): See DVD entry above. Buy The Brothers Bloom [Blu-ray].

Moon (2009):  See DVD entry above. Buy Moon [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.

Canonically Weird (The List)

45. WAKING LIFE (2001)

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“Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.”–George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

DIRECTED BY: Richard Linklater

FEATURING: Wiley Wiggins, ,

PLOT:  An unnamed young man appears to be drifting from dream to dream, each animated in a different style. His dreams involve him talking to various college professors who explain their theories on existentialism, artificial intelligence and free will, as well as more typical dreamlike experiences such as floating away and taking a ride in a boat-car. About halfway through the film it slowly dawns on the dreamer that he is dreaming, and he begins to ask the characters he meets for help waking up.

Still from Waking Life (2001)

BACKGROUND:

  • The film was shot on mini-DV video over a period of six weeks. Each frame was then painstakingly hand-drawn by a team of animators using computer software specifically adapted for this film (a 21st century update of the process known as Rotoscoping).
  • Each minute of film took an average of 250 hours to create.
  • Featured actor Wiley Wiggins also worked as one of the animators.
  • The monologues on existentialism and free will were delivered by Robert C. Solomon and David Sosa, respectively, two philosophy professors from the University of Texas.
  • Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy play the same characters in their short scene as they did in Linklater’s earlier film, Before Sunrise.

INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a film where thirty different animators each put their own distinctive stamp on the characters, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if thirty different people came up with thirty different answers to the question, “what was your favorite image in Waking Life?” We’ll suggest that final shot of the dreamer floating into the heavens is the obvious take-home image to bring to mind when you remember the movie, however.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Though Waking Life is a string of vignettes of varying levels of oddness, it’s the animation—which shifts from style to style, with the only constant being the fact that the backgrounds continually shift and waver in a state of eternal flux—that keeps it weird. The concept—that the entire film is a dream from which the unnamed protagonist can’t seem to awake—promises an exemplary level of surreality. In fact, many of the segments are, on their face, completely ordinary: cogent explanations of sometimes difficult, sometimes speculative philosophical concepts. The fact that these heady but decidedly rational ideas are explored in the context of the supposedly irrational world of dreams, might, in itself, be considered just a little bit weird.

Original trailer for Waking Life

COMMENTS: There are at least two ways to conclude Waking Life is an unconditional Continue reading 45. WAKING LIFE (2001) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: EYE OF THE DEVIL (1966)

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DIRECTED BY:  J. Lee Thompson

FEATURING:  Sharon Tate, , David Niven, , Flora Robson

PLOT: A happy marriage descends into an odyssey of terror when a woman’s husband is called to his ancestral estate by pagan heretics.

Still from Eye of the Devil (1966)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Eye of the Devil tells a strange story, the occult  genre always spins an unusual yarn. In this context, strange is normal. Aside from being well produced, Eye of the Devil is noteworthy only because it debuts the doomed Sharon Tate.

COMMENTS: Vineyard owner Marquis Philippe de Montfaucon (Niven) is called back to his castle when a drought withers the crop, upon which the entire region depends. His wife and children are supposed to remain in London, but of course she becomes curious and is compelled to intrude. Catherine de Montfaucon (Deborah Kerr) subsequently discovers that her husband is behaving in a secretive and peculiar manner. His personality has undergone a distinct change and he seems dreadfully grim and preoccupied. Why?

There are many mysterious comings and goings, some heavyweight clergy are milling around who appear to be legitimate, but why are the Marquis’ young cousins shooting medieval arrows at her, casting spells on her children, and trying to hypnotize her into leaping off of the castle parapets? And who the devil are those troublesome dark characters in black Franciscan monk’s robes, chasing Catherine about in the deep dark woods?

As Catherine snoops, she discovers mounting evidence of heretical pagan practices and that an extraordinary number of the Marquis’ antecedents met untimely deaths. Could there be a relation between the deaths and some profound event that her husband seems to be preparing for?

Flora Robson (The Shuttered Room) is creepy and aloof as always in her role as the Marquis’ Aunt.  Sharon Tate (in her film debut) plays a sinister and threatening witch who turns frogs into doves and seems to perversely enjoy taking a good old fashioned horse whipping from the Marquis. (Blow-up, Juggernaut) cavorts as her delightfully menacing, archery-happy brother. Eye of the Devil features crisp, striking, artful black and white cinematography by Erwin Hillier.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Kerr is our only touch with reality, and she tries to carry the pic, to little avail.”–Variety (contemporaneous)

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