Capsules

CAPSULE: S. DARKO (2009)

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DIRECTED BY: Chris Fisher

FEATURING: , Briana Evigan, Ed Westwick

PLOT: Samantha Darko goes on a cross-country road trip and learns along the way that, once again, the world will end at a predetermined time unless she figures out a way to stop it. Where’s Jake Gyllenhaal when you need him?

Still from S. Darko (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: In a way, S. Darko is an oddity itself; its very existence is questionable to anyone who has ever seen the original. But the only weird thing about this movie is how much it missed the mark. It’s a cheap teen thriller looking for a quick direct-to-DVD freak-show buck, not a captivating look at angry youth, mental illness, and time travel.

COMMENTS:  In this direct sequel to Donnie Darko, a movie that couldn’t have needed a sequel any less, we follow the exploits of Samantha Darko, Donnie’s little sister, who lost interest in the preteen dance group Sparkle Motion and went about growing up. She decides, or perhaps her BFF Corey decides for her, that she wants to become a professional dancer. They take a road trip from Virginia to California seeking this lofty goal, but their car peters out in rinky-dink 90s Utah. From there, they meet a couple locals, and everything seems peachy until BAM! time travel stuff happens again; not because of some real world-shattering drama, but through the power of friendship (???) The whole concept is somehow more bogus than before, and the suspension of disbelief is infinitely harder to maintain. It’s a bland pastiche of ideas presented in the first film blended together with sexy ladies and 90s slang that weakly mimics Richard Kelly’s original like a parrot without a beak. There’s none of the spirit of Donnie Darko to be found here that would even qualify this movie as a spiritual successor. S. Darko has a hollow concept that could have been designed to boot up a franchise involving time traveling teens with washboard abs. I’m not a slavish follower of the original, but Kelly had inspiration, and at least a vague idea of where to place a camera to make the most of a scene. S. Darko is all textbook pap, and while I don’t think I would travel back in time to un-watch this movie (as that is the single lamest reason to time travel ever) I won’t look back on it fondly, to say the least.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“S. DARKO is intriguing, and its actors come off well, but there’s no way of escaping comparisons to DONNIE, a truly special film…While you can tell it’s trying as hard as it can, and takes things a little further and into weirder territory in the process, the soul just isn’t there.”–Samuel Zimmerman, Fangoria

Capsules

CAPSULE: WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE (2009)

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DIRECTED BY:  Spike Jonze

FEATURING: Max Records, voices of , Lauren Ambrose,

PLOT: A troubled, rambunctious boy travels to a land where wild beasts anoint him their king, but discovers that socialization is a struggle even in his imagination.

STill from Where the Wild Things Are (2009)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Jonze slips a couple of odd visions into this ersatz kiddie fare; watch for the giant dog on the horizon, the friendly stoning of a few owls in flight, and a surprising limb-rending scene. The director fills the frame with scattered cuddly monsters of childhood psychology, but there’s not enough of the frantically irrational here to justify a weird rating.

COMMENTS:  It’s been only a few weeks since Where the Wild Things Are‘s release, and the movie already comes with its own critical cliche: this isn’t a children’s movie, it’s a movie about childhood. Like most cliches, there’s truth in the observation, and I have empirical evidence to back it up: I saw the film in the company of a 9 and an 11 year old, and they found it boring. As a boy, I would have found it boring too; there’s not much narrative thrust to the film, and its conflicts are complicated and interpersonal. To a kid, the tale itself is a mundane series of playground antics played out in an exotic setting—Max and his monster pals build a fort, engage in a dirt clod war, and favoritism and hurt feelings take over until someone decides to take their ball and go home—not a magical adventure they can get lost in. They’ll take some delight in beasts themselves, who are attractive and tactile with surprisingly expressive CGI faces: Muppets from the id. But the complex childhood psychology, while fascinating to nostalgic adults, will go right over their heads, the omnipresent womb imagery won’t make a dent in their little psyches, and the melancholy moral about accepting one’s limitations will be hard to absorb.

Each of the wild things Max encounters in his flight of fantasy represents some childhood preoccupation of his, and although it’s easy to see connections between the individual beasties and his real life, the symbolism is complex and mixed-up, just the way a real child’s dreams would be. There isn’t a simple one-to-one correspondence between each beast and a real life character.  Carol, who’s creative (and, like our hero, intensely destructive whenever he feels his creativity is being impinged upon), is Max’s main alter ego, but Carol also seems to represent Max’s absent father. KW, who is drifting away from the family unit to make new friends of her own, is simultaneously Max’s teenage sister and his mom, who has a new boyfriend. Other wild things represent various facets of childhood experience—there’s a goatlike being who complains he’s constantly being ignored, and the cynical horned woman who champions the defeatist voice inside us all. Getting along with these competing aspects of himself proves as difficult to Max as getting along with playmates and family in the real world. It ends as a sort of Jungian tragedy, as Max fails to integrate and harmonize the competing aspects of himself. The closest thing to an epiphany Max achieves is his disillusionment when he abdicates, admitting he’s been lying to these beasts he sought to rule. He’s not a king, or even a great explorer: “I’m just Max.” “Well, that’s not very much, is it?” shoots back his disappointed monster alter-ego, Carol, who longed for a monarch to bring order to their disintegrating fantasyland. Max has no answer to this self-riposte. His only solace is that he has a lifetime left to devise a comeback.

The grapevine says that Warner Brothers pressured Jonze to do some serious reshooting after his initial, even darker cut had tykes in tears at test screenings. It will be interesting to see if the inevitable director’s cut delivers something even more idiosyncratic and uncompromising, maybe even a tad weird.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Max’s dilemma and emotions are distilled to their essence, so the way his real-life suffering informs his dreamscapes becomes unmistakable… more than just a visual feast; it’s a blissful evocation of imagining as a process of spiritual maturation.”–Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

Miscellanea

WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE

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NOTICE – POSSIBLE DOWNTIME:  Our webhost tells us they will be upgrading the servers on Monday, Nov. 9 and Tuesday, Nov. 10.  This may cause some limited interruptions in the availability of these pages.

Finally, we have an early frontrunner for weirdest movie of 2009! But what is it?  Spike (Adaptation) Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are?  The independent twentysomethings-get-slaughtered-in-the woods horror film I Can See You?  Or are we contrarians who actually liked the widely despised Donnie Darko direct-to-DVD sequel, S. Darko? Check this space in next week to find out the shocking answer!

For our “weirdest search term used to locate the site” pick of the week, we’re dipping back into the overflowing “disturbing” file for “watch free rape nuns movies in the farms.”  We find this request both disquieting and encouraging.  The weird specificity of the search: not only “nuns,” but nuns “in the farms”—sets it apart from the generic sordid “watch free rape movies” garbage we get all the time.

But why in the world would we find a rape search encouraging?  Because it came from the Islamic Republic of Egypt.  I say this more than half-seriously: porn will destroy Islamic fundamentalism.  By pumping free porn behind enemy lines via broadband, we teach them the true value of freedom.  It may be a NeoCon myth that the huddled masses out there all yearn to be free, but they most certainly yearn to masturbate to freaky porn.  Show them a vision of a land overflowing with free rape movies, and they will eventually demand their governments give them the same freedom.  Worldwide democracy and an unprecedented era of global peace will inevitably follow.

On a more pleasant note, we finally have a Miss Weird Movie 2009!  Her name is Lola, and her favorite site is http://366weirdmovies.com!

missweirdmovies2009

Much thanks to the anonymous webmaster who spammed our server logs with this autogenerated image in order to promote some service or other, I forgot what it was.

Thanks to our decision to focus on 2009 releases, the reader-suggested review queue is growing quite unruly: 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! , Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (if it’s released), Takashi Miike’s 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, and The Science of Sleep.  Although we’re focusing on 2009 release at the moment, Johnny Got His Gun is likely to jump the line due to the fact that this long-unavailable movie finally got a DVD release this year.

Miscellanea

WEIRD HORIZON FOR THE WEEK OF 11/6/2009

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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 Men Who Stare at Goats:  George Clooney or no George Clooney and loosely based on fact or not, I doubt anyone will claim that a comedy about a classified experimental squad of U.S. marines who are trained to kill using Jedi-mind tricks isn’t coming at us from a left-of-reality place.  Co-starring offbeat icon Jeff (Tideland) Bridges, Ewan (Stay) MacGregor, and Kevin Spacey.  The Men Who Stare at Goats official site.

IN THEATERS (LIMITED RELEASE):

Gentlemen Broncos: From Jared Hess (writer/director of Napoleon Dynamite) comes this gross-out satire about a nerdy amateur fantasy writer whose story is stolen by an established author and turned into an awful movie by a small-town director. Critics hated it (“Gentlemen Broncos doesn’t just visit Planet Quirk, it crash lands upon it.”–Peter Howell).  Still, scenes from the film-within-the film, with it’s gay cyclops and flying robotic deer, look at least mildly weird, and it seems anything that almost everyone in the mainstream hates must have something going for it.   On the other hand, Armond White liked it, which may justifiably scare you off.  Gentlemen Broncos official site.

SCREENINGS: NEW YORK CITY (MON, NOV. 9)

Flaherty NYC: Experiments with Animation!:  A program of new experimental animated shorts to be presented at the Anthology Films Archive, with a question and answer session with some of the animators to follow.  Featuring films by Martha Colburn, Jesse Epstein, Kenneth Hung, Jeff Scher, Phil Solomon, Steven Subtonick, and Signe Bauman (The Threatened One). For more information visit The Flaherty Seminar homepage.

NEW ON DVD:

Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] (1987): Wim Wender’s beautiful, poetic movie about invisible angels roaming West Berlin who dispassionately hear the fears and desires of humans gets the Criterion Collection treatment. One of the best films of the 1980s.  Buy from Amazon.

NEW ON BLU-RAY:

Wings of Desire [Der Himmel über Berlin] (1987):  See above.  Buy Blu-ray from Amazon.

NEW FREE (LEGITIMATE) MOVIES ON YOUTUBE:

Dracula (1992):  Read our capsule review.  The free viewing expires November 10, so hurry on down!  Watch Dracula (1992) 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.

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