Autumnir is an artistic short filmed in a park in Germany using minimal subjects. It’s also seasonally appropriate. Alec Crichton, the creator of this short, has a remarkable talent for taking ordinary entities, and making them look atypical.
For more information on Alec and his work visit http://www.crichton.tv/.
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):
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: I don’t know how weird it will be, but if you know your movies you’ll immediately see that the concept is totally crazy: the great Werner Herzog remakes Abel Ferrara’s singular, bleak Bad Lieutenant, but as a self-aware action parody, with Nicolas Cage going wild (maybe channeling Klaus Hinski?) as the titular drug-crazed cop. Even if it wasn’t getting excellent reviews, it would be worth seeing just for the talent mashup involved. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans official site.
Mr. Sadman: The interesting premise is that one of Saddam Hussein’s body doubles loses his job and moves to Los Angeles immediately before Iraq invades Kuwait in 1990. The press release describes the impersonator’s journey as a “surreal quest to rediscover the love, adoration and fame he once knew;” we suspect that’s a “small s” surreal, but it sounds offbeat at the very least. Playing Los Angeles this week before heading off to DVD land. Mr. Sadman official site.
SCREENINGS (NEW YORK CITY):
I Can See You (2008): Read our review of this “psychedelic campfire tale.” Here’s your chance to see one of the weirdest movies of 2008 on a big screen in high definition, along with the 3-D short The Viewer. Playing at NYU’s Cantor Film Center at 36 East 8th Street tonight only!
The Sun [Solzne] (2005): It contains at least one crazy dream sequence, but this minimalist biopic about Emperor Horohito’s defeat from Russian director Alexander Sokurov is only a borderline weird pick; it’s still a noteworthy off-the-beaten-path choice for New Yorkers. Playing at the Film Forum.
NEW ON DVD:
Franklyn (2008): This weird-sounding film tells two converging stories, one set in modern London and the other in a fantastical Meanwhile City, which is ruled by religious fanatics. The films fans compare the visual look to a low-budget City of Lost Children. Another one we’ll need to take a look at down the road. Buy from Amazon
The Limits of Control (2009): From Jim Jamursch, who brought us the anti-western Dead Man, comes this anti-thriller about a mysterious nameless, assassin in Spain meeting with enigmatic strangers in pursuit of an unknown mission. Buy from Amazon
Thirst [Bakwji] (2009): Korean ultra-stylist Chan-wook Park + vampirism; sounds like a match made in heaven (or hell) to us. Buy from Amazon
NEW ON BLU-RAY:
Fight Club (1999): David Fincher’s anarchic, very nearly surreal satire features brilliant performances by both Edward Norton and Brad Pitt. It’s a weird movie favorite that’s long overdue on Blu-ray. Buy from Amazon
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.
Robert Dornhelm’s film Beauty As I See It is a compelling, ambitious documentary on the life and career of the late conductor Herbert Von Karajan, who, more than any other musician of the twentieth century, made an obsessive, downright bizarre fetish of surface beauty in musical interpretation.
A billion words have probably been written about Karajan, from the adulation of Richard Osborne, who surprisingly wrote the fairly well balanced biography, “Karajan, a Life in Music,” to Norman Lebrecht, author of the intentionally provocative “The Maestro Myth” who sometimes likens Karajan to Lucifer himself. 2009 is the centenary of Karajan’s birth and, predictably, the Berlin celebration has garnered intense praise and intense criticism.
Karajan (who died in 1989) left far more audio recordings and filmed performances than any other conductor in history. His last series of films, for Sony, were produced, edited, and directed by himself, sparing no expense. Karajan is often lit from below, like a descending deity. This was the conductor’s final valentine to himself.
Karajan’s Nazi Party membership; his marriage to his second, Jewish wife (which predictably hurt his career in the Third Reich); his influential promotion of the compact disc format; his alleged homosexuality; and his divisive, bitter struggle with his beloved, yet misogynistic Berlin Philharmonic over his attempt to appoint a female clarinetist are either glossed over or are not covered at all in the film.
Still, despite these glaring omissions, Beauty As I see It probably comes closer to capturing the conductor’s paradoxical, obsessive nature than any other of the numerous films. Karajan was an autocrat who, upon being told he had been appointed director for the BPO, said, ” I shall be a dictator”. Karajan was mercenary in his business dealings and died a near billionaire. Stories about his superstar celebrity abound. A taxi driver picks up Karajan after a concert and asks, “where to?” Karajan replies, “it doesn’t Continue reading KARAJAN, OR, BEAUTY AS I SEE IT (2008)
“How can you tell what is a dream and what’s real when you can’t even tell when you’re awake and when you’re asleep?”–line from Joe’s internal monologue in Johnny Got His Gun
DIRECTED BY: Dalton Trumbo
FEATURING: Timothy Bottoms, Jason Robards, Donald Sutherland
PLOT: Joe is an ordinary young man with a sweetheart back home who goes to Europe to fight World War I and is blown apart by an enemy shell. The accident leaves him limbless, deaf, and blind; the doctors assume he is brain dead, but keep him alive in hopes of learning how to cure similar brain injuries in the future. Left alone in a hospital bed with only his own thoughts for company for years on end, Joe drifts in and out of memories and dreams, while during his lucid moments he struggles to find a way to communicate with the outside world.
BACKGROUND:
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Jesus Christ howling out the window of a locomotive engine as he drives doomed doughboys to the front.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The bizarre flashbacks and fantasies Joe endures for years on end as he lies in a nightmarish paralysis. His dreamlike reveries—including conversations with Jesus and imagining himself as a freakshow exhibit in a carnival traveling though a barren desert—are never gratuitously weird, but always relate tightly to his psychology and to the antiwar theme.
COMMENTS: It’s difficult to imagine a more nightmarish scenario—to be paralyzed in a Continue reading 42. JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN (1971)
DIRECTED BY: William Forsyth
FEATURING: Christine Lahti, Sara Walker, Andrea Burchill
PLOT: Two orphaned girls are joined by their transient aunt who becomes their guardian in this dreamy, pensive study of nonconformity and the breaking of social mores in a restrictive 1950’s environment.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: While Housekeeping has an original plot about unusual characters doing unusual things, it is not truly weird. If anything, the entire point of the movie is to illustrate that what many consider odd is perfectly normal, depending on the angle of interpretation.
COMMENTS: Housekeeping is a surreal atmosphere piece that questions right and wrong, debates the meaning of normality, and examines the consequences of non-conformity. The story follows the erratic behavior of two teenage girls and their seemingly irresponsible caretaker.
In the 1950’s Pacific Northwest, a series of bizarre events unfold, leading to the abandonment of two adolescent girls. In a dramatic early scene, the girls’ misfit mother asks some young boys for help in getting her car out of a muddy rut. When they do, she casually commits suicide in front of them by driving over a cliff. Her daughters, long abandoned by their father, become the wards of their grandmother and aunt, who see them into their early teens. When the deceased mother’s sister shows up, the grandmother and great aunt disappear into the night, leaving them in the care of the newly arrived “Aunt Sylvie” (Lahti).
Sylvie, as it turns out, is an avowed nonconformist with an unconventional lifestyle and unique view of the world. Her permissive parenting enables an alternative existence for her nieces. This new freedom includes skipping school, stealing boats, riding the rails, and other risky, unstructured behavior: acts which are particularly outré when performed by young women in the conservative 1950s.
The film is an odyssey of self discovery as Ruth, from whose point of view the story is presented, begins to question social convention and accepted folkways. As Ruth gravitates toward Sylvie’s atypical values, her sister Lucille is upset by the lack of structure and begins to embrace social norms.
The film presents this evolution of the girls’ characters and personalities through a series of ethereal misadventures and explorations. This transition is further influenced by the recounting of early childhood impressions, and their observations of the unique geography of their home, which is located on a surreal lake surrounded by wooded mountains. Ice and snow symbolism connects different story segments, along with railroads and trains, particularly a spectacular derailment disaster that occurred many years in the past. The lake itself, a massive body of deep cold water holding the wreckage and bodies from the doomed train, embodies concepts of obstacles, boundaries, mystery and the transcendence of space and time.
Ultimately, and inevitably, outside authoritarian interference descends upon the trio; the tale alludes to fear of witches by the unsophisticated locals. Nonconformity is equated with a dread of the unknown. At this point, the slowly building tension between the girls’ independence and the mainstream establishment comes to a rolling boil. The three must choose between two extremes, either one of which will create dramatic and permanent consequences.
Some credit Housekeeping with exploring themes concerning transience, self reliance, dependency, female marginalization, and freedom. This may be true, but the literary eye rollers —that crowd who seek to distinguish themselves intellectually via the discovery of a plethora of symbolism, real or imaginary, in any work—are likely to perceive Housekeeping as an exploration of feminist issues. This would not be the best interpretation of the story. Housekeeping is not a women’s movie. It is a beautifully photographed, thought-provoking atmospheric fantasy about unconventionality and its consequences. The events are experienced from the point of view of a youngster who happens to be a girl. The choice of gender serves more to facilitate this study of social taboos than to make any sort of statement. Those who wish to interpret Housekeeping as being a feminist vehicle will miss the nebula for the stars.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: