Capsules

CAPSULE: GROWING OUT (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Graham Ratliff

FEATURING: Devon Lott, Ryan Sterling, Michael Hampton

PLOT: An aimless musician gets a job cleaning up an old William Castle-style spooky mansion. In the basement he finds a hand emerging out of the floor, and the longer he works there, the more he watches the mysterious person appear from below…

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WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Normally, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you why a man slowly rising out of the sandy floor of a scary old basement isn’t weird, but if we’re going to count down the WEIRDEST movies of all time, this really doesn’t scratch the surface. It’s a guy-meets-girl movie with a few Lynchian twists thrown in, and that’s really not enough to hang with the big boys, now is it?

COMMENTS: Perhaps a penetrating metaphor for the encroaching distance that separates our true selves from our public personas, or perhaps a cheap, quick flick about freaky shenanigans in a creaky old house, Growing Out is a movie that tries to reach out and grab a very particular audience, specifically the indie horror crowd, and it does this with a gusto that is atypical of independent features like this. And, for what it is, it’s indeed enjoyable. It’s quite thrilling to see a young director and cast just go for it—even though the results aren’t all that spectacular, their enthusiasm is in itself kind of spectacular. The film looks good, the actors—in particular, the peripheral characters—are a lot of fun to keep track of, and the scenario is rife with possibilities. The problem it faces as a weird movie, though, is that it places a lot of limiters on itself. It wants to be a relationship movie so badly, with the usual current-jerk-boyfriend-in-the-way-of-the-aspiring-sensitive-boyfriend scenario, that it forgets the oddities it sets up in favor of meet-cutes and lonesome emotional guitar playing scenes. It’s not conducive to what they seemingly wanted to do with this kitschy film full of hipper-than-thou hopefuls. What about the guy growing out of the ground? What about the freaky house? And how about the strange man that lives in a trailer in the back yard? These factors seem unimportant compared to how our troubled troubadour is going to wind up with the girl of his dreams, and while I for one was interested to a point, it left me at the end feeling slightly disappointed and expecting a slightly more charming, slightly smarter, slightly weirder movie that just didn’t come. If you want well-paced and well-shot on a shoestring budget, this is a good bet, but this isn’t what you’re thinking of when you’re thinking of a bizarre film.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Overly talky and slow, the film is tedious and unpersuasive. Ratliff fails to integrate the mechanics of supernatural horror with his concern for youthful passions and dreams, and the result is glum indeed.”–Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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Not sure exactly what we’ll be reviewing next week, but for once, the problem is having too many options on what to publish, rather than too few. I think we’ll continue our “2009 in review” series with Growing Out, an indie horror about a musician who finds a head growing out of a cellar floor. We may also sneak in a review of Cold Souls, the Paul Giamatti expose about the black market soul trade. You can also expect to see a review of the offbeat 1979 vampire film Thirst. What else? Well, some possibilities include Johnny Got His Gun (1971), Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988), Housekeeping (1987), and Feed (2005)—you’ll just have to check out this space to find out for sure.

As for the weirdest search term used to locate the site this week, we may as well pick “sex movie in which fairies come near water,” which sounds like pretty weird request but could actually refer to an actual movie we’ve reviewed here. On the other hand, our favorite search term used to locate the site was “why are weird movies always the best”?

Here’s how the reader-suggested review queue looks: Greaser’s Palace (substituted for Institute Benjamenta), 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 (if it’s 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, Johnny Got His Gun, The Science of Sleep, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 11/13/2009

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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 (WIDE RELEASE):

The Box: A couple are given a mysterious box that contains a temptation; push a button on it and you will get a million dollars, but an innocent person somewhere will die. I passed on mentioning this one last week because the theatrical previews made it look like a lame and hokey extended Twilight Zone episode. I disregarded a few reports trickling in that said it was “weird,” assuming they came from the same type of people who find any fantasy weird. Then, I discovered that it was directed by Richard Kelly, which makes it noteworthy for this site. We probably should give it a shot despite the underwhelming reviews and uninspiring trailer. The Box official site (much like the Donnie Darko website, there’s no clear navigation and you’re forced to click around randomly to find stuff).

Fantastic Mr. Fox:  This animated fable about talking animals is clearly not weird, but it does represent a collaboration between two borderline weird figures: ultra-quirky director Wes (I Heart Huckabees) Anderson and mordant children’s book author Roald (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) Dahl.  Featuring the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep, and Bill Murray.  Fantastic Mr. Fox official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Uncertainty: An experiment in conflicting storylines from two different directors, Uncertainty deals with a young couple whose day follows one of two paths, depending on the flip of a coin: one route leads to a family drama, the other to a murder thriller.  Uncertainty official site.

NEW ON DVD:

Ink (2009): Critics compared this visionary thriller about a father entering the nightmares of his daughter to the work of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet; its own press release compares it to Brazil, Dark City and Donnie Darko, among others. We’re cautiously optimistic; that’s some awfully lofty company. Expect a review in the coming weeks. Buy from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Watchmen: The Ultimate Cut (2009): Read our Watchmen capsule. Hopefully, this four disc (!) Blu-ray release will be the ultimate edition of Watchmen, but would you truly be shocked if Warner came out with a 6-disc Watchmen: The Even Ultimater Cut in three months? At any rate, this new version integrates the fanboy demanded story-within-a-story “Tales of the Black Freighter” into the Director’s Cut. There’s also a disc of featurettes, a digital copy of the theatrical release, and a disc of “Complete Motion Comics” (whatever that means). Buy from Amazon.

Guest Reviews

RECOMMENDED AS WEIRD: VISIONEERS (2008)

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Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Jared Drake

FEATURING: Zach Galifianakis, , Mía Maestro, Missi Pyle, Chris Coppola

PLOT: Repressed corporate employees the world over are literally bursting apart from frustration. Innocuous worker George Winsterhammerman must deal with his huge corporate employer’s misguided and demeaning attempts to remedy the malady. But could the source of the problem be the perpetual brain-numbing proselytizing of the very corporations themselves?

Still from Visioneers (2008)


WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Visioneers is an unconventional metaphor about the illogic of artificial business and social constructs.

COMMENTS: Set in the not so distant future, Visioneers is a satirical black comedy about the absurdity of corporate culture, futile optimism, and the ridiculous nature of self-help schemes. George Washington Winsterhammerman works for the fictitious Jeffers Corporation, a giant corporate bureaucracy. His mid-level workaday job is mundane and unfulfilling. The PA system bombards him hourly with optimistic corporate pep talk encouraging productivity.

Everything is business as usual until George and his personal office staff are made aware that around the world, people are spontaneously exploding—literally. The root of the problem stems from lives of quiet desperation and repression. It seems that everywhere, people are being forced to pay lip service to falsely optimistic corporate culture and to suppress human emotion and rational thought.

The constant denial of emotions, the enforced phony business visages, and the frustration of coping with senseless bureaucracies takes its toll. The pent-up stress and officially-enforced anal-retentiveness is causing employees everywhere to literally burst apart into a spray of atomized blood and body parts as surely as if a fuse had been lit to a rectally embedded stick of dynamite. The Jeffers Corporation frantically imposes an endless series of misguided remedies, accompanying them with futile reassurances and encouragement not to explode.

Meanwhile, George has his own worries to deal with. He and his wife are unhappy, he struggles with impotence, his ex-convict, whackjob brother founds a freedom-of-expression movement in George’s backyard, and George worries that he too will explode under all of the confusion and pressure. His employer and physician instruct him to relieve stress via a cascade of absurd quack remedies and bizarre devices, such as a “happiness hat” that comes equipped with a mobile of the solar system. Try as he might, George cannot make any of these remedies reduce his anxiety.  Finally, George has to confront the question of whether or not a lifestyle of mindless productivity, absurd Orwellian bureaucracy, and smiley-faced denial actually provides a positive, substantially meaningful conduit to reality and the human condition.

In the way it addresses the effect of irrational propaganda on the human psyche, Visioneers is reminiscent of Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros,” with human explosions stemming from modern workplace dogma replacing rhino metamorphosis from political indoctrination.

Visioneers furnishes an effective metaphor for the artificial constructs of the modern world. The film is very funny until it misses its chance to top its premise near the end, when it changes into a personal triumph of self-actualization for the protagonist. With great irony, Visioneers becomes the very thing that it condemns and satirizes; a sort of inspirational icon, akin to the posters on your bosses’ walls with the motivational messages printed at the bottom.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…gently absurdist… quirky satire wears its influences on its dystopian sleeve, but an amiable cast and some surprising poignancy add up to Orwell that ends well.”–Michael Rechtshaffen, The Hollywood Reporter (contemporaneous)

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