Canonically Weird (The List)

44. GREASER’S PALACE (1972)

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SEAWEEDHEAD GREASER: Coo Coo.  I wish I could put my arms around each and every one of them, and let them know that everything is going to be okay.

COO COO: Why don’t you, Sea?

SEAWEEDHEAD GREASER: I’m not bizarre enough.

COO COO: Who is?

–dialogue from Greaser’s Palace

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Alan Arbus, Albert Henderson, Michael Sullivan,

PLOT: Perpetually constipated Seaweedhead Greaser and his gang of hired guns run a small Western village in the middle of the desert. One day Jessy, a mild-mannered hispter in a zoot suit, parachutes into the nearby countryside. Jessy, who is traveling to Jerusalem to become an actor/singer, stops in town to walk on water, repeatedly resurrect Greaser’s son Lamy Homo after Greaser has him killed, and do a boogie-woogie song and dance number before winding up crucified.

Still from Greaser's Palace (1972)

BACKGROUND:

  • Director Robert Downey began his filmmaking career in the early 1960s with a series of low-budget, absurdist short films that gained him a devoted following. His 1969 advertising/race relations satire Putney Swope brought him the adoration of the hippie counterculture. Greaser’s Palace is his only big-budget production, made with $1,000,000 invested by an independently wealthy Broadway producer.
  • Downey’s son is the now-famous actor Robert Downey Jr.; the younger Downey appears, uncredited, as a child in this movie.
  • The credits to this film begin to scroll before the movie starts instead of afterward, and many of them are illegible.
  • The topless, mute Indian girl is none other than Toni Basil, who later went on to fame with her gratingly catchy 1982 pop single “Mickey.”

INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jessy, still in his striped suit and white gloves and shoes, crucified, with his pink and lavender hat perched atop the cross.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Set in a barren town in the old West, Greaser’s Palace is a series of bizarre sketches which run a gamut from arid comedy to hints of disturbing perversion. These absurd anecdotes hang off a storyline that loosely and enigmatically follows the outline of the New Testament. In a movie where the Holy Ghost appears as a cigar-smoking man wearing a bedsheet with eyeholes cut in it and a black stetson, whether the movie is weird or not is the last question you’re likely to be asking yourself.

Clip from Greaser’s Palace

 

COMMENTS: A man leaning on a crutch waits for the “messiah” to come and heal him. Continue reading 44. GREASER’S PALACE (1972) →

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POSTMODERN MINIMALIST SHAKESPEARE AT THE LOCAL INDY FRINGE

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Bill Shakespeare’s play, Richard III, has always been a play about duality. Done right, it is a fun play, juxtaposing equal doses of black humor with rich, high octane melodrama.  It’s also a tough, balancing act and, perhaps for this reason, its usually not anybody’s idea of  first choice when tackling the Bard, but I suspect Indiana director and actor Tristan Ross revels in the challenge.

Tristan Ross as Richard IIIRoss has brought his post-modern, bare-boned, minimalist adaptation to the local IndyFringe Theater at 719 East St. Clair in Indianapolis, where it plays Thursday-Sunday until January 24.  This Richard III is the first of Ross’ planned series of cutting edge, contemporary Shakespeare plays with his “No Holds Bard Productions.”  If Richard goes well, Ross hopes to tackle Julius Caesar.

Ross’ adaptation is a concept-heavy Richard III, employing eight actors for fifteen roles.  Taking dualist themes to a refreshing extreme, Ross has issued his artist statement from his No Holds Bard website, “The characters all represent duality and I’ve done my best to make it as much of an ensemble piece as possible; that is, reducing Richard and strengthening the rest.  The duality is a reflection on Richard’s dual nature.  Every character is cast with a double.  For instance, one actor will play Elizabeth and Hastings.  Elizabeth is compassionate, sympathetic, and aware of Richard’s treason.  Hastings is competitive, vindictive, and believes Richard is her ally.”

Does Ross’ concept work?  For the most part, yes.  He has clearly thought the play Continue reading POSTMODERN MINIMALIST SHAKESPEARE AT THE LOCAL INDY FRINGE →

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WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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We’re still trying to determine exactly what we’re going to publish next week, but you can be sure we’ll knock at least one item off the reader-suggested review queue with our treatment of Robert Downey’s absurdist Western hippie Jesus flick, Greaser’s Palace.  We’ll also cover Nine, the musical loosely based around Federico Fellini’s womanizing.

For the weirdest search term used to locate the site last week, we’ll go with “sex in movies in english 30 mint in aboue,” mainly because we’re thrilled to have come up #1 in a Yahoo search for that exact phrase!

The reader-suggested review queue continues to grow, but we’ll be knocking out at least one of these reviews a week.  Here’s how it currently looks: Greaser’s Palace (snext week!), Waking Life, Survive Style 5+, 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), and The Peanut Butter Solution.

We’ve been holding back on announcing some of our future projects, but here’s something for you: 366 Distribution will be coming out with it’s second DVD release soon, planned for the end of January!  It’s The Best of Damon Zex, a compilation of some of the best work of public-access TV cult hero Damon Zex.  Here’s the trailer we whipped up for the release:

Weird enough for ya? We’ll let you know in this space when the DVD is officially available.

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WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 1/8/2010

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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):

Bitch Slap: Three tough women behave badly while fighting over a fortune in diamonds in this “postmodern parody” of busty bad babe flicks like Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The trailer indicates there are numerous fantasy sequences, and the press release promises a parallel series of Memento-like flashbacks that reveal the backstory.  Critics say they’d like to perform the title act on the producers. Bitch Slap official site.

SCREENINGS (NEW YORK CITY)

Flooding With Love for the Kid (1989): A one-man, shoestring-budget ($96) alternative adaptation of First Blood (yes, the Sly Stallone actioner that introduced the world to John Rambo), shot entirely inside a single apartment.  Remarkably, it’s gotten almost universal praise for its narrative ingenuity, despite every single reviewer comparing it to something you’d find on YouTube.  Playing at Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan.  Actor/director Zachary Oberzan’s official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Hansel and Gretel (2007): Bizarre-sounding Korean variation on the Brothers Grimm fairy tale involves a man lost in a forest who is taken to a mysterious house inhabited by creepy children. Buy Hansel and Gretel.

Loren Cass (2006):  An experimental angry teen drama about the 1996 race riots in St. Petersburg, Florida, with poetry interludes (featuring spoken word contributions by Charles Bukowski and other underground figures) and mondo-style documentary footage of a televised suicide added for shock value.   Well-reviewed by the very few critics who saw it. Buy Loren Cass.

Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures (1987-1988):  This satirical Saturday morning cartoon show, brought to the airwaves by Ralph (Coonskin) Bakshi and John Kricfalusi (who would later create another controversial cult cartoon series, “Ren and Stimpy”), ended after two seasons amidst accusations that Bakshi had snuck a cocaine-sniffing reference into one episode. A gonzo cartoon with a small but devoted fanbase. Buy “Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures – The Complete Series”.

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.

Celebrating the cinematically surreal, bizarre, cult, oddball, fantastique, strange, psychedelic, and the just plain WEIRD!